Imation buys IronKey’s hardware assets
Storage device manufacturer Imation Corp. has reached a deal to buy the hardware business of privately-held IronKey, best known for its highly secure USB flash drives.
Imation will take over the development and sales of IronKey's portable storage devices.
IronKey's hardware business has about 40 employees who will move over to Imation. The financial terms of the acquisition, expected to close within 30 days, were not disclosed.
IronKey is perhaps best known for its highly secure USB flash drive, which uses a 256-bit AES encryption algorithm to secure data. The drive comes in a stainless steel case with no seams so it cannot be pried open. The highly secure devices carry with them a hefty price as well, costing around $108 for an 8GB model. Read more...
Windows 8 is Microsoft’s biggest bet in 20 years – and three challenges could trip it up
Windows 8 is Microsoft's attempt to make the shift into what many have called the post-PC era. This is a period when new interfaces using touch and gesture will replace the user interface (UI), and mobile devices take centre stage from desk-bound machines.
Microsoft's approach is to provide a single client operating system platform and modern user experience that spans Intel and ARM architectures as well as the full range of client devices, from mobile handhelds through to fixed-location desktops. Microsoft presents this strategy as "reimagining Windows".
Windows 8 is not a finished product and Microsoft will need a number of iterations to refine itPhoto: Microsoft
Windows 8 is an ambitious project and I generally like the direction Microsoft is taking. The new Metro interface looks promising and Microsoft now supports HTML5, CSS and JavaScript as key elements in the development model. Read more...
Red Hat swells sales and profits in fiscal Q2
Commercial Linux distributor and virtualization and cloud computing player Red Hat just continues to grow organically like a batch of yeast. Or an open source collective from outer space (well, North Carolina anyway) that feasts on Unix servers.
In the second quarter of fiscal 2012 ended August 31, Red Hat's revenues embiggened by 28 per cent, to $281.3m, and net income exploded by 69 per cent, to $40m. Support subscription contracts for its Linux, middleware, and other software were up by 28 per cent to $238.3m and training and services revenues kept pace, hitting $43m. Deferred revenue rose by 25 per cent in Q2, to $813m, and the company is sitting on $937.2m in cash and equivalents. That makes Red Hat the biggest and strongest open source company in the world and perhaps the only one that will ever grow to this size because of the difficulty of competing with Red Hat. Read more...
Surviving the Facebook app ‘swamp’ with Azure
“Developing with Facebook is like building a house on a swamp,” says Microsoft’s Nathan Totten. He should know. He used to work at social media company Thuzi, and when the company needed to write a C# Facebook application, he and his colleague Jim Zimmerman were so disappointed by the existing C# SDKs that they built their own.
Totten is now a technical evangelist at Microsoft, and his project has become the open source Facebook C# SDK with a measure of approval from Microsoft as the suggested way to build C# applications for Facebook.
So why is Facebook development swamp-like? The first problem is that the Facebook API changes over time, and any wrapper you build on top can soon get out of date. The second problem is that Facebook does not officially support C#. It has SDKs for JavaScript, Apple iOS, Android and PHP.
In mitigation, the dynamic features of C# 4.0 are actually well-suited to APIs that are in flux, as Totten explains in his post mentioned above. Some API changes and additions can be accommodated without changing the SDK at all. This has also made it possible to make the C# SDK somewhat similar to the PHP SDK, which is an advantage when you are consulting the Facebook documentation. Read more...
Senators question whether Google has biased search results
Several U.S. senators accused Google of giving search preferences to its own suite of services over competitors, but Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt denied that his company is manipulating search results during a hearing Wednesday.
Google's search results appear to be biased in favor of its shopping results and other services, and Google's own services always seem to appear near the top of its organic search results, said Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican.
Lee referred to a chart showing Google's shopping results consistently in the top three search results, while other comparison shopping sites moved up and down in Google rankings. It appears that Google has "cooked" its search results, he said. Read more...
Adobe Systems launches Flash Player 11 and Air 3
Adobe Systems announced on Wednesday the release of Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 software to help developers build more sophisticated applications, with dozens of new features across smartphones and tablets as well as desktop computers.
The releases are Adobe's biggest in two years and will be available free of charge in early October, said Anup Murarka, Adobe's director of product marketing. The related tools, Flash Builder and Flex, will support new features in Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 by the end of the year.
The releases will enable delivery of 2D and 3D games over the Internet to various devices, Murarka said. Developers of enterprise applications will also find the 3D capabilities popular for data-centric apps. Enterprises, for example, will be able to build application dashboards to "visualize complex data sets" with 3D images, he said. Read more...
Kindle books now ready for borrowing from public libraries
Users of the Kindle e-reader and Amazon's e-reading app for other devices can now borrow e-books from more than 11,000 U.S. libraries, the online retailer said Wednesday.
Barnes and Noble Nook and Sony e-readers have allowed open e-book library borrowing, a missing Kindle feature that has concerned some librarians.
A spokeswoman for Amazon.com said in an email that about 11,000 libraries will offer Kindle versions of all of their e-books that use OverDrive technology. The number of e-books available varies at different libraries, she noted.
She also said that e-books will be delivered to users via Wi-Fi or USB technology, making Kindle the only e-reader to offer wireless delivery of library e-books. Read more...
Report: Apple to unveil iPhone 5 on October 4
Apple will launch the next iPhone on Oct. 4, a technology blog said today, citing what it called "sources close to the situation."
The date, two weeks from yesterday, was pegged by the AllThingsD blog, operated by Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, in a post today.
According to the blog, new CEO Tim Cook will preside over the introduction presentation, which will precede the new iPhone's availability by a "few weeks."
Apple has been mum, as is its practice, about the new iPhone's name -- most have dubbed it the "iPhone 5" -- and any changes from 2010's iPhone 4.
The timing seems right, a Wall Street analyst who follows Apple said today.
"[This] is in line with our thoughts for an October rollout," Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities said in a note issued to clients Wednesday after AllThingsD claimed the Oct. 4 date was accurate.
White speculated that Apple will start selling the iPhone 5 shortly after it announces the new model, reducing the lag time between introduction and availability that it last had with the iPhone 4 in June 2010.
Apple introduced the iPhone 4 on June 7, 2010, and put it on sale a little over two weeks later, on June 24.
"Apple should launch iPhone 5 with less lag time after the media event versus iPhone 4 given the later-than-typical unveiling," said White, referring to Apple's previous practice of launching a new iPhone in the early summers of 2007-2010.
White pointed out that Apple trimmed the lag time for the iPad 2 last March by introducing the new tablet on March 2 and kicking off sales just nine days later.
If Apple used a similar trajectory for the iPhone 5, it would start selling the smartphone Oct. 13 or Oct. 14. The latter is a Friday, a weekday often used by Apple for product launches.
Apple will also probably roll out the new iPhone faster to more markets than it has in the past, White said, repeating an assertion he had made before.
Last year, Apple sold the iPhone 4 in just a few countries -- France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. -- at the start, following those with 18 others by the end of the following month and the remainder of its markets two months later.
"We [also] expect that China will play a more important role this time around," White said. China Unicom, still the only Chinese carrier authorized to sell the iPhone, began dealing the iPhone 4 near the end of September 2010, three months after the smartphone debuted in the U.S.
Reports have regularly circulated that China Mobile, the country's biggest mobile operator, will sell the next iPhone. White believes that China Telecom, which has the third-largest wireless subscriber base, may also get the iPhone 5 this year.
Apple's iPhone 5 roll-out will be a first on several fronts, including the first model introduced after co-founder Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO . Former COO Tim Cook was appointed in Jobs' place and -- if he follows in Jobs' footsteps -- will presumably lead the media event.
Apple often uses the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to stage major product introductions, although it has also held them on its own Cupertino, Calif. campus.
(Source: infoworld.com)
Twitter buys social analytics firm Julpan
Twitter has acquired Julpan, a startup founded last year that analyzes the way people share information on the social web with the goal of delivering fresh and relevant content to users.
The acquisition was announced by Julpan founder and CEO Ori Allon announced on the company website.
"With more than 230 million Tweets per day on every subject imaginable, Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them," Allon said. "We look forward to joining forces with Twitter's engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan's innovations." Read more...
Dear Microsoft: When your cloud goes down, keep users informed
Microsoft still doesn't get it. Tuesday, Arthur de Haan, VP of Windows Live Test and Service Engineering, posted an analysis of the Sept. 8 outage that took down most of Microsoft's cloud applications. On the Windows Team Blog he explains:
[W]e have identified two streams of work to drive specific service improvements around monitoring, problem identification, and recovery. Along with these service improvements, Microsoft is focused on further hardening the DNS service to improve its overall redundancy and fail-over capability... [and] an additional recovery process that will allow a specific property the ability to fail over to restore service and then fail back when the DNS service is restored. In addition, we are reviewing the recovery tools to see if we can make more improvements that will decrease the time it takes to resolve outages. Read more...