In a recent blog post, NASA’s CIO Linda Cureton gives both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services a shout-out for helping NASA save money while serving its constituencies. But she made no mention of OpenStack, the cloud platform NASA helped bring to life. Read more »
CloudLock, the Waltham, Mass.-based startup specializing in cloud security, says it’s bringing PCI compliance to Google Drive storage. The company’s new service scans files flowing into and out of Google Drive looking for personally identifiable information. Read more »
Anyone who has used Microsoft Excel since 1993 has likely dabbled at least once with VBA, or Visual Basic for Applications. Now, a pair of MIT students have created an plug-in alternative to VBA called IronSpread, which uses the cross-platform Python scripting language. Read more »
Enterprises unnerved by the bring-your-own-device movement that many had promoted are now trying to lock down employees’ own devices for security purposes. The unintended consequence is that many of those employees, frustrated by these restrictions, just use unsanctioned devices instead. Read more »
Once a rising star, HTC continues to lose lustre as it not only faces increased competition from Apple and Samsung, but also due to alleged patent infringements and limitations on future products. With three issues at once, this may be the worst week in HTC’s history. Read more »
Windows Azure, Microsoft’s huge platform-as-a-service, is getting a big boost from Appfog and Apprenda, two small PaaSes that will make it easier to run hybrid clouds using Azure back-end services. That addresses a concern among business customers that want to run apps in house. Read more »
Research firm IDC offers up its look at smartphone market share through 2016 and suggests several surprising trends: Android may peak this year while Windows Phone will jump past iOS in 2016. A year ago, IDC said the same thing for 2015. Here’s the problem. Read more »
With all the cloud computing hubbub this week as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Oracle gala events all vie for attention, it’s telling that most of the buzz centers on what exactly, Larry Ellison will tweet some time tomorrow. Read more »
Microsoft hopes to prove Windows Azure a worthy adversary to Amazon Web Services with new solid-state block storage cloud, dramatically revamped REST API, and a console to meld management of on-premises and Azure-based applications on a single screen. Read more »
Android enthusiasts have a new way to control their smartphone or tablet, courtesy of Microsoft. The company released a new Android app and supporting web service Tuesday called on{X}, which lets users create JavaScript code or simple recipes that add automated tasks to their connected device. Read more »
Microsoft unlocked an new achievement this month, surpassing 100,000 apps for its Windows Phone mobile platform. But there are several reasons why this number isn’t equating into sales of Windows Phones. There’s a still a key question Microsoft hasn’t answered about its mobile platform. Read more »
Fifteen years after buying WebTV, Microsoft is once again trying to bring the wide-open Internet to the living room. Here’s a look at Internet Explorer for Xbox and other highlights from Microsoft’s E3 presentation Monday. Read more at paidContent »
At Computex, Asus introduced numerous new computer designs for Microsoft Windows 8, covering laptops, desktops, Ultrabooks and more. There’s even one laptop with two screens. But the smartest move by Asus is to re-use the popular design from its Android tablet and dock, the Transformer Prime. Read more »
All right all you big data nerds — it’s time to suit up for the NIST’s Big Data workshop slated for next week. The event will focus on what state-of-the-art core technologies will drive big data and how to ensure accuracy of big data processes. Read more »
A report that Microsoft will hold back on Office for iPad and Android devices until it’s out on Windows tablets and phones illustrates Microsoft’s quandary. Office is its cash cow and solidifies account control. The danger is people may like iPads more than Office. Read more »
Mobilize.net aims to bring .NET applications to the Azure (or other) cloud and to the mobile devices of the customer’s choice. The company knows from Windows and .NET — between them, its CEO and VP of business development spent 40 years at Microsoft. Read more »
Next week, legacy tech powers Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Microsoft will vie for the spotlight as they set forth their cloud computing game plans at closely scheduled events. All three have prodigious resources and all three lag far behind cloud giant Amazon Web Services. Read more »
Google has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft and Nokia and is also tattling on the companies with U.S. regulators, accusing them patent-troll-like behavior. The good thing about filing a complaint with the EC is Google doesn’t have to do the legwork. Read more »
The adoption of tablets, social media and new interfaces and the changing nature of the TV itself mean the digital living room will continue on its path of rapid change, thanks to new ways of creating, viewing, bundling, distributing and selling content. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As major PaaSes like Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud Foundry and Salesforce.com’s Heroku race to embrace multiple languages, a few like Apprenda say that’s exactly the wrong approach. Language-specific PaaSes are better able to exploit a company’s native applications and features, says Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuler. Read more »
Changes in the power market are rippling through the Internet industry, altering both the location of data centers and their sources of power. There are many factors in picking a data center location beyond the geographic location, such as how to procure energy and green-energy models. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Nokia has launch the Lumia 610 at a low, £15 per month price point with service in the UK. It’s not high performing hardware, but Windows Phone runs well on meager silicon. The bigger issue is limited memory, which means some top tier apps are incompatible. Read more »
The Xbox 360 just got more videos: Amazon launched an app on the game console that offers access to both video-on-demand and Prime Instant subscription streams. With 25 percent of all Netflix traffic coming from the Xbox, it’s an important place to be for Amazon. Read more »
According to some researchers, web companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook are doing the research world a disservice because they won’t make their datasets available for peer review. These researchers have a point, but privacy concerns might always trump openness where openness matters at all. Read more »
Microsoft has won the latest salvo in its ongoing war with Motorola, but it’s not yet clear whether Moto will buy a license for the infringed patent or try a workaround. Read more »
Microsoft’s Bing StreetSide service was offering a welcome replacement for Google’s out-of-date Street View imagery in Germany, but now privacy complaints have seen it taken offline. When will somebody realize these complaints have gone too far? Read more »
In its push to get traction for Windows Azure as a platform for cloud services, Microsoft is opening an Azure accelerator in Bangalore. The goal is to find and help startups across India and Southeast Asia — and get them aboard the Microsoft PaaS. Read more »
What use are hundreds of shortcuts if you don’t know them? Berlin’s Veodin has come up with a free tool called KeyRocket, which trains users in the way of the shortcut with more relevance and less irritation than Microsoft’s hated old Office assistant. Read more »
Github, the social network for software developers, now has a brand-new, first-ever Windows client. That means developers can build their Windows XP, Windows 7 and pre-release Windows 8 — even Vista applications — but now also share their work on the popular Github repository. Read more »
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: What Apple et al are up to with Nortel’s patent trove, why iPhone subsidies won’t be lowered any time soon, a contract-free iPhone 3GS and Tim Cook’s compensation. Read more »
The European Commission today announced it had found four possible “abuses of dominance” by Google, and suggested the search giant propose a package of “remedies” in coming weeks. Read more »
With news that Google and Microsoft plan to take on Amazon Web Services with infrastructure services of their own, you have to ask: How many clouds do we need? Legacy vendors IBM, Microsoft and HP are hoping at least a couple more. Read more »
Google is hard at work on a cloud computing offering that will compete directly with the popular Amazon EC2 cloud, I have been told, although Microsoft probably will beat it to the punch. The timing for Google is TBD, while Microsoft should announce on June 7. Read more »
VMware’s set its sights on becoming a bona fide application development powerhouse. With the latest version of its Springsource-based vFabric Suite, VMware adds application deployment automation, vSphere-optimized Posgres and a SQLFire in-memory database layer — all are geared to woo web scale developers. Read more »
SAP All-in-One business applications will now run in Amazon’s cloud — another step that could make Amazon Web Services more enticing to risk-averse businesses that stress over entrusting their life-blood applications to a public cloud. Read more »
There’s quite a ruckus going on over ARM-powered Windows 8 tablets: Mozilla and Google are crying foul over third-party browser restrictions Microsoft has put in place in Windows 8. Here’s why this isn’t really a new problem and why it’s likely to get worse over time. Read more »
Microsoft’s top search guy took to the Web Thursday to show off a refreshed interface for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, that he said better incorporates the user’s social media contacts in a new sidebar which brings in their Facebook and Twitter contacts input. Read more »
Of the dozens of meeting requests I received for this year’s Interop conference, the one I least expected came from Google. Interop is all about enterprise IT — networks, security, servers, stuff with gravitas. But in its own way, Google is becoming a serious IT company. Read more »
Paul Doscher, CEO of Lucid Imagination wants you to know that when it come to enterprise-class search, open-source Lucene is a contender. And a strong contender that can face off against Google, Amazon and Microsoft in the big data search arena. Read more »
Let it never be said that the cloud computing wars are boring. Within hours of being blasted for locking developers into its ever-rising cloud stack, Amazon announced new managed database services and Elastic Beanstalk support for thousands of Microsoft-centric developers. Read more »
