A new report claims that the upcoming Windows Phone 8 OS might not share Windows 8′s kernel after all, despite a leaked presentation from Microsoft that suggested it was in the works. Read more…

Neowin.net

A patent application filed by Apple last year and published recently indicates that the company may be planning to implement Intel’s new Thunderbolt cable technology in future iOS devices. Read more…

Neowin.net

As Samsung confirms that the company will launch new Google TV products next year, one has to wonder why, when an Apple television seems to be the only real hope for the future of TV. Read more…

Neowin.net

Do we need another location-based check-in app? I would argue no, if it’s another Foursquare competitor. But Crowded Room, the first location-based app from IAC, isn’t just about your current check-in or about even the future check-in, something Ditto and other apps are trying to pursue. Crowded Room is introducing the idea of the ‘Might Go,’ a casual pre-check-in action that suggests where people might be interested in going that night, something that can create connections to friends and strangers based on shared places and interests.

At its heart, Crowded Room, which is available for free on iOS and Android, is trying to help users meet new people. The key is that in addition to the traditional check-in, which can be integrated with Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter, it invites people to say where they might go later that day. Users can indicate they might go to any number of places, which can then prompt others to head out with them. But the bigger goal is to help connect people that might have a shared affinity for certain places and other common interests.

Connecting users by place and interests

After a user indicates where they might go to, they can hit a People tab and see the other users who are currently at or plan to go the places a user might go to. With a Suggested button, they can see the profiles of people that Crowded Room thinks has something in common with a user, which could be a similar interest in places, common friends or other things. Crowded Room gets smarter with its recommendations as it learns more about a user.

Users can also drill down with a Places tab to get recommendations about places to hit. And they can see a map that shows where people are headed later that day, kind of like a heat map of intent. Specific places will show who might go there later that day or who is currently there. All the Might Go check-ins expire after one day so every action only refers to sometime later on the same day.

One of the more intriguing ideas is a Shortlist feature, which allows any user to privately show interest in another user that they’d like to meet. If another user also puts the original person on their shortlist, Crowded Room will notify both parties. Crowded Room offers a messaging feature to reach out directly to another user. Or it can be used to chat up someone at a location, which can be used to get a conversation started or just to get some information about that specific place.

Helping users find their kind of people

This has some similar aspects to other location-based apps. I mentioned Ditto, which helps friends coordinate for future check-ins. There seems to be an element of Sonar, which alerts users who check into a location about other people who are connected to them at that location. And there’s some Foursquare in there with recommendations about places to go. But Crowded Room is trying to be different, said Michael Kestenbaum, CEO of Crowded Room, who was formerly vice president of mergers and acquisitions for IAC.

He said the app isn’t really meant to coordinate evening plans with friends, something GroupMe and other messaging apps can do. And it’s not simply about building connections around a current location. And it’s more than just dating, something IAC already tackles with Match.com. It’s about helping users meet interesting people out and about.

“Where you go and what you do says a lot about the people you want to meet,” said Kestenbaum. “Crowded Room helps you find your kind of people at your kind of place by using the best aspects of social media to help create connections in the real world.”

Users have broad privacy controls and can decide who sees each check-in. They can also indicate what kind of people, male or female, that they’re interested in meeting.

Will the ‘Might Go’ work?

I’m curious about how this will work. I can see young, hip city dwellers potentially using this to see what’s happening in their city. If enough people use it, it can give you a good sense of what’s hot and where people might be headed. Now whether enough people use it to meet others, that’s harder to tell. Some people are avid users of location-based services but they’re not eager to leverage location to meet people. Some might find it a little bit much, or potentially a back-door dating service.

But for people who are open to meeting others, this could be interesting. The Might Go check-ins are a way to generate a lot more signals about someone beyond where they actually go. The fact that you short-list someone opens up a low-risk way to connect with another person. But again, you have to have people avidly using this to make it work. I wonder how many people will use this consistently. If I was dating, yeah, I might, but I’m not so I’m not sure I would make that much of an effort.

Advertising opportunity

If Crowded Room can get people to show potential intent to go to places, this could also be a way for local businesses to advertise. If a person is interested in coming to my bar tonight, maybe a discount will seal the deal. And if you can see that people are interested in heading out to a certain kind of restaurant tonight, that might be an opportunity for a restaurant owner to target them with an offer. It’s too early to say how Crowded Room will make money, but this could be one way.

Either way, it’s another sign that companies are still very intent on innovating on the check-in. It’s still a very important signal and if location-based companies can show there’s value for a user in exposing their location or their future whereabouts, it’s another opportunity to provide services and potentially make some money too.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Apple has started offering replacement first-gen iPod nanos to those with faulty units. Some players shipped with a bad battery that caused it to overheat in rare cases. Read more…

Neowin.net

Apple has started offering replacement first-gen iPod nanos to those with faulty units. Some players shipped with a bad battery that caused it to overheat in rare cases. Read more…

Neowin.net

Nokia may soon be making an appearance stateside with its Lumia 710 this coming January. Having recently passed through the paws of the FCC, a black and white version are on tap for release. Read more…

Neowin.net

There are many chrome themes inspired by and dedicated to the singing sensation Lady Gaga. So, what is the difference in our Lady Gaga Themes Collection? These themes which we have listed are the themes which one would not be able to find in the Chrome Web Store or the Chrome Themes Gallery. These Gaga [...]

Google Chrome Browser – Plugins and Themes

Analysts and shareholders spent yesterday being up in arms over Amazon’s missed earning targets — a shortsighted mindset that we’ve addressed before — but the cloud computing watchers might have noticed something very noteworthy in Amazon’s quarterly statement. “Other,” the revenue category in Amazon’s reports that encompasses Amazon Web Services, is growing like mad — 70 percent over last year, in fact.

This matters because it likely means AWS is outpacing its projected growth and is rapidly approaching a $ 1 billion run rate. Last August, UBS analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald put out possibly the most-thorough projections for AWS’s growth, something Amazon doesn’t do. Pitz and Fitzgerald projected AWS would account for $ 751 million of a total $ 1.2 billion for “Other” in 2011.

However, this quarter’s 70 percent year-over-year increase resulted in third-quarter revenue of $ 407 million, bringing total “Other” revenue to $ 1.07 billion for the year thus far. If it grows by another 70 percent in the fourth quarter, “Other” will do $ 546 million for the quarter and almost $ 1.6 billion for 2011. If UBS’s percentages of AWS revenue to total “Other” revenue are correct, AWS might hit the billion-dollar mark this year.

Last year, by comparison, “Other” grew 48 percent year over year in the third quarter, and 39 percent in the fourth quarter. Even if it doesn’t grow at all year over year in the fourth quarter, though, it will hit more than $ 1.3 billion for the year. In-Stat recently predicted that Infrastructure as a Service will be a $ 4 billion market by 2015, but that might end up being too small a number if AWS continues its rapid revenue climb. The UBS projections, which now look low, have AWS doing close to $ 2.54 billion in 2014.

Whatever the actual market size though, one has to assume AWS will be responsible for the lion’s share. Rackspace topped $ 100 million in cloud revenue in 2010, and has done just just over $ 80 million over the first two quarters of 2011. When Terremark announced its fiscal third quarter earnings in February before the Verizon acquisition closed, it claimed an annual cloud computing run rate of $ 37.5 million.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

The federal government has been gung ho over cloud computing in the past few years, but is it ready to do big data in the cloud? Federal contractor GCE Federal thinks so: It’s offering a GCE Cloud service that’s based on Hadoop and is designed for federal agencies to outsource their data analytics workloads.

The big obstacle for GCE is that it’s essentially asking federal agencies — a cautious bunch if ever there was one — to try two entirely new technologies at once. Cloud computing isn’t commonplace among agencies yet, and using Hadoop to try and make sense of their previously underutilized and unstructured data certainly is a new concept for many agencies. But GCE Founder and CEO Ray Muslimani has a plan.

He’s hoping federal budget constraints lower inhibitions against trying out new technologies, and possibly will lead agencies to look at Hadoop as a way to save money. The business case for big data in the cloud is easy to make because many agencies aren’t investing in the big infrastructure necessary to do those jobs, Muslimani told me. Ultimately, government IT decisionmakers just want to know what a vendor can give them and what it will cost, but “that’s not the conversation you would have had five years ago.”

And early on, GCE is focusing on two types of data that actually could end up saving agencies money if they’re properly analyzed: financial management data and procurement data. GCE creates a central data repository through which agencies can analyze their own data against other agencies’ data to determine how and where to best spend their money. Thus far, Muslimani says, procurement data (e.g., who’s doing business with what vendors, the size of the contracts, etc.) has been more popular, likely because there are still walls to break down around the centralization of financial data, especially with a third party.

Just a couple years into the GCE Cloud business, Muslimani acknowledges it’s still just a “small fraction” of GCE’s total revenue, but he thinks it will actually grow faster than the rest. “The budget crunch is forcing everyone’s hand,” he explained, which is fueling the appetite for a shared big data offering.

If GCE is alone in trying to sell federal agencies on a cloud-based approach to big data, it probably won’t be for long. The government already has a cloud-first mandate in place when it comes to provisioning resources for new applications, and big data is growing in popularity even among certain agencies. Cloudera, for example, has highlighted how numerous federal entities already are using Hadoop to tackle workloads ranging from intelligence to search engines. The NSA has been building its own distributed intelligence database on Hadoop since 2009.

But shared, multitenant services like GCE is building will make Hadoop more attainable for agencies that don’t have the IT knowledge and big budgets of intelligence agencies, and there should be lots of business to be had addressing their big data needs.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Rob Crawley.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM