Samsung scoffs at quad-core, dials it up to 8 cores
Dual-core applications processors are old hat by now, but as the industry moves on to quad-core processors Samsung has decided to turn the dial up to eight cores with its Exynos 5 Octa. Read more »
Twitter’s human-powered search is the present and future of AI
Twitter’s use of actual human intelligence to make sense of its search results, points to the mundane reality that even with machine learning and lots of data, sometimes humans are the best source for insights — something those trying to create artificial intelligence should remember. Read more »
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to speak at Structure 2013
Just announced: Pat Gelsinger, who participated in several major computing shifts at Intel, EMC and now VMware, will be speaking at Structure in San Francisco, June 19-20. We’ll talk about VMware’s vision of a software-defined data center and its place in the changing IT ecosystem. Read more »
Qualcomm’s latest chips and the quad-core era
While Qualcomm’s opening keynote at CES contained an electric-power Rolls Royce, a Star Trek actress and Maroon 5 it also unveiled some cool new technology — namely two families of faster mobile chips that put a lot more compute power in your hands. Read more »
Alcatel-Lucent makes its network play for the cloud
Nuage Networks is a new venture from Alcatel-Lucent that wants to remove the networking complexities of building out a cloud platform. The venture was formed last year and will show off its wares to customers this month. Yet, it already has plenty of competition. Read more »
Belkin’s WeMo builds an internet of things in your kitchen
photo: Jarden Corp.
Connected home junkies should pay attention to a deal signed between Belkin and consumer appliance brand manager Jarden Corp. The move connects appliances like slow cookers and space heaters to the WeMo, and positions the WeMo as Belkin’s gateway for the internet of things. Read more »
All computing isn’t equal: Here are the four types
photo: Flickr user Keith Ellwood
Despite the idea that a server is a server, the needs of different computing customers differ widely. For those thinking about selling infrastructure, software or even services understanding the difference in computing and IT styles will help you hone your pitch and find your buyer. Read more »
Want better Wi-Fi? Maybe you just need a better router.
Too many connected devices downloading, streaming or uploading in the home can choke a home network, and there’s not much average consumers can do about it. But Qualcomm hopes that its new StreamBooost technology will help make the router –and home networks — smarter and better. Read more »
Faceless sensors and tiny routers needed for the internet of things
photo: smartthings
Connecting sensors as well as connected devices to build an Internet of things-style service isn’t easy. But new products from vendors that range from Texas Instruments to ThingsSquared and Mobiplug make it easier for product vendors and consumers to build internets of things. Read more »
Facebook tests Wi-Fi calling, and voice app in Canada
Facebook is testing out Wi-Fi based calling in Canada with its latest update to its Messenger app. The calling is only avoidable for the iOS app, but both IOS and Android users still get the benefit of being able to record voice messages. Read more »
Leap Motion gets $30M to change how you interact with computers
photo: Leap Motion
Leap Motion, which invented a gesture-based user interface that tracks movement in a 3-D space, has raised $30 million in second round funding. The startup plans to use the money to scale its peripheral device, and has the chance thanks to a bundling deal with ASUS. Read more »
Ahead of CES: 4 questions to ask about the internet of things
The internet of things is set to be a hot topic this year at CES, but before going gaga over the latest connected device, there are some hard questions industry watchers should ask — or at least think about– when evaluating the latest announcements and gadgets. Read more »
YouTube sucks on French ISP Free, and French regulators want to know why
photo: 20th Century Fox
After users complained about bad online video experiences, France’s telecom regulator launched an investigation trying to figure out if a local ISP was blocking YouTube or if it was just underinvesting in its network. A decision is expected soon, and could have worldwide repercussions. Read more »
VictorOps raises $1.58M to helps ops teams get web sites back online
Todd Vernon, the CEO and founder of both Lijit and Raindance Communications, is back with a startup aimed at helping the people responsible for keeping web-based services functioning. The startup, VictorOps raised $1.58 million in seed funding and is seeking alpha testers. Read more »
The data center and mobile web drive Lightower Fiber’s and Sidera’s $2B merger
Without the underlying pipes connecting data centers, cell phone towers and telco points of presence, there would be no internet. A $2 billion deal to merge two fiber providers shows how the new infrastructure demands of the consumer web and cloud computing are driving deals. Read more »
Calxeda finds a new market in storage
Calxeda, the startup building ARM-based servers for the scale out data center, has sold 130 systems and expects customers to put its systems into production before the end of the second quarter of 2013. Plus, it’s finding success in a completely new market — storage. Read more »
Over half of American homes don’t have or use their landline
Don’t use your landline? Don’t have a landline? You’re in the majority according to the latest data from the CDC. The agency is tracking the death of landlines to understand how it needs to adapt its phone surveying techniques to counter bias in landline-only surveys. Read more »
2013: The year carriers choose whether Wi-Fi is friend or foe
photo: phloxii via shutterstock
Will 2013 see carriers eyeing their Wi-Fi offload strategies with suspicion? As consumers turn more to ubiquitous Wi-Fi networks, will that threaten carrier’s data revenue, and if so, what will carriers do about that? Expect a subtle war to control Wi-Fi in the coming year. Read more »
Ford engineers have 3D printers on their desks. When will you get one?
photo: Ford
Personal computers and broadband were work tools before gaining wider adoption in consumer homes. Now, I wonder if 3D printers can make the leap from engineering and office tool to the next must-have machine in the home? How would that change the world? Read more »
QR codes for satellites and mineral oil baths for servers: Facebook’s top hacks
photo: Facebook
Facebook’s hackathons have generated some cool ideas. Facebook shared the top hacks from 2012 that range from silly (3-D printed globes showing where and how people use Facebook) to serious (calendar views for you upcoming events on the site). Read more »
Yes, software and the cloud could kill the set-top box
The efforts to sell Cisco’s Linksys business and Google’s attempts to sell Motorola’s set top business both indicate changes in the market for consumer boxes is changing. Soon we’ll see fewer of them. And maybe we’ll even lose the ISP-provided modems and routers. Read more »
Detroit is the testing ground for a new open source wireless network technology
How do you connect people who have no Internet? How do you build a wireless network outside of the official wireless ISPs? These are questions the Open Technology Institute wants to answer in Detroit with Commotion, an open source, wireless mesh networking technology trial. Read more »
Catbird gets $2M from new VC fund founded by ex-Terremark CEO
Catbird, a company providing security for virtualized environments has taken on a small funding round from Medina Capital Partners, the venture firm set up by Manny Medina, the former CEO of Terremark. The new fund seeks to invest growth capital in enterprise IT deals. Read more »
2012: The year software-defined networking sold out
Companies spent roughly $1.6 billion buying networking startups in 2012 with one deal being responsible for the lion’s share of that total. Yet, even if VMware hadn’t purchased Nicira for $1.26 billion, networking deals and software-defined networking deals in particular, were red hot in 2012. Read more »
Why you should expect more online outages but less downtime
Gmail went down for 18 minutes during prime email checking hours on the West Coast thanks to a routine software update conducted Monday morning. But in an era of continuous code deployment Google’s mid morning update isn’t unusual — it’s the future. Read more »
Seattle’s planned fiber network: The gigabit is in the details
Seattle, the University of Washington and Gigabit Squared have teamed up to build out a gigabit network. The plan was announced on Thursday but I followed up with Gigabit Squared’s president to get more information on costs, technologies and when this network might be live. Read more »
Yahoo gets hip to entrepreneurs and puts Max Levchin on its board
Yahoo has added Max Levchin, a Silicon Valley star, to its board of directors giving it a much-needed entrepreneurial and engineering-savvy board member. The web portal will also see two of its existing directors leave, shrinking the board to 11 members. Read more »
Seattle is the latest city to go around ISPs to get a gigabit network
Seattle will join Chicago, Kansas City, Bruistol, Tenn. and other cities with its very own gigabit broadband network. The proposed plan would see a mix of fiber-to-the-home, mobile broadband and gigabit point-to-point wireless services. The city will partner with Gigabit Squared to make it happen. Read more »
Transcriptic raises $1.2M to bring cloud economics to science
Transcriptic is a startup that’s trying to let grad students and researchers conduct their experiments over the web. The company offers a lab-as-a-service product and hopes to take some of the economics from the cloud and apply them to scientific research. Read more »
Here’s why Sprint offered $2.1B to buy the rest of Clearwire
photo: ShutterStock / Susan Cain.
Sprint needs spectrum and Clearwire has it. Here’s what’s behind Spint’s $2.1 billion offer for the remainder of the shares it doesn’t own in Clearwire. The deal, which values Clearwire at $4 billion, would close out a year of spectrum-related acquisitions in the mobile space. Read more »
Juniper to buy SDN startup Contrail in deal worth $176M
Juniper will spend up to $176 million on stealthy software-defined networking startup Contrail. The move coming just weeks after Cisco’s own SDN buy and months after VMware’s $1.3 billion grab for Nicira show how aggressively the established vendors are about staking a claim. Read more »
Twitter and Google offer case studies in spanning distributed systems
photo: Shutterstock / Smith
As our compute infrastructure becomes more distributed it’s much harder to keep everything synced. But with users demanding immediate access to their files, photos and whatnot all around the world, solutions like Google’s Spanner DB and Twitters photo blobstore are a solution. Read more »
Facebook happy to endorse, but not use, Intel’s newest chip
photo: Pinar Ozger
Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky was onstage at today’s launch of Intel’s first low-power system on a chip for the data center, but it turns out that the social networking doesn’t plan on using the chips. Instead Frankovsky’s role could be seen as validating the microserver market. Read more »
Intel’s new microserver chips and how it is beating its innovator’s dilemma
Intel has released its first Atom system on a chip aimed at the data center. The new SoC consumes 6 watts and has many enterprise-class features. But with ARM taking aim at the same market Intel has a totally different type of competition to worry about. Read more »
Power and dumb machines are the biggest challenges for big data
photo: Shutterstock / mkabakov
IBM has just hired a former Assistant Secretary of Defense as a VP for research strategy. With an expertise in cybersecurity and big data, Zachary Lemnios has some predictions and thoughts about big data and machine learning worth hearing. Read more »
Gmail’s outage disrupting Chrome for some too
Google’s Gmail service is down and up and down again, but why does that mean Chrome is getting crashy as well? Google, we really, really want to know! Read more »
Another company for the networking startup files: Pica8
After raising $6.6 million in October, Pica8 is launching its combination of OpenFlow-based hardware and the software to control massively scaled-out data centers. The company is hoping that buyers will rip out old gear and replace it with its commodity switches and software. Read more »
Gamers rejoice: New screen-shifting tech coming to high-end phones
photo: Silicon Image
Silicon Image has developed a new, smaller WirelessHD chip to let mobile gamers project their games from their smartphones or gaming devices onto their TVs. Will the same company that pushed HDMI be able to popularize a new wireless standard? Read more »
Faster networks anyone? IBM pops optics on conventional silicon chips.
photo: IBM
Figuring out how to bring the speed of light to communications on chips, between chips and everywhere has been an overarching goal of semiconductor research. IBM says it is ready to bring a technology that puts optics and electronics on a chip using conventional manufacturing methods. Read more »
Hope springs eternal: FCC says in 18 months you can text 9-1-1
In about 18 months, over 90 percent of wireless subscribers will be able to text 9-1-1 to get the help they need, bringing one more element of our telecommunications infrastructure out of the landline era. It’s a project that’s over two years in the making. Read more »
