Atlassian seeks geeks in Europe
Atlassian, Australia's current darling-of-the-VCs, has orchestrated a European recruitment drive it says is designed to snare fifteen developers in fifteen days.
The company says it will be investing “millions” in creating new engineering positions in the year ahead and is looking offshore to fulfil the Australian tech brain drain.
Atlassian VP Joris Luijke, also a European import, said that the rapidly growing company was taking advantage of a depressed European job market hit by economic slump. “I expect more Australian tech companies to recruit in Europe,” Luijke forecast. Read more...
Google gets into the airline reservation business
Google isn't only rolling out new privacy changes today; the company is also dipping its toes in the airline reservation business.
Google and partner Cape Air, a small regional carrier based in Hyannis, Mass., announced the airline would be using an air reservation platform built by ITA Software, which was purchased by Google in July 2010.
According to Cape Air, the ITA booking platform will give its travelers:
- Easier shopping for one-way, round-trip and multicity flights and fares.
- Self-service tools for quickly making changes in reservations and itineraries.
- A booking flow that's smooth and secure.
The new reservation system can be accessed at the newly redesigned websites for Cape Air and Nantucket Airlines. It replaces a system put into place 48 years ago. Read more...
Microsoft to offer government-only cloud option for Office 365
Microsoft will offer U.S. government agencies the option to host their Office 365 suites in a dedicated "cloud community" reserved only for government customers, the company said on Thursday.
The new option, available today, is the latest effort targeting government agencies that sign up for Office 365, the cloud-based email and collaboration suite that includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office and other Microsoft applications.
Giving government agencies a variety of options is crucial because not all public sector customers have the same needs in terms of regulatory compliance, security, data privacy and product functionality, Microsoft said in a blog post. Read more...
How new Mac OS X security measures will affect your AppleScripts
To the average user, the two new security technologies coming to OS X this year -- sandboxing and Gatekeeper -- should be virtually invisible. But they could be all too visible to more advanced users, particularly those who use AppleScript and Automator.
As we've reported previously, Apple will soon require that all Mac App Store apps implement sandboxing, which forces developers to request specific permission (or, in developer-speak, "entitlement") from Apple to give their apps access to certain parts of a user's system. Few apps in the Mac App Store today use sandboxing, but come June all new apps and updates to existing ones will need to per Apple's revised rules. Read more...
AT&T’s app developer billing scheme: Will app makers buy in?
AT&T's trial balloon of charging app developers for bandwidth their users consume might not stay in the air very long.
John Donovan, AT&T's senior executive vice president for technology and network operations, told the Wall Street Journal this week that the carrier was considering developing "a feature" that would be "the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage" from the end user's perspective. Instead, the company whose app was being used would be the one to foot the bill for the bandwidth consumed. Or put another way: People using the app wouldn't incur any data usage on their monthly service plans but app developers would have to pay a price as condition of users' unlimited data use through the app. Read more...
Windows 8 preview breaks 1M download mark in first 24 hours
Microsoft today announced that customers had downloaded more than 1 million copies of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in its first day of availability.
The company released the preview Wednesday around 9:30 a.m. ET as Windows chief Steven Sinofsky was touting the new operating system's "no compromises" approach to integrating a touch-and-tablet user interface with the traditional Windows desktop.
"One day later...one million downloads of the consumer preview," said Microsoft in a tweet this morning from its Building Windows 8 Twitter account. Read more...
How Twitter users saved a wedding
Six weeks before their wedding day, a woman and her fiancé found themselves facing a nightmare: The events company organizing their wedding suddenly closed down and their deposit of over $7,000 was lost. "Totally devastated," the couple turned to Twitter for help. Could a group of strangers save their special day?
The Guardian's Steven Morris reports that things began when Lauren Lane, the bride-to-be from the UK county of Somerset, explained her situation. "Help needed with aspects of our wedding after venue goes bust with 6 weeks 2 go & with our £4.5k!" Read more...
iPad 3 may be nearly impossible to find
Hype is at a fever pitch for the iPad 3. With less than a week until Apple pulls back the curtain at the event, we’re probably only a couple of weeks away until the tablet goes on sale. It’s going to sell in record numbers, and we’d know this even if older iPads weren’t being traded in at unprecedented rates.
There may be one big problem with this though: there just won’t be enough iPads to go around. According to people with inside information at DigiTimes, those fancy new Retina Display LCDs may be in short supply until the second quarter of 2012.
When added to what is looking like unprecedented demand, this could make the iPad 3 an extremely hard-to-get product. This isn’t out of the norm for Apple releases, as store shelves are often bare for the first few weeks to months of a new product’s lifecycle. But the iPad 3 release could take this hard-to-get nature to a new level.
Face it: everyone is going to want that Retina Display. Apple will wow us at next Wednesday’s event, and people who don’t even use electronic devices will be asking you about that Retina Display. Owners of two generations of iPads will be pawning their old slates and looking to snag a shiny new iPad 3. But there won’t be enough for everyone. It’s going to be insanity.
Much will hinge on whether Apple takes pre-orders for the new tablet. The company typically does for new products, but there were no pre-orders for last year’s iPad 2 release. If there are pre-orders available, we’d recommend finding out the exact time that they begin (we’ll let you know here at Geek) and set your alarm. Call in from work if you have to, just get that pre-order in asap. It may be the only way that you’ll have an iPad 3 in your hand before April.
If there are no pre-orders, then prepare for a mad rush that will make Black Friday look like a leisurely stroll through the park.
(Source: geek.com)
Chrome to be deployed on State Department computers worldwide
Across the internet, Google Chrome is often touted as being the safest and fastest browser available — it’s even survived a hacking contest with big money prizes for anyone who is able to break in and cause trouble. The sandboxed way that Chrome operates, combined with the speed and fluidity of its updates, means that it just makes sense to give it a try. In fact, at last month’s State Department Town Hall meeting, that’s exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced they were going to do.
On January 26th, when Secretary Clinton was asked what could be done about the painfully slow update process for Internet Explorer, she announced that the State Department would be deploying Google Chrome to their offices worldwide. The conversation, which can be found at CSpan (skip to 35:00 or watch below), includes a deployment plan for Internet Explorer 8 as well. The official go-live date for Chrome was February 14th and for IE8 it will be March 20th. Read more...