ACTA could be the worst thing for the internet - ever
If the leaks that have been released in the past day are to be believed, the internet may be facing its biggest threat yet: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The negotiators who are sitting down behind closed doors today to iron out this international trade agreement have the internet on their mind.
And that's not a good thing.
Got traffic? Yahoo has a gift for you
If your website gets massive traffic, or you are building a new website and can't sleep at night because you're worried that you will, Yahoo wants to help. And it doesn't want anything in return, except maybe your love.
On Tuesday, Yahoo will announce that it has open sourced Traffic Server, the HTTP web proxy cache it uses internally to serve up millions upon millions of requests to its users on a daily basis in an efficient manner.
Amazon's cloud grows in size
Amazon is flying high. While the online retailer is still pulling in the vast majority of its revenue from retail, it has also become one of the biggest players in the cloud computing space.
And Amazon's cloud is only growing in size. Yesterday it announced that it will be launching a new relational database as a service called Amazon RDS and a new range of high-memory instances of Amazon EC2.
Cloud #fail: Sidekick data loss sideswipes T-Mobile customers
The past week hasn't been good for T-Mobile and Microsoft subsidiary, Danger. An apparent hardware failure has left hundreds of thousands of T-Mobile's customers using Sidekick phones without access to the data services that are relied upon to deliver almost all of their mobile services, including address books and calendars.
The news doesn't get any better for those customers who don't have the data stored on their devices: it may all be gone. While reports are coming in indicating that data has been restored for some users, rumors have also circulated which claim no working backups are available.
Q&A: Dane Atkinson, CEO of Squarespace
Before the company's Twitter marketing campaign went viral, Squarespace wasn't a brand known to many. But the company has experienced rapid growth building a niche in the competitive market for content management solutions/publishing platforms. And it has done it by doing something many others have avoided: charging users.
I spoke with Squarespace CEO Dane Atkinson about the company, its success with a paid business model and what ROI the company's viral Twitter marketing campaign produced.
WordPress attack catches bloggers off guard, but it shouldn't have
Over the weekend, reports surfaced of a seemingly widespread attack targeting older versions of the popular blogging software WordPress. The attack leaves WordPress installations severely compromised and appears to be part of a campaign to spread spam and malicious code.
Numerous bloggers found themselves victims. One of those bloggers was popular tech personality Robert Scoble. He claims that two months of his blog's content was lost and that his site was booted from Google's index because of malicious code that had been inserted (ouch).
Is the cloud a weakling?
The cloud is all the rage today. For online business owners and startup entreprenurs, the cloud is often pitched as a low entry cost solution to many scalability challenges. Just throw your web application into the cloud and pay as you grow.
But does the cloud deliver? According to researchers at the University of New South Wales, the cloud may not be all that it's cracked up to be. When put to stress tests, cloud computing solutions offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft showed some weaknesses.
Five easy ways to make your business website more social
Social media is an increasingly important part of the internet. But many businesses are still trying to decipher what it's really all about and how it can relate to their bottom lines. Naturally, not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and throwing all their resources at Twitter, Facebook, et. al.
The truth is that for many businesses social media makes sense -- in moderate doses. If you're a small business owner, chances are you don't need to hire a full-time social media manager and the only thing social you're likely to get from social media experts is a lot of smooth-talk.
Target going in-house for e-commerce
Target, the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, has announced that it will bring its e-commerce website, Target.com, in-house in time for the 2011 holiday season.
Since 2001, Target.com has been run in partnership with Amazon.com. The e-commerce giant's platform powers the Target.com website and Amazon.com handles much of the call center and fulfillment operations.
Is a major social network denial-of-service attack underway?
Twitter is down. LiveJournal has been down, although it appears to be back up. Facebook users are experiencing problems too. What's going on?
In Twitter's case, the culprit has been confirmed as a denial-of-service attack. A note on the Twitter status page states "we are defending against a denial-of-service attack". There is no word yet on the cause of the LiveJournal and Facebook issues that have been reported. Needless to say, the fact that three popular social networking services are all having a bad morning hints at the possibility that the most important parts of the social internets are under siege.
Holiday shopping forecast 2009: a lot like 2008, with more coupons
The NLA explains why it is going after the news aggregators
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
