Over the past few years, Google has been working constantly to build some cloud -ased platforms and other infrastructure for third-party developers, to help them build applications and websites, provide storage, or analysis of data.Google has already built several products that do just this, such as Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google BigQuery. The search giant recently introduced another product to that list at Google IO, called Google Compute Engine, which is a cloud based computing engine for application developers.Google Compute Engine will allow users to run Linux Virtual Machines (VMs) in the cloud. It gives greater flexibility and control to application developers to manage and access computing resources more fundamentally.Meant to be a powerful and affordable...

We spoke to Danny Winokur, VP and GM, Platform, Adobe Inc. a while ago. (Edit: Post this insightful interaction, there were a couple of developments we've been closely following. Among them, Adobe Flash support would cease from Jelly Bean beginning August 15. The rationale behind these decisions have been explained in the conversation below.)Danny Winokur, VP and GM, Platforms, Adobe There’s a lot of buzz surrounding the future of Flash. Tell us a bit about the transition from Flash to HTML5. Realizing the growing presence of HTML5 in the web, Adobe has pulled back on its Flash development slightly. Rather than focussing on developing Flash for multiple platforms, Adobe is trying to better integrate Flash with desktop web browsers. Flash development though cannot be ignored...

The concept of self-replication, or the ability for something to create another version of itself has always been rather alluring. We see it everywhere in the organic world, animals give birth to the same animal, plants to the same plant. So it’s genuinely exciting when we find artificial systems capable of such complexity.Take something like the RepRap, an open source, open hardware design for a 3D printer that has been carefully constructed such that it can print its own parts, and in a sense give birth to another RepRap printer. It goes even a step ahead by being able to print not only its own parts, but also the parts of the next, improved model of the machine. An excellent model for evolution in machine form. Consider this, once you make or buy a RepRap machine, you are set...