Twitter is a popular web 2.0 site gaining huge traction in disproportion to its sheer simplicity. Twitter just asks, What are you doing? and nothing more. Despite this...

When UserVoice launched its hosted solution for companies looking to harness user feedback a little over 7 months ago, we wrote it could well be a replacement for e-mail when it comes to aggregating opinions, ideas and suggestions from user / customer bases. Now, UserVoice says its offering is solid enough for enterprise usage and is consequently dropping the beta tag.

Billing itself as an ‘online suggestion box that sorts itself’, UserVoice enables companies to embed widgets onto websites and applications to sollicit feedback from users in combination with a Digg-like voting feature. The idea behind that approach is that it’s easier and more scalable to crowdsource user opinions, ideas and suggestions than other ways of communication.

You can use the UserVoice service for free, but with a rather big limitation on features. More advanced packages are available starting from $289 per month, and there are also special packages for startups, non-profit organizations and educational institutions. If you want to take a look at alternatives, you might want to check out similar service providers such as CrowdSound, Suggestionbox and Get Satisfaction.

UserVoice has attracted customers from various sizes so far, including nice references like Sun Microsystems, Nokia and MySpace but also smaller web application providers like Blip.fm, 12seconds and Alert Thingy. According to the announcement, over 120 million widget impressions have already been served, with over 530,000 votes logged to date. Not bad for a startup that operates without outside financing apart from a small seed round from Nuvoiz raised back in 2007.

Bonus points for using Initech as the company for the live demo. Marvellous touch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The Open Computer Forensics Architecture (OCFA) is a modular computer forensics framework to automate the digital forensic process, to speed up the investigation and give tactical investigators direct access to the seized data through an easy to use search and browse interface. The architecture forms an environment where existing forensic tools and libraries can be easily plugged into the architecture and can thus be made part of the recursive extraction of data and metadata from digital evidence. It aims to be highly modular, robust, fault tolerant, recursive, and scalable in order to be usable in large investigations that spawn numerous terabytes of evidence data and cover hundreds of evidence items. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / This release adds routing on evidence global metadata, a Photorec module, and a more comprehensive router rule list. The smarter data store module dsm2 is now the default. makeoverview has been deprecated. dsm1 has been deprecated. staticmounts are no longer the default. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/qLPKquVtx48GuLg9N8TiUJoRjFo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/qLPKquVtx48GuLg9N8TiUJoRjFo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/wVscTVE5J1I" height="1" width="1"/

The Open Computer Forensics Architecture (OCFA) is a modular computer forensics framework to automate the digital forensic process, to speed up the investigation and give tactical investigators direct access to the seized data through an easy to use search and browse interface. The architecture forms an environment where existing forensic tools and libraries can be easily plugged into the architecture and can thus be made part of the recursive extraction of data and metadata from digital evidence. It aims to be highly modular, robust, fault tolerant, recursive, and scalable in order to be usable in large investigations that spawn numerous terabytes of evidence data and cover hundreds of evidence items. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / This release adds routing on evidence global metadata, a Photorec module, and a more comprehensive router rule list. The smarter data store module dsm2 is now the default. makeoverview has been deprecated. dsm1 has been deprecated. staticmounts are no longer the default. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/_pXbcbYr7Kmm4vVzXiwcTxBSG20/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/_pXbcbYr7Kmm4vVzXiwcTxBSG20/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/wVscTVE5J1I" height="1" width="1"/

Microsoft is about to take trailer park computing, or, as The Register has dubbed it, white trash computing, to its logical and necessary conclusion. The company's next generation of utility data centers will take the form of - you guessed it - trailer parks: sprawling, roofless parking lots in which all the components - server clusters, power units, security systems - will be prefabricated offsite, packed into containers or other types of "modules," trucked in, and plopped down on the ground as needed. All employees at the new centers will be required to wear wifebeaters and carry around 30-packs of Busch Light.

In a blog post, Microsoft's top data-center guy, Michael Manos, lays out the details of what the company calls its "Gen 4" centers, which will become the cornerstones of its "hyper-scale cloud infrastructure" for at least the next five years. He writes:

If we were to summarize the promise of our Gen 4 design into a single sentence it would be something like this: “A highly modular, scalable, efficient, just-in-time data center capacity program that can be delivered anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, while allowing for continued growth as required.” [You can tell Manos is a real data-center guy because he's under the impression that sentences don't require verbs.] From a configuration, construct-ability and time to market perspective, our primary goals and objectives are to modularize the whole data center. Not just the server side ... but the mechanical and electrical space as well. This means using the same kind of parts in pre-manufactured modules, the ability to use containers, skids, or rack-based deployments and the ability to tailor the Redundancy and Reliability requirements to the application at a very specific level.

The modularity of the systems will, in other words, allow the company to tailor the sophistication (and cost) of its infrastructure to the varying levels of service quality that users expect from different web apps, allowing reductions in capital costs, Manos says, of "20%-40% or greater depending upon class [of app]." Equally important, from a cost standpoint, the new design will allow the company "to deploy capacity when our demand dictates it" rather than "mak[ing] large upfront investments." This underscores one of the core economic challenges that has faced every utility through history and will face the new computing utilities as well: the need to match capacity to demand on an ongoing basis to ensure that capital is used efficiently.

On the green side of things, Manos says he expects the open-air design of the centers to "completely eliminate the use of water [for cooling]. Today’s data centers use massive amounts of water and we see water as the next scarce resource and have decided to take a proactive stance on making water conservation part of our plan." I may be reading too much into it, but I take this as a dig at Google, which up to now has sited its data centers in places where it has easy access not only to cheap electricity but to megagallons of water. In fact, I think Microsoft's openness about how it builds its data smelters is meant to draw a contrast with Google's hyper-secrecy. "By sharing [our plans] with the industry," writes Manos, "we believe everyone can benefit from our methodology. While this concept and approach may be intimidating (or downright frightening) to some in the industry, disclosure ultimately is better for all of us." Translation: Microsoft is all about sharing, while the Googlers are stingy and selfish. (That's a nice PR twist, but I'm guessing Google would argue that the reason it's more secretive is because it has more valuable stuff to hide.)

Oh yeah: there is the obligatory animated video, and it has a bitchin' soundtrack:

Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision

Roofless!

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/7324_thumb.png" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" OBM is a groupware, email, LDAP, Windows PDC, CRM, and project management application. It is mainly used as an Exchange or Notes/Domino groupware and mail server replacement, as an LDAP directory, as a Windows PDC, as a contact and customer database, as a project management tool, or as any combination of these functions. It provides groupware (calendars, contacts, and tasks) connectors for Outlook, Thunderbird/Lightning, and PDAs. It supports internationalization and themes. It is highly scalable, and is used by sites from five to many thousands of users. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Event participation notifications were sent twice. A SQL bug was fixed on event insertion with resource. Improvements and fixes were made on event alerts. Other fixes and small improvements were made. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/_blgRuoeqCmkdauRAtYmfWj97xE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/_blgRuoeqCmkdauRAtYmfWj97xE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/9Wb0kxztx9M" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/7324_thumb.png" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" OBM is a groupware, email, LDAP, Windows PDC, CRM, and project management application. It is mainly used as an Exchange or Notes/Domino groupware and mail server replacement, as an LDAP directory, as a Windows PDC, as a contact and customer database, as a project management tool, or as any combination of these functions. It provides groupware (calendars, contacts, and tasks) connectors for Outlook, Thunderbird/Lightning, and PDAs. It supports internationalization and themes. It is highly scalable, and is used by sites from five to many thousands of users. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Event participation notifications were sent twice. A SQL bug was fixed on event insertion with resource. Improvements and fixes were made on event alerts. Other fixes and small improvements were made. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/SrpuaipsyVTFedZIDscKXHXEbwY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/SrpuaipsyVTFedZIDscKXHXEbwY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/9Wb0kxztx9M" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/61983_thumb.jpg" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" Equalizer is a programming interface and resource management system for scalable OpenGL applications. An Equalizer application can run unmodified on any visualization system, from a single-GPU laptop to large scale graphics clusters and shared memory visualization systems. Equalizer is build from ground up as a parallel, scalable programming interface, solving the common problems for any multi-GPU application. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / 2D and DB load-balancing, support for time-multiplex compounds, a statistics overlay, and ParaComp integration were added. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/wHapzWWhNup4ut5rstoJFu5dU0w/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/wHapzWWhNup4ut5rstoJFu5dU0w/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/zyt8jsLLeJo" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/61983_thumb.jpg" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" Equalizer is a programming interface and resource management system for scalable OpenGL applications. An Equalizer application can run unmodified on any visualization system, from a single-GPU laptop to large scale graphics clusters and shared memory visualization systems. Equalizer is build from ground up as a parallel, scalable programming interface, solving the common problems for any multi-GPU application. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / 2D and DB load-balancing, support for time-multiplex compounds, a statistics overlay, and ParaComp integration were added. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/l7D_M7LGnk406VhZzL9WHunO5Q4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/l7D_M7LGnk406VhZzL9WHunO5Q4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/zyt8jsLLeJo" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/55916_thumb.jpg" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" The WiKID Strong Authentication System is a highly scalable, secure two-factor authentication system. It is simple to implement and maintain, allows users to be validated automatically, requires no hardware tokens, has a simple API for application support (via Ruby, PHP, Java, COM, Python, etc.), supports multiple domains, and supports replication for fault tolerance and scalability. It also supports mutual /host and transaction authentication, wireless tokens only domains, locked tokens (to your PC), anti-keystroke logger keypad PIN entry, etc. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / The database is now ensured to be stopped before running setup. The sudoers file was changed to allow sudo to work during boot. Improvements were made to scripts. A database connection leak in the passcode request block was fixed. Connections are now ensured to be properly wrapped for device initialization. Some general code cleanup was done. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/bvwoAwm-mnojQEZnVPb-OFJlRiM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/bvwoAwm-mnojQEZnVPb-OFJlRiM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/fn9Nmjt-nsA" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/55916_thumb.jpg" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" The WiKID Strong Authentication System is a highly scalable, secure two-factor authentication system. It is simple to implement and maintain, allows users to be validated automatically, requires no hardware tokens, has a simple API for application support (via Ruby, PHP, Java, COM, Python, etc.), supports multiple domains, and supports replication for fault tolerance and scalability. It also supports mutual /host and transaction authentication, wireless tokens only domains, locked tokens (to your PC), anti-keystroke logger keypad PIN entry, etc. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / The database is now ensured to be stopped before running setup. The sudoers file was changed to allow sudo to work during boot. Improvements were made to scripts. A database connection leak in the passcode request block was fixed. Connections are now ensured to be properly wrapped for device initialization. Some general code cleanup was done. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/cU5eUKTlpCBw7r9SjLidarhYfjk/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/cU5eUKTlpCBw7r9SjLidarhYfjk/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/fn9Nmjt-nsA" height="1" width="1"/