Last week the technology community was saddened by news of the apparent suicide of Diaspora developer Ilya Zhitomirskiy. He was 22 years old. In response to the news, developer/entrepreneur Joshua Ellis wrote: It’s been reported that Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide this week at 22 years of age; while no one is sure of ...

Monday Canonical announced that it will no longer use Apache CouchDB to power the structured data synchronization aspect of its Ubuntu One cloud storage service. Canonical’s John Rowland Lenton wrote: For the last three years we have worked with the company behind CouchDB to make it scale in the particular ways we need it to ...

Ubuntu has fallen to fourth place on its Linux distribution popularity index and Linux Mint has surged to the top. The top five most popular distributions for the past month are: Mint Fedora OpenSUSE Ubuntu Debian Over the past year the top five are: Mint Ubuntu Fedora Debian openSUSE Server monitoring service Pingdom charts the ...

Today Heroku launched a new PostGres database-as-a-service. PostGres is a popular open source SQL database server that serves as an alternative to MySQL and Oracle. It has a reputation as a mature, reliable and scalable database solution. Heroku has long supported PostGres, but it’s now offering the database as a standalone service, meaning you don’t ...

Over 200 labels recently left Spotify. It seems these were mostly smaller electronic music labels, and I’m not sure how much that will affect Spotify’s bottom line. But it has opened up an interesting discussion about the way the company compensates artists and labels. And now Spotify is promising a big announcement this month. What ...

We reported earlier today that EMC has released an update to its Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform service that rolls out many new features. You’ll now be able to use Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform to build your own public storage cloud, to build a private storage cloud, or to connect your on-premise storage to EMC’s public ...

Platform-as-a-Service vendor Engine Yard is launching Engine Yard Labs, a service with experimental support for development stacks the company is not yet ready to fully support. The first language being offered as part of the Labs project is Node.js. You can sign-up for access to Node.js on Engine Yard here. Engine Yard’s strategy for the ...

Box announced today the Box Innovation Network (/bin), an alliance of platform partners including Appcelerator, Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Rackspace, SnapLogic and Twilio. In addition to the platform program, Box is investing up to $2 million in /bin developers. According to Box’s press release: A /bin member will build on the Box platform to deliver products ...

Today Informatica announced the pre-release of its new data integration platform called Informatica Cloud 2012, which should be generally available in January 2012. Among its features is a contact validation service that verifies postal addresses and checks phone numbers against the U.S. Do Not Call Registry. Informatica Cloud 2012 product also includes the Rapid Connectivity ...

Cloud compliance vendor ServiceMesh closed a new $15 million round of funding from Ignition Partners. Here’s ServicesAngle editor Alex William’s description of the company from last month: ServiceMesh is a self-funded startup that has a monitoring platform for measuring and monitoring a hybrid infrastructure. The company was founded in 2008 and now has 100 employees. ...