Artur Bergman

Artur Bergman, hacker and technologist at-large, is the CEO of Fastly and formerly the Chief Technology Officer of Wikia. He is also an enthusiastic apologist for federated identity and a board member of the OpenID Foundation. His current interests include semantic search, large scale infrastructure, open source development, federated instant messaging, neurotransmitters, and the future of cyborgs.

Savory: Native Kindle epub and PDF Converter

In an editorial for Forbes, Tim called for the the opening of the Kindle, else it will slowly turn obsolete. Since I love my Kindle, I am happy that my friend, Jesse Vincent, a long time open source contributor and OSCON speaker, is trying to open the Kindle. (You might remember him as the guy who discovered Amazon's USB-network easter-egg…

Cloud Computing defined by Berkeley RAD Labs

I am pleased to finally have found a paper that manages to bring together the different aspects of cloud computing in a coherent fashion, and suggests the requirements for it to develop further. Written by the Berkeley RAD Lab (UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory) the paper succinctly brings together Software as a Service with Utility Computing to come…

Adhearsion – next killer app for Ruby?

Foo camp attendee Ben Black alerted me to Adhearsion, a framework for developing applications in the VoIP space. Think of it as a Ruby on Rails for telephony. Developed by Jay Philllps who got frustrated by the slow uptake of Asterisk. Adhearsion is written in Ruby and lets those even without any VoIP experience write applications intuitively and productively or…

Perl on App Engine?

I am a Perl hacker. I have written parts of the core, created CPAN modules and written tons of perl code. In fact I am addicted to it ; or rather, CPAN. I have been wanting to play around with Google App Engine, but I haven't had time to get up to speed in Python. Today at OSCON I met…

OpenID Foundation – Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo

I am very happy to be able to say that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo are joining the OpenID Foundation (on whose board I sit.) It marks the end of a lot of hard work by all parties involved, as well as — at least for me personally — the hope that we will be able to get a…

Books that make you dumb

Wikiscanner hacker Virgil Griffth told me a while ago about his latest data mining project, to visualise the relationship between books and SAT scores. Today he released his findings at Booksthatmakeyoudumb. He does this by cross referencing the 10 most popular books at every college, as given by Facebook, and the average SAT score. He then presents it all…

OpenID 2.0 Final

The next version of OpenID, the open authentication system, is finally a released specification. As well as the technical work on the 2.0 specicifaction, the community has worked to ensure that OpenID is freely implementable, resulting in the execution of a non assert agreement by the contributing parties. As a board member of the OpenID Foundation, I am grateful and…

Platial acquires Frappr

In Brady's CFP for Where 2.0 he mentions the emerging importance of the Geoindex. In the — to my knowledge — first consolidation in the social mapping space, Platial is acquiring Frappr. Platial's community generated place data together with Frappr's personal location data combines into a larger geoindex allowing for a more personalised mapping environment. Talking with Platial's CEO Di-Ann…

German and Japanese Wikipedia scanner

Time for more excitement on the Wikipedia front. Last week Virgil released the English Wikiscanner, as I wrote about previously. This week, it is time for German and Japanese edits to be exposed, with the newly-released German and Japanese Wikiscanner. Sadly, I don't read either German nor Japanese, but I am sure some of you readers do. If you find…

Opening up the Social Network Graph

LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick and Open Source Awards winner David Recordon just posted a manifesto titled "Thoughts on the Social Graph". Brad and David presented their work at Foo Camp and have been sharing it with interested parties over the last couple of months. Their project attempts to solve the problem of multiple overlapping social networks. This overlap makes it…