No matter how you categorize the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, the technology industry has unified against this issue in a way that I have not seen before — even during the network neutrality debates. We take a look at what the web is saying. Read more »
Last night I was schooled at playing Jeopardy by Watson in an exhibition match and discovered that despite our fear of the robot overlords, humans are much smarter than we think. Case in point: Watson could never use Apple’s personal assistant Siri. Read more »
DotCloud, the platform as a service that won our Structure 2011 Launchpad competition, said Wednesday that it will support three new data stores as part of its multi-language platform. The company will add MySQL, Redis and MongoDB support. Read more »
Quantenna, a startup building chips for sending massive data over Wi-Fi, has built the first gigabit chip for Wi-Fi networks and devices. The chip is available now for use in routers, home gateways and even consumer gadgets. Products containing the chips could arrive in 2012. Read more »
Vyatta, which provides open-source networking software, has raised $12 million in expansion round financing as the entire networking field finds itself on the cusp of big changes. The round, its fifth, was led by HighBAR Partners and brings Vyatta’s total funding to $45 million. Read more »
Boundary, a startup that aims to rethink network monitoring for the cloud, has raised $4.1M. The San Francisco-based startup, founded by Amazon Web Services veteran, Benjamin Black, launches Tuesday with the funding from LightSpeed Venture Partners and a new beta. Read more »
In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power. Read more »
What happens when you place the equivalent of 1024 neurons in parallel on a chip? Well, you get a new form of computing for cloud computing and sensor networks as well as toys that can recognize cue cards, better artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. Read more »
SIM cards, those tiny slivers of silicon that carry your identity inside a cell phone or connected device, are once again poised to get smaller as Giesecke & Devrient introduces the nano-SIM. If adopted, they could mean thinner devices or more room for larger batteries. Read more »
The Senate failed to stop the network neutrality rules enacted by the FCC. But for anyone who watched the hearings or sees how the vote split completely along partisan lines, the vote is a reminder of how easily the folks in D.C. can stymie innovation. Read more »
Computers — the boxes that we consult — are wonderful, but they take away from what it is to be human and to really connect with one another, so the challenge and opportunity that lies ahead is how to get the computers out of computing. Read more »
Almost a third of U.S. households don’t subscribe to broadband, and it’s driving the government nuts. According to an report out today 71 percent of Americans are online, and the rest don’t want it or find it too expensive. And yes, 3 percent can’t get it. Read more »
The economics of providing mobile data don’t work, and as proof we only have to look at the death of the unlimited plan. Today only 13.5 percent of operators offer a “true” unlimited plan, while 25 percent offer an unlimited plan in name only. Read more »
Johns Hopkins is building a 100 gigabit per second network to shuttle data from the campus to other large computing centers. The network would be capable of transferring the amount of data equivalent to 80 million file cabinets filled with text each day. Read more »
Luxtera has developed an optical chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. That’s the same speed delivered by long-haul networks under the sea, but now harnessed to move big data and deliver cloud computing. Read more »
Republic Wireless, the division of Bandwidth.com that offers customers an Android phone with unlimited voice data and texts for $19 a month launches Tuesday. Here’s how it will work (there’s a $199 “membership” fee) and what it means for the wireless industry. Read more »
Ericsson released a report today about mobile data consumption today that gives a clear picture about how pricing for mobile broadband will change as well as how cultural norms will shift as wireless networks become more popular and prevalent. Check out the charts inside. Read more »
Another day, another gear maker getting into the broadband data prediction game, with Ericsson prognosticating that mobile data traffic will be 10 times what it is today by 2015 at 3.5 exabytes per month. This is about half of rival gear maker Cisco’s guesstimates. Read more »
From the perspective of an ISP, making Skype calls on your iPad is far better than doing so on a MacBook Pro, while making calls via an Android handset falls in the middle when it comes to adding to the congestion of the overall network. Read more »
Peer 1, the hosting provider, joins the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those of a platform. Read more »
The carrier cash cow of SMS text messaging is on the wane, driven by third-party messaging apps that include BlackBerry Messenger, iMessage, Skype and others. So what will carriers do to replace it? Look for pricing changes and a focus on M2M. Read more »
We’re big believers in a connected world enabled by ubiquitous broadband here at GigaOM, which is why when Ericsson asked if we wanted to see a new video about the future of a connected society, we said yes. We figured you guys would enjoy it too. Read more »
Do startups create jobs, or more accurately, do they create jobs the way they used to? In a House hearing Wednesday, a researcher said the number of startups created have been declining since 2006, and when they are created they tend to generate fewer jobs. Read more »
Sprint and C Spire Wireless (formerly Cellular South) can go forward with their joint lawsuit to try to stop the AT&T proposal to buy T-Mobile, a merger that the U.S. Justice Department has also sued to stop in a separate proceeding. Read more »
The folks at the Kauffman Foundation have teamed up with Google to create a portal where folks can submit their ideas for gigabit application that could use the proposed fiber to the home network that Google plans to build in both Kansas Cities. Lucky them. Read more »
Mobile handsets have a bad habit of oversharing with the networks they operate on, with some handsets being chattier than others. This signaling data, as it’s known in the industry, makes managing networks even more challenging, and Traffix wants to help operators handle it. Read more »
Clearwire wants to simplify its pricing and remake itself as a neutral provider of excess mobile broadband capacity, but its success hinges on Sprint making a new role for itself as the mobile market consolidates. Read more »
Huawei is planning to boost its cloud offerings on the software side through acquisitions, but thanks to the uncertain politics related to the Chinese government, U.S. startups may not be in the running. Read more »
China Telecom, the No. 3 player in the Chinese mobile market, has managed to add 9 million subscribers in the third quarter and 26.4 million so far this year. No wonder mobile players such as Apple (AAPL) are so eager to get into the market. Read more »
The enterprise is where the big bucks used to be, but home is where the heart and consumers are. As the web becomes more integrated in people’s lives, the home will become the battleground for the coming generation of startups and big-name companies. Read more »
Today there are two primary players making the brains inside servers. But that’s about to change if ARM adding 64-bit processing to it’s cores has the impact the chip IP licensing firm is hoping for. It usher in more innovation, and chips that cost less. Read more »
Cell phone chips just became more appropriate for server workloads, as ARM released a 64-bit version of its low energy processor. And the first company to take advantage of the new design looks to be AppliedMicro, which will build servers for webscale environments. Read more »
ARM said its next generation architecture will offer cores capable of 64-bit computing. The boost from 32-bits to 64-bits will push ARM-based processors over the last big hurdle keeping the chip IP company outside the enterprise and corporate computing market, and pit it squarely against Intel. Read more »
There are more than 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and new growth is coming from Asia and Latin America, according to data out on Thursday from Wireless Intelligence, which ranked the top 20 mobile operators by subscribers. U.S. carriers are way down the list. Read more »
Sure, Sprint will deliver LTE-Advanced in 2013, a standard that can offer gigabit speeds on fixed networks, but Samsung is talking about ways we can get multi-gigabit wireless networks. These are wireless networks that are faster than today’s wired ones. Read more »
Sevin Rosen is trying to raise a tenth fund, according to Al Schuele, a partner with the Texas-based venture capital firm. Sevin Rosen hasn’t been big since about 2006, when it stopped raising money on a proposed fund and returned money back to investors. Read more »
With myriad applications fighting for limited gigabytes on a mobile broadband plan or multiple users fighting for access to a wired home connection, what broadband users need is a connectivity thermostat that they can use to control how they can access their ISP’s pipes. It’s coming. Read more »
Time for mobile operators to hit the panic button — mobile video use is increasing across their networks and users are choosing to watch higher resolution clips when they sit down for a video-watching session. New data from Bytemobile sheds some light on how video swamps networks. Read more »
Flexible office locations and teleworking reduce the need for as many square feet per employee according to a real estate broker that specializes in flexible work space. But along with gains in productivity, such flexibility comes with potential costs if an employee doesn’t fit in. Read more »
