Schmidt: The Web will dissolve national barriers

HANOVER, Germany--Google Executive Chairman is hopping from country to country on a European tour, but he said today the Internet is breaking down those national barriers.

"Loyalty is not just to a nation but to friends and interests," Schmidt said in a speech at the opening ceremony of the CeBIT technology show here today. "That will change everything for citizens, states, and society."

That may cause indigestion for any number of customs agents, tax collectors, and politicians, but it fits right in with Schmidt's optimistic view of the world: "It's a wonderful, wonderful … Read more

Jeff Jaffe lights a fire under Web standardization

BARCELONA--It's been an action-packed two years since Jeff Jaffe took over as the World Wide Web Consortium's chief executive, but more action is the order of the day at the standards group.

The W3C oversees the standardization of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), technologies that carry tremendous importance as the Web expands from a medium to publish documents into a foundation for applications that can run on anything from mobile phones and cars to TVs and tablets. These Web standards, combined with the JavaScript programming language and other related technologies, let programmers reach a … Read more

Flite 3 lets advertisers integrate apps, tweak campaigns on the fly

Display-advertising company Flite today unveiled Flite Platform 3, marking a shift away from static ads to one based on a real-time, app-driven world. Flite 3 enables two fundamental innovations: real-time updates to live campaigns and the ability to integrate Web applications directly into online ad units.

This means that advertisers can tweak campaigns based on real-time analysis of how users are responding to ads, including interaction rates and how much time users spend seeing an ad, but also the ability to edit an ad on the fly based on what the analytics data shows the advertiser.

Flite 3 also enables … Read more

Who's topping the big data charts?

Thanks to the rise of open-source data analysis tool Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics have reached new levels of interest and hype as the market scrambles to keep up with the volume of data and the need to make sense of it immediately.

In the wake of Yahoo nurturing Hadoop, an ecosystem sprung up among other big Internet companies developing their own tools, in many cases variations of database management systems. Facebook eventually rolled out Cassandra, Google introduced BigTable, and from there variations began to appear among smaller companies and open source foundations.

The majority of these databases rely on … Read more

Is Mozilla's mobile OS good for games? See for yourself

BARCELONA, Spain--Telefonica today showed off B2G, the Mozilla browser-based operating system for mobile phones, saying it's good enough to sell to today's feature-phone customers later this year.

You may or may not agree. To help you judge, here's a video of Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, demonstrating a prototype phone at a press conference today at the Mobile World Congress show here. At the event, Telefonica announced its mobile OS pact with Mozilla.

Having watched the demo myself, the phone looked workable but awfully pokey. And touch input-- specially the keyboard--was … Read more

Telefonica: Mozillaphone is 'ten times cheaper than an iPhone'

BARCELONA--Half of Telefonica's customers are in Latin America, where smartphones are scarcer than in wealthier parts of the world. But the mobile network operator hopes Mozilla's new browser-based operating system, B2G, will change that.

"What we're selling the most in these countries is feature phones, which is ridiculous, said Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, in an interview at the Mobile World Congress show here in Barcelona, Spain. "We think we can bring smartphones to the masses in developing countries with this approach."

How affordable, exactly? The B2G phone … Read more

Telefonica signs up for Mozilla's mobile Web OS

BARCELONA, Spain--Mozilla took a big first step in making something real out of B2G, its browser-based mobile operating system, by signing on mobile network operator Telefonica as a partner.

In addition, the Firefox maker discussed another step, a close relationship with mobile processor maker Qualcomm to create the hardware for the first phones, expected to launch later in 2012.

Those are two very important steps. But they're only one of dozens that it must take to create an operating system competitive with Apple's iOS and Google's Android, much less one that fulfills Mozilla's grander ambition. The … Read more

Data mining's adult challenges

Probably no data-mining legend has been more pervasive than the "beer and diapers" story, which apparently dates back to an early 1990s project that data-warehousing pioneer Teradata (then part of NCR) conducted for the Osco Drug retail chain.

As the story goes, they discovered that beer and diapers frequently appeared together in a shopping basket on certain days; the presumed explanation was that fathers picking up diapers bought a six-pack when they were out anyway. This correlation was then used to optimize displays and pricing in the stores.

That's the story anyway. The reality, as best anyone can determine, … Read more

Microsoft SkyDrive aiming to outcloud iCloud

Microsoft is targeting a host of improvements for SkyDrive, potentially giving iCloud and similar services some healthy competition.

The next version, dubbed SkyDrive Wave 5, could lead the way, with several features revealed by blogging site LiveSide.net.

Tipped off about "new features that are said to be coming to SkyDrive soon," the site detailed such items as support for the OpenDocument format and the ability to store and manage BitLocker recovery keys on SkyDrive.

A new URL-shortening service will provide links to your shared files, while you'll be able to share those files directly with your … Read more