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The ownCloud project is adding features fast and furiously. The open-source file synchronization and sharing project announced the Milestone 4 release earlier this week, taking ownCloud in an interesting direction for corporate users. Forget Dropbox killer - ownCloud could be something even better, someday.

Axis, Yahoo's "new kind of browser" that launched yesterday, is an attempt to do something noble and important. Yahoo has taken away the search results page, the intermediate step where a search engine makes most of its money, in order to get the user straight to where she's going. Axis is a gamble to redefine search. Unfortunately, Yahoo lost the bet.

Today's theme is real artists ship. Everyone wants their tech to be fun. iPads get close, but it's quite another thing to build actual space stations or robot exoskeletons... or the actual Starship Enterprise.

But people are going for it, anyway.

Today the X Prize Foundation announced a $2.25 million Nokia Sensing X Challenge to produce a new generation of health care and biometric sensors. This adds a new health-related prize to their roster of other scientific challenges, including a $10 million prize to produce a wireless health monitor like the Star Trek Tricorder, another $10 million prize for gene sequencing, and a $30 million prize sponsored by Google to bring back robotic lunar landers.

It is time for another look at enterprise IT from our friends Chief and Chuck. If your management still thinks Facebook and Twitter are fads, then perhaps this cartoon will hit home. After all, if we could only just not be bothered all the time from our customers when they have problems, right? One way is to just ignore them, and the message from this cartoon is clear: You do so at your own peril.

If your boss asked you to identify all of the various SaaS-based providers that are being used across your corporate network, how long would it take you to put together a report? This isn't academic: As more of your end-users sign up for these cloud-based services, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain the appropriate enterprise security policies as the number and kinds of files stored there increases.

Social scientists are increasingly looking at online friendships and trying to figure out if they carry the same emotional baggage that real-world friendships do. A preliminary study suggests that breaking up, even if it’s on Facebook, is hard to do.

 PayPal co-founder and Facebook pre-IPO stockholder Peter Thiel

Facebook's tainted public offering, which has attracted the attention of federal securities investigators, has grown a bit darker with the filing of a class-action lawsuit. Los Angeles-based law firm Glancy Binkow & Goldberg filed the suit Tuesday in state court in San Mateo County, Calif., on behalf of all investors who lost money in the IPO.

The generally accepted definition of "cloud services" - even the one prescribed by the U.S. Government (PDF available here) - includes the existence of metered or measured service - usually a flat rate that scales along with the service consumed.  Now one of the cloud's most prominent competitors is opening up its enterprise license program to negotiation, enabling big customers - perhaps including the government itself - to name their price and enter into long-term, fixed-price deals.

UpNext Maps for iPhone is beautiful. It's the smoothest, fastest map I've ever used. It renders 3D buildings for virtual exploration of certain cities. Its look and functionality are distinctive. It's free. And both Google and Apple want to build these features themselves. Is this a kamikaze mission for UpNext?

Web-only, original programming. If there's one trend in TV this year that has the potential to shake things up moving forward, this is it.

Steve Wozniak, two years later

It’s been fun to watch the normally exuberant tech press go through the rationalization process of what went wrong with Facebook’s IPO, starting with claims that Friday’s flat opening meant the IPO was perfectly priced to outright ignoring the story. It’s been almost as much fun as watching the business press declare Facebook dead on arrival.

Before we dig too deeply into either discussion, let’s remember that the same doubts, along with the same proclamations that an issue had chilled the tech IPO market, were being bandied about eight years ago in the days after Google went public.

shopfront: the front side of a store facing the street; usually contains display windows (Dictionary.com)

Yahoo's search app Axis, launched earlier today, is being marketed as "a new kind of browser." It's not a browser though, it's an app that is available on PC, iPhone and iPad. On the PC, it's a plug-in (which is a type of app) for actual browsers, like Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. So what is Axis, exactly? It's a new shopfront to entice people to use Yahoo. Yahoo has always been a shopfront, from the online directory in the mid-90s to the personalized homepage of the past few years. What's different about this new shopfront is that it's a group of apps, instead of a webpage. The question is: will people use it? Let's give it a test drive...

Yahoo just joined the browser game. The veteran Web company, which has been struggling to define its focus for years, is suddenly betting on the mobile space with a new browser called Axis.

The product combines an iOS Web browser with a plugin for most major desktop browsers that syncs a user's Web history and bookmarks across their devices. How does Axis stack up?