Saturday, April 30, 2011

Looking for a drinking fountain? There will soon be an app for that

You're in a new city and enjoying the sights on foot, public transportation, or bicycle. You're also one of those staunch travelers who packs your own drinking water. And not the plastic, over-the-counter, bottled stuff, either. No, you carry your H2O in your own container. But you are constantly frustrated by the scarcity of public drinking fountains in many urban places in the United States.

What you'd really like is a click-and-go online source for where the nearest public water cooler is. The good news is that there's a Android application for that. It's a collaborative app called WeTap, being developed by Google and the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. The driving force behind the idea is Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story of Our Obsession with Bottled Water.

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Nokia Siemens Closes $975M Acquisition Of Motorola Solutions? Wireless Network Assets

Nokia Siemens has closed the acquisition of the wireless network infrastructure assets of Motorola Solutions today. The company reports that it paid $975 million in cash for the assets and approximately 6900 employees will transfer to Nokia Siemens Network from Motorola. The finalization of the deal come after China regulators approved the acquisition a last week. The full release is paste below. As of April 30 2011, the company says that responsibility for supporting customers of Motorola Solutions? GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, WiMAX and LTE products and services transfers to Nokia Siemens Networks. Part of the approval is due to the fact that Motorola reached an agreement with Chinese manufacturer Huawei over a pending patent lawsuit relating to the assets being acquired. In January, Huawei filed a lawsuit to prevent Motorola from giving Nokia Siemens Huawei's IP information.

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Onavo?s Guy Rosen Plans To Disrupt Data Roaming (TCTV)

Onavo, as we just reported, is a magical iPhone app which literally shrinks the data your phone uses and thus your roaming data bill when you are travelling. It launches today and I caught up with CEO and co-founder Guy Rosen at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam.

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Friday, April 29, 2011

Amazon's lengthy cloud outage shows the danger of complexity

Reddit, Foursquare, and Quora were among the many sites that went down recently due to a prolonged outage of Amazon's cloud services. On Thursday April 21, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) went offline, leaving the many Web and database servers depending on that storage broken. Not until Easter Sunday (April 24) was service restored to all users. Amazon has now published a lengthy description describing what went wrong, and why the failure was both so catastrophic and so lengthy.

Amazon has cloud computing data centers in five locations around the world; Virginia, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, and Tokyo. Within each region, services are divided into what the company calls Availability Zones: physically and logically separate groups of computers. This design allows customers to pick a level of redundancy that they feel is most appropriate; hosting in multiple regions provides the most robustness, but at the highest cost. Hosting in multiple Availability Zones within the same region is cheaper, and guards against problems affecting any one zone.

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Kinect + Windows: New & Amazing Experiences through NUI

Steve Clayton today has posted today on the Official Microsoft Blog about bringing Kinect to Windows with a SDK that will be available later this spring. He talks about how we believe this SDK will enable developers in the academic research and enthusiast communities to create new and amazing experiences on the PC through natural user interfaces (NUI). As Steve puts it, these experiences will ?transform our relationship with computers?. Steve?s post includes the below video that shows off some of those experiences which we demonstrated at MIX a few weeks ago.

For more information on the Kinect for Windows SDK, click here. And you can click here to read more about Kinect for the Xbox 360.

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AudioMicro Partners With Microsoft: Free Music, Sound Effects For Office 2010 Users

AudioMicro, a site where you can find royalty-free stock music and sound effects backed by DFJ Frontier and Fotolia, has struck a deal with Microsoft to provide music and sound effect files to Microsoft Office 2010 users worldwide. Under the terms of the licensing and distribution deal, Microsoft Office 2010 users are able to select from a hand-picked collection of over 1,500 music tracks and sound effects at Office.com to use with any Microsoft Office project.

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Must-Read Blog Posts of the Week



List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week:


Joe Chung/Xconomy Seattle
Since part of my job at Redstar Ventures is to meet as many entrepreneurs as possible who might want to co-found a startup with us, I?ve swilled plenty of...

Megan Muir/The Venture Alley
CONTRIBUTED BY Megan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com � � Welcome to the Venture Spotlight, an occasional column in which�we will profile startups, VCs...

willcritchlow/SEOmoz Blog
<p>Posted by <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/21379">willcritchlow</a></p><p>You might have seen some of...

Tim Getsch/CheckOutMyCards
I didn?t quite know what to expect today. I have never paid to get an item autographed before, but one of our rapidly growing consignors, SwagCards, recently...

Alison Clancy/LiquidPlanner
Here at LiquidPlanner, we love our nonprofit customers (and we mean it?Qualified 501(c)3 non-profit organizations receive a 50% discount on each seat...

John Cook/GeekWire
Groupon is pushing deeper into the mobile world today, gobbling up Seattle startup Pelago for an undisclosed price. Tricia Duryee at All Things D has more...

Meadow Creek Blog
What has your office business center done for you lately?� Other than provide you office space, internet service and a phone?� Probably not much...

Derek Johnson/The Derek Johnson
Are you an agency that is looking for a platform to launch and manage mobile campaigns for your clients? If so, today is your lucky day! I?m pleased to...

Joseph Sunga's Thoughts
When they tell you your experience is going to be a roller coaster at a startup, they aren?t lying. Today, we?re celebrating our 3 year anniversary of...

Matt Tronvig/Affiliate Tracking Blog
We really pride ourselves on the flexibility of HasOffers. We have to be flexible. You would be amazed at how many completely different business models we...



From Seattle 2.0


Marcelo Calbucci
Yes, we have some amazing finalists at the 2011 Seattle 2.0 Awards ; we have the phenomenal Mark Suster coming to speak; we have an A-List of attendees (some B-list as well); we?ll have...

Aaron Franklin
You know the saying that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame?�It also applies to startups.�Most startups will get one shot at attention; after that, they risk being old news.�So I?m confused when I...

Marcelo Calbucci
You can?t have a technology company without a technologist behind it. Most of the time the technologist behind those companies is someone with a technical background who brings mad development...

Marcelo Calbucci
It?s not easy being boss. There is a lot more glamour in TV, movies and the press than in reality. Recently there has been a flurry of CEOs blogging about the hardships and mental agony that goes...

Marcelo Calbucci
Just a few years ago, a clunky UI with bad typography, misaligned elements, mismatched colors and confused was actually fairly acceptable for consumers when using their software, website or mobile...

Marcelo Calbucci
This is certainly a controversial category amongst entrepreneurs. A few people are very passionate about creating long lasting companies, generating gobbles of cash and never sell it. However, it?s...

Marcelo Calbucci
Investors are a critical part of the tech startup ecosystem. A lot of businesses require more capital to execute than they could generate through their own cash-flow. Investors bet on ideas, the...

Matt Paulin
Some amazing irony happened recently.� As you know, my focus on this blog is; ideas, generating ideas, and talking about the properties of ideas.� I also run events through the Seattle Think Tank...


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