data

Online-productivity suite Zoho announced on Wednesday that it now accepts Google and Yahoo logins. An executive from Zoho parent company AdventNet announced last month that Google login compatibility was on the way.

"For Google and Yahoo users who are curious about Zoho but don't want to set up another account, we've removed that hurdle," Zoho 'evangelist' Raju Vegsna said in a release Wednesday. "Users don't have to create a Zoho account to use Zoho applications. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to try our online apps."

In addition … Read more

Updated at 2:20 p.m. PST.

Hewlett-Packard is in talks to buy Electronic Data Systems, HP confirmed Monday.

The Wall Street Journal initially reported the two have been in talks for HP to buy EDS for $12 billion to $13 billion, citing unnamed sources. An agreement between the world's largest computer maker and the IT services provider could come as early as Tuesday, according to the Journal.

Shares of HP were down 6 percent after the story posted, and HP confirmed that trading of its stock has been halted. EDS shares were up 27 percent on the news. … Read more

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, OpenID, DataPortability: Managing a bunch of different log-ins and passwords suddenly seems easy and straightforward.

Within a matter of days, some of the biggest names on the Web announced new projects that all have a roughly similar aim of making it possible for Web users to have a single social-media identity across the Internet--"data portability," as the general term has come to be known. MySpace.com was first out of the gate with the announcement of Data Availability, a way for members of the News Corp.-owned social network … Read more

Updated 3:15 PST May 12

As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming.

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.

"The Web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and … Read more

Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter … Read more

This post was updated at 10:34 a.m. PDT.

News Corp.-owned social-networking site MySpace has announced a new initiative called Data Availability, a way for members to share profile data with other social and community sites across the Web.

Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, and vice president of technology Jim Benedetto announced the new development in a press call Thursday. DeWolfe called it "an innovative offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile content and data to Web sites of choice throughout the Internet."

Inaugural partners in … Read more

When I checked Hitslink yesterday, it showed Apple's Mac jumping 52 percent. Now the number has retreated to a more reasonable number. People thought I was making up the Hitslink number - I wasn't. It's what I found when I visited the site, as captured in the graphic I show.

O'Reilly takes a stab at measuring Mac adoption. Undoubtedly, its data is flawed, too, as it admits.

Hitlink also had Firefox market share declining, though not by an unreasonable amount. Still, Mozilla says the Hitslink data is flawed.

The numbers don't lie...but they sure … Read more

The "slow food" movement came first, followed by "slow work" and even "slow medicine." Next, will people let the Internet relax a little for the sake of ecological sustainability?

Researchers are finding that data centers can make relatively simple power consumption tweaks that mimic those long available for personal computers, as New Scientist reports.

Energy-saving settings take several clicks to set up on Windows or Mac personal computers. But at data centers, where power consumption counts on a grander scale, equipment is often left on even when dormant.

Data centers' emissions of global warming … Read more

I've always wondered why European telcos were so stingy with their data plans, offering set data limits for a monthly fee when the U.S. carriers--so backwards in other ways--offered unlimited usage.

Well, Vodafone has finally taken off the blinders and is offering unlimited data to all of its customers ... for free, when it used to charge $15 per month.

The fine print is that "unlimited" means 500MB. (While in London recently I burned through 10MB per day, so 500MB may well effectively mean unlimited use.)

As in open source, the opportunity of the mobile web lies … Read more