"Lakehead University in Canada was one of the first large-scale adopters of Google applications, but a storm has broken out after staff were told not to use it for personal or sensitive information. The problem arises because the information is stored on Google's servers in the US where authorities have the right to read everything Google stores under the Patriot Act."

Ah, the ugly side of cloud computing is emerging. And Google wants to get privacy standards unified? Fat chance, but with all of Google's resources, they should be able to built distributed datacenters in each country... they maybe open it up like Amazon has so ew can all benefit?

"While Perth will be the first Australian city with Google Transit, company officials said the search firm was in talks with other state transport authorities and expected the service eventually to be available Australia-wide."

Good luck Google if you're bringing this to Melbourne. Unless you cater for our broken system, all Google Transit will do is remind us what public transport should be.

"Why don't we have all the (applications) on the network - and by the way it's free," Mr Schmidt said in a dig at Microsoft."

Arrogant twat. Nice to see he conveniently forgets that we're actually giving Google all our data for free so they can effectively on-sell it and make more money at our expense. There's no such thing as a free lunch, people.

"Adobe Flex Builder 3 Pro is available for free to students and faculty of eligible education institutions."

Although Flex 3 is open source, there isn't a decent IDE out there for it apart from Adobe's commercial Flex Builder 3. Luckily, they've made it free for students here - just fill in the form and attach a scanned copy of your student card. Only takes a day or two to get the key. Pretty neat stuff.

"Ribbit, which is still in beta testing phase and set to launch in the coming months, is headed up by Silicon Valley tech veterans who plan to load their phone service with applications previously unavailable from a single phone network. Instead of simply displaying a caller ID, for example, Ribbit will create a mashup of relevant information culled from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, revealing what the caller is currently doing/reading/watching."

This is pretty neat, kind of like half-way between now and complete web integration on our phones. When will we get complete integration? Please....

"The Slashdot take on Blackboard’s setup is very informative - particularly this bit (cut down):
*It produces hundreds of megabytes of absolutely useless logs every day.
*The built in log archiving utility doesn’t work.
*It’s built primarily on Tomcat.
*Their support is nearly non-existent
*They use incredibly inefficient stored procedures which can bring down an entire system"

Read the linked slashdot thread. I'm just glad other people hated it and WebCT just as much and I wasn't just going crazy. And my new uni has it too (a slightly better version) - arrgh!

"As the environmental consequences of driving cars become ever more clear, consumers are increasingly aware of the benefits of alternative modes of transportation... Walkit's goal is to help consumers make more informed decisions about whether they choose to walk for all, or part, of any given journey... Users looking for walking routes simply enter their starting location and desired destination, along with whether they prefer the most direct route or the least busy one; there's also an option to request a route "via" some other spot along the way."

Melbourne needs this, with integration with our public transport, and probably with an option to avoid public transport when it screws up, like today.

"By offering a set of sophisticated project management tools, Kluster aims to enable crowds to develop new concepts... Anyone can initiate a project, and Kluster claims to use complex algorithms to let the brightest ideas surface, not just the loudest ones. Several companies have signed up to engage Kluster’s community and tap into their collective creativity. In the best case scenario, the crowds will help brands create new hit products."

One of the better executions of crowdsourcing out there. The idea of getting companies to use a platform like this to help focus their products is similar to my now dead loopboard project. One to keep an eye out for I reckon.

"With computers as common a household appliance as televisions now, who might be using your web-application has expanded beyond the realm of just the power user. Complicated menu systems, alert dialog messages that lock you out of the browser and flashy but confusing layouts aren’t necessarily going to help you make conversions. The Web user demographic has changed and to make your web application appeal to the masses your user interface needs to teach and to guide."

Nice article on the role of web user interfaces - some food for thought.

"More recently, we've started to see moves towards even greater integration of these Web 2.0 applications, with Redhat promoting the concept of the "online desktop", with a focus on using SaaS applications rather than locally installed ones. But what about security? Although the BBC made reference to issues with privacy, other security aspects were covered in a more positive way: your applications and data are being entrusted to "specialists", who will take care of everything."

Good concise post about the security implications of SaaS, or web apps in general really. Is it going to stop the wave of web apps? No, but we should be looking for better solutions to get the pros of SaaS without the cons.