July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
“Incredibly dysfunctional” is not an option you can list as your relationship status on Facebook, but that seems to be the way to describe the site’s relationship with its users. It’s like an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend you hate so much but just keep going back to again and again and again, possibly because you can’t find anyone better. Never has the site been more popular. It just reached half a billion users — just six months after reaching the 400 million mark. Facebook was quick to trumpet those numbers.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development has unveiled a prototype of a touchscreen computer that will initially cost $35. Eventually, Minister Shri Kapil Sibal said, the price will drop to $20 and then $10. In photos, the device looks much like the sleek tablet-style PCs coming on the market and typified by the iPad. It will offer such standard functionality as word processing, Web browsing and video-conferencing. It is aimed at university students, with delivery planned for 2011. At $35, the computer is cheaper than most digital cameras.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
And you thought Apple was the only Teflon technology company out there. Despite a brief six-year lifespan filled with privacy complaints and user gripes over neck-snapping design changes, Facebook just signed up User No. 500,000,000. Businesses continue to pile onboard the Mark Zuckerberg express, thanks to the powerful recommendation engine that is the “Like” button. Tech and mainstream journalists keep tripping over themselves to lock up interviews with the youthful CEO.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
Safari’s Autofill feature, which can be set to automatically insert a user’s data such as name and address into Web forms, could expose users to theft of their personal information, according to security expert Jeremiah Grossman. Grossman, the founder and CTO of security firm WhiteHat, wrote in his blog that the feature autofills HTML form text fields with specific attribute names such as “name,” “company,” “city,” and “state.” It works even though the victim has not entered this data on any website.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
The Software Freedom Law Center provides free legal representation and other law-related services to open source software developers. The organization began in 2005 under the direction of Eben Moglen, a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School. His law center represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects. The SFLC’s goal is to help non-profit FLOSS projects succeed. The free legal assistance provides programmers and open source projects with sound legal and organizational structures.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
The idea of an online magazine with content that can be customized by its readers has been around for years. The execution of that idea, though, has produced less than stellar results. That may be about to change with a new free application released this week for the iPad called “Flipboard.” Flipboard combines information from Facebook and Twitter to create a personalized magazine on the iPad — a “social” magazine, as the service calls it. What really distinguishes Flipboard from other efforts in this vein is the stylish way it’s able lay out that information.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
Twitter has announced that it will be working toward consolidating management of its data centers within its own organization. The company’s first custom-built data center, located in the Salt Lake City area, will fire up later this year. Twitter will keep its relationship with NTT America to maintain its current operational capacity, said Jean-Paul Cozzatti on the Twitter Engineering blog. However, he listed numerous advantages to taking data center operation in-house and noted that more Twitter-owned and operated facilities will be built during the next two years.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
HP says it has begun customer evaluation of a Windows 7 tablet that appears to resemble the Windows-based touchscreen device that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer trotted out in January at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. The device, apparently called the “HP Slate 500,” will run Windows 7 Premium. It will have two cameras and a stylus. HP is also planning to launch a tablet running the webOS operating system it acquired when it purchased Palm earlier this year.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
Here in the Linux blogosphere, things have been remarkably calm, cool and collected of late. Much, in fact, like the Father of Linux himself, one might say. It should come as no great surprise, then, that the very same man — Linus Torvalds — was the subject of some considerable — albeit well-mannered — debate. The “scalability of Linus,” in fact, was the subject of a post by Jonathan Corbet earlier this month on LWN, and it’s sparked quite a discussion.
July 26th, 2010 by Paul Christopher Grejaldo
Every business needs to understand its audience in order to put together a social strategy that makes sense. A one-size-fits-all template fits no one in the social era. Still, there are some things that you don’t do. You don’t use social data to creep out your customers, for instance, by revealing that you know things about their kids, their travels, or their interests when it’s not appropriate. Another no-no is to try to control the conversation. It is not yours to manipulate — even in cases where the conversation is taking place in a community your company has created.
