ReadWriteWeb

Craigslist loves Perl, Amazon wants to help customers use geo-blocking, and if you're looking for an overview of Hadoop solutions then we've got a good link for you.

Geo-Blocking Content With Amazon CloudFront – Geo-targeting has its good and bad side. I'll let you decide where geo-blocking content falls. If it's something your company needs to do, though, Amazon has a short post by Nihar Bihani of the CloudFront team on using geo-blocking for content with CloudFront.

As prominent as cloud computing has already become in today's enterprises, it's amazing to realize that the world's reference standards are only now catching up with the concept. On Tuesday, the consortium of industry stakeholders known as The Open Group updated its reference standards for Service-Oriented Architecture. You remember SOA, don't you?

Well, if you've been following along with the SOA story, you know that cloud computing platforms have catapulted the service concept onto a huge and growing platform. Now, the consortium - led by software giants IBM, Oracle, and SAP, along with HP, and business consultancy CapGemini - has produced a formal interpretation of the role services play in the cloud, by offering a new term for the concept. Say it with me (if you can): XaaS.

Many of us would love to be trained to have more social skills in everyday life, whether at work or at home. Or perhaps we wish other people we know would receive that kind of training. But is socializing online something that people need to be trained how to do? It might have sounded silly a few years ago, but social technology has now clearly become an important part of workplace activity and productivity.

Tech giant IBM believes that the socialization of business presents a big opportunity to train people to do it really well. The company announced this week a major new services initiative in social business. This kind of news makes me think it's time to put the whole question of whether engaging with social technology at all has a potential for meaningful ROI to bed.

Among a handful of patents transferred last December 31 from IBM's portfolio to that of Google, as first discovered by Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea, is a system for processing text compiled by users of social networks, and ascertaining their common interests. We've already seen the rise of tools such as Radian6 for ascertaining social net users' individual interests; this new technology, which received a U.S. patent only one year ago, would judge what concepts they share with one another.

The goal of this technology, as IBM originally stated, is to literally to filter out irrelevant links to articles that may not pertain to users' search intentions. What we don't know yet is whether Google intends to use this technology, or simply keep others from using it first.

For several years, a company called Green Hat (not associated with Red Hat) has been in the business of creating sophisticated software testing equipment for developers, particularly for service-oriented applications that use messaging queues. The problem with distributed application testing is that it's getting more and more complicated, especially as a multitude of new and independently evolving frameworks introduce dependencies that can't always be accurately simulated in a test environment.

So yesterday's acquisition of Green Hat by IBM brought up an interesting question: Will a company whose test environments were developed to support Oracle, Java Message Service, SAP, Software AG, and TIBCO as well as WebSphere MQ continue to do so after being acquired by the maker of WebSphere MQ? Today, we have the answer.

Last week IBM announced that it has taken chemical data from various patents and made this information available to researchers online. It is just the latest in an ever widening of publically available information concerning patents and intellectual property. But online patent access has had an interesting history, and even though it dates to the early days of the Web, it was a difficult path and an interesting story in public access to information.

In collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, IBM is providing a database of more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from about 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal abstracts from 1976 to 2000. IBM Research developed it in collaboration with these private companies over the past six years. It includes patents from a variety of sources outside of the US. The data will be incorporated into the PubChem archive at the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health.

"What if you could quantify the world's consumer behavior," asks a company video, "and use it to make different and better decisions than you ever have before?" This is the question that has been asked over the past decade by a company called DemandTec, a manufacturer of retail analytics software for analyzing economic and behavioral trends around consumer purchasing decisions.

The idea is to change the conventional way manufacturers engineer their product lifecycles: first by developing it, then by marketing it upon completion. Those cycles have historically been separate; DemandTec's idea is to merge them, to make businesses make strategic merchandising decisions (e.g., "How about marking that tablet down to a hundred bucks?") rather than marketing corrections (e.g., "What if we changed that tablet's promotional slogan?"). It sounds like an idea IBM could wrap its head around. Today, that's exactly what IBM did.

IBM is poised to unleash its revamped mobile strategy with a full suite of tools aimed at providing enterprise developers with an end-to-end system for collaboration, development and management for mobile applications. IBM is putting the full weight of its history, tools and computing clout behind its mobile strategy. The company's comprehensive framework has the potential to be one of the most powerful end-to-end development environments available.

We have been studying what IBM is doing in the mobile realm for the last week as the company readies the push of its IBM Mobile Technology Preview. IBM is not going to push its tools and frameworks onto developers in one large product vertical but rather is taking an iterative, pragmatic approach to solving many of the mobile dilemmas that face enterprise developers today. We also interviewed Leigh Williamson, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and a member of the CTO Team for mobile software strategy development. Check out the transcript of our conversation below.

Today IBM announced the availability of several new iOS, BlackBerry and Android apps for accessing its enterprise communications software products. The apps cover Connections, LotusLive Meeting, Samtime, and Lotus Notes Traveler, along with other tools. Most of the apps are free, but of course you have to be using the server versions that they correspond with in your company.

One of the most basic tasks a smartphone can perform is the reading and writing of email. Research In Motion built an empire off of this function with its BlackBerry platform. Yet, the concept of mobile email might need to be redefined. Currently, a mobile inbox does not look all that different from a regular inbox. IBM Research studied how users interact with mobile email and is developing a whole new client based off triage and capturing user intentions.