‘Russian Google’ Yandex doles out free cloud service ‘cocaine’

Russia’s go-to search engine, Yandex, has launched a free and open-source challenge to Google’s App Engine called “cocaine”. The open-source platform as a service (PaaS), allows creation of custom cloud-hosted web apps, such as the Google-owned Panoramio location-based photo service, supporting C++, Python and JavaScript programming languages, with Java and Racket support in development. The tool is available for download

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DRM and HTML5: it’s now or never for the Open Web

The future of the Web is being decided at this very moment. While I’m speaking personally rather than for the W3C, the decisions made today by the W3C will build the Web of tomorrow, so these decisions will affect you. The question is: Are you at the table? For example, take the issue of whether or not digital rights management

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Jaron Lanier: the digital pioneer who became a web rebel –interview

Jaron Lanier is that rarest of rare birds – an uber-geek who is highly critical of the world created by the technology he helped to create. Now in his 50s, he first came to prominence in the 1980s as a pioneer in the field of "virtual reality" – the development of computer-generated environments in which real people could interact. Ever

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Groupon: from dotcom star to just another coupon business

Last November, Andrew Mason, former music student turned internet wunderkind, was celebrating. Groupon, the daily deals site he founded and at that point "the fastest-growing company ever", had just raised $700m and was being valued at $13bn. It was the biggest technology flotation since Google. Mason had even been given the ultimate Google seal of approval, having recently turned down

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Google, Apple, Berners-Lee and more team up to launch Web Platform Docs

It’s rare that the caption describing someone’s job is both banal and overarching – but in the case of the picture of Sir Tim Berners-Lee above, you have to say it’s apposite. Yes, he really is the developer of the world wide web. It’s his brainchild. Berners-Lee appears in the video for the launch of Web Platform Docs, which has

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