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Target for iPad brings the giant shopping site to your iOS device, but its clunky interface might lead you to try a different shopping app. We were excited to see how Target handled its iOS app, but immediately after launching it became apparent it wasn't as good as competing apps.

To browse products in the Target app, you touch the Products button in the upper left. This brings up a pop-up-like window that lets you drill down through categories. Even when just trying to browse a category, the Target App took a long time to produce search results and … Read more

One day you might not own the games on your portable device. You might be renting them instead.

At least that's the vision from Seattle-based Big Fish Games, which has become the first developer to get a subscription-based video game on Apple's App Store, Bloomberg reports.

For $6.99 a month, users of the company's upcoming iPad application can play "dozens" of game titles within the single piece of software, versus the publisher coding each title as its own application and submitting it to the App Store. Those games are streamed to the app, versus … Read more

Occasionally we see some learned organization counting the number of bytes of data that humans have produced to date. And I've been known to scoff at these projections.

Seriously folks, even if you think that the number is 789.332 yottabyes on some given day--let's say today--the number is bigger tomorrow. And it gets bigger the next day. Even the rate of growth of the world's collective data is meaningless. Who would ever try to collect it all in one place and do something with it?

Oops. Someone actually is trying to collect all the data in … Read more

As everything moves to the cloud, the underlying network can make or break your apps.

To address the need for network visibility, Boundary, a developer of real-time network monitoring-as-a-service, today announced a $4 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Boundary, which is focused on providing continuous visibility into network and application traffic flows in public cloud environments, was founded by Ben Black, previously part of Amazon.com's infrastructure team, and Cliff Moon, who was part of Powerset (acquired by Microsoft).

In terms of business models, this is clearly a case where cloud computing has helped … Read more

Since Intel's Apple-only Thunderbolt standard offers up to 10Gbps of bandwidth, it doesn't seem to make sense to use it in a single-volume external storage device. This is because the device's internal drive, which would currently cap at the 6Gbps of the latest SATA 3 standard, will be the bottleneck of the whole package's performance.

LaCie, however, believes otherwise. Case in point: the Little Big Disk SSD, the first single-volume Thunderbolt storage device that's also based on an internal solid-state drive. And for the most part, it's a success.

The new external drive is … Read more

Spoiler alert: this is a blog post about world peace.

I've been spinning some cycles lately looking for free data. Why? Here's my thesis: As our use of the cloud evolves, we will come to understand that, to do powerful computational things, we not only don't need to own massive amounts of IT infrastructure, we don't even have to own the data. The cloud will offer us both. Think of it as big free data.

At the dawn of modern computing history, one needed millions of dollars to buy big iron to do serious computational things. … Read more

Now that people have had some time with their iPhone 4S, I'm sure many have had plenty of time to take pictures using the upgraded 8-megapixel camera. On it's own, the iPhone 4S takes great shots, but what if you want something more?

This week's iOS app collection is all about adding effects to your images. The first lets you flip through numerous effects and stack them for amazing results. The second offers tons of premade effects, but also gives you the option to adjust everything to your liking. The third app lets you play with the focused area of your image to produce visually unique images.… Read more

In a classic pairing of IT and renewable energy, an IBM supercomputer will optimize placement of wind turbines to improve performance.

IBM and Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas yesterday announced that the Firestorm supercomputer will analyze petabytes of data to maximize energy output of Vestas turbines.

The supercomputer crunches through weather reports, moon and tidal phase, sensor data, satellite images, and deforestation maps to generate the best placement of turbines, IBM said. Once installed, Vestas engineers will use the software to predict future performance and figure out the best time to do maintenance.

Predicting energy output of turbines is vitally … Read more

BrightSource Energy today disclosed plans to build a 750-megawatt solar power plant in California, which would be its third and largest utility-scale project.

The company said that the Rio Mesa Solar Electric Generating Facility will use its solar tower technology, where a field of mirrors reflects light onto a tower to create steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity. The project would generate enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes, BrightSource said.

The plan calls for installing three towers able to generate 250 megawatts each (before accounting for the energy consumed by their operation).

BrightSource earlier this … Read more