Amazon announced the released of a new web service today that aims to facilitate easier access to open, public data sets. Public Data Sets on Amazon’s Web Services will attempt to make a wide range of public data available for free use by anyone. Users can interact with data sets via an Amazon EC2 machine image and only pay for their compute time — they won’t have to worry about storing, downloading, or cleaning the actual data. According to Amazon business development manager Deepak Singh, the new program “significantly lowers the barrier for researchers and data analysts to access and...
Calling all designers, inventors, and green gadget geeks! The 2009 Greener Gadgets Conference is shaping up to be an incredible event, and we’re excited to announce the details of next year’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition! Hosted by Core77 and Inhabitat, the Greener Gadgets Design Competition will award $5000 of cash prizes to extraordinary designs for green gadgets that offer innovative solutions to the issues of energy, materials, product lifecycle, recycling, and social development. Designers are encouraged to consider their design’s product ecosystem, and may focus upon a particular context, material, device, or area of human enterprise. Want to enter?...
Amazon released its previously announced Public Data Sets web service this evening. The project encourages developers, researchers, universities and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon - things like census data, genomes, etc. - and then let others integrated that data into their own AWS applications. Previously, Amazon says, large data sets like the Human Genome or U.S. Census data required “many hours to located, download and customize,” but that developers can now access and start computing on this data within minutes. Data is hosted for free. Data sets available today include an Annotated Human Genome, a public...
Since its July debut some 10,000 iPhone applications have been released to Apple’s App Store and 9,887 of them are still available for purchase. 10,000 apps. An impressively broad ecosystem for just under five months of development. Apple’s (AAPL) year-end list of Top App Store Downloads for 2008, then, is both handy and timely (Click on the image below to see the top 10 paid and free apps). It’s largely what you’d expect, with the Games and Entertainment categories proving most popular, Facebook and Pandora dominating the Paid App category, and Texas Hold ‘Em and Moto Chaser topping the Free...
Forgive me Steve, for I once had sinned, and I come to you in confession to admit I had wronged you. For more than a year after iPhone was available to the public, I held off on buying one. I made all these excuses - that my BlackBerry was "good enough", that work was paying my monthly bills, that I was concerned about lackluster Exchange support, or switching to AT&T. I now know that I was naive, for my time as an iPhone owner has convinced me that there is no need for any other phones to be on this...
We hated Apple's tiny DVI ports because even though they used an industry standard, they were de facto proprietary connections. We were ready to hate Mini DisplayPort too, but we might not have to. That's because Apple will be licensing the Mini DisplayPort specification for free, meaning Apple might not be the singular assholes to use it (which is why their shrunken variations on DVI, while not technically proprietary, practically were). At the very least, even if vendors like Dell—an early supporter of DisplayPort—don't pick it up, it should mean a decent-sized ecosystem of Mini DisplayPort accessories, not just a...
Arup Ghosh ©courtesy of Sony World Photography Awards 2009 Amateur Winner Portraiture 2008 Environmental Graffiti wouldn’t be what it is today without the wonderful images provided by our readers and the public. It’s no secret there are some amazingly talented snappers out there, a lot of them highly worthy of having their work recognised by the big boys. So you might be interested in finding out more about our collaboration with the Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA). This year, Environmental Graffiti is proud to announce a partnership with the Sony World Photography Awards, in association with the Prince’s Rainforests...
Developed by NASA, the EcoSphere is complete eco-system that has been sealed in hand blown glass. The pod contains all the basic necessities of life – water, air and earth. Algae and other microbes sustain each other with nutrients. All the pod needs to sustain is indirect sunlight. Perfect for gifting to someone who wants to start his/her green life, the EcoSphere Pod can be purchased for $59.99 from Target....
Garbage is America's #1 export and possibly the biggest raw material source we have. But what is waste? And why do we make it? In nature, waste does not exist - if it did we would not be here today since the creation of a material that another life form cannot use is not sustainable and would lead to the destruction of our eco-system. One way to look at waste is that it is a commodity with negative value. That is, it's a commodity that we are willing to pay to get rid of. It is a liability that has...
Last February when Microsoft announced it had purchased Danger, makers of T-Mobile’s consumer friendly smartphone the Sidekick, I suggested that rumors of a Zune-branded phone would quickly resurface. Today, CNBC’s Jim Goldman claims that a new device from Microsoft, codenamed ‘pink’, is indeed in the works and that it will combine the company’s Zune with technology from Danger, with an end goal to develop a viable competitor to Apple’s iPhone. All of which seems perfectly plausible. Both the Zune and Danger teams fall under the company’s Entertainment and Devices Division, which also overseas the XBox 360 — Microsoft’s most successful...
I’m a big fan of Google services - search, blog search, finance, news and images. But until recently, I was only a quasi-GMail user, mostly because I didn’t want to commit all my e-mail to a third-party service supplier. As a result, I was using Thunderbird. It was an unorthodox decision because it’s not like Thunderbird plays as nice as other e-mail clients such as Outlook and Entourage. But as an ardent Firefox user, it seemed to make sense to support Mozilla’s e-mail efforts. Unfortunately, my faith in Thunderbird has gone unrewarded. As much as Firefox has become a...
We all have heard the buzz about twitter growing rapidly. Nielsen is reporting today the the year over year growth is at 343%. This makes twitter the fastest growing socail network online. What is really interesting about this statistic is that I am quite candidly surprised that they have pegged the growth at this level. I was anticipating the number would be closer to 500%. Twitter does not make its traffic or member statistics public. This leaves a lot of guessing for the measurement and analytic companies. What most of these companies fail to accurately report is the number of...
Apple removed another program from the AppStore over the weekend: Wallpaper Universe is the latest for the chop. And so the 'net embarsk on yet another round of the exact same hand-wringing over Apple's policies. Why do people not understand that you are working for Apple when you develop for the iPhone? It's not even trying to trick people into thinking the ecosystem is open, or that devs aren't unpaid work-made-for-hire: Apple's right to make arbitrary and inscrutable decisions is right there in the contract you sign! This is not an argument for Apple's shiny golden godhood, but for "If...
Quick Summary for those too lazy to read the whole page: Ask PuneTech is a One-Stop Shop for all the information needed by infotech professionals and infotech startups in Pune. Ask us a question, or for a referral, or for some information and we find it for you, or we will put you in touch with person who has previous experience in that area to guide you. Just send an email to ask@punetech.com. Details: PuneTech has been running for 8 months now, and it has been very successful in filling the information gap that existed in the tech ecosystem in...
Eco Factor: A structure made from electronic items we discard during our lifetime aims to educate the benefits of recycling. Statistics show that an average citizen of the United Kingdom produces about 3.3 tons of electronic waste in their lifetime. The waste includes everything from an old cellphone to a couple of washing machines one might buy in an effort to keep pace with technology. In an effort to make people think about their behavior when it comes to disposing electric equipment they no longer want, WEEE man was created by British Royal Society of Arts. The structure weighs...
