Techme101

You might recall that Electronic Arts took to a fully freemium income model with their driving game ‘Real Racing’. Well it looks like they’re happy with the money they’ve made through the app, as the upcoming ‘Plants vs Zombies’ title will also be using the free download model, relying on in-app purchasing to create a revenue stream.

Source: Forbes.com    Read More

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now The main thing MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis wants you to know about his company’s merger with Stratasys is that, no, MakerBot is not selling out. “We’re a growing company. We’re out there to make 3D printing easier and more accesible to more people, and this will help us do that,” Pettis told me earlier today.

Source: VentureBeat    Read More

Turner Broadcasting today revealed the names of the startups participating in its next Media Camp accelerator class. These five startups will be a part of the 12-week program held this summer in San Francisco. It’s the second time a class has been organized in the Bay Area.

Source: The Next Web    Read More

Despite the promise of portability from service providers, the reality of the cloud for big customers is a similar type of lock-in as they experience with on-premise apps vendors such as Oracle and SAP, two CIOs said Tuesday.

Source: Computerworld    Read More

With more than a billion monthly active users, it's easy to imagine that most of the data travelling over Facebook's networks is delivering photos, status updates and "likes" to its end users, but that's far from the case.

Source: Computerworld    Read More

Twitter has bought Spindle, a search technology company that informs users about what's happening with local businesses and organizations around them.

Source: Computerworld    Read More

While NoSQL databases have gotten their share of interest in recent years, that doesn’t mean developers should rule out running good old SQL queries to get insights on large amounts of data flowing in in real time, without spending an arm and a leg.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest public cloud but get ready, it’ll only get bigger and it may well be show up in more “gated” configurations around the world. In this country, Amazon hosts Gov.cloud, a U.S.-only cloud for local, state, federal and some other workloads.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

Fidelity, the largest mutual fund company in the United States, is now using OpenStack, giving Rackspace’s open infrastructure as a service project some notable backing from a major enterprise customer. That’s one of the news stories coming out of GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco, where Rackspace CTO John Engates was joined by Fidelity Technology Group VP Keith Shinn on stage Wednesday to announce the partnership.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now Shopping for clothes online can easily turn into a downward spiral of frustration. “Buying engine” TheFind has unveiled its new iPad app that seeks to turn e-commerce into pleasant shopping experience.

Source: VentureBeat    Read More

Google chief legal office and senior vice president David Drummond got right to the point. Asked in a Q&A session with The Guardian immediately following whistleblower Edward Snowden’s live Q&A, Drummond denied that the NSA has access to Google’s data and servers, as has been extensively alleged via the NSA’s PRISM program.

Source: VentureBeat    Read More

Apparently, Microsoft has just remembered that it needs gamers to sell a gaming console. In a complete and humiliating reversal, Microsoft’s next-gen console just dropped some of the contentious bits that had formerly loyal gamers shouldering pitchforks and heading to Redmond.

Source: ReadWriteWeb    Read More

The Outlook.com issue of missing emails has come back to the fore, with users taking to the official Microsoft forums in force. We last went round this specific tree when, in January, Microsoft addressed consumer complaint that users were missing emails from their Outlook.

Source: The Next Web    Read More

So, the massive public debate over Microsoft’s choices regarding Xbox One DRM, used games and a requisite Internet connection has come to roost. Today, the company pulled back from many of the stances that it had taken since the reveal began several weeks ago, and people are super-duper happy about it.

Source: The Next Web    Read More

Microsoft and cellphone maker Nokia were in advanced talks about an acquisition of the Finnish company's device business, but the discussions have broken down, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Source: Computerworld    Read More

As software-defined networking (SDN) startups such as Big Switch and Embrane make headway and headlines, Juniper and other big network gear vendors have been responding with big visions and insider consortiums. In doing so, Juniper is looking to help companies bring ease and scalability to their networks just as compute and storage are becoming easier to control.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

Server Density, the London-based startup that hopes to give RightScale a run for its money, just added some cloud management capabilities to its existing monitoring features. Version 2.0 of Server Density adds a graphical way to view a customers’s  infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services or Rackspace infrastructure.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

If your organization is looking for a SharePoint alternative, see how Huddle compares to the Microsoft collaboration platform in three common usage scenarios.

Source: TechRepublic    Read More

As has been written ad nauseam, we’ve seen a lot of activity in the wild and whacky world of cryptocurrency of late, thanks primarily to the tech industry’s new obsession with Bitcoin. Depending on whom you ask, digital currency like Bitcoin will either be worth nothing in 10 years, or its value will make Warren Buffet weep.

Source: TechCrunch    Read More

Palo Alto-based ScaleIO is one of a new generation of startup storage providers that’s using intelligent software to help big companies streamline and converge their data storage operations at scale across thousands of servers. On a mission to re-imagine the very operations of enterprise data centers, the startup’s tech takes aim at the core business of storage giants like EMC and IBM.

Source: TechCrunch    Read More

MakerBot, the leader in desktop 3D printing, has just been acquired by Stratasys Ltd., the leader in 3D printing and additive manufacturing in a $604 million deal. The merger, which will allow MakerBot to continue to operate as a separate company, will pay $403 million in exchange for 100% of MakerBot’s stock.

Source: Forbes.com    Read More

Lorne Lanning, founder of Oddworld Inhabitants, launched Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee on Sony PlayStation in 1997. After developing a sequel for Sony and publisher GT Interactive, Oddworld: Abe’s Exodus in 1998, the independent developer opted for Microsoft’s Xbox platform with Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee in 2001.

Source: Forbes.com    Read More

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now Facebook page owners have long yearned for more insight than PTAT — Facebook’s people talking about this metric — offers. Starting today, they’re getting their wish. Facebook announced today that the statistics and numbers that make up PTAT are now going to be available, by default, in their individual elements, along with other metrics on page owners’ Insights overviews.

Source: VentureBeat    Read More

Lipstick maker Revlon isn’t likely the first company you’d think of when you think high tech. But part of what helps the global brand push more cosmetics to consumers is an IT infrastructure based on a private cloud. Since 2007, the company has implemented a common cloud strategy that puts all of its data in one place and better enables it to align its business goals with its technology, said David Giambruno, Revlon’s SVP and CIO, at GigaOM’s Structure 2013 conference in San Francisco.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

It’s hard for externals to know how popular a particular messaging service is. Yes all your friends might use it, but does the public at large? And is it larger, or smaller than other similar services? Telecom, a well-named New Zealand provider of Internet and mobile service has lifted the curtain as to what its smartphone users are using to stay in touch.

Source: The Next Web    Read More

Ever since allegations first emerged that Google and a host of other tech giants were providing data on their users to the National Security Agency, there has been a race to see who can be the most transparent about this story. Google appears to be in the lead — even going so far as to file a lawsuit claiming that forcing the company not to disclose FISA court orders is a breach of the First Amendement.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

Workday has cornered the HR market, cofounder and co-CEO Anheel Bhusri said at the GigaOM Structure conference Wednesday. Now it’s turning to other industries. “If HR is a $10 billion market, financials is ten times that size,” Bhusri told GigaOM’s Om Malik, adding, “financial data is really the key record data for whatever business you’re in — if you win HR and finance together, you’ve effectively won the ERP department.

Source: GigaOM    Read More

Reacting to “feedback from the Xbox community,” it appears Microsoft is reversing course and changing two key components to policies for its new Xbox One video game console.

Source: CNN – Technology    Read More

With the reveal of the Xbox One at E3, gamers had all-but declared Xbox’s competitor, the PlayStation 4, as the victor in this particular console war. One feature of the One that seemed particularly vexing to Xboxers was the need for Internet connectivity.

Source: Forbes.com    Read More