Groupon scoops up Silicon Valley startup Adku

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Adku was founded in San Francisco a year and a half ago by a group of former Google employees. It specializes in using data to craft personalized shopping experiences on the Web and has financial backing from high-profile venture capital firms such as Greylock Partners and Battery Ventures. The latter firm is also an investor in Groupon.

via Groupon scoops up Silicon Valley startup Adku – chicagotribune.com.

From www.adku.com

Adku started a year and a half ago from our passion for big data and a desire to create products that would instantly and automatically give users a more personalized experience. We had ambitious goals and some of the most rewarding and busy days of our lives. We were also fortunate to assemble an amazing team of engineers and investors and create something special.  

Google to start hanging Internet cables today in KCK

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The BPU is owned by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, which penned the original agreement that secured the Google Fiber project — something more than 1,100 American communities actively lobbied for — for Kansas City, Kan.

That agreement had made the unusual stipulation that Google would be able to hang its wires, for free, in the upper part of the utility poles typically reserved for electrical lines. Utility companies sometimes attach their own communication cables on that part of the poles, but rarely allow third parties access to the space.

via Google to start hanging Internet cables today in KCK – KansasCity.com.

Why the House spectrum bill should be ditched

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I’ve also read that the House bill bars the FCC from paying for spectrum and then opening it up for unlicensed use. Can you comment on that?

I was the guy who created the idea of unlicensed spectrum. Several technologists and economists came to me and said that we need spectrum for short hops between computers and cable connections. That technology became known as Wi-Fi and it completely transformed the Internet experience, as everybody who has a computer knows.

via Why the House spectrum bill should be ditched: Q&A with Reed Hundt.

Soton boffins embed electronic components into optical fibres

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Rather than trying to merge flat chips with round optical fibres, the team of scientists used high-pressure chemistry techniques to deposit semiconducting materials layer by layer directly into tiny holes in optical fibres. This bypasses the need to integrate fibre-optics onto a chip, and means that the data signal never has to leave the fibre.

via Soton boffins embed electronic components into optical fibres – Techworld.com.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced in Novemebr that they had developed photonic chips that use light beams rather than electrons. The arrival of photonic computers could help speed traffic across fibre optic networks by eliminating a conversion process, the researchers said.

Pinterest online bulletin board soars as social media darling

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Pinterest went unnoticed for almost a year. Then it caught fire.

By December 2011, the number of U.S. unique visitors to Pinterest soared to 7.5 million, up from 418,000 in May, according to comScore Inc., a Chicago-based Internet research firm. That is a steeper ascent in traffic than the early days of Facebook, Twitter or MySpace, said comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman.

via Pinterest online bulletin board soars as social media darling – chicagotribune.com.

Half of Fortune 500s, US Govt. Still Infected with DNSChanger Trojan

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Rasmussen said there are still millions of PCs infected with DNSChanger. “At this rate, a lot of users are going to see their Internet break on March 8.”

via Half of Fortune 500s, US Govt. Still Infected with DNSChanger Trojan — Krebs on Security.

Given the Conficker Working Group’s experience, shutting down the surrogate DNS network on March 8 may actually be a faster — albeit more painful — way to clean up the problem.

List of open source captive portal software and network access control (NAC)

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List of open source captive portal software and network access control (NAC) « Mohamed Thalib’s Blog.

I have listed here some open source captive portal software and network access control (NAC) systems.

1. ChilliSpot – http://www.chillispot.info
2. Wifidog – http://dev.wifidog.org
3. PacketFence – http://www.packetfence.org
4. HotSpotPA – http://www.hotspotpa.com
5. NoCat – http://nocat.net
6. CoovaChilli – http://coova.org
7. Utangle – http://www.untangle.com
8. pfSense – http://www.pfsense.org
9. PepperSpot – http://pepperspot.sourceforge.net
10.Zeroshell – http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/
11. m0n0wall – http://m0n0.ch

Four telescope link-up creates world’s largest mirror

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The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry.

In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on earth.

Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope’s spatial resolution and zooming capabilities.

via BBC News – Four telescope link-up creates world’s largest mirror.

Making a WiFi Hotspot / Access Point using Linux & wifi lan card/USB adapter

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If you have a wifi LAN card / USB adapter, then you can use it as an access point so that other machines can connect to the internet via your machine using Wifi. The process is fairly simple, but requires you to have a compatible set of drivers which allow a wifi lan card to come into “Master” mode.

via Making a WiFi Hotspot / Access Point using Linux & wifi lan card/USB adapter « Vivek’s blog.