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.
BarCampBank Seattle
If you are in Seattle this weekend, come join me at BarCampBank, the second edition of an event originally held in Paris. Aiming to "foster innovations and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance," the Seattle version explores this goal by examining open source credit unions. Organizer Jesse Robbins has been doing exciting work…
Travel Tips: FlightAware
In the course of my travels, I have discovered a few sites that are extremely helpful to get a smooth ride. Airlines currently have an information advantage over the customers. They have all the data, you have none. Want to know how many seats are free? They know but they don't want to tell you. When is that flight really…
Changing the Game: Jane MacGonigal on collaborative games
Radar friend Jane McGonigal has been profiled over at Salon in "Play peak oil before you live it". Jane is a regular speaker at our conferences, were she talks about how to bring collaborative intelligence out into the offline world and how to bring meaning to your product. We covered the start of world without oil. It is a game…
Shared nothing parallel programming
I agree strongly with Tim and Nathan's belief in the importance of parallel computing. I've been following this space since 2000, when I took Gurusamy Sarathy's initial work on making perl multi-threaded and finished it for the 5.8 release. The initial perl threading released in 5.5 had a traditional architecture: all data was shared between all threads. The problem with…
Where2.0: Garmin Developer, Browser Plugin and Javascript API
In Garmin's first Where 2.0 appearance in June, the GPS company announced that it has opened up their platform for developers to use. Aaron Roller, who cofounded Motion Based in 2003, gave us a walkthrough of the evolving platform.Originally Motion Based developed a Trail Networks service for runners, but they found that the only way to interface to do GPS…
Amazon EC2 and S3 disaster planning
In my post Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA, I asked the following question. So, if your company is based on AWS: What does your disaster recovery plan look like? How do you react if Amazon goes down or if Amazon decides to shut down AWS? I asked for what your tradeoffs and disaster recovery plans were….
Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA
I am interested in understanding the business tradeoffs that people make when they decide to host their data on S3 or run their service on EC2 instead of investing in their own infrastructure. Quoting from the Amazon T&C. We further reserve the right to discontinue Amazon Web Services, any Services, or any portion or feature thereof for any reason and…
Google releases open source toolkit for offline web apps.
Google joins the group of companies trying solve the offline web application problem with Google Gears. Released as an developer oriented open source technology, under a BSD license, as a new browser extension. It provides 3 significant components to the browser ecosystem. A multithreaded javascript environment, which provides a restricted background taks JavaScript environment for accessing remote data source without…
Where 2.0: Mumbai Free Map and Geo Community
Opening up Where 2.0 is Schuyler Erle, of MetaCarta, keynoting a session; Mapping the Maximum City. Schuyler is the co-author of Mapping Hacks and Google Mapping Hacks. Schuyler gave a clarion call speech on the need for accessible open interoperable geodata. He has spent parts of the last two years helping the Collective Research Initiatives Trust, a group of architects,…
Where 2.0: Mapquest API Announcement
Mapquest is beta launching a brand new API for Actionscript, it is the first available native API for Flash and Apollo. It enables complex rich applications with quickly rendered, points and applications. The true native ActionScript 3 approach, unlike Yahoos wrapped Action Script 2, allows a faster runtime. Availability inside the Flex builder helps developers easier access to build apps….