Posts tagged applications
Slingshot SEO Names John Lawrence VP of Applications Development – MarketWatch (press release)
Feb 6th
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Slingshot SEO Names John Lawrence VP of Applications Development
MarketWatch (press release) INDIANAPOLIS, IN, Feb 06, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Slingshot SEO, the innovative firm delivering digital relevance to deserving brands, has announced that John Lawrence has joined its growing team as VP of Applications Development. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Combine PHP & Ajax as a Powerful Platform for Web Applications with Packt’s … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Dec 26th
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Combine PHP & Ajax as a Powerful Platform for Web Applications with Packt's …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Packt is delighted to announce the release of PHP Ajax Cookbook, a collection of over 60 recipes with step-by-step directions to build SEO-friendly websites using standard Ajax tools. Written by Milan Sedliak, R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah, Roshan Bhattarai, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Top 10 Consumer Cloud Applications of 2011
Dec 16th
For the last few years, many everyday folks who’ve been asked in surveys, “What is a cloud application?” have either guessed wrong or said they don’t know. Folks don’t know what “the cloud” is, and for the most part, that’s not their fault. Unlike the Internet, which truly is a single network of interconnected resources, “the cloud” is more of a concept, one which can be leveraged by marketing departments to mean just about anything.
For this year’s ReadWriteWeb list of the most important and influential consumer-grade cloud computing apps of the year 2011, we focused our gaze on services that truly fit the formal definition: specifically, services that 1) utilize a remote resource of 2) variable capacity 3) which the user can provision for herself, 4) which is mostly or totally independent of programs installed on the user’s devices or PCs, and 5) which is not just a Web site with a big server. You may have seen Facebook on some publications’ Top Cloud lists already; by our definition, Facebook is not a cloud service. But we did look for providers that perform innovative, discrete functions built around their services.
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Not every entry on our list is new this year, but they have all done something innovative within 2011. Keep in mind also, these are consumer cloud apps – things that an individual would use for her personal work or livelihood. We’ll have a separate list later on for enterprise cloud innovations of the year. The functionality needs to be delivered from the cloud app, as opposed to installing an application on a PC or smartphone that just happens to borrow cloud storage.
Hosting services are not cloud apps for purposes of this list; and there are plenty of innovative hosts to consider (we gave serious thought to Wistia), but in the end we decided that a hosting service is not really an application unless it provides a discrete function that goes over and above simple storage or sharing. Analytics, which Wistia provides, is right on the edge, but it’s really a measurement of a byproduct of using the service as opposed to a function that users actually perform. That’s not saying Wistia isn’t a great idea; it just belongs on another list.
10. CloudApp. The largest single category of cloud apps for consumers is storage and retrieval, which is understandable because it’s a service that everyone needs to one degree or another. What’s interesting is how certain services innovate on this theme, and especially whether they give themselves room to continue innovating.
CloudApp is for Mac OS and iOS users at the moment, and its innovation is that it’s building a little ecosystem around itself. It utilizes your choice of quick-and-easy gestures for designating a file or object to send to CloudApp’s storage, the most basic of which is dragging and dropping the object to CloudApp’s icon in the taskbar. In exchange for this gesture, CloudApp produces a URI which is copied to the Clipboard. From there, you can paste it into an e-mail, a tweet, or an IM message; when your recipient receives the link, she has instant access to the object.
The way CloudApp innovates is by incrementally enhancing what can be easily uploaded, and how those objects can be utilized in their native context. One example is screenshots: You can designate a key for taking a screenshot and uploading it in one fell swoop; the recipient sees your link, clicks on it, and sees your screen. There’s no exporting or importing necessary here.
But what hoisted CloudApp onto our Top 10 list this year is how well the company is promoting Raindrops. This is an extremely clever, self-promotional idea for enabling developers to build their own tools that utilize CloudApp in similarly contextual ways, with the help of CloudApp’s own API. One example the company created at the time this feature was launched in April 2010 is for Adobe Photoshop; since then, the community has contributed a truckload more, including an intelligent link interpreter for Twitter and a stand-alone CloudApp client for iOS called Stratus.
Here’s an example (above) of another add-on you can’t even see (which is a good thing): The maker of SparrowMail used CloudApp’s API to develop a way to do simple drag-and-drop of attachments into e-mail messages, bypassing Mac OS’ sometimes convoluted series of steps.
Building a community around something as simple as an app is a difficult thing for a small company to achieve, especially when it’s in competition with a plethora of other vendors in the same category. CloudApp is pulling this off brilliantly. (It’s worth noting that the service is built on the open-source Heroku platform from Salesforce, thus answering RWW’s question from last year on whether developers will trust Heroku: Yes.)
RWW’s The Consumer Cloud series by Richard MacManus:
- The Consumer Cloud: Your Next Big Home Computing Project
- How to Store Your Files in the Cloud, and Why You’d Want To
- Windows 8 Will Bring Personal Cloud to Billions
- Cloud Drive Comparison
- How to Get Started With Apple’s iCloud (for new users)
- Making the Transition to Apple’s iCloud (for MobileMe users)
- Should You Move Your Files to Amazon’s New Cloud Drive?
9. Waze. What would be nice is if someone hired a few thousand cars to drive around each town looking for traffic incidents, and report on them in real-time. Let’s see, $25 bucks per hour salary times 1,000 reporters times 50 cities… I’ll get back to you on that idea.
Or, what would be brilliant is if someone leveraged the platform that’s already in existence to enable a few thousand folks to do this job passively and voluntarily. Waze is a system that utilizes the GPS information being pinged back from iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. It’s been in existence since 2006, but last October the 3.0 version of the service introduced a fabulous new feature (so far, just for the iPhone users) that integrates with Twitter. This way, people can tweet on what’s happening in their neighborhoods (including the good things, like street fairs) from right where they’re standing.
Okay, maybe there aren’t a thousand Waze users in a city like mine (Indianapolis) just yet, but it’s surprising what you can find. There’s updates on traffic accidents and reported police sightings (which are rarer in some cities than others). What Waze demonstrates is that there are ways of making use of data that can be collected passively from a crowd of users, in ways that do not jeopardize privacy.
8. Box.net. This is one of the services that comes to most folks mind when they know what a cloud app is. What’s kept Box.net in the news, including just this month – and what keeps Box.net on our list this year – is a constant stream of innovations. Customizable synchronization is one example from last fall; and earlier this month, a completely revamped iOS app that enables features like uploading photos and videos to discrete folders. This puts Box.net on a par with dedicated photo-sharing services that simply can’t expand its features list to Box.net’s size. And just this morning, the company launched an enterprise-grade option for unlimited storage.
Next: Playing your own tune…
How Do Business-Critical Database Applications Perform Under Virtualization?
Dec 2nd
Research from Principled Technologies suggests that a large UNIX/RISC-based, business-critical database application handling peaks of 10,000 queries per hour is delivering good performance. Using that metric, Principled Technologies set about testing 12 VMs hosted on a server running VMware vSphere 5.0 using the Intel Xeon E7 processor family.
How did it handle? According to Principled Technologies, “this solution comfortably supported 12 80GB databases” without over-committing resources and allowing all VMs to run in parallel with solid performance.
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Intel + VMware Delivered 12 Virtualized Business-Critical Database Applications
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November MacBook Air Contest and Poll: What Application(s) Make Up the Biggest Workload for Your Virtual Servers?
Nov 4th
What workloads are you running under virtualization, and what are you holding back?
That’s the question for ReadWriteCloud’s October contest. Virtualization providers like VMware and hardware partners like Intel say that almost all workloads are suitable for virtualization. What workloads are you running under virtualzation today, and what are you holding back? Do you have workloads you’re worried about moving to virtualization? If so – why?
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The prize? A light, sleek MacBook Air. All you need to do is submit the best comment right here on this post, and you’ll be taking home a MacBook Air! Participating is easy, you just need a Disqus account, and make sure you follow the rules.
We know ReadWriteCloud readers have been tackling virtualization projects for years. But lots of organizations have held back some of their workloads, and we’d like to know what, and why. We’re also encouraging readers to participate in our poll, but don’t delay – the poll and contest close on November 20th. But be sure to respond in the comments as well, to get a chance to win a sweet MacBook Air.
To win, you need to comment by end of day, November 20th. We’ll announce the winner shortly thereafter. You can’t win if you don’t respond, so fire up the keyboard and let us know what made your most successful virtualization project a winner. We’re eager to read your responses!
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Intel and VMware Delivered 12 Virtualized Business-Critical Database Applications
Oct 8th
Is your organization looking to get away from expensive, UNIX RISC systems? The key question is, can industry standard Intel-architecture based servers deliver the performance you’d need to consolidate applications via virtualization?
Principled Technologies’ test report from July 2011 says yes. In tests using the newest Intel Xeon processors and VMware vSphere 5.0, they tested 12 database applications simultaneously – and all delivered strong and consistent performance. How strong? Read the case study, examine the results and testing methodology, and see for yourself.
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Intel + VMware Delivered 12 Virtualized Business-Critical Database Applications
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Virtualizing Business-Critical Database Applications
Oct 1st
You might feel stuck, if you have large and business-critical database applications on expensive UNIX RISC systems. The number of applications running on virtualized systems has jumped, but many businesses have questioned whether industry-standard Intel-based servers could deliver the performance needed to consolidate applications via virtualization.
Principled Technologies did a study to see if VMware vSphere on Xeon could meet the challenge. They ran four large database applications simultaneously, each with a 200GB database in its own virtual machine. Wonder how they did?
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See the full case study from Principled Technologies, “Intel and VMware Delivered 4 Virtualized Business-Critical Database Applications.”
4 Virtualized Business Critical Database Applications
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Incapsula Offers Expanded Web Applications Firewall
Sep 21st
Hosted Web application firewall vendor Incapsula announced today a new release that offers more website traffic data, better analytics and faster SSL setup. They have also made their access controls more finer-grained so you can use white and black lists and block by specific IP address ranges. On top of this they’re also introducing free accounts for smaller sites that have less than 25GB of bandwidth per month.
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We last wrote about them at their launch earlier this year. The paid plans start at $50 per month which include 50 Gb of bandwidth, and a single site; there are additional fees for adding sites and more bandwidth. The free account doesn’t include SSL support and some other features.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Report: Web Applications Attacked Every 2 Minutes
Jul 26th
Data security company Imperva released research today that says Web applications are probed or attacked 27 times an hour, or once every two minutes. At the peak of attacks, some Web applications see probes or attacks 25,000 times an hour, or seven times per second. The research gives concrete numbers to what security researchers, governments and enterprises have known for a while – their networks are persistently under attack.
When researchers look for malware and attack vectors, the tendency is to look for vulnerabilities in portals or code. Yet, most of the major data breaches in recent news have been the result of attacks on Web apps like email and data systems. The goal for hackers is to break applications with automated attacks searching for vulnerabilities until the apps crack and spill data straight into the hands of the hackers.
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Imperva saw three distinct trends in observing Web app attacks from Dec. 2010 to May 2011: the attacks use four distinct strategies, they are automated and they originate in the United States.
Imperva says that 61% of attacks originate from botnets in the U.S. Yet, that does not mean that those doing the actual attacks are located in the U.S. When botnet controllers are looking to hit a specific target, they want to use computers closest to their bounty. The important thing about the attacks coming from the U.S. is that a lot of American’s computers are infected with malware, thus part of some botnet. For instance, if hackers want to attack the U.S. government, the command-and-control center of the botnet might activate the 1,000 computers closest to Washington, D.C. About 10% of attacks originated from China, with Sweden and France also large contributors. China makes sense for its raw number of hackers while Sweden has some of the most universal and robust broadband in the world.
The large number of attacks stems from botnet automation. Imperva said that it sees patterns where applications will be attacked with heavy bursts of many thousands of attacks per hour followed by lighter periods of activity. In essence the criminal hackers are looking to break the application quickly by testing a lot of known vulnerabilities. If it doesn’t crack, their eyes turn elsewhere (criminal hackers are notorious for looking for easy targets). They automate the attacks before coming back for another look.
While Imperva was not specifically monitoring the Lulz Security attacks at their peak in June, they noted that they were very similar to what its research had turned up. A “hack” is an esoteric term. As far as the general public knows, the attacks were some complicated computer stuff that led to data being stolen. Yet, security researchers see four common types of attacks, what Imperva calls “the unfab four”: directory traversal, cross-Site Scripting, SQL injection and remote file inclusion (RFI). These attacks come in two waves: scan and exploit. An attacker may use directory traversal and cross-site ccripting during a scan phase and then hit it with an SQL injection or an RFI in the exploit phase.
Overall, Imperva’s findings are a great illumination of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). The company recommends that agencies and corporations become familiar with how to stop deter automated attacks and perform their own “scans” to detect known vulnerabilities. If companies are on top of knowing their security weaknesses and communicate with the security community, APT attacks can be withstood and ultimately turned against the criminals perpetrating them.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
A New API for Bringing Cloud-based SEO Tools into Other Applications: Web CEO … – PR Web (press release)
Jun 21st
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A New API for Bringing Cloud-based SEO Tools into Other Applications: Web CEO …
PR Web (press release) Web CEO, a leader in SEO desktop software, has just announced new features in Web CEO Online (http://www.webceo.com/), its web-based SEO solution. These include an updated logic and design of the application interface, the opening of an API and … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
