One of the key concerns for any fledgling start-up is overload. Too many users trying to get at your data is one thing, but dealing with the onslaught of notifications and data pings from connecting services can be quite another.
A new start-up called Gnip is trying to solve this problem by acting as the middleman. Got a service like Twitter that's getting attacked in a thousand different directions by services trying to get at that data? Sending any new bits of information to Gnip will keep that attack coming on their end instead of yours, which will hopefully keep your service running a lot smoother, no matter how many folks are using it. ReadWriteWeb is calling it a "Grand Central Station for the social Web."
In a perfect world, services that used this system could open up their APIs a little to encompass more activity, leading to faster third-party tools that take advantage of that data. Users would also be getting faster notifications and conceivably less downtime due to overload.
Sounds great for everyone, right?
Unfortunately, all of this will not be available from the get-go. Gnip is starting out by offering a notification service only, with polling, transformation, and identification coming later. Notifications are one of the main overloaders though, especially for services like Twitter that have had to throttle the amount of times any external service can ping it for data. There are also concerns about what happens if everyone starts relying on Gnip to pipe data to third-party tools, and the tool goes down--leading to something similar to when Amazon's S3 has had blips, taking out entire businesses for hours at a time.
Gnip was founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the co-founders of the now Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog.
Gnip bridges the data divide by offloading all the pings off your servers and onto theirs.
(Credit: Gnip)On Monday, Orbitz Worldwide plans to announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite. Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday's announcement will add significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry.
Orbitz's operations center
(Credit: Orbitz Worldwide)On Friday, Orbitz gave me a preview of the announcement and the opportunity to talk with its sponsors, Winthrop Short, senior director of Orbitz Worldwide, and Matt O'Keefe, senior architect of Orbitz Worldwide. In talking with Winthrop and Matt, it's clear to me that Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's vision for enterprise collaboration through open-source communities is going to be led by companies like Orbitz, companies for whom technology is not necessary drudgery but rather competitive advantage.
Consider the following: Orbitz employs 1,600 full-time employees and has another 500 contractors. So, 2,100 people total. Half of this total number is made up of technologists. As Brian Hoyt, Orbitz Worldwide's vice president of corporate communications and government affairs told me, "We have always been a technology company, one that just happens to be really good at selling travel."
But why open source? What benefits does Orbitz derive from open-sourcing these projects? Why not keep ERMA and Graphite to themselves?
... Read more
XX25 powers a MiTAC V100 rugged laptop.
(Credit: UltraCell)A California company has introduced a 25-watt mobile fuel cell system designed to power a ruggedized laptop computer for up to 14 hours at a time using a single 250cc cartridge.
The XX25, as it is called, internally generates fuel cell-ready hydrogen from a highly concentrated methanol solution, providing power to a field computer and communications equipment at weight savings of up to 65 percent, according to Livermore, Calif.-based UltraCell.
(Credit:
UltraCell)
Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that use hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, and continue to produce it as long as the fuel lasts. This is not only ecologically correct, but it also weighs less. The company calculates that on a typical 72-hour mission, each soldier requires 27 pounds of rechargeable military batteries.
The Army's Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) and DARPA (PDF) have extended UltraCell's development contract so that tests can continue. A year ago, CERDEC deemed the 25-watt model safe enough to be worn by soldiers in the field and used to power portable devices, a first for this type of fuel cell.
A look at Google's Android mobile operating system.
(Credit: Google)Last we heard, we'd be seeing phones powered by Google's Android open-source software in the second half of 2008. A report Monday from The Wall Street Journal has narrowed that down somewhat: Those handsets will start appearing in the fourth quarter of this year, a later time frame than expected.
And according to the Journal, some handset manufacturers are "struggling" to get Android on track even for a fourth-quarter launch. Sprint Nextel and China Mobile, the world's largest cell carrier, reportedly won't be able to put out Android-powered phones until next year. Other carriers, like T-Mobile, claim their Android phones are still on track.
Some developers of mobile applications, on the other hand, have been sidetracked by the announcement of the iPhone 3G, the second-generation version of Apple's ubiquitous handsets. With a lower price point, a developer kit already released, and a concrete launch date of July 11, not to mention faster Web access and a built-in GPS chip, the appeal of the new iPhone may have pushed Android to the back burner for some companies.
And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd...
Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.
Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.
The numbers don't get much better for Vista in 2009: 24 percent (compared with 29 percent for XP). That's a big step up from 8 percent, but is it a sign of momentum to come or just a temporary stopgap while developers wait until Windows 7?
Nor has Microsoft made it easy to develop Vista applications, according to an article in ITJungle.com:
... Read moreUpdate 8:25 a.m. PDT: I added a dash more detail about his next job.
Jeremy Zawodny, a programmer who helped launched the Yahoo Developer Network and worked on many other internal projects at the Internet company, said on Thursday that he's leaving for a "much smaller company."
Jeremy Zawodny
(Credit: Jeremy Zawodny)"In the next few weeks, I'll walk the halls at Yahoo as an employee one last time and turn in my purple badge," he said in a blog post. "After 8.5 years of service, and a better experience than I could have possibly imaged back in 1999, the time for me to move on has arrived."
Zawodny was quick to say that Microsoft's machinations and Carl Icahn's agitations are unrelated to his departure. "The opportunity to work in a much smaller company recently presented itself, and it was simply too interesting to pass up," he said.
In an e-mail, he said he'd be starting work again at the end of July--"right around the time that OSCon (the Open Source Convention) starts...It's not an open-source company but they do use a lot of open source and would like to contribute more to open source."
At Yahoo, Zawodny wasn't just a behind-the-scenes coder. Projects visible to the outside world included the Yahoo Developer Network and the Yahoo Search Blog, and he was a notable promoter of open-source software such as Hadoop and a believer in openness in general.
"Anyone who knows me knows that I come from open-source roots and am a big proponent of opening things up more and more. I'd have left Yahoo years ago, if I didn't see it happening," he said in March.
That philosophy aligns closely with the Yahoo Open Strategy, under which Yahoo is trying to make itself an open foundation for others' Web-based applications and to expose some of its inner workings for use by other Web sites.
Intel has launched a Web site to help game and visual content developers create software for its graphics silicon and processors. Intel's next-generation Larrabee graphics chip is also slated to become part of the focus.
"Supporting the new Intel 4 Series chipset family introduced at Computex, Intel has launched the Intel Visual Computing Developer Community, a technical resource to enable developers...to create innovative graphics and video applications," Intel said in a statement.
The Intel 4 Series includes the G45 Express chipset and GMA X4500HD graphics media accelerator, which has built-in support for Blu-ray 1080p high-definition video playback. The chipset also supports Microsoft DirectX 10 and game-centric graphics technologies such as Shader Model 4.0.
Intel says these improvements deliver "everyday gameplay for the most popular game titles."
Intel Visual Developer Community Web site
(Credit: Intel)Intel is clearly ratcheting up its presence in the gaming and visual computing segments. In a video posted on the site, Roger Chandler, director of marketing for the Visual Computing Software Division, said that though Intel works with developers in the digital content creation space, "We're really focused on the game industry...The big focus we have right now is the game space."
Chandler's team is focused on processors, integrated graphics products, and mobile platforms.
"We're entering this era where folks have been so focused on making games look real, (but) they're now realizing that we need to make them act real," he said. Chandler cited artificial intelligence and game physics as two pillars of this "act real" strategy.
The video also indicated that the upcoming Larrabee graphics platform looms large. "This effort is supporting a platform we don't talk about all that much--Larrabee," said Paul Steinberg of Intel, who participated in the video. Intel has described Larrabee as a "many core" Intel Architecture graphics chip that is expected to debut in the second half of 2009.
The site also contains white papers on high definition audio and video, discussion forums, blogs, and wikis, Intel said.
Demand in emerging markets fueled worldwide growth in the cell phone market for the first quarter of 2008, according to a new report from Gartner.
The firm published a report on Wednesday that said worldwide sales had increased by 13.6 percent in the first quarter compared to the first quarter of 2007. Much of this growth came from developing markets.
Sales in Asia jumped 26.6 percent from the same quarter in 2007 driven by demand in India and South Korea, as consumers upgraded their handsets before extending carrier contracts. Sales also increased by 25.8 percent in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And the biggest growth was seen in Latin America where sales increased 28.4 percent compared with the first quarter of 2007.
Meanwhile sales in Western Europe dropped about 16.4 percent, the first decline in sales in this region since 2001 when Gartner first began tracking the sector. Sales in Japan also dropped about 10 percent.
"While sales in emerging markets continued to be driven by strong net new subscribers' growth, mature markets felt the pressure of an uncertain economic environment," Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner, said in a statement.
In North America, Gartner found that sales increased only 2.4 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. Gartner's numbers differ from those of another research firm NPD Group, which found that sales of handsets in the U.S. actually declined 22 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007.
Gartner's analysts said they believe that the mobile handset industry will continue to grow about 10 percent to 15 percent in 2008, driven mostly by emerging markets. But the firm also warns that the current economic slowdown could further slow growth in mature markets, while higher food prices could lead to longer replacement cycles in emerging markets.
The sales cycle in the U.S. has already started to lengthen. A recent customer survey by J.D. Power and Associates found that consumers in the U.S. are holding onto their phones, on average, a month longer than they had previously. So instead of replacing a phone every 16.6 months, as Americans had done in 2006, they are replacing phones, on average, every 17.7 months.
In addition to economic woes, the market will likely slow a bit due to market penetration. With nearly 3 billion cell phones in the market already and penetration over 80 percent in places like the U.S., it makes sense that sales in these regions would slow.
The good news is that consumers in developed markets are starting to buy more smartphones, which typically cost more and offer better profit margins for manufacturers. These handsets typically sell for between $200 and $600, compared to more basic phones which sell for about $60.
The challenge for handset manufacturers going forward will be striking a balance between offering more expensive, feature-rich devices for developed markets like Europe, Japan, and the U.S. and also offering lower-cost, basic phones for the emerging markets, such as India, China, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
This post was updated at 12:30 p.m. PDT with more detailed information and quotes.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook plans to unveil a redesign of profile pages in coming weeks to help members cut down on the clutter, executives said here at a press event Wednesday.
Executives also said they'll introduce a beta version this week that will allow developers to test the new pages before it rolls them out to members in June.
The redesign, a preview of which was released Tuesday night, slots member information under five new tabs: personal news feeds; profile information; photos; applications; and a customizable page.
As part of the redesign, Facebook is dramatically playing up the role of its News Feed, which will be the anchor, or first tab, of the new member home page. This shift is meant to make it easier for people to see dynamically changing information from friends and applications first, according to Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of product marketing.
"We see this big trend," Palihapitiya said. "People are publishing feeds all the time, and the point is, people are increasingly telling a narrative, and we want to make that easier for our users to do. And we want people to consume that narrative more easily."
The company will unveil design changes at the risk of angering application developers that rely on Facebook for distribution and member usage. Designers of less popular widgets, for example, could feel somewhat marginalized by Facebook's placement of external applications on a dedicated profile tab.
Company executives, however, said the design overhaul will ultimately give developers more reason to engage with members. "We think there's more opportunity for distribution, but (also) for more meaningful application," Facebook product manager Mark Slee said.
Palihapitiya added that some developers could suffer in the more dynamic environment of News Feeds on member home pages. "Applications that are much more static in nature will not be as successful as they used to be."
Here is an overview of the changes:
The news feed will take the role of the member home page, with one stream of information that people can reformat into three different sizes. From the main page, people can also update information on new Facebook applications, post a wall message, or upload photos from one point next to the news feed.
The reason for that change, Palihapitiya said, is the company's desire to make the home page cleaner and simpler, and allow people to see dynamically changing information first.
Developers can also get front-page play through the news feeds. "Developers can integrate into the feed through the publisher box, so I could draw some graffiti or send a SuperPoke," said Facebook product manager Ruchi Sanghvi.
Facebook moves the static information on members to its second tab, or the information tab. That page will contain detailed data about the person's address, personal history, and preferences. Executives said developers can get creative with new applications that help members tell a story about who they are.
Next is a tab for photos, which are commanding a lot of attention from Facebook users, according to Palihapitiya. So far, he said, members have uploaded 6 billion photos to the site, or 14 million on a cumulative daily basis. "Photos are just one example of an application that could blow up for us," Palihapitiya said.
The profile box tab, or where applications will reside, lets people see a record of the widget they downloaded.
The last tab gives people a choice to customize a page, much like a new feature on the iPhone. People can add a new tab to highlight an application like Scrabulous that they play often. Executives said this is "a huge new opportunity for developers" that could increase advertising revenue.
That said, developers will need to try it out of themselves.
"We are going to give developers a beta period in which they will be able to step into the sandbox and tweak their application," product manager Slee said, "so that they're ready for when this thing gets rolled out in coming weeks."
It's one thing to bang out a quick third-party program for a single phone model, and quite another to develop a mobile application that works as predicted on a battalion of cell phone models, each with their own set of finely cultured specs.
For numerous reasons, developers may not have all those phones at the ready, and when it comes time for final testing, emulators that live on the screen and mimic device behavior just aren't good enough.
(Credit:
Palm Software)
If you're Palm, a mobile platform and device manufacturer that's fighting for its slimmed-down market share, you'd want to encourage developers to get their applications out there. That could be one reason why, with the help of DeviceAnywhere, Palm is launching its Virtual Developer Lab. Simply put, developers will rent hourly remote access to Palm phones in the physical world to complete their tests and make tweaks. Software makers throughout the community will be able to collaborate on projects in real time or fly solo to finish their products and bring them to market.
It's Palm's undertaking, but DeviceAnywhere is running the show. Previously known as MobileComplete, the company, headed by CEO Faraz Syed, has established management systems for helping developers on all platforms port and monitor applications to shared hardware pools for over 1,000 cell phone models. The remote access software includes a built-in advanced reservation system for booking time on a device, and a first-come, first-served queue that alerts the next developer in line when it's his or her turn to test a program's mettle. When they're done, a clean-up script plucks out leftover artifacts.
For the Palm Virtual Developer Lab, data centers sprinkled across the globe will house the 13 Palm handsets, for which developers will pay $100 per month and $13 to $16 per hour to access. This system replaces Palm's previous invite-only lab for premium developing partners, said Syed, which shut out the majority of developers.
No doubt the initiative will spark discussion about Palm's attempts to steady its declining presence in the mobile industry even after some lift brought by the Centro device in late 2007. Interested developers can register for the Palm Virtual Developer Lab here.
Related articles:
For the Palm faithful: Treo 800w rumors abound
Palm closing retail stores, paying out Treo owners
