Stories by Heather Havenstein

Human-based search engine in hiring mode

Mahalo, a search engine that uses people to come up with search results, has begun taking applications from people who want to be paid for researching queries.

Texas arrests seven sex offenders based on MySpace data

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said Thursday that police in the state have arrested six convicted sex offenders for violating parole by posting online profiles on MySpace.com. The social networking site provided data on the profiles to the attorney general.

Amnesty International taps tech to slow Darfur violence

Amnesty International USA will announce Wednesday a new effort to use satellite imagery and the Web to try to identify and stave off potential attacks against villagers in the Darfur region of Africa by Sudanese-government-backed militia.

Adobe LiveCycle adds Flex to build rich Internet apps

Adobe Systems Inc. has overhauled the architecture of its enterprise form-building tool set, infusing it with its Flex tool to let IT developers build rich Internet applications, the company announced on Monday.

Eager adopters create headaches for BI projects

Providing business intelligence tools to a large number of users can boost a company’s bottom line. However, some IT executives attending Information Builders’ recent Summit 2007 user conference in Las Vegas noted that wider use of the tools can also create problems for IT shops.

Don't let user resistance thwart BI projects

Business intelligence tools can bring a host of advantages to companies, but IT shops must first ensure that the technology is accepted by business users. This was the consensus reached by a panel of IT executives at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle earlier this month.

Microsoft rolls out mashup tool set for nontechies

Microsoft Corp. Friday announced the alpha release of Popfly, http://www.popfly.ms/ a combination tool set and social network that can help nontechnical users build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages and applications.

New SQL Server used new development process

At the first Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, held in Seattle last week, the company announced the target ship date and new details for the follow-on to SQL Server 2005. In an interview with Computerworld at the conference, Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of Microsoft's data and storage platform division, said the new version, code-named Katmai, will include support for unstructured data and offer new management features and improved scalability.

Farming co-op extends rollout of SOA tool

US agricultural company Southern States Cooperative is rolling out a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) tool companywide in an effort to boost the efficiency of developers now using several different technologies.

Sun set to open source Java products

Bob Brewin, software CTO at Sun Microsystems, said the company will discuss the state of its open-source plans for Java and present the first CommunityOne day for open source and Web developers at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week. In an interview with IDG, Brewin said that the company is on track to make all Java products available under the same General Public License (GPL) that Linux carries. He added that the company continues to mull over whether to make the Solaris operating system available under GPL. Solaris is now available under the Sun-created Community Development and Distribution License.

Digg.com user revolt: 'The community won'

Digg.com, the popular site where users determine the placement of new stories by voting, Tuesday found itself in the centre of what some are calling a test case for the power of user-generated content on social networking sites.

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