Photos: Hands-on with Pandora's Internet radio iPhone app

Apple publicly unveiled the Pandora Internet radio iPhone and iPod Touch application during the unveiling of the iTunes App store on Thursday, July 10. Tim Westergren, CEO for Pandora, was kind enough to give me a personal tour of the new application. The following is a synopsis of just about every question I had for Tim. Editors' note: This is not an interview transcript, but a roundup of information on the Pandora iPhone application presented in a FAQ format.

How much will iTunes charge for the Pandora application?

It's free.

Will the iPhone version of the Pandora application stream … Read more

Coordinating fireworks to music

Watching this year's Fourth of July fireworks display in Seattle, I wondered (not for the first time) how they coordinate the fireworks with the musical soundtrack--the hearts exploding right at the climax of "Unchained Melody," or the long fizzy streamers during the theremin part of "Good Vibrations," for instance. Not surprisingly, software's the answer.

The Seattle display was operated by a company called Pyro Spectaculars based out of Rialto, Calif., which reportedly uses a highly customized or home-built system to coordinate the music to the displays. But other pyrotechnicians might use combined hardware-software systems … Read more

How Facebook stays afloat adding 250,000 users per day

A few weeks ago I talked with Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, about the challenge of innovating quickly and building stable infrastructure while 250,000 new members are added to the social network every day. Check out the video on ZDNet.

Q: You've been at Facebook, I think, for about a year and it's been quite a ride I guess, scaling up from zero in 2004 to over 80 million today. How do you keep up with that hyper growth? Heiliger: You're absolutely right--we've had a lot of growth. We add over … Read more

Cloud computing hangover

After attending GigaOM's Structure 08, I came away with a cloud-computing hangover. Just trying to define cloud computing is daunting given all the hype and companies thunderclapping.

Today the research firm Gartner has jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon, proclaiming that it "heralds an evolution of business that is no less influential than e-business," and defining it as massively scalable IT-related capabilities provided as a service using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.

Yahoo just announced a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which will develop computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. What was Yahoo … Read more

Wirewize tells you how to wire your entertainment center

Good idea alert: A newish site, Wirewize, tells you how to connect the gizmos in your home entertainment center. You tell it what you have, and it tells you which cables you need and then, very specifically, where to plug them.

It's a great idea, since most entertainment systems are unique in one way or another, and the manuals that come with AV gear rarely cover all the bases, not to mention that they're written at varying levels of clarity. To remind you of that, the service also provides the PDF manuals for your products.

I enjoy wiring … Read more

Cloud computing on the horizon

SAN FRANCISCO--Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. "We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way," he said. He made a similar prediction last year.

Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability. … Read more

Is Google's BigTable too private?

SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:

Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer, Google Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent Tony Lucas, CEO, XCalibre Communications Lew Moorman, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, Rackspace Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T

The panelists agreed that there will be open and proprietary, as well as specialized, cloud platforms. The discussion got a little heated between Google's Bisciglia and Joyent's Hoffman on the … Read more

Amazon's blueprint for cloud computing

In the early morning at Structure 08, AMR Research's Jonathan Yarmis described various tech trends around cloud computing. Mendel Rosenblum, a founder and technical lead behind VMware, outlined the role of virtualization in data centers.

Now Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO at Amazon.com, is talking about why Amazon is in the cloud computing business, how it got there, and why customers should want it. Instead of every company or developer doing the heavy lifting, dealing with the "muck" as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say, Amazon opened up its software-as-a-service stack (Amazon Web Services) … Read more

The new geek chic: Data centers

Forget about flashy Web 2.0 applications. The real, geeky coolness of the Web is the growing acreage of data centers that deliver bits to billions of devices. At GigaOM's Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, infrastructure--"clouds" of servers, storage and networks--was the headliner.

Jonathan Yarmis, vice president of advanced, emerging and disruptive technologies at AMR Research, said changes in the next five years will make the past Internet revolution feel like child's play. He didn't explain exactly how the next five years will be more revolutionary than evolutionary, but outlined the … Read more