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A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."

The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.

Cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. El Dorado Ventures led the round with participation from Vesbridge Partners.

The long and short of enStratus’ technology is that it provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring popular public and private cloud offerings through a single interface. In theory, this means customers can utilize multiple clouds and even switch between cloud providers without having to learn the intricacies of each provider’s APIs or management consoles.

The Minneapolis-based EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.

The first GSMA Mobile Observatory report to focus on Africa has come back with some fascinating conclusions. First among them, Africa has passed Latin America to become the world's second largest mobile market. The global mobile association examined the 25 African countries that account for 91% of mobile use (calling them the "A25"). Here are some of the most interesting of the report's conclusions.

The report "integrates data from a wide range of existing sources to provide a comprehensive picture of the African mobile industry. These include public sources such as the ITU, World Bank and research by National Regulatory Authorities as well as commercial providers such as Wireless Intelligence, Informa, Gartner, Buddecomm and ID." Africa now has 620 million mobile connections, passing Latin America Regional penetration has risen from 2% in 2000, to 57% this year Over the last decade, the number of mobile connections has grown an average of 30% per year, forecast to reach 735 million by the end of next year Mobile provides 3.5% of African GDP Highly competetive sector has resulted in price decreases of up to 60% in some areas, with an overall average of 18% decrease in the last year 96% of is pre-paid with voice services currently dominating, however data is increasing rapidly - Kenya data revenues, for instance, including SMS, have increased at a 67% annual growth over the last 4 years, representing 26% of total revenues in that country

Back in 2008, we got a chance to take a look under the skin of Chevrolet's range-extended hybrid, the Volt. A couple of weeks ago, thanks to the fine people at ShopAutoWeek, I got a chance to spend some time driving one.

The thing I was most struck by was the dashboard, which left me wondering if it might just be the key to modifying behavior on the open roads.

That's when I started paying attention to the dashboard, which Chevrolet is calling the Driver Information Center.

Taiwan's Acer Inc. plans to launch smartphones with near field communication (NFC) technology, which will allow users to make remote bill payments and contactless payments for retail and public transport, a company manager said Thursday.

"Telecom operators have forecast that NFC technology will become critical for smartphones next year, and I think other cellphone makers will also regard this technology as a default function on their products by that time," said Vincent Chen, product manager of Acer's telecom business department.

The current Mango operating system does not support NFC technology, but the next release of the Windows mobile platform -- Windows 8 -- is likely to feature the function, Chen said.

Perhaps we need to ensure that the future world is “info friendly”?

Using word pictures like “the pig’s blood of technology,” award-winning science fiction author Greg Bear urged Friday’s TEDxSeattle audience to be mindful of our increasingly public and digitally-archived lives. “The web that knows who you are … do you want it to?” he asked.“All of us are neural nodes” in a massive and “vast social brain.” What does it mean to live in a world where finding a moment of private time — for nefarious or honorable reasons — becomes nearly impossible?We don’t know, Bear asserted. “We must understand that we cannot predict the ultimate social response to technology.” In part, that is because society changes over time. Bear painted two scenarios related to our increasingly visible digital lives.In one, he used humor to take us to a world where everyone has a digital dossierBut in the other world, a darker world, social mores have changed. In that future world, behavior that was “acceptable” in 2010 (like drinking coffee) is no longer legal.Read more at wiredpen.com 

The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to make money. Longtime users of the microblogging service, which for years has operated without a viable business model, are anguished at the prospect of paid ads appearing among their tweets. But advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s vast and ever-growing data store will be the true profit center, say company execs — both for Twitter and for independent developers.Exactly to what extent Twitter plans to make its data available to outside parties remains unclear, but the company’s APIs are already accessible for developers to access its services, and last October it signed deals with Google and Microsoft to allow tweets to appear alongside search results. Now Twitter is reportedly developing “analytical products” aimed at marketers who want to mine the Twittersphere for insight into public opinion about companies, products, and brands — and it’s encouraging others to do the same.Read more at infoworld.com

Social media has led to “social sharing,” the broadcasting of our thoughts and activities. It’s not a fad. It’s a sociological phenomenon, accelerating at light speed. Social sharing is a major behavioral shift, the most important so far of the 21st century. And the information we choose to share with friends, co-workers and even strangers, is re-defining the idea of what’s private and public before our very eyes.Read more at blogs.hbr.org

Not very impressive, if these are the trends occupying the Facebook public mind. BTW (by the way) FML stands for (Fuck My Life). What can that be about? It’s #2 and I’ve never heard of it! It does not sound very positive. Is it the equivalent of whining? It’s a genuine question.Amplify’d from www.independent.co.ukTop Status Trends of 2009:1. Facebook ApplicationsSpecific words: Farmville, Farm Town, Social Living2. FMLSpecific word: FML3. Swine FluSpecific words: Flu, Swine Flu, H1N14. Celebrity DeathsSpecific words: Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Billy Mays5. FamilySpecific words: Family, Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter, Kids6. MoviesSpecific words: New Moon, Transformers, Star Trek, The Hangover, Paranormal Activity and Harry Potter7. SportsSpecific words: Steelers, Yankees8. Health CareSpecific words: Health Care, No one should have to…9. FBSpecific words: FB, FB Friends, News Feed10. TwitterSpecific words: Twitter, RT11. YearsSpecific words: 2008, 2009, 201012. Lady GagaSpecific words: Gaga, Poker Face13. YardSpecific word: Yard14. ReligionSpecific words: Easter, Lord, God15. ISpecific words: I, isFacebook Memology ranks the most commonly used phrases or words in people’s status updates in 2009 and compares them to the trends seen in 2008.Read more at www.independent.co.uk

As of today, FB has a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck "Allow", then repost this to your profile.

We're working closely with these partners so you can quickly connect with your friends and see relevant content on their sites. These sites personalize your experience using your public Facebook information. When you arrive on these sites, you'll see a notification from Facebook at the top of the page. You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by "No Thanks" on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites.

We are a generation constantly terrified by the idea of someone, somewhere, effectively advertising to us by way of glancing at our "data" and knowing whether or not we like country music or alternative 1990s rock. But is it really so terrifying to have annoying banner ads offering deals on some product you might actually enjoy?

This weekend in Amsterdam you may see a whole bunch of people waving their smartphones around at once. It’s the first social net/augmented reality flashmob, aka a fabulous way to combine three novel Net memes into one event.“Every square in every major city in the world knows the ‘human statue’ phenomenon,” he notes, so the intention of this weekend’s performance art is to take the human statue game totally into the digital world.have a smartphone that’ll run Layar (i.e. one with GPS).activate Layar, wave your smartphone in the air and ogle whatever strange and wonderful digital statue installations Veenhof’s chosen to populate the augmented space over Dam Square with. There’s a rumor that the Beatles will be showing up in pixel form, to recreate their famous Abbey Road pose.Is this the start of a new trend? You betcha. Flashmobs are still a popular affair, and AR is a tech that’s on the point of exploding into the mainstream public consciousness.

Rainier , director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, looks ahead and makes a lengthy prediction of where we’re headed via the internet. As tempting as it was to clip the whole thing, I’ve resisted which means you will want to follow the link to read the article.

Themes:Cognitive capacities will shift (memorization)New literacies will be required. Fourth “R” is retrieval… “extreme Googlers”Tech isn’t the problem; people’s inherent character traits is the issuePerformance of information markets is a big unknown especially in the age of social media and junk information … Google will improve.Innovation ecosystem will change so radically (bandwidth/processing) that it’s hard to forecastBasic trends are evident — “the internet of things” and “sensors” and “mobile” and “location-based services” and “3D” and “speech recognition” and “translation systems”Law/regulations to protect privacy even though more disclosure required“Workarounds” to provide a measure of anonymityConfidentiality and autonomy will replace yearning for anonymityRise of social media is as much a challenge to anonymity as authentication requirements. Reputation management and information responsibility will emerge. Significantly more responsive govt, biz, NFP (71%/72%) v (26/26) [responses - anonymous, not-anonymous] Tide too strong to resist – pressure for transparency is powerfulData wil be the platform for changeEfficiency and responsiveness aren’t the same thingWe’re reading and writing more than our parents – participation breeds engagementNature of writing has changed (public). Quality will get better due to feedback and flamersReading and writing will be different in 10 years; screen literacy will become importantRead more at wiredpen.com

Adding realism to AR by using real world surrounding information (HDRs panoramas, IBLs) is a thing we all want to have sooner than later! We have seen a cool demo of Suomi’s VTT on this, where they fake the surrounding information using the background and scanning a ping pong ball for lighting information. Now we have another candidate porting a similar approach to our beloved mobile devices. The paper of the University of Münster (Germany) has been published already in 2004 (titled “Virtual Reflections for Augmented Reality Environments”), but now it’s time to hit the mobile world with it!

If you are interested in some tech talk, please read on! :-) Their approach can create CubeMaps for all reflective or lighting purposes in real-time using only the information from the background video frame: they not only flip and stitch the frame six times and mirrored together, but do a pretty smart estimation, that yields in plausible neat-looking reflections (although obviously fake): they project six regions of the background frame (see below) onto the new six sides of a Cube. The general idea is to have reasonable regions to map from

This way they get to simulate glossy and diffuse reflections already. Lighting/shadow influence will probably be the next step, since the CubeMap is already there…

At the close of an almost three-hour hearing on cell-phone tracking, Sen. Al Franken said Tuesday that he still has "serious doubts" that consumers' privacy rights are being respected when it comes to location-based services via iOS and Android. "I think that people have a right to know who is getting their information, and a right to decide how that information is shared and used," said Franken. "After having heard today's testimony, I have serious doubts that those rights are being respected in law or in practice."

"We need to think seriously about how to address this problem, [especially since] mobile devices are only going to become more and more popular," he continued. "This is an urgent issue we'll be dealing with." Franken, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs the new Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, heard testimony from Apple and Google executives today about how their mobile platforms collect and use location-based data, and what type of control users have over that information. Google said that any location-based data it collects via its Android mobile operating system is anonymous in nature and the majority of that information is deleted after one week. "The location information sent to Google servers when users opt in to location services on Android is anonymized and stored in the aggregate and is not tied or traceable to a specific user," said Alan Davidson, director of public policy at Google. "The collected information is stored with a hashed version of an anonymous token, which is deleted after approximately one week."

a group of international researchers meeting in Istanbul, Turkey has released what they call “stunning proof” that confirms findings from the Council of Europe -- pulsed digital signals from cell phones disrupt DNA, impair brain function and lower sperm count. A meeting convened by Environmental Health Trust, with the Turkish cancer society, and Gazi University, revealed the new research that the scientists say shows damage to DNA, brain and sperm

Nesrin Seyhan, an advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) and NATO and head of the Biophysics Department and Bioelectromagnetics Laboratory at Gazi University in Ankara, presented findings that he says confirm the warning that just four hours of exposure to cell phone radiation disrupts the ability of human brain cells to repair damaged genes. “We are deeply concerned about what this could mean for public health,” Seyhan said. Prof. Wilhelm Mosgoeller from the Medical University of Vienna, who has led European research teams, said he found that the cell waves induce DNA breaks. Despite industry claims to the contrary, he says DNA breaks are real.

Insect studies A research team at the University of Athens said insect studies have demonstrated that acute exposure to GSM (Global System for Mobile) signals brings about DNA fragmentation in insects’ ovarian cells, and consequently a large reduction in the reproductive capacity of the insects. Further studies, they said, demonstrated that long exposures induced cell death to the insects in the study. Other researchers said throughout a gestation period, exposure to radiation for just six minutes a day affects the bone formation of fetuses. The researchers also worry about the effect of cell phone use on children.

According to some interesting statistics, India has created more than 60,000 jobs with an investment of US $26.5 billion in the US over the past 5 years. This involves investments of US $21 billion by 239 Indian companies and 127 greenfield investments worth US $5.5 billion. The top three states for investments include Ohio, California and Texas. Investments have taken place in sectors like IT / ITes, biotech, chemicals, automotive, telecom etc. Indian organizations are increasingly opening up units in the US and also providing large scale employment opportunities in USA giving rise to a strong reverse outsourcing trend.

India has emerged as one of the largest FDI players in the US after the United Arab Emirates

The recent US $10 billion export deals worth for the US employers like Boeing signed by Obama with many Indian leaders is expected to create more than 50,000 jobs in Seattle.

Mark Roberti, founding editor of the publication RFID Journal, writes in an editorial this month that while M2M communication has great potential, the "real value" for sensor technology lies in machine-to-object communication.

"On the other hand, a firm could put passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) transponders inside a container at various levels. Since the liquid would interfere with the ability to read the tags, a company could determine liquid levels by ascertaining which tags can and can not be read...you can't put a Wi-Fi transmitter or a cell phone on every box of Tide detergent, bag of Granny Smith apples or Van Heusen shirt. Low-cost RFID tags will, one day, be put on all of these things, enabling M2O communication."

Leading wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma detailed a similar vision to us in an interview earlier this year. (How 50 Billion Connected Devices Could Transform Brand Marketing & Everyday Life.) Sharma talked with us about cereal boxes with sensors inside them.

"The Invisible Internet is associated closely with the concept of the “Internet of Things,” in which a multitude of everyday objects are connected wirelessly. In such a world, not every object will have the intelligence to make decisions for itself — your carton of milk doesn’t need an advanced processor, only the ability to communicate what it is and its expiration date — but collectively they’ll create a form of ambient intelligence, allowing them to self-organize as a group. If the Invisible Internet of Things does become a reality, the Web will cease to be merely a virtual space, where people interact with one another from behind a PC or phone’s screen, and become a real space — “meat space,” if you will — where thousands of objects, both personal and public, interact with one another.

The one element, besides a radio, all of those objects have in common is awareness. They have to be able to sense one another as well as their surroundings. Embedding devices and objects with that kind of sensitivity probably is the smallest challenge the Internet of Things faces right now, said Henry Tirri, head of the Nokia Research Center. The core sensors needed in the network of the future already are embedded in the average smartphone today: GPS and cellular triangulation sense location; accelerometers and digital compasses sense movement and direction; digital cameras can see for the devices. Some of those sensors need to be refined, but for the most part, devices already have access to enormous amounts of raw sensory data, Tirri said. The challenge for the industry is processing that data, interpreting it and combining it with data from other sensors to make it useful. Once the technology overcomes those problems, there’s no limit to what can be wirelessly enabled, he added.

“In today’s world of handsets, we talk in billions; in the future, we will talk about trillions of devices,” Tirri said. “Radios and sensors will be very small. They will be in everyday devices like coffeemakers and key chains, as well as all consumer devices, but also things you wouldn’t think you’d have wireless capabilities, like chairs, tables, even your bed.”

The latest wave of social networks document, photograph and broadcast your every move, opening an unprecedented opportunity for small businesses and big brands alike to target consumers based on their whereabouts and activities.Local Response wants to help businesses collect and respond to their customers’ public posts. The platform scans Twitter for explicit checkins to locations, like on Foursquare, as well as natural language that indicates location (ex. “I’m going to…”), and responds with Twitter @mentions on behalf of businesses. Messages most often include a coupon or offer in a bit.ly link.In other words, when customers check into a store on Foursquare, the store can send them a coupon while they are there. If customers tweet a photo through Instragram from a competing store, they might get the same coupon.