Disruptors

Can PostgreSQL pickup where MySQL left off?

EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, today announced Postgres Plus Cloud Server, which the company has billed as "a full-featured, Oracle-compatible, enterprise-class PostgreSQL database-as-a-service for public and private clouds with support for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and GoGrid."

We've seen other database-as-a-service offerings come on the scene from the likes of Salesforce.com's Database.com, Amazon RDS, as well as from startup Xeround. But they're not based on PostgreSQL, which has had years of hardening and development by a committed community. The other databases are not "Oracle compatible," … Read more

24-hour design marathon to benefit children's nonprofit

Companies everywhere get stuck. A lack of resources or passion--as well as any number of dysfunctions that can plague an organization--can all get in the way of building great things online. Today, a close-knit Bay Area design firm called Zurb is trying to help one lucky nonprofit get unstuck.

Today marked the kickoff of this year's ZurbWired design marathon, an annual event during which the Zurb team and a group of volunteers work together to pull off a marketing miracle for a nonprofit in 24 hours. This year, the fourth annual event of its kind, the challenge will benefit … Read more

Amazon releases secure cloud for government

Cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Amazon's move reflects the ongoing adoption of public cloud services by government entities, including the U.S. Treasury's Recovery Accountability and Transparency board, which hosts Recovery.gov and Treasury.gov on AWS, as well as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which processes telemetry data and high-resolution images on an array of EC2 cluster compute instances.

The announcement also … Read more

Private-cloud growing pains

As cloud adoption continues to soar, the debate between public and private continues apace. While I am a fervent believer in the public cloud, I do believe there is a lot of opportunity for private clouds in many areas, especially industries that have strong technology footprints and experience with large data center management, such as financial services and government.

Over the weekend I read a piece by Jonathan Feldman that really showed how challenging private cloud solutions can be. Lots of dependencies on non-mainstream software packages coupled with a lack of cloud-specific skills shows the lack of maturity in the … Read more

Netflix reportedly getting kid-friendly with new tab

Select Netflix members have been getting a new tab labeled "Just For Kids" in the main menu of the Netflix Web site, according to a GigaOm post.

When clicked, the tab opens a sliding bar of characters from a number of kid-friendly sources, including Nickelodeon and Disney, GigaOm explains. A click on one of those characters opens up a new page with access to TV shows and films starring that character. "Each episode is previewed with a screenshot," the post says, "and there is barely any text at all. Everything is optimized for instant playback … Read more

Coders choosing Mac OS over Linux environment

Apple's Mac operating system has surpassed Linux in popularity as a development environment in North America, according to an Evans Data survey.

Windows remains at the top of the development environment heap, used by 80 percent of the survey's more than 400 professional software developer respondents in June; Mac OS was used by 7.9 percent of those surveyed, displacing Linux, used by 5.6 percent.

A few other tidbits from the survey:

Developers believe that mobile and cloud development will increase the most in importance over the next three years 44 percent of respondents are actively engaged … Read more

It's a good time to be a developer

One of the myths in Silicon Valley is that it's somehow super-cheap to build a company. Much of that theory is based on the fact that you can get a lot of very high-quality software very cheap or free, thanks to open source and cloud computing. But getting beyond a prototype of a product takes a lot more cash.

To build a quality, sustainable product and have a business that scales, you will sooner or later have to hire people, and in the Valley that usually means engineers. And engineers aren't cheap these days.

The infographic below from … Read more

Totango set to enhance SaaS sales tools

As enterprise users grew tired of installing massive suites of on-premise customer relation management software and Internet-oriented businesses began to rise, Salesforce.com came along and turned hosted applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), into a multi-billion dollar market.

Following in Salesforce's wake came lead-nurturing tools like Constant Contact, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Marketo that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and have ostensibly added value to their customers' relationship.

This week we see the launch of Totango (pronounced like "to tango"), which bills itself as a "real-time customer usage analysis platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) … Read more

VC funding in second quarter continues 2011 uptick

Private company research firm CB Insights today released a new report on the state of venture capital financing for the second quarter of 2011. With $7.6 billion invested in 768 deals in the second quarter, we are on track to see $29 billion to $30 billion invested through all of 2011.

California, Massachusetts, and New York combined to take nearly 75 percent of U.S. venture capital funding in the second quarter of this year, the highest concentration in five quarters. California remained on top with deals in the state up 27 percent and dollars up 19 percent. California'… Read more