Federated clouds, the idea that customers can span different clouds with their computing and data, decided on cost, location or other variables, isn’t really available today, but there’s hope that it will emerge in the future and help service providers compete against Amazon. Read more »
Japanese mobile operator SoftBank plans to acquire a 70 percent stake in Sprint for $20.1 billion. The deal would give the cash-strapped U.S. carrier an $8 billion cash infusion and gives the Japanese carrier a foothold and spectrum in the valuable U.S. mobile market. Read more »
There has been a lot of bad news from the chip giants this quarter, but it’s not the decline of the PC or even merely economic worries pressing on the sector. No, there’s a systemic change in the market and the industry giants are reacting. Read more »
Jason Hoffman is familiar to many in the computing industry as the CTO of Joyent and a leader of the movement to build distributed systems. But before that, he was a doctor who helped his mom beat cancer. Here’s how the past and present connect. Read more »
ComodIT, a startup in Liege, Belgium wants to take the IT management world by storm with its product that’s adapted for cloud computing as opposed to legacy IT. The startup, which is a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition is seeking a Series A round. Read more »
Some hardware companies are turning to Kickstarter, but it may not be the answer. Adapteva and Xi3, for example, are falling short of their funding goals about halfway through- — but one says it’s still happy with the results. Read more »
IBM and Cisco have both launched specialized hardware designed to securely and efficiently handle big data, but is there a large market for specialized big data gear? If there is such a market, are these the boxes that will fill it? Read more »
Calxeda, a company making dense, low-power servers using the same ARM chip architecture found in cell phones, has raised $55 million to take on Intel as well as the myriad other vendors that want to take ARM’s low power chips and cram them into servers, Read more »
The U.S. Congress is set to release a report that tells U.S. firms not to buy gear from Chinese telecoms vendors Huawei and ZTE. But is the report a real assessment of a threat or just economic protectionism? Here’s how we might be able to tell. Read more »
Conference calls and collaboration needs an overhaul to fit better in this consumer-oriented VoIP, video and social age. Too many platforms, complicated dial-ins and keeping clients up to date, make the experience miserable. Polycom wants to change that, with new software. Yes, software. Read more »
Big data doesn’t always have to be complicated or even be the core of a business. As Alliance Health Networks is discovering, applying a few machine learning models taught using public data to healthcare discussions online can help patients and build a business. Read more »
FedEx has always dealt in big data, but its CIO Rob Carter isn’t worried about more. In a conversation with reporters he explained how FedEx has coped in the past and where he things the future of data storage is heading. Read more »
Our computer networks and broadband connections are reliant on both light and electronics, but a breakthrough at the University of Minnesota might help take the electrons out of the equation. A new device can use light to switch states, which could enable faster, more efficient broadband. Read more »
We know that Facebook is building a storage facility next to its Prineville data center, but in a conversation ahead of our Structure Europe event this month in Amsterdam I spoke with Facebook’s Jay Parikh to learn more about Facebook’s data center for digital packrats. Read more »
Sending traffic over long-haul pipes is much cheaper in most places than connecting back to a local point of presence. TeleGeography looked at the price differences and discovered that the service offering and the competitiveness of the market determine how much more you pay. Read more »
Arista Networks, one of the quiet success stories of Silicon Valley co-founded by legendary engineer Andy Bechtolsheim has hired Michael Lehman, formerly of Palo Alto Networks as its CFO. It has added Cisco’s SDN guru Tom Black to its team already chock-a-block with engineering heavyweights. Read more »
The EU is preparing a package of loans to boost broadband speeds and access across Europe. Neelie Krose, the VP of European Commission is meeting with telecom CEOs and government leaders to push a broadband loan package worth €9.2 billion. Read more »
For most people scaling out a web service is a matter of thinking about hardware and software. But the recent Surge conference taught me that most devops folk need to look down to the physical infrastructure as well as the economic tradeoffs of building a service. Read more »
More than 64 percent of broadband subscribers in the U.S. have a cap on their usage. Are you one of them? This story shows which ISPs are capping your broadband, the structure of those plans and explains why caps are a big business. Read more »
Broadband caps are spreading like Kudzu but the FCC has no oversight of how ISPs implement them or who they affect. While, the agency is showing signs of waking up to the problem, we’ve laid out three areas where it needs to take action. Read more »
People and processes are just as important as servers when it comes to scale. A Facebook engineer explains how the social network built a culture and tools to help it keep up with its ever-expanding hardware infrastructure and software toolsets. Read more »
Pinterest has learned about scaling the way most popular sites do — the architecture works until one day it doesn’t. But in a talk at the Surge Conference two Pinterest engineers shared their wars stories. Here’s what they learned about keeping it simple and database sharding. Read more »
It’s hard for chip startups to raise funding, but the demands of mobile and cloud computing are providing a window of opportunity for all kinds of innovative silicon-based designs. Thus, when Adapteva couldn’t find a VC backer, its CEO turned instead to Kickstarter. Read more »
Apple doesn’t often make a formal appearance at trade shows or conferences outside of its own. But it looks like getting engineers for its iCloud may have preempted that policy since the device maker has a sleek presence at the Surge Conference in Baltimore. Read more »
Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is tossing around hints of his possible retirement in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg. The CEO, who has been in that role for 17 years, listed a few of his potential successors as well as gave a two-to-four-year time frame. Read more »
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke today on the state of U.S. broadband. He didn’t break new ground, but he did push for faster and higher capacity broadband in the U.S. The question is whether he plans to get the agency to do anything about it. Read more »
Many interested in deploying software defined networks are eager for the agility and programmability they can provide. But the fear of breaking their network means IT is leery of deploying SDNs. Apigee has updated its API management products to work on SDNs to alleviate those fears. Read more »
We’re three weeks away from our inaugural Structure: Europe event, but before we head across the pond we wanted to introduce our readers to our five Structure:Europe LaunchPad finalists. The companies, who come from across the EU will present on Oct. 16 in Amsterdam. Read more »
Better sensors could change the way consumers diagnose and monitor their physical ailments. So maybe your smartphone becomes an EKG monitor, or perhaps you buy a device that measures 5 vital signs at once as opposed to a digital thermometer. We learn more in this video. Read more »
You don’t need to be some kind of infrastructure-loving genius to bild a mobile app — and really, you shouldn’t have to be. That was the message from Kevin Lacker, the CTO and co-founder of Parse, who gave some tips on how to build engaging apps. Read more »
Mobile virtual network operators are popping up everywhere, but will they ever be large enough to threaten the large national carriers? Can they build a profitable business? Time will tell, but these companies have high hopes. Read more »
Dennis Crowely of Foursquare has a big goal of creating an ambient-aware location service that will recommend people, places and events happening nearby, but the hardware isn’t quite up to snuff yet. In the meantime, he’s using location data to take on Yelp and Google. Read more »
Hate your Wi-Fi on planes? Think it’s too pricey? Too slow? Don’t blame your flight attendant, blame physics and the high cost of delivering broadband to a metal tube flying through the air at 500 mile sper hour. Here’s what it costs and why it’s slow. Read more »
Facebook had a problem ensuring that its tens of thousands of caching servers were performing at their peak. If they bogged down, so did that site. So Facebook created Claspin, a heat map of the health of its caches that builds on its institutional knowledge. Read more »
Kore Telematics, which provides cellular connectivity for business who want to span different countries and carriers, is seeing its business grow along with the number of machine to machine connections — especially in the medical device and mobile payments sector. The internet of things is coming. Read more »
Comcast is bringing its 305 Mbps service to more places in the Northeast. But in the Southwest it launched its second trial of new caps — one that gives users up to 600 GB per month on the fastest tiers and sticks slower users with 300 GB. Read more »
Open Internet groups plans to complain to the FCC about AT&T’s decision to limit Apple’s FaceTime video calling application to its cellular network for certain customers. The groups view the limits as a violation of the network neutrality rules the FCC implemented in 2010. Read more »
What if the current DIY trend is as fundamental a shift to manufacturing as broadband is to … everything? I offer up 3 products that not only are awesome to have in your home, but may be to DIY what email was to broadband. Read more »
Google, which is notoriously secretive about technology advances, has opened up the vault and spit out a research paper on its Spanner database. And like other Google innovations, this one is hot. It’s a database that scales to millions of machines and trillions of rows. Read more »
Comcast may change its stance on a blanket broadband usage cap of 300GB. DSLReports says the nation’s largest ISP is thinking of a 500 gigabyte per month cap for users who buy faster speeds. Comcast declined to comment. Read more »
