Peer 1 Hosting’s small Manhattan-based staff, along with friends and customers, managed to keep the company’s generators at 75 Broad Street going with good-old fashioned brute labor. For two days they’ve hand-carried buckets of diesel fuel up 17 flights. Talk about above and beyond… Read more »
Steven Huffman, who co-founded Reddit and then Hipmunk, used Google App Engine to teach novice programmers web development on Udacity. He is impressed with it as a real-life development platform. And Google really, really wants you to know that. Read more »
The SDN startup’s Series B round comes courtesy of new investors Redpoint Ventures and Goldman Sachs. The money will be used to staff up an already tech-heavy engineering staff as the company readies its SDN controllers and applications for the market. Read more »
Data center sites and colocation centers in and around New York City are struggling to stay online with varying degrees of success. And there are reports of intermittent issues with undersea cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Read more »
Streaming media powerhouse Netflix says its experience with Amazon Web Services outages led to best practices and technology that can insulate Netflix — and potentially other companies — from the impact of weather-related and other events. Read more »
Nasuni, which helps distributed companies manage their cloud storage securely, has $20 million in a new funding round — led by a mystery investor — to help it pay for new features and expand sales and marketing, said CEO Andres Rodriguez. Read more »
Hurricane Sandy’s impact made itself felt on major media properties including the Huffington Post, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. All of those sites reported outages around 7 p.m. EDT. Read more »
Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices. Read more »
At just a few months old, Google Compute Engine is seen as a threat to public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. At least that appears to be what Amazon thinks given its lawsuit against a former exec who is joining Google. Read more »
It was a busy week in cloud, bookended by Amazon and Google App Engine outages. In between those snafus, OpenNebula updated its cloud and stealthy startup Yottabyte launched technology that it says will let companies yoke commodity hardware into clouds of their own. Read more »
Google says it resolved whatever ailed its platform as a service. It was Black Friday for the web with Tumblr, Dropbox and Google App Engine all going down. It was unclear if these issues were related and/or due to a broader systemic problem. Read more »
It’s a bad week to stop sniffing glue — and to run big cloud services. Google App Engine took a hit Friday, just days after Amazon Web Services suffered another very public snafu. Read more »
Build-your-own cell phones, a “finger-worn executive assistant,” immersive TV, 3-D printed houses: These are among the many cool technologies on display at MIT’s Media Lab. Read more »
If the world wants solutions to its most intractable problems — getting enough food, water and fuel for 9 billion people, for example — entrepreneurs must be able to try out big ideas. And fail sometimes. Read more »
MC10 wants to take wearable electronics into the heart of healthcare where they can aid in surgical procedures and track personal health stats, according to CEO David Icke. Read more »
Sure, Baxter the Robot can pack boxes or maybe even assemble furniture. But he — er, it — may one day help senior citizens stay in their homes longer. Rethink Robotics’ Baxter made his public debut Wednesday at EMtech 2012 at MIT. Read more »
Given the world’s inability to stem the flow of CO2 in the atmosphere — or even put a price on that flow — new scenarios to mitigate global warming are coming to the fore. Pumping sulfuric acid into the stratosphere could help, says Harvard’s David Keith. Read more »
Which type of Amazon Web Services Reserved Instance should your company deploy and for what time period for any given job? These are the kinds of questions Cloudyn’s new calculator can help you sort out for yourself, the company said. Read more »
Why is it that Heroku, Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram et al are still so heavily dependent on Amazon’s aging and problematic US-East region? Very good question. Here are some potential answers. Read more »
EMC’s Greenplum division hopes to encourage users of its Chorus big data application to reach out to the Kaggle community of data scientists to do real-world work. The company also inked partnerships with Gnip and Tableau and open-sourced a version of Chorus. Read more »
Rackspace’s new OpenStack-powered Cloud Block Storage comes in spinning disk and faster SSD tiers and lets customers mix and match block size with compute instances as needed, says company CTO John Engates. Read more »
Once again Amazon has experienced significant problems at its big US East data center. The snafu has taken down Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku and other popular websites. Read more »
Facebook’s breaking up with hardware OEMs, Europeans distrust the cloud and it’s anyone’s guess whether there will be an Amazon of Europe. Those were among the key takeaways from the first-ever Structure Europe event in Amsterdam last week. Read more »
10gen, the proprietor of MongoDB, signs on a raft of senior execs from Cloudera and Oracle to accelerate its NoSQL push worldwide. Read more »
Google Apps for Business users need to be protected from their own downloaded apps, according to Waltham, MA-based CloudLock, which on Monday launched a firewall for just that purpose. Read more »
When cartoonist Scott Adams decides that cloudwashing has become too much to take, maybe it’s time to give this annoying practice the boot. Sooooo … what do you say Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft? Can we agree to put the mindless use of the C-word on ice? Read more »
When it comes to realtime JavaScript frameworks, developers love Meteor. But they want better security features and user controls. With Meteor 0.5.0, it looks like they’re getting what they asked for. Read more »
Microsoft’s lackluster first quarter earnings news actually came as a relief after a raft of bad tech sector news from IBM, Intel and Google this week. The software giant missed expectations but not by all that much for the quarter ending September 30. Read more »
BloomReach, which offers a big data parsing service that etailers can use to juice their web sites, netted $25 million in new funding which it will use to boost both sales and marketing and research and development efforts. Read more »
What sort of amazing cloud services could Amazon have up its sleeve? Werner Vogels ain’t saying anything in detail but here are five things to watch out for where the public cloud services giant is concerned. Read more »
NASA wants unmanned aircraft that can fly in tight airspaces and may launch a competition to find partners to design and manufacture such vehicles. The agency is working with the FAA and Air Force Research Lab on this effort which may stir controversy. Read more »
The fear of a US-owned cloud company turning over personal data of a European citizen to the feds is still a factor impacting growth of cloud in Europe, according to an Orange Business Services exec speaking at Structure Europe. Read more »
API love is all fine and dandy. But successful application programming interfaces should have a real — and measurable — business value, according to API experts speaking at GigaOM Structure Europe on Wednesday. Read more »
Cisco and CA are working with Citrix to support its CloudPlatform implementation of CloudStack. The news, out of Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, comes as a raft of OpenStack news hits the wire. Read more »
Microsoft snarfs up StorSimple as an easy way to get customer data into its Windows Azure storage cloud. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, signals increasing competition between Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the OpenStack crew for customer data. Read more »
CIOs that try to thwart user demand for latest-and-greatest consumer technologies in the workplace could be an endangered species, according to speakers at Structure Europe. Better to accommodate and bring that new technology under IT’s big tent. Read more »
European hosting companies and service providers are hurting their cause by offering the same old services but with the word “cloud” attached, according to Flexiant founder Tony Lucas. Read more »
New funding from GGV Capital and Onset Ventures will help Gridstore push its case that, with the right software, plain, old disk drives can scale out to do the heavy lifting for most web-scale applications. Read more »
If there isn’t an OpenStack cloud you fancy, wait a second, there’s more — a lot more — in the pipeline. Cloudscaling, Metacloud and Dreamhost will all preview their take on the open-source cloud this week at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego. Read more »
Tallinn, Estonia? Berlin? London? Dublin? Those aren’t the only contenders for the title of Silicon Valley of Europe. Read more »
