Archive for the ‘Web Industry’ Category

Open APIs Are All The Rage

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Everybody is calling everyone else, apparently, in a monster repackaging of data, re-presenting info on my website (please stay here, don’t go to the source) and especially via mobile apps. REST is killing SOAP. Some info on the numbers, republished from a ReadWriteWeb post:

Perhaps most illustrative is his “API Billionaire’s Club.”

Members of the club include [...]

Mobile Data Aggregation, South Africa style

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

The New York Times has an article about Ushahidi, a platform for aggregating data and plotting it on a map.  Ushahidi was created by a Kenyan lawyer after the violence that followed the 2007 Kenya election.

The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on [...]

When Google loses power…

Monday, March 8th, 2010

A power outage at one of Google’s datacenters took App Engine down for over two hours.  Google has provided the details of why it went down for so long and what they’re doing to improve things in the future.  Transparent Uptime called their postmortem a “nearly perfect model for others”.   Two of their action [...]

Android in a list of “10 things not to buy in 2010″?

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Here is an MSN money article which recommends NOT buying any smart phone other than the Blackberry or iPhone.

Smart-phone also-rans
In the past few years, several smart phones have hit the market with features similar to the iPhone and BlackBerry, but they haven’t generated the same buzz.

As a result, fewer developers are likely to create [...]

A Facebook breakup story

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Warms the heart … well actually it chills it a little.  But it is good to see that teenagers can see the potential trouble.

Breaking up with time-consuming Facebook

Nothing untoward took place on her Facebook page (her parents checked). Her grades stayed strong. So the adults in her life didn’t see any urgent reason to intervene. [...]

Google Apps Script

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Google Apps now supports scripting that can automate processes and access Web services. This looks like the beginning of their play to make their platform programmable and extensible a la Force.com. Could be interesting. Available in Google Apps Premier and Education Editions.

Google Apps Script works mainly within the Spreadsheets app to automate various processes. For [...]