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We should talk. I'm always enthusiastic about projects involving Multi-Value databases, and I have more than 25 years experience in everything from manufacturing and insurance, to retail distribution and higher education.

I can provide web programming as well. Since 1998 I've developed a whole range of sites, all with extensive presentation schemes and back-ends.

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7 Big Facebook Advertising Stories Before the IPO

Facebook has been pushing out new ad products in the hopes of better monetization.

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For Do-Not-Track Users, Tailored Twitter Won't Work

Twitter's new feature is reliant in part on tracking DNT would disable.

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Weekly Wrap-up: Google's Knowledge Graph, SlideShark's Presentation App and More

Google unveiled the Knowledge Graph. SlideShark makes giving presentations via your iPad easy peasy. Learn more about these stories and many more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Google Goes Back to What It Does Well: Finding Things

Google released the Knowledge Graph this week and Jon Mitchell explains the ins and outs:

In the new Google, with the Knowledge Graph online, a new box will come up. You'll still get the Google results you're used to, including the box scores for the team Google thinks you're looking for, but on the right side, a box called "See results about" will show brief descriptions for the Los Angeles Kings, the Sacramento Kings, and the TV series, Kings. If you need to clarify, click the one you're looking for, and Google will refine your search query for you.

Learn more about how this will affect your search experience by reading Jon Mitchell's Google Goes Back to What It Does Well: Finding Things.

Giving iPad PowerPoint Presentations Just Got a Lot Better

If you've ever tried to give a presentation with your iPad, you know it's virtually impossible if you want to use presenter mode. That all changed with the recent release of SlideShark. Get a good look at the app by reading David Strom's review of the presentation app, SlideShark.

[Infographic] Taking HTML5 to the Next Level for Mobile

By 2013, there will be more than one billion HTML5-capable browsers in use throughout the world. Applications for those HTML5 browsers will be created by two million HTML Web developers, according to research from IDC. There is no question that HTML5 is going to be a major factor in mobile development during the next five to 10 years. The rise of HTML5 does not mean the death of native applications, but as the standard progresses, many developers will begin to incorporate more HTML5 into their apps than native code. More

Study: Facebook Timeline Improves Fan Engagement For Brands

Facebook posts by brands live longer on Timeline than they did prior to the social network’s massive overhaul, according to a study released Monday.While the analysis by London-based social media analytics firm Sotrender is limited in scope, covering just 130 brands headquartered in the U.K. and 5,000 posts, it is the first such empirical review since Timeline became mandatory for all Facebook brand pages at the end of March. More

Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy

What Is the Point of: #Hashtags?

Whenever a new Web trend comes along, there are people who ask, "What is the point of this?" If millions of people are using something, there has to be a reason. In our "What Is the Point of..." series, we'll explain it to you.This week, we're asking, What is the point of #hashtags? More

Staying Off Facebook Won't Protect Your Privacy

Stay away from social networks and people won't know who you're hanging out with or what you're doing, right? Wrong. When it comes to social networking, a recent study suggests, you can run but you can't hide. More

A Discreet Guide to Using Mobile Devices in the Loo

Last year, British researchers swabbed 390 cell phones and analyzed what they picked up. Know what they found? One in six phones has poop on it. Four out of five are contaminated by some kind of bacteria. Sure, we all like to make our own calls while answering Mother Nature's, but that's just gross. Here’s a surefire way to avoid a crappy user experience on your smartphone or other mobile device. More

How and Why Your Startup Should Go Virtual

Working virtually sounds like heaven to many startups. After all, not having a central office staffed with employees saves money on rent, utilities, parking, etc., freeing you to invest in research, development or marketing.On the other hand, operating virtually is no panacea. Before you make the virtual leap, you need to figure out exactly what working virtually means to your business. MoreReadWriteWeb ChannelsEnterpriseFollow ReadWriteEnterprise on Twitter.

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When Words Fail, Text an Animated GIF

Think emojis are fun? Now you can send messages that move. A new iPhone app called MyFaceWhen makes it fast and easy to record and send video in the form of animated GIFs attached to text messages. We've had multimedia messages (MMS) for years, and we're used to static images showing up alongside text messages. Most phones can handle audio and video recordings, too. But those take a long time to send and receive, and they require the recipient to click 'play' to see the message.Spicing up a text message with an animated GIF is way better, and MyFaceWhen makes it incredibly easy. Wave hello, smile or spin around in circles, and instead of text, a still photo or a poop emoji, your friend will instantly see your animated greeting playing in loop, like a cartoon. If you can get over the app's name and somewhat offputting icon, MyFaceWhen is phenomenally easy to use. It launches surprisingly fast, which is crucial if you're trying to record something spontaneously. It launches straight to the camera in video mode, and a big "Record" button sits in the center of the screen. You can flip between the front and back camera as usual.Record your video and then tap the center of the screen again. You'll see the preview as a video. If you like it, hit the big yellow "SAVE" button, and the app will convert the video into a small GIF in seconds. Then it takes you to a grid view of all the GIFs you've recorded, with the new one shown first. In a couple taps, you can copy it to your clipboard. When you copy it, it even gives you a handy button to switch over to the Messages app. All you have to do is paste a GIF into a text message and send it. Recipients with iPhones and many (but not all) other smartphones will see it pop up in a familiar chat bubble with the animation looping away.Whether it's hilarious pet antics or just you waving hello, communication by animated GIF makes everybody involved feel warm and fuzzy. If you're in a situation where you need to send video quickly - a sporting event, a momentous occasion, a protest in the streets - GIFs will upload much faster than video files.And you don't have to send your GIFs via text or iMessage. Since they're copied to the clipboard, you can send them as email or any other GIF-friendly way. The GIFs produced by MyFaceWhen are quite small and highly compressed, but this is an advantage. They're big enough to get the point across but small enough to send quickly without eating up your data plan.Other animated GIF apps, like Gifture, go after the Instagram vibe. They let users apply filters, be artsy and share to the Web and social networks. MyFaceWhen is more personal. It expands the range of emotions you can express in an iMessage conversation.The app is free on the App Store, so it's definitely worth a try.

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Facebook Beefs Up Its Mobile Arsenal With Karma, a Social Gifting App

Facebook became a publicly traded company a few hours ago, but it's not wasting any time making new moves. The social networking giant acquired Karma, a mobile app for finding and sending gifts to one's friends and family. By buying the social gifting app, Facebook pushes further into the mobile space it so desperately hopes to conquer. Karma relies on its users' Facebook accounts to find their friends and determine when important dates in those friends' lives happen to be. The most obvious use case is birthdays, but the app is much smarter than that. For example, it knows that a friend of mine recently landed a new job in New York and that another friend just graduated. From there, Karma recommends a number of gifts to send to that person, from baby booties to whiskey rocks. You can break down gifts by the type of person you're sending them to. Are they a foodie? A geek? Tap the appropriate tab to filter gifts accordingly. "The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force," wrote Karma cofounders Ben Lewis and Lee Linden in the acquisition announcement. "By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways."The acquisition is Facebook's first as a public company, and one that comes a few weeks after it announced the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for close to $1 billion. Karma already has Facebook baked thoroughly into the experience, so the acquisition makes perfect sense. This is precisely the kind of social commerce service that Facebook strives to provide its users, and it doesn't hurt that it's a mobile application, an area in which the company has acknowledged it needs to do better. This also helps diversify Facebook's revenue beyond social advertising.

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Oracle Versus Google: The Database Kingpin Gets Desperate

Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over alleged infringement of Java slipped from epic battle to soap opera this week: The relationships between the judge, jury, plaintiff and defendant have become a tangle of legal ambiguity and financial suffering — or is it avarice? The jury deferred to the judge on the extent of Oracle’s intellectual property protections. The judge, in turn, wrested from the jury control over the lion’s share of damages, yanking Oracle’s prize another few inches out of reach. With major issues still to be decided, it is becoming clear that Judge William Alsup holds the high cards - and that he has the tech smarts to play them intelligently and mercilessly.

The trial is unfolding in three phases: Copyright, patent and damages. The copyright phase ended last week with the jury convicting Google on one of three counts, namely infringement of nine lines of Java code known as rangeCheck. In a separate issue, the jury couldn’t agree on the question of whether Google’s use of the Java API was a so-called fair use, and thus allowable under copyright law. That question went to the judge, who hasn't decided yet. His decision could have a big impact on the size of Oracle’s payoff, as we'll explain in below.

Phase Two, the patent phase, consumed the past several days, focusing on two Oracle patents that Google allegedly violated. The jury was still deliberating at the time of writing. However, one of Oracle’s claims was thoroughly debunked by Google’s lawyers, who showed that Android does not even use the technology in question. Although anything can still happen, it looks unlikely that the jury will accept that claim. The other claim is a closer call.

Oracle Seeks to Cover the Cost of Acquiring Sun

But never mind about whether or not Google is guilty of infringing Oracle’s patents. The big money won’t come from damages for patent infringement, but for copyright infringement. That’s where Oracle has pinned its hopes.

You can’t blame Oracle for kicking and scratching for anything it can get at this point. Oracle spent $7.38 billion to acquire Java creator Sun Microsystems in 2009 with the thought that it could leverage Java to recoup the cost. Taking Google to court (which it did shortly after the acquisition was formally approved in 2010) could recover most of that money. It’s no coincidence that Oracle’s initial damage estimate was in the $6 billion range.

It's Up to Judge Alsup

Here’s the rub: The fate of Oracle’s prospective payoff now rests entirely with Alsup. When the fair use decision passed to him, with it went control over damages in the copyright phase. If Alsup awards statutory damages, Oracle's reward would be $150,000. And if the judge rules that Google’s appropriation of the Java API was a fair use, that might be all Oracle gets. On the other hand, if the judge decides against fair use, he still might not award Oracle anything close to the billions of dollars it seeks.

Alsup won't be hoodwinked. He has proven that he is willing to learn about the technological issues at the heart of the case. And learn he has. This week, he revealed that he has not only learned how to program, but has used the nine lines of rangeCheck code more than a hundred times. He found it simple to do, he says. Will he find an infringement of a mere nine lines, out of the entire corpus of Java, worth $1 billion? Or even $1 million?

Oracle's desperation hasn’t been lost on Alsup. During the discussion of copyright damages, he called Oracle’s effort to gain significant revenue from Google "a fishing expedition."

If the developer community agrees, Oracle stands to damage not only its bottom line but also its credibility. Sun created Java to be open source and free. It developed the language more as a steward than as an outright owner. By attempting to copyright the API despite the impact that would have on the entire software ecosystem, Oracle is calling into question the legal nature of computer languages and programming. Its soap opera risks the good will of the developer community at large.

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5 Things Spotify Should Spend All That Cash On

Spotify is raking in the money. The six-year-old streaming music startup has only been live in the U.S. for about a year, but it has apparently won the confidence of investors, who are said to be ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company. So what will Spotify do with all that money? They won't say, but it's safe to assume that content licensing, app development and hiring are high on the list. Here are a few of our unsolicited recommendations.

1. Expand the Music Catalog

Spotify already has a massive selection of music, but to stay competitive with the likes of Rdio and the cloud music lockers, it's going to need to continue to grow that library. This is one of the more expensive things a company like this has to deal with, so it's probably one of the first places that money is going to end up.

2. Increase Royalty Payments For Independent Artists

It's still very much a growing company, but Spotify should consider increasing the royalty checks it sends to indie artists. That may not help the bottom line in the short term, but to remain viable, the service is going to need to retain those artists. Some of them are already uneasy about the meager payouts they've seen to date, and even an incremental boost in revenue would be a good way to restore their confidence.

3. Redesigned Apps For Every Platform

This may well be something that's already underway, but a good way to mark the one-year anniversary of Spotify's U.S. launch would be with a fleet of shiny, newly-redesigned apps across all platforms. The UI of their desktop app, for instance, is functional and looks fine, but it's not the most jaw-droppingly beautiful interface we've ever seen. The same is true of the iPhone app. The standard set by the company's brand new iPad app is a pretty good one. There's no reason the desktop experience shouldn't be every bit as nice, and then some. The model could be shrunk down to fit on smartphones, and some lessons can be drawn from the design of Rdio's iPhone app. It might be a longshot, but a Web app would be nice too. Unlike Rdio and MOG, Spotify doesn't exist as in-browser experience. Since Spotify uses P2P architecture, there are legitimate technical issues on the backend that might prevent Spotify from doing this, or at least make it very challenging.

4. More Native Social Features

Spotify's integration with Facebook is nice, and it has certainly helped the company grow its user base. The social experience of using Spotify shouldn't stop there, though. Twitter and Facebook could both be baked even more thoroughly into the service, and users should be able to interact with one another from within the app itself through basic features like comments, likes and private messages.

5. Grow the Third Party App Platform

One of the best things Spotify has done in the last year is launch its own app store for third party developers. Right now, the selection is still fairly limited, but the potential there is huge. Apps like Last.fm, Pitchfork, Matador Records, Rolling Stone and We Are Hunted are great for discovering new music. Mood Agent, TuneWiki and Soundrop are all innovative apps that layer in a new element to listening to music. The innovation could go even further on this platform and the apps would be even more useful in a mobile context. To date, they only exist on the desktop.

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Big Question (Answered): What's Your 1 Piece of Social Media Advice?

If the Facebook IPO and Pinterest's $1.5 billion valuation mean anything, it's that social media have become business as usual. Everybody's full of social media advice and best practices these days. For today's Big Question, we asked the savvy RWW readers to share their tips. If you could give someone one piece of advice about social media, what would it be?We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and now we're presenting them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

View the story "If you could give someone 1 piece of advice about social media, what would it be?" on Storify

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Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society. The democratization of literacy in the late 19th century created one of the great inflection points in human history. Knowledge was no longer confined to an elite class, and influence began to spread throughout all levels of society. Any educated person could command the power of words.What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?The usual definition of computer literacy stops at the UI: If a user knows how to make the machine work, he or she is computer-literate. But, of course, the deeper literacy of the programmer is far more powerful. Fortunately, computer languages and human languages are basically very similar. Like human languages, computer languages vary in form and character (Python to Java to Ruby) and can be implemented in infinite ways. My Python may not look like your Python, but it can do the same thing; likewise, a single idea can be expressed using a variety of combinations of English words. And both kinds of language are infinitely flexible. Just as a person literate in English can compose everything from a sonnet to a statute, a person literate in programming languages can automate repetitive tasks, saving time for things only a human can do; distribute access to systems of communication and control to large groups of people; and train machines to do things they've never done before. Computer programming already does marvelous things like deliver this article to your mind, operate life-sustaining medical devices and enable IBM's Watson to win at Jeopardy. The current potential for innovation would be many times greater if every schoolchild had a firm grasp of programming concepts and how to apply them.Among programmers, a movement is forming around this idea. Shereef Bishay, founder of San Francisco-based Developer Bootcamp, believes that coding is destined to become a new form of widespread literacy within the next 20 to 30 years. Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don't know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn't read or write 200 years ago.300 years ago, Bishay said, "you would have to hire to write a letter for you, and hire them to read the letter for you. It is just insane." Today most people hire a skilled programmer to write computer programs for them.The code literacy movement began to gather steam in late 2011, when Codecademy started teaching basic programming skills for free. The debate came to a head this week as two blog posts took the top spots on the tech website Hacker News. The first, dubbed “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” came from noted developer and StackOverflow.com creator Jeff Atwood on his blog Coding Horror. The second, a rebuttal entitled "Please Learn to Code," came from Sacha Greif, a Parisian designer whose clients include HipMunk and MileWise. “I do think (or at least, hope) that computer programming will become the next version of literacy,” Greif wrote in an email to ReadWriteWeb. “When I watch my 4 year old niece interact with an iPhone, I see her intuitively using interaction patterns that older people often have trouble with, even when they're computer-literate. And kids can easily memorize huge quantities of facts about complex abstract systems like Pokemon games. So clearly they have the potential to learn how to code.” Not everyone in the programming community agrees. Atwood argues that verbal literacy is a different kind of skill, and more fundamental. “Literacy is the new literacy,” he told ReadWriteWeb. “As much as I love code, if my fellow programmers could communicate with other human beings one-tenth as well as they communicate with their interpreters and compilers, they'd have vastly more successful careers.”Atwood stresses learning, and mastering, the basic skills of communication. Learn to read. Learn to write. Learn to hold a conversation. Learn some basic math. These skills, he says, are more essential than being able to program a computer.Of course, the path to universal code literacy is not without roadblocks. The skills necessary depend on how computing evolves over the next several decades. How will quantum computing affect our relationship with computers? However, the human capacity to learn is not at issue. If it becomes necessary for me to code to interact with my machine, I will likely learn to code. It is no different than if I was dropped off in Cambodia without a place to stay or food to eat - I'd learn the local language posthaste. At present, the ability to program computers is vocational, like carpentry or learning to cook. There's little impetus to make it universal. But imagine if it were.Should computer programming become the new literacy? Or should it remain a vocation? Let us know in the comments. Images courtesy of Shutterstock

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Looking for Unidata / Universe / Pick or Datatel Colleague Expertise?

7 Big Facebook Advertising Stories Before the IPO

For Do-Not-Track Users, Tailored Twitter Won't Work

Weekly Wrap-up: Google's Knowledge Graph, SlideShark's Presentation App and More

More Top Stories

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

When Words Fail, Text an Animated GIF

Facebook Beefs Up Its Mobile Arsenal With Karma, a Social Gifting App

Oracle Versus Google: The Database Kingpin Gets Desperate

Oracle Seeks to Cover the Cost of Acquiring Sun

It's Up to Judge Alsup

5 Things Spotify Should Spend All That Cash On

1. Expand the Music Catalog

2. Increase Royalty Payments For Independent Artists

3. Redesigned Apps For Every Platform

4. More Native Social Features

5. Grow the Third Party App Platform

Big Question (Answered): What's Your 1 Piece of Social Media Advice?

Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy