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Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.
MQTT is an IBM-developed protocol for real-time messaging that could become a keystone of the emerging Internet of Things. As the BBC explained recently, MQTT (which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is "a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world." MQTT is used as a messaging protocol for sensor and actuator solutions - for example in the house that twitters, which we covered earlier this week.
According to one of its creators, Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, MQTT is "going to explode" in popularity this year and next year. The protocol has just turned 10 years old; indeed there was a party to celebrate in London this week. In this post we explain MQTT and look at a health care product that uses it.
Beloved online shoe retailer Zappos has announced it will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon in exchange for almost a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock. Both of these companies are interesting because they have mastered making the connection between a quality online experience and physical delivery of tangible goods offline.
Is this just a story of a big online shopping mall buying up a hot little online shoe store? Taking a closer look at the offline supply chain of each company indicates that there may be more to this deal. Some supply chain analysts believe that the two companies are actually radically different, but complementary, and their union could help Amazon both change the way it relates to its customers and reach a whole new group of customers willing to pay more for a high-quality user experience. This is a story of two different ways of selling things on the internet and delivering them to your door.
Musicians and their fans are meant to be hip, sometimes tragically so.
RWW recently reviewed 18 streaming music services and our readers still had at least a dozen more suggestions. New and innovative music sites are springing up like daisies this summer, so at first glance when Billboard magazine announces the launch of their new online community, smaller independent sites should be shaking in their boots. Powered by streaming music from Lala.com, a Ticketmaster concert sales engine and All Music Guide's artist info, Billboard aims to offset waning sales and encourage a new generation of fans.
More than 70 major companies, academic institutions and high profile technologists have launched a campaign to educate US government agencies about the benefits of open source technology. Announced earlier at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, groups such as Google, RedHat, Novell, Linux, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation have teamed up to create Open Source For America. The joint effort is a coalition aimed at lobbying the US Federal government to consider using open-source software over proprietary code. O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly and Executive Director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin are just some of the board advisors.
This weekend millions of North American children diligently completed their homework, did their chores and stayed on their best behavior in the hopes that they'd attend Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince in theaters. Meanwhile, half way around the world, thousands of children work for the magical protections of mosquito nets and running water. Their Voldemort is malaria. Between 1-3 million malaria deaths happen every year with the majority of the victims being young children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, thanks to the work of a Berkeley research team, help may be on its way.
Google's market dominance in search and advertising, when combined with growing strength in a wide variety of online services like video, documents, telephony and more could be seen as the Internet equivalent of the monopolistic bundling that Microsoft faced government anti-trust action for in the late '90s. Fred Vogelstein wrote a long and important article on the case the government could be building against Google yesterday on Wired.com.
The Obama administration has appointed a Google critic who's invoked the Microsoft comparison directly in the past to now lead the US Justice Department's antitrust division. Wired's Vogelstein says that if legal action is going to be taken, it would require years of political work first to build up public support for prosecution in order to be successful. The government and Google have already begun to jockey for public favor in the pre-legal stage of the anti-trust dance.
Last week, Google announced some interface changes to their Google Docs service that are designed to make finding your files easier. The changes are relatively minor - the "shared with" list has gone away, there's a new "Sharing" menu, and you now have the ability to save your searches - but that hasn't stopped some bloggers from theorizing that the shiny new UI is bringing us one step closer to the often theorized, yet never realized, "Google Drive" service, aka "your hard drive in the cloud."
Although we know this service exists in some form as an internal tool, Google has yet to release a version for public use. But with the latest announcements about the new Chrome operating system, we wonder: will Google Drive finally become a reality thanks to Chrome OS?
On the internet, data lives forever. Once you post something to the web, you see, you simply can't take it back. Many people have had to learn this lesson the hard way, unfortunately, after discovering that the "delete" button doesn't really work to delete something from the internet as a whole. The embarrassing missive lives on and on, in the web service's archives, in Google's cache, and eventually in the Internet Archive itself.
That may be about to change, though, thanks to a new tool created by researchers at the University of Washington. Called "Vanish," the system places a time limit on any message posted to any web service through a web browser.
In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. It was a good couple of years before they were spotted at the Web 2.0 conference, for example. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter.
I recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Yesterday we wrote about how Stanford-Clark has hooked his house up to Twitter. Today we delve more into what his employer, IBM, is doing with the Internet of Things.
