YQL - A Query Language for the Web

The YQL Web Service enables applications to query, filter, and combine data from different sources across the Internet. YQL statements have a SQL-like syntax, familiar to any developer with database experience. The following YQL statement, for example, retrieves a list of cat photos from Flickr:

SELECT * FROM flickr.photos.search WHERE text="cat"

To access the YQL Web Service, a Web application can call HTTP GET, passing the YQL statement as a URL parameter, for example:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=SELECT * FROM flickr.photos.search WHERE text="Cat"

When it processes a query, the YQL Web Service accesses a datasource on the Internet, transforms the data, and returns the results in either XML or JSON format. YQL can access several types of datasources, including Yahoo! Web Services, other Web services, and Web content in formats such as HTML, XML, RSS, and Atom.

Asterisk : wonderful opensource for voice communication

Asterisk is software that turns an ordinary computer into a voice communications server. Asterisk is the world's most powerful and popular telephony development tool-kit. It is used by small businesses, large businesses, call centers, carriers and governments worldwide. Asterisk is open source and is available free to all under the terms of the GPL.

Web Sites become Web Services

So bringing together Open APIs (like the Amazon E-Commerce service) and scraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way to treat any web site as a web service that exposes its information. The information, or to be more exact the data, becomes open. In turn, this enables software to take advantage of this information collectively. With that, the Web truly becomes a database that can be queried and remixed.

MapReduce is a software framework introduced by Google to support distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers.

MapReduce is a software framework introduced by Google to support distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers.^[1]

The framework is inspired by map and reduce functions commonly used in functional programming,^[2] although their purpose in the MapReduce framework is not the same as their original forms.^[3]

MapReduce libraries have been written in C++, C#, Erlang, Java, Python, Ruby, F#, R and other programming languages.

cloud computing

A new era is here
Information technology is changing rapidly, and now forms an invisible layer that increasingly touches every aspect of our lives. Power grids, traffic control, healthcare, water supplies, food and energy, along with most of the world's financial transactions, all now depend on information technology.

An emerging compute model—cloud computing—addresses the explosive growth of internet-connected devices, and complements the increasing presence of technology in today's world. Cloud computing is massively scalable, provides a superior user experience, and is characterized by new, internet-driven economics.