MapR today announced a comprehensive set of data connection options for Hadoop enabling a wide range of data import and export options to extend the ability to connect to data warehouses and applications such as Talend Open Studio, Pentaho Kettle and an OBDC driver. A summary of the announcement from MapR can be found here.
Don't know whether your visitors are going to be able to use Flash or HTML5 for video and audio playback? Don't guess, take a look at the jPlayer project. jPlayer is an HTML5 audio/video library for jQuery that supports real cross platform audio and video.
Me? I'm a fan of HTML5 solutions, not so much the Adobe Flash solutions – especially since Adobe is essentially abandoning Linux. But you can't assume that all users are using a browser that can support HTML5 playback. And you can't assume they're on a platform that has Flash support, either.
If you are looking for large content repositories, you probably can't get much larger than the article archive of the Associated Press. Today they announced they have launched a content analysis tool that is used to search the millions of articles in their archives to create custom archive products for their customers. Users can query for particular keywords, and the AP can use the search query traffic to see trending topics and deliver article collections to particular B2B customers. For example, they could create references on a particular subject or moment in time. The project makes use of a solution from MarkLogic, a major Big Data enabler that is used by many different kinds of publishers for this type of purpose, such as Lexis/Nexis.
SendHub has put up a post on things its developers learned in rebuilding the front-end of its Web site as a single-page application with Backbone.js. This includes everything from template rendering to "avoiding a zombie apocalypse."
The company decided to give SendHub.com a facelift because "the site looked a bit dated, and it just didn't feel as snappy as we wanted it to. All pages were rendered almost entirely on the server, and only a couple of places used Ajax to pull in data asynchronously." The company also wanted to test out its developer API>.
Adobe has had a SaaS-based forms creation service called FormsCentral for the past year. Today they announced the ability to link your forms with PayPal for automatically collecting money from your respondents. It is a great move.
Gravity, a company that provides "interest graphs" based on content visited by users has announced Gravity Labs.
Gravity Labs is, as CTO Jim Benedetto puts it, "an initial peek into our underlying interest graph infrastructure as well as a showcase of some of our Open Source projects."
NASA is inviting all citizens of planet Earth to take part in a two-day coding marathon next month. Called the International Space Apps Challenge, the idea is to develop software for various purposes to support NASA's mission. It is open to just about anyone interested, including "engineers, technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, students, and entrepreneurs." The challenge will take place in several cities on all continents around the globe, including San Francisco, Santo Domingo, Sao Paulo, Nairobi, Tokyo and even on Antarctica at McMurdo Station.
After catching a note about the wiki for SXSW being edited with Hackpad, I thought it might be worth a look. Then I caught the tagline, "best wiki ever." Well, that's a bold statement. Then I noticed that Tomboy creator Alex Graveley was part of the team behind it and thought maybe it really is. After a short test drive, I'm even more impressed. Hackpad combines the simplicity of Tomboy with real-time collaboration features that make it a great lightweight tool for teams.
Tomboy, for folks who haven't spent much time on Linux, is a wiki-like desktop note-taking application written in Mono. It's been ported to other platforms, but has been most widely used on Linux. For many years, Tomboy was one of my go-to apps. As I've used more and more Web-based software, I've gotten out of the habit of using Tomboy.
Big fan of TED talks? Think you can do something stellar if only you had an API with RESTful access to the TED library and its data? Now through May 16, the TED folks are issuing up to 50 API keys to developers "whose vision and plan we believe will set the standard for new ways to power ideas worth spreading through the TEDapi program." You might even get to show off your app at TEDGlobal 2012.
Imagine looking for a job at the same exact time that everyone else is doing it, and you have to adhere to rigid interviewing and application standards. Now imagine that to get the job you have to be matched with your prospective employer by a national computer system. The program is designed to take into account your preferences and your prospective employer's. That is precisely what is going on next week, when medical students from all over North America participate in what is called Match Day. For more than 50 years, Match Day has happened in March, on the third Thursday, which is next week.
