"specialized services" entries

User Mediated Trans-Enterprise-Web Mashups?

There has been an on again off again discussion behind the scenes at Radar about the nature of the enterprise vs. the web and how they are defined not just by their technologies, but by their frames of reference. For my part, I think the enterprise view is defined implicitly by a planning mindset and a perceived scope of control that ends at the enterprise boundary. Whereas the web is too large for effective control so it tends to be an environment more conducive to serendipity and emergent behaviors.

An ESB for the Web?

I spend a great deal of my time encouraging "enterprise people" to think more like "web people." Focus on adoption, use platforms to enable emergent capability, build the "generative enterprise," and that sort of thing. So, imagine my surprise when I saw the web acting a bit like the enterprise with the launch of Gnip. As the web moves toward…

Hyperic CloudStatus service dashboard launches at Velocity!

Javier Soltero just launched CloudStatus during his Hyperic sponsor session today at Velocity. CloudStatus is a public health dashboard for web services like Amazon's EC2/S3, and Google's App Engine. Javier called to tell me about this last week after I declared that "Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory". This comes right after Amazon and Google had visible outages, and couldn't have…

BarCampBank is spreading

When Ben Black and I organized the first BarCampBank in North America last year, we hoped that it would spread. According to William Azaroff's post on NetBanker, the movement is there and growing: What's all this about BarCampBanks? From a North American premiere in Seattle almost a year ago, we've witnessed two more in the last few months, and eight…

Special Purpose Computing Focuses on Energy Efficiency

Researchers turn to specialized hardware design to reduce supercomputer power consumption by an order of magnitude.

GSM Cracking: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You via a Web Service

A new web service, based on specialized hardware, will make cracking the GSM A5/1 protocol fast and cheap.

Disaster Telecom after the earthquake in Peru

The BBC is reporting that over 500 people were killed and thousands of people left injured and homeless after the earthquakes in Peru earlier this week. The 24 hour Skype outage started shortly after the earthquake and contributed to the initial chaos. Skype's Villu Arak has claimed that the problems are resolved and promised to provide details about the cause…

Patent Reform Project Looking for RoR Help

We don't normally broadcast job postings, but Andy Oram writes about one that could be of interest to our audience: The Community Patent Review (a phase of the better-known Peer to Patent project) is seeking to hire a top-notch Ruby on Rails programmer. This is not an ordinary job posting; it’s a chance to get paid for public service. The…

IBM Wants Many Eyes on Visualization

IBM today announced Many Eyes, a site for sharing and commenting on visualizations. Martin Wattenberg, who developed the original version of the treemap we use for our book market visualizations as well as the awesome baby name voyager, and Fernanda Viegas, who worked with him on the equally awesome history flow visualizations of Wikipedia, are the geniuses behind this project….

Worldmapper Visualizations

"Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest." [via] See how the map of the world changes when you look not just at land area, but at other factors, such as population, GDP, import/export flows, or HIV infections. There are literally hundreds of map projections. This would make…