Fidelity Investments is one of the world's largest providers of financial services, with assets under administration of $4.7 trillion, and it didn't get there by using yesterday's technology. In fact, the company has a standalone group, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology – more commonly referred to as Fidelity Labs -- whose job it is to take the long view, to examine technologies years before they become mainstream and help the firm get a leg up.
There used to be a whopping 110 million attack messages per day spoofing the Twitter domain name as cyber-criminals blasted out fake Twitter e-mail at intended victims to try and fool them into opening dangerous malware-infested links and other scams. But by adopting a messaging authentication protocol called Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), Twitter has seen that number drop to a few thousand.
Ellen DeGeneres, the queen of awkward humor, set a record overnight for the most retweeted Twitter post of all time by squeezing a dozen of her closest Hollywood friends into a selfie during the Academy Awards show Sunday night.
Father of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe bravely dove back into the Reddit Ask Me Anything pool on Wednesday, deftly fielding questions from the masses about everything from techie topics like SDN to news topics like the NSA to random topics like bar fighting.
While Princeton University researchers predict Facebook could shed 80% of its users over the next few years, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist has the social network's back and says Facebook's prospects are good.
I recently decided, somewhat randomly, to experiment a bit more with social networking. I was on LinkedIn and at some point the service asked me if it could access my Gmail contact list.
Wikipedia and its users are planning more than 300 celebration events across six continents for the 10th anniversary of the free, online encyclopedia that has become an Internet juggernaut by spreading access to information with a model that lets anyone edit its articles.
Sure, companies have started using Web 2.0 tools, but one man says we've only seen a glimmer of the serious change that they're going to bring to the way we do business.
There's no doubt that 2009 was a rough year for startups and established businesses alike, but many are holding out hope that 2010 will be different, especially since venture capitalists seem to be loosening their purse strings. Keep an eye on these five businesses that offer fresh ideas to the Web 2.0 arena.
Last week I attended the <a href="http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09">GigaOM Structure 09 Conference</a>, which is an innovation-oriented cloud computing conference. One of the interesting things about the Silicon Valley-based event: it brought together a mix of different types of companies, emerging technology products and services, and people with cloud challenges:
