Yahoo serves cocktails from its back-end (Photo: aoife mac/Flickr)

Google, Amazon, and Yahoo began life as websites, but they’ve evolved into something more. Now, they share their underlying infrastructure with the outside world, letting other businesses take advantage of the complex hardware and software systems they’ve erected over the years.

Google lets outsiders run applications atop its infrastructure via Google App Engine. Amazon offers its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). And sometime next year, Yahoo will launch “Manhattan” — an online service where anyone can build and host applications usi...

More Bollywood sci-fi, this Ra.One.

Bollywood superhero flick Ra.One is like Tron with dance numbers and crotch punches.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Calling the new 3-D Hindi superhero flick Ra.One the Bollywood Tron or Iron Man would be a bit of a misnomer. The most apt parallel for Ra.One would be Automan, that swiftly cancelled 1983 cop show about a crime-fighting hologram. And like Automan, Ra.One is shitstorm-preposterous in all the right ways.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Writer/director Anubhav Sinha’s Ra.One — which is being billed as the most-expensive Indian movie ever made ($30...