Technology News: Box acquires technology to let admins keep better track of content
Cloud storage vendor Box has acquired the technology behind a company called dLoop, which it will use to add more controls that give enterprises more features for protecting their content. Enterprises have become increasingly interested in storage services offered by the likes Box, Citrix Systems, Dropbox, Egnyte and EMC, which lets users store and share content online. Enterprise interest has been a boon for the vendors, but has also put more demands on especially security and management.
Read full story => InfoWorld

Programming News: Agility, Big Data, and Analytics
Agile and Lean techniques seem to be the best way we currently know to create complex software in the face of risk, uncertainty, and changing requirements. Agile hinges on embracing and adapting to change by enabling rapid feedback cycles and evolutionary development. However, bringing agility into big data (and small data) analytics has been a challenge for many, very bright and talented, data scientists and engineers. In this article we’ll explore what makes analytics uniquely different than application development, and how to adapt agile principles and practices to the nuances of analytics. We’ll also examine how the disciplines of data science and software development complement one another, and how these intersect in an agile project environment.
Read full story => InfoQ

Photography News: How to Calculate and Use Hyperfocal Distance for Better Landscape Photography
Hyperfocal distance, much like the “Sunny 16 Rule,” is one of those things that has arguably lost some relevance in the age of digital photography; the sophisticated metering and auto focusing systems built into digital cameras have helped make life a little easier in some ways. But there are times when some automated feature of your camera simply doesn’t come through for you, or times when you prefer to take away all your camera’s decision-making abilities and do it all for yourself. Then it’s good to know all those old school rules that you thought you would never have any use for. One of those “old” photographic principles deemed useful by landscape photographers is that of hyperfocal distance.
Read full story => LightStalking

Technology News: Batteries Are The Only Thing Stopping The Wearable Device Revolution
Longer-lasting batteries are crucial for a new crop of wearable computers whose rise may upend Apple and Google’s dominance of mobile devices, two of the field’s pioneers say. Wearable devices – from bracelets that monitor physical activity and sleeping patterns to clothing with built-in sensors and Web-ready glasses – may mark the next big technology shift, just as smartphones evolved from personal computers.That transition has put the unglamorous battery in a starring role. “All this wearable stuff is constrained by battery technology. It’s not a computing problem,” Hosain Rahman, CEO of Jawbone, told the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Monday.
Read full story => BusinessInsider

Programming News: There’s still a big misunderstanding of Big Data
Spending time in London and Paris this week for TIBCO’s Transform Conference was a great reminder that there’s still an enormous swath of our world that doesn’t get Big Data. Look no further than the leak of the NSA’s PRISM data surveillance project and you’ll see that the officials charged with oversight don’t get it when they poo poo it as “just the metadata.” Talk to a London cabbie who says, “What’s the fuss? I have nothing to hide.” and you’ll immediately realize he doesn’t get it (read the link, it’s provocative). Watch the BBC whipping the Brits into a frenzy that U.S. companies can snoop on their conversations and you’ll see they don’t get it. One British elected official thought the answer was to create a British version of Facebook and Google. Sure…that’ll solve it…good luck with that.
Read full story => JavaLobby

Photography News: NASA Video Shows Off Curiosity’s Cameras
We’ve been following the exploits of the Curiosity Rover with excitement ever since it landed on Mars. The photographs that come back from the Rover have provided an astonishing look at another world — but have you ever wanted to know what the camera rig on the Rover actually is? This video from NASA provides a look at the 17 different cameras on the Rover, and what their purposes and capabilities are. It also delves into how the Curiosity grabs some of those shots, including the now iconic self-portrait, and the panoramas.
Read full story => PopPhoto

Technology News: A Giant Step Forward for the Internet of Things and Big Data
Andy Stanford-Clark, an IBM Master Inventor who lives in the United Kingdom, jokes that his goal was “world domination” in 1999 when he and Arlen Nipper of Eurotech invented a protocol aimed at greatly improving machine-to-machine communications. This was at the time when another British technology pioneer, Kevin Ashton, coined the term “Internet of Things” to describe how the Internet could be connected to the physical world via a vast network of sensors. Sanford-Clark believed that his protocol, now called MQ Telemetry Transport, or MQTT for short, would enable organizations to quickly and affordably gather, integrate and make use of all of that sensor data. It would be an essential underlying technology for the Internet of Things.
Read full story => A Smarter Planet

Programming News: JSON refactoring
libgdx has its own JSON parser, emitter, and reflection-based object serialization. I’ve never been happy with the parsing results being OrderedMaps and Arrays because it is so clunky to iterate over the data and get out the values you want. At one point I had a JsonMap and JsonArray classes, but it was too much of a mess. Recently I worked with cJSON, a JSON parser for C, and I liked the simplicity of its DOM. I was inspired have committed something similar for libgdx.
Read full story => BadLogicGames

Photography News: 6 Reasons Why RAW Tops JPEG
When working in conditions like these, RAW really helps you maintain control and push the envelope. If you’ve been around photography for a little while, you’ve probably heard of a file format called RAW. Your camera most likely supports it as an alternative to JPEG. So you’re probably wondering what all the buzz is about this RAW format, or you’re wondering why so many people are proponents of it. I’m here to shed some light on that discussion.
Read full story => ShutterPhoto

Technology News: Why The Human Body Will Be The Next Computer Interface
By now you’ve probably heard a lot about wearables, living services, the Internet of Things, and smart materials. As designers working in these realms, we’ve begun to think about even weirder and wilder things, envisioning a future where evolved technology is embedded inside our digestive tracts, sense organs, blood vessels, and even our cells.
Read full story => FastCodeSign

Programming News: The money of big data is in analytics
Big data is on everyone’s mind lately in the tech press. With computer power having reached such a high level, and with the cloud becoming ubiquitous, data has increased at a tremendous pace. This means companies like Google, Facebook and others have an immense amount of information pouring into their databases which can cause a lot of issues when trying to deal with all of these incoming signals. These last couple of years, many have been focused on trying to solve this problem with things like NoSQL and other data processing concepts to deal with exabytes of data.
Read full story => Dendory Net

Photography News: Otherworldly Landscapes Spawn From Photog’s Solitary Wanderings
With the increasing frequency of “Personal Projects” tabs found on photographers websites, it seems more and more shooters are keen to distinguish between work and hobby — between paid work and non-paid work. Mark Bramley, a commercial photographer in the U.K., adeptly hops between the two. His barren landscapes are a counterpoint to the shiny, car-porn images he creates at his day job.
Read full story => Wired

Technology News: Big Data Is Just For Big Companies – And Other BS
2013 is going to be a 12 full months of hype surrounding the Big Data craze, with tantalizing tales of e-commerce analytics that will move beyond predicting pregnancies to doing something really cool: like figuring out the Last Twinkie Ever Bought. As the hype continues, smug enterprise IT departments will whip out their thick wallets and plunk down serious coin for multi-cluster hybrid cloud Hadoop systems that can figure out the worldwide effects of a butterfly wings’ flapping before brunch and knock out the Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything before afternoon tea rolls past.
Read full story => readwrite

Programming News: The Backbone’s connected to the…
We are currently integrating BackboneJS into our application, which will facilitate this seamless experience, and we plan to roll it out through the year. So, without further ado, I have prepared a presentation below (don’t worry, no death by Powerpoint here) which can give you the highlights of our approach and flesh out the points of the above explanation. Just click the image below to check it out!
Read full story => Kash Flow

Photography News: Moon Photography Tips
It’s easy to learn how to capture the moons craters and detail with your digital camera. In fact once you get a handle on why you must use these wonderful photographic methods, taking pictures of the moon will be pretty easy from now on.
Read full story => PictureCorrect

Technology News: Big data: How the revolution may play out
If 2012 was the year of big data hype, interest and pilot projects, 2013 will bring production deployments, early returns on investment and a bit of disruption. By 2014, big data projects and systems are likely to be commonplace.
Read full story => ZDNet

Programming News: Changes: A Year Without Flash
The past year has been a complete whirlwind for me. A year ago I was a happy ActionScript 3 consultant, operating independently and remotely and working on complex and rewarding projects targeting Adobe’s Flash runtime. Last December, though, a client invited me to join their company full-time and I decided to take the plunge. This post is basically a recap of what technologies I’ve been playing with in the past year.
Read full story => Noumenology

Photography News: The Difference Between a Photographer and an Artist
A photographer is someone who takes photographs. These days, anybody can be a photographer, and the reciprocal is also true—a photographer can be anybody. From the hottest haute-kultur gallery orchid on the planet down to somebody selling something on eBay or a real estate agent snapping pictures of an empty house with a cellphone.
Read full story => The Online Photographer

Technology News: Big Data and what it is we haven’t thought about
If it was 2003 and you were looking forward, would you have predicted the iPhone, Cloud and Social Media? You probably would have missed at least one of them. Maybe even all of them. If you want to predict what the world will look like in 2020 from a technology point of view, you need to take into account that new technologies will emerge.
Read full story => sogeti

Programming News: Essential JavaScript: the top five MVC frameworks
Picking the right JavaScript framework for your needs can be tricky. Jack Franklin sets out to make your decision easier by providing this guide to five of the most popular choices.
Read full story => .net

Photography News: Two-Week-Long Cross-Country Road Trip Captured in 3 Minutes and 5000 Photos
A Seattle-based couple named Mike Matas and Sharon Hwang recently went on an epic cross-country road trip and documented it in a cool way. The duo, both product designers at Facebook, rented a car from a national rental company and spent two weeks driving from San Francisco to New York City. Over the course of their journey, the two snapped thousands of photographs documenting their adventures. After flying back home to the West Coast, Matas took 5,000 of the photographs and turned them into the time-lapse video above that shows their entire trip in 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
Read full story => PetaPixel

Technology News: Creating order from digital chaos
What happens when data is huge? We get lost. Discovery, not search, will produce the next data-exploration breakthrough. This partial excerpt is from Jim Hornthal’s TED ebook, “Haystack Full of Needles: Cutting Through the Clutter of the Online World to find a Place, Partner, or President.”
Read full story => gigaom

Programming News: Tinkering With TypeScript
In the spirit of David Wagner’s try [harder] talk on ‘the value of tinkering’ I decided to do a little tinkering with a new language from Microsoft called TypeScript. TypeScript attracted me for three reasons. Its the new project from Anders Hejlsberg the creator of C#, it brings type safety to JavaScript and I’m a sucker for new technology.
Read full story => mikecann.co.uk

Photography News: Antelope Canyon – got a mirrorless camera? No permit for you!
I spent a lovely hour at Lower Antelope Canyon near Page in Arizona this morning. Antelope Canyon is a famous slot canyon carved by flash floods which have exposed beautifully coloured rock walls with grooved surfaces. The canyon itself is a narrow passageway about two stories deep and around a couple of meters wide. In places you have to squeeze your self through, but unlike caving there’s rarely a feeling of claustrophobia. If you can climb down some narrow stairs, you’ll have no problem paying a visit.
Read full story => Gordon Laing

Technology News: Big data is useless unless it’s also fast, diverse
In the past, year big data has elevated from a hot topic in the enterprise to one of the most buzzed about, and potentially overhyped, phrases of the year. Big data has huge disruptive potential and the flood of attention should be no surprise. A recent IDC report stated that the business analytics software market grew by 14.1 percent in 2011 and will continue to grow to reach $50.7 billion in 2016, all driven by the focus on big data.
Read full story => gigaom

Programming News: How I learned to stop worrying and love web development again
We’ve already talked about some of the technology choices we’re making as a company. And while our choices on the back-end can hardly be labeled as mainstream, the most difficult choice we actually had to make was related to the client-side as it directly affects our users. Obviously, Javascript on the client is a given, and we love it. However, as most web developers know, the differences between browsers are enormous and developing for all of them is almost impossible (Try using Netscape 4.7 today, if you’re curious).
Read full story => Silk Beta

Photography News: The iPad Workflow
When Apple launched the original iPad back in 2010, photographers quickly embraced this sleek, portable device as an elegant way to present their images. But if you think of the iPad primarily as a digital picture frame, think again. The release of the third-generation iPad with its high resolution Retina display makes the strongest case yet for the iPad as a professional production tool for photographers on the go, with an expanded role in the image-creation process.
Read full story => dpreview

Technology News: Your Laptop Can Now Analyze Big Data   
Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer. The software could help developers working on many modern tasks: for example, designing a new recommendation engine using social network connections. In order to make effective recommendations — “your friends liked this movie, so here is another movie that you haven’t seen yet, but you will probably like” — the software has to be able to analyze the connections between the members of a social network.    
Read full story => Mashable Tech

Programming News: New Analyst Report Rips Agile: Says It’s ‘Designed To Sell Services,’ a ‘Developer Rebellion Against Unwanted Tasks’   
“The Agile movement is designed to sell services,” says analyst firm Voke Inc. in a brand-new report analyzing the movement, presenting findings about its use and providing insight to organizations considering its adoption. In addition, the report includes data supporting what Voke calls the “Agile Dilemma,” described as “the inherent risk and confusion created by the business desire for speed and flexibility misinterpreted as a mandate to participate in the developer-centric movement called Agile, which may not be appropriate for all organizations or projects.”   
Read full story => Application Development Trends

Standards News: DHL -“ How ISO standards deliver   
Chris Hillis, Managing Director of DHL Express Switzerland, and Roman Bisig, Managing Director of DHL Freight Switzerland, sit down with ISO Focus+ to discuss the role of International Standards and how the company benefits.    
Read full story => ISO