Singly, which has as its mission connecting people more closely with their data everywhere it lives, now is opening up the beta of its development platform to help developers create the apps that can make that happen.

As co-founder and CEO Jason Cavnar describes Singly’s work, “it is an app fabric product” that gives developers a way to build applications without having to worry about making all the different connection points into the other applications they want their products to talk to. “That’s handled as a service for them. Like Amazon Web Services is for the infrastructure layer, we would like to be a trusted partner in the data layer,” he says.

“It’s really about a person’s life and experiences – sharing that wherever it is in other applications into a new one and that new one generating things to share back out,” says fellow co-founder and CTO Jeremie Miller, who invented Jabber/XMPP technologies and was the primary developer of jabberd 1.0, the first XMPP server. APIs are prominent in Singly’s approach to unlocking that data, but Miller sees some parallels between its own mission and that of the semantic web – a concept whose potential he’s always been excited about, he says, but which he doesn’t think has caught on as he’d hoped.

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Amazon Web Services have added CloudSearch to their increasingly comprehensive portfolio of everything a developer would ever want.

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index.

In their press release they say CloudSearch is based on technology that has been rattling around on their network for a while – A9.
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Amazon Web Services is now offering CloudSearch as a paid service. The official AWS announcement states, “Continuing along in our quest to give you the tools that you need to build ridiculously powerful web sites and applications in no time flat at the lowest possible cost, I’d like to introduce you to Amazon CloudSearch. If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you’ve already used the technology that underlies CloudSearch. You can now have a very powerful and scalable search system (indexing and retrieval) up and running in less than an hour.” Read more

The Common Crawl Foundation is on the verge of adding to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Data Set of openly and freely accessible web crawl data. It was back in January that Common Crawl announced the debut of its corpus on AWS (see our story here). Now, a billion new web sites are in the bucket, according to Common Crawl director Lisa Green, adding to the 5 billion web pages already there.

“When are you going to have new data is one of most frequent questions we get,” she says. The answer is that processing is underway now, and she hopes they’ll be ready to go this week.

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The Common Crawl Foundation’s repository of openly and freely accessible web crawl data is about to go live as a Public Data Set on Amazon Web Services.  The non-profit Common Crawl is the vision of Gil Elbaz, who founded Applied Semantics and the AdSense technology for which Google acquired it , as well as the Factual open data aggregation platform, and it counts Nova Spivack  — who’s been behind semantic services from Twine to Bottlenose – among its board of directors.

Elbaz’ goal in developing the repository: “You can’t access, let alone download, the Google or the Bing crawl data. So certainly we’re differentiated in being very open and transparent about what we’re crawling and actually making it available to developers,” he says.

“You might ask why is it going to be revolutionary to allow many more engineers and researchers and developers and students access to this data, whereas historically you have to work for one of the big search engines…. The question is, the world has the largest-ever corpus of knowledge out there on the web, and is there more that one can do with it than Google and Microsoft and a handful of other search engines are already doing? And the answer is unquestionably yes. ”

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