ReadWriteWeb

Hunch has really interesting problems. They collect a lot of data from a lot of users, and once someone creates a profile they need to quickly deliver useful recommendations across a wide range of topics. This means running a sophisticated analysis on a massive data set, all to a strict deadline. Nobody else is doing anything this ambitious with recommendation engines, so I sat down with their co-founder and CTO Matt Gattis to find out how they pulled it off.

The first thing he brought up was hardware costs, casually mentioning that they'd looked into getting a server with one terabyte of RAM from Dell! That immediately piqued my interest, because the Google-popularized trend has been towards throwing an army of cheap commodity servers at big data problems, rather than scaling vertically with a single monstrously powerful machine. It turns out their whole approach is based around parallelism within a single box, and they had some interesting reasons for making that choice.

I have to admit, I read with fascination this morning the latest Techmeme headline from Techcrunch: "Yep, Apple Killed the CD Today." Of course, a headline like that is meant to cause a reaction - and it did, by the number of tweets, Diggs and comments. In my gut, I agree with the general trend (as it applies to computers) - the optical drive is becoming passé in favor of smaller portable storage options like USB flash drives and even file-sharing via Web-based tools.

However, optical media itself is not dead yet - far from it, mostly thanks to Blu-ray. So perhaps the headline should have read "optical drives in computers are not really all that important anymore, but Blu-ray is doing well." But that wouldn't have been as catchy.

Boxee, a company whose software allows users to watch any Internet content on their televisions, announced a set-top box in November. In January, they unveiled a 3-D printer-made design prototype.

Now, in advance of its launch in "late October/early November," Boxee has published a show-and-tell video starring the company's design head, Zach Klein. (He's the one with the headband and made of meat.) The box and remote are functional finals, right off the assembly line of the manufacturers, Taiwan's D-Link.

When the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted and subsequently spread its ash across European flight paths the industry it had the most effect on was travel. But it has had an effect on the tech sector as well, even if it has been under-reported.

That tech industry mainstay, the conference, was the first element affected. One of ReadWriteWeb's writers had his trip to Funconf rescheduled.

Researchers at Stanford University have just made a major breakthrough that may impact the technology industry for years to come: they've built a better battery. The project, an attempt to use lithium-sulfur in place of the lithium-ion technology that is used in batteries today, has been in development since 2007. Recently, the scientists' efforts were rewarded when they created a battery that lasts four times as long as its lithium-ion counterparts while also having the benefit of being "significantly safer" than today's batteries which occasionally explode after short-circuiting.

Although still a ways off from commercial viability (and availability), the lithium-sulfur batteries promise advances like 80% more capacity, 10 times the power density and, theoretically, the ability to last four times as long as modern batteries.

Have you ever wanted to build a better web cam, GPS device or web video pet monitoring service? Well you just might get your chance. Bug Labs recently released their latest BUGbase device module with an embedded WiFi and bluetooth solution. Best known for its Lego-like hardware blocks, BUG offers users a set of programmable modules to develop DIY gadgets. What makes this so groundbreaking is the fact that the company is offering one of the first-ever open source WiFi hardware solutions. This means that both large-scale hardware manufacturers and garage tinkers can utilize the code.

Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit has doubled every two years, explains the exponential growth in computing power that enables all the innovation we web-heads love so much. Futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that the exponential growth of computing power extends beyond the history of the integrated circuit, though. Exponential growth in computing happened as a result of innovations prior to the circuit board and it will continue after the integrated circuit's dominance has been surpassed, Kurzweil believes.

Steve Jurvetson, one of the best-known technology investors in the world, has posted an updated version of Kurzweil's visualization of the history of exponential growth in computing. In his thought provoking discussion of the phenomenon, Jurvetson calls this "the most important chart in technology business."

It's the perfect storm. Computer manufacturers have figured out how to produce lightweight, low-end machines that cost very little just as the economy takes a big tumble. Meanwhile, software applications that once needed robust hardware to run are now moving to the cloud. The result? An explosion of netbooks, the "sub-compact" car of notebook computers, most of which don't cost too much more than the average smartphone.