Nicholas Kolakowski

Adobe Systems has made its open-source ActionScript 3 Client Library available for the Facebook Platform, opening the latter even more to developers. Through the library, more than 60 free APIs are available as of March 31, allowing developers to combine Adobe’s Flash platform technologies into applications built for Facebook. Flash allows for the building of […]

Microsoft will be shutting down Encarta, that boon to high school researchers everywhere, by the end of 2009. The encyclopedia, which started in 1993, was having difficulty competing as a model against the collaborative online encyclopedias offered by Wikipedia and Google. The last version of the digital encyclopedia was Encarta Premium 2009, which according to […]

Google announced the creation of Google Ventures on March 30, a venture capital fund designed to invest in startups across the technology spectrum. By doing so, Google joins Intel and other companies in establishing a venture-capital arm for investment in smaller firms with potential. Google already has a philanthropic arm, Google.org, that has focused on […]

Google has announced that it will be working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on a pilot program that will let Medicare beneficiaries in Arizona and Utah import their claims data into Google Health. Google recently enabled users of Google Health to share their medical records and other personal health information with trusted […]

Hewlett-Packard further increased its presence in the cloud computing space with HP Cloud Assure, a software-as-a-service offering that incorporates a variety of security, performance and availability applications and analytics. In doing so, HP moves deeper into a competitive arena also occupied by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems and other players. The HP solution is available […]

Technology from Nvidia, Hewlett-Packard and Intel went into the Parallels Workstation Extreme, a high-end workstation virtualization solution launched by Parallels on March 30. The solution allows for “near-native performance for resource-intensive applications that utilize large memory support, multiple CPU cores and direct access to graphics cards,” Parallels said. With Workstation Extreme in place, “Users can […]

Worldwide enterprise software revenue will continue to be flat in 2009, growing at a miniscule 0.3 percent, according to research firm Gartner in a report issued on March 30.In dollar amounts, Gartner forecasts that enterprise software revenue will hit $222.6 billion, compared to 2008 revenues of $221.9 billion. The numbers represent a marked contrast to […]

Google Gmail Labs, the company’s testing ground for experimental features for its cloud-based e-mail service, is available in 49 languages as of March 30. Launched in June 2008, Labs (which, like the rest of Gmail, seems to be perpetually in beta) allows users to enable everything from YouTube previews in e-mail to custom label colors […]

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are major investors in Tesla Motors, which on March 26 revealed the prototype of its all-electric, zero-emission sedan, the Model S. The vehicle, which can accelerate from 0-60 mph in under 6 seconds and hit a top speed of 130 miles per hour, will feature a 17-inch touch-screen […]

Google laid off 200 employees from its sales and marketing teams on March 27, raising questions about its strength in the face of the current recessionary environment. The company claims that those jobs were slashed in order to eliminate overlapping positions, a side effect of years of explosive growth. However, coupled with the February 2009 […]