Vizio could give Google TV a lifeline, with a new line of HD televisions that run the operating system combining live TV with Internet apps. But will Vizio’s market heft and integration with new mobile devices be enough to save the Google TV platform? Read More »
The number of Wi-Fi hotspot connections is expected to explode to 11 billion sessions by 2014, up from 2 billion this year as mobile devices proliferate. The growth will outpace the increase of hotspot venues, which has largely contributed to the rise of public Wi-Fi sessions. Read More »
China has reportedly moved to block private VoIP services such as Skype and will only allow China Telecom and China Unicom to offer such services. It’s unclear when this will take effect or if it means the outright ban of services such as Skype. Read More »
Verizon’s long-rumored push into the smart energy home is, finally, on its way. Well, a trial version is. The phone company said today that starting in January it will conduct a home monitoring and control pilot program in homes in New Jersey that will include energy … Read More »
Next week, T-Mobile is expected to detail plans for it’s HSPA+ network, confirming strategies that it will again double data speeds to 42 Mbps. Faster mobile broadband is always welcome, but if the pace of improvements is too fast, it can actually be a bad thing. Read More »
This year has turned out to be a boom year for the solar industry. What will 2011 bring? Here are key trends that can emerge next year, in terms of policies, financing, project development, new markets and technology. Read More »
Japan joins the LTE party courtesy of NTT DoCoMo, who just launched a fast 4G network in major urban areas of the country. The carrier says outdoor downloads are up to 37.5 Mbps, while indoor areas, such as Tokyo International Airport, will enjoy double those speeds. Read More »
Over the course of 2010, professionally produced content, not cats and stunts gone wrong, was what people were watching online. While the power of viral spread will never disappear, the decline of amateur found footage indicates that in 2011, sustainable brands will eclipse the viral … Read More »
2010 was a year of ups and downs for the smart grid industry. Here are my thoughts on what needs to happen — both across the industry and with some of the individual players — for this sector to hit a home run in 2011. Read More »
You may think you’re downloading a movie or a TV show via BitTorrent — but you’re really taking part in a massive distributed denial of service attack against a major corporation. Sounds like Sci-Fi? Well, it’s possible today, thanks to a security vulnerability in BitTorrent’s protocol. Read More »
Hybrid Computing: Using the Right Tool for the Job
By Jonathan Boutelle
Dec. 28, 2010, 7:00am PT
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Some of the most creative uses of cloud computing use a hybrid of cloud servers and conventional servers to provide the best of both worlds. But there are disadvantages to such an approach, so here’s how engineering organizations have designed hybrid architectures to counter issues. Read More »
In the last 18 months, Dell, HP, IBM and EMC spent almost $10 billion on data storage and warehousing companies. This all-out gold rush was driven by a massive consolidation wave sparked by Cisco’s entry into the server market and Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Read More »
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I reported earlier this week on Amazon’s new VM Import service, which some have described as a Hotel California for VMware images. Today, I received word from Amazon Web Services that it’s planning to address this issue, to a degree, as the offering evolves. Read More »
As Skype sputters back to life today after its first major outage in three years, it’s helpful to look at how critical the communications tool has become for users and companies, who increasingly rely on it for phone, IM and video chat service. Read More »
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski issued a draft order to the other commissioners today that gave the Comcast-NBCU deal the “OK,” with some “carefully tailored conditions.” But what those conditions are, and what they mean for the future of online video, remains to be seen. Read More »
Stock traders and hedge funds can’t predict the future yet, but they are doing their best to come as close as possible, and that involves crunching every bit of data they can get their hands on — up to and including that tweet you just posted. Read More »
Red Hat just announced another solid fiscal quarter, continuing a trend of increased operating system and middleware market share that carried on even through the worst of the current recession. According to CEO Jim Whitehurst, customers know that buying Red Hat means “future-proofing” their IT investments. Read More »
On Friday, Microsoft’s HPC division opened up the company’s Dryad parallel-processing technologies as a Community Technology Preview (CTP). Dryad could be a rousing success, in part because Hadoop — which is written in Java — is not ideally suited to run atop Windows or support .NET … Read More »
Google is finding a significant boost from a new mobile ad tool — click-to-call — that’s providing an important lesson on the power of online interaction to prompt offline actions. It is been a boost in helping Google achieve a $1 billion run rate in mobile. … Read More »
WiMAX might have had a head start when it comes to the next generation wireless broadband sweepstakes, but it’s feeling the heat from Long Term Evolution aka LTE. New data shows that by 2015, LTE will have seven times as many users as WiMAX. Read More »
Cloud Engines, the company behind “personal cloud” Pogoplug, announced it has raised $15 million from new investors Softbank Capital and Morgan Stanley Investment Partners along with existing investor Foundry Group. Cloud Engines said the capital will go toward global distribution of the Pogoplug service and devices. Read More »
Nasuni has closed a $15 million Series B round, bringing its total to $23 million over two rounds on the promise of its file system virtual appliance that automatically distributes files between the cloud and a local cache. Read More »
FLO TV, Qualcomm’s mobile video network is expected to be shut down in March 2011. The San Diego-based chip maker is selling the 700 MHz spectrum that propped up the nationwide mobile video network to AT&T for $1.925 billion, a move that help AT&T’s 4G efforts. Read More »
With the launch of ChromeOS, Google CEO Eric Schmidt realized his long-time dream of building a network computer. Today, Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise president, in a blog post, vividly paints the company’s cloud-future. As it takes on Microsoft, Google believes 2011 will be about Web OS. Read More »
We already knew that Netflix streams about 20 percent of peak data traffic. But you might be surprised just how few Netflix subscribers it takes to push that much data: One analyst estimates just 3.5 million users might be responsible for one-fifth of primetime data traffic. Read More »
Larry Ellison and Oracle aren’t interested when it comes to technology trends. They do their own thing, whether it’s mocking cloud companies or hiring deposed chief executives of rivals. Somehow, it all works out. Oracle reported blowout results for first quarter of 2011 on Friday. Read More »
Anyone who’s walked the exhibition floor of a large IT tradeshow might recognize Splunk for its cleverly emblazoned T-shirts and bumper stickers. But beyond quirky sayings, there’s real value in Splunk’s IT search and monitoring product — so much so that it’s planning an IPO in … Read More »
California wants 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, but hitting that goal might be difficult. State regulators approved a 1 gigawatt program Thursday that they believe will help. Read More »
It seems like every year since 2008 has been dubbed the “Year of the Cloud,” but I think 2010 was it. There are legitimate trends that allow us to get past mere speculation and actually make informed predictions about what the future holds for cloud computing. Read More »
The author of the National Broadband Plan is happy to debate the plan. He agrees with an earlier column that said broadband is a critical economic development tool and takes work, but wants to set the record straight on speed goals and how to fund them. Read More »
Rackspace is moving up the cloud stack by acquiring Cloudkick, a startup that provides server management and monitoring as a service. Rackspace already has a partnership with CA-owned Nimsoft, so I suspect the purchase was spurred by a desire to compete with Amazon Web Services. Read More »
Vuze has a novel new product offering it hopes will help users browse and find the content they want on connected devices. The key to making the new offering, called Fanhattan, work is a cloud-based approach to serving entertainment information onto connected devices. Read More »
Nokia Siemens Networks is ready to take wireless broadband to a whole new level: peak rates of 672 Mbps by 2013 with Long Term HSPA Evolution. T-Mobile is happily backing the effort, since it’s not yet clear what 4G path the carrier will take. Read More »
Google has delayed its selction of a town to get a Google built fiber-to-the home network. It’s sad news for those eager to see what innovations Google can bring to the process of building a broadband network and what applications might run over such a network. … Read More »
Private-cloud pioneer Eucalyptus is furthering its partner-centric growth strategy by partnering with Red Hat. Possibly more important than the announcement, though, is the timing: Eucalyptus is not the only internal-cloud software on the market, and it needs to win back its space in the spotlight. Read More »
A Washington Post columnist argues that Google has grown so large and dominant it should be prevented from buying new companies, even those in completely new markets it doesn’t have a presence in. But is that really what we want antitrust laws to do? Read More »
Although LTE networks are appearing around the world, the U.S. will push LTE faster than most others, says HTC CEO Peter Chou. His company plans to bring LTE phones to the U.S. soon because of the perfect storm brewing with smartphones and fast wireless networks. Read More »
How does one of the world’s biggest makers of technology to control buildings connect with the power grid? Honeywell is in a natural position to start answering that question with smart thermostats, home energy management, open source demand response, and a couple of quiet research projects. Read More »
Startup EnergyHub is raising funds to help make the transition from small-scale utility pilots to commercial deployments over the coming years, and has also brought on a high-profile new independent director onto its board: EnerNOC President and Co-founder David Brewster. Read More »
It’s been a sport for analysts and competitors to speculate when solar panel maker First Solar might no longer be the industry’s low-cost leader. First Solar executives issued their sales forecast and promised the company’s reign won’t end next year. Read More »
Scalable SQL startup Clustrix has closed a $12 million Series B round of funding, bringing its total to $30 million. The new money came from existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and ATA Ventures. Considering Clustrix’s steady momentum, this funding shouldn’t take anybody by surprise. Read More »
Bundle uses the billions of Citi customer transactions to draw correlations between spending habits and what other people might enjoy or buy. CTO Phil Kim explains that wrangling even highly structured data takes a lot of organizing, a lot of computing and a lot of time. Read More »
CloudBees, fresh off closing a $4 million funding round, has acquired fellow Java PaaS startup Stax Networks. The move might seem inconsequential — both companies are relatively unknown — but it signals that the PaaS consolidation kicked off by Red Hat and Salesforce.com might just be … Read More »
When you have almost 600 million users and a “social graph” of the connections between them, you can do a lot with that data — so a Facebook intern plotted the connections between millions of users and came up with a map of the socially connected … Read More »
The buying spree in the smart grid-smart building nexus keeps going, this time in France, where Schneider Electric has bought building energy management software providers Vizelia and D5X. Chalk it up to what’s set to be the biggest greentech acquisition trend of 2011. Read More »
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