In the latest phase of a well-organized succession plan at IBM, Virginia Rometty will become chairman of the IT giant on October 1. Sam Palmisano will stay on as advisor until December 1, the company said. Read more »
New images built using 10 years of data of the Furnace constellation and beyond show what NASA and ESA officials call the deepest look ever into the universe. Read more »
Would Google chairman Eric Schmidt like his company’s search engine to replace Microsoft Bing as the default search in Yahoo.com? Do you really have to ask? If so, the answer is yes, according to reports out of Japan. Read more »
Sometimes the lack of $10k means the difference between life and death for a startup. Upstart, says founder Dave Girouard (formerly president of Google Enterprise) will match college grads with patrons who will back their proposed startups money and advice. Read more »
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the Series B round which also includes contributions from Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures. SimpliVity is building a data center appliance that it says can replace a half-dozen specialized boxes and be run by a single VM admin. Read more »
The troubled IT giant is about to tweak its cloud services effort according to a Bloomberg News report. The question is whether yet another new strategy can give the company the traction it needs so badly. Read more »
At ONA, Dick Costolo promised free curation tools to help newsrooms better present the flavor of news events. That’s all well and good, but can these tools–and the ability to download your own tweets — resolve growing tensions between Twitter users and Twitter itself? Read more »
The connected home — which would let you control your thermostat from your phone, check on the dog while you’re traveling, automate the downloads of your favorite entertainment — is getting closer, but it ain’t here yet. Here’s why. Read more »
Oracle’s still fighting to recover, recoup and profit from its $7.4 billion buyout of Sun Microsystems three years ago. In its first quarter, Oracle’s overall hardware business was off 24 percent year over year despite “triple-digit growth” in engineered systems like Exadata. Read more »
Electronic Arts has survived in the cut-throat gaming business since 1982. And it plans to keep its console games alive while diverting resources to the fast growing mobile and social gaming world, company senior vice president Nick Earl said today. Read more »
It makes sense for the CMO to help pick which technology marketing uses — but marketing is just one of many departments of a company. In this age of BYOD, all that autonomy will lead to more “rogue” IT. That’s not always a good thing. Read more »
Bad economy aside, European government agencies and private businesses will be strongly encouraged to beef up their cloud infrastructure in a forthcoming report by the EC-sanctioned European Cloud Partnership. A leaked report said companies/agencies should invest €45 billion in cloud computing by 2020. Read more »
Knock me down with a feather! After a week of sometimes not-so-civil discourse, alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer says she’s started paying the artists who volunteered to back up her band on its “Theatre is Evil” tour. Read more »
New guidelines for the design of wider data center racks are available for discussion, according to the Open Compute Project. In theory, racks designed using the Open Rack 1.0 specification will allow more flexible, energy-efficient design of data center resources. Read more »
The OpenStack Foundation is official as of Wednesday with a new 24-person board, $10 million in funding, 5,600 members, and a mandate to promote flexible open-source cloud infrastructure. Question: Will the foundation echo the success of Eclipse or the failure of OpenOffice? Read more »
Heroku is morphing from what was a Ruby-focused PaaS for web developers to a fully Java-supportive PaaS for big business. At least that’s what Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff hopes as he integrates Heroku — purchased in 2010 — more tightly into the company’s overall platform. Read more »
Baxter the robot may not iron your clothes but he very well might assemble your furniture or pack the boxes it comes in. The brainchild of Rethink Robotics’ founder Rodney Brooks, Baxter is really making some waves in the industrial robot sector. Read more »
Yes, cloud adoption in Europe hasn’t happened as fast as in the US. But despite the difficult economy, there’s considerable interest in cloud on the continent. The market bears watching and here are 5 things you should know about it. Read more »
If you think fake online reviews are bad now, just wait a few years. Gartner predicts that in two to three years, 10 to 15 percent of all online reviews will be bought and paid for by businesses. Read more »
New updates to Alfresco’s content management system and Box’s cloud sync service renew questions about whether these file-share-and-sync services are best offered as part of a larger, legacy product or by an independent provider that specializes in this technology. Read more »
Apprenda, hopes to make private PaaSes more attractive to companies by giving developers access to a public instance of its Paas to experiment with, then pull in house, according to company CEO Sinclair Schuller. Read more »
Github’s planned migration to a new 3-node MySQL cluster didn’t go as planned, resulting in outages Monday and Tuesday. In addition, Github’s status site, which runs on Heroku, had its own problems, acccording to a Github post-mortem published Friday. Read more »
Are you a startup working on big data/high performance computing; gaming; consumer or business applications? Do you want $50,000? If so, Amazon has a challenge for you. Read more »
Amanda Palmer, an alt rock fan favorite who’s worked Kickstarter and social media masterfully in her career, may have mis-stepped when she posted a plea for free musicians to back up her band in its current tour. Or else it was a publicity stunt. Read more »
The Go language is gaining momentum among PaaS and IaaS vendors, says Apcera founder and CEO Derek Collison. Research shows the language gaining ground, although it hasn’t cracked the top 20. JavaScript and Java remain top dogs among overall programing languages. Read more »
In-Q-Tel which finds and vets strategic technology for use by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, has given a boost (and some money) to Huddle, the UK provider of cloud collaboration services. Together they”re working on a version for use by US government entities. Read more »
Amazon — which knows a thing or two about online marketplaces — is launching one for Amazon Web Services customers who may have over-provisioned their EC2 reserved instances. Now they can buy or sell those instances with other AWS customers Read more »
It’s bad enough when Twitter or Facebook fail, but when Github goes down, real work is affected. And Github has now gone down twice in two days. Developers want to know: what’s up with that? Read more »
ComodIT, a tiny startup out of Liege, Belgium, has big plans to help you manage your IT infrastructure in the cloud. The company’s new Synapse Agent, a step towards that goal, lets you manage multiple hosts or instances from a single command-line interface. Read more »
Mark Shuttleworth, a superstar in the open-source world and the force behind Ubuntu Linux, is funding Inktank to the tune of $1 million. DreamHost spun out Inktank last year to help get customers up and running on Ceph open-source storage technology. Read more »
Nasuni, the startup that built its business bringing secure unified cloud storage to mid-sized businesses and companies with remote branch offices, is attacking the BYOD problem with new support for iPhone and Android devices, says CEO Andres Rodriguez. Read more »
As ProfitBricks rolls out its scale-up infrastructure as a platform in the U.S. this week, it says it can offer more powerful instances to customers cheaper than market leader Amazon Web Services. That’s a tall order, but an intriguing one. Read more »
After weeks of back and forth and considerable anxiety, VMware, Intel and NEC are now Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation. The news comes out of Friday afternoon’s OpenStack board meeting. Read more »
According to a new 8K filing with the SEC, EMC CEO Joe Tucci will stay on at the storage giant until at least February of 2015. But he may not hold the top job for that whole time, according to the document. Read more »
The popular social network uses devops software deployment smarts to keep all those pinboards up and running in the face of explosive growth and still be able to add features, according to operations engineer (and devops pro) Ryan Park. Read more »
Just when we think we’ve maxed out the amount of cloud-based storage the world can consume, there’s data to prove us wrong. IHS iSuppli research shows that cloud storage subscriptions will grow at double-digit rates til 2017 when they’ll hit 1.3 billion Read more »
Microsoft has spent billions to make Bing a search contender against the heavyweight champ Google. Now it’s inviting users to judge for themselves with an online contest. Check it out and let us know how it goes. Read more »
Pogoplug appears to be the first company to offer a service that uses Glacier, Amazon’s slow-but-cheap storage service as a data archival backend-in-the-cloud. But nobody expects it to be the last. Read more »
Journalism schools have to do a much better job teaching prospective reporters about the programming skills needed to tell data-driven, visual stories on web pages, not front pages, says the executive director of Northwestern University’s Knight News Innovation Lab. Read more »
Basho says its Riak CS object store will fit nicely into the CloudStack open-source cloud platform. As service providers and enterprises look for Amazon S3 compatible storage, entries like Riak CS and DreamHost’s new Ceph-based store could be viable options. Read more »
