Live blog: Google I/O 2013 showcases Android, Chrome, YouTube and more
Our live coverage from Google I/O 2013, Google’s most significant public event of the year, can be found right here. Read more at GigaOM »
GigaOM hits Google I/O 2013 (roundup)
Here you’ll find all our coverage of Google I/O 2013, Google’s annual showcase of its technology prowess. Read more at GigaOM »
How ABC plans to use live streaming and the cloud to challenge Aereo
ABC is going to offer iOS users in New York and Philadelphia a 24-hour live stream of its programming this week. It’s the first time a broadcaster has embraced live streaming. Read more »
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Feedly survives the outages from the post-Google Reader rush, adding users, feeds and maybe revenue
photo: Feedly
Feedly has faced two outages since adding millions of users in the wake of the announcement that Google will retire its Google Reader service. Now Feedly is accelerating its monetization plans. Read more »
The Empire acquires the rebel alliance: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
photo: Shutterstock/Luis Santos
Mendeley, an open collaboration platform for scientific research, has promised that it won’t become less open after being acquired by journal publisher Elsevier, but some prominent users aren’t waiting around. Read more »
Allen Stern, blogging pioneer and entrepreneur, passes away — we will miss you Allen
An early blogger and startup founder who had recently launched a new business focused on health and fitness, Allen Stern passed away last week and was remembered by his friends and blogging colleagues. Read more »
Should you be worried about the new “six strikes” anti-piracy rules? Yes and no
A new system of warnings for users who download copyrighted content is being rolled out by some of the biggest internet service providers in the United States. Is it something you should be concerned about? That depends. Read more at GigaOM »
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Why Google’s settlement with French publishers is bad for the web
While Google may see its payments to French publishers as a smart move for its own short-term purposes, the deal is still being seen by many as a payment for links, and that could set a dangerous precedent. Read more at GigaOM »
Memo to Marissa: Partnering with everyone else is not a winning strategy for Yahoo
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told attendees at the World Economic Forum that the key to the company’s future success is partnering with other players like Apple, Google and Facebook. But is that a future worth betting on? Read more at GigaOM »
A valuable lesson from Randi Zuckerberg: Online privacy is complicated
The sister of Facebook’s CEO got caught in a privacy snafu on Christmas Day after a private photo of her family was shared publicly. But this is about more than Facebook and its notoriously complicated settings — figuring out the boundaries of online privacy is not easy. Read more at GigaOM »
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Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets more kudos, but challenges loom
photo: Amazon
Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon 16 years ago, is the second-best CEO on the planet, according to Harvard Business Review’s latest rankings. Last month Fortune named him its Business Person of the Year. Read more »
Christmas Eve AWS outage stings Netflix but not Amazon Prime
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Big problems with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Load Balancing service in its US-East data center nailed Netflix and Heroku on Christmas Eve and carried over into Christmas. Netflix competitor Amazon Prime Instant Video appeared to be unaffected. Read more »
Netflix is down: AWS outage takes down service on some devices
Netflix is down for some customers this Christmas Eve, thanks to a outage of some of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. However, there’s good news: You may be able to watch your holiday movie, after all. Read more »
Who’s to blame for the Instagram debacle? Take a look in the mirror
photo: Shutterstock/Javi Indy
Instagram has come under fire — as other services based on user-generated content have — for changing its terms of service in a way that suggests it might experiment with advertising. But should that really be a surprise? What else should we expect from a free service? Read more at GigaOM »
It’s our duty — all of us — to fight for the open web
photo: Shutterstock/Luis Santos
Closed and proprietary networks and platforms like Facebook and Apple and Amazon are appealing in many ways because they are so easy to use, but in depending on them for so much of our online lives, we give up many of the benefits of the open web. Read more at GigaOM »
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Dropbox buys Audiogalaxy: next up, a cloud music service?
Seattle-based file sharing pioneer turned personal music streaming service Audiogalaxy has been acquired by Dropbox. The service will wind down over the coming months, but we shouldn’t be too surprised to see some of the ideas behind it find their way into Dropbox’s offerings. Read more at GigaOM »
Understanding Instagram and why Flickr might just have a chance
photo: Shutterstock/Lightpoet
Everyone seems determined to copy Instagram’s filters as a way of trying to co-opt their success at photo-sharing, but few — with the exception of Flickr — are seeing the real value of Instagram’s service, which is the ability to share photos with friends on multiple networks Read more at GigaOM »
Aereo CEO: Our cheap TV wouldn’t exist without cloud computing
photo: Aereo
Aereo, a TV-on-the-go service that relies on small antennas, is getting a lot of legal attention. The bigger story should be how it is using economic breakthroughs in computing to offer a new form of TV. Read more at GigaOM »
Study: News sites take a huge hit on election night
If you weren’t clicking on news sites on election night, you were probably better off. Yottaa’s monitors showed that almost every major online news site fared very poorly when the results started to flow in with page load times hitting 50 seconds. Read more »
What makes a free trial work (or not)
photo: Flickr / Alan O'Rourke
Do limited time try-before-buying offers work for tech vendors? That’s the question Totango addressed in new research that shows that companies can boost their conversion rate simply by paying attention to the people who sign up and — shocker — communicating with them. Read more »
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Magine aims to be a cloud pay TV service without the box
Tomorrow’s pay-TV box could be a handheld device or an in-TV app, if Magine, a new Swedish service using existing consumer gadgets and cloud distribution, gets its way. Read more »
PRSS aims to be a low-cost iPad magazine factory in the cloud
Indie travel publisher TRVL didn’t like the software it had to use to make its free, iPad-only magazine – so it built its own. Now TRVL is giving away PRSS, hoping to kickstart other would-be moguls, and make a buck of its own. Read more »
The disruption of education: How technology is helping students teach themselves
photo: Flickr user Vince Alongi
Mobile technology and social networks aren’t just disruptive to existing industries like communications and media, they are also helping the change the way that students learn and how education is delivered both in North America and around the world. And the disruption is just beginning. Read more at GigaOM »
The very long tail – how magazines could make their archives sing
A magazine is making its 1,000-issue, 90-year archive available to digital subscribers. The model could light the way for expert content publishers, who may be sitting on an archive gold mine – if they can start producing future-proof digital content today. Read more »
Sandy takes out Gawker, Huffpo and other sites
Hurricane Sandy’s impact made itself felt on major media properties including the Huffington Post, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. All of those sites reported outages around 7 p.m. EDT. Read more »
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A healthy reminder from Amazon: You don’t buy ebooks, you rent them
Although it’s not clear exactly why, an Amazon customer in Norway has lost access to all of the books she bought with her Kindle — a healthy reminder of how with ebooks, we have very little actual control over something we have theoretically purchased and own. Read more at GigaOM »
Forget your fancy data science, try overkill analytics
photo: Shutterstock / nasirkhan
Carter S. won his first-ever Kaggle competition — our own GigaOM WordPress Challenge — using a brute force method of data science he calls overkill analytics. Rather than spend untold hours perfecting complex models, Carter used simple algorithms and let powerful microprocessors do the rest. Read more »
Announcing RoadMap 2012: Speakers include Evan Williams, CEOs of Tumblr, Instagram
Announcing our initial speaker lineup for our 2nd RoadMap conference! Our focus this year: design in the age of connectedness. It is scheduled for Nov. 5th in SF. Some of our speakers include Kevin Systrom, Evan Williams, David Karp, Tony Fadell, Yves Behar and more. Read more at GigaOM »
Streaming media could have larger carbon footprint than plastic discs
photo: Shutterstock / Sponner / olly http://shutr.bz/QFEc8l http://shutr.bz/QFEc8l
Streaming media is hot – maybe too hot. music streaming could be more energy-intensive than CD production and distribution, while YouTube could soon guzzle one percent of global electricity, says a report calling for solutions. Read more »
Want to be a reporter? Learn to code
photo: Shutterstock user/argus
Journalism schools have to do a much better job teaching prospective reporters about the programming skills needed to tell data-driven, visual stories on web pages, not front pages, says the executive director of Northwestern University’s Knight News Innovation Lab. Read more »
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Interview: Sony keeps iOS close as it waits for Apple TV
Sony VP Michael Aragon is trying to realise the corporation’s dream of uniting home electronics hardware and digital content. But, to do it, he will need to rely on rivals’ gadgets, as well as its own. Read more »
Think App.net is just a Twitter clone? Then you’re missing the point
Most critics of Dalton Caldwell’s App.net project seem to see it as a replacement for Twitter, only with users paying for the service rather than advertisers. But what the service really wants to be is a central messaging bus and open ecosystem for the social web. Read more at GigaOM »
How India’s favorite TV show uses data to change the world
Satyamev Jayate, one of India’s highest-rated television shows, is using data as a means to effect meaningful change. The show’s producers are aggregating and analyzing the millions of messages they receive on controversial issues to do everything from planning future episodes to pushing for political change. Read more »
We have a new look: Let me show you around
Starting today, our article pages have a different look. It’s not only a cleaner look — it provides better context for readers, improved sharing options, and better opportunities for commenting and discussion about our stories. Read more at GigaOM »
Should Google and Amazon be allowed to control domains?
photo: Flickr user Fabio Venni
Google and Amazon have applied for dozens of new top-level domains — including .blog and .book, as well as .search and .cloud — and many of these will be for the exclusive use of the two companies, which critics say is bad for the web. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter was down: sporadic outages persist Thursday morning
Twitter appeared to be experiencing widespread outages on Thursday morning, users discovered, taking their complaints to other sites around the web while waiting for the company to respond. Read more at GigaOM »
GigaOM Data Challenge: Predict which stories get read, win $10K
In publishing, there’s a constant struggle to determine who’ll read what posts, what the ideal headline might is and when is the best time to publish. GigaOM is teaming with Splunk to find some answers via a Kaggle competition worth a total of $25,000 in prizes. Read more »
Twitter shows when we tweet and explains why its search sucks
According to new research by Twitter’s data science team, Twitter search is used often as a tool for finding breaking news in real time, which makes it difficult for Twitter to assign relevance to any given tweet or topic in the long run. Read more »
Silicon Valley stars pony up $2M to scale Diffbot’s visual learning robot
What do Andy Bechtolsheim, Sky Dayton, Joi Ito, Brad Garlinghouse, and Jonathan Heiliger have in common? They’re are all backing Diffbot, the startup that’s building visual robot technology that parses web content to make it easier to repurpose and reuse in new apps. Read more »
Urban Airship prepares for its Super Bowl moment
Urban Airship is investing big in its infrastructure, scaling its push messaging platform to deliver 100,000 messages a second. As Airship begins to refine push marketing to take into account location, time and context, it’s becoming critical it deliver notifications in volume and in real time. Read more »
