Alex McFarlane - Web Developer

Rackspace’s Mosso cloud hosting has introduced a new product named CloudFS, their own scalable storage solution to take on Amazon’s S3 service. The motto is very straight forward that you pay only for what you use, and the pricing is slightly below Amazon’s that went into effect on May 1st, but ...

A new app from the American Social Health Association aims to spread Chlamydia on Facebook to raise awareness of the disease. The Morph Monkey Facebook app looks fairly benign at the start. Users can select pictures of their friends to see what their combined child will look like. As the user ...

Hollywood Newsroom noted that Google ads are now popping up for searches on “Tom Cruise” that say “Official Tom Cruise Site. Stay Tuned for the Official Launch of TomCruise.com. Check it out!” or alternatively “Official Tom Cruise Site. The Countdown is On. TomCruise.com launches May 5th. Get the scoop!” and ...

Apple iTunes is to offer movie downloads on the same day as their DVD releases after securing deals with major US film studios

The number of Britons joining a social network is expected to treble from 9.6m to 27m by 2012, according to Datamonitor

Google AdWords has just made a major announcement: they are launching Google TV Ads, an all-digital system that lets you place your ads into TV program. The service has been available as a trial program for over a year now, and now Google has opened it up for everyone. Using TV ...

Adobe is making a big play to make Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen you can think of. It is announcing the Open Screen Project to make it easier ...

The BBC iPlayer is now available via a TV platform after a partnership deal between Virgin Media and the BBC

Two Google scientists presented a paper (pdf embedded below) at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing last week that outlines their vision for the future of image search. Notably, the new image search technology doesn’t just index text associated with an image in determining what’s in it. Google is now ...

Update: Microsoft’s Bill Sisk offers a denial on the company’s IIS blog that the MS SQL Server technology has no association with the SQL vulnerability described in the security concern mentioned below. SQL, one of the most widely utilized server technologies today, is going through a particularly rough time. According to ...

We’ve got the scoop on an announcement set to be delivered by Steve Pearman this morning at the Web 2.0 Keynote address. Pearman is the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy for MySpace, and he’ll be unveiling the MySpace Application Gallery. The gallery will showcase all the applications available to MySpace ...

Many branded applications on Facebook have failed to take off as members of the social network choose not to install them.

Seesmic, the video conversation startup founded by Loic Le Meur, has launched a WordPress plugin that allows users to leave video comments on blogs. Le Meur describes the purpose of the plugin as follows: ”We warmly welcome Wordpress users to the Seesmic community. With over 70 million blogs worldwide, there ...

More than half (59%) of internet users worldwide view at least one video clip every week, according to Universal McCann

In this new millennium, our lives are becoming increasingly digital, thanks to proliferation of devices — from MP3 players to digital cameras to cell phones and of course computers. The challenge is to keep a handle on the data on these digital devices and the software programs that go ...

Google has released an updated developer sandbox for iGoogle, the company’s personal startpage service. The key new feature is support for OpenSocial APIs, which means that activities from Google Gadgets can be posted to activity streams on OpenSocial supporting networks. Jessica Ewing, Product Manager for iGoogle, offered the ...

It looks Sony has decided to play catch up with the PlayStation 3, and offer a service that Xbox owners have been enjoying for a while now: online video distribution. According to Dawn Chmielewski of the Los Angeles Times, Sony has been engaging in talks with Hollywood studios to negotiate ...

Sprout - the impressive browser-based tool that debuted at DEMO in January and suddenly made it feasible for non-developers to create rich Flash-based widgets - has got even better with the release of v1.5. One of the most promising things about Sprout was that it integrated third-party services. At launch, publishers ...

However you feel about Google’s implementation of software within YouTube to combat the publication of copyrighted content on the video site sans content owners’ express permission, the company has chosen to apply the technology as an aid to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help identify ...

Mark Zuckerburg’s creation has a new role. Fighting crime in Manchester, England. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) (reports TechCrunch UK) has launched a Facebook application which adds local crime alerts to your profile and news feed, getting the news about crime incidents out there to more youthful users of the Net ...