Facebook says mobile ads successful; analysts say challenges remain
Facebook seemed to answer at least one burning question about its mobile business on Thursday -- it doesn't plan to build its own smartphone -- but it's still not entirely clear how it will capitalize on its rapidly expanding base of mobile users.
"Building out a whole phone wouldn't really make much sense for us to do," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, when asked about Facebook's mobile strategy during a conference call to discuss its first financial report as a public company.
The number of people who access Facebook's service from mobile devices is expanding rapidly. The company had 955 million monthly active users at the end of June, of which 543 million accessed Facebook from a mobile device, the company said Thursday. That was up 67% from the same quarter last year, it said. Read more...
Businesses fill Hadoop skills needs with partners
As enterprise adoption of Hadoop booms, the pool of IT personnel able to build and maintain deployments hasn't kept pace. In May, analyst firm IDC pegged the compound annual growth rate for the Hadoop software market at more than 60 percent, forecasting an ascent to $812.8 million in 2016 from a base of $77 million in 2011.
The Apache Foundation's Hadoop distributed computing technology initially staked out a role in search engines. Yahoo helped get the software off the ground, announcing what it termed the largest Hadoop production application in 2008. Distributions of the open-source software have since boosted availability beyond the earliest adopters. Cloudera kicked off its Hadoop distribution in 2009, followed by Hortonworks and MapR Technologies.
As Hadoop penetrates a broadening range of industries, from publishing to agriculture, IT departments look to Hadoop distributors and specialized consulting firms to fill Hadoop skills gaps. CIOs and IT managers look for outside help to launch projects, write code, and generally navigate the Hadoop ecosystem. IT organizations also tap channel partners for training as they seek to grow in-house Hadoop talent. Read more...
New Mac Trojan hints at ties to high-priced commercial hacking toolkit
French security firm Intego discovered a new Mac Trojan horse this week that is being used to target specific individuals.
The Trojan, dubbed "Crisis" by Intego -- a Mac-only antivirus developer -- and called "Morcut" by Sophos, is espionage malware that spies on victims using Mac instant messaging clients, browsers and Skype, the Internet phoning software.
According to Intego, which published an initial analysis on Tuesday and has followed up with more information since then, Crisis sports code that points to a connection with an Italian firm that sells a $245,000 espionage toolkit to national intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
From all indications, Crisis, like any true Trojan, does not exploit a vulnerability, but instead relies on trickery to convince the user to self-infect his or her Mac.
"We believe that the infection vector may rely primarily on social engineering to be installed and at this point in time there is no reason to believe there is a vulnerability being used in conjunction with the threat," said Symantec in a post to its security response team's blog yesterday. Read more...
Mountain Lion grabs 3% share of OS X in first 48 hours
Apple's OS X Mountain Lion is off to a solid start in its first 48 hours and now powers more than 3% of all Macs, an online advertising network said today.
Chitika, which regularly mines its ad impression data for trends in operating system and browser usage, reported Friday that two days after its introduction, OS X Mountain Lion accounted for 3.2% of all versions of Apple's operating system.
OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, retained the top spot in Chitika's ranking with a 45.5% share, while Lion, or version 10.7, accounted for 35%.
In an email touting its findings, Chitika characterized Mountain Lion's 3.2% as "rather impressive," and predicted that the new OS would "do much better" than its 2011 predecessor, Lion.
Other Web measurement firms have not corroborated Chitika's data. Irish analytics company StatCounter does not break out individual OS X versions and U.S.-based Net Applications does not automatically disclose its daily numbers to the public or the press. Read more...
MDM moves beyond mobile devices into Macs
MobileIron today announced that its mobile device management (MDM) tool now supports the new OS X Mountain Lion operating system for Macs, released on Wednesday. The company cited fast adoption of Macs in business as the reason it moved out of its mobile-only roots (iOS, Android, and some lesser-used mobile OSes). "Forrester Research forecasts that enterprises will spend $19 billion on the Mac and iPad in 2012, with that number increasing to $28 billion in 2013," MobileIron noted. In June, MDM provider AirWatch annoucned similar support for OS X Lion and says Mountain Lion support is due soon.
The management capabilities MobileIron and AirWatch offer IT for OS X are minimum passcode and password requirements, Wi-Fi and VPN configurations, authentication certificates (for users, apps, and devices), email configuration, remote lock and wipe, and removal of enterprise provisioning information when retiring Macs. Although OS X Server provides these same capabilities for Macs and iOS devices, it requires that IT have a separate server than what is used for managing other devices and doesn't provide as much management capability as available in an MDM tool such as MobileIron's or AirWatch's. Read more...
Microsoft acknowledges Surface may trigger OEM hostility
Microsoft yesterday confirmed what most analysts and company watchers had concluded last month when the firm unveiled its own tablet, that it risks alienating the computer makers which account for the bulk of Windows sales.
In a document submitted Thursday to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft acknowledged the potential problem. "Our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform," Microsoft said in the 10-K filed for the second calendar quarter of 2012.
The New York Times' Bits blog first reported on Microsoft's SEC filing. Read more...
Apple pays $356 million for security company AuthenTec
In a deal that should help Apple boost its enterprise security offerings, the iPhone maker is planning to buy mobile security company AuthenTec for $8 per share or a little over $356 million, AuthenTec said on Friday.
AuthenTec provides security software and hardware for mobile phones, PCs and networks, according to the company's website.
Earlier this month, AuthenTec closed a deal with Samsung that would put its QuickSec VPN security into new Android smartphones and tablets.
The Florida company's products and technologies are used in "hundreds of millions of devices", and AuthenTec said it has shipped more than 100 million fingerprint sensors for integration in a wide range of portable electronics including over 15 million mobile phones. Other customers include Motorola, Nokia, Lenovo and LG. Read more...
Oracle hurls MySQL at Microsoft database wobblers
Migration tools come and go in the turf wars between the enterprise vendors.
Over the years we’ve had Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange migration tools and tools to swap one company’s database for another.
Under the latter category, Oracle is now throwing open source at Microsoft in the form of a migration tool to shift users off of Redmond’s latest database.
Oracle new migration tools will move data from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, which Oracle bought from Sun. The tools come as part of the MySQL Workbench.
Oracle claimed the migration tool would also shift database tables and data to MySQL and “quickly” convert existing apps. Read more...
W3C names four new editors of HTML5 spec
The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has named four people as the new editors of its HTML5 specification, following a recent split that divided the HTML standardization process into two parallel efforts.
The new editors were announced on Wednesday by HTML Working Group co-chair Paul Cotton in a message posted to the W3C's public HTML mailing list.
They are Travis Leithead and Erika Doyle Navara, both Microsoft employees; Ted O'Connor, an Apple employee; and Silvia Pfieffer, an independent consultant whose company, Ginger Technologies, specializes in HTML video.
Cotton gave no specific explanation for any of the appointments, saying only, "After evaluating all the applications, we chose the above HTML5 editorial team based on the individual qualifications of the new editors as well as the combination of the individual appointee's qualifications." Read more...
Money can’t buy open-source love… only code can
Money can't buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community.
Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it "will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings."
Is that so? Who knew all you needed for an open-source community was $11.2m in venture funding?
This may be a bit harsh. After all, Meteor's board is filled with people who understand that money can't buy a community. David Skok invested in and helped to build JBoss's commercial business. Rod Johnson built up a massive, two-million strong Spring community. Peter Levine also has an open-source pedigree, having run XenSource until its acquisition by Citrix.
But guess what? In exactly zero of those cases did venture money buy a community. The opposite, in fact, happened. Read more...