Cloud

Rumors in recent months have pointed to Apple's next big music innovation being some cloud-based service. While nothing has appeared as of yet, its move to support streaming of music stored on a customers iDisk could be the beginning.

Users of Apple's iDisk app for iPhone can stream audio from their iDisk thanks to the latest update to the app shipped earlier last month. The functionality went all but unnoticed because Apple has done little if anything to promote its existence.

Jive Software, a leader in enterprise social software which recently closed a new $30 million in investment, has unveiled a new capability for its customers. With the Jive Widget Studio, users of the company's latest software release will be able to create customer OpenSocial widgets inside their enterprise collaboration space.

Similar to the Google Gadgets, Jive users will now be able to choose or create their custom widgets displaying virtually any information delivered via RSS. Jive also is providing pre-made widgets for sources such as Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo. Users will also be able to create other simple widgets such as survey forms or slideshows.

Long-running Voice over IP company Vonage released a mobile app for iOS and Android Wednesday called "Vonage Talk Free" that lets users call each other for free over 3G or Wi-Fi. Calls placed over 3G will incur the usual carrier data charges.

Vonage has taken a new and brilliant approach to getting customers hooked into its VoIP architecture. Instead of requiring a Vonage account to make calls, Vonage Talk Free requires only a user's Facebook account, and calls can only be made to other Facebook users with the mobile app installed on their phone. Phone numbers are not assigned, so the spread of the app will be largely done by Facebook's half billion users sharing it amongst themselves.

Microsoft's Bing Maps unveiled a host of new features and functions this week, including the public beta of a revamped user experience with new visuals and dynamic map labels, and a handful of new Bing Map Apps submitted for the King of the Maps competition. One of the newest apps now ties Bing Maps into the OpenStreetMap community, the online map comprised entirely of free and open geographic data, edited by users in the fashion of Wikipedia.

"We've taken the OSM data as is, created tiles to fit our tile schema and are hosting it on our Windows Azure [Content Delivery Network]," Chris Pendleton said in the Bing Maps community blog. "This means, pure OSM data coming down at screaming fast speeds from the massive Windows Azure infrastructure built out to support globally distributed applications…like Bing Maps."

Skype, Kazaa, and Joost creators Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström launched Rdio on Tuesday, aiming to offer an inexpensive way to provide unlimited streaming music from mobile phones. In addition, the service would allow users to save music to their device for offline listening.

The service costs $4.95 per month for desktop-only access, and $9.95 monthly for both desktop and mobile use. The company has about seven million songs in its database, and unlimited streaming. Users can select songs to be synced to their devices for online listening, or download copies of the song to keep at a cost of 99 cents per track.

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.

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.

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:

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.