A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A Skype visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Israel Derdik and his high-flying media suite, Aviary, a Web-based media-editing platform that enables users to alter, save and present their multimedia creations, all in the cloud.
On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.
by Jonathan Zittrain, Contributing Writer, New York Times
Earlier this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online–also known as in “the cloud”–using whatever device is at hand.
The U.S. Supreme Court today cleared the way for Cablevision to offer a network DVR service, allowing consumers to record copies of television programming “in the cloud,” rather than on set-top boxes. Without comment, the court refused to review a Court of Appeals ruling that rejected claims by film studios and television networks that the network DVR approach would infringe copyrights.
by Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer, Ars Technica
Amazon has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution.
If you’ve been wondering what Microsoft’s Software+Services strategy is for its Windows Mobile platform, the answer should become a lot clearer in another couple weeks. Microsoft is set to take the wraps off these three services at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona in mid-February.
On Friday, a massive outage occurred at Amazon Web Services that generated a wave of negativity and criticism in the blogosphere. Not long ago, Rackspace, one of the world’s largest hosting companies, experienced an outage that resulted in a similar reaction. When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services. This makes us mad. It makes us say things like: Well, maybe we shouldn’t be using the cloud.
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