"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas
Who will turn this crisis around? We will. Who else? And how else but with innovation and entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurs: this is your time to step up to the plate. Hard as the times may be, you must remember, many, many great companies were born during recessions. And many others almost died in the midst of recessions but managed to survive through their founders' tremendous grit and resilience.
Two months ago, Amazon - which has taken to sharing some of its massive computing power with mere mortals as a means of developing additional revenue streams - announced that they were developing a content-delivery network (CDN) to complement their existing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offering. Today, they unveiled the beta version of that service, named Amazon CloudFront. Boasting a now-familiar, pay-as-you-go pricing model, Amazon CloudFront promises to make CDN an affordable addition for any site looking to gain more efficient content delivery.
It seems like only yesterday - or almost a year and a half ago - that Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang was named interim CEO of the embattled and fragmented company he co-founded. Taking the helm of Yahoo! following entertainment-industry veteran Terry Semel left Yang awash in the throes of a mishmash of "Web company meets traditional media company" - plus a bunch of Web 2.0 acquisitions sprinkled here and there.
By any estimation, the position he inherited would have been a challenge for even the most seasoned executive. So it comes as little surprise that Yang has announced he is stepping down from the position of chief executive, returning to his role as Chief Yahoo!
Google's highly anticipated update of its Google Mobile App for the iPhone (iTunes link) finally arrived in the App Store this afternoon. The app now uses voice recognition to translate voice commands into search queries. The new version also gives you easy access to all your other Google apps, though the star of this update is obviously the voice recognition, which, in our tests, was amazingly accurate.
Note: the description in iTunes has not been updated yet, but if you follow this link, you can just download and install the new version.
In November 2007, we listed and reviewed 10 promising Semantic Web apps. A lot can happen in one year on the Internet, so we thought we'd check back in with each of the 10 products and see how they're progressing. What's changed over the past year and what are these companies working on now? The products are, in no particular order: Freebase, Powerset, Twine, AdaptiveBlue, Hakia, Talis, TrueKnowledge, TripIt, Calais (was ClearForest), Spock.
In our next post in this series, we're going to publish a completely new list of Semantic apps to watch! That's right, 10 more Semantic apps. Let us know your suggestions in the comments.
Facebook announced this afternoon that the company will now offer more high-profile placement for applications that are verified as trustworthy and pay an application fee for the honor.
The biggest problem with Facebook apps is probably not that they are security-violating and spam-happy. The biggest problem is that this incredible medium for global communication is being polluted by applications that are mind-numbing, insipid and pander to the lowest common denominator of humanity - even if they are otherwise well behaved.
One would think that few ads could be less controversial than ads for painkillers, but over the weekend, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the maker of Motrin, found itself in the middle of a major controversy on Twitter, FriendFeed, and other social networks. Motrin's latest ad discusses the advantages of using the painkiller for mothers who 'wear' their babies close to their body with a sling or other baby carriers and who might suffer from back pain because of it. A lot of mothers (and fathers) were clearly not amused by these ads and Motrin has now decided to remove them and has issued an apology.
When it comes to storing personal digital data in the cloud and serving it up in interesting ways - we're in the very early days of a brand new paradigm.
Today popular online storage company Mozy announced that it has been merged by the company that acquired it with another acquisition called Pi (Personal Information) - into a new forthcoming service called Decho (your digital echo). Pi was founded by Paul Maritz, who is now the CEO of virtualization powerhouse VMWare. What do you get when you bring these kinds of stars together into one service? Only a few clues are available so far, but we're excited to see what Decho becomes.
After it had been unavailable in Germany for more than two days, the Wikipedia's German portal is finally back online. The local German version of the Wikipedia had become unavailable after a member of the German parliament, Lutz Heilmann, pressed charges against the German Wikipedia because of defamatory statements in his biography on the site. Heilmann argued that the article was "false and slanderous." A German judge then ordered the closure of the German portal for the Wikipedia, wikipedia.de.
Apparently, growing up digital doesn't just mean being used to technology - it means not being scared of it when things go wrong, either.
Do crashing computers and busted Blackberries completely freak you out? Does a cryptic error message on your screen leave you feeling defeated or discouraged? According to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, your age might have something to do with your attitudes and emotions surrounding technology.
