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Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009: The Finalists
By Aaron Ricadela, Douglas MacMillan, Arik Hesseldahl, and Olga Kharif Innovation among startups is alive and well, judging from the crop of entrepreneurs who made it onto this year's list. Herewith, BusinessWeek.com's annual rundown of the most promising tech startups and the young people, age 30 and under, who set them in motion.
Is Sweden, the only country to have sent a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament, finally giving up its swashbuckling ways? When Sweden's IPRED anti-piracy law went into effect earlier this year, Internet traffic across the country plummeted overnight—a sign that P2P users, fearing exposure at last, were abandoning their existing copyright infringement tools. The Pirate Bay defendants were found guilty by a Swedish court earlier this year, and the site's ISP are now under assault by the music and movie industries. The music business insists that the measure are working. Music's major labels say that sales of digital downloads are up 18 percent in the first nine months of 2009 in Sweden.
Swedes start buying music; are anti-P2P laws working?
Canonical hosted its biannual Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) last week in Dallas, Texas. I was one of many open source software developers who attended the event and participated in the collaborative process of planning Ubuntu 10.04, the next version of the popular Linux distribution. An important part of the 10.04 roadmap that emerged during UDS is a tentative plan to remove the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Tool, from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision is viewed by some as controversial, the reasoning behind it is valid. The removal of a niche professional graphics editing tool reflects Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users. How UDS works
Giving up the GIMP is a sign of Ubuntu's mainstream maturity
Parse.ly: better feeds with less garnish | The Web Life | ZDNet.
I haven't figured out a way to manage Google Reader. I tried using Fever , but it doesn't find news that matters to me... and it cost $30. Techmeme is my home page, but I think it needs an upgrade .
SC09 The Hybrid Multicore Consortium is on a mission that perhaps all of computing - on the desktop and in the data center - will one day embark on: making hybrid computing architectures as easy to program and use as monolithic platforms have been. There is a growing consensus - but by no means a complete one - that the future of energy-efficient and yet powerful systems will be based on the coupling of general purpose, multicore CPUs with various kinds of co-processors that also have hundreds of cores to do specific kinds of accelerations needed by particular applications. The trouble with these hybrid computing architectures, which can bring a lot of flops to bear, is that even the smartest people in the world complain about how hard it is to program them.
Nuke labs show the future of hybrid computing
Disclaimer: The information presented here has been gathered and analyzed in my capacity as a graduate student at Indiana University. This data was gathered and analyzed on my own time, without using federal government resources. This data, and the analysis I draw from it will be a major component of my PhD dissertation, and as such, I am releasing it in order to receive constructive criticism on my theories from other experts in the field. The opinions I express in my analysis are my own, and do not reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission, any individual Commissioner, or any other individual or organization with which I am affiliated. UPDATE 12/3/2009 @ 12:20PM: I received a phone call from an executive at TeleStrategies, the firm who organized the ISS World conference.
8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversig
As mobile platform makers grant more and more system functionality to their browsers, the once distinct lines between native applications and web applications are beginning to blur. Over the past few months, HTML5 and other advances in web technology have allowed developers on various platforms to access to GPS coordinates, accelerometer data, and more. Plenty of limitations still exist (it’s still mostly impossible to access the microphone/camera on most smartphones from the browser, for example), but one big hurdle might be on the way out: hardware-based acceleration, otherwise known as the goods required for graphic-heavy gaming. The key here is “WebGL”, a Mozilla project which is aiming to bring the popular OpenGL 3d library to the browser via Javascript. The advantage of this approach is compatibility; as long as your hardware supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and your browser supports Javascript, it should work with minimal tweakage.
Video: WebGL might eventually bring awesome 3D to web apps
10 Web trends to watch in 2010
Mashable's Pete Cashmore says real-time communication, Internet TV and social gaming will be big in 2010. Mashable's Pete Cashmore lists his 10 Web trends that we'll be talking about next year Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time communications trend will grow The cloud-computing movement will see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated mobile payments market Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable , a popular blog about social media.
Facebook friend turns into Big Brother
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer has nearly 400 friends on Facebook. He got an offer for a new one about a month ago. “She was a good-looking girl. I usually don’t accept friends I don’t know, but I randomly accepted this one for some reason,” the 19-year-old said. He thinks that led to his invitation to come down to the La Crosse police station, where an officer laid out photos from Facebook of Bauer holding a beer — and then ticketed him for underage drinking. The police report said Bauer admitted drinking, which he denies.Barnes & Noble Nook E-Book reader reviews
Editors' note (May 24, 2011): Barnes & Noble has announced that the second-generation e-ink Nook will be available as of June 10, 2011. It features a touch-screen, and retails for $139. The first-generation model reviewed here will be discontinued immediately. Remaining inventory will be sold off at closeout prices of $119 (Wi-Fi-only) and $169 (3G+Wi-Fi) . The Nook Color remains in the line at a price of $249. Editors' note: This review has been updated extensively to account for changes in the Nook's features and performance resulting from firmware upgrades on April 23, 2010 , and November 22, 2010 , as well as the availability of the third-generation Kindle and the Nook Color.
If your company has people on the road, such as sales or technical people, a VPN is a good method for letting them access data on the company network. Many different VPN solutions can be bought, but many are free. Here, I discuss only solutions you can set up without buying a commercial VPN product.