It’s amazing the amount of time and money wasted in the world of tech over completely pointless things. One of the best examples of this is patent rights. Now,patentsthemselves are great things. They reward inventors by giving them an exclusive run on their idea in reward for sharing their methodology with the world. It’s when those patent rights get acquired by others that things start to go awry. In recent weeks we’ve seen Lodsysassert its rightsover in-app payments by demanding money from (and evensuing) mobile app developers....

A simple guide to Redis and caching with NodeJS What is Redis? Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. You can think of it as a No-SQL database, which stores data as a key-value pair in the system memory. Redis supports disk-persistent data storage, too, if needed. Redis has support for storingmultiple data structures and data types, including strings, lists, hashes, sets, and sorted sets....

FoodSpotting, one of our favorite photo sharing apps, has set the table to take on yet another strategic partnership. Last year it teamed up withZagat, and today with New York basedSinglePlatform, a tech savvy service pulling restaurants into the digital era. One year ago, in January 2010,SeamlessWebentrepreneur Wiley Cerillilaunched SinglePlatformto ease restaurants into the next course of internet marketing and social media. Restaurants provide SinglePlatform with their information like menus, photos, events and specials through an easy-to-use portal and SinglePlatform updates it across their hundreds of publishing partners including hotels, city guides, restaurant review sites and application developers....

Klout, the tool regarded as the standard in measuring a user’s impact on their Twitter network, has just released a beta version of its upcoming redesign with the goal of creating a more engaging environment for users to gauge their personal influence. The layout changes are quite obvious. It has a much cleaner interface, which I personally think is an improvement over the old Klout. It’s much easier to understand and navigate as it manages to fit everything in a single page....

This year,Accenturehas asked me once again to contribute to their yearly innovation competition, theAccenture Innovation Awardsin the Netherlands. I have been involved with the Communications, Media and Technology category of these awards for some years, and it’s inspiring to see the latest developments and innovations in the Dutch market. The number of contributions increases each year and the quality of the concepts keeps improving as well. With past winners likeMyngle,LayarandTenPages.com, the AIA has proven its value as a platform for cutting edge innovation in this industry....