Posts tagged Brings
Amazon Brings Kindle Newsstand to iPad, Updates Kindle Fire
Dec 22nd
Amazon updated the Kindle app for iOS today, giving iPad users the ability to access publications from the Kindle Newsstand. Amazon’s Newsstand offers over 400 full-color publications to Kindle Fire users. Apple’s own Newsstand offers more app-like experiences from many of the same publishers.
In addition to the 400 magazines and newspapers, the iPad app can also now display “print replica textbooks,” which are more like giant PDFs than interactive applications. All iOS devices, not just the iPad, now support the Send-to-Kindle feature, allowing users to send documents to the device by email. They can also open PDFs from email or the browser in the Kindle app.
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The Kindle Fire itself is off to a good start, at least in terms of sales. It’s the fastest growing tablet since the iPad. Amazon has also released the first over-the-air update for that device, fixing some of the performance problems.
The Verge has a nice hands-on review of the new Kindle Fire update with photos and video.
It’s a compromised device, and it’s positioned as a service, not a dedicated hardware product like the iPad. Rather than making money off the device, Amazon wants to put the device into as many hands as possible in order to make money on the content.
The Kindle app for iOS is Amazon’s extension of that service onto Apple’s platform. Apple’s own Newsstand has given publishers a major bump since the launch of iOS 5 in October. The Kindle app is popular on the iPad for e-books, though, and Amazon hopes to divert some attention away from Apple’s Newsstand with today’s update.
Download Kindle for iOS from the iTunes Store.
Do you read on a tablet? Which one do you use?
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New Solar Investment Brings Google’s Clean Energy Portfolio to Nearly $1B
Dec 21st
Google is investing $94 million in solar farms built by Recurrent Energy in the Sacramento, California region. This brings Google’s total clean energy investments to over $925 million, with over $880 million in 2011 alone.
The Recurrent Energy -…
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Google Brings Japan’s Tsunami Damage to Street View
Dec 17th
Google has released a compilation of StreetView images that cover 44,000 kilometers of the region devastated by Japan’s March 11th tsunami and earthquake. Users can view before and after footage as if they were right there, standing on the streets…
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Red Hat 6.2 Brings Better Resource Management
Dec 6th
Red Hat has taken the lid off Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2, Though it’s a modest update, Red Hat has a laundry list of improvements to KVM and the kernel that will make it easier to set resource limits and improve performance for virtualized systems.
Last week I spoke to Tim Burke, VP of Linux engineering for Red Hat to get a look at what’s coming in the release. Aside from the usual collection of security patches and bug fixes since 6.1, Burke says that 6.2 is emphasizing performance, scalability and manageability. Naturally, Red Hat is also including support for new hardware in this release as well.
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In RHEL 6.2, Burke says that it will be easier to use cgroup resource controls to control CPU consumption, memory consumption, and I/O consumption. This is important for a lot of shops that need to ensure that virtual machines don’t go over their limits. Burke says that it’s also usable for bare metal applications, and for hosted cloud providers like OpenShift.
OpenShift and RHEL 6.2
It’s unclear how much Red Hat’s OpenShift effort is driving features in RHEL 6.2, but Burke did say that Red Hat is learning quite a bit from developing OpenShift and is already using 6.2 to host its PaaS. For example, Burke says that OpenShift makes heavy use of Linux Containers and “really stresses” logical volume management (LVM). “It’s so dynamic, and we want it to be as rapid as possible to deploy [on OpenShift].”
Linux Containers don’t get as much attention as KVM, but they can be used in cases where a full virtual machine may not make sense. With 6.2, the features for managing Containers are available via a GUI or using libvirt. Note that Containers are considered a “technology preview” in 6.2, though. Burke says it’s “not generically suited for a full spectrum of workloads,” but says it is being used heavily in OpenShift.
He also says that OpenShift “heavily uses a lot of the tool stack” that ships with RHEL, such as Perl, Python and Ruby.
RHEL 6.2 is also a major component of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 which is in beta right now.
Burke says that RHEL 6.2 has made it easier to configure resource policies. If you’re using RHEL 6.2 with RHEV 3.0, Burke notes that a lot of the resource policy management is now exposed via GUI tools that ship with RHEV – though those are not available just with RHEL 6.2.
Additional Updates
On the device side, RHEL 6.2 has added support for new Infiniband devices, a bunch of new 10GbE network cards, and better utilities for configuring Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
It’s worth noting, of course, that the cgroup and KVM features are not exclusive to Red Hat. The features are being developed in the upstream Linux kernel, and they’re available to any vendor that’s using the Linux kernel. Red Hat may be one of the first to market with these features in an enterprise Linux distribution, but the kernel/KVM improvements aren’t exclusive.
For a full list of improvements, see Red Hat’s What’s New Guide (PDF) for 6.2.
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YouTube Redesign Brings Google+ To Facebook’s Front Door
Dec 1st
The YouTube redesign we got a sneak peak into last month is now going live for all users. It has been reborn as a social and customizable media site, letting users customize their lists of channels right on the front page, as well as share to Google+ and Facebook.
It might be surprising to see Facebook integration so prominently on YouTube, with Google+ is trying to make a name for itself, but think of it this way: Facebook is huge. YouTube is huge. Google+ is not yet huge. What better way for Google to introduce Facebook users to Google+?
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The new YouTube got a lot of design attention. No more simple boxes on a white background. Google wants lots of eyeballs on these pages. It is realigning its media relationships and striking new content deals around the world. YouTube has been mainstream for years, but the new YouTube will redefine the term “mainstream media.” Disney movies, music videos, Rebecca Black and cute puppies all make YouTube what it is, and the new design encourages users to watch and share all of it.
Read more about the redesign on the YouTube blog.
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How SkyChalk Brings A New Twist To An Old Location Trick
Nov 30th
Whatever happened to location being about just location? With the recent launch of NFC-powered Foursquare check-ins and 4sqwifi, an app that uses the Foursquare API to help users find free wifi and passwords, it seems like location is no longer a standalone space. Or maybe it’s just not being done right.
Meet SkyChalk, the most noncommittal location-based site we’ve seen as of late. It doesn’t rely on Foursquare’s API, and it also isn’t about the whole check-in game. Co-founders Justin Krause and Scott Wen say that SkyChalk “is about communicating with neighbors, visitors, and local businesses.” In that way, it still has the feel of Foursquare, but without the gameification element – and more focus on the location itself. Instead, it reminds us of what Craigslist used to be before, uh, all those sex scandals took over.
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On SkyChalk, you can choose to login and create an account, or you can just post anonymously. SkyChalk does not send personalized recommendations, ask users to check in to every place they visit, share a ton of information to other social sites, or give out badges. It’s so simple that it just might work. SkyChalk users can post a message to a physical location after selecting from the following categories: uncategorized, gatherings (events, meet-ups), knowledge (local tips, history), marketplace (for sale, trade, deals), overheard (news, gossip, intrigue) or romance (flirting, dating).
Users post notes about a location and, over time, establish a reputation around that location. He or she will then receive comments or replies related to that place.
Registered users can also opt for subscribed places, a list of three places they actually care about. SkyChalk will send a weekly email to the user with a round-up of everything that has happened there over the past week.
Anonymity on SkyChalk may seem like a ripe space for spam but co-founders Scott Wen and Justin Krause say that they carefully monitor the site for inappropriate content. In that way, SkyChalk reminds us of the good ol’ Craigslist community board, which was monitored by Craig himself, combined with EveryBlock, a citizen journalism site for community members to see what’s going on in their neighborhood.
“Many people simply aren’t going to be interested in chatting on Craigslist’s community boards,” writes Krause. “But when they see a comment that is tied to the block where they live, or a question from someone who lives across the street, that feels very local and people want to respond.”
The location space isn’t dead – it just needs to be revisited and refocused on location.
“The problem is that anyone can slap a geolocation onto a Facebook message, tweet, or whatever – but that doesn’t give the content local intent,” writes Krause. “If you post a Beyonce video to Facebook from your favorite cafe, that says nothing about the cafe, and people around you probably don’t need to see it. People have tried to just put Tweets on map based on where they were sent, and it fails for this reason. You are sharing information with your friends, not with people around you.”
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Feedly 8 Brings Tagging, Infinite Scrolling
Nov 29th
Google Reader may be one of the best things to happen to RSS/Atom feeds, but Feedly is definitely one of the best things to happen to Google Reader, and Feedly 8 makes it even better. With this release, Feedly adds tagging, “infinite” scrolling, and two new views.
The biggie, at least from my viewpoint, is the tagging. Feedly has always supported saving articles for later, but you just end up with a huge pile of items. Finding that really interesting piece on running a startup from last July can be tricky with no way to organize items except chronologically.
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Tagging
With F8, Feedly now has a rudimentary tagging system so you can group articles. I say rudimentary because at the moment, it only seems to support a single tag per item. When I’m tagging items in Evernote or other systems, I often use two or more tags. (Like “tickler” for article ideas and a relevant topic like “javascript” or “hadoop.”) But at least now I can separate items into some sort of order, so that if I want to dig out a piece on Vim from six months ago it should be easier than scrolling through six months of saved items.
The other thing missing here is that you apparently can’t assign tags using Feedly’s excellent keyboard shortcuts. If you’re used to plowing through articles using the keyboard shortcuts, you’ll still have to slow down and get clicky to add a tag.
Tags are private now, but expect more goodies based around tagging with Feedly 9. According to the F8 announcement post, with Feedly 9 you’ll be able to “selectively publish and share your collections.” Sounds just a little like the old days of goodness with Delicious, before that service was sucked up and derailed after years of neglect by Yahoo. (Not that I’m bitter or anything.)
Views
Feedly has always had a number of different “views” you could use to browse your feeds. With Feedly 8, it adds a card view and a new titles view that displays more information for each item. The card view calls to mind a set of index cards, with the text-only posts just having the item title, summary and byline/publication info. Posts with graphics display all the summary info plus a random graphic from the post.
The so-called infinite view comes into play when you have a lot of items in your feeds. Instead of stopping at an arbitrary number of posts, you can simply keep scrolling through items as long as you have more posts to read.
If you haven’t tried Feedly before, this would be a good time to check it out. You don’t need to have a Google Reader account, there’s a default set of feeds you can skim with Feedly even if you’re not signed in. But I do recommend using it in conjunction with Google Reader. Note that Feedly syncs in real time with Google Reader, so changes made in Feedly should reflect in Google Reader as well.
The update is available immediately for Chrome and Safari, but the Firefox version is currently under review. Note that you can still install it, but you’ll be warned that it could “harm your computer.” For the cautious, I’ve installed Feedly 8 and thus far my computer seems unharmed.
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Google Comes to Thanksgiving Dinner Early and Brings a Turkey Doodle
Nov 22nd
A tradition as American as apple pie, Google has decided to give thanks this year by paying homage to the turkeys that elementary school kids make by tracing their hands.
The Thanksgiving Doodle, their holiday Google logo, has gone up on the …
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