Although Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in 1997, Google wasn't officially launched till one year later, making Google 9 years old this year. Google's birthday has always been celebrated on September 27th with a doodle displayed on the homepage, and today is no exception. "Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake," says Google's help center. You can read more about it directly from Google. ... (more)

[Flashback to 2008] Is Google the Elephant in the Cloud?

While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing. The article, written by Stephen T. Arnold, concludes that: "Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement....[T]his patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot." Stephen E. Arnold, who blogs at arnoldit.com, monitors search, content p... (more)

Linux Foundation Lives in a Fool’s Paradise

Linux Foundation (LF) chief Jim Zemlin needed hand-holding after IBM waved some of its patents under the nose of open source mainframer TurboHercules, particularly those two allegedly penalty-free patents IBM pledged to the open source community five years ago, so he turned to LF board member Dan Frye, VP of open systems development at IBM. Frye thereupon repeated part of IBM's 2005 pledge closing his e-mail with the words "IBM stands by this 2005 Non-Assertion Pledge today as strongly as it did then. IBM will not sue for the infringement of any of those 500 patents by any Open Source Software." According to Zemlin that means "all of us can breathe easy - IBM remains true to their word." Jim, Jim, aside from being at variance with IBM's other official statements, he didn't say IBM wouldn't assert its patents - even those magic 500 - like it did. And he didn't say ... (more)

P2P Web Promises Many Freedoms - Part 3/3

Author's Note:  In Part 1 we examined the events leading up to the creation of Dot-P2P, the planned alternative peer-to-peer Domain Name System. In Part 2 we looked at the existing Internet DNS and how Dot-P2P aims to compete with it.  In this, the third and final part of this article, we look at where Dot-P2P may reside and why. The decentralized authority enabled by the web of trust model works well for BitTorrent-based file sharing, but, in the opinion of the Dot-P2P organizers, would add complexity and diminish security in a domain name system, and so they are proposing a central authority instead to govern the otherwise highly distributed system. The lack of a central authority in the existing BitTorrent network is one of the things that make it resilient against interdiction. If The Man shuts down any elements of the network - peers, trackers or sites, there a... (more)

Facebook, Google, and the Near-Term Future of the USA

On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it was impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the future. Obama grasped the nettle full-on. "We are poised for progress," he declared, adding: "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing." As one blogger expressed it, though - and he is a former Goldman Sachs trader called Tyler Durden, so he ought to know wheref he speaks: "There was a massive pink elephant in the room called reality though." Durden's gripe is with what he deems to be the unreality of Obama's praising Google and Facebook so highly in an Ameri... (more)

Opinion: Is This the #Jan25 Uprising?

First came Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" and now we have the "#Jan25 Uprising" - the world's first revolution named for a Twitter hash tag. Calling it the "Twitter Revolution" misses the beauty of the hash tag itself, and besides what would one then call the upcoming social unrest in other Arab States? So-called "hashtag dates" are already being planned for the Arab world: Sudan #Jan30, Yemen #Feb3, Syria #Feb5, Algeria #Feb12 and Bahrain #Feb14. Photo by Arabist, via TwitPic I am not the only one who argues that "Twitter Revolution" is not the right term. Ulyses Mejias has written vehemently that "...[I]t is [absurd] to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on." And he is right. Let me quickly just give the floor to Mejias, since he in turn is generous enough to note that things can sometime... (more)

Know Your Road Map for IT Maturity in the Age of Cloud Computing

Are you suffering from double vision in your IT? As odd as it sounds, this is a common occurrence. Line-of-business (LOB) stakeholders often use a different set of criteria to measure IT than IT uses to measure itself. This can lead to a kind of "double vision"that can hurt IT prospects. A cloud-centric IT maturity model is a useful tool for evaluating present IT capabilities and planning future growth. It is increasingly being used to establish present and future success criteria for IT in a common language understood by all parties. In this article, we will discuss three essential dimensions of IT maturity and how they can be applied to help IT decision makers achieve their goals. The Double Vision Cloud computing has created two major sets of expectations, which are worth a critical look: IT-centric View of Cloud: Historically, many CIOs and IT professionals, ... (more)

AJAXWorld 2006 West Power Panel with Google's Adam Bosworth

Six of the Web's brightest and best minds - Google's Adam Bosworth, Laszlo Systems founder David Temkin, coiner of the term 'AJAX' Jesse James Garrett, Paul Rademacher of HousingMaps.com and Google, Web 2.0 Journal editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe and Microsoft MVP Sahil Malik - wrestle with a host of issues in this 'AJAX Power Panel' moderated by SYS-CON Media Group Publisher and Editorial Director, Jeremy Geelan. ... (more)

Is the Rise of Google the End of the Game for Everyone Else?

As I write this, the stock price of Google, Inc. just exceeded $500 for the first time in the company's still-brief (two-year) history as a public company. That gives the search colossus a market cap of $150 billion, many times in excess of its physical assets - currently valued at $10.2 billion. Whether the latest surge in value is being driven by the perception that Microsoft may be losing its golden touch, or whether it is Google's sheer Web 2.0-style inventiveness that is causing investors to pile into its stock, matters not. What matters is that the company that snapped up video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion now doesn't seem quite so profligate. Everything is relative. But why, many outside the industry are wondering, is the company started eight years ago in a Silicon Valley garage by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin al... (more)

Google Maps on the Good Old Palm OS

You know, despite all the modern Smartphones, and my new Treo 750v, I still always have a hankering to go back to my Palm Treo 650.  The ease of use is still  just fantastic compared to just about anything I've ever used...the apps are great, really functional.  Yes, it has its problems, its not WiFi, the camera is..well its dodgy as we know..it has no real JVM support although I appreciate you can get a JVM on it, but it takes so much effort and space, the end result is still not worth it...and then there are the applications that won't run that you come to rely on, such as Google Maps.  Wait, did I say Google Maps..now just hang on there, there *is*  a Google Maps client for the Palm..and it really rocks ! The applications is everything you expect, very responsive, and the UI with the translucent buttons is even kinda sexy - great job !  I think a retro smartphon... (more)

How to Create a Gadget for Google Desktop

Alan Williamson's Blog Have you played with Google's Desktop tool? This is basically a strip on the side of your screen that lets you house small applications, called Gadgets. The tool is available for Windows, Linux and Mac so no matter your vice there is a flavour for you. There is a wide variety of Gadgets available, ranging from the usual news tickers and clocks right through to games and even being able to vote if a girl is hot or not! Each gadget is essentially a small Javascript application that is built to a given framework that is provided to by the Google application that you install. The Javascript is out of the sandbox, permitting it to connect to any host utilising the popular XMLHttpRequest object to do all the heavy network lifting. In addition, Google has a whole set of API's allowing you to query details about the system in which you are running. ... (more)