Plexxi Systems, a stealthy networking startup that wants to bring fiber into the data center at a cost the comprable to existing Ethernet technologies, has scored a $20.1 million third round of financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Northbridge Venture Partners. Read more »
Dell has agreed to purchase Quest Software in a deal valued at $2.36 billion, giving the computer maker a path forward in the software business, and helping Dell reduce its reliance on selling hardware. The bid brings a bidding war for Quest to a close. Read more »
Startup Prior Knowledge opened up its public beta to its database API on Monday, so it can solve the problems of developers who want to play with data, but who’d rather avoid all that pesky math. Prior Knowledge has raised $1.4 million to achieve its goals. Read more »
Zplasma, startup spun out of the University of Washington hopes that its ability to harness super hot, stable plasma to to make light will help the semiconductor industry continue its march to cram more transistors on a chip. Read more »
Beam Technologies got FDA approval for its connected toothbrush today — approval it never thought it needed. But its story shows how the FDA is paying attention to startups seeking to add connectivity to medical devices and maybe even medical apps to regular smartphones. Read more »
In the latter half of the 19th century, the introduction of elevators and steel trusses enabled us to put up taller buildings with denser cores. It changed urban landscapes forever–packing more people into small spaces. Now, chips are set to benefit from a similar design leap. Read more »
Once we connect 50 billion devices to the web by 2020, what will those devices talk to? Chicago Startup Tempo hopes those sensors will take to its database as a service — depositing their tiny bits of time series data inside its custom database. Read more »
Phlip Falcone, the head of the private equity firm that invested billions in LightSquared has been charged with fraud. The SEC said it was changing the founder of Harbinger Capital Partners with misappropriating client assets, market manipulation, and betraying clients. Read more »
TheFCC has settled with Comcast over charges that the cable company made it hard for consumers to find stand-alone broadband packages that don’t cost an arm and leg. As part of the settlement Comcast paid the U.S. Treasury $800,000. Read more »
T-Mobile’s CEO Philipp Humm has resigned, according to the company. The move is a surprise to industry watchers and T-Mobile’s COOs Jim Alling, will take over the duties of the CEO while the nation’s fourth largest phone carrier searches for a replacement. Read more »
Swedish operator TeliaSonera won’t ban Skype’s voice service on handsets using its network but it will charge customers for it. The operator is piloting plans that will cost customers extra for using an over-the-top voice service. Ring ring! It’s network neutrality calling. Read more »
Many popular sites use memcached and/or Redis as part of their back-end infrastructure. Both technologies are popular ways to store data that needs to be easily accessible, and both require compromises. GarantiaData, a Tel Aviv-based startup wants to eliminate some of those compromises. Read more »
Google, Microsoft and more than 500 colleges and universities are joining the team behind the Gig.U project to create a new partnership designed to bring broadband to rural America using Super Wi-Fi. The plan is to launch six pilot projects by the first quarter. Read more »
Cisco has shaken up its executive team. Ned Hooper, the former chief strategy officer at Cisco is leaving to start an investment fund, while Padmasree Warrior, the former CTO is stepping up to become the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer. Read more »
Researchers showed off a way to deliver speeds of 2.5 terabits per second over wireless networks — 500,000 times faster than the current low-end LTE speeds and 5,000 times faster than 5.5 gigabits per second, which is the fastest theoretical wireless broadband I’ve encountered. Read more »
Google is teaching computers to recognize human faces without telling the algorithms which faces are human. It’s a machine-learning problem made for this era of unstructured data and access to large compute clusters. It’s also the next big opportunity in tech — enabling computers to “see.” Read more »
Verizon’s newly launched 300 Mbps-tier is expensive. What’s amazing here isn’t the price, but the audience for high speed broadband. Verizon expects roughly 70 percent of FiOS customers to take speeds of 50 Mbps or higher — the top-of-the-line speeds four years ago. Read more »
Scale breaks everything. When you move from thinking 10,000 servers is a lot to buying hundreds of thousands a year your perspectives change. And that shift in perspective has changed the information technology industry. We cover some of the biggest takeaways from our Structure 2012 conference. Read more »
Node.js the event-driven programming language that is the darling of the real-time web world, is many things but it’s not a good business, nor is it applicable for all use cases, according to two panelists speaking in San Francisco at Structure 2012. Read more »
Facebook is boosting its edge network with its own servers to speed the delivery of its photos according to Frank Frankovsky, a VP at the social networking company. Frankovsky outed his plans onstage at the structure 2012 event and explained how he hopes to scale. Read more »
Networking is the current big bottleneck in scale out and virtualized data centers. It’s also the hottest hardware area around with startups creating fabrics, controllers and alternatives to the current networking regimes in place. Now we can add Plexxi Networks Inc. to that list. Read more »
Since the dawn of the digital age we’ve scattered information about ourselves on the web, inside home computers and laptops and in online storage lockers. It’s the reason we love Facebook. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime for marketers. And its the reason Caringo exists. Read more »
It’s tough for the phone business and data released this week from the FCC indicate that it’s not just people abandoning their wireline phones that are helping kill the copper-based voice biz, but also VoIP providers. Read more »
Network neutrality, the idea that ISPs can’t discriminate against traffic on its network, is an enshrined right in some areas and a hotly contested regulatory fight in others. But it may become moot if the ITU succeeds in take over the management of the Internet. Read more »
For fans of software defined networking (SDN) — especially those paid to make sense of each vendor claim and then advise clients — this week brought a bonanza of news. Both Cisco and Juniper, the largest players in the networking space and the two with the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cisco’s plans to capitalize and perhaps marginalize the emerging software defined networking sector are now in full view, and for those wondering how the world’s largest networking gear maker plans to deal with the commodification of networking gear the answer is in the northbound traffic. Read more »
The Department of Justice is looking into the power that cable providers have over how and where consumers can access television content via the Internet. It’s a step that acknowledges the vertical integration of cable as well as their control over the last mile. Read more »
AMD has taken an ARM license, a huge step for the company. But in taking an ARM license, which gives AMD the ability to design ARM-based chips, AMD is targeting security — not phones or even servers. Read more »
Juniper, one of the big technology vendors in the crosshairs of the revolution occurring in the networking industry has finally decided to tell its story around the rise of software defined networking and OpenFlow. It’s going to have to walk a fine line. Read more »
AMD, ARM, Texas Instruments and two smaller chip firms have teamed up to create a nonprofit that will try to unseat Intel’s x86 dominance in computing. But this group isn’t just after Intel; it’s taking the CPU — the beating heart of computers today — down a peg. Read more »
Residents of a small section of Gainesville, Fla. will get a gigabit network thanks to the GigU project that wants to deliver fiber to the home to areas around U.S. colleges and universities. Read more »
Rice University researchers have built a web-based calculator that predicts the risks associated with hurricanes for an address. The tool uses historial and meteorological data to generate a risk profile for residents of Houston. This is what big data tools should do — offer users actionable intelligence. Read more »
Like 3-D? Well get ready to research like mad trying to figure out what system will work best. There are seven types of display decoder technologies that deliver stereogrpahic 3-D on 13 platforms including common ones like TVs and cinemas, making for 91 possible combinations. Read more »
Earlier today I wrote about online bra retailer True&Co delaying delivery of its products to customers. It turns out that the supply chain was an issue, but only because the demand for the service outstripped what True&Co thought would be a full year’s supply of inventory. Read more »
Online bra retailer, True&Co, which launched last week to help women find the perfect bra, is having trouble delivering its products. As the Internet crosses over into the real world, not only websites must prepare for a launch, but the entire supply chain. Read more »
Traditional cable is no longer about choice; it’s about access. As an access provider for content, cable has the widest depth of content right now, but it also costs the most. So how long can it keep content and customers? Read more »
Golfer Phil Mickelson withdrew from The Memorial Tournament this weekend, and apparently cell phones –or people snapping pictures with them — were to blame. The bigger story is one of cell phones, etiquette and sporting events — something the Summer Olympics will bring to the fore. Read more »
It’s almost World IPv6 Day, a time when ISPs and websites flip the switch to a different form of addressing system and very little actually changes for anyone online. But here are 5 things that could go wrong if ISPs don’t make the move to IPv6. Read more »
Facebook is rethinking how it does networking, as Wired reports, but it’s actually rethinking the entire composition of the data center. Its plans will destroy the servers, switches and storage boxes vendors sell today in an effort to operate efficiently at web scale. Read more »
From the beginning of Amazon Web Services in 2006 to the current state of webscale and cloud vendors, the concept of cloud computing, webscale firms and corporate IT have taken a crazy journey, and at Structure, I’ve had a front trow seat for most of it. Read more »
