People who own tablet computers spend more time and money on the internet than anyone else in Britain. This is according to research commissioned by Total Media into how tablet technology has, and will, affect the population in terms of media consumption and behaviour. The quantitative study of more than 1,000 nationally representative respondents identified that 79% of tablet owners mostly use the device at home, with a further 33% saying that the tablet has affected their behaviour in the home.

The team, led by Jeremy Elson in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research Redmond, set the new sort benchmark by using a radically different approach to sorting called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS). The team’s system sorted almost three times the amount of data (1,401 gigabytes vs. 500 gigabytes) with about one-sixth the hardware resources (1,033 disks across 250 machines vs. 5,624 disks across 1,406 machines) used by the previous record holder, a team from Yahoo! that set the mark in 2009.

Google is selling some of its analytic guts as an online service, in an effort to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services in the market for enterprise cloud computing.</p><p>

In November, Google offered a limited number of developers access to some of its most powerful data analysis software, part of what Google uses to index the Internet, in a product called <a href="https://developers.google.com/bigquery/">BigQuery</a>. On Tuesday, Google announced that it was selling that software, which can scan terabytes of information in seconds, as a service to corporate customers.

Divvy is a tool for exploratory data analysis with unsupervised machine learning. Use Divvy to better understand your scientific and business data.

The government has created a Digital Advisory Board (DAB) of industry IT heads and academics to support its digital by default agenda.</p><p>

The board will be chaired by UK digital champion Martha Lane Fox and will meet twice a year to advise the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service (GDS) on the accessibility of online services, as they are rolled out across Whitehall departments.

The spreadsheet below captures the acquisition date, dollar amounts, and ballpark counts of the users and employees at the time of acquisition. Be warned: any of these numbers are very rough, cobbled together from Internet Archive searches, old news articles, Quora answers, and tech blogs. If you have more accurate information, please leave a comment and I'll fix it.

This month Google is showing off their newest opt-in service known as Account Activity, a service capable of showing you everything the group knows about your signed-in activities. Google services of course work their way into several daily activities of people like you and I, and certainly knowing everywhere I logged in from as well as all the YouTube videos I’ve ever watched could be entertaining – but that’s not what the service is for, says Google. Account Activity is Google’s way of helping you “step back and take stock of what you’re doing online” in an analytical way.

When Oink shut down yesterday, I used their export tool so that I could do something useful with the information I gave them. In requesting my data, which I did simply by filling out a form with only my username, I received the email below. In looking at the link, it seemed that my publicly available username (cristina) called for the download.

Massachusetts-based publishing house, Astrolabe, abruptly dropped its months-old database case Wednesday after getting legal threats from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF said the lawsuit was an affront to the legal system, as historical facts are not subject to copyright.

“Thus, we can only conclude that neither you nor your client conducted even a cursory legal or factual investigation prior to filing the complaint, much less a reasonable one,” EFF attorney Corynne McSherry wrote to Astrolabe. The EFF also sought sanctions unless the lawsuit was dismissed.

The publisher markets its data to astrology buffs “seeking to determine the historical time at any given time in any particular location, worldwide,” and claimed ownership to the data in its “AC International Atlas” and “ACS American Atlas” software programs.

Astrolabe took EFF’s threat seriously, dropped the case and issued a public apology.

On Pinterest, every pin ties back to an external link. We used RJMetrics to extract the top-level domain of those links for the pins in our sample. What we found was a pretty tremendous long-tail effect. In our sample of about a million pins, over 100,000 distinct source domains existed.

I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company's database has Mark Zuckerberg's cell phone number, Larry Ellison's home phone number and Bill Gates' cell phone number. This data is not meant to be public, and people have an expectation of privacy with respect to their contacts.

On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, "Pro" option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry.

a source tells us that CEO Larry Page, who seems to be hell-bent on competing with Mark Zuckerberg whether it’s the right thing for Google or not, had this to say to employees at a Friday staff event after the Search Plus Your World launch: “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.”

The quasi-ultimatum caught our source by surprise and underscores just how important this new direction is for Page. It also helps explain why Google’s PR was so silent since evidence of the Don’t Be Evil toolbar came out yesterday. If this is the future of the company and it flies in the face of Google’s stated values, what can they say?