Unstructured data, for lack of a more poetic phrase, exists. In fact, there’s more of it now than at any time in history – the growth rate Forrester experts cite is 80% annually, and perhaps rising. All this year, analysts have been asking whether Microsoft would come to embrace unstructured data, or what some call “NoSQL databases.” But by now, it’s grown so large that it’s encompassing Microsoft.
So amid today’s stunning news that the company plans to integrate Hadoop support in Windows Server, even insofar as to consider adopting it as a role alongside Web server (IIS) and DNS server, there’s this structured database management system whose roadmap to general availability was announced this morning at the PASS Summit in Seattle.
Alongside іtѕ Kindle Fire tablet device аnԁ nеw line οf Kindle e-readers, Amazon introduced another nеw product today: Amazon Silk, a mobile Web browser thаt rethinks thе way browsers hаνе traditionally worked.
Silk essentially splits thе architecture οf thе Web browser іn half, relying οn both thе computing power οf thе hardware аnԁ οn thе remote servers thаt comprise Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It relies οn thе cloud tο call up сеrtаіn elements οf a page, acting sort οf Ɩіkе a content delivery network built rіɡht іntο thе browser. Thе company claims thаt thіѕ unique аррrοасh wіƖƖ offer a much fаѕtеr browser experience tο еnԁ users …
The Chromebook is ready for the Web, but is the Web ready for the Chromebook? This is the fundamental question you must ask yourself before deciding to fork over $400 to $500 dollars for one of the new Google Chrome-powered notebook computers, available as of today. The Chromebook, with initial hardware coming from manufacturers like Samsung and Acer, is a vision of the future of computing where everything is done online, in a Web browser. The operating system it runs has no desktop, no way to install apps to a hard drive and no local folders to store all your personal files. It is a Web browser, and just a Web browser …
There were a few updates to Google Docs last week. Discussions, a new feature we covered previously, received some improvements – most notably, the ability to see how many times a document has been viewed. Google Docs also added a new font, made it easier to restore deleted sites and the spell checker gained an additional feature.
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Microsoft’s Windows Azure DataMarket, the company’s online store of various large data sets, has partnered with Colorado-based web mapping software service OnTerra Systems to offer a quick map view of all data in the data store that has a geographic component.
Data marketplaces are hot and likely to get hotter. Place, space, time and streaming are all key characteristics in an increasing number of data sets of interest. OnTerra’s map app works in conjunction with Bing Maps. Bing has partnered with OnTerra on a number of mapping projects over the past several years. In January OnTerra released a service called MapSavvy WMS that helps business and security customers to capture web imagery of Bing Maps for a low subscription price …
Last fall, Google Docs users gained the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop to the upload page. Now Google has announced that it will be rolling out a few more features to make that process of uploading any file to Google Docs even easier.
The first new feature will help those who tend to upload a lot of documents: Google has added the ability to upload folders, not just individual files. This upload will actually preserve the folder structure, which means that folders within folders will also be uploaded …
Cloud computing has been a buzzworthy topic for some time, as more and more enterprises move their computing infrastructure and software to cloud-based solutions. While the cloud continues to be a smart option for them, it’s also arguably even more beneficial for small businesses, whose resources can be miniscule.
First of all, what exactly is cloud computing? To take a broad definition, Focus Research describes it as “the ability for organizations to share critical computing infrastructure (e.g. servers, storage, etc.) and related services over the internet.” This can include IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or software (SaaS) …
It’s no secret that Google App Engine has suffered from reliability issues. Google is attempting to address some of its issues by making a new datastore option available: the High Replication Datastore.
“The High Replication Datastore provides the highest level of availability for your eads and writes, at the cost of increased latency for writes and changes in consistency guarantees in the API,” writes Kevin Gibbs in theannouncement. “API. The High Replication Datastore increases the number of data centers that maintain replicas of your data by using the Paxos algorithm to synchronize that data across datacenters in real time.” A detailed comparison of the two datastore options is available in App Engine documentation.
The price for the new datastore is starting out at three times the cost of the Master/Slave option, but the pricing will likely change in the future.
If you ever share a computer with a friend or family member, you’ve probably experienced the challenge of remembering who is logged in to accounts on Google or other services. User’s of Google’s excellent Chrome browser will be happy to hear that now in the works is a simple feature that will allow multiple browser windows to run different Google Profiles with a simple click of a button.
The feature is not yet available but was spotted in developer documentation and first reported on by the watchdog blog Google Operating System. While this might seem like a simple matter of convenience, it also represents the convergence of a number of other trends in online computing …
Although by no means a new technology, cloud computing retains the buzz as one of the latest innovative – and potentially transformative – elements of the industry. But there remains quite a bit of confusion about what exactly is meant by cloud computing, often making the question of whether or not your startup should be in the cloud difficult to answer.
Should you move (or launch) your startup into the cloud? Proponents of cloud computing will likely tell you unequivocally “yes.” more entrenched IT forces may respond with an unequivocal “no.” …
