Gigaom
Why Digg Digs Cassandra
Digg, the San Francisco-based social media company, is dropping MySQL and instead betting its future on Cassandra, an open-source data store. It’s just the latest sign of the growing popularity of the software, which was developed (and open sourced) by Facebook to search through its inbox. While Facebook has since backed off Cassandra, Digg... »
Big Media or Big SEO Spammers?
Faced with declining revenues and increasingly dismal prospects, some mainstream media outlets are adopting questionable tactics, specifically dead-end web pages stuffed with outbound links and pay-per-click ads. A liberally funded LA startup is only too quick to help them. The story starts with San Francisco-based sex writer Violet Blue. She used to be a... »
Venture Capital’s Data Side Story
From new data stores to large-scale databases to cloud-based storage services, it seems VC dollars these days are primarily flowing into two important (if somewhat unsexy) technology sectors: storage and big data. Which make sense, given that the continuous digitization of everything is resulting in a proverbial explosion of structured and unstructured data, in... »
Video: Google & Its Grand Ambitions
It goes without saying that Google has gigantic ambitions. We hear a lot about its various products but it’s hard to contextualize those efforts. A new video from Australian weekly news show, Hungry Beast, is a graphical representation of Google’s grand ambitions. It’s also a lot of fun. Especially when you see former Intel... »
Where, a Geo App, Launches a Local Mobile Ad Network
Where, a geo-enabled local search and recommendation service by Boston-based uLocate Communications, has launched Where Ads, a hyper-local advertising network. The company is launching the new network because it believes that its access to carrier infrastructure gives it an ability to deliver hyper-local and contextually relevant content — and by extension, highly targeted local... »
Web’s Buildout Boosting Server Chip Demand
A few days ago, Jay Adelson, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based social media company, Digg, told me that his company now has hundreds of servers. And the size of its infrastructure was continuing to grow with its usage. And that is after the company has started to maximize its CPU usage after tapping the power... »
iPad to Be Available in Stores on April 3rd — Plus, Our Poll
If you’re a fan of the iPad, like I am, here’s some good news. Apple says it will start selling the Wi-Fi versions of the iPad on Saturday, April 3. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will arrive in late April. From a company press release: “iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.... »
iPad to Be Available in Stores on April 3rd. Plus Our Poll
If you’re a fan of the iPad, like I am, here’s some good news. Apple says it will start selling the Wi-Fi versions of the iPad on Saturday, April 3. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will arrive in late April. From a company press release: “iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.... »
How Big Were the Winter Olympics Online?
The recently concluded Winter Olympics that were held in Vancouver, Canada, were a watershed moment in the history of online video. Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based content delivery network with a global footprint, helped collect some of the stats about the Vancouver Olympics and they are truly mind-boggling. I had previously noted that NBCOlympics.com clocked 710... »
Ex-Six Apart CEO Joins Wolfram Alpha
Barak Berkowitz, a veteran of Silicon Valley has joined Wolfram Alpha, an intelligent search engine by Wolfram Research, a Champaign, IL company founded by scientist Stephen Wolfram. He joins as the managing director, a position that is roughly equivalent to the title of chief executive officer. Wolfram, who is English by birth prefers the... »
Nearly 300M VoIP Subscribers Seen By 2013
There will be 288 million users of Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) by 2013, according to market research firm In-Stat. While so far, VoIP has been driven largely by the likes of cable companies that want to disrupt the incumbent phone companies, the next big VoIP boost is going to come from mobile. In-Stat believes over half... »
The State of Google Apps
Google for the past three years has been trying to upend the enterprise market’s leading software suite, Microsoft Office, with its cloud-based Google Apps. With cloud services now being widely adopted in the enterprise, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s offering is starting to pull ahead. Google currently claims some 2 million entities as Google Apps... »
U.S. Mobile Market: Highly Competitive, and the iPhone Still Rocks
Pretty much everything you’ve read about the U.S. mobile industry is true: The networks suck — some more than others — and the iPhone is still a king-maker. Yet according to data collected by Wireless Intelligence, during the quarter ended Dec. 31 2009, 5.9 million net new subscribers signed up for wireless services, the... »
Curling on Mobiles: The Winter Olympics By the Numbers
During the past two weeks, the only time I would remember that the Winter Olympics were underway was when I was looking at the stats of our NewTeeVee blog or checking out Mathew Ingram’s Twitter stream. In the case of NewTeeVee, we saw a whole lot of people show up via Google looking for... »
Can Cardpool Solve the Unused Gift Card Problem?
Gift cards, as far as my friend Barry Ritholz is concerned, represent the end of civility, as with them the giver says: I put very little thought into buying this for you. But for me, lack of time — or information about the recipient’s tastes — prompt me to buy them, and increasingly... »
What You Should Read This Weekend
This week I read some interesting, some bizarre, some funny but mostly mind stimulating articles. Here is a short selection that includes a must read post about the rise of narrative in social networks and a fascinating presentation by graphic designer Nicholas Felton. The Future of Social Networks. It is storytelling – or narrative based... »
Video Break: The Foursquare Rap
When fan-bois start making rap videos (however amateurish) about something, you know it is hot. Badges Like Us, a new video by Matt Newberg and Boris Silver, about Foursquare, the New York-based start-up shows why it is on its way to becoming a mobile phenomenon. I continue to be a big fan of the service,... »
Cisco & Google: Enemies Now & Forever
A few weeks ago, GigaOM contributor and veteran entrepreneur Allan Leinwand wrote a post entitled Cisco vs. All Comers. Well let’s add Google to that list of all comers. The Financial Times reported today that Cisco is developing a new “ultra-high-speed system for internet access in partnership with a number of U.S. service... »
CA Buys 3Tera
As predicted, CA, the company formerly known as Computer Associates, is buying another cloud computing company. Instead of snapping up Eucalyptus or Cloudkick, as our own Derrick Harris thought, CA is going old school and buying Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based 3Tera for an undisclosed amount. 3Tera is one of the oldest companies focused on infrastructure... »
Why ngmoco’s CEO Is Bullish on the iPad
Apple’s iPad, which is soon going to find its way onto the market, has drawn criticism and scorn from many a technorati. But Neil Young, chief executive and co-founder of San Francisco-based mobile gaming startup ngmoco, isn’t one of them. Not only does he think that the iPad will make netbooks pointless, he believes... »
Open Angel Forum Coming to San Francisco
The Open Angel Forum, a free, meetup-style event held by technology industry raconteur Jason Calacanis, is coming to San Francisco. Calacanis launched the forum in an effort to offer an alternative to all the “pay-to-pitch schemes” out there, and so far this year has already held events — through which five startups are subsequently... »
The Slow Death of a Social Network
A few weeks ago, when News Corp’s digital chief, Jon Miller, fired MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and replaced him with Co-presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, I decided it was time to write the social networking site’s epitaph. The recent exodus of executives and technical talent has only bolstered my belief that MySpace... »
More Details About Spotify’s New Money
Spotify, one of my favorite new companies, is getting more money. Earlier today, Michael Arrington reported that he had heard from multiple sources that the Founders Fund has invested in the fast growing European start-up. “We do not know the size of the investment; however, we believe it may have been a token amount to... »
Is Competition Starting to Eat Into Cisco’s Core Markets?
Cisco Systems, no matter what happens, always seems to find a way to move forward. It grows its revenues and squeezes out profits even when the world is falling apart, thanks largely to its near-complete domination of its two core businesses, routers and switches. But it seems the 2009 recession, increased competition and the... »
Video: Reality TV, iPhone & The Future of Technology — Why it’s All a Game
Forget everything you did today. Clear your schedule and spend the next half hour watching this video. It is a presentation by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell Games and former creative director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio. A veteran game designer, he is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center... »
Amazon is The Most Trusted Brand in America
Amazon.com is the top performing brand in the US based on two critical factors – trust and recommendation – according to a new report by market research firm, Millward Brown. The new report, “Beyond Trust: Engaging Consumers in the Post-Recession World” puts Amazon ahead of FedEx, Huggies and Downey. The “Beyond Trust” study used a... »
What You Should Be Reading This Weekend
It was a busy week that started off that way. In between trying to make sense of all things Mobile World Congress and the announcements made at that big show in Barcelona, I read a lot of stuff on the web, thanks to these five tips for power browsing from former LifeHacker editor Gina... »
My Bow Wow Pow Wow with Dogster CEO
It was four years ago, when I first met Ted Rheingold. He had just started a company called Dogster, an early example of a niche social network that was growing pretty rapidly. At that time, it had about 200,000 registered users and gotten $1 million in investment from an impressive list of angel investors... »
Skype-Verizon Deal: More Details
Skype and Verizon announced a partnership earlier this week that would embed the Internet calling service on Verizon’s smartphones. The partnership, at least to me, was driven by Verizon’s fear of the iPhone. I wondered if the two companies had signed an exclusive deal. But during the press conference, when I asked Verizon chief marketing... »
In the Netherlands, 1 Gbps Broadband Will Soon Be Everywhere
Google last week announced Google Fiber, an experimental fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that the company plans to build and use to connect between 20,000 and 200,000 homes. And while we wait for that network to take shape, Reggefiber of the Netherlands is moving ahead and is upgrading its network to 1 Gbps. (Related post:... »