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Bungee Labs extends its application hosting options

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications. … Read more

Google your name, make a movie on what you find

You know you've done it. Like just almost anyone who knows how to use a computer, I'm willing to bet you've googled your own name to see what's out there about you, and to see who else has the same name.

In the case of a sometimes actor from Los Angeles named Jim Killeen, that search instinct not only led to at least 24 namesakes, but also to a documentary about his experiences tracking some of them down and visiting them around the world.

Killeen's film, Google Me, which he is debuting on Friday on … Read more

Live Blog WWW2008: Kai-Fu Lee of Google Greater China on cloud computing

I'm now sitting in the opening keynote of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) here in Beijing, adjacent to the newly opened Olympic Stadium.

The first presentation is by Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China. He's talking about "cloud computing," the general term for developing ways to turn our computer lives into something not tied to any single device.

So far, he's been outlining what cloud computing is, something that he admits is not news to anyone in this room full of industry and academic researchers, and highlighting all of Google's … Read more

Google sued over advertising program

Updated 2:30 p.m. PDT with comment from the plaintiff lawyer.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court accuses Google of deceiving its customers into paying for ads they didn't expressly request.

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed by the firm of Kabateck Brown Kellner in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., on behalf of David Almeida, a Massachusetts-based private investigator who enrolled in Google AdWords in November 2006.

When participating in Google's online auction-based advertising system, customers specify what they would be willing to pay per-click for words or phrases that … Read more

Hot kilowatts: Infinia, Stirling Energy Systems, eSolar get money

Three solar-thermal companies have raised money in the past week in a sector that's showing life, despite a choppy investment environment.

Infinia on Tuesday said it has taken $7 million from Asian contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group, part of a total of $57 million in a Series B round first announced in February.

The company uses a dish to concentrate sunlight onto a Stirling engine, which makes electricity. It intends to sell its 3-kilowatt devices to small-scale utility plants.

On Monday, eSolar said it has raised $130 million from Idealab and Google.org. Its solar-thermal systems, designed for utility-scale … Read more

Ex-Googler tip: Build start-ups in packs of three

Three: It's the magic number.

Googlers have long had a geeky obsession with numbers. The name Google, after all, is a play on the mathematical term "googol"; one of the company's office buildings is named "Pi"; and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set the search giant's public offering price at $2,718,281,828, the product of the natural logarithm "e" and $1 billion.

So it seems only fitting that ex-Googlers--of which there are many these days--are setting a new trend when it comes to starting their own companies. The … Read more

Ex-Googlers working on stealth social search

Nathan Stoll, former product lead of Google News, has been quietly working on a new social search service he started with the help of two other Google refugees, CNET News.com has learned. The site, called Mechanical Zoo, is poised to launch in beta next month.

The San Francisco company, which is about 9 months old, has an impressive team of tech veterans. It was co-founded by Stoll; Max Ventilla, a former business development manager at Google; and Damon Horowitz, a longtime computer scientist and former lead engineer of Perspecta, a search software company that sold to Excite@Home in … Read more

Big week in Microsoft-Yahoo battle

This week is shaping up to be a big one in Microsoft's nearly 3-month-old effort to acquire Yahoo.

The software maker has set a Saturday deadline for Yahoo to come to the bargaining table or else face a proxy fight.

Coloring the state of things will be earnings reports from both Microsoft and Yahoo due this week. Yahoo reports Tuesday, while Microsoft is set to release quarterly numbers on Thursday.

Those reports are all the more significant in that Microsoft's bid (at least so far) is half stock. A good earnings report from Yahoo might put pressure on … Read more

Report: Google plans to hire 200 in China this year

Google wants be the search market leader in China within the next five years, and it's hiring the workforce to back up that desire.

Kai-Fu Lee, president of the Google's Greater China operation, said in a recent interview with Reuters that the company plans to add 30 percent, or 200 people, to its Chinese operations this year. Lee said the company will maintain that pace of hiring over the next three to five years, in an attempt to overtake Baidu.com as the leading search provider in that country. He said the new jobs will come largely in … Read more