According to the 2013 BrandZ Top 100 report, tech companies hold the top three slots in this year's list of top global brands — Apple, Google and IBM leading the pack in that order. Microsoft rolls in at number 7 on the list.

There's big money in them thar brands, too. The ClickZ report pegs Apple's brand as worth $185.1 billion, up 1% from last year. Google rose more from last year, up 5% to a brand worth of $113.7 billion. IBM's brand shrank 3% to $112.5 billion and Microsoft shrank even more: 9% down to $69.8 billion.

These valuations are based on proprietary valuation methods, so take them with a grain of salt. Still, it's interesting to see how marketing views the power of the almighty brand.

Check out BrandZ's technology sector rankings to see how your favorite companies stack up against each other.

Image via Shutterstock

Dell is a computer company desperately in search of a new market as the desktop and laptop PCs dwindles. But the Austin-based company is finding that that an elusive target.

Public Cloud? That's So 2011

Yesterday the company announced it was dropping Dell Cloud, its home-grown infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud service. It is also pulling the plug on its planned OpenStack-based public cloud service and online storage service before they even get off the ground.

Dell isn't out the cloud game altogether, mind you - it will be reselling public cloud services through its new Dell Cloud Partner Program. And it's still working on private cloud offerings.

Dell's decision to drop its program after only two years isn't terribly surprising - it was regarded as pricey compared to similar offerings from HP and IBM, and going head to head with similar services from Amazon Web Services and Google without good pricing and a very solid support system is tantamount to suicide these days.

Bring On The Dongles

But Dell is still on the hunt for new revenue. Reports out today indicate that the hardware maker will be releasing a new thumb-drive PC, codenamed Project Ophelia, this July for a reported $100.

PC World has revealed that the device will be based on Android and can be plugged into a TV or monitor via the HDMI port. File storage will be handled via Wyse's PocketCloud.

Dell wants to get this device in the hands of telecomm carriers, who could use Ophelia to deliver streaming TV to customers who don't currently have smart TVs or devices like Roku or Apple TV to pull in online content.

Developers will get their hands on the PC-on-a-stick first, in order to build Android apps and build up a collection of TV-friendly apps. Since there's a lot of Wyse thin-client tech packed into this thing, presumably there will be some capability to have portability between home and work.

This is an interesting concept, save for the fact that there are already similar and cheaper devices on the market now. The concept of a dongle PC is not new, and to date, they haven't really taken off.

The idea also ignores the very real trend away from vertical screen and keyboard/mouse devices to handheld tablets and smartphones. While Ophelia devices would give you portability, you still need a mouse, keyboard and screen to use these things… so the portability is constrained. And if I'm essentially recreating a PC-like portable work setup anyway, why not just use a laptop?

I suspect that's why Dell is emphasizing the telecom angle when it pitches these things. Carriers could offer Ophelia with video and data plans, maybe. But it's hard to imagine consumers buying these things off the shelf when there are other similarly priced set-top devices already on the market and proven to work.

Dell is clearly throwing a lot of things against the wall to see what sticks. Public cloud didn't work, and it's difficult to see Project Ophelia working out, either. Servers, however, aren't doing badly right now. Perhaps Dell should stick to what it knows best.

Getting called out by the Obama administration wasn't enough of a deterrent for Unit 61398, the cyberattack unit of the People's Liberation Army of China, because apparently they're at it again, working to pilfer information from private company and public government data stores.

The New York Times is reporting that Unit 61398 has resumed operations and is actively engaged in hacking into any U.S. systems that might hold information considered to be of use for the People's Republic of China.

Security firm Mandiant told the Times "that the Chinese hackers had stopped their attacks after they were exposed in February and removed their spying tools from the organizations they had infiltrated. But over the past two months, they have gradually begun attacking the same victims from new servers and have reinserted many of the tools that enable them to seek out data without detection.

"They are now operating at 60 percent to 70 percent of the level they were working at before, according to a study by Mandiant requested by The New York Times," the article reported.

If accurate, then it's clear that the U.S. is going to have to step up its game when it comes to cybersecurity, particularly organizations that have data related to trade secrets or, more disturbingly, infrastructure plans - both targets of Chinese hackers.

Even if this isn't the PLA, someone is hacking these systems, and it's time to stop treating cybersecurity like a game.

If you like using online tools to hunt and gather your food, take note: Seamless and GrubHub, two of the better-known players in the mobile food-delivery business, announced today that they will be merging their services.

GrubHub, which is privately owned, features the most restaurants of the two services, claiming 20,000 eateries in their online ordering network, compared to Seamless' 12,000. Seamless users, then, are going to get the better end of the deal right away, with the inclusion of GrubHub's additional dining options. GrubHub users should benefit from Seamless overall service, which is generally held in higher regard.

The consolidation might help both vendors overall, with one less mobile ordering service for restaurant owners to have to work with to get customer orders coming in.

This is a big bite of business: in 2012, the two organizations sent approximately $875 million in gross food sales to local takeout restaurants, resulting in combined revenue well in excess of $100 million, today's press release indicated.

No terms of the deal between privately held GrubHub and the public Seamless company were revealed, though Fortune Senior Editor Dan Primack tweeted this morning that "Seamless investors will hold majority stake in combined co w/ GrubHub."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Yahoo has officially announced the all-cash acquisition of blogging site Tumblr, picking up the six-year-old company for a cool $1.1 billion.

The move, which was telegraphed by the major tech sources over the weekend, comes as no real surprise, and ReadWrite's Owen Thomas already has insights on the potential directions for the deal. But details are coming out this morning on what -initially - Yahoo has planned.

(See also Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis.)

Rather interestingly, Yahoo will be moving its official blog to Tumblr. And in the very first blog post, right out of the gate, Yahoo explicitly affirms the question that was on everyone's lips this weekend when the news was first leaked:

"I'm delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!," wrote Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, "We promise not to screw it up."

Mayer's post was the epitome of how the two content companies should be able to work together.

"In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience," Mayer continued.

Given the type of content produced in some of those 50 billion daily blog posts on Tumblr, it will be very interesting to see how that seamless mesh of advertising opportunities will work, since advertisers are sure to be all over NSFW blog posts.

Image courtesy of Yahoo.

If you've ever used the Internet — and you know who you are — you've undoubtedly had apps or various services stop working unexpectedly. For ordinary users, this usually just means no access to Twitter or Gmail for a while. But for developers, whose apps and services rely increasingly heavily on hooks into popular Web services, the problem can be far more complicated.

That's because modern Web services (and the apps that facilitate them) can fail for a variety of reasons. One of the most common problems arises when some other service has gone down — more specifically, when the application programming interface (API) that lets your app tap into that other service stops working. Trouble is, until recently there hasn't been an easy way to confirm or rule out API failures.

You Don't Need A Weatherman...

And that's where API status dashboards, the weather reports of the Web-service world, come in. Dashboards enable developers and administrators to quickly check to see what's going on with the API itself. If the API is slowed or offline, then at least you, the developer, know the problem isn't in your own code. So you can start working with (translate: yelling at) the API vendor to fix the situation.

Zapier, a startup that helps developers integrate APIs into applications, was already using just such a dashboard for its internal purposes. It's now opened up that API weather report for the world at large. Zapier's tool is unique in that it covers a lot of APIs for smaller but still useful services out there, not just their mega-service cousins. It should be a stopping point for anyone who is using one of these smaller APIs.

...To Tell You Whether APIs Are Up Or Down

It might seem a little obsessive to be so concerned about an API's status that we build "weather reports," but it makes good business sense. Like the air around us, APIs are a type of environment, too. They have to work and be available at any given moment in order to enable connectivity to a given web application and service. When they fail, data exchange can slow down or completely halt.

Of course, API failures aren't the only things that can bring down a Web service. The service itself could have bad code, or one of the servers might be on the way to failure. Tracking down the exact failure, though, can take a lot of time, especially if hardware failure is ruled out. That leaves the code itself, precipitating a search that could take hours.

So it's definitely helpful to know right away whether you've got an API problem... or something else. "When a call to an API breaks," says Zapier CEO and co-founder Wade Foster, "you don't always know where the problem is."

But Weather Reports Help

Zapier isn't the only status board around. Watchmouse has an API Status board that monitors the larger API services, such as Google, Twitter, Dropbox and the like. Its technology was so attractive that CA bought the company in 2011 and incorporated the monitoring service into its Nimsoft Cloud Monitoring tools.

Unfortunately, it's not entirely clear that the public Nimsoft page is up to date. The page is currently reporting disruptions for Digg, Dropbox and some Google services. The latter seems inaccurate, since Google itself isn't reporting any issues today.

Of course, if you have an app that depends on Google services, you can always check out Google's API status page. Amazon Web Services has its own API and service reporting dashboard, too.

If you're building an API for your own service, you can provide your users with a quick status dashboard of your own, using the Stashboard code that was open sourced by Twilio a few years ago. Developers can use the code to create a dashboard that can be hosted on Google Apps Engine.

Lead image courtesy of NOAA

In all of the razzle-dazzle coming out of Google I/O Wednesday morning, it's easy to forget about the company's core product: Search. But Google didn't forget about Search, showing off a number of interesting improvements, including a new hands-free feature that will bring voice-activated searches to desktop computers.

(See also Google Is Turning Search Into The Planet's Biggest Anticipatory System.)

Google Loves Star Trek

The new voice commands for Google Search are the culmination of Google's fixation on the Star Trek computer interface of the future. It's something that Senior VP Amit Singhal very much wants to see - and Google Chrome browser users on desktops and laptops will get to share in the experience, simply by saying the phrase "OK Google" and then speaking the desired search term. No need to even press a button.

Voice search is already familiar to iOS users, in the form of Siri, and Google Search for Android users. The roll out on Android no doubt served as a great testbed to get Google's voice-recognition algorithms better adapted to human speech patterns. 

According to a blog post by by Google senior VP Amit Singhal, the idea is to turn search into a natural language conversation: 

Soon, you’ll be able to just say, hands-free, “OK Google, will it be sunny in Santa Cruz this weekend?” and get a spoken answer. Then, you’ll be able to continue the conversation and just follow up with “how far is it from here?” if you care about the drive or “how about Monterey?” if you want to check weather somewhere else, and get Google to tell you the answer.

Reminder Cards & Knowledge Graphs

Voice was not the only addition to Google Search's feature set: the company also announced new reminder cards in its Google Now tool. Currently, Now's cards are based on a set type of search, such as sports team cards based on your frequent searches. Now users will be able to add reminders set to pop up as cards in Google Now whenever your location in time and space (your context) is close to the reminder. Like a note to buy milk when you go by the grocery store.

Google's search will also start to deliver information in a far more anticipatory way, using Google's Knowledge Graph to build and manage connections between searches and deliver information based not only on the user's immediate search, but potential searches that many people ask as a follow-up.

(See also Forget Searching For Content - Content Is About To Start Searching For You.)

All of these features move Google towards a more friction-free form of contextual search - and that promises to bring knowledge to users faster and more seamlessly.

Lead image by Nick Statt for ReadWrite.

Disaster is a word with strong connotations, conjuring images of fire, flood, storms, earthquakes and... spilled cups of coffee.

That latter category might not strike you as the kind of disaster that will bring the 24-hour news vans to your door, but to a business that depends on the uptime of its systems, a jostled cup of joe or a faulty hard drive can be just as much of a disaster as the Biblical stuff.

According to a new survey of small to medium-sized businesses, it isn't flooding, tornadoes or hurricanes that are mostly responsible for IT downtime, but rather hardware failures - a full 55% of downtime incidents, in fact. IT recovery vendor Quorum tracked the trouble tickets of customers who used their service in the first quarter of 2013 to derive the data.

Disk failures were the number one hardware failure, says Quorum CEO Larry Lang. "More often than you think, it's a SAN failure," he adds, referring to "storage area networks" that are designed to keep data available even when a disk - or disks - crash.

Power supply problems are another big hardware issue. At times, they're complicated by cooling system malfunctions that in turn overheat power supplies and bring them down in a giant cascade of fail.

Or you can face something completely unexpected. A Quorum customer once had a problem when a neighbor's renovation work spewed gypsum dust onto server heat sinks, causing them to lose efficiency and overheat the system.

Delete All? OK...

Next on the list was human error, which made up 22% of incidents that caused downtime. But Lang suspects that this figure is actually on the low side. "Human nature being what it is, the actual human mistakes tend to be under-reported," he said. Accidental deletions, are common mistakes that don't get reported.

Software failures ranked next, coming in at 18% of downtime causes. These include updates that don't go well, many of which were probably untested before deployment. (That could also put these back in the human error column, too.)

The last category is the flashier stuff. But natural disasters only accounted for 5% of IT downtime incidents.

The Cost Of Goofs

Estimating the damage caused by IT downtime isn't always easy. Ball-parking the financial cost is straightforward - just take your company's annual revenue, divide that by number of business hours in a year (2080 in the U.S.), then multiply that number by the number of hours your systems are down.

But some times in the year are worse for downtime than others. If your accounting firm's servers go down in mid-June, it's likely not as stressful or painful to the bottom line as a similar failure the week before the April 15 tax deadline in the U.S.

Then there's the reputational effect. When an actual natural disaster strikes and you are offline, customers are more likely to cut you some slack until you get things up and running. But if they tune in on any given day and your computers are dark for what to them seems no apparent reason, they might be... unsatisfied. Some might take to Twitter, Yelp and other social outlets to broadcast their frustration, too.

Back Up And Prepare

IT managers need to prepare for the worst, but also must understand that the worst might not happen when Mother Nature drops by.

To be prepared for the disasters that occur in the chaos of our daily lives, Lang recommended that, at the very least, businesses need to back up as much as they can. It may take longer to restore than expected, but when the worst happens, your data will still be there and you can start the recovery process.

Lang also recommends testing and retesting backup and restore processes as often as possible. Software and hardware configurations can change often, so you need to make sure your recovery operations won't fail.

"In business, the longest distance in IT is the distance between ought to work and known to work," Lang said.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

The Internet of Things isn't really an Internet of anything, at least not yet. Sure, devices are connected to the Internet, but they don't communicate with other devices — just with their own home servers. But that may be about to change.

A new common cloud platform dubbed Xively Cloud Services aims to provide a common ground through which any device connected to the Internet could actually communicate with any other device. Xively is an old fixture within the Internet of Things ecosystem, as it's actually a new commercial version of the older non-commercial Cosm platform, which in turn used to be known as Pachube until Xively's current owner LogMeIn purchased Pachube in 2011.

Like Cosm before it, Xively will offer a way for disparate devices to connect with each other, though now with commercial terms of service for commercial users and freely available services for projects in development. Whatever you call it, the availability of a platform like Xively is a key component in building a true Internet of Things instead of what we actually have now.

The Intranets of Things

To understand the difference, think back a decade or so to when the term "intranets" was all the rage. While the Internet was the grand, connected network of networks, intranets were the smaller, private networks used by corporations who were on the cutting edge of cool in the early days of the 21st century.

Today, the concept is still the same, even if the mystique of the term has worn off somewhat. Devices that are connected to the Internet at large behave in much the same way as servers on an intranet: they communicate only with their corporate systems, reporting data only to the commercial manufacturer.

Instead of the Internet of Things, then, what we have now is a whole bunch of intranets of things.

This may work for individual products, such as the car sensors that report back to the factory with critical maintenance data that, ideally, leads to faster diagnosis and repair of problems. But it doesn't leave much room for connecting devices and objects that really were never designed to communicate with each other.

What The Internet Of Things Might Look Like

Imagine, says Xively VP Chad Jones, a collection of tiny accelerometers and heat sensors woven into the fabric of an infant's onesie, designed to communicate with monitoring software in the cloud with the intent to watch the baby's breathing and body heat for the onset of sudden infant death syndrome or any other form of respiratory distress. The special clothing probably has its own alarm, but what if parents wanted the option to set off every fire alarm in the house?

(Hey, when it's your kid, you might want it to call the fire department and the National Guard, too.)

Right now, both the clothing and the alarms might be connected to the Internet, but not to each other. To make such an option work in our current circumstances, the manufacturers of the devices would have to meet, figure out common signal specifications and work out a commercial agreement. And that's for every fire alarm manufacturer.

Xively enables device makers to set the privacy settings for device data in the Xively network to share all, share some or share none, Jones explained. If device makers were on the Xively platform, they would have a common ground to connect and effectively communicate, using data sharing combined with directory services that provide the ability to selectively share device data and control.

Connecting the medical onesie and the alarms in this scenario would be a far easier and more frictionless experience.

This sort of common platform is exactly what the Internet of Things really needs. Xively and similar platforms like Open.Sen.se will make it much easier and faster for unrelated devices to connect with each other and start delivering on the promise of smart homes, intelligent devices services and similar long-promised notions.

Besides ushering in a boon of new connected devices, common cloud platforms for devices will ultimately help the consumer by ushering in competition and more choices. Right now, to build a smart or connected home requires you to choose from a relatively small array of compatible devices — which, unsurprisingly, aren't cheap.

Introduce more compatible devices through a common network, then suddenly the market will naturally drive prices down. More device vendors should jump into the game, too, knowing they will have a fair shot in this new market.

Image courtesy of Xively

The idea that a business needs data analysis to better make business decisions is not in dispute… but there is currently a strong debate on how big a data set a business actually needs and how much they need to spend to get that data.

The lure of big data is a powerful one… your web site is flooded with tracking and logging data, after all, and if you only had the tools to store and analyze that data, you could learn the secrets of making your business successful, discover the Colonel's secret recipe and figure out the Question that goes with the Answer 42.

Well, maybe not that much detail, but with the level of hype around big data, one sometimes wonders.

One standard approach to analyzing this data is the installation and configuration of Hadoop servers that are grouped together in clusters of machines - either physical or virtual. Hadoop clusters use distributed storage that makes it relatively simple to store a lot of data fast with less pain than relational database configuration. They also use Java-based MapReduce software to reach into that data and scoop out what you really want - golden nuggets of pure information.

There are limits to MapReduce, naturally: it doesn't perform analysis in real time, but rather in occasionally time-consuming batches, and setting up MapReduce software to do exactly what you need has been compared to getting a root canal. This is why there is an entire ecosystem around Hadoop dedicated to working around those shortcomings, introducing real-time analysis, structured database tool, and software that can convert existing database queries written in Structured Query Language (SQL) to something MapReduce can handle.

But even though Hadoop is relatively inexpensive and easy to scale out onto many machines that run the Linux operating system, is this approach the equivalent of using a wrecking ball to knock down a dollhouse?

Too Much Data?

Some would argue that is indeed the case. A January 2013 paper from Microsoft Research, for instance, disputes the notion that most data analysis that a business would even need a Hadoop cluster, but instead could use a more powerful single server that is scaled-up.

According to the authors of "Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying a Cluster," the data set sizes of many given businesses are not typically large enough to warrant scaled-out clusters of multiple computers.

You would expect that to be the case for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but it's also true for enterprises. Even the mega-companies for which big data tools were practically invented don't need those tool a large majority of the time.

For example, the authors found, an analysis of 174,000 jobs submitted to a production analytics cluster in Microsoft had a median job input data set size of less than 14 GB, and 80% of jobs had an input size of less than 1 TB.

The paper cites another study from K. Elmeleegy that "analyzes the Hadoop jobs run on the production clusters at Yahoo. Unfortunately, the median input data set size is not given but, from the information in the paper we can estimate that the median job input size is less than 12.5 GB."

And Yahoo, by the way, is where much of the core functionality of Hadoop was developed, built on the distributed filesystem research conducted earlier at Google. If they aren't using Hadoop for mega jobs all of the time, how appropriate is Hadoop for a "normal" enterprise's data sets?

Facebook, the Borg-like consumer of all user data, surely needs the big data tools, right?

"Ananthanarayanan et al. show that Facebook jobs follow a power-law distribution with small jobs dominating; from their graphs it appears that at least 90% of the jobs have input sizes under 100 GB," the paper states. "Chen et al. present a detailed study of Hadoop workloads for Facebook as well as 5 Cloudera customers. Their graphs also show that a very small minority of jobs achieves terabyte scale or larger and the paper claims explicitly that 'most jobs have input, shuffle, and output sizes in the MB to GB range.'"

Most Data Is Small

The conclusions of the paper, which analyzes various configurations of Hadoop jobs in clustered computers, both physical and in the cloud, against a single scaled-up Hadoop cluster, found that for a majority of data analysis work, the scaled-up server not only handled the workload well, it actually outperformed the clustered machines in many respects.

Now, like any scientific paper, particularly one from a commercial vendor, some skepticism must be applied. Here, the conclusions would seem to benefit Microsoft's sales model for pushing data analysis tools into the enterprise and even SMBs. Scaled-out Hadoop clusters on Linux, after all, are pretty cheap compared to comparable Windows Server clusters, but even the least expensive Hadoop cluster can't hold a candle to the low price of a single scaled-up server.

Which may be the point of the paper, so take it as you will.

Still, there seems to be compelling evidence from sources other than Microsoft that there is a vast majority of data analysis jobs that do not need much more than a strong server or even a personal computer to crunch the numbers and get those golden nuggets of information.

This is not to say that every data problem can be solved with an Excel spreadsheet and a laptop. The flexibility of non-relational (NoSQL) databases are still a very attractive solution to storing and analyzing data sets. And Hadoop is still a relatively inexpensive way to store a lot of data until such time you need to massage it and discover the secrets of the universe or at least your third-quarter sales.

(See also Hadoop Adoption Accelerates, But Not For Data Analytics.)

Before beginning an exploration into the world of big data, businesses should be careful on separating hype from reality and making sure they don't overkill their data needs with a solution that will be more costly to set up and operate in the long run.

Look at NoSQL databases as a way to hold and analyze data for lower costs than relational SQL databases. Or look at federated data services that can provide key information aggregated within your particular sector. And even look at the data you have and start playing around with it in a spreadsheet sometime and see what you come up with.

Hadoop is one way to work with data, but it is by far not the only way.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The proliferation of mobile devices has created a firestorm of demand for Application Programming Interfaces (API) to act as data gateways between devices and services. But fire can also be a destructive force, and mis-managed APIs can hurt application performance, alienate developers and even lead to costly and damaging data breaches.

API Security Is Critical

Among other things, APIs serve as gateways to Web-based services like Twitter or Facebook. They are the specifications that let developers build applications that communicate directly with those services. You can think of APIs as doors; they let data in and out of a Web service. Just like physical doors, leaving APIs open can let anyone wander in, for whatever purpose.  

APIs are only as secure as they are written to be, explained Alistair Farquharson, chief technology officer for API-management vendor SOA Software. Smart developers make sure their APIs are open only for those people who have the authorized key.

What Problems Can APIs Cause?

The threat assessment for an API that isn't locked down isn't a pretty thing. Insecure APIs can fold under the artificial pressures of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks (which attempt to overwhelm a site or service with spurious requests in order to block legitimate access) , blocking the door through which data from a Web service is supposed to flow - perhaps bringing down the entire site. SQL script injections (which attempt to insert malicious code into a database), Farquharson added, could be used to re-route or copy data to outside servers operated by people who have no business looking at your data or your customers' information.

Because APIs enable very deep leveraging of a web service's features, they can be misused by hackers to spoof services, or even pretend to be entire websites, as web designer Feross Aboukhadijeh detailed last Autumn, when he discovered how the HTML5 Fullscreen API could be abused to appear like any legitimate site, such as a banking transaction web site. Aboukhadijeh works through how the fake web site could be created and fool many unsuspecting users, even down to a citation of a study on "change blindness," a psychological event where people can miss obvious changes.

And then there are the less subtle attacks, such as the 2008 security breach that took advantage of a bad Myspace-Yahoo services API and ended up gaining access to celebrity photos that were supposed to be privately stored.

These are the obvious malicious outcomes of APIs that aren't secured properly. But hacked APIs can also create perceptions of poor quality of service, which could erode customer confidence in a Web service.

The importance of getting APIs under control can't be overemphasized, contended identity-management vendor Xceedium's VP of Product Management, John Suit. "If the web interface is the front door to a company," Suit said, "then the API is the side door." And any door that lets in the wrong person - or the wrong code - can result in the same disastrous results.

Building A Better API Lock

Locking down APIs can tricky business. In these early days of the API boom, there are many different API standards being used by vendors to create the APIs through which applications will leverage Web services. Complicating that is the fact that there are a lot of different security standards, too.

This is a rich recipe for problems, since an effective API management system must allow authorized developers in to use the API, but not let anyone gain so much access they can subvert the API or use it as a doorway to the host service's internal data. Oh, and add to that mix the problem you have if APIs have to reside in a public cloud environment, outside your firewall.

Most security experts recommend using some sort of the strong authentication process in place when working with APIs. You need to make sure that the absolute correct person is accessing the API.

SOASoft's approach is a just-launched API Gateway virtual appliance that uses an OAuth server to work with many different existing security protocols. Playing to its strengths, Xceedium uses role-based identity systems to not only make sure the right person is connecting to the API, but that person should be accessing that API in the first place.

Things To Do Right Now

Even if you don't want to implement a formal identity and security management system for APIs, there are steps to take right now that will at least help mitigate potential problems.

If you want to prevent SQL injection attacks, then by all means sanitize the inputs in the API that connect to your internal databases. This will reduce the risk of a successful attack of this kind: 

API developers should also make sure that everything is transmitted through the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) - encrypted and transmitted by HTTPS - so that information like usernames and passwords are not captured in-process and then used to gain access to users' accounts or worse, the host organization's account. 

APIs are becoming increasingly important as so many new devices on the Internet generate and consume data via an ever-expanding list of Web services. While essential, those APIs also creating tempting targets for hackers. The need to lock down this growing vulnerability has never been a higher priority.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock, comic courtesy of XKCD.

Working on the Internet every day, you start to have certain suspicions about how it affects the way you think and process information. Turns out, there's something to that.

Readers of Nicholas Carr's 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains will certainly confirm this. While the Internet is a fantastic tool to conduct business and communicate with friends and colleagues, the constant distractions can and do have an interruptive effect on how we think and learn.

The animation team at Epipheo Studios recently interviewed Carr and put together a video on the topics expressed in The Shallows. It is presented to you here, somewhat ironically, as one of those distractions that the Internet can present you during the course of the day.

Pick a time to watch it on your own schedule, and then think about ways in which you can start unplugging a bit more in your busy online life. You may not buy into this, but we can share one thing with you: every writer who has written for our Pause series of stories has reported a reduction of stress or some other calming effect.

Taking time for yourself to just think and be is not only relaxing, it may help avoid the dinosaurs and sharks in your life.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

On Tuesday, OpenStreetMap significantly lowered the barrier to creating fully share-able map data. With the launch of a new editor for the open source mapping platform, its freely available mapping data will be improved upon even faster, leading to more accurate and detailed mapping information in the many apps and services that reply on it.

Starting today, anyone who wants to update OpenStreetMap can use iD Editor as one of their tool choices, alongside the existing Potlatch 2 in-browser editor. Both editors are capable tools, but the new iD Editor is much more beginner-friendly. It was always possible to edit OpenStreetMap, but iD Editor's simplicity makes the task simple enough for just about anyone to do it - with very little training.

This is big news for certified map-heads like me, but it will important effects even for users of Google Maps and Apple Maps who have never heard of OpenStreetMap. That's because "the free wiki world map," as OpenStreetMap describes itself, is relied upon by a wide array of well-known apps and services.

Who's Asking For Directions?

"OpenStreetMap's data is used in Hipmunk for mapping hotels, and in Foursquare to map bars," explained MapBox CEO Eric Gundersen. "It's used in Evernote, too." In fact, Gundersen, added, there are more than 35,000 subscribers to OpenStreetMap data through MapBox alone, including USA Today. Apple's own iPhoto app also uses OpenStreetMap data - not Apple Map data.

The business of maps is major - according to Charlie Hale, a Google Policy analyst for Oxera, consumers have placed a $37 billion value on mapping services in the U.S. Globally, that number could be as high as $270 billion. It is little wonder then, that players like Google, Apple and Nokia (through its acquisition of Navteq) are jockeying for position, trying to be the preferred source for potential subscribers of mapping data.

No More Monkeys

OpenStreetMap's openness gives it a big advantage in this race. Yes, Gundersen admitted, "there will be the same kind of data flaws in open data as in proprietary data, but in the open data, you can fix them."

As an example, Gundersen pointed out the iOS map rendition of Kabul, Afghanistan, where a road that leads southwest out of the city's center is prominently labeled as "Bad Monkey."

Chehilsoton Main Road, still known as "Bad Monkey."

The map's flaw was discovered and made the rounds in the tech media way back in January of 2013. And yet, as of Tuesday, that error had still not been corrected on Apple's iOS maps. The Chehilsoton Main Road remains unnamed thanks to someone's poor idea of a joke.

Such errors could also crop up in OpenStreetMap, (like any vandalism you might see on open and wiki-based knowledge platforms), but it can be immediately repaired.

Fix It Yourself

In addition to more accurate maps overall, and mapping data available to everyone to use as they see fit, the ability for anyone to easily edit OpenStreetMap could also be a boon for businesses. If one of the major mapping services screws up the location for your business, for example, you have to wait for them to fix it, however long that might take. With OpenStreetMap and iD Editor, you could fix it yourself, right away.

Open source mapping was always a good idea. By making it easy for anyone to edit the maps, OpenStreetMap is making it even more useful.

Images via OpenStreetMap, Apple.

A new video technology quietly announced late last week could mark a landmark change in how apps are deployed on PCs, tablets and smartphones for years to come - and also have big ramifications on how companies like Apple do business.

You wouldn't think that the technology launched by the Mozilla Foundation and graphic-rendering vendor Otoy on Friday would be all that big a deal. After all, the software, which is known as a codec, was originally designed to allow for the playback of videos on HTML5 pages within a browser without plug-ins.

That alone is pretty cool, from a consumer's point of view. There's are still videos out there, such as those encoded with the H.264 format, that need a special plug-in to be viewed, thanks to the patents tied to the H.264 specification. Live TV and HD video can be viewed with any HTML5 browser that can support WebGL (hold that thought).

But the other thing the new codec, known as ORBX.js, features is much, much more significant: it also enables steaming of desktop applications. An application (say, Microsoft Office) could be hosted on a company's server and then used by any employee who logs in to the application. It would not matter what operating system they were using (Windows, OS X or Linux) or even what platform (phone, tablet or desktop), because the browser would be the only thing that matters.

"This is not just remote desktop tech, or X11 reborn via JavaScript]," [blogged Mozilla Foundation CTO Brendan Eich, "Many local/remote hybrid computation schemes are at hand today, e.g., a game can do near-field computing in the browser on a beefy client while offloading lower [level of detail] work to the [game processing unit] cloud."

When Cloud Becomes The Platform

Using streaming video to deploy remote desktops is not new, of course, this is pretty much the way Logmein does it with their remote desktop technology. But as good as Logmein and other RD vendors are, they still use a dedicated client and the speed of the remote setup can be hampered by the power of the source desktop as well as the limitations of bandwidth.

If the application were to be hosted in the cloud with more resources, as Eich suggests, then only bandwidth would become a limit to application performance. In fact, if ORBX.js performs as promised, you won't even need a "beefy" client, as Eich says we have now - nearly all of the processing work will be done in the cloud and streamed to the waiting browser client.

Streaming apps, if this technology works, would then represent a big change for end users and even a potential cost savings - if the bulk of the processing power is situated in the cloud, then hardware requirements for end-user devices can stay where they are or even be lowered.

Another big change - if all you need is a decent screen and an interface to connect to applications, you could host your entire work/home environment in the cloud and access it from any compatible device at any time. It could be a full version on the desktop or laptop, and perhaps a scaled-down version on your tablet or smartphone, but the apps and your data would always be there, on any of your machines.

Walled Garden? What Walled Garden?

If applications can be delivered effectively through this kind of enhanced video streaming, currently that also puts Apple and Microsoft at a strong disadvantage against competitors like Google and Blackberry, especially in the mobile space.

Recall the requirements for the JavaScript-based ORBX.js: any HTML5 browser that can support WebGL.

As it stands right now, the Safari browser on the iOS mobile platform does not support WebGL at all (except for iAd developers) - and on OS X, Safari only offers partial support for the standard (if the user has up-to-date video drivers). Internet Explorer does not support WebGL at all, either.

Android is a little tricker: neither the native Android browser or Chrome for Android support WebGL, but Firefox for Android does. As of BlackBerry 10, the BlackBerry browser will support WebGL, too.

This would mean that Android and BlackBerry users could run cloud-based apps on their devices right now, while Windows Phone, Windows 8, Windows RT and iOS users would be out of luck.

That's probably no accident, either, since any application that streams in through browser is one the operating system vendor can't monetize. In other words, Apple and Microsoft won't get their app store cut from apps that are streamed.

That this is a deliberate choice on the part of Apple and Microsoft seems likely. Even Google has yet to support WebGL on its mobile-device browsers, possibly for the same reasons.

But given that Google's Chrome browser is all in for WebGL, Google could still reap the benefits of cloud-based applications soon. If that proves a success, or if BlackBerry's WebGL bet pays off, then it won't be a long wait for the Android browsers to come around to WebGL.

At which point, it will be anyone's guess if Microsoft and Apple will jump on board, too. There are already rumors that Internet Explorer 11 will support WebGL, so Microsoft may be on its way to enabling cloud-based streaming apps.

Cloud applications will never supplant native apps - connectivity issues and security concerns will make sure of that - but it's a future that looks pretty cool for users who want to use their applications and data any where, any time.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Showrooming, the practice of looking at items in a physical store and then buying them online, is yet-another pain-in-the-butt problem facing brick-and mortar retailers. Despite all the hand-wringing, however, there are ways to mitigate the problem.

First, there's evidence to suggest that the showrooming is not quite as bad a problem as some think. A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey from the beginning of 2013 found that of surveyed consumers, fewer than half (46%) called someone for advice for a purchase, and only 28% used their phone to look up product reviews and 27% used their phone to look up product pricing during the 2012 holiday shopping season. All told, 58% of cell phone owners used their phones to try one of these shopping activities in the store. Not surprisingly, younger shoppers (78% of 18-29 year olds) and smartphone owners (72%) led the way.

Not Everyone Showrooms

But here's something telling… even though the number of cell-phone shoppers increased from 2012 to 2013, "When asked what happened on the most recent occasion they looked up the price of a product inside a store using their cell phone, 46% of 'mobile price matchers' say that they ultimately purchased the product in that store - an 11-point increase from the 35% of such price matchers who said this in 2012," the report stated.

The rest of the results were equally interesting: 30% of cell-phone shoppers didn't buy the product at all, just 12% purchased the product online and only 6% went to another store to buy the product.

Retailers, it appears, are getting better at keeping customers buying in the store, no matter what they are finding on their phones and tablets.

(See also Paper, Bricks & Cash Will Die: The Inevitable Evolution Of Local Commerce.)

Still, 12% of cell-phone owners is a significant chunk of revenue. And there's every indication that as smartphones continue to penetrate the market and older shoppers are increasingly replaced with younger, more showrooming-friendly buyers, retailers have to address the problem head on.

There are plenty of ways that proactive retailers can fight showrooming. These five are a good place to start:

1. Differentiate Your Products

Amazon got its start selling books for reason. Bookstores are especially vulnerable to showrooming because unless they are selling very specialized publishers' catalog items or very rare and special books, a book is a book is a book. 

If anything, the big booksellers made the very bed they are now forced to lie in. By presenting books as a bulk commodity, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and the extinct Borders reinforced the notion of books as a pure commodity, and that it didn't matter where you got the book, as long as you saved money. That was great when they were cheaper than independent bookstores, but it's come back to haunt them in the form of lower prices online.

Other retailers may have things a little easier, because not every product is available online in exactly the same form as in the local stores. But stores getting hurt by showrooming should think about switching up their inventory with unique items that may be harder to find online. 

2. Incentivize Local Shoppers

It's old-school business to entice customers into your establishment with sales and coupons. Don't stop; people still like that stuff. But other techniques can also help pull customers in the front door.

Mobile shopping apps are the bane of a retailers' existence - anything that makes it easier to comparison shop can encourage users to walk out the door. But what about an app that does the opposite, rewarding users every time they walk in a participating merchant's store?

That's the hook for Shopkick, a mobile, location-based app that reward users with points that can be redeemed for in-store purchases and rewards from other merchants and brands who have partnered with Shopkick.

Cyriac Roeding, CEO and co-founder of Shopkick, said the app has more 5 million users and has delivered $200 million in revenue to Shopkick's 15 retail partners - including Target and Best Buy.

While Shopkick is not primarily about anti-showrooming, Roeding explained, it can tend to help depress that activity. The main objective, Roeding said, is to get foot traffic in the door. Shopkick also includes features designed to help customers shop and discover products before they enter the store.

3. Provide Service... With A Smile

One thing missing from most product retailers these days is the need to repair anything. In our mostly disposable society, it is usually cheaper and faster to junk a broken product rather than have it repaired.

That means most buyer's connection with a store ends the moment they walk out the door with their purchase - reducing the differentiation from online retailers. It doesn't have to be that way. If post-purchase service doesn't make sense, what about training and support? 

4. Make Shopping An Event

Special events offer another way to entice buyers into brick and mortar stores. Grocery stores can set up cooking classes. Apparel outlets can host fashion shows. Any special and even semi-regular event that convinces your customers to come back will strengthen the perception that  connection and make it less likely the customer will use your store for showrooming.

5. Don't Panic

What retailers don't need to do is panic. Most customers don't walk into a store with showrooming in mind; they're there to shop, as quickly or as leisurely as they would have been before smartphones came along. Pay attention to customers' needs, put in the extra effort and, as the stats still indicate, they'll likely follow buy from you, not from some faceless online retailer.

(Need more? See also Showrooming: 5 Ways Retailers Can Fight Back [Slideshow].)

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Online television offers a truly dizzying array of choices. Viewers of services like Hulu and Netflix, as well as customers of iTunes and Amazon Digital Services, can stream, rent or purchase episodes of television shows from every era.

But not every show that ever aired is legally available online. Surprisingly, there are plenty of high-profile shows that are not available for online consumption – not even for purchase. For a variety of reasons, there are some seriously popular (or once-popular) shows that you just can't find online.

Here's my list of the concluded shows that were popular in their day and are not currently available online in any streaming form. DVD collections do not count, and the show doesn't have to be free online: shows on HBO Go are regarded as online, even if you have to subscribe to HBO to get them. (I'm looking at you, Sopranos.) And because legal is the watchword here, I am not going to count the ways you can download copies of episodes with BitTorrent or watch them on YouTube.

Note that the availability of online shows is constantly shifting. The Cosby Show was once on Netflix, then off, and now is on Hulu Plus. Nor is this list complete: you may have your own favorites that you can't find online. Stick around until the end, though; I've included linkst to a set of tools that can find shows even on obscure networks.

1. Batman

Image courtesy of Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television

Thanks to the DC Comics/Warner Brothers money machine, you can view Batman animated series episodes practically anywhere on the Internet. But the original 1966-1968 classic show starring Adam West and Burt Ward is not showing online at any Bat-time or any Bat-channel. For comic-book aficionados, this is both bad (it's Batman!) and good (the Batusi? Really?). But at the end of the day, who wouldn't want to relive the harrowing cliff-hangers we saw as kids while also catching the barely disguised innuendo we can detect as adults?

2. Full House

Image courtesy of Jeff Franklin Productions/Miller-Boyett Productions/Warner Bros. Television

Yeah, I cringed too. But the 1987-1995 run on ABC was hugely popular and its absence online is sure to be noted. This wholesome-to-the-max family drama with three men caring for three girls (trust me, it worked) actually poked a few holes in the usual sitcom situation, especially with the notion that dads could parent, too.

3. The Golden Girls

Image courtesy of Witt/Thomas/Harris Productions

In the days when comedy shows reigned supreme, this one showed viewers that old could mean funny. For seven seasons, from 1985-1992, this NBC show featuring four sharp women was acerbic enough keep even younger audiences interested. But older audiences flocked to this show, and might again if it was more widely distributed online.

4. The Honeymooners

Image courtesy of Jackie Gleason Enterprises

"To the moon, Alice!" Or at least to the nearest IP address, please. But alas, the comedic genius of Jackie Gleason and an incredible cast of comedy veterans is not to be found online now. Popular from 1953-1956, and then even more when it was revived as a part of a variety show from 1966-1970 (with sporadic episodes throughout the '70s), this comedy about working-class couples remains timeless.

5. Little House on the Prairie

Image courtesy of Ed Friendly Productions/NBC Productions

For about a season, maybe two, this NBC family drama followed the books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder fairly closely. But the popularity of the family drama pushed the writers to expand the Ingalls-verse to keep the show going. Until the end, it mostly worked. The saga of Charles Ingalls and his family in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was compelling and genuinely warm, even if it bore little resemblance to history.

6. M*A*S*H

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox Television

One of the longest-running shows on television, this medical procedural/comedy/war series ran for 11 seasons on CBS, bringing the Korean War into our homes every Monday night. You wouldn't think a show about a medical unit in a proxy war in Asia would be a hit so soon after the actual Vietnam War, but it was. The chemistry of the cast and the razor-sharp writing kept this show alive far longer than the conflict in which it was set. I'd like my kids to see this one.

7. Mork and Mindy

Image courtesy of Henderson Productions/Miller-Milkis Productions/Paramount Television

This spin-off from Happy Days (yes, go look it up) followed the adventures of one Mork from Ork in Boulder, Colorado, for four seasons. Not a long run, but Robin Williams, Pam Dawber - and even the late Jonathan Winters - created a show full of insane improvisation and sheer goofiness… and maybe a valid mirror on human behavior. That it's not online now? ShazBot, somebody call Orson.

8. The Six Million Dollar Man

Image courtesy of Kenneth Johnson

You can rebuild him. You can make him better than he was before. Faster. Stronger. But if you want to actually watch Lee Majors as the world's first bionic man online? Forget it, the show's locked up tighter than the OSI. Okay, so the show doesn't rank up there with the greats, but it was pretty decent sci-fi that managed to bring super-heroics to the screen and show us a surprisingly realistic future of bionics. Even if they always did run in slow motion.

9. Thirtysomething

Image courtesy of The Bedford Falls Company/United Artists Television

I may be one of the few people on the planet that has never watched a single episode of this show, but there's no denying its impact as an ensemble drama that drew in the lucrative demographic of, well, thirtysomethings to ABC for four seasons. The show's depiction of baby boomers in their thirties was smart, well-written and very much loved by its viewers.

10. The Waltons

Image courtesy of Lorimar Productions

This nine-season family drama based on the novel Spencer's Mountain ran from 1972-1981 depicting the lives of a rural Virginia family in the midst of the Great Depression and World War II. This was a big family, too, with seven kids, the parents, and the grandparents all trying to make do in one of the roughest American economies ever. A lot of people make fun of this show, pegging it as pure schmaltz. Yet the Waltons enjoy a lifestyle that many people not-so-secretly strive for - and might watch all over again.

Good night, John-Boy.

Find Your Own Favorites

If you are not sure if the show you want to watch is online anywhere, try Sidereel, which does a pretty good job listing the online availability of shows. It's not 100% accurate, though, so if your results come up empty, try Hulu next.

Even if you are not a Hulu subscriber, you can still search for TV episodes on the site. If Hulu does not have them, it may point you to other sources (like cable channel websites) where the show can be watched.

You might also try Netflix, which often changes show availability at the drop of a hat.

Hopefully, all your favorite shows will be online someday. Until then, what shows are you missing?

Lead image courtesy of Henderson Productions/Miller-Milkis Productions/Paramount Television

Contextual search and the Internet of Things are two key factors in how search is evolving from users actively searching for information to users receiving information as they need it.

But there is another key component that must be added to the search equation: the rise of intelligent software agents that will not only anticipate the information you need, but also act on that information to help manage your life.

(See also Forget Searching For Content - Content Is About To Start Searching For You and How The Internet Of Things Will Revolutionize Search.)

The Dawn Of The Bot Age

Call it artificial intelligence, software agents or even bots, the technology for search-related automated prediction and action has been in development for a long time. (In fact, I used to cover this topic when I was the managing editor for BotSpot.com at the turn of the century.)

(See also Futurist's Cheat Sheet: Artificial Intelligence.)

In those days, bot development was focused on creating automated software to handle the routine tasks that were proliferating on the then-fledgling commercial Internet. Web crawlers, software that actively seeks out and indexes websites for search engines, were one very popular use of software bots. But there was always a goal beyond the mundane world of Web crawlers and software trying to reasonably fake a Turing test to appear human: developers wanted the software to take specific tasks completely off the hands of humans.

Over a decade later, we may finally be getting to the point where bots can actually do that.

It is not that the development of intelligent agents stalled during the first decade of the 21st Century. Instead, we may not have been quite ready to implement them. Automating routine tasks just didn't seem like the top priority during the beginnings of the mobile revolution.

Now things have changed. First, and most obviously, mobile devices are everywhere. Second, there are now legions of interesting Web services to automate. The final ingredient is the most important: With the rise of Big Data, there is now enough information available for a software agent to actually use to perform anticipatory actions. In that context, the challenges of applying software agents and artificial intelligence to business solutions is nothing compared to the potential payoff to users.

(See also How The Internet Will Tell You What To Eat, Where To Go And Even Who To Date.)

Dr. Moshe BenBassat, CEO of ClickSoftware, it is fair to say, lives and breathes this stuff every day. BenBassat envisions a world where personal agents, which he calls “butlers,” manage the day-to-day planning and implementing of workflows.

The "Butler" Did It

BenBassat offers an example to illustrate: Imagine a service technician who logs into his smartphone’s service app and pulls up today’s schedule. His first appointment: the Acme Bank downtown. A few more swipes pulls the address from the calendar app and then brings up a map in the navigation app, and off the technician goes. When he arrives at Acme, he finds and calls the customer contact, who has to come down to the lobby and admit him into the building. Once arriving at the customer site on the 17th floor, the technician discovers he has left the replacement part in his vehicle, so he goes back down to get it.

In a scenario like this, BenBassat estimates the technician would spend 7-12 minutes just swiping and typing on the phone to find and use the data he needs. Over the course of the day, that adds up to a lot of lost productivity.

In a world staffed by BenBassat’s butlers, the scenario might unfold like this: The service technician logs into his phone’s service and is immediately informed about the first appointment: the Acme Bank downtown. The butler asks if the technician if he would like a map to the appointment, and after agreeing, off the technician goes, using the map to reach his destination. Just before he arrives at Acme, the butler autodials the customer contact and informs her the technician is about to arrive, so she can come down to the lobby and let him into the building. When the technician leaves his vehicle, the butler senses that the replacement part is not in toolkit the technician is carrying, and prompts the technician to grab it from the truck, saving the trip back down to the vehicle.

"Butlers" like the ones BenBassat describes promise to play a huge role in changing search - and by extension the way we work. Proactive software agents will reduce the need to waste time looking for information. Instead, information will be delivered right when we need it. As software agents get better at figuring out what we want, that information will become more useful and actionable.

We are almost there now: Contextual search tools like Google Now, which takes into account where you are and what you are doing to provide useful information, are the first big step towards anticipatory and responsive software agents.

(See also Google Now Knows More About You Than Your Family Does - Are You OK With That?)

The Interaction Issue

There is still a ways to go. Social interaction is seen as the biggest obstacle to effective software agents. Agents are only as good as what they are programmed to do, while humans have internalized a lot of common-sense tricks for interpreting reality. We know what we mean when we say, "find me some pizza," but the software agent might give you a map of nearby pizza places - or just call up pictures of pizza.

In the consumer world right now, Apple's Siri is the most well-known example thus far of how a software agent will interact with humans, though it has its limitations, both in speech recognition and plain common sense. As that interaction is smoothed out, though, it is not hard to imaging giving agents like Siri or Google Now's voice search more permissions to act on the information at hand, instead of just reporting it. Once that hurdle is overcome, all of that predictive and contextual information that the Internet is starting to finding for us will have a smooth, human-like interface and better able to help us manage our days.

(See also Who Has The Advantage: Siri Or Google Now?)

Why Search Anymore?

Searching for anything - be it on the Internet, your inbox or on your personal devices and services - will be far less necessary, both in business and personal contexts. Search is not just firing up Google, after all - it also includes combing through your own data for relevant information. When your spouse has a last-minute meeting and can’t pick up the kids from after-school sports, for example, you won't have to go though a complicated dance of multiple phone calls, texts and emails as you re-arrange both your schedules and stress out over making sure someone gets there on time. Instead, your search agents could analyze and coordinate both your schedules and create a single suggestion to line everything up. All you'd have to do is agree to the changes.  

The combination of automated agents, contextual search and a sea of data from our devices, services and the Internet of Things, search is poised to become vastly more useful and efficient than it already is. The pieces are getting there with agents like Siri and contextual search like Google Now. If it all works as promised, information we need will be delivered to us just when we need it, without our having to invest time and effort looking for it.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted its annual report on which Internet vendors do the most to help protect their users's private information. And this year's two best protectors by the EFF's definition? Twitter and Internet Service Provider Sonic.net.

Each of these two vendors scored well within the EFF's six criteria used to judge online services in the organization's Who Has Your Back? 2013 report posted today.

For the EFF, the most privacy-oriented companies should comply with these policies:

• Requiring a Warrant for Content
• Telling Users About Government Data Requests
• Publishing Transparency Reports
• Publishing Law Enforcement Guidelines
• Fighting for Users’ Privacy in Court
• Fighting for Users’ Privacy in Congress

Each rated company gets a star when it does well with one of these criteria. Twitter and Sonic.net nailed it with six stars. LinkedIn, Dropbox and storage service SpiderOak received five stars, having each missed the fighting for users’ privacy in court category.

The worst performers in the EFF's round-up of privacy advocacy? Social media platform MySpace and cellular carrier Verizon, which were awarded no stars at all. Apple, AT&T and Yahoo, only received one start apiece, with the latter getting the award for pushing back in the courts and the other two companies achieving the fighting for users' privacy in Congress star.

Overall, the EFF thinks that things are getting better among these vendors that deal with so much user data.

"We’re happy to report that several of the companies included in last year’s report have significantly improved their practices and policies concerning government access to user data," the organization reported, "Comcast, Google, SpiderOak, and Twitter earned two new stars this year while Microsoft earned three new stars. Foursquare went from zero stars in 2012 to four in 2013."

The report might seem a bit disjointed in its approach, lumping a lot of companies in together with the only common thread being the handling of user data. Users' expectations on a social network like Facebook is much different than privacy concerns on Verizon or Amazon.

But this is a report about government overreach, not expectations of privacy. The government may be able to see your data on your Facebook page, but to use it in a trial or investigation, they should still use a warrant, the EFF is arguing. Users may be surprised to see so many large data handlers that don't even have that basic requirement.

Things are getting better, but there is still a long way to go.

If you're looking for a U.S.-based cloud provider to host your business applications and data, you might want to take note of one new report that ranks the performance levels for providers in 2012. The results might surprise you, because it turns out that size and location may make a big difference in overall performance.

The data was provided to ReadWrite via Compuware's CloudSleuth service, which monitors the on-going availability and response time of providers around the world. The CloudSleuth application is hosted by cloud providers just like any other customer's app and is constantly polled for metrics from 17 locations around the U.S.

Global Cloud Availability, Past 30 Days

The data for the rank list was aggregated over the 2012 calendar year, measuring average response time, availability, and consistency. Consistency is the standard deviation of the response time, indicating the range of values for the reported response times over the course of the year, according to Compuware APM Technology Strategist Stephen Pierzchala.

To come up with the overall ranking, Pierzchala explained, the company combined the individual ranks for all of the three categories.

In 2012, based on overall rank, the top five providers were:

1. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
2. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
3. Qube (US East - New York)
4. Layered Tech (US South - Texas)
5. Layered Tech (US Central - Missouri)

Not exactly widely known providers, are they? The players with more notoriety - like Rackspace, Google, Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services - are conspicuously missing from the top five listing. Looking at the rest of the list, Rackspace's Texas facility rolled in at number 6 overall, with Windows Azure's Illinois data center tying for ninth. Google App Engine was ranked number 15, and the highest Amazon Web Service rank was the EC2 facility in California, which came in at number 26 in a list of 38.

Fly-Over States Rock

There's another interesting pattern, one that leaped out as soon as Pierzchala pointed it out.

"If you look at the first 10-15 providers, they're almost all located in the center of the U.S.," he noted.

Location, it seems, makes a big difference in where you choose to host your cloud applications. If you are one of the coasts, there's a certain logic to hosting your cloud applications and data in a facility that is in the middle of the country, where all users, wherever they are, can roughly traverse as the same amount of network to get to the actual cloud machine. Balancing your data and app use geographically can provide real benefits.

North America Cloud Response Times, Past 24 Hours

That the top-ranked providers are all smaller providers may not be an accident, either. Larger providers may have slower response times ands availability by virtue of the fact they are working with so many customers and web applications. If that's the case, there may be something to using a smaller provider that's not located on one of the Coasts.

The full overall rank list is below, followed by the top 10 providers in terms of average response time and availability for 2012, respectively.

2012 Top U.S. Cloud Providers

1. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
2. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
3. Qube (US East - New York)
4. Layered Tech (US South - Texas)
5. Layered Tech (US Central - Missouri)
6. Rackspace (US South - Texas)
7. GMO Cloud (US West - California)
8. PeakColo (US West - Colorado)
9. SoftLayer (US East - Virginia)
9. TekLinks (US South - Alabama)
9. Windows Azure (US Central - Illinois)
12. SoftLayer (US South - Texas)
13. SoftLayer (US West - Washington)
13. US Signal (US Central - Michigan)
15. Google App Engine
16. ElasticHosts (US West - California)
17. BlueLock (US Central - Indiana)
18. CloudSigma (US West - Nevada)
19. Dimension Data (US East - Virginia)
20. ElasticHosts (US South - Texas)
20. TekLinks2 (US South - Alabama)
22. SoftLayer (US West - California)
23. GoGrid (US West - California)
24. Cartika (US South - Texas)
25. Dimension Data (US West - California)
26. Amazon EC2 (US West - California)
27. Terremark (US East - Florida)
28. eApps (US East - Georgia)
29. Amazon EC2 (US East - Virginia)
29. Green House Data (US West - Oregon)
31. eApps (US East - Virginia)
32. GoGrid (US East - Virginia)
33. Voxel (US East - New York)
34. Claris Networks (US South - Tennessee)
35. Green House Data (US West - Wyoming)
36. Voxel (US West - California)
37. Bit Refinery (US Central - Colorado)
38. PhoenixNAP (US West - Arizona)

2012 Top 10 U.S. Cloud Providers (By Average Response Time)

1. Windows Azure (US Central - Illinois)
2. Layered Tech (US South - Texas)
3. Rackspace (US South - Texas)
4. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
5. SoftLayer (US South - Texas)
6. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
7. Qube (US East - New York)
8. Layered Tech (US Central - Missouri)
9. PeakColo (US West - Colorado)
10. BlueLock (US Central - Indiana)

2012 Top 10 U.S. Cloud Providers (By Availability)

1. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
2. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
3. SoftLayer (US East - Virginia)
4. Terremark (US East - Florida)
5. US Signal (US Central - Michigan)
6. SoftLayer (US West - Washington)
7. GMO Cloud (US West - California)
8. Green House Data (US West - Oregon)
9. Amazon EC2 (US East - Virginia)
10. Qube (US East - New York)

Story images and data courtesy of Compuware.

Ah, public Wi-Fi. That magical tool that lets you surf the Internet at your favorite coffee house, bookstore or the mall. (Because nothing says cool like surfing at the food court.)

As much of a boon as using the Internet in public places can be, there are always risks involved whenever you are connected to a public network. Here are five steps you can take to help keep your public Web activities secure.

Beware Fake Wi-Fi

You sit down at the bookstore, fire up the laptop and lo and behold, you see the store's network name (SSID). But wait, what's this? An even stronger signal from an SSID that's wide open. Strong signal equals better connection, so that's the one you want, right?

Think again.

Known as a man-in-the-middle attack, that shiny new (and possibly free-of-charge) Wi-Fi signal may not belong to the store at all, but rather someone else in the store who has set up their own Wi-Fi router to attract people just like you. Once you're using their signal versus the store's, they can monitor all of your Internet traffic using special software that can easily discern things like login and password information.

I actually discovered someone doing this at the local Borders a few years back when there was a local Borders. The kid had even mimicked the store name with the SSID "Borders_1". But I knew the real SSID and started looking around the stacks until I found him right in the middle of the store just sitting with his laptop.

Cities are particularly bad about this kind of thing because everywhere you go, there's a Wi-Fi signal. My favorite: the "FREE-WIFI_Here" SSID my computer saw when staying at a Midtown hotel in Manhattan.

If you are not sure about what the store's Wi-Fi SSID is, just ask, or look for a sign. Better to be sure than surf on someone else's network.

You Don't Know Where That's Been

You grab a seat at the table, stealing coffee and a scone in hand. And on the floor under the table, you see a thumb drive. Ever the helpful citizen, you pick it up and boot your laptop with the intent to insert the drive and see if you can figure out who it belongs to.

Stop, helpful citizen.

That USB drive may in fact have been planted there, waiting for a Good Samaritan like you to pick it up and do exactly that. And instead of finding a file that says "This drive belongs to…" you will probably find trojan malware that will infect your machine so a hacker can get into it then, or later.

This is a method of breaking into your system that goes beyond public Wi-Fi, too. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security conducted a study where they left USB drives and discs in the parking lots of government buildings. When found, 60% of the government workers - who really should have known better - plugged the drives into their office computer. If the thumb drive or CD case had an official logo, 90% of the workers would plug them in.

If you find a drive or CD somewhere public, and want to be helpful, turn it in to the nearest lost and found and let that be your good deed for the day.

Cowboy Up

In Westerns, the gunslinger always sits with his back to the wall - so as to avoid getting shot from behind when someone walked in the door spoiling for a fight.

That's not a bad plan, when it comes to public Wi-Fi. If at all possible, find a seat where there's no way someone can be behind you. You don't want anyone looking over your shoulder or worse, recording you when you are typing in critical information.

Don't Share Your Internet

Very occasionally, you may get someone who is desperate to use your computer or smartphone to check something on the Internet. Put your foot down and say no, even if they say it's an emergency.

First, if its really an emergency, they should be calling someone, not communicating with Facebook or email. Second, even if you watch them to make sure they insert nothing into your computer, all it takes is a quick visit to a known malicious site on another browser tab to get your machine infected.

Don't Login

I have a pretty standard rule of thumb about surfing in public: never conduct banking transactions or visit a credit card website account. If I absolutely have to, I will use my phone's cellular connection to get to the bank Web site, but never with Wi-Fi I am just visiting.

But beyond that, I don't sign into Facebook or Twitter in a public place, either. If I want to use those networks, or anything similar, I use an app on the phone that's already signed in. That way, there's nothing to spy on and see.

Surfing in public doesn't have to be dangerous to your online identity, but you should always take care about your personal safety in a public place, and that includes your online activities.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.