August 30, 2011

Tips for Building Data-Efficient Apps

Most U.S. mobile carriers are moving to tiered data pricing plans, charging fees for excessive data use and/or throttling customers who consume the most bandwidth. In the face of this changing reality, it’s up to mobile developers to build apps that keep data use as low as possible. How? Here

Enterprise Software Developers Crack Down on Chinese Piracy

According to the Business Software Alliance, Chinese software piracy costs American application development firms $7.7 billion per year. However, V.i. Labs says that it can help those firms recover 10 to 25 percent of those lost licensing fees by tracking unlicensed copies of enterprise software. It says that it found

Diffbot Releases APIs

According to Diffbot co-founder Mike Tung, “The entire Internet can be broken down into 30 different page types.” The Diffbot tool uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to see each of those 30 different page types the way humans would. Now those tools are available for free to

Tendril Seeks Smart-Grid Apps

Energy management company, Tendril, is launching the Tendril Connect Platform Application Developer Program. This new program will allow third-party developers to create apps that utilize Tendril’s smart grid technology. “Developing on the Tendril Connect cloud platform means that, with a single application, a developer can leapfrog seven years of deep

The Spiral Model as an Agile Alternative

When seeking buy-in for adopting Agile software development as a standard, offering alternatives can be useful. Agile alternatives allow enterprises to sample some of the benefits of Agile without making a sometimes drastic transition. They can also help enterprises smooth out bumps in the transition process. The Spiral model (aka

Heroku Adds Java Support

Heroku began as a platform-as-a-service offering for Ruby developers, but has since branched out into Node.js and Clojure. Now the service is making a play for the estimated six million Java developers. The company’s blog post on the topic provides a lot more detail, including sample code for building a

Skype Opens Its Own App Store

Just when you thought every technology company in existence had opened an app store, now Skype is launching one too. The Internet telephony service currently has about 25 listings in its directory of third-party applications. The current most popular app is a tool for recording and editing Skype video calls.