Microsoft launches new Embedded OS to harness the data of devices
"It's now essential for businesses to tap into the vast potential of data if they want to compete," says Kevin Dallas, general manager for Windows Embedded at Microsoft.
"With Windows Embedded powering industry devices, that data is made readily available to drive real, actionable operational intelligence for industries. Windows Embedded Compact 2013 is a powerful, flexible platform for extending that capability to some of the smallest industry devices," Dallas says.
Windows Embedded CE is a modular, real-time OS with a specialized kernel that can run in less than 1 MB of memory. It first hit the market in 1996 as a solution for powering very small computers and embedded devices-for instance industrial devices and consumer electronics devices such as set-top boxes and game consoles. Read more...
How to keep the feds from snooping on your cloud data
A cottage industry is growing up around virtual padlocks that consumers can place on cloud services so that the vendors themselves can't get to the information -- even if the government requests access.
And in recent years there have been a lot of those government requests for access from storage-as-a-service providers.
For example, Google regularly receives requests from governments and courts around the world to hand over user data. Last year, it received 21,389 government requests for information affecting 33,634 user accounts. Sixty-six percent of the time, Google said it provided at least some data in response. Read more...
Facebook: We’ll show you our PUE, now you show us yours
The data center industry has come a long way from the days when organizations closely guarded their efficiency secrets. Facebook is now the poster child for green-data center openness: Not only has the company shared details about its data center equipment and designs through its Open Compute Project, it is now providing the public with a near-real-time view of its data centers' energy efficiency via online dashboards. Beyond that, Facebook is offering the code to let other companies create dashboards of their own to make public their data centers' ongoing efficiency metrics. Read more...
Open your data to the world
When Neil Fantom, a manager at the World Bank, sat down with the organization's technology team in 2010 to talk about opening up the bank's data to the world at large, he encountered a bit of unfamiliar terminology. "At that time I didn't even know what 'API' meant," says Fantom.
As head of the bank's Open Data Initiative, announced in April 2010, Fantom was in charge of taking the group's vast trove of information, which previously had been available only by subscription, and making it available to anyone who wanted it. The method of doing that, he would learn, would be an application programming interface.
The API would place thousands of economic indicators, including rainfall amounts, education levels and birth rates -- some metrics going back 50 years -- at the disposal of developers to mix and match and present in any way that made sense to them. The hope was that this would advance the bank's mission of fighting poverty on a global scale by calling on the creativity of others. "There are many people outside the bank who can do things with the data set we never thought about," says Fantom. Read more...
Oracle buying Tekelec for network signaling software
Oracle is filling out its product stack for communications with the acquisition of Tekelec, which provides network signaling, policy control and subscriber data management software for mobile data networks. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the first half of this year, were not disclosed.
The explosive growth of smartphones and mobile services has put new strains on mobile networks, and Tekelec's products can help providers manage these workloads as well as optimize profits, according to its website.
Oracle plans to roll Tekelec's capabilities into its communications product portfolio and will combine them with products gained through the pending acquisition of network equipment vendor Acme Packet, according to a statement. Read more...
Amazon makes storage service more Web-friendly
Amazon is adding a Cross-Origin Resource Sharing capability to its S3 Simple Storage Service, allowing developers to more easily build Web applications that access data stored in the company's cloud.
Developers can now implement HTML5-based drag and drop uploads to Amazon S3, show upload progress, or update content, according to Amazon. Until now, developers needed to run a custom proxy server between their Web application and S3 to support these capabilities, which made it more complicated, it said. Read more...
VMware seeks to virtualize the entire data center with vCloud Suite 5.1
In an aggressive bid to rule the emerging software-defined data center (SDDC), VMware unveiled at VMworld today its vCloud Suite 5.1, which is aimed at extending virtualization beyond servers and storage to the network. The vCloud Suite 5.1 software bundle comprises the latest versions of vCloud Director and vSphere (and more), equipping admins with a single GUI through which they can provision and deploy virtual data center containers.
Although a mere dot-one release, vCloud Suite 5.1 adds some compelling features to help organizations realize the SDDC vision of a fully abstracted data center that doesn't care about the physical location of servers, storage gear, or networking hardware. Instead, an SDDC automatically draws from pools of disparate infrastructure resources -- whether in different racks or an entirely different data center --- to ensure application and service requirements are consistently being met. Read more...
Big data analytics gold for the call center
There may be no corporate function that throws off more data than the corporate call center. "Every contact is counted, routed, measured and scored. Agent performance is actively measured," says Tony Filippone, executive vice president of research for sourcing analyst firm HfS Research. "Other key process owners, like finance and accounting or claims adjudication,wish their data was as rich."
Throughout the history of the contact center, much of the analysis of that data has been quantitative in naturecalls received, average hold time, call length, resolution rate. "Over time, companies added more sophisticated workforce management tools including global scheduling informationto help with network call handling, scheduling, real-time adherence-but the data collected was agent performance- and efficiency-related," says John Magliocca, principal consultant for contact center service at outsourcing and management consultancy ISG. Read more...
Hadoop becomes critical cog in the big data machine
Apache's Hadoop technologies are becoming critical in helping enterprises manage vast amounts of data, with users ranging from NASA to Twitter to Netflix increasing their reliance on the open source distributed computing platform.
Hadoop has gathered momentum as a mechanism for dealing with the concept of big data, in which enterprises seek to derive value from the rapidly growing amounts of data in their computer systems. Recognizing Hadoop's potential, users are both using the existing Hadoop platform technologies and developing their own technologies to complement the Hadoop stack.
Hadoop's corporate usage now and in the futureNASA expects Hadoop to handle large data loads in projects such as its Square Kilometer Array sky-imaging effort, which will churn out 700TBps when built in the next decade. The data systems will include Hadoop, as well as technologies such as Apache OODT (Object Oriented Data Technology), to cope with the massive data loads, says Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at NASA. Read more...
Got no idea what Hadoop is, but think you need it? You’re not alone
Hadoop is quickly becoming essential infrastructure for enterprises hoping to glean insights from the massive quantities of data they collect. The problem is that relatively few enterprises have the necessary competence to make effective use of the still-complex open-source project. While Hadoop vendors like Cloudera, Hortonworks, EMC, and MapR are doing their parts to simplify Hadoop, the real breakthrough for Hadoop may come from the applications that run on it, and not improvements to the infrastructure, according to Cloudera CEO Mike Olson. Read more...
Onion Browser brings encrypted mobile browsing to the iPhone
In an era when security is at the top of our minds, mobile web browsers seem to be lagging behind. There are few options for secure web sessions on smartphones, but a new iPhone app called Onion Browser is changing that. Onion Browser connects to the Tor network to encrypt all your data.
The Tor Onion router network is essentially a series of virtual tunnels that your connection will bounce through before reaching the destination. While connecting through Tor is slower than a non-tunneled connection would be, it has the upshot of making it almost impossible to monitor your activity online — it’s the closest you can get to anonymity online. Read more...
Charting H-1B users, as attention shifts to L-1
Offshore outsourcing firms rely heavily on the H-1B visa to deliver services, and the chart accompanying this story provide data on the top users of the visa since 2009.
The chart, compiled from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) data, provides figures on approvals of both new H-1B visas and renewals of existing visas (H-1B visas must be renewed every three years). To calculate largest users of H-1B visas, Computerworld consolidated various versions (and spellings) of some company names, such as IBM Corp. and IBM India Private Ltd.
You can use the form below to search through the full, original database of H-1B visa approvals. Read more...
SAS promises pervasive BI with new tool
SAS Institute this week unveiled new technology designed to allow a broad swath of enterprise users to do advanced analytics on massive volumes of data.
The new Visual Analytics technology, part of the SAS High-Performance Analytics suite, allows business users to explore data gathered from corporate databases and the Web, and to generate easy to understand charts, graphs, dashboards and the like.
SAS said the Visual Analytics technology takes advantage of in-memory processing techniques to handle data at much faster speeds than the company's existing analytics tools can support. Read more...
You are naked on the Internet
Unless you’re Ted Kaczynski circa 1985, living deep in the woods of Montana far from one of the roving homeless 4G connections we so conveniently enjoy here at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, your illusion of privacy is a sad, pathetic, ridiculous joke.
Providing a much-needed wake-up call to those of you who think your spouse or partner will never know about your dalliances at the local hot-sheets motel (as long as you protect your password), “Sex, Dating, and Privacy Online Post-Weinergate” described the myriad ways in which every step you take, every move you make, is online and searchable.
You don’t have to be a prominent politician sexting pics of your junk to be vulnerable to the brave new world of naked data, panel members said. You may have heard that Facebook and dating-site messages are commonly subpoenaed by divorce lawyers. Read more...