Saturday, May 14, 2011

This Week in Technology (May 9th 2011): Facebook Caught Smearing Google; Apple Talks to Congress; Sony PlayStation Network Still Down

At the beginning of this week we saw the opening of EMC World, which SiliconANGLE got people at—namely SA’s editor and chief Mark Hopkins—as a result we got some news about Hadoop, and a video of Tom Roloff, Senior VP of EMC Consulting, speaking about Big Data. For video games, a Czech computer scientist designed an error-correcting algorithm for video cameras and Happy Cloud is looking to leverage the cloud to aid quicker click-to-play. Apple got called to the principal’s office (aka Congress subcommittee) over their Location tracking snafus which they fixed last week in patch 4.3.3. The Pirate Bay thought they were being blocked by Comcast in the United States; and Facebook got caught hiring a PR company to smear Google.

FREE-TO-PLAY MMOS

Only one MMO game review to speak of, but it’s a game really worth playing because it’s quite fun. That game would happen to be World of Tanks. Published by Wargaming.net this game has actually had be somewhat entranced for a while. I don’t know how long I’ll keep playing it—it has a rather limited playability as it’s the same thing over and over—but they did an excellent job.

  • World of Tanks First Impressions—a team-based tank combat simulation that presents itself with authentic historical tank designs and equipment. It’s also full of WWI and WWII trivia about tanks, tank commanders, and crews. The simulation space has excellent graphics, quick exhilarating battles, and an excellent experience.

PlayStation Network Looks to Make Up With Suffering Fans

EMC World 2011

  • Hadoop Seeing a Surge of New Products at EMC World 2011 from Greenplum to Brisk—the workhorse of cloud computing technology, Hadoop, has seen a lot of new software designed to make use of it. This article lists eight new software technologies that either hybrid Hadoop or make direct use of it for Big Data analysis, storage, or other cloud-computing functions.
  • Tom Roloff Talks About Big Data and Cloud Enterprise Solutions—as the VP of EMC Consulting, Tom Roloff is in the perfect position to speak about how the business work is adopting technologies that simplify Big Data problems. The takeaway from the conversation is about how Big Data solutions can give companies the know-how to better interact with their customers.
  • QLogic’s Competitive Edge: the Business of Data Infrastructure—in an interview with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, Satish Lakshmanan, Senior Director of Product Marketing & Management for QLogic, outlined his company’s future expectations about the cloud-computing market and how they expect to fit into it. QLogic is a well known provider of Fiber Channel over Ethernet technology for data centers to more rapidly transfer data, but they’re looking to reach out with as many bandwidth solutions as possible to capture the new wave of data processing.

Video Games See Some Sunlight

For the random newsweek

The cloud is a big deal, and cloud data in government is even more interesting. During his term, President Obama signed legislation into play that requires that the government be more open about their data. In order to help, Microsoft put on their superhero cape and tried to come to the rescue—Microsoft Tapped to Enable the US Government Open Cloud—of course, others such as Google have already been working hard on this.

In an attempt to address privacy concerns cropping up out of smartphones, Congress called upon both Google and Apple to explain themselves. Apple Faces Congress over Location Tracking Concerns—no doubt they felt a little squeamish when trying to explain why the phone didn’t stop recording customer locations when they turned Location Services off. Of course, the Google Android also records this sort of information; but the difference that makes a difference in people’s minds seems to be that Apple’s iPhone did so without consent.

As it turns out Comcast customers discovered that they couldn’t reach The Pirate Bay. Alarms went off, but it doesn’t look like Comcast had anything to do with it—Comcast Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay, ISP Says “It’s Not Us”—and it wasn’t…this week Comcast assisted TPB with determined where the problem existed and it’s on its way to being fixed.

Well, it looks like Facebook got caught badmouthing Google behind their backs—Facebook Hired PR Company Burson-Marsteller to Plant Negative Google Stories—in possibly one of the worst-executed-smear-campaigns-ever. USA Today broke the story after public relations experts from Burson-Marsteller tried to sell them on exaggerated concerns about Google’s Social Circle application. Now we’ll just have to see how Facebook runs damage control. Who expects them to back away and says, “Sure, we hired them, but we didn’t tell them to mudsling Google. Honest!”

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