The consumerization of IT has led to the growth of cloud, a big shift for the major hardware players and new opportunities for startups to build a business using IT without huge up-front costs. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels explains what’s going on at Structure:Europe. Read more »
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 »
Siri, and possibly Apple’s overall search functionality, is likely to get smarter: Apple has hired William Stasior away from Amazon. Stasior led Amazon’s A9 search unit and was Amazon’s director of search and navigation. With the move, Apple can rely less on others for search. Read more »
Russ Grandinetti, vice president for Kindle content for Amazon, spoke to magazine publishers and editors Monday in San Francisco, where he talked about the particular challenges facing their industry as they slowly move toward digital platforms for publishing and editing. Read more »
Reports of Amazon considering the purchase of Texas Instruments’ mobile chip business for billions of dollars may not make sense at first glance. But there are several reasons why such a deal could make sense for Amazon in both devices and cloud computing activities. Read more »
This week on the audio podcast, Matt and Kevin share hands impressions of with Apple’s new iPod touch, Jelly Bean on the Galaxy S III and thoughts on prices for the iPad Mini and Windows RT tablets. Plus a recap of other mobile gadget news! Read more »
Apple’s iPad Mini isn’t yet a real product: It hasn’t been announced yet. However, that may change soon with talk of an upcoming event. And now there is a retail inventory system reportedly showing tablet pricing in 4 different storage capacities with Wi-Fi and cellular. 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 »
The nation’s biggest broadband and cable provider is joining the OpenStack effort, just in time for it’s big coming out party in San Diego next week. Comcast is also working with Cisco on applications that can build on that open-source infrastructure. Read more »
Oyster, a new startup that wants to be the Spotify of books, announced it has raised $3 million led by Founders Fund. The money will help Oyster build a library that allows members to access an unlimited number of books for a monthly fee. Read more »
Oracle is not often accused of helping customers cut costs, but in this case, modifications to its recovery manager product with the 10g release helped Amazon.com save $1 million a year by backing up directly to Amazon S3 storage. Read more »
The PaaS market is predicted to reach $20.1 billion in 2014. Huge brands occupy this space, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com, as well as newer startups. As the market grows, watch for more consolidation, tighter integration with IaaS services, and more features. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Zenoss will use its new-found cash to staff up its international operations, better support global partners, and improve the real-time analytics of its IT monitoring system, said CEO Bill Karpovich. Read more »
By integrating its AWS Marketplace with Identity Access Management, Amazon is making the purchase of third-party services running on its cloud infrastructure more palatable to companies worried about shadow IT. Read more »
Selling customers on the cloud as a set of technologies that will improve their business and agility is fine, but vendors need to be able to back up those lofty claims with experienced teams that can really deliver on the promise of the cloud. Read more »
After seven years of legal battles, Google has finally reached an agreement with American book publishers that will let it scan and digitize books. The deal stands to make things better for readers and publishers — although Amazon is probably not happy about it. 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 »
Dublin-based Cloud Vertical, which wants to help companies get the most bang for their cloud computing buck, now has cash and backing from the Citrix Startup Accelerator to build its business, says Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne. Read more »
Amazon’s new e-reader, the Kindle Paperwhite, started shipping on Monday but is already sold out. Customers who order one today won’t receive it for four to six weeks. Read more »
Agility is increasingly recognized as one of the main advantages of cloud computing, but an important aspect of agility is choice: the choice to run computing jobs in house, in a private cloud, or on public cloud services from the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, and a growing number of other providers. To exercise choice, customers require information and the ability to compare the costs and benefits of competing solutions. This report explores opportunities for accurately measuring computing resources and their use, simplifying the comparison of competing cloud offerings and opening the door to charging models based more closely on actual consumption. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Morgridge Institute ran Cycle Computing software atop Amazon Web Services to build a cell knowledge base that, over time, could help doctors build the tissue types they need to resarch and cure disease in a petri dish. Read more »
The empire strikes back: Amazon Web Services adds the Oracle database — actually the whole RDS lineup — to its free usage tier. Anyone who doesn’t see Oracle’s new Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Amazon Web Services as potential competitors should probably look again. Read more »
Thanks to the rise of online business, companies must now get their products and services to market as fast as they can, and releasing software now means small releases that occur very frequently. Enter devops, which is disrupting traditional assumptions about the roles of development and operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
I spent a week testing Amazon’s new e-reader, the Kindle Paperwhite, which starts at $119. The verdict: The front-lit screen improves the reading experience all day long, not just at night, making this a big step up from the Kindle Touch. Here are my review and video. Read more »
Twitter has been awash (again) with banter about the myth or reality of private clouds. The conversations revolve around the technology, rehashing the “what makes a cloud a cloud” argument. Yet, all of us are right, and many of us are wrong. Read more »
The online social networking platform for promoting social change handles more than 20 million users, but has a tiny in-house IT footprint thanks to its use of cloud services from Amazon and Rackspace. The key thing, says infrastructure manager Kyle VanderBeek, is flexibility. Read more »
Fans who preordered the ebook edition of J.K. Rowling’s new book, “The Casual Vacancy,” are in for a disappointment today: Due to a file formatting mishap, It’s basically unreadable on e-readers. Read more at paidContent »
Newvem, which already kept taps on Amazon EC2 instances, is now adding S3 storage to the services it monitors and analyzes for customers. The goal is to help them pick the right storage tier for their different data sets, Newvem president Zev Laderman said. Read more »
There’s nothing like the holiday shopping season to test an e-commerce site’s ability to ramp up and down as needed. RightScale says it can help sites proactively respond to changing loads so they don’t run out of juice and don’t pay for more resources than needed. Read more »
Why is the ebook edition of J.K. Rowling’s new novel, “The Casual Vacancy,” $17.99? Thank the fact that publisher Hachette is in a sweet spot between the ebook settlement’s approval and the time that it actually takes effect at non-Apple retailers. Read more at paidContent »
Optimists hope that the EU’s expected cloud computing recommendations will resolve concerns around diverse data protection laws that slow cloud adoption. Realists hope for the best, but prepare for less. The reality is Europe remains a collection of countries, not a unified whole. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is adding a flexible IOPS storage option to its Relational Database Service. People setting up new MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server instances can take advantage of the new option now. Later, they can move legacy instances over. Read more »
Barnes & Noble’s new Nook HD tablets, priced starting at $199, aim to stand out from the pack with reader-centric features and enhanced reading experiences for magazines and catalogs. The company’s goal is to drive book discovery and purchasing through the tablets in new ways. Read more »
With the launch of Nook Video, Barnes & Noble will begin selling digital movies and TV episodes across devices. The company plans to release Nook Video apps, and the service will be available in the US and UK. Pricing and other details are unclear. Read more at paidContent »
Google is adding some new features to its Android ebooks app, including highlighting and annotation, translation, dictionary definitions and geographic information. Google Play Books for iOS lacks these features for now. Read more at paidContent »
With multiple Amazon Kindle Fire tablets that differ in screen size, display resolution and even hardware capabilities, how will developers manage their mobile apps across the platform? A new “device targeting” feature will help and it supports Android devices through Amazon’s app store as well. Read more »
The troubled IT giant is about to tweak its cloud services effort according to a Bloomberg News report. The question is whether yet another new strategy can give the company the traction it needs so badly. Read more »
Walmart has announced that it will stop selling Kindles in its stores and on its website, suggesting that as it beefs up its own e-commerce strategy it does not want to turn sales over to a competitor. Target also stopped carrying Kindles in May. Read more »
With the ebook pricing settlement recently approved, and the Department of Justice’s trial against Apple, Macmillan and Penguin set to begin next June, Apple has subpoenaed Amazon in a Washington State court. Read more at paidContent »
Whether it’s the iPhone 5, the importance of LTE, or BYOD trends disrupting the enterprise, there are always technologies, trends, and companies changing the way we define mobile. Here are some noteworthy segments to watch in the coming months, from location-based shopping to apps to wireless networks. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
