Articles about Cloud

Only into its second day, the criminal copyright infringement case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay has already begun to crumble.

Exposing a clear misunderstanding of how .torrent files work, the prosecution was forced to drop all charges except those of "making available," a term common among all file sharing suits.

Continue reading →

Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced that its Ovi suite of mobile applications will be getting its own App store in May, and Microsoft announced Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile devices.

Nokia's store fits into the company's Ovi suite of mobile services, and will appropriately be named The Ovi Store. It will carry the applications, games, videos, podcasts, widgets, and "personalization content" (likely wallpaper and ringtones) previously found on Download!, MOSH, and WidSets, now combined into a single location.

Continue reading →

Microsoft had always promised interoperability as one of its key goals for Silverlight. The way it's accomplishing this on the Linux side of the scale is by empowering Miguel de Icaza to take the project and run with it.

This week marked an important milestone in a genuine effort to take a pretty good graphical Web applications platform and make it workable for Linux. The Mono Project, a team backed by Novell and Microsoft whose goal is to make the .NET Framework workable on other platforms, including Linux (and even, if you can believe it, Windows) has released its first non-beta version of the Moonlight 1.0 plug-in.

Continue reading →

This week, Google cranked out several tools that exploit the search company's strength in the LBS (location based service) model. Betanews took a look at one for Android, and one for Gmail.

Google Labs is a repository of potentially advantageous little gadgets, so when new product is pushed through, it usually warrants solid consideration. On Tuesday, a Gmail lab was premiered that carried a solid concept: Show the geographic origin of a user's e-mails as a signature.

Continue reading →

A settlement by Facebook's founder to college classmates, pegged by lawyers at $65 million, contained only $20 million in cash, according to an AP report this week which also revives the issue of Facebook's real stock value.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg paid the controversial settlement to former Harvard classmates who claimed he stole their idea for a social networking site. The classmates later started their own social network, ConnectU.

Continue reading →

So begins a new day for the venerable YouTube, the popular video streaming site is testing downloadable videos which include both a free and a for-pay model.

Thai Tran, Product Manager at YouTube announced today in the site's official blog that YouTube is "going offline." That is to say, it is giving video owners the option to make their videos downloadable under the Creative Commons License. Also, the option to make the videos available through a Google Checkout purchase is being tested.

Continue reading →

Apple is rumored to be readying an on-demand video service that would let users stream iTunes Movie and TV show purchases directly from iTunes servers for playback. The speculation springs from a report in Apple Insider, which proposes that such a service would benefit users by eliminating the need for local storage of media files.

According to Apple Insider, Apple is now putting the finishing touches on "iTunes Replay" for inclusion in iTunes 8. But the report also noted that it appears undecided by Apple whether or not it plans to charge for the service. Apple Insider does not cite any sources at Apple as the basis for the report. When Betanews attempted to confirm this information with Apple today, spokespersons were not immediately available for comment.

Continue reading →

With Larry Heck going aboard Microsoft this week, Microsoft has hired yet another Yahoo executive in efforts to make a larger dent in the search engine market versus industry leader Google. At Yahoo, Heck was in charge of a laboratory that developed algorithms for more accurate searches and ad targeting.

Although Microsoft announced 5,000 job cuts a few weeks back, its search arm is still hiring, and at least three of its recent key hires are from Yahoo. Others from Yahoo include Sean Suchter, hired by Microsoft in November, and Dr. Qi Lu, appointed president of Microsoft's online services group in December. In a new job slated to start within the next few weeks, Heck will report to Satya Nadella, a senior VP in Microsoft's online services unit.

Continue reading →

Over one year ago, Southwest Airlines announced its intention of bringing in-flight wireless internet to its passengers.

Yesterday, Yahoo said the tests will take place on a single plane starting this month, with three more equipped by March, all running on the same Row 44 system they noted last year. What does Yahoo have to do with it, you ask?

Continue reading →

Major Linux and open source software distributor Red Hat today released JBoss Enterprise Portal Environment 4.3, an update designed to make it easier for Java developers to deploy rich applications and portlets on corporate Web portals. In one new feature, the 4.3 release brings support for JBoss Portlet Bridge, an implementation of the JSR-301 specification aimed at letting developers get JavaServer Faces (JSF), Seam and RichFaces apps up and running quickly without concern over underlying portlet development or the API.

Portal Environment 4.3 is also the first release of the environment to support the Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286) standard for improved management of portal-to-portal communications, caching, and the Ajax frameworks often used for composite applications, or "business mashups," in service-oriented architectures (SOA). At the same time, Red Hat announced that its upcoming JBoss Developer Studio 2.0 will contain portlet plug-ins and wizards geared to simplifying portal development for both Portlet 2.0 and Portlet Bridge environments.

Continue reading →

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg paid $65 million to two former Harvard classmates who claimed he stole their idea for a social networking site, a law firm has revealed.

The settlement amount in the suit waged by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Zuckerberg's ex-classmates, was supposed to be confidential.

Continue reading →

A public beta of an innovative, if ambitious, project originally announced in December is being launched this morning: Imagine if someone who normally sends you mail via your US Mail box outside your front door were instead to send an electronic document to an address that's keyed to that same postal address -- not your e-mail, but your street number. You'd have access to that electronic delivery location because, well, you live there.

That's the notion behind Zumbox, a service that relies on both sender and receiver to be interested in sending regular mail electronically. You may have read about this "electronic mail" concept, it's in all the papers. Zumbox's value proposition is that it may enable services like public utilities, print publications, and other firms that do their business with consumers using dead trees and postal carriers, to instead save the time and post electronic documents (maybe PDFs, maybe Word files) online to the very same postal address.

Continue reading →

As it turns out, Google did not develop a calendar and contacts synchronization platform all on its own. Rather, it licensed Exchange Server patents from Microsoft, in a deal that company is describing today as an "open" license.

This morning, Google launched its initial beta for a contacts synchronization service that enables individuals to share information for up to five mobile calendars and three e-mail addresses between devices, including iPhone, S60, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile phones. If that list sounded familiar, it's because their manufacturers are all on the patent licensing agreement list announced by Microsoft last December 18.

Continue reading →

Google has released a tool that allows Google calendar and Gmail contact data to be synced with iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. Similar to the Blackberry application Google released last year, Google Sync integrates a user's Google calendar data with the phone's native calendar. It also works with Google Apps accounts, but administrator approval must first be granted.

There are currently some limitations to the application. The iPhone, for example, cannot sync more than five calendars, and contact information cannot hold multiple numbers for fax, mobile, or pager headings, and each contact is limited to 3 email addresses.

Continue reading →

Rupert Murdoch's empire is sprawling, varied and, as everyone saw in yesterday's News Corp earnings report, hurting in the current economy. What does that mean for MySpace and the company's IGN Entertainment properties?

News Corp. files its Fox Interactive Media endeavors, which include all of those properties along with Photobucket, Hulu, Beliefnet and many more, in the "other" segment of its quarterly earnings reports. And Thursday's report was not cheerful; "other" reported a Q2 2009 adjusted operating loss of $38 million, down from a $23 million profit in Q2 2008 -- most of it due to weakness at IGN and News Digital Media (which operates mainly in Australia and has since been taken private by the company).

Continue reading →