#tech-highlght

Google ditches WebKit for Blink

Google’s Chrome web browser which was built on WebKit, an open source rendering engine developed by Apple, which also is the bases of  many other browsers, including Safari and Opera. But on Wednesday, Google told the world it will no longer use WebKit. Instead, it’s starting its own variation — or fork — of WebKit. This new open source project is known as Blink.

Read More: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html

Google launches Compute Engine to take on Amazon

Anyone can now use the Google Compute Engine — the web giant’s answer to Amazon’s seminal EC2 cloud computing service. Well, anyone who’s willing to pay Google $400 a month for customer support.

On Thursday, the company announced that you too can now use Google Compute Engine if you sign up for “Gold Support” program, which provides twenty-four-hour-seven-day-a-week access to Google support engineers for prices beginning at $400 a month. Previously, the service was only available to certain beta testers. “You no longer need an invitation or a conversation with sales to get access,” the company said in a blog post.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/google-compute-open/

Facebook Home: A Social Smartphone?

Facebook announced Thursday its big mobile plans for Android: Facebook Home. Although it will initially be available only on a few models, Facebook Home represents how Facebook wants to exist on Android phones.

Read More: http://mashable.com/2013/04/04/facebook-home-everything-you-need-to-know/

Tech companies celebrate April Fools’ with fake products & pranks

Every April Fools’ Day, a handful of big-name companies get into the spirit of pranks and practical jokes. Some — namely Google — go all out with well produced videos, while others just phone in a silly Photoshop and call it a day.

Top Tech Stories for the week.

Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals

Data base revenue, which has been the cash machine of the company, has changed. There are now alternative databases, as well as the cloud,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “That pressure is still a tiny bleed, but it is out there and the question is – is it bigger than we think it is?

Read More: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/oracle-is-bleeding-at-the-hands-of-database-rivals/

DaaS, MaaS & DRaaS: The Next Phase Of Cloud Computing

It's no secret that the public cloud market has been growing like gangbusters. In fact, a recent Gartner study found spending on public cloud services is growing at more than 28% per year and private cloud spending is three times that of public cloud. That projects total cloud spending in 2016 to hit $240 billion.

Read More: http://readwrite.com/2013/03/29/the-next-phase-of-cloud-computing-daas-maas-draas

Yes, This Week's DDoS Attack Was Huge, And Part Of An Ominous Trend

Depending on who you believe, the week long Spamhaus-Cyberbunker cyberattack we covered Wednesday was either a threat to the Internet itself or hyped up by an overzealous security vendor. Either way, it was still serious business.

Read More: http://readwrite.com/2013/03/29/ddos-attack-was-huge-and-part-of-a-trend

Yahoo acquires Summly

Yahoo had the tech world talking after announcing plans to purchase mobile news app Summly, which was created by a now very rich U.K. high school student named Nick D'Aloisio. The app has already been pulled from the App Store, but its technology will soon be integrated into a number of Yahoo's mobile products

Read More: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417047,00.asp 

Amazon buys Goodreads 

Amazon announced that it will acquire Goodreads, the popular social network for books, for an undisclosed sum. Goodreads launched in 2007 and currently has more than 16 million members. The service lets users share and review books they've read or want to read, as well as to keep track of what their friends are reading.

Top Tech Stories for the week

What If The Google Reader Readers Just Don’t Come Back?

If judged by my Twitter stream last week, the shutdown of Google Reader is the biggest story ever in the history of news. Of course, the reality is that Google is likely shutting down the product for a good reason

Read More: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/bees/

Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry

Google Reader was born in October 2005. Within two weeks of its soft launch, it had hundreds of thousands of users.

I know those details because the team responsible for developing Google Reader blogged about their progress regularly beginning with that first “Hello, Internet” post more than seven years ago.

Read More: http://www.zdnet.com/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-google-crushed-and-abandoned-the-rss-industry-7000013025/

New 3D Display Lets Phones and Tablets Make Holograms

A new kind of 3D display developed at HP Labs plays hologram-like videos without the need for any moving parts or glasses. Videos displayed on the HP system hover above the screen, and viewers can walk around them and experience an image or video from as many 200 different viewpoints -- like walking around a real object.

Read More: http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/3d-display-phones-holograms/

Canon Rebel SL1: The World's Smallest DSLR Camera

Canon unveiled on Thursday what it says is the smallest and lightest DSLR camera ever made, the EOS Rebel SL1

Read More: http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/canon-eos-rebel-sl1/

Google Gears Up to Take Web Services Beyond the Web

Google just can?? seem to resist baiting the 800-pound gorilla in Redmond. With Google Gears, just announced minutes ago, it?? providing Web developers a way to take their online services offline??ssentially, providing an alternative platform, based on the Web browser, to Microsoft?? Windows.