Activist investor group urges companies to track their use of energy and resources as closely as it does its hiring and cash flow.
Battery Ventures' new, $750 million fund is the latest sign of a revival in Silicon Valley.
Ars Technica
| peter.bright@arstechnica.com (Peter Bright)
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Tech News
A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users. Not normally the kind of thing you'd expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one, if timed a bit oddly. The world of hard disks is set to change, and the impact could be severe. In the remarkably conservative world of PC hardware, it's not often that a 30-year-old convention gets discarded. Even this change has been (...)
This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
Name: Scordit
Quick Pitch: A social site where you share
tad001 writes "The Japanese phone giant KDDI has developed a way to track users movements in fine detail. It works by analyzing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets. Activities such as walking, climbing stairs, or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say. The company plans to sell the service to clients such as managers, foremen, and employment agencies."
Read more of this story at (...)
Palm caught a second wind last year when they released the long awaited successor to Palm OS 5. WebOS got an immediate fan base before the first device shipped and investors cheered the handset maker. A year later though, things aren't looking quite as bright.
img alt="" height="0" width="0" border="0" style="display:none" src="http://a.rfihub.com/eus.gif?
In the wake of the DMCA takedown notice that forced Cryptome offline, the EFF is pointing out yet another massive in with the DMCA's notice-and-takedown setup: it leads to a ton of collateral damage in getting legitimate, authorized, non-infringing content blocked by overzealous takedowns. Obviously, there are lots of cases of false takedowns or where there's a fair use argument -- but even if we assume that (in this example) Microsoft's DMCA was justified, the fact that the entire site (...)
Sony unveils its new motion controller the PlayStation Move, as a contender to market leader Nintendo Wii.
The tech industry and media are focused on Apple’s (AAPL) forthcoming iPad tablet computer, a multifunction device that includes an e-book reader. Meanwhile, with much less fanfare, other companies are pressing ahead with conventional, dedicated e-readers aimed at the leader in the category: Amazon’s Kindle.
[ See post to watch video ]
These more focused, monochrome devices aren’t as flashy or as versatile as the iPad, which handles everything from email to games. But they cost less and are (...)
Hold on that credit card, Apple’s Mac Pro desktop might receive a major brain transplant as early as this coming Tuesday. According to ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, an unnamed tipster alleged that Apple’s pro desktop is up for a big hardware refresh on Tuesday, March 16. The updated Mac Pros will allegedly pack in Intel’s rumored [...]
Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace, we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service.
We'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch.
Sponsor
Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with (...)
Biz Stone used an age-shortener to fit his birthday onto Twitter; Julia Allison tried doing math with her brain; and Ana Marie Cox attempted to flirt with Rahm Emanuel over basic cable. The Twitterati turned to tools of last resort.
Don't let the tricky phrasing of Twitte
At their GDC press conference this afternoon, PlayStation officially announced their new motion controller, the PlayStation Move. Previously known as the Arc, this controller will give gamers a more interactive experience on the PS3. The Move is said to be precise and accurate when paired with the PlayStation Eye, and will get you off the couch and into the game - use it as a golf club, a sword, or as a pointer. PlayStation seems to be taking advantage of the casual gaming movement, and is (...)
10-year-old shows her age
Mozilla is updating its open source license after more than 10 years of use.…
The power of collaboration within unified communications
Filed under: Internet
The UK is already one of the most-monitored Western countries. It has a record number of security cameras on the streets and public transport stations (one camera for every 14 people!); its authorities are installing chips in garbage cans to monitor the amount of trash, and now Google is "helping out" by bringing Streetview to each and every street, effective tomorrow. 238,000 miles of public roads (lined with private residences, businesses and people) will be (...)
Google Maps unveiled the addition of biking directions Wednesday at the National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C. The new beta offering is being launched in partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy -- a nonprofit organization that has already built a database for locating more than 1,600 rail trails and connecting corridors available for free public use.
Google Maps now includes data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the United States, noted Shannon (...)
Twitter is launching a new service designed to stop users of the social-media site from getting duped by phishing links that steal their login credentials and other attacks.
The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.
To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and (...)
TechRepublic and Global Knowledge have again produced one of the IT industry's most comprehensive salary surveys. Learn which IT skills are in demand.
louisgray.com
| louisgray@gmail.com (Louis Gray)
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Tech News
Anybody who watches my online activity knows that I try to consume a ridiculous amount of information and filter out the best to you. My most efficient tool for that is Google Reader, which captures all the feeds I am interested in, as well as recommendations from friends I follow. The best of these items get shared. But not everybody wants to read a ton of items as fast as possible, in the order they were received, with no sorting on relevance. With that in mind, Reader is experimenting (...)
OneUpWeb recently released the results of an eye-tracking study on Google’s new real-time results integrated into SERPs—and it looks like the search giant might have just wasted $15M (the estimated cost of Google’s deal with Twitter).
The study segmented web users into two groups: consumers and informati
Last Saturday (March 6), several hundred folks gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to spend the day discussing open government. O'Reilly's own Laurel Ruma was one of the organizers, and she sends in this report:
To geeks, bar camps are nothing new. But what we're seeing is a surge in civic-based camps, including Transparency Camp , Participation Camp, Change Camps in Canada, City Camp, Congress Camp, and the ongoing Crisis Camps. However, there is one overarching topic (...)
It’s that time again. Spring and pheromones are in the air, and 11,000 web geeks are about to descend on beauteous Austin, TX for our industry’s version of the TED Conference plus Spring Break, SXSW Interactive.
Along with nearly all of Happy Cog, I’ll be there. Join us, won’t you? Friday, March 12, at 3:30 PM, come to Battledecks 2010 in Room 18ABCD, where I’ll compete against the likes of Avery Edison, Ted Rheingold, Mike Monteiro, and SeoulBrother Number 1 Albert McMurry to see who can (...)
"It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close to recovering. It closed Tuesday at 2,340.68, 54 percent below its dot-com bubble high on March 10, 2000."
Editor's note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook.
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If (...)
We’ve covered the Apple iPad several times on CenterNetworks. The device appears to be launching next month and I believe it will be a game changer. Andreas discussed how he sees the device being used in the home and I agree with him that a whole new set of consumers will join the Apple camp when the iPad tablet hits the market. Whether you buy an iPad or one of the other 50 tablets that will launch this year, one thing is clear: all of them will have some level of Internet access built in. (...)
