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News

• Barnes & Noble launches Nook Tablet

  Barnes & Noble launched its widely expected tablet Monday, taking on the soon-to-be released tablet from book-selling rival Amazon with a machine that has slightly better specs.

• Amazon sets up Kindle lending library

  Amazon.com announced the launch of an e-book lending library for Kindle users, that allows Amazon Prime members to borrow books for free, as frequently as a book a month, and without due dates.

• Where there are clouds, there's lightning (and other cloud disaster tips)

  They say that lightning doesn't strike twice, but apparently a single bolt of lightning can take out two cloud provider data centers at once. At least that's what initial reports cited as the cause of <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218970/Lightning_strike_in_Dublin_downs_Amazon_Microsoft_clouds">concurrent outages</a> at the Dublin data centers that serve as Microsoft's and Amazon's major cloud computing hubs for Europe. These reports serve as a good reminder of why it's a good idea to consider disaster recovery and business continuity when contracting with a <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/topic/158/Cloud+Computing">cloud</a> computing provider.

• Opera responds to Amazon's Cloud-powered 'Silk' browser

  One of to features of Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire tablet drawing attention is its WebKit-based 'Silk' Web browser. What makes Silk different from most browsers is its 'split browser' approach: Putting together complicated Web pages in Amazon's Cloud infrastructure before downloading the end result to the browser.

• Amazon inks deal with Fox for 2,000+ streaming movies

  Amazon announced Monday that it would add more than 2,000 TV shows and movies to its streaming video services this fall in a new partnership with Fox. The new content, which includes classic movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and TV shows like the X-Files and the cult hit Arrested Development, will bring the total number of instant streaming titles on Amazon to more than 11,000.

• Here's how Kindle tablet could shake up the market

  Amazon's unveiling of a Kindle tablet would shake up the industry and pose one of the biggest threats to the Apple iPad -- which is why the technology world has its eyes on the online retailer as it prepares for a media gathering in New York this week ahead of the holiday season.

• Staying alive after migrating to the cloud

  Multi-tenant cloud providers might promise greater resiliency, ‘five nines’ uptime and better security than some in-house managed infrastructure, but organisations would be wise not to assume the provider has covered all bases.

• Amazon AWS algorithms watch for cloud-based hacks

  The hack of Sony's PlayStation Network in April this year was launched from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform. But Amazon is keen to emphasise that it has procedures in place to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

• Tech Ed 2011: Australian data centre makes no economic sense, Microsoft says

  Despite plans flagged by Dell and Amazon to establish Australian data centres, Microsoft has quashed any speculation it will do the same.

• Cloud storage providers need sharper billing metrics

  Purveyors of cloud storage services may be doing their customers, or themselves, a disservice by relying on imprecise metrics for billing, argued a researcher at a Usenix conference.

• Industry agrees on security vulnerability reporting format

  Three years after its founding, the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI) is starting to bear fruit with the launch of version 1.0 of its framework designed to allow tech vendors to more easily share data on software vulnerabilities.

• Google reportedly launching online music locker service

  Google is expected to announce Tuesday its new music service, that will allow users to store their music online, according to reports.

• Amazon Cloud Player now works with iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch

  Amazon's Cloud Player music streaming service launched only with Android compatibility, but an update rolled out this weekend quietly introduced basic support for Apple's iOS. If you have an Amazon Cloud Drive account (5GB free, plus a free 20GB upgrade if you purchase an album via Amazon MP3), you can now stream music on iOS devices too.

• Amazon Cloud outage bad for business

  Outages to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offerings over the weekend have received plenty of global coverage, but they left at least one Australian business frustrated.
  

• Lawson Software takes page from Apple with marketplace

  Lawson Software is taking a cue from Apple, Amazon and others, announcing on Monday the Lawson Marketplace, an online store where customers can use a credit card to buy a range of add-on tools for their ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.