We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: Turn MySQL into blazing fast NoSQL.

Tomorrow's augmented reality is being built today on mobile devices. The Tasker application for Android is a fun platform for prototyping personal automation and sensing applications. Described modestly as an application which "performs tasks based on contexts," it gives non-programmers access to the sensing and system features of the phone.

Following a simple rule metaphor of taking action upon matched conditions, Tasker can respond …

We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: What your inbox knows.

The trend for NoSQL stores such as memcache for fast key-value storage should give us pause for thought: what have regular database vendors been doing all this time? An important new project, HandlerSocket, seeks to leverage MySQL's raw speed for key-value storage.

NoSQL databases offer fast key-value storage for use in backing web applications, but years of work on regular relational databases has hardly ignored performance. The main performance hit with regular databases is in interpreting queries.

We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: Kinect democratizes augmented reality.

Today's databases are designed for the spinning platter of the hard disk. They take into account that the slowest part of reading data is seeking: physically getting the read head to the part of the disk it needs to be in. But the emergence of cost effective solid state drives (SSD) is changing all those assumptions.

Over the course of 2010, systems designers have been realizing the benefits of using SSDs in data centers, with major IT vendors and companies adopting them. Drivers for SSD adoption …