Articles about Cloud

Leading media research company Nielsen posted a report Monday called "What Americans Do Online..." that details how U.S. Web users spend their time online. According to the research, use of social networks has risen 43% since last year, and they now take up more than a third of the total time an average user spends online.

"Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities: social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie," Nielsen analyst Dave Martin said in the company's blog.

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Using publicly available information on Facebook, a researcher has been able to gather personal details of nearly 170 million users of the service, or about a third of all users. The data includes names, addresses, e-mails, phone numbers, and birthdays: essentially anything that was not marked as private is now part of this file.

The file has now ended up on The Pirate Bay, and so far has seen over 10,000 downloads. This could mean hackers would have an easy way to obtain personal information necessary for identity theft and other malicious uses.

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Cloud computing dominated the morning's Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2010 presentations. COO Kevin Turner and Chief Research Strategy Officer Craig Mundie spent more time talking cloud computing than any other topic. For Mundie, it was a bold departure from previous years, where he spoke broadly and almost exclusively about forthcoming technologies -- typically years from release, if ever. Last year, he asserted that the successor to the PC would be "a room."

Some reasons for Microsoft's cloud focus should be obvious:

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Facebook today officially introduced a new feature called Facebook Questions, the social network's take on crowdsourced question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Hunch.

The new feature, still classified as a beta, lets users ask questions of the vast Facebook community of more than 500 million simply by typing them into a new field labeled "What do you want to know?"

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Online retail giant Amazon on Tuesday launched a beta of new functionality intended to use data from Facebook to make recommendations. Once connected, the retailer would comb through the data in both your own profile and that of your friends.

Amazon said it would share no personal data with Facebook. The social networking site would be sending data over to Amazon, however: this would include the user's likes and favorites on Facebook as well as his or her friends, and their birthdays. In addition, Amazon would make it easier for a user to find a friend's wish list once the services are connected, but this would be a guess based on given information.

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Most Internet veterans would associate the Ask brand with the familiar face of Jeeves, who you could ask a question and usually get the answer that you'd be looking for. However, as the Internet became more sophisticated, that method of search became dated.

The change in our search habits forced Jeeves into retirement in February 2006, and the company moved to a standard based-query system. But it now appears as if question-based queries -- maybe not Jeeves himself though -- may be about to make a comeback.

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Twitter on Wednesday announced that it is relocating its technical operations infrastructure to a custom-built data center in the vicinity of Salt Lake City, Utah later this year. The move is expected to help the site's reliability and availability.

Popular microblogging site Twitter is estimated to have over 75 million users, and to be growing at a rate of about 6.2 million new accounts per month.

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Palo Alto, Calif. based Flipboard launched what it called the "first social magazine" for the iPad Wednesday, however it quickly found out that a much-hyped launch can lead to trouble in keeping the service online for its users.

Tech luminary Robert Scoble twittered incessantly in the hours leading up to the launch, giving few details on the product other than calling it the "killer app" for the iPad and "revolutionary."

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Today, to celebrate the 500 million user milestone, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Facebook Stories, a new application dedicated to all the stories of people using Facebook in unique and inspirational ways.

These stories are arranged either by geographic location (as shown on a Bing Map) or by theme. The themes include: Crime Fighting, Movements, Causes, Grief, Rescues, Small Business, Support Groups, and many more.

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Google's image search service will be getting a revamp this week, aimed at making the search function easier to use, and to provide more relevant results. The redesign is essentially the service's first major makeover since Google Images went live in 2001.

At that time, only 250 million images had been catalogued by the Mountain View, Calif. search company. Now over 10 billion images are indexed. With such an increase in volume, obviously the search functionality will need to improve, as does the way the site displays ever larger results.

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Social networking company Foursquare is in talks with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo over using its data to help enrich search results, UK paper The Telegraph reported on Monday. According to co-founder Dennis Crowley, the data would be anonymized and then shared.

Foursquare is one of the most rapidly growing social networking services on the Internet. Last week, it signed up its two millionth user, just three months after signing up one million. Word of mouth seems to be driving a lot of the growth, as friends sign up to follow one another.

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Google moved to better its search results by acquiring Metaweb, a San Francisco based company that maintains an open database of "things," and their relationships to one another. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Metaweb's database currently includes some 12 million items, including places, notable people, companies, and movies. Queries to the Google search algorithm would return more relevant results as a result of the company's technology, the company claims.

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In a sign that Hewlett Packard is becoming much more serious about WebOS following its acquisition of Palm in April, the company has apparently "tabled" its plans for an Android-powered tablet. The device was originally intended to come to market later this year.

Sources told All Things Digital Thursday that HP has no new timetable for the release of the device. Following a similar fate for the Windows-powered Slate, it certainly seems as if WebOS is the future at the company. It is not known whether the Android project may be restarted.

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Today, a select group of PlayStation Plus subscribers got access to the first preview version of Hulu Plus on the PlayStation 3.

Hulu Plus is the new subscription tier for the popular streaming TV website which lets U.S. subscribers watch their favorite programs on connected TVs, Set-top boxes, mobile devices, and now video game consoles for $9.99 per month.

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French canadian online news site Cyberpresse said Wednesday that Apple had purchased 3D map making company Poly9, possibly indicating the company has plans to enter the competitive online mapping sector with an entry of its own.

The acquisition is the second mapping-related acquisition. A year ago, Apple silently acquired Placebase, a mapping software company. Together, the technology would enable the Cupertino company to produce a product that could be akin to Google Earth.

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