Articles about Cloud

In a blog post over the weekend Mel Carson, community manager for Microsoft's adCenter Analytics, announced that the project will not be leaving beta. The project, which began its pilot stage in France back in 2005, will remain online through the end of the year, and the associated blog will continue as "Insights & Analysis" -- indicating that perhaps Microsoft's not entirely done thinking about the Web numbers problem.

Carson called the beta program a success, despite the failure to launch. "The insights you've contributed through your feedback and your use of the tool have served an invaluable purpose in shaping Microsoft's future in this space. You've helped us work towards making an informed decision about building a general Web analytics solution," he wrote. He added that Microsoft in this case is now looking more closely at addressing specialized markets, as opposed to the more general small- and medium-sized "self-serve" clients that adCenter Analytics served.

Continue reading →

SpiralFrog, the ad-supported music service launched by Universal Music Group and EMI in 2007, is now defunct.

To say SpiralFrog started off on the wrong foot would be an understatement. The service's launch was delayed by nearly a year due to an internal coup that resulted in the departure of the entire executive team. Then, beta testers reported a very unfriendly system of that commanded the user to authenticate each download within a 60-second span after it was completed, or else the download would be negated. This made the service impossible to use passively.

Continue reading →

In perhaps another sterling demonstration of the effectiveness of Google's own product announcements by way of its blog posts, the world awakened this morning to an experimental capability in Google's Gmail that, if you think about it, you wonder why no one's thought about it before: An independent developer with the handle Yuzo F is distributing a Gmail add-on that gives users five seconds after clicking on the Send button to click on an Undo link that stops distribution from going forward.

"This feature can't pull back an e-mail that's already gone," writes Google UX designer Michael Leggett this morning, "it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don't worry -- if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we'll still send your message."

Continue reading →

It feels as if we've been waiting forever for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, which is why the fuss a few days back over Microsoft Research's "Gazelle" project -- ZOMG NEW BROWSER MAYBE!!!! -- was sort of refreshing and fun, if pretty far removed from reality as we know it.

The confusion came down to some observers' misunderstanding of the relationship between Microsoft Research and the parts of the company that actually ship products. Microsoft Research is, of course, a research facility; they think interesting thoughts, they test their theories, and after that maybe their ideas are taken up and maybe they're not.

Continue reading →

Since the very beginning of Microsoft's venture into distributed video platforms, it's intended to make a system for enabling developers more conventional languages like C++, C#, and Visual Basic to produce truly distributed applications. The code word for this is "n-tier logic," and it refers to the ability for a core application to assume its input/output is being handled by a set of graphical resources, while enabling any number of intermediate layers to connect the core with the graphics. That way, the only technical differences between a local app, a network app, and an Internet app take place in the middle of the chart -- for example, is there IIS or isn't there?

When Microsoft started testing what it had called Silverlight 1.1, it was with the idea to introduce .NET app languages to the mix, and to go beyond JavaScript. Sometimes you still hear a hint of the arbitrary dividing line at Microsoft, between C# "developers, developers, developers" and JavaScript "designers." During the learning process, the company evolved the 1.1 project into Silverlight 2.0, whose stated goal was to provide fluid graphical functionality for rich Internet applications (RIAs) using any .NET language.

Continue reading →

Download Internet Explorer 8.0 for Windows Vista from Fileforum now.

As suspected, Microsoft used this week's MIX09 conference to unleash Internet Explorer 8, downloadable as of noon today (EDT). Our initial tests on the final release indicate that Microsoft's promises of better performance and security are realized, and that the team goal of creating "a better way to waste time on the Internet" has been realized too -- in the good sense.

Continue reading →

When Nokia announced last month that it will be opening The Ovi Store for mobile apps, the company noted that the content in the store would be of the same nature as the content previously available on Download, WidSets, and MOSH.

Previously is the operative word in that statement, according to a report from Reuters today. According to the report, MOSH will be closing down.

Continue reading →

By now, the matter of Google's multiple small disasters with its early round of cloud-based applications -- troubles which led to the unauthorized sharing ability of some files -- is one of public record, and certainly the company has made plenty of public apologies. But was it criminally deceptive in promising to users a safe system, only to then be hit with safety issues? The Electronic Privacy Information Center advocacy group says yes, and it has taken its case to the US Federal Trade Commission.

In a formal complaint issued this morning (PDF available here), EPIC uses citations from Google's online marketing promotions for its cloud-based applications, along with links to news articles about the company's recent headaches, to build the case that the company makes promises to users that it can't keep.

Continue reading →

If there really is any release news regarding Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft this morning in Las Vegas -- and we expect there will be -- it will probably come during the opening minutes of Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie's keynote this morning. He'll need IE8 to demonstrate everything else on his plate today, and if IE8's not ready for RTM, that fact may as well be stamped on everything he shows. "5-D" wouldn't save Silverlight 3 if that's the case.

Stay in touch with Betanews for live commentary in sync with Scott Guthrie's two-hour keynote session this morning.

Continue reading →

At a two-hour keynote address to the MIX 09 conference in Las Vegas scheduled for noon EDT / 9:00 PDT today, engineers from Microsoft are expected to make this a very busy day for Web application developers. Attendees have been told to expect the first betas of Silverlight 3, the company's Web video and functionality platform, which in this edition may include support for three-dimensional controls and graphics.

There does appear to be a prominently veiled curtain in front of what will likely be the big news of the day, even if there's nothing behind it. If there is something behind it, it will very likely be the public release of Internet Explorer 8, which will introduce greater standards compliance, a private browsing mode, and a somewhat faster execution engine -- more than doubling the speed of IE7.

Continue reading →

Abuse of Twitter users is getting to be such a regular thing than a wiser journalist would write a macro for the story, though for once they're not being duped into revealing their passwords. That said, Rik Ferguson at Trend Micro is reporting today that a site sharing a name with a brand-new iPhone application for the popular microblogging service has a nasty little malware payload waiting for the unwary.

The application, TweetFollow, was released just last week. It is safely available from its developers at b1te.com, as well as from Apple's apps store. It is not, however, available from tweetfollow.com, which instead has a JavaScript infection called, in Trend Micro parlance, JS_IFRAME.AKK. The domain was registered on December 31, 2008 to John Dennis of Netus Group, with whom Betanews has left a message requesting clarification concerning a) how the site is connected to the TweetFollow application and b) why the site has JavaScript cooties. We'll keep you posted.

Continue reading →

After a beta test, Carbonite, a major provider of online backup services to consumers and small businesses, this week opened its first backup service for Macs.

Carbonite's new service provides automatic online backup for Intel-based Macs running Mac OS 10.4 or 10.5, backing up files to Carbonite's cloud-based servers in the background while users work at their computers. Secure socket layer (SSL) encryption is used for privacy.

Continue reading →

Masters of procrastination are familiar with the snoopy pleasures of WikiScanner, which lets you input an organization name or domain and get back a list of what folks using their network have been up to on Wikipedia. Some edits are pretty obvious -- for instance, the edits from users at aig.com on "The Fate Of Achilles' Armor," "Lists of Past Disneyland Attractions," and "1975 in Country Music" are obviously attempts to earn their bonuses. But what was the Church of Scientology up back in 2006 to with Kurt Cobain?

Over at Culture kills... wait, I mean Cutlery, Matthew Caverhill searched on a whim for "Scientology" and noticed that in addition to the sort of edits one might expect from a large organization with concerns about their public image, the CoS domains also showed a number of edits to pages done on a single January day in 2006, concerning celebrities who had killed themselves or been murdered by someone believed to be mentally ill.

Continue reading →

It was twenty years ago today: Tim Berners-Lee taught the band to play wrote up his "Information Management: A Proposal" paper and hatched the idea for the "Mesh," which on further review he'd decide to call the World-Wide Web. What started as a simple tool for managing the dataflow at CERN has become the most disruptive technology of our lifetime. If you're reading this, raise a glass -- but don't get too comfortable.

If you've never taken a look at the document that set it all off, you should -- there's even a little diagram that reminds you of what flow charts looked like before Powerpoint. (Scroll down.) Terms like VAX and hypercard and uucp are used, which should make all the old guard around here feel sort of happy and nostalgic. Making us all feel rather less happy and nostalgic is Sir Tim's address to Parliament this week, in which he warned that the looming loss of privacy thanks to Internet tech would mean more than just privacy lost: "We must not snoop on the internet... What is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium."

Continue reading →

TV.com -- CBS Interactive's answer to video sites like Hulu, Veoh, and Joost -- has announced today that it is beta testing streams in full 1080p high-definition.

The beta site includes clips of popular CBS properties CSI, Survivor, The Late Show With David Letterman, and even a classic Pink Panther cartoon.

Continue reading →