AddressSearch.com, a website helping users to reconnect with acquaintances through email, expanded its directory to include more than 95 million email records, which are freely available. The site's index has grown from 68 million entries in last 8 months, a 40% growth.

Users of Amazon Web Services, LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company, can now run Microsoft Windows Server applications within the AWS Free Usage Tier, a program designed to help customers get started in the cloud. Developers can launch new applications or test existing applications in the cloud.

AboutOne, LLC, an online family management system, closed a $1.6-million-dollar deal in Series A financing. The round was led by Golden Seeds, a network of investors dedicated to funding early-stage companies founded and led by women.

Vision Critical, a global research technology firm, debuted a suite of market research tools called Firefly Surveys, which integrate online survey and forum functionalities as a SaaS (software as a service) model. The tools are designed to provide companies with holistic research and promote more efficient decision making.

Two Seattle residents have filed a class-action lawsuit against HTC and AccuWeather, Inc. The plaintiffs allege that the AccuWeather app on their HTC EVO phone has been transmitting precise and unencrypted GPS data at regular intervals as well as when they open the app to check the weather.

Occupy Wall Street protestors have been drawing the media's attention to the influence of corporations on the America political system for months. With primary season now in full-swing it seems that the web is getting in on the action. This week has seen announcements from LegiNation as well as MapLight, both of which aim to keep voters informed about what their elected representatives are up to and who is influencing them.

Content in the cloud is a natural evolution from storing files on our desktops-but the content creation explosion that has overfilled our inboxes and overwhelmed our social networks won't be solved by moving the growing mass of data from a private realm to a public one.In fact, there's a solution on the horizon that promises to keep the clouds fluffy and the content contextual. It's the "curated cloud," and it's the next big thing. By one measure, we created 5EB (exabytes) of data from the beginning of time until 2008. Now we're creating 5EB every 2 days. Where did that statistic come from? The folks who should know: Google.

When it comes to leveraging Facebook pages, publishers can be forgiven for wondering, "Where do I start?" Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Facebook users are highly engaged and influential consumers that brands should be falling over themselves to court, it isn't always obvious exactly how a Facebook page can help businesses grow. AllFacebook's AF Expo in San Francisco recently examined the question.

In the past few years, social media has taken the marketing world by storm. The use of networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as advertising tools is transforming the way some companies do business and opening up new horizons in direct marketing, lead generation, and promotion. Social media, however, can also be a tricky business, with social media ROI being difficult to gauge and tie into other more traditional marketing efforts.

Last spring, Google found itself on the receiving end of a fair amount of consternation from the technology press, privacy advocates, and several European countries. German officials accused the search giant of using its ubiquitous Street View cars to do more than merely snap those unsettling panoramic shots of your house and neighborhood. Those official Google vehicles were also collecting "samples of payload data from WiFi networks," Google admitted in April on its official blog, in response to the accusation.

Meet the five new fundamentals of the information experience. Whether it's on a desktop monitor or a tiny mobile screen, ‘information experience' is the moment when the user experience and information-intensive applications meet. Over the past few years, as the volume of structured and unstructured data within organizations has exploded and the channels on which that information is consumed has diversified, content consumers have been revising their expectations for what qualifies as an acceptable information experience.

The government sector finds itself between two pressure points: the public's demand for content access and up-to-date information and that same public's demand for costs to be kept down. As a result of these technological and economic requirements, open source technology—which allows source code to be publicly available—has quietly become the solution of choice for government entities at the national, state, and local level.

Can you easily find the government information you need? Do you feel empowered to share your ideas? Do you think your ideas are being heard and acted upon? Do you believe government is spending our money more wisely? If you can't answer yes to these questions, then we need to look at what's being done and what can be done to improve our government's credibility and ability to serve the American people.

Organizations of various sizes and industries are using XML in equally diverse ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business operations. The technology is also helping companies discover innovative ways in which to generate new revenue opportunities.

As technical and cost barriers fall and security issues are addressed, the cloud has become a viable platform not only for back-end operations but also for key business practices, including content management and distribution.

I'm really tired of being inundated with contextually irrelevant information. I don't want to know what I don't need to know. I don't. Really. And, neither does anyone else.The sheer volume of information available to me in the digital age is overwhelming. Everywhere I look, there it is. Even when I'm not looking, it's there, waiting to be found. Unfortunately, most of what is presented to me is of little use -- or is difficult, if not impossible to find -- especially on the web.

It is a worthwhile exercise to review what I thought were trends in the technologies and tools that I follow and to examine my predictions over the past year. It improves my assessment of important technologies and can refine my forecasting approach. This past year I emphasized three trends: the potential benefits of XML as expressed in the eXtended Business Reporting Language (XBRL); a legal issue combining digital documents (Microsoft Word) and XML—i4i's suit against Microsoft's alleged patent infringement in Microsoft Office Word; and the importance of a new product category, e-readers.

Adobe's recent acquisitions, such as Adobe Connect (web conferencing), Omniture (web analytics) and Day Software (website design), make it clear that it understands the increasing importance of the web. Most of its acquisitions are web-based enterprise solutions that augment one of its primary applications-Adobe Acrobat.

New data analysis tools are overwhelmingly enhancing the way we access data. These new offerings from content providers allow us to do more with the information we find so that we can extract more meaning and insight from the content.

The cloud seems to be manna to most analysts, investors, and vendors these days. As my colleague Alan Pelz-Sharpe writes, "It's a great term, ‘Cloud Computing,' since it conjures up visions of an invisible internet—an ether-like zone in the sky where computing power and storage is unfettered by the petty restrictions of boxes, cables, and technicians. Cloud computing sounds fluffy, it sounds cool, it sounds limitless, it sounds like the future."