Thanks to Arduino kits and the Raspberry Pi Linux computer, computing now can cost less than LEGOs. So today’s kids — and a generation of enthusiast hackers — are creating a movement that might incubate the next Woz. What will cheap computing build? Read more »
Win or lose, it usually doesn’t cost a lot for patent trolls to bring spurious lawsuits against companies and technologists. In this guest post, Ben Lee of Twitter argues that it’s time for trolls to bear more of the costs they create with baseless lawsuits. Read more »
The demand for mobile data is increasing at an amazing rate. A challenge of this magnitude needs more resources and, more importantly, radically new ways of acquiring, deploying, managing and optimizing these resources. Qualcomm’s Prakash Sangam looks at what’s needed to keep up. Read more »
Selling customers on the cloud as a set of technologies that will improve their business and agility is fine, but vendors need to be able to back up those lofty claims with experienced teams that can really deliver on the promise of the cloud. Read more »
To take full advantage of big data, businesses must think about how to use those mountains of data as they come into the network, not store it and hope to gather insights weeks or even months later. To do this, we need new tools. Read more »
Twitter has been awash (again) with banter about the myth or reality of private clouds. The conversations revolve around the technology, rehashing the “what makes a cloud a cloud” argument. Yet, all of us are right, and many of us are wrong. Read more »
In its series on data centers and power the New York Times ignored many of the strides the industry is making toward energy efficiency, but it the bigger problem is that it ignored the potential of the web to reduce our energy consumption. Read more »
Most small companies can’t take advantage of the big trends occurring in the world today, but they can keep an eye out for small ones that they can then translate into new businesses or companies. Thinking small and being imaginative can let entrepreneurs succeed. Read more »
In the five years since the iPhone hit the market, Apple and Google have delivered more than 40 billion cumulative downloads of apps. Other sources predict the app marketplace will swell to surpass 66 billion downloads in 2016, a growth fueled by tablet, entertainment, and enterprise apps. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The hard question for Apple is whether it can build a meaningful paid-subscription business without grossly cannibalizing its current per-track paid download business. There are very few examples of those two models being successfully combined within a single content service or a single billing ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Enterprises are struggling to get a grip on big data initiatives. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Apple looks to build on its dominance with the introduction of the iPhone 5, but a patent battle with HTC could result in a ban of its LTE hardware in the U.S. That’s an unlikely scenario, but Apple should nonetheless consider settling this ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Ernst & Young recently released its renewable energy attractiveness index, its quarterly index of how exciting various countries are for renewable energy deployment. The 42 page report gives us a snapshot into macro trends in the global environment for renewable energy deployment, ranging from the uncertainty ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Yahoo isn’t giving up on ad technology, but the real action in online advertising is in social media. Facebook is getting hammered for not growing social media ad revenues fast enough, but it and Twitter are starting to take the right ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
OpenStack is hot, but determining which companies are best poised to capitalize on its promise is hard to do. Prabhakar Gopalan assesses what hardware vendors, software vendors and service will have to do if they want to be among the big OpenStack winners. Read more »
The synchronous timing of the court’s approval of the settlement agreement between the government and a group of publishers in the e-book price-fixing case, and the Amazon’s news conference to unveil the new Kindles was obviously coincidental. But it couldn’t have been more fitting had Jeff ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The synchronous timing of the court’s approval of the settlement agreement between the government and a group of publishers in the e-book price-fixing case, and the Amazon’s news conference to unveil the new Kindles was obviously coincidental. But it couldn’t have been more fitting had Jeff ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The latest threat report from McAfee says that ransomware is on the rise, which means attackers are seeing success with it, which means people are handing over money to anonymous sources on the web, without any guarantee that they will get what they are paying for. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Nokia is clearly all-in on Windows Phone 8, as it will illustrate this week as when it unveils new handsets running Microsoft’s mobile system. But the success of Microsoft’s platform won’t be enough to ensure Nokia’s return to relevance in the world of ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last week released a paper showing that a modest carbon tax would be beneficial to the economy because it could help avoid cuts to the federal budget, which the Congressional Budget Office has warned will send the U.S. economy across a “fiscal cliff” toward negative GDP ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
While Google grabs all the gigabit glory and headlines in Kansas City for its fiber project, a local company that participated in the drive that brought Google to town is already delivering a gig service – wirelessly! Wait, is that really possible? Apparently so. Read more »
Mellanox, a maker of Infiniband interconnects and switches, has doubled its sales in the last two quarters. What is behind its recent success and what does that say about Mellanox, Infiniband and the current state of scale out data center networking? Read more »
Prabhakar Gopalan looks at how the skill sets and mindsets of corporate strategists need to change in the cloud computing era. This means everything from learning to accept new revenue models to being technologically savvy enough to actually build new products. Read more »
When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private cloud and legacy IT are here to stay. Read more »
HotLink, Atos, RiverMeadow, Bromium and Plexxi all caught my eye for different reasons as this year’s VMworld. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
High-quality mobile voice calls are beginning to come to market in the U.S., where audio quality has been neglected in favor of cutting-edge data offerings. That’s why HD voice is the new battleground for network operators as the 4G era begins to get ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The slew of struggling cleantech companies, particularly in solar and battery technology, combined with the headline grabbing bankruptcies that have accompanied these struggles has led to a general gloominess surrounding cleantech investing. And yet significant long term macro trends remain that indicate that the global energy ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
On its earnings call, Salesforce.com showed 34 percent revenue growth and called marketing its next billion-dollar business. Salesforce has made some big bets on social media marketing technology. The company is well positioned, but it has a lot of work to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As executives contemplate the emergence of cloud computing, it’s important that they understand the questions they need to ask about why they’d adopt the new IT paradigm. Those deciding should consider the history and decisions made by Borders, the bookstore chain. Its execs chose poorly. Read more »
The role that IT plays is transforming. Thus, the skills, roles, and tools for CIOs have to transform too. Why? If the trend toward cloud-based services continues, then the role of the CIO will shift from being a builder/technologist to becoming an integrator/vendor-manager. Read more »
The leading social media platforms’ latest campaign efforts could turn out to be more effective politically than traditional lobbying. Rather than acting simply as one voice among many asking for legislative favors or regulatory forbearance, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are providing tools that politicians can ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
After going it alone with a proprietary version of Hadoop, MapR has rejoined the open source community via Apache Drill, an open source initiative to re-engineer Google Dremel. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
