Heroku might have expanded its embrace to include Node.js and Clojure, but its heart is still with Ruby. To wit, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto is joining the company as its chief architect for Ruby, which should only improve its standing in the developer community. Read more »
The ability to analyze enormous amounts of data and use that to better target an ad, make a new drug or any number of other lofty goals is talked about constantly, but what about harnessing Hadoop for the rest of us? Read more »
VMware on Tuesday morning launched the latest version of its vSphere virtualization management software, as well as a suite of integrated products for managing cloud computing environments. There isn’t much new aside from the capabilities in vSphere 5, but VMware’s timing was ideal. Read more »
Citrix Systems has bought hot private-cloud startup Cloud.com, a move that immediately makes Citrix a leader in the quest to help companies build on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds à la Amazon EC2. Cloud.com brings an impressive list of customers that includes Bechtel, GoDaddy and Zynga. Read more »
For once, the biggest news in social media and real-time technologies didn’t come from Facebook. Rather, it was Google that, at the end of the second quarter, introduced an innovative collection of technologies, under the Google+ label. Another big headline was the return of digital music: Pandora filed a successful IPO, and Google and Apple unrolled cloud-based music offerings. Meanwhile, other social networks generated valuable lessons about technology and business strategies. LinkedIn went public, while Myspace was sold. And Apple essentially appointed Twitter its mobile social network infrastructure supplier. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Skype, Groupon, Turntable.fm and Amazon. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Enterprise employees have shifted from the gray and controlled world of corporate IT to the colorful Oz of consumer technologies, but according to data from an IDC/Unisys survey, everyone is in need of some kind of wizard to sort things out. Read more »
Piston Cloud Computing has launched with $4.5 million from True Ventures, Hummer Winblad and others in what is both a big deal for the relatively young OpenStack platform as well as an expected move by the founders of what became the code for OpenStack. Read more »
The service provider responsible for Groupon’s daily e-mail deals, suffered a server outage this weekend that looks to have had a staggering effect on Groupon sales in several cities. This seems to play up Groupon’s overall dependence on emails as the primary method of subscriber interaction. Read more »
The furor over Michael Stonebraker’s criticism of Facebook’s scaling of its MySQL database we covered last Thursday has continued to generate comments on the post itself and on Twitter. Friday, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels weighed in with a tweet that seemed to accuse Stonebraker of hubris. Read more »
Underneath Twitter’s fun and trendy public image, the data streamed through the microblogging service is apparently worth some big bucks. DataSift, one of only two companies authorized to re-syndicate Twitter’s content using its “firehose,” on Monday announced a $6 million venture capital funding round. Read more »
We give Intel a lot of flack here at GigaOM for not being mobile enough or low power enough for scale out computing, but the chipmaker is doing all right in the server category. We discussed how well and the future for servers in this video. Read more »
Big processors or little processors, scale-up or scale-out, on-premise or in the cloud: the answers might not be as easy as one would think. Web-style, scale-out architectures, low-power server processors and cloud computing are getting more attention by the day, but they have their limits. Read more »
IDC’s latest snapshot of the digital universe suggests that data volumes continue to grow at a dramatic pace that shows little signs of slowing down. The sheer scale of the problem suggests that simply adding more storage is not a sustainable strategy. What is the solution? Read more »
When the smoke clears, Dropbox’s newfound focus on transparency could turn out to be a great thing. Especially if it triggers an avalanche of other web-service providers following in its footsteps, making life easier for consumers and getting the federal government off their backs. Read more »
According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death.” It’s actually a predicament all too common among web startups, for which the solution might be a class of databases referred to as NewSQL. Read more »
Virtustream, a cloud computing provider focused on hosting enterprise applications, has raised $10 million in a Series B round. The round was funded by existing investors Intel Capital, Columbia Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, and TDFunds, which invested $49 million in Virtustream’s Series A round last year. Read more »
Amazon.com is making what appears to be a big investment in analytic database startup ParAccel. ParAccel today announced the close of a Series E round led by Amazon, bringing the company’s total funding to $73 million. The amount of this round is undisclosed. Read more »
If you think people are over-sharing on the Internet today, brace yourself, says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. As the sharing booms, so will the online data. And Facebook plans to build more of its own data centers to deal with the coming data boom. Read more »
There are big cloud server instances, and then there are big cloud server instances. Storm On Demand’s new 96GB, 32-core instance is of the latter variety. In fact, it’s the biggest you’re likely to find anywhere, and it’s designed with maximum I/O performance in mind. Read more »
Sometimes, the geeks come out of the shadows and hit the mainstream consciousness. Remember the early ’00s and the rush of publicity for Ruby and Ajax as they became the calling cards of Web 2.0? Node.js looks like the next candidate for such mainstream elevation. Read more »
The size of Hadoop deployments appears to have tripled since October, according to statistics that Cloudera is sharing. If accurate, they help prove assumptions that Hadoop usage grows quickly once organizations wrap their heads around how it is used. Read more »
PaaS pioneer Heroku has added support for the Clojure programming language to its offering. Heroku also supports Ruby and Node.js as development options. Supporting three development options might not appear like a big deal, but it is, especially for enterprise developers who require certain features. Read more »
Obama will have a virtual town hall meeting with Twitter Wednesday, as he uses social media to reach out to voters and constituents. But more importantly, the Twitter Town Hall will provide Obama and the White House with invaluable data about what voters are thinking about. Read more »
If I were a cloud-service provider, I’d consider investing in television advertising. If I didn’t know better, TV, and the media, in general, the cloud is a fairly useless and highly insecure place to store my data. Perhaps worse, I might think it’s a joke. Read more »
Twitter announced Tuesday it has acquired BackType, an analytics platform aimed at helping companies and brands gauge their social media impact. The possible rationale for the deal is BackType’s Storm real-time big data processing platform that could help Twitter offer well-defined analytics. Read more »
Big data — as in managing and analyzing large volumes of information — has come a long way in the past couple of years. Among the greatest innovations might be the advent of real-time analytics, which allow the processing of information in real time to enable instantaneous decision-making. Read more »
With all the great languages, databases and cloud hosting options available, now is a great time to be a software programmers. But that same variety makes it very difficult to be the IT manager tasked with configuring applications. That is where PaaS startup DotCloud comes in. Read more »
We’ve all heard stories about cloud-service fees run amok, only spotted when the bill comes due. Cloudability, part of Structure 2011 LaunchPad, wants to keep companies abreast of what they’re spending in the cloud with a free app that shows them what’s being spent and where. Read more »
With its new SplitSecure technology, Structure 2011 LaunchPad finalist BeyondCore is trying to prove that companies processing sensitive data don’t have to be afraid of cloud computing. The company has actually been around since 2003, but SplitSecure represents its first foray into the cloud. Read more »
Behind the cloud are thousands of servers, switches, appliances both physical and virtual, and any number of complicating bits of machinery and software all just waiting to cause a problem. Understanding and monitoring that massive infrastructure is the world of LaunchPad finalist Real-Status. Read more »
Much like Apple’s elegant Time Machine software helps make backing up your MacBook effortless, Zerto wants to make disaster recovery in the cloud as simple. The Structure 2011 LaunchPad company wants to become the disaster recovery solution for companies that rely on the cloud. Read more »
Structure LaunchPad startup vCider disguises packets like I disguise zucchini in my four-year-old’s chocolate muffins. Except vCider does it to help companies bridge between different cloud providers while providing a bit less latency and more security that one would with a virtual router. Read more »
CloudFloor, which launched at Structure 2011 last month, has raised $3.1 million from undisclosed investors to build out its software which purports to show both IT workers and business managers how their cloudy assets are performing against business goals. Read more »
When done right, cloud computing actually can be a source of significant competitive advantage. So says Zynga, at least, which highlighted its unique cloud infrastructure, as well as its advanced analytics efforts, as part of its core strengths in the S-1 statement it filed this morning. Read more »
Among the biggest problems with developing applications for the cloud is scaling the database layer. GenieDB, a competitor in our recent Structure 2011 LaunchPad competition, wants to give its customers the benefits of both SQL and NoSQL to scale across data centers. Read more »
For anyone concerned about the difficulty of doing advanced analytics tasks with Hadoop, the future might be just around the corner. A stealth-mode Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup called Platfora is working to make Hadoop usable even for the non-data scientists among us. Read more »
Recent developments in the vehicle industry suggest that 2011 could be the year of the car as a major platform for apps. From BMW’s support for Apple’s iPod Out feature to the emergence of Nokia’s Terminal Mode, a system that integrates mobile applications and the car, automakers and app developers are jumping on board the in-vehicle app movement. This report examines that landscape, its major players and their offerings, and how the market is shifting from device to car and, eventually, to the cloud. Increased broadband speeds, electronic vehicles and social apps such as those powered by Twitter will play major roles on this journey. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Ford, BMW, Geely, Nissan and Google. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If there’s one thing certain about Amazon Web Services, it’s that the company isn’t Oracle. On Thursday, the company slashed the bandwidth charges for its various services, the latest in a series of price cuts dating back to 2008. Read more »
PHP Fog is a cloud computing Platform-as-a-Service with a laser focus on PHP applications. It’s what PHP Fog does in the foggy middle that’s so unique and that garnered it a place in our second-annual LaunchPad competition. Read more »
At last week’s Structure conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels used his “State of the Cloud” keynote to highlight how cloud computing is evolving beyond its traditional IaaS, PaaS and SaaS layers. I’m not so sure it’s outdated yet, but it’s getting there. Read more »
