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This week, the President spoke on American Energy Security at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, celebrated the luck of the Irish, honored leaders in STEM education and small business, filled out his NCAA tournament brackets, announced his nominee for the Secretary of Labor, and embarked on a 5 day trip to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan.

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SQL or NoSQL? In-memory or hard disks? Graph? These questions have been top of mind in recent years as developers and IT administrators check out new-age databases capable of handling scale-out data sets. Executives from four databases showed how they stand out in a hot market at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference on Thursday.

Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology, touted the power of Neo4j and other graph databases to show relationships among disparate varieties of data with nodes, edges and key-value properties. (Think of Facebook’s Graph Search as one version.) The style takes inspiration from the connections among neurons and synapses inside the brain, Eifrem said. But, like other NoSQL databases, Neo Technology’s Neo4j product doesn’t use the SQL programming language, which could limit its adoption among enterprises.

Damian Black, CEO of SQLstream, touted his database’s use of SQL, calling it “lingua franca for data management.” Sure, it isn’t the easiest language to use. Still, “you know it’s going to save, it’s going to work,” he said. “It’s auto-optimizing. It’s proven.” Plus, it might be easier to find developers who can use it. As specialized databases get more attention, that’s become a more important point, said the moderator of the talk, GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthicum.

Different databases have different sweet spots. For Ryan Garrett, vice president of product of MemSQL, it’s comparing real-time data — from the trading floor, say — with recent historical data from perhaps a day or a week ago. Andrew Cronk, CEO of TempoDB, said his database excels at crunching time-series data in long columns coming off of many new connected devices.

Black believes storing data in memory provides a clear advantage. “It’s obviously going to be faster if you’re pulling it from memory,” he said. Eifrem took issue with that notion, saying that Neo4j runs on wherever sufficient memory is available. “Generally speaking, we want to be as horizontal as possible,” he said.

Legacy database vendors such as Oracle still command large swaths of the database market. But specialized databases such as the four on display here could keep chipping away as data sets get larger and larger. Because there are so many flavors, a few databases could become leaders, rather than just one, as they really do have different strengths and weaknesses and use-case sweet spots. At least they do for now.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Listening platforms: finding the value in social media data
• A near-term outlook for big data
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Verizon Wireless just updated its messaging service with an interesting and extremely useful feature. The carrier will now allow you to send text and multimedia messages from your PC or tablet just as you would from your phone.

The new integrated messaging feature basically divorces Verizon’s SMS service from the device it’s attached to, virtualizing the customer’s messaging client in an Android tablet or iPad app or within a web browser. In the PC, You can activate the service in the My Messaging tab once logged into the Verizon’s customer portal. So long as the messaging portal remains open messages will start popping up in your PC (Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported, though Explorer won’t receive pop-up notifications). On the tablet, the service works like any other messaging apps, spawning push notifications whenever a new SMS or MMS is received.

The service works very similar to many SMS forwarding and cloud-based SMS applications we’ve seen from messaging outfits like MightyText, Zipwhip or DeskSMS. The difference between, say, a MightyText and Verizon Messaging, is Verizon isn’t intercepting messages as they reach the phone. They’re coming straight from Verizon SMS infrastructure, and require no phone client. You can utilize the service no matter what kind of mobile phone you use or whether the phone is even turned on or connected.

As over-the-top messaging services like WhatsApp, Pinger, TextMe and TextPlus, as well as platform-specific apps like Apple’s iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger, carriers are starting to see more messaging traffic move off their traditional SMS networks. Operators like Rogers in Canada – and now Verizon – have been trying to combat that trend by expanding their communications capabilities (and the phone number associated with them) beyond the phone.

It will be interesting to see if Verizon uses this as a building block for more cloud communications services. It could start virtualizing the phone’s voice capabilities in the browser or tablet, turning it into a mobile carrier version of Skype or Google Voice.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

I’m sorry I’m too late to get anyone to these events today but I did want to applaud the efforts around Minneapolis to promote digital literacy. Today the city and various partners are kicking off a series of activities to promote digital literacy in 2013…

The City and its partners are hosting a series of open houses March 21 to encourage new users, community members and businesses to get connected with local community technology resources.  In addition to libraries and parks, there are several locations in Minneapolis where residents can use computers with Internet for free, and improve their digital literacy skills. These locations are referred to as “Community Technology Centers” and the following locations are partnering with the City to host these open houses through their association with the Technology Literacy Collaborative, a local network of digital inclusion supporters committed to sharing best practices, advocating for technology and digital literacy skills and access, and promoting collaborative efforts.

Partners include:

• Free Geek Twin Cities
• Project for Pride in Living Learning Center
• NorthPoint Health and Wellness Center, Inc.
• Pillsbury United Communities / Oak Park Neighborhood Center
• Pillsbury United Communities / Waite House Neighborhood Center
• University of Minnesota – Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC)

You can learn more about the yearlong effort on the City of Minneapolis website. You can also get a nice personal view of the event from a recent article by Alan Palazzolo in MinnPost. He makes the point that while there are some great resources out there, the hard part is getting word to the folks who most need it. So if you see a time and place to share the news, I hope you will.

Speaking of hopes, I’m also hoping that this citywide effort might spur efforts on a wider scope and/or serve as a model to others. I suspect that one impetus for the effort is the 2012 Minneapolis Digital Inclusion survey spearheaded by Otto Doll. It’s not the first time I’ve said that I’d love to see that survey expanded!

The financial services industry needs to store a lot of data, and the folks at NASDAQ want to use it to help build new products. But they also have to keep an eye on costs. Ann Neidenbach, an SVP at the NASDAQ OMX Group, explained how the exchange made the decision to use the Amazon public cloud for storage Thursday at the Structure:Data 2013 conference in New York.

“The economics of the clouds are just phenomenal,” says Neidenbach. She and Ron Bodkin, the founder and CEO of Think Big Analytics, noted that the exchanges have regulatory requirements to keep petabytes of old data associated with trading, and that adds up. She says the exchange has 10 petabytes of trade data and 3.5 petabytes of data that’s just backups. “We’re not even talking about email or even instant messaging,” said Neidenbach. “It’s a tremendous amount and that’s why we went into this partnership with AWS.

“We have to leverage the public cloud where storage is so much cheaper per gigabyte,” she added.

The exchange did have to spend time making sure the public cloud was secure enough for their data, but also for their customers’ data and that’s a journey that is just beginning. But she certainly implied that given the costs of storage in the public cloud and the amount of data financial institutions must keep, that the journey and eventual public cloud destination was inevitable.

And the end result of having all this data stored in one public place might yield new products. Neidenbach expects that combining trade data with social media might result in new opportunities for trading and research. You had the feeling that the sky might be the limit.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

When Apple broke out Podcasts as a separate iOS app from iTunes last year, a rather glaring omission was the ability to create playlists. Six months later, Apple has added that feature along with several other improvements to the app in an update released Thursday.

New features in the Podcasts 1.2 update include: playlists synced from iTunes now appear in the app; the ability to create automatically updating stations featuring preferred podcasts; customized stations that are stored in iCloud and automatically synced across your iCloud-enabled devices; a choice to start playing either the newest or oldest episode; and the ability to add any podcast episodes to On the Go playlists.

Apple has also toned down some of the corny design to make it look more like the iTunes app and less like an old tapedeck — perhaps related to Jony Ive’s elevation to head of software and hardware design at Apple — and a playback bug has been fixed.

Apple’s Podcasts app has been lambasted by users since its introduction last fall (see the ratings and reviews in the App Store). The updated design and functionality should be welcome news to those frustrated with the iOS Podcasts experience; that is unless they’ve moved on to any number of third-party podcast apps that have moved in to fill the void.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

If you go online to look for health information – as about a third of Americans do – chances are the information targets a general audience, not someone with your specific medical history, risk profile or needs. But if you’re looking up diabetes complications, for example, it makes a difference if you’re an older man juggling different medications or a pregnant young woman with no other health conditions.

The larger promise of personalized medicine that considers genomic data on top of medical history and clinical data is still on the verge of reality. But, in the meantime, a few companies are at least beginning to bring a new level of personalization in health care to the web.

On Thursday, Palo Alto-based HealthTap, which lets people ask anonymous questions of a network of 35,000 doctors online, released a new feature that prompts them to tag questions with relevant personal characteristics, including age, gender, prior conditions and medications. (Previously, users had the option to tag questions, but now it’s more front and center and they can add personal characteristics across more variables.) The new addition enables that particular user to receive a tailored reply and also means that, as other users searching the site add information about themselves, they’ll see the content most specific to them.

“Amazon optimizes for your taste, Facebook optimizes for your social graph. We’re doing it for your social graph,” said HealthTap cofounder and CEO Ron Gutman.

HealthTap has long offered tools that enable users to store detailed personal health information with the goal of personalizing content but, as the demise of Google Health showed, consumer personal health records are a tough nut to crack.  People don’t care enough to take the time to fill out online forms if they don’t see the reasons for using them, or they’re concerned about privacy implications. HealthTap, which is HIPAA-compliant, is trying to meet people where they are, hoping that if they can see the benefits of providing a little bit of personal information, they’ll be incentivized to provide more.

Now that the site has received provided more than half a billion answers (since launching in 2010), Gutman said it’s reached the critical mass for tagged answers to provide meaningful personalization.

Hoping to personalize digital content with data provided by personal health tracking devices, earlier this month, WebMD announced a partnership with Qualcomm Life’s 2net platform  to create a cloud-based health hub for consumers. Once users connect their tracking devices to the platform, WebMD said it would be able to aggregate data from those devices and use it customize searches so that, instead of just getting generic diabetes information, users could receive content specific to their needs. The companies haven’t yet released anything yet but say they’d roll out their first product later this year. While consumers may see value in personalized information and insights, they could also be reticent to store their data in aggregate with a company known more for content than health services.

Smaller startups are also taking a stab at personalization with sites meant to take aim at “Dr. Google.” Symcat analyzes patient-provided symptoms and personal characteristics against disease prevalence data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other public sources to provide people with likely possible diagnoses. And Meddik goes beyond symptoms to help people access online articles, general resources and answers to questions provided by people in their “health networks” (or who share their condition profiles and symptoms). On both sites, as users participate online, they develop profiles that are used to customize future content they receive.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

With today’s tendency to hoard files on the hard disk, it should come as no surprise that the same file may be located in more than one place, thus chipping the free space you would otherwise use for storing more relevant data.

Although there are plenty of utilities that can clean up the computer of unnecessary files and thus claim free space, only some of the… (read more)

Location of TED Conversations started in the past 30 days, based on member profiles.

TED Conversations is a unique space where any member of the TED.com community can get feedback on an idea, pose an interesting question, or start a fascinating debate with fellow TEDizens from around the globe.  We’ve seen participants from Columbia to Palestine, Sudan to Nepal—a total of 114 countries in just the past 30 days.  See just where above. And below, a sampling of the discussions happening in this global community:

Seigi Karasaki, from Tokyo, Japan, asks: Do people deserve to know the truth, even if it isn’t in their best interest?

Is truth always the best choice of action? In “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” Mark Twain argues:

“Lying is universal–we all do it; we all must do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others’ advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather.”

What are your thoughts?

From Kamloops, Canada, David Johnson responds to Stewart Brand’s provocative de-extinction talk: Science is developing the tools towards de-extinction of species on the planet that have become extinct. The question becomes; Should we?

Stewart Brand: The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?Stewart Brand and his colleagues are at the biotech precipice of reviving extinct species. The Revive and Restore project plans to not only bring species back but restore them to the wild, as well as protect currently endangered species.

I don’t think any of us will have a problem with the latter, this discussion is focused on the primary goal; reintroduction of extinct species. We are not talking about dinosaurs, but the Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Heath Hen, Bucardo, the Taz Tiger, etc.

Up for debate here: Should we?

And Pabitra Mukhopadhyay, from Kolkata, India, invites us to consider a thought-provoking linguistics question: He, she or s/he? Should languages be made gender neutral or be left on their own to preserve literary integrity?

Feminists have long argued that sexist language can have real world consequences for gender relations and the relative status of men and women, and recent research suggests that grammatical gender can shape how people interpret the world around them along gender lines.

But language is as much a communication tool as literature. Some argue that steward and stewardess are distinct but equal terms and dropping one for another takes away the beauty of literary expression.

Interestingly there are a number of genderless languages—they have no grammatical gender but have specific words to recognize gender. There are also natural gender languages which have evolved through a constant process on conscious neutralization of grammatical genders.

Things start to get serious when studies of Jennifer L. Prewitt-Freilino, T. Andrew Caswell and Emmi K. Laakso on the gendering of languages come to fore. After investigating 111 languages of the world, their findings suggest that countries where gendered languages are spoken show less gender equality compared to countries with other grammatical gender systems. Furthermore, countries where natural gender languages are spoken demonstrate greater gender equality, which may be due to the ease of creating gender symmetric revisions to instances of sexist language. Norway and Sweden show Global Gender Gap Indices of .82 and .81 (1 being ideally gender equal) and both these countries have natural gender languages. Yemen scores a GGG index of .46 with a gendered language.

Do you agree with this co-relation?

With 237 open discussion topics, join us in tackling more big ideas, questions, and debates on TED Conversations»

Google recently dropped the bombshell that it is closing down Google Reader, much to the chagrin of its loyal user base. I’ve done my share of ranting about it, and discussed why some businesses may want to be more strongly thinking about their email strategies. We’ve since reached out to a handful of prominent bloggers and industry professionals for some additional perspectives on what the closing of Google Reader means for blogs and publishers.

“I think it’s net positive that Google is shutting down its reader,” Automattic/WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg tells WebProNews. “It encourages people [to try] the great new experiences that have been developed over the past few years, including the WordPress.com reader.”

According to Mullenweg, the open source WordPress software is used by 16% of the web.

And trying new experiences we are. Feedly, for one, is getting a great deal of attention since Google’s announcement. Two days later, Feedly announced it had already seen 500,000 new users coming from Google Reader. At times they’ve had trouble keeping up with the demand.

“I think that Google Reader is a standalone technology and not indicative of whether the world will shift away from RSS,” says Human Business Works CEO and all around popular social media guy Chris Brogan. “The notion that social networks and human sharing has replaced RSS is like saying that fireplaces have replaced central heating. Quaint, but not effective.”

Not everyone quite agrees with that sentiment, however.

Jeremy Schoemaker, author of the popular ShoeMoney blog, says he has about 70,000 RSS readers but that the amount of traffic from them has dropped significantly.

“For me Social Media has become the new RSS,” he says. “I use a free service called Twitter Feed, that automatically posts my new posts to Twitter and my Facebook personal and fan page. I see far more traffic from that then any news reader. I haven’t thought of it until now but I haven’t logged into my Google Reader account for years. I don’t ever think RSS will die, but it will used more as an API like tool to interact with websites than a reader.”

Long-time blogger and EVP/Global Strategy and Insights for Edelman, Steve Rubel, tells us, “The majority of large sites won’t see an impact. Most of their traffic now comes from Twitter and Facebook. In addition Google (search) is a large source of traffic. The smaller sites, however, will be impacted. Their more dedicated readers are using Google Reader. These sites will need to gravitate to other forms of distribution such email newsletters and other vehicles.”

“It’s hard to say,” says Search Engine Land and Daggle blogger Danny Sullivan about the impact of Reader’s demise. “Technically, all those readers can easily continue to be readers by taking their feeds elsewhere. In practice, some might not make the effort. I expect that some blogs that see traffic from RSS are about to take a hit, though it might not be anywhere near as bad as they fear. We have, of course, been through this before after the decline of Bloglines.”

TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden tells us, “It’s a disappointment and a little puzzling that Google would shut down reader. What’s next, FeedBurner? Probably. Google is a data-driven company, so clearly they have their reasons. The cost must now outweigh the goodwill created by offering a free and useful service like reader. Still, I have to wonder if there isn’t useful usage data with reader that Google could use?”

“For content marketers, the main consideration is the impact on reach of content,” he adds. “If a substantial portion of a blog’s readers are using Google Reader, it’s a big deal. The blog would do well to point those readers to another service like Feedly.”

Zee Kane, CEO of The Next Web, says, “I think older blogs, perhaps primarily ‘tech blogs’, might experience a degree of negative impact as many (ourselves included) have hundreds of thousands of RSS subscribers. Many of our readers our early adopters and geeks who consume (technology) news as though their life depended on it, Google Reader is/was an undoubtedly brilliant way of doing so. With Google Reader disappearing, we’ll see an even heavier focus on social as a means to distribute stories, as a way to rank stories and as a means to increase readership.”

This is, of course, a small sampling of industry opinion, but it’s interesting to hear people’s different takes on the effects. Really, we won’t know what impact it truly has until Google Reader is finally gone. In the meantime, other services will pop up, and existing alternatives will strive to improve and outdo their peers.

There for a while it was starting to look like Google was really pushing for an end to the RSS format, as even its RSS Subscriptions Chrome extension disappeared from the Chrome Web Store. Thankfully, that was said to be a mistake, and it came back. Meanwhile, Google is phasing out links to Google Reader from its other properties. We’re still waiting to find out if Google will keep the RSS option alive in Google Alerts, which seems to be experiencing its own negligence from the company. Interestingly, Google is giving advice on how to build news readers for Android.

RSS.com is currently on sale with a $200 million asking price.

Pinterest has just launched an update to their iOS app that brings two important functional features to the app and one minor, but fun cosmetic improvement to the iPad.

With today’s update, you can now edit your profile inside the app – something that was a long time coming.

Individual pin pages have also received a tuneup to help promote discovery. Scroll down to the bottom of a pin page to see the new “people who pinned this also pinned” section.

This “people who pinned this also pinned” feature is the same one that Pinterest recently rolled out on desktop. It was part of a larger rollout of their brand new UI redesign that they said was all about discovery. Individual pin pages on desktop now feature pins from the same board and pins from the same source alongside “people who pinned this also pinned.”

The desktop redesign also brought bigger pins, better browsing, and more.

You can get a more detailed (close-up) look at your pins with the new iOS app as well, but only on iPad.

You can grab the new Pinterest app from iTunes today.

Amazon Kindle was one of the first high-profile apps to launch on Windows 8 late last year. Now the app has made its way to BlackBerry World a day before BlackBerry 10′s launch in the U.S.

BlackBerry announced that Amazon Kindle is now available on BlackBerry 10. It’s part of a larger collection of apps that will be hitting BlackBerry World as it crosses 100,000 app threshold.

Kindle for BlackBerry 10 won’t be adding any new features, like Pandora for Windows Phone 8, but it does have all of its usual features intact: