Author: Serkadis

Stealth startup Makara is launching publicly tonight with its cloud-based application deployment and management platform. Formerly known as WebappVM, Makara has raised angel funding from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The startup also raised $6 million last year from Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures.

Rather than offer a system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara’s cloud-based platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product, which is self-service and self-managing, is available for free on its site.

The startup’s platform allows developers to deploy new or existing web applications to a public or private cloud with no code changes. Once the application is deployed, developers can control the application runtime and have cluster-wide visibility into end user response times end-to-end through the entire stack. Makara’s offering supports Java, Flex, PHP, JBoss and Tomcat applications and runs on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Terremark vCloud Express, VMware ESX, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox and Xen. Makara faces competition from rPath.

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The Chinese market continues to be one of the most important markets in 2010 as well, with most companies posting enthusiastic sales figures for the first month of the year. Ford is sure the best example, as its local joint venture, Changan Ford Sales Company, sold a total of 30,759 passenger cars in China in January, which represents an 128 percent increase as compared to the same month of the previous year.

Just as expected, Ford Fiesta and Ford Focus remained the best-selling models in For… (read more)

In an attempt to put Pontiac Vibe owners at ease, American manufacturer GM tested two such vehicles and tried to find out whether the brakes can override the possible unintended acceleration of the cars. The conclusion: yes, braking will override acceleration.

Of course, the conclusion GM reached is somewhat common sense, as we all know, instinctively or not, that braking pretty much stops the car, regardless what the renegade acceleration pedal is doing. Still, owners of Toyota vehicles who… (read more)

Hyundai’s North American division had just released pricing information for the 2011 Sonata, which is available in three trim levels in the US market. Getting straight to the point, the new Sonata has a a starting price of $19,195, but the freight charge of $720 is not included in the MSRP.

The sixth generation Hyundai Sonata comes equipped with Hyundai’s new Theta II 2.4-liter gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine and in-house six-speed automatic transmission, developing 198 horsepower stan… (read more)

There’s been lots of talk about whether or not Google’s Street View effort violates anyone’s privacy — and also whether or not it’s proper for police to use photos that were uploaded online in charging people with crimes. How about a combination of the two? A property owner in Canada was caught illegally chopping down some trees on a lot, and Google’s Street View images appear to catch the tree choppers red handed. It’s not yet clear if the Street View images will be used in the prosecution, but it does seem like valid evidence, though again it will raise privacy questions. However, I’m not sure what the argument really would be there, since it would really be no different than a neighbor taking a photograph (it was the neighbors who complained about the tree chopping in the first place).

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Dell is serious about its thin and light class of machines judging by its ability to churn out these lovelie lappies from its Adamo design studio. Today we’ve got the Latitude 13. Oh sure, it looks almost exactly like the Vostro v13 for small businesses but this is Latitude brother, Dell’s mainstream business brand. As such, it comes fully IT-ified with a preinstalled Citrix client, easier virtualization options, and baked in know-how for system image and software updates distrtibution. So it’s not really now, but it’s still “the world’s thinnest 13-inch commercial client laptop,” according to Dell and that’s gotta be worth a second look when it begins shipping in a few weeks.

Dell Latitude 13: a thin-and-light for big business originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung GT-S8500 is first with Bluetooth 3.0 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iMac, Software Update

Amid rumors that Apple has halted production of the 27-inch iMac do to display issues, Apple has released a second firmware update. The update, which is for iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) only:

Updates the display firmware on 27-inch iMac systems to address issues that may cause intermittent display flickering.

The update weighs in at 294KB and can be downloaded here or through Software Update.

The first 27-inch iMac update was released on December 21, 2009 that updated “the graphics firmware on ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards to address issues that may cause image corruption or display flickering.”

TUAWApple releases another 27-inch iMac firmware update originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After the first day of testing in Valencia, one can only say one thing about Michael Schumacher. The man still has it in him to become a serious contender for the world title. Seeing the sudden good pace he had from his very first lap in the Mercedes W01, most of the drivers present at Valencia were impressed with what they saw.

Rubens Barrichello was one of them, as the Brazilian used the entire day testing Williams’ FW32 single-seater on Monday. Asked by the reporters what would be a decent… (read more)

Toyota’s safety recall frightens the whole automotive world after it was discovered that millions of cars are affected by what can prove to be a deadly glitch. After its French rivals Peugeot and Citroen confirmed that approximately 100,000 cars have the same accelerator-related problems as the ones that concerns Toyota, Renault stepped in and assured consumers that its vehicles are not using parts involved in the recall.

"Renault vehicles use neither the same pedals, nor the same parts … (read more)

Article Tags: World Temperatures

Scotland has suffered some of the coldest winter months in almost 100 years, the Met Office has confirmed.

By combining the temperatures of January and December it showed they were the coldest since 1914 – the year data started being logged. Elsewhere, it was the coldest December and January in Northern Ireland since 1962/63 and the coldest in England and Wales since 1981/82.

Sub-zero temperatures and snow blew into the UK from mid-December. The average minimum overnight temperature for January is usually at freezing point, but in Scotland it was regularly below -5C.

Click source to read FULL BBC report

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

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Article Tags: ClimateGate, Front Page News, Headline Story, You could not make it up

The Guardian Exclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures

• How the location of weather stations in China undermines data

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

Click THE GUARDIAN (yes, THE GUARDIAN) link to read FULL report from Fred Pearce

Source: guardian.co.uk

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Ustream, which provides live video streams to web sites and cell phones, has raised $75 million in a new round of venture funding led by Softbank.

Softbank operates the third-largest mobile phone firm in Japan. The funding will let Mountain View, Calif.-based Ustream expand in Japan, China, Korea and India.

Ustream plans to open offices, hire employees and invest in technology in those countries, according to a statement provided to Bloomberg by John Ham, chief executive of Ustream.

We’ve used Ustream technology to broadcast live video from the Consumer Electronics Show. With the equipment, a single person with a video camera and Ustream broadcasting pack can upload live video to a web site. Ustream had 50 million users in January.

The company was started in 2006 by Ham, Brad Hunstable and Gyula Feher. The original goal was to let overseas soliders stay in touch with families. Backers include DCM, which led an $11.1 million funding round in 2008, and Western Technology Investment. Softbank has been active lately; in November, it increased its investment in RockYou, a Facebook application developer, and it has stakes in China’s Alibaba.com and Yahoo Japan.

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You may not know what a QR code is exactly, but you’ve probably seen one on a poster, magazine ad, or some other printed material over the past few years. Cellphone users can simply take a picture of the black and white code, have it decoded by an application, and get redirected to a website that offers more information about whatever the code was attached to. For example, Google recently adopted QR codes as a way for customers to get more information about an establishment by linking them to the venue’s Google Places page.

With Microsoft Tag, the technology giant is attempting to jump into this space with their own proprietary bar code technology. MS brings some bonuses to their variant, including: Intricate color designs for the tags (compared to the QR code’s blocky black and white design), the ability to hold more data, and increased analytics (a boon for advertisers). Microsoft Research has been working on the underlying technology, dubbed High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB), since 2007.

Tags are decoded via Microsoft’s software. While it would be nice to see MS opening up the standard for other bar code reader applications (like QuickMark) to join in, at least they were wise enough to offer a version for pretty much every phone platform — including iPhone, Android, Palm OS, Blackberry, and J2ME (Java) phones.

They’ve been popping up in magazines for the past year, but now Microsoft is allowing anyone to make their own Tags via its official website. There’s a definite need for some sort of perfect solution in this space — something that will connect offline media to the web — and the door is wide open for someone to dominate. Helping MS is the fact that QR codes haven’t become nearly as prevalent in the US as they have in Japan and a few other countries.

Another competing standard in this space is Data Matrix, which was adopted by the US Department of Defense. At this point, most QR code reading software also supports Data Matrix.

It remains to be seen what exactly Microsoft will do with Tag. For now, it seems that they just want to make us aware that it exists, and that it’s much prettier than the competition. Given its stylistic advantages over uglier QR codes, the promise of better analytics for advertisers, and the fact that Tags can remain legible to reader software while remaining physically smaller than QR codes, it’s very likely that Tags will soon be everywhere.

Tag was demonstrated at the last DEMO conference (which VentureBeat co-produces) in Fall 2009.

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Aw, yeah. The pre-PMA part is officially on. Olympus is kicking out a foursome of new shooters this fine morning (or evening, for those camped out in the great state of Hawaii), so we’ll just get right to it. The SP-800UZ megazoom (which we spotted a few days ago) boasts an almost mind-melting 30x optical zoomer, a 14 megapixel image sensor, dual image stabilization, AF tracking, 720p movie mode, face detection and a 3-inch rear LCD. The SP-600UZ sports a stepped-down list of features, including a 12 megapixel sensor, 15x optical zoom and a 2.7-inch rear LCD. Both cams support SDHC / SD cards and are slated to ship next month, with the big boy setting you back $349.99 and the other guy $249.99. Moving on, there’s the “shockproof, waterproof, crushproof and freezeproof” Stylus Tough 8010 and 6020, both of which feature a 14 megapixel sensor, HD movie mode, 5x wide-angle optical zoom, 2.7-inch rear LCD and an HDMI output. The only major difference is the toughness level; the 8010 can withstand a 6.6-foot drop and 220 pounds of pressure, whereas the 6020 can only withstand a 5-foot drop and undisclosed amount of pressure. Check ‘em later this month for $399.99 (8010) / $299.99 (6020). Full releases are after the break, per usual.

Continue reading Olympus intros SP-800UZ and SP-600UZ megazooms, Stylus Tough 8010 / 6020

Olympus intros SP-800UZ and SP-600UZ megazooms, Stylus Tough 8010 / 6020 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in 1994, Muriel Cooper, one of the co-founders of the MIT Media Lab where she taught interactive media design as the head of the Visible Language Workshop, presented her work at the TED5 conference in Monterey, CA.

Her presentation would initiate a new era of data visualization, and it changed the way designers thought of the possibilities of electronic media. (Maybe quite similar to how David Small‘s dynamic renditions of text changed my way of thinking about 3D visualization). Her work was revolutionary as it pushed typography into the 3 spatial dimensions, and augmented it with dynamics, animation and interactivity. Tragically, it was just after this event that she passed away.

Since many years, David Young has carried around an old VHS tape that demonstrated this work, to show it to students as an example of Muriel’s vision and as an inspiration to push creative boundaries (or, as told in the film: “We must reexamine the current stultifying interface standards and metaphors. We must define a rich vocabulary, tools and design strategies that are applicable to any information domain and to this multidimensional world“). He has finally digitized the tape and has posted it online for all to see (see the movie below).

“The work is a beautiful demonstration of the ideas that Muriel had been pursuing for much of her career. Dynamics, interactivity, typography, and live data. For this video she used the titles “Designing and information landscape in time and space” and “The dynamic visualization of information in two and three dimensions.”

For more information about Muriel Cooper, you should read Muriel Cooper’s Visible Wisdom” by Janet Abrams.

Note: Image above taken from the Talmud Project by David Small, and Financial Viewpoints, by Lisa Strausfeld.

Mass Effect 2 heading out to the PS3 has always been one persistent rumor. But now that the game’s been released for Microsoft’s platforms, this cryptic message comes out on the Internet supposedly confirming the PS3 version.

Chinese shares have experienced a nasty correction, but foreign investors have clearly seen it as a buying opportunity rather than a reason for panic. According to Citi’s Fun With Flows report, last week saw a substantial pick up for foreign investment inflows into Chinese stocks .

Elaine Chu @ Citi: The 7.4% decline in MXASJ in the week ended last Wednesday enticed foreigners to put more money into Asian equity funds. As per EPFR, US$371m of inflows last week were 13x of the amount in the prior week. In the past when such sizeable correction took place in a week, flows tended to get weaker if not negative.

Moreover, China was essentially the only major emerging market to receive fund inflows:

Amongst all emerging market equity funds, Asian funds were the only one receiving net cash last week. GEM funds saw the largest outflows of all, followed by Latin American funds. Flows to Global/International funds that geared investment in developed markets fell to an 8-month low of US$331m, which was even smaller than inflows to Asian funds last week.

(Via Citi, Fun With Flows, Elaine Chu, 1 February 2010)

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See Also:

• Who Needs Gold As An Inflation Hedge When You’ve Got Coke?
• China’s Mercantilist Policies Are Screwing Us Out Of 1.4 Million U.S. Jobs
• Chinese Bank Valuations Dirt Cheap As They Collapse To Crisis Levels

As more and more companies are looking at cloud computing, a startup called Makara is announcing new tools that should make it easier to get traditional software applications onto cloud infrastructure.

Plenty of other startups, such as Heroku, help companies deploy and manage their cloud applications. But Redwood City, Calif.-based makara says that with its Cloud Application Platform, developers can build applications as if they were meant to work in a traditional data center. Those applications placed in an application capsule, then Makara’s platform handles deploying the app to the cloud, scaling the app based on demand, and monitoring for any problems.

Makara supports applications that run on an online public cloud, on a private cloud (i.e., private data centers that use cloud computing architecture), or applications that move back-and-forth between both. (for example, testing the application on Amazon’s infrastructure, then running the real thing on a private cloud behind your company’s firewall). You can see more details about how the platform works in the video at the end of the article. And kudos to Makara for making a cloud computing video that didn’t put me to sleep.

The company is launching its platform in testing mode today, for free, with plans to launch Version 1 and start charging in a few months. It’s also announcing a name change — until now, Makara was known as webappVM, but apparently Makara will be easier for people to remember. The company raised a $6 million first round from Sierra Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Mark Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz.

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As far as I’m concerned, no one has completely solved the problem of delivering all the on-the-go computing capabilities I need in a truly portable device. You may have experienced this yourself, if you’ve tried to use your laptop in a cramped space (say, the backseat of a car or the front row of a press conference) or tried do any extended writing on your smartphone. Now virtualization companies Citrix and Open Kernel Labs have are tackling this problem with a new concept they call the “nirvana phone.”

The idea is to really make your phone the center of your working life. Of course, for many people that’s already the case when you’re away from the office — for example, on my iPhone I’ll often read and send email, participate in the VentureBeat chat-room, and check the latest news via Techmeme and Google Reader. But if I want to do anything more serious, I need to unpack my laptop, because the iPhone’s screen and keyboard are too small. With the nirvana phone, however, I can use my smartphone for casual computing, then also plug it into a keyboard and a monitor, so I could access all the applications and data on my phone while avoiding the drawbacks of a tiny device.

“What we envision is a scenario where a company can manage applications and virtual desktops from the data center and from the cloud and not have to worry about the endpoint devices, ” said Chris Fleck, vice president of community and solutions development at Citrix. “We want them to have full control, but at the same time we want employees to have the freedom to use the devices that they want to choose.”

Citrix and OK Labs are virtualization companies, not device makers, so they’re not actually building the nirvana phone. Instead, they’re releasing the basic architecture of the phone here, and they hope to make deals with manufacturers to create these devices using their virtualization technology. They describe the nirvana phone as a smartphone plus a full-sized display, plus a keyboard and mouse, plus a virtual desktop, plus OK Labs’ mobile virtualization. Broadly speaking, there are a number of improvements that must be made to existing smartphones before they can become nirvana phones:

• Enhanced graphics capabilities, so that a phone can not only send video out to an external screen, but can also offer that video at a resolution that doesn’t look totally horrible on the larger screen.
• The ability to connect the phone to a keyboard and mouse using a Bluetooth or a docking station.
• A Citrix receiver to securely access corporate applications and data on the mobile device.

There are some drawbacks to this idea — for one thing, it requires the near ubiquitous presence of screens and keyboards, which isn’t universally true. But that may change over time, and I’m guessing this may already be a good fit in specific industries and companies it may be close in specific situations and industries.

Meanwhile, Citrix and OK labs aren’t the only ones looking at these ideas — Google evangelist Don Dodge told me the idea of a phone as your core computing device is part of the search giant’s vision of the office of the future, though he didn’t say that this was part of a specific product roadmap.

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