O’Reilly Media

As I wrote in Daddy, Where's Your Phone?, it's time to start thinking of the phone as a first class device for accessing web services, not as a way of repurposing content or applications originally designed to be accessed on a keyboard and big screen. The release of speech recognition in Google Mobile App for iPhone continues the process begun... Read more.

Social networking software is making trust more transparent to the user of a service. It is creating a new paradigm shift in computing: it allows people to just use resources without worrying about trust issues. Building your social network and integrating social network trust data into your application will be more important than ever. Read more.

While I don't believe that there is a "silver bullet" for security, I do think that end users should be getting a lot more for their money, by getting a better experience (e.g., AV that doesn't slow down their computer) and better security (e.g., AV that is more than one step above "worthless"). Read more.

Thoroughly vetted by Adobe's AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and topics that web developers and application designers inquire about most. The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios you may encounter using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. It's an ideal way to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR, with practical solutions you can use right away, and detailed explanations of why and how they work. Learn more.

It is time that legislators, regulators and procurement officials put an end to end-user license agreements (EULA) that prevent publication of comparative benchmarks. Read more.

I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talking about Google's mobile strategy and the insanely cool new voice-activated Google search in the Google Mobile Application for iPhone. But what I really want to share is Vic's story... Read more.

Stay Competitive. Regroup, retrain, rebuild. Financial markets are in a tailspin. Jobless rates are at a 7-year high. Budgets are shrinking. The good news is that the shifting economic landscape is creating new opportunities for those with the right skills. Do you have what it takes to tackle tough technical problems? To offer bold solutions? To provide businesses with the expertise they need? Learn more.

In this article, we take a look at how the "Heroes" VFX team fried Hayden Panettierre to a crisp, shattered a human Popsicle, and tore Tokyo in two using one of the industry's best proprietary content management systems. Read more.

Two new books from O'Reilly's Companion Series offer a complete photography class, tailored specifically for folks using Canon's new Digital Rebel cameras. Both--The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450D Companion and The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion--are by producer and videographer Ben Long. In each of his handy pocket guides, Ben not only provides a detailed one-stop camera manual but he also walks you through all the basic photography theories that apply to any camera. And here Ben provides tips, warnings, and reminders from the books for using the XS cameras (which are applicable to most DSLRs). Read on to learn more. Read more.

Many people that are just starting in their software career have not been exposed to the contrast between two very different approaches to solving server side scalability issues. And although efficiently using 100 CPUs is not critical today, in the next five years it will become critical for a projects success. In this article we look at how the cognitive styles of functional and imperative software will shape the computing industry. Read more.

Twitter—the messaging service that lets you send instant, short updates to people around the world—is fast becoming a mainstream communication tool. In her Twitter for Business webcast, Sarah Milstein (a Twitter user from day one) shows how to use Twitter and other micro-messaging services at work. She covers the the benefits and challenges of this exciting new medium, along with best practices and potential pitfalls you can avoid. Sarah is the author of the O'Reilly Radar report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy--140 Characters at a Time.

Sun announced massive layoffs of up to 18% of the global workforce as they split the software division into three groups. What do these changes mean for Java? Who is managing the new Application Platform Software group? Read more.

The authors of O'Reilly's soon-to-be-released Using Drupal are featured on Drupal.org, with an excerpt from their book. In the new reference, the authors—Angela "webchick" Byron, Addison "add1sun" Berry, Nathan "quicksketch" Haug, Jeff "eaton" Eaton, James "walkah" Walker, and Jeff "jjeff" Robbins—guide you through the amazing Land of Modules, pointing out popular attractions and steering you around the Maw of Module Madness. Head over to Drupal.org.