Nik Cubrilovic (koo-bree-low-vick) is an Australian-born entrepreneur, technologist, software developer and blogger. Nik has been a writer and advisor to Techcrunch since 2005, is a founding editor of TechcrunchIT, and is currently working at Techcrunch and on the Crunchpad project. Nik is the founder and CEO of Omnidrive, a web content and storage platform. Nik was also the founder of Solutionstap, a technology solutions and software development company. Prior to Solutionstap, Nik was a freelance developer, project manager and security specialist in Australia, the UK, South Africa and throughout Europe. Nik has contributed to a large number of open source projects and published a number of security vulnerabilities for various platforms and applications since 1996.
In 2007, Nik was named in The Bulletin magazine as one of Australia’s “Smart 100.”
In 2005 Nik was a founding member of 2web, a loose-knit group of Australian technology entrepreneurs. Nik has advised, or is a current advisor to a range of companies and startups based in both Australia and the USA.
Amazon today launched a new web service – EBS, the Elastic Block Store (yes I also first read it as ‘Elastic Book Store’) for EC2. EBS provides persistent storage for EC2 computing instances, and the service is public today and available to all customers after a period of alpha testing with some users. Previously EC2 instances were able to access temporary storage as part of the compute… → Read More
Amazon today launched a new web service – EBS, the Elastic Block Store (yes I also first read it as ‘Elastic Book Store’) for EC2. EBS provides persistent storage for EC2 computing instances, and the service is public today and available to all customers after a period of alpha testing with some users. Previously EC2 instances were able to access temporary storage as part of the… → Read More
iPhone application development house taptaptap has published sales figures for the first month of sales for their two AppStore applications, bringing further insight into overall sales volume and figures for the online store. The two applications developed by the company are WhereTo, an application that provides a more general GPS interface to the iPhone with location-based services, and… → Read More
After the recent outbreak of a worm that hacked user Facebook accounts and disseminated through users contacts, Facebook responded with a post with advice to users on general tips about web security. Facebook head of security Max Kelly, a former FBI computer forensics examiner, wrote a blog post with advice to Facebook users including: As a Facebook user you can help us protect you by doing the… → Read More
Over a year has passed since Google completed the acquisition of feed massaging and hosting service Feedburner, and today some users now finally have their feeds hosted on what appears to be Google’s servers and infrastructure. At Techcrunch we have always been big fans of Feedburner, and their widgets and RSS subscriber counts have adorned almost all of our sites since their first days. At… → Read More
In yet another case of widgets going crazy and causing havoc, a bug in Sitemeter has caused a large number of websites and blogs using the free web analytics tool to fail loading for users of Internet Explorer. Users of Google’s Blogger were amongst the first to report experiencing problems with sites running Sitemeter at 6pm pacific time on Friday. The problem has since been partially… → Read More
Atlassian has announced the availability of their JIRA Studio suite as a hosted Saas service. JIRA Studio is a hosted integration of popular Atlassian products starting with the JIRA issue tracker and Confluence, their wiki and knowledge management product. Atlassian has partnered with Contegix to provide the hosting for the new suite of applications. The JIRA Studio solution includes issue… → Read More
Microsoft announced today that they have acquired data warehousing application provider Datallegro for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was run out of the Data and Storage Platform division at Microsoft, with an intention to integrate the Datallegro application into Microsoft SQL Server and the data application suite. Microsoft are rapidly building out their data services offerings and have… → Read More
This morning at that OSCON conference David Recordon of Six Apart will announce on stage the formation of the Open Web Foundation. The new foundation is about providing a home for the development and ratification of web-related standards efforts. The foundation will be focused on developing the technical specifications of protocols used for communication and inter-operability between applications… → Read More
Microsoft has just announced a major reorganization of its Platforms & Services Division. It will now be split into two groups (Windows/Windows Live and Online Services) which will both report to Steve Ballmer. That’s right. Steve Ballmer will now personally be running Windows. Kevin Johnson, who used to head the Platforms & Services Division, will soon be leaving the company to… → Read More
Today at the f8 conference Benjamin Ling revealed that Facebook will be releasing a Cocoa framework for the iPhone that will allow application developers to integrate with Facebook Connect. The framework is expected to be released sometime in the fall, and will take the form of an SDK that can be used by developers of iPhone applications. Facebook Connect allows applications to integrate the… → Read More
Drizzle is a newly announced fork of the open source MySQL project. The developers of the project are taking MySQL back to its roots as a light-weight web application database by removing many of the features introduced in MySQL 5. The fifth version of MySQL was in development for years as some users demanded features such as views, stored procedures, transaction handling, clustering and more. The… → Read More
Kontagent is an application that integrates tightly with platforms such as Facebook to offer widget and application developers a high level of analytics data. Current analytics packages for social network applications or widgets offer nothing more than pageview stats or simple user numbers (such as what Facebook publishes itself) while Kontagent is able to bury itself deeply into the platform and… → Read More
News broke out across the world yesterday that Bosnian Serb war-time leader Radovan Karadzic had been captured after 12 years on the run. Karadzic had adorned the top of the Interpol most wanted list for over a decade, commanding a reward as large as that offered for Al Quaeda terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden. What was most surprising about the arrest was that Karadzic had been living in… → Read More
Chris Saad, a co-founder of the Data Portability project has posted that tomorrow at OSCON a new Open Data Web Foundation will be announced by David Recordon and others. The goal of the new foundation is to set out the actual data specifications, legal structures around data portability and in helping to evangelize set formats. Saad says that the initiative is different to the Data Portability… → Read More
Chris Saad, a co-founder of the Data Portability project has posted that tomorrow at OSCON a new Open Data Web Foundation will be announced by David Recordon and others. The goal of the new foundation is to set out the actual data specifications, legal structures around data portability and in helping to evangelize set formats. Saad says that the initiative is different to the Data Portability… → Read More
A week ago we reported that Apple had finally filed suit against Mac clone maker Psystar. Apple claimed that Psystar was trading on the Apple brand and illegally releasing the Mac OS X operating system on clone hardware. Today we have learnt via Macblogs of a new clone maker, Open Tech, who are planning on filling the void that is likely to be soon left by Psystar. Open Tech are taking more… → Read More
The good computer hackers are similar to war veterans in that they spend hours talking about how great the scene used to be “back in the day”. I first heard similar stories way back in 1995 but today it is actually somewhat true as the final HOPE conference has now been held, Black Hat is now a corporate event, the good e-zines are long gone and hacking is now associated with Russian… → Read More
There are times when the full disclosure of a security vulnerability works well for everybody, and there are times when it does not. One such case where it hasn’t worked out well is with the DNS security vulnerabilities recently ‘discovered’ by security researcher Dan Kaminsky. Some weeks ago after he called a press conference with the organizers of the Black Hat conference… → Read More
The Public Interest Registry, operators of the .org top-level domain name, was today granted permission from ICANN to implement Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC). DNS is inherently insecure, which has become more apparent recently with security issues found in most server implementations (to do with easily guessing client ports used for responses) and the lack of a trust mechanism that… → Read More
Continue comments here. The discussion has been very interesting, thank you to everybody. We are taking it all in and organizing the new dev site which will be up in the next few hours. Forking comment thread here. Thanks! → Read More
COMMENTS CLOSED HERE. PLEASE CONTINUE AT NEXT POST Digg This Today at Techcrunch we announced that we are building our own web tablet hardware device. This all stems back from a conversation a few weeks ago when we were discussing the ultimate web browsing/cloud computing client hardware. The iPhone is nice but too small, and most laptops are over-powered for the task. With applications on the web… → Read More
The Live Mesh team at Microsoft announced today that P2P storage between Mesh nodes is now available in the latest client update. Previously storage on the Mesh worked by utilizing the 5GB allocated to each user on the central hosting platform at Microsoft. Users are now able to sync their files between connected nodes automatically. The new technology works by synching the files between… → Read More
Facebook is starting to pursue social networks that have copied their design or features by suing German site StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook filed a suit in California against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”. StudiVZ claims to have 10 million active members, and is the largest… → Read More
Android is the new highly-anticipated “open source” mobile platform that is currently under development at Google. There are a high expectations of Android as the first viable open source based mobile platform and a viable competitor to the dominance of Symbian, Microsoft and now Apple. Android is based on Linux and developers can write applications in managed code that use the Google… → Read More
Since launching TechcrunchIT we have been pounding away about open standards and data availability. One of the biggest victims of this focus recently has been Twitter, who went from being a leading light in the field, to closing everything up and now finally today have gone back to being open again. Gnip has announced this morning that they now have access to the Twitter XMPP feed, and that they… → Read More
The AMD Q2 earnings report today recorded a $1.2B loss for the second quarter, as the company replace CEO Ruiz with Dirk Meyer. The board voted out Ruiz, who has been CEO since moving to the company from Motorola in 2001. Dirk Meyer is taking over as CEO from his current position as both COO and President. Meyer has been with the company for 12 years, and presided over microprocessor design at the… → Read More
It is definitely a day where attention is reverted back to the old IT giants as Microsoft today announced in their Q4 earnings results that they have seen the biggest earnings-per-share growth since 1999. Revenue reached $60 Billion for the first time, with $15.48 Billion for the quarter, an increase of 18% over last year. Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said: “Delivering $60 billion in annual… → Read More
Moments after the disappointing results from Google, IBM announced their Q2 results and their reported revenue increase beat out analyst expectations. IBM stock is up 0.5% in after-market trading as the company reported second-quarter earnings of $2.8 Billion, up 22% on the same time last year. Revenue rose 13% to $26.8 Billion. IBM have again upgraded their earnings forecast for the year to… → Read More
Google announced their Q2 results today after the market had closed. Shares are down by as much as 12% as earnings growth reported was below analysts expectations. Net income for the quarter was $1.25B, up from $925M. The company reported a profit of $4.63 per share, which was slightly below the $4.72 average expectation from Wall Street analysts. Continue reading at TechcrunchIT >>… → Read More
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