Data protection
Google fought the law and the law (sort of) won
Google has been handing over private Gmail data to the US government but not without winning the right not to do it in secret. Google publishes the numbers of requests it receives from governments.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
SQL Azure Q4 2011 service release
Microsoft has announced the latest SQL Azure service release. Stated feature improvements are:
- maximum database size increases to 150 GB from 50 GB
- SQL Azure Federation to simplify scaling
- a new management portal
Existing applications should be unaffected by the upgrade.
Also announced is a forthcoming preview of Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux.
Google App Engine SDK 1.5.5 released
Google App Engine SDK 1.5.5 has been released for Java, Python and Go. As well as various performance tweaks, the SDK includes the Python-based web application framework webapp2.
AMQP working group publishes final 1.0 specification
The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) working group has published its final 1.0 specification for AMQP, the open standard for business messaging.
EU survey on guidelines for public procurement of ICT goods and services
The European Commission is carrying out a survey to help determine guidelines for the public procurement of ICT goods and services. There are two separate surveys, one for public procurers and the other for ICT suppliers.
Platform-as-a-Service
IBM launch PaaS offering
All the big industry players are jostling for position with their latest cloud computing offerings. Following on from Oracle, IBM has announced its PaaS offering with the easily forgettable name IBM SmartCloud Application Services.
Google announces new web programming language
Google announced its new web programming language Dart last week and it didn’t take too long before the knives were out. Currently Dart compiles to Javascript – rather large amounts of Javascript – although Google Chrome is likely to implement support.
Company news
Wave Accounting raises new funding
Accounting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider Wave Accounting has secured Canadian $5 million in funding. Focusing primarily at the small business user, the free service claims almost 75,000 customers since launching less than a year ago. Revenue is raised via targeted advertising and a group-buying scheme.
Six Degrees Group raises £60 million
UK-based Six Degrees Group has raised £60 million to bring its managed data services offering to the UK’s medium-sized companies. Six Degrees Group was founded by entrepreneur Alastair Mills who recently sold SpiriTel Plc for £37m.
Spree Commerce raised $1.5 million
Open-source eCommerce solution Spree has raised $1.5 million. Written in Ruby on Rails, Spree allows for easy customisation and integration into existing Ruby on Rails projects. The Spree code is hosted on Github.
ShareFile acquired by Citrix
Business cloud document sharing service ShareFile has been acquired by Citrix Systems. ShareFile sells its services to businesses rather than consumers and eschews the freemium model of more well-known rivals such as Box.net and Dropbox.
As a contract developer and manager I’ve worked in a wide range of enterprises in a variety of countries where I’ve encountered everything from great work, awful work, bizarre work, all the way down to quasi-legal work. If you think that you recognise your own organisation within my articles then you’re undoubtedly wrong, where you work isn’t that unique.
