With over 70 thousand new applications for the iPhone & iPod Touch on the iTunes AppStore, it is no doubt that Apple hit the mark there. With the tremendous success of this new emerging developers platform it is becoming really hard for end users to find the application that they want to install in their devices. We need a solution to enable a more smooth App discovery process, because finding for application inside iTunes is really terrible and slow.

This is what uquery.com is doing to help all the iPhone fanatics to easily find new applications. Continue reading…

Feeling the pressure from Microsoft’s Windows Azure, Amazon works hard on releasing GUI tools for managing their services. Until now, the only GUI way for managing services were a couple of Firefox plugins - Elasticfox for managing EC2 and S3fFox for organizing S3 and CloudFront. However, Amazon just released, in BETA of course, its brand new AWS Management Console, (using Yahoo’s YUI framework, using JSP in the backend).

The initial release of the AWS Management Console provides a graphical user interface for Amazon EC2, with additional Amazon infrastructure services scheduled to be added to the console in the coming months. You can create Elastic Block Store volumes and assign Elastic IP’s to your instances.

The features planned for the future releases look promising: Continue reading…

In a story at Wall Street & Technology, Penny Crosman writes about how Nasdaq stock exchange looks to the clouds for data storage. 

Nasdaq stores lots of terabytes of Nasdaq, NYSE and Amex data using Amazon Simple Storage Service. Nasdaq adds 30 gigabytes to 80 gigabytes of data every day to S3, about 300,000 flat files each representing 10 minutes’ worth of trading activity on a stock. The data retrieval time, is less than one second, and the system scales instantly.

They are using S3 for a new product called Market Replay that enables brokerage firms to show customers and regulators that best-execution requirements were met for a given trade. The application was developed using Adobe Flex.

Nasdaq plans to develop future applications in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, according to Claude Courbois, associate VP, product development, Nasdaq Data Products. Continue reading…

Cloudfork AWS is a new open source project that provides easy access from Smalltalk to the Amazon Web Services that are related to cloud computing. The following services are supported: SimpleDB, SQS, S3.

The code is hosted on Squeaksource. The plan is to port Cloudfork AWS to other Smalltalk dialects as soon as the code is reasonably stable. The goal of the Cloudfork AWS project is simply to make the API’s easily usable from Smalltalk. 

Here’s the official blog of the project.

“Cloud” buzzword started appearing in more and more job description. So it is time to update our resume with “cloud” related keywords (this will help). Anyways, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively looking for a CTO.

SALARY RANGE: 117,787.00 - 177,000.00 USD per year
OPEN PERIOD:  Friday, December 26, 2008 to Thursday, January 15, 2009
POSITION INFORMATION: Full-Time  Permanent
DUTY LOCATIONS:   1 vacancy - Washington DC Metro Area, DC
WHO MAY BE CONSIDERED:   Applications will be accepted from all groups of qualified individuals.

Between other duties we find

Leads a team of technologists across DOD, DHS, and the Intelligence Community and be fluent in cloud computing, Web 2.0 and social networking applications.

I’m not sure what “fluent in cloud computing” fluent in Web 2.0 or even fluent in social network applications means, maybe Michael Arrington will clarify it for us, he seems fluent in Web 2.0 …

Sriram Krishnan is working hard on the Erlang bindings for Windows Azure. Hopefully we’ll have them next week. Keep an eye on the github repo. I like the fact that Microsoft is providing implementations for other platforms, remember Sriram made available python client wrapper for windows azure storage. Keep it up Microsoft, and don’t forget to keep us in the loop …

Not too long ago Google had finally graduated the Google Suggestions as an auto-complete features when you start typing your query terms in the search text box. I really like this feature, but Google has introduced advertisement inside that auto-complete list, which I am not sure if I like it. 

I personally find this a little bit too intrusive for my search experience. What do you guys think ?

Update: I have received some reports that not everyone has this feature enabled yet. I believe Google is deploying slowly to groups of people to test the new feature.