Articles about Cloud

The contributions counter on the front page ticks slowly, slowly along, but it would be faster to watch the minutes count down for Wikia Search, Jimmy Wales' "people powered" would-be Google competitor, which announced Tuesday that it was shutting down at day's end.

The Wikipedia founder wrote in his blog that the project "has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped." Wikia Search, known early in its career as Wikiasari, was launched in January 2008, and rolled out its Wikia Intelligent Search Engine for developers in October.

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In a move which may have forestalled a deal that may have accelerated arch-rival Hulu's "evil plot" to assimilate consumers' brains, YouTube has made an extended deal with Disney Media Networks -- parent company of the American ABC and ESPN channels -- that not only gives ABC its own branded YouTube channel, but enables Disney to manage its own in-stream advertising.

This afternoon, a hastily-produced preview video was posted to ABC's new channel in a format that could not be embedded elsewhere, contrary to the usual YouTube methodology. And a two-and-a-half minute clip from a recent SportsCenter serves as a placeholder for future content on ESPN's new YouTube channel. ESPN already has a full-featured sports news and video highlight service on Disney's own Go Network, its homebase since 2004 after Disney and Microsoft's MSN terminated their deal.

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At this point, the Adobe Flash platform is ubiquitous. For many users, like the growing number of those browsing on their iPhones its absence can be point of perpetual irritation.

Likewise, Facebook has reached near ubiquity, counting everyone from octogenarian grandparents, to captive elephant seals as users. A marriage of the two is a perfect fit.

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Music search engine provider SeeqPod filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US Bankruptcy court in the Northern District of California yesterday. Not a large company by any means, it listed a modest $2 million in assets and $1.6 million in debts. Five percent of the company is owned by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory.

SeeqPod is most easily remembered for being sued by Warner Music Group early last year based on the record company's belief that the search engine was built to make money off of advertising in its built-in Web player, even though it did not even advertise.

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MySpace may not need any more chaos on its festively designed pages, but with traffic numbers down it could probably use some good news on the apps-development front, not to mention some good apps. To the rescue: Microsoft. On Monday MySpace announced that its Open Platform will support Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework. (This runs the table for MySpace, by the way, putting it on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Sidekick, Palm, Nokia, and now Windows Mobile phones.) The SDK will be available from Microsoft's CodePlex site on Thursday.

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Google Earth has added a Wayback Machine of satellite images over the years. In the application, click the clock icon at the upper left. If there are multiple images available in that region, you'll get a sliding timeline that'll let you check them out. depending on where you're looking you may find images dating back as far as 1945, which you can step through shot by shot.

It's a nifty way of seeing how often your location of choice has been snapped by the birds and at what resolution. (Wow, remember when satellite images were black and white? Neither did we.) It's definitely a work in progress; in particular, areas with 3D views available don't seem to display correctly. And it's not half as cool as Superman flying backwards to spin the world the other way and turn back time -- if that could be done on behalf of our friends in, say, Jakarta or North Dakota, we have no doubt Google would. For now, though, enjoy the free time travel.

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I still like to take my wife on dates. Call me old-fashioned, or just call me old. We sometimes only manage to get away on the spur-of-the-moment, and if we can get a table at one of our favorite places, we're lucky.

Anyway, in low-light situations, I can't exactly maintain whatever fleeting resemblance I may have had to a debonair man-on-the-town if I'm fidgeting with the BlackBerry's default browser trying to locate movie times. I could keep my cool if I could just say, "Movies," into the little speaker that comes as standard equipment with these new phones nowadays, and get a list.

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It's axiomatic that any site redesign will cause hysterics among some portion of the readership. But Facebook's user complaints over the new look have succeeded to the extent of eliciting a lengthy, slightly abashed, and palpably frustrated blog post from Chris Cox, the company's "director of product," discussing where the site goes from here.

What users apparently will not succeed in doing is in getting Facebook to back down from its new, more Twitter-like mien. The post outlines a variety of adjustments in the works, including live page updating (no more hitting Refresh!), better control over which applications intrude in one's stream, realignment with the new Highlights features to bring it back in line with the old News Feed functionality, and some reorganization of navigation components.

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Maybe it was thanks to its surprisingly popular Super Bowl commercial featuring an alien Alec Baldwin, or maybe it's thanks to its clean interface and ever-growing library of content, but Hulu's popularity exploded last month.

According to comScore's Video Metrix service, Hulu became the fourth most-viewed video site on the Internet, bypassing Microsoft, Viacom, and AOL sites, and snaring a 2.5% share of the market. The NBC-News Corp. joint venture climbed two positions in the ranking and experienced a 42% increase in views in February. The majority of the growth (33%) took place after the Super Bowl advertisement began running.

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From time to time, Microsoft has announced its intent to build its Outlook component of Office into a more fully-featured system for organizing personal contacts, as well as doing some automatic background research into those contacts on the side. Last year, the company very nearly concluded a deal with a San Francisco-based company called Xobni that would have given Microsoft that functionality in one fell swoop, but that deal collapsed.

As it turns out, that's where the good news actually began for Xobni. It managed to obtain startup funding from such top-tier venture capital sources as Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Cisco, and now BlackBerry Partners Fund. Now, the company is prepared to remove the little piece of sticky-tape that says "Beta" from its principal product, which now becomes "Xobni 1.7" for the first time, though it remains a free download.

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A brand-new site for mixtapes (or the virtual equivalent) has a charming interface, a fair database of tracks, and the ability for visitors to either play other members' playlists or search out individual songs. So does MixTape.me have a hope in hell of surviving where the legendary Muxtape ran afoul of the music industry?

Hard to say, but practical folk will check it out before much time elapses. Adam Pash, who daylights as editor of Lifehacker, pulled the site together from a raft of sources -- artist bios from Last.fm, lyrics from LyricWiki, videos from YouTube, and so on.

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It's allegedly designed to help folk manage their online identities by spotting where "their" usernames might be in use without their knowledge, but DialUsername can also provide some amusement for a slow day at work. Find all the services you never even heard of among their list of 68, then rush to them and register your preferred username, just in case the service becomes popular. We can call it Land Rush Tuesday or something.

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Twitter-populated and Microsoft-sponsored, ExecTweets may be the first step on the path toward -- depending on your point of view -- a revenue stream for the microblogging model or a sign that the service is selling out. That's the conversation inside the Twitterati beltway; most of the rest of the world, on the other hand, will probably just be amazed to hear that actual C-level execs tweet.

Yes -- 77 of them so far, according to the list on ExecTweet's About page. According to that page, ExecTweets "empowers the community to surface the most insightful, business-related tweets," though one may well ask how Guy Kawasaki's tweet Monday that "Cassettes Are Cool Again: Jimi Hendrix Tape Portrait" fits into that vision.

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David Elliott has an interesting video that demonstrates just how lossy the JPEG format really is. The UCLA MFA candidate chose an image and saved it repeatedly -- 600 times, to be exact -- ratcheting up the compression each time. He's posted the results as a 20-second clip on Vimeo. Very cool; check it out. (HT Laughing Squid)

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Today's rollout of a new customer relationship management application for Twitter follows Salesforce.com's already contentious announcement of its Facebook- and Google-enabled Service Cloud in January.

Known as Salesforce.com for Twitter, the new CRM application will work as a plug-in to Service Cloud, a cloud-based customer service channel that gives business workers access to Facebook connections, Google search, and other communications and discussion tools and forums.

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