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Bits Blog: Twitter Implements Do Not Track Privacy Option
Explore Technology (May 17 2012)
It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collectedpersonal data about its users. A lot of data.
Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter.
Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it.
Twitter said it will allow users to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information used for advertising.
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Facebook
Bits Blog: Why Mobile Data Is Such a Cash Cow for Carriers
Explore Technology (Apr 26 2012)
Verizon and AT&T reported their quarterly earnings in the last week, and they told nearly identical stories: Both are making a ton of money just from mobile data - the fees we pay to access the Internet over their networks. Most people are paying for more data than they ever use.
(Read Full Article)
Bits Blog: Zappos Says Hackers May Have Accessed Customer Account Details
Explore Technology (Jan 16 2012)
The account information for millions of customers at Zappos.com, an online shoe and clothing company, may have been compromised by a hacking attack, the company’s chief executive, Tony Hsieh, wrote on Sunday in an e-mail to employees.
In the message, posted on the Zappos Web site, Mr. Hsieh said a criminal “gained access to parts of our internal network and systems” through one of the company’s servers in Kentucky.
He wrote, in capital letters, that the database containing complete credit card and other payment information for Zappos customers had not been accessed.
Mr. Hsieh said the company would send an e-mail notifying the more than 24 million accountholders of the incident, including details about the information that might have been obtained: names, e-mail addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of credit cards. The messages will encourage customers to create a new ...
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Amazon.com Facebook
Bits Blog: The Coming War for the Social Workplace
Explore Technology (Dec 19 2011)
The hard-nosed competition for billions in corporate software spending is heading for an improbable showdown: Will the boss “like” that product prototyping cost projection?
Last week Salesforce.com, a leader in cloud-based corporate software, bought Rypple, a little-known outfit that specializes in creating and observing what is called “the social enterprise” — which uses things like Twitter posts, status badges and Facebook-esque likes to set goals, manage teams and recognize performance.
Rypple is at the far end of a movement to sell companies on the idea that the modern worker, armed with a cellphone and a tablet computer, having access to a nearly infinite amount of computing power in the cloud at all times, is a new kind of beast. Just as our social lives have changed because of Twitter and Facebook, the argument runs, so too must our working lives change.
Salesforce did not say what it paid for Rypple ...
(Read Full Article)
Bits Blog: Consultants in the Cloud
Explore Technology (Nov 25 2011)
Earlier this week we published an article about Google Apps, and Google’s struggle to displace Microsoft Office and Sharepoint inside large corporations. While Google has worked without a large consulting partner, it should be said that several smaller consultancies are working to encourage companies to adopt Google’s cloud-based office productivity software.
Among these are Dito, SADA Systems, Appirio and Cloud Sherpas. Each offers a somewhat different approach. SADA is reselling both Microsoft and Google products. Appirio offers Google along with a broad range of other cloud services for business, like Salesforce.com. Dito is making much of moving companies to Google’s Chromebooks, which are lightweight laptops built for cloud interactions. Cloud Sherpas is among the largest consultants stressing Apps, and it claims to have moved over 1 million people to Google Apps.
(Read Full Article)
Bits Blog: EBay's Plans for Hunch: Recommendations Galore
Explore Technology (Nov 21 2011)
EBay has been adding new technologies to its arsenal lately in an effort to overhaul its retail identity and better compete with rivals like Amazon. Included in the company’s recent acquisitions are RedLaser, a bar-code scanning application; Milo, a price comparison tool; and GSI Commerce, a provider of online services that will help the company work with larger retailers.
On Monday, the company announced the latest step in its strategy: the acquisition of Hunch, an online recommendation start-up based in New York. Hunch creates a profile of what it thinks a person will like based on information about that person’s friends and activity from around the Web.
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Amazon.com Facebook eBay
Bits Blog: A Telecom Pushes Its Cloud Strategy
Explore Technology (Nov 15 2011)
The business of supplying cloud services to corporations certainly looks promising. Technology research firms are forecasting that the market for cloud services will expand at a dizzying pace over the next several years.
The logic of the cloud — remotely providing computing, data storage and applications online — is compelling. Customers don’t have to buy all that hardware and software themselves, and suppliers gain the efficiencies of running large-scale data centers for many different customers.
But a big, growing market doesn’t assure success for all. Salesforce.com has been a cloud company since before the term was popularized. Amazon has been an innovative pioneer, supplying low-cost cloud services to companies and applications developers. Google, like Amazon, is using its data-center expertise and spreading its costs by offering cloud services to companies. Data center hosting specialists, like Rackspace, have offerings. The big technology companies have to be in the cloud market ...
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Amazon.com Facebook Rackspace
Bits Blog: Amazon, Hot and Cold
Explore Technology (Oct 25 2011)
After the close of the stock market Tuesday, Amazon.com will announce its third-quarter results. Analysts are predicting yet another revenue blowout, up 44 percent compared with last year. Amazon’s torrid growth more than 15 years after its founding makes it an object of envy and fear across the retail world. It is now a $100 billion company, about 12 times the value of Sears.
Viewed from a public relations point of view, however, the quarter was pretty much a disaster, at least until the announcement of the Kindle tablet on Sept. 28. First came the lengthy fight with the state of California over whether Amazon would collect sales tax. Even more damaging was a long article in The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa. It revealed that workers in Amazon’s local warehouse were collapsing from heat stress as they struggled to ship copies of “The Girl With the ...
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Amazon.com
Bits Blog: At Long Last, Facebook Releases an iPad App
Explore Technology (Oct 10 2011)
It has been the equivalent of waiting for Bigfoot. Bloggers had seen it. Developers said they had worked on it. Facebook denied its existence. Everyone else just wanted to know if it was real.
It’s the Facebook application for the iPad, which is finally out in the wild for everyone to prod, pinch and interact with.
After months of speculation and false alarms, Facebook said Monday that its official iPad application was available as a free download from the Apple App Store.
The app will likely benefit Apple and Facebook. Although the iPad is the biggest-selling tablet on the market, some consumers are not convinced they need it and opt for less expensive tablets. Seeing a slick Facebook app could convince people to choose an iPad over competitors, as there is no Facebook app specifically tailored for tablets running Google’s Android software.
(Read Full Article)
Bits Blog: A Data Center Power Solution
Explore Technology (Oct 4 2011)
The rapid growth in data centers, some with hundreds of thousands of computer servers attending to tasks as diverse as managing complex physics problems and posting pictures to Facebook, has led to a lot of worries about power consumption. A recent census of the industry indicated electricity use will grow by 19 percent just in 2012.
That is actually less than people had seen in years past, but indicates no less demand for “clouds” of servers accessible by millions of users. If anything, demand for corporate and private clouds is likely to be even greater. But management of the big centers is getting more efficient, as engineers re-examine every aspect of production, especially power.
If you have one server, you might just plug it into the wall and forget about it. Put a few hundred together and the power use, including the power to cool the chips that are sending ...
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Amazon.com Google Juniper Networks
Bits Blog: Why Flash Is the Future of Storage in Data Centers
Explore Technology (Aug 23 2011)
Flash memory has taken over the world of consumer computing as the storage technology used in iPods, iPads, smartphones and digital cameras.
It is light, fast, energy-efficient and increasingly inexpensive when used in the comparatively small doses required by consumers.
Flash had made inroads in data-center computing, but mainly for specialized applications and in hybrid systems. What has held up the advance of flash for industrial-strength computing has been price. It has traditionally been 5 to 10 times more expensive to store a comparable chunk of data on flash than on hard disks.
But the cost handicap is eroding. And a start-up, Pure Storage, that is opening its business on Tuesday, makes a strong claim for the changing economics of flash.
It asserts that its flash-and-software technology can store data for less than the cost of hard-disk storage. In addition, data access and retrieval is 10 times faster, and its ...
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Carnegie Mellon
Bits: 2010 Online, by the Numbers
Explore Technology (Jan 14 2011)
Think your e-mail in-box is overflowing because you get dozens of e-mails a day? That’s nothing: Internet users collectively sent 107 trillion (yes, that’s with a “t”) messages in 2010.
Granted, a large percentage of those messages were spam, but that’s still a lot of e-mail. And that’s only a tiny slice of the bits that flew around the Internet last year.
In an effort to figure out how many e-mails, videos, photos and other digital stuff we collectively uploaded and passed around the Web in 2010, Pingdom, an Internet monitoring service, corralled a number of research reports and company statistics to create a picture of the year in online stuff.
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: The New York Times Europe Facebook
Bits: Is It Time for the Verizon iPhone?
Explore Technology (Jan 7 2011)
Just yesterday, Verizon’s top executives had the attention of the world’s technology press during a keynote speech and news conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The events left some disappointed: Verizon had little new to announce, and in particular, there was no announcement about an iPhone running on Verizon Wireless.
Now Verizon has invited reporters to an unexpected red carpet event at Lincoln Center in New York on Tuesday. Speculation is rampant across the Web that this time Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s president, will finally announce that the iPhone is coming to Verizon. And all signs suggest it is.
(Read Full Article)
Bits: One on One: Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer
Explore Technology (Nov 5 2010)
Internap Network Services (INAP) said Thursday that it will expand its Boston-area data center at 50 Inner Belt in Somerville, Mass. to add another 7,000 square feet of raised floor space. This is the second of Internap’s three planned expansions in this facility, which Internap opened 18 months ago.
The expansion space is scheduled to come online in the second quarter of 2011, and will have expanded power density capacities of up to 10 kilowatts per rack. Internap’s data center at 50 Inner Belt is supported by a power substation on the property.
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Amazon.com Barack Obama Department of Homeland Security
Mobile Uploads Spur Facebook Video Growth
Explore Technology (Jun 14 2010)
Facebook’s nearly half a billion users are now uploading 20 million videos each month, many of which are shared through mobile phones.
Facebook members also watch two billion videos each month, according to Meredith Chin, a company spokeswoman. Last month comScore reported that Web users watched 30.3 billion videos online during April.
Josh Wiseman, an engineering manager at Facebook, said the company had seen a steady rise in video views across the Web because of the rise in video-ready mobile smartphones. “Video traffic has grown over the past year as more people upload video directly from their mobile phone,” he said.
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Facebook
Google Extends Outside Research Funding to New Fields
Explore Technology (Feb 1 2010)
Google, like other leading technology companies, funds university research in fields where its interest and the interest of science coincide. Until now, the company has done that mainly with lots of smaller grants, typically $50,000 or so.
But Google is stepping up its funding. In a focused approach that it is announcing on Tuesday, the company is making a $5.7 million commitment to a dozen university research projects. The program funds are earmarked for four areas: machine learning, the use of cellphones as data collection devices in science, energy efficiency in computing and privacy.
“We’ve identified four extremely important areas, both to Google and to society,” explained Alfred Spector, the company’s vice president of research and special initiatives.
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: Google Carnegie Mellon University
In the New Data Center, It’s Roofs Off and Taxes Down
Explore Technology (Aug 17 2009)
Google and Microsoft continue to spar over both their data center designs and how much information they reveal about the inner workings of their vast computing centers.
In one corner, you have the do-it-yourself Google that builds its own servers and even switches. The homemade approach fits Google’s cultural belief that hand-crafting products to meet its unique needs makes more sense than buying general purpose computing systems.
No one really knows how effective Google’s strategy is. The secretive company releases precious little information about its internal operations. Maybe it saves vast amounts of money by fine-tuning a super-efficient data center. Or maybe the “must-be-invented here” method adds a lot of cost and complexity to Google’s infrastructure.
(Read Full Article)
Mentions: New York Times Google Cisco
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