Flotype says Bridge will handle all the heavy lifting of real-time communications between any device and any server so software developers can focus on what they do best — app development — not the complexities of communications infrastructure. Read more »
Damien Katz says it’s time for him and the CouchDB team to focus on building up CouchBase Server for business customers. For some, this move re-ignites the always-simmering debate about the benefits and deficits of open-source software development. Read more »
GrabCAD, a specialist in open-source CAD software, has netted $4.2 million in new funding from its existing VC backers. It has also added Matrix Partners’ David Skok to its board, according to a new blog post by GrabCAD President Hardi Meybaum. Read more »
It looks like development superstar Ray Ozzie is about to come out of stealth mode: The force behind Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform-as-a-Service project and Lotus Notes is starting to hire developers for his new “Cocomo” project. Read more »
Much has been written about the U.S. government’s plan to shutter 1,200 data centers. There’s been considerably less chatter about the fact that some of the remaining, revamped federal data centers are now leasing out excess capacity to other government agencies. Read more »
It’s four days into the new year and IBM just made its first acquisition of 2012 — it is buying Green Hat, a company that simulates application testing in the cloud. The deal is all about IBM building its automated software testing portfolio. Read more »
Amazon is hiring techies for a new digital media services push. The company seeks senior development managers and developers for a “brand new team,” although their work will grow out of an existing AWS digital media offering, according to a job post. Read more »
Internap, the first company out of the chute with an OpenStack Compute–based public cloud, is buying Voxel for that company’s dedicated hosting and cloud services expertise. This could be a sign that the cloud-service consolidation that kicked off last year will continue into 2012. Read more »
When Supermechanical turned to Kickstarter to crowdsource funding of its Internet of Things project, it’s doubtful even company co-founders would have thought that they’d reap nearly a half a million dollars — more than 1,000 percent of goal — with time to spare. Read more »
On New Year’s Day, Ginny Rometty took the reins at IBM. Big Blue is on a roll: its stock outperformed Google and Apple this year, and Warren Buffett is a fan. But the IT giant faces perils as well as opportunities going into 2012. Read more »
Boston-area tech incubator Adverplex is reborn as Cogo Labs and is starting to talk itself up. The 30-person shop, which backed CourseAdvisor and Autotegrity, is also on the hunt for software, analytics and data warehousing talent. Read more »
Moving Flickr photographs over to Facebook is not easy. Goyaka Labs promises a free, automated, fast way to transfer your photos en masse in a three-step process so they can be shared with friends and family. A Picasa version is also on its way. Read more »
In what purists see as capitulation to attention deficit disorder, several Boston theaters plan to offer special “tweet seats” for cell-phone wielding patrons. Boston is following in the footsteps of venues like the Palm Beach Opera and Norma Terris Theater that already breached the tweet/no-tweet divide. Read more »
With its new Elastic Network Interfaces, created by separating IP addresses and some key attributes from EC2 storage instances, Amazon is making its Virtual Private Cloud more flexible for companies that want to bring legacy applications to Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. Read more »
2011 is surely a year that Hewlett-Packard would like to forget. It fired its second CEO in two years. It said it might sell its PC business and push WebOS phones and tablets only to back off on both moves. Here’s what HP needs to do in 2012. Read more »
Does the world really need another search engine? Trefis says yes at least for do-it-yourself and even professional investors. For them, Trefis is launching a new search option that will return only pertinent, rich data about the companies they follow. Read more »
If Amazon opens an office in the Boston-Cambridge area as reported, it would boost a high-tech community that often feels overlooked and undervalued compared to Silicon Valley and Seattle. Amazon is recruiting engineers for an as-yet-unannounced Boston area venue slated to open in 2012. Read more »
To hear Typesafe folks tell it, the Scala programming language and associated middleware is about to join the ranks of first-tier development tools. And, a new Scala plug-in for the popular Eclipse integrated development environment should help pave the way. Read more »
In a consolidation of content delivery network players, Akamai is buying rival Cotendo. The $268 million cash deal is expected to close in the first half of 2012. Akamai is the legacy power in CDN, while Cotendo was seen as a leaner upstart. Read more »
This year may have been the beginning of the big data onslaught, but big data will only get bigger in 2012. Watch for companies to check out specialized databases for different data types and to segment their data centers for old and new workloads. Read more »
The decision to end Microsoft CES keynotes after next month was painted by both parties as an amicable split. Inside sources say it was anything but and that the Consumer Electronics Association booted the software giant in a bid to shake up the show. Read more »
Oracle is finally learning that the hardware business is not the software business. Revenue for the company’s Sun Microsystems-rooted servers fell 14 percent in the second quarter compared to the year-ago period. And gross margin on those hardware sales is returning to earth. Read more »
Everyone knows about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but did you know December 21 will be a big online traffic day next year? Here, courtesy of data center power Equinix, are other big data, big web traffic dates to prep for, in chronological order. Read more »
Schneider Electric filled in some checkboxes in its overall data center infrastructure management (DCIM) stack with the acquisition of Viridity’s EnergyCenter technology. EnergyCenter will bring Schneider a fuller picture of the energy cost and resource utilization of information technology gear. Read more »
MIT next spring will launch a pilot of MITx online-only courses geared to reach prospective learners around the world. And, the university plans to open source the underlying technology coursework infrastructure for use by other educational institutions. Read more »
Metallica may not be the house band for PHP programmers, but it comes close. The heavy metal rockers are the group that most PHP coders like to listen to while they work, according to a new survey of 3,335 coders by Zend. Read more »
In this era of cheap-and-reliable renta-data centers run by Amazon, Rackspace, and others, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on it’s own? Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s own James Hamilton doesn’t think so. More surprisingly, other IT pros agree. Read more »
For those in a perpetual snit about personal data privacy, here’s bold proposal from Michael Driscoll: Donate your own medical data. And do it now — don’t wait till you’re dead. What better way to make big data truly relevant — and helpful — to real live people? Read more »
Salesforce.com’s plan to purchase Rypple shows the importance of human capital management to the new cloud-savvy enterprise. The game plan calls for a new Salesforce.com HCM business unit and the relabeling of Rypple’s offerings as “Successforce.” The effort will be directed by industry vet John Wookey. Read more »
After a long-running controversy, the Los Angeles Police Department will definitely not move to Google Apps. And that’s final.
The City Council voted to kill the proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD although the city’s other 17,000 employees are still aboard. Read more »
IBM is buying Emptoris, a specialist in supply chain and contract management analytics, in what is the latest example of an entrenched IT provider’s buying analytics and cloud capabilities. The move comes a week after IBM’s $440 million buyout of DemandTec. Read more »
Did you know that the proceeds from cyber weekend sales surpassed the entire budget of Bulgaria? Or that people will create 1.2 trillion GB of data this year — that’s equivalent to 75 billion 16 GB iPods. These nuggets courtesy of Emerson Network Power. Read more »
It may not be man-bites-dog but it is still surprising to hear about a software as a service vendor moving towards on-premises deployment. And yet that is just what Birst is doing, first with its business intelligence service and now with its home-grown in-memory database. Read more »
Microsoft’s SkyDrive is coming to an iPhone near you, the company said this week. A new app means that iPhone users can store and access their personal photos, files and documents in SkyDrive as opposed to, say, Apple’s own iCloud. Read more »
In the latest salvo in the ever-hotter cloud storage battle, YouSendIt added iPad and Android client apps to its cloud-based document sync, transfer and storage service, as well as updated iPhone and Windows desktop apps. A new Mac desktop version is in beta. Read more »
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as a service (PaaS) now supports Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript development framework. That could give Azure more traction beyond the Microsoft .NET faithful. Also new: a limited trial of Hadoop-based distribution for Azure. Read more »
After a long look at the performance of cloud storage providers, only six of the 16 largest CSPs made the grade and the two top dogs were Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, said Nasuni, a data continuity specialist that works with all the major CSPs. Read more »
The cloud-based SAP Social Media Analytics service aims to bring more consumer-centric smarts to SAP’s enterprise customers. SAP will sell and provision NetBase semantic search and analytics capabilities and provide a user-friendly dashboard to display the results on an iPad or other device. Read more »
Northwestern University is doing its bit to feed the need for analytics skills in this era of big data. NU’s McCormick School of Engineering launched a new Master of Science degree in analytics and is accepting applications for the inaugural class. Read more »
Most venture capitalists obsess on the latest shiny object for youngish consumers. That’s remarkably shortsighted. The aging U.S. population is a potential gold mine for entrepreneurs that can build technologies to help this huge population remain active and stay in their homes as long as possible. Read more »
