Amazon Launches Cloud-Based Business Process Automation Service
Amazon just announced the availability of a new service called Simple Workflow Service (SWF), which allows developers to define a series of complex steps in carrying out a business process, then implements and monitors those steps all together, as a se...
Pixar Engineers Leave to Build Real World Living Toys
Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri.
Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive netw...
Why Talent Management Tech is Super Hot and Bound to Get Hotter
Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness - those are the aims of some of the software industry's hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got...
How Big Data From Connected Machines Gets Used
"Big Data" is a hot topic these days, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about the specifics of what will most likely be one of the biggest sources of data: newly web-connected devices in the home and workplace.
I spoke this week with Bill Zuje...
$1m in 1 Day: Meet Double Fine, the New Kings of Kickstarter
Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she'd pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the fi...
LinkedIn Eats Rapportive: Let’s Hope the Magic Lives On
Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the ...
What Feminists Are Saying About the Facebook IPO
Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry's biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world's ...
How YouTube is Part of a Global Economic Transformation
The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it's a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education ...
Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011
Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.
"As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for ...
Twitter’s Censorship Policy: Three Unanswered Questions
In June of 2009, leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Chinese government blocked access by its citizens to Twitter, Flickr and a number of other US-based websites. Social media being already widespread throughout th...
Data Privacy: What Bill Gates Said 10 Years Ago
Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data.
The need to keep people from being ...
iTunes U 2.0: Not Perfect, Just Awesome
iTunes U has been around for a long time, but its expansion last week onto iPhones and iPads, as well as into new content like K-12 curriculum, has truly made this a 2.0 release. And it's very, very good.
The iTunes U website carries the bold title "...
