Welcome to the concept of the superstack — which acts to circumvent the openness that the Internet and the digitization of content has enabled and once again lock consumers into a single platform for their content determined in part by the hardware they choose. Read More »
Jeff Jonas is now an IBM Fellow, according to a post on The Smarter Planet blog. We obviously think the world of him — Jonas has been a featured speaker at our Structure Data events twice. Read More »
An effort to build a telescope that can see back 13 billion years to the creation of the universe is prompting a five year €32 million ($42.7 million) effort to create a low-power supercomputer and networks to handle the data the new telescope will generate. Read More »
If IBM Distinguished Engineer Jeff Jonas ever invites you for a friendly game of puzzle, be prepared: Jonas likes to leave out half of the pieces, or introduce false positives from other puzzle sets. These kinds of experiments have taught him a lot about data analytics. Read More »
As Salesforce.com trots out the integration of its social networking-oriented HR tools into CRM and Chatter, Microsoft is touting new research about why companies need to have workplace-oriented social tools. One problem: Some of these tools are more annoying than useful. Read More »
We’re entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests in real time. Siri and Watson have gotten a lot of attention but we’ll see this type of service in a variety of areas. Read More »
IBM is stepping up its mobile profile, buying up Israeli mobile app provider Worklight and releasing a new device management tool for enterprise customers. The moves help IBM capitalize on the push toward mobile by enterprises as they manage an exploding number of devices and apps. Read More »
Less than three years in, that’s a very big number, especially since data center buyers tend to be a conservative bunch. Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems definitely has legs, but it still hasn’t cracked the top five server vendors. Rival HP still holds the top slot. Read More »
AppDynamics netted $20 million in new Series C funding led by Kleiners Perkins Caufield & Byers, a new investor. Existing backers Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in this round which will help fund the company’s application performance management offering. Read More »
IBM is showing off how its artificial intelligence system Watson can help retailers get smarter in dealing with consumers. IBM believes that Watson could be positioned as a phone customer service line, in-store kiosk or as a resource available through tablet-wielding store clerks. Read More »
Computer and memory chips usually tend to get smaller over time, but in a paper published Thursday in Science, IBM details how it’s building memory chips that would be 100 times more dense than today’s hard drives by starting with the smallest building blocks: atoms. Read More »
The coming wave of open-source hardware, 3-D printing and other breakthroughs will open the floodgates to tech innovation, just as open-source software sparked the last tech boom by fueling the Google, Facebook software empires, said Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. Read More »
More Must Reads
Every year, IBM comes up with a list of five innovations it believes will become popular within the next five years. For 2011, it has come up with the following technologies it thinks will gain traction. I also look back at some of its previous predictions. Read More »
IBM plans to acquire retail data analytics company DemandTec in an all-cash deal valued at $440 million, continuing Big Blue’s buys in big data businesses. DemandTec has two especially compelling elements for IBM: It adds to its big data expertise, and it’s vertically focused. Read More »
Grady Booch, IBM’s chief scientist, has launched a Kickstarter project for a multi-media documentary series called Computing: the Human Experience. The project looks to shed a light on computing much like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series made learning about the universe exciting. Read More »
IBM has made three breakthroughs that could help chips continue following Moore’s Law, resulting in more performance or memory at lower prices. These breakthroughs may also allow us to take advantage of new spectrum for mobile broadband and make better batteries. Read More »
Wikileaks today released a database of tech providers that are involved in government tracking around the globe and quite a few familiar names are on the list, including Alcatel Lucent, Nokia and Cisco. Called The Spy Files, the project includes 287 records. Read More »
The 2011 holiday season that was kicked off earlier today (Black Friday) is proving to be a big boost for m-commerce as shoppers are using their smartphones, mobile apps and other devices to go bargain hunting according to various sources. Its the season of couch commerce. Read More »
Last night I was schooled at playing Jeopardy by Watson in an exhibition match and discovered that despite our fear of the robot overlords, humans are much smarter than we think. Case in point: Watson could never use Apple’s personal assistant Siri. Read More »
What happens when you place the equivalent of 1024 neurons in parallel on a chip? Well, you get a new form of computing for cloud computing and sensor networks as well as toys that can recognize cue cards, better artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. Read More »
Virginia “Ginni” Rometty is just the ninth CEO in IBM’s 100-year history The announcement earlier this week that she would succeed Sam Palmisano was not surprising or controversial, even though Rometti is IBM’s first female CEO, and now arguably the most powerful women in business. Read More »
Virginia Rometty may be the new face of IBM when she takes the helm as CEO in January, but she is expected to keep pushing her predecessor’s vision of cloud-computing related services — hard. It is these services, increasingly, that drive IBM’s global business. Read More »
IBM today named Virginia Rometty as the first female CEO in its 100-year history. Rometty, credited for building IBM’s strong and profitable services business, will take the reins from Sam Palmisano on January 1 as CEO and president. Read More »
We want information, and we want it now, so technologists are racing to keep up. From a stealthy startup in New Mexico getting funded to Infinera providing gear that could download Netflix’s entire library in 5 seconds, the secret for our need for speed is light. Read More »
USC Annenberg Innovation Lab launched a film forecaster last month that utilizes IBM’s BigSheets analytics tool. It showed that Big Data analysis is something that can be done by non-technical people and it underscores the promise of data analysis when it reaches the masses. Read More »
After a century of making tabulation machines IBM has come up with a new chip that marries our brain’s architecture with silicon guts. The goal is to create a new style of computing aimed at making sense of big data without consuming a lot of power. Read More »
In Silicon Valley, happy days are indeed here again: Investors are feeling generous, the IPO market is percolating, and the tech industry’s biggest players have worked up a very healthy appetite for mergers and acquisitions. Read More »
The global economy continues to face uncertainty, but despite this, many technology companies have cash on hand and are opting to spend it on mergers and acquisitions. Here we examine some likely strategies from five different companies: IBM, Oracle, HP, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Read More »
IBM showed how it will ride the growth of Big Data to continue its momentum into the future. IBM announced a $100 million investment for future data analytics along with new services and software aimed at helping improve data analysis and new services for IT professionals. Read More »
The most rewarding part of being a blogger/writer is the generosity with which others share their insights. I have learned and evolved my thinking as a result of this process. Here are three responses to some of my writings from this week that are worth sharing. Read More »
When is a technology company dead? It is something that has been on my mind lately. My definition of a dead tech company has less to do with the company’s numbers and more about its abilities. Of course, that is different from what others think. Read More »
Much of last week’s buzz surrounding the launch of Color was justifiably skeptical. Does the world really need another mobile photo-sharing app? But parts of the startup’s vision extend far beyond photo-sharing, and make the company worth watching as a potential indicator of social media trends. Read More »
Data isn’t the solution to business problems. Pulling data into applications and using it to make decisions and improve the user experience is the way to solve business problems said Jim Baum, the CEO of Netezza, at Structure Big Data. Read More »
As the amount of captured data grows, how can businesses make more sense of it, use it for accurate predictions and better understand their customers? The answer may lie in the world of physics: the concept of space-time paired with data improves predictions through context. Read More »
The White House today announced The Startup America Partnership, an effort to boost innovation and entrepreneurship in the U.S. through a private program that encourages companies to offer mentorship and resources, but looks like an opportunity to get press with low returns for startups. Read More »
Google has come under increasing pressure from those who believe the government should investigate the company for antitrust violations, just as it did Microsoft and AT&T. But would doing so help make the tech sector more competitive? A recent study suggests that it would not. Read More »
GigaOM TV rock-tobered this month, delivering a bevy of videos that will engage, entertain and quite possibly inspire. From business insights and optimal work habits, to cutting-edge inventions, see what you may have missed. Read More »
Fundamental changes in networking and computing are leading to new business models, new services and shifts in corporate and consumer behavior. It’s also leading to a lot of M&A activity as companies jockey for position before the ongoing technology shift settles into the new status quo. Read More »
Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics Group and an IBM Distinguished Engineer thinks the world has a big problem with big data and the problem is only going to get bigger. In this video he discusses the coming data tsunami and its impact. … Read More »
The z190, a brand new chip from IBM, runs at a breathtaking speed of 5.2 GHz and it is meant to power a new mainframe system that is trying to tame the flow of data emerging from modern enterprises and their customers. Read More »
Last month I sat down with Dharmendra Modha, manger of cognitive computing at IBM Research, to talk about simulating the way brains work in hopes of advancing the way our computers can process information in real-time by changing the basic architecture of the chip. Read More »
Cisco today unveiled an Android tablet that means it has an integrated solution stretching all the way from the network and server to the client device. Cisco is betting that the integration and its cachet in the enterprise justifies its entrance into the tablet market. Read More »
IBM isn’t looking very far to find opportunities in cloud computing. In its first year offering cloud services, the company has been helping existing businesses in health care and other industries move towards service models for their infrastructure and products. Read More »
IBM is reportedly close to buying Israeli-American storage startup Storwize for about $140 million. Such an acquisition could indicate the start of consolidation in the cloud storage sector, as predicted by industry insiders and venture capitalists. Read More »
By Derrick Harris
May. 30, 2010, 8:00am PT
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If you’ve been following the data center hardware space for the past year, you might be under the impression that integrated stacks are the future of IT. But it doesn’t look like customers are buying into the promise of having just one throat to choke. Read More »
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