January 23, 2013

RIM Renames Its App Store

With the launch of BlackBerry 10 just days away, RIM has decided to change the name of its app store. But it isn’t a major change—”BlackBerry App World” will now be called simply “BlackBerry World.” According to a company blog, “The naming change reflects a shift in the type of

China Blocks GitHub Access

On Monday, the Chinese government began blocking the country’s Internet users from accessing GitHub, a popular code hosting service for developers. Why would the government take such a move? One forum commenter speculated, “I believe the blocking is directly related to an automated train ticket polling plugin that had brought

Survey: Nobody Knows What the Cloud Is

A new survey of more than 1,000 consumers conducted by Webfusion revealed a general lack of understanding about cloud computing. While 33.8 percent claimed they clearly understood the term, 28.5 percent did not, and 18.3 claimed only limited understanding. When asked whether Dropbox, iTunes and Gmail were cloud services, about

Congressman Proposes APPS Act

U.S. Representative Hank Johnson (D, GA) has proposed a new piece of legislation called The Application Privacy, Protection, and Security (APPS) Act of 2013. The bill would require app developers to tell users what data they collect, how they use it, how they store it and how they share it.

Beware Big Data “Experts” and Their Snake Oil

I’ve spoken about the slippery definition of Big Data in two recent blog posts: Big Data Today, Not So Tomorrow? and The Big Data Long Tail. Since we define Big Data in relative terms, the challenges that constitute Big Data problems will continue to shift as our tools mature. Fair