Author: Serkadis

Microsoft managed to emerge somewhat unscathed from the first quarter’s PC sales decline as it handily topped analysts’ fiscal third-quarter consensus and posted profits that grew 20% over the same period last year. The company’s stock climbed in after-hours trading as CFO Peter Klein, who is leaving the company at the end of the current fiscal year, made some intriguing comments about future products. For one thing, Klein suggested that earlier rumors about Microsoft bringing the Start button back in its Windows 8.1 update due later this year are accurate. The executive also hinted that Microsoft is prepping smaller Surface tablets that will launch later this year to combat Apple’s iPad mini and Amazon’s latest Kindle Fire lineup.

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An Atlanta-based startup called Ionic Security has raised a $9.4 million Series A-1 round to develop its technology that aims to let employees access data on whatever devices and networks they want without fear of having their data stolen along the way. Kleiner Perkins Caufiled & Byers led the round, with Atlanta’s TechOperators also pitching in.

Ionic’s Fusion product works in part, Kleiner Perkins General Partner Ted Schlein told me, by attacking all three critical aspects of cloud security: data at rest, data in transit and authentication. It encrypts data all along the line until policies are met and it’s actually unencrypted on the device, but for employees, the whole process doesn’t seem much different than standard single signon.

Notably, it doesn’t require adding a performance bottleneck such as a VPN or security gateway, either. “If you want to try to attack them,” Schlein said, “you have to go after the endpoint itself.”

Ionic’s authentication process is somewhat unique, too, thanks for what it calls the “skeleton key.” Users get one password to access all their corporate applications and cloud services, Schlein explained, but the IT department retains control because it changes the actual credentials and manages all policies on the backend. This way, if an employee quits or is fired, some just needs to delete that skeleton key in order to ensure the employee won’t be logging into those applications again surreptitiously.

Schlein said he’s excited because it’s one of the few approaches to cloud and endpoint security that actually solves for the whole problem. The rest tend to “bite off little parts of the security world as it relates to the cloud,” he said, but it will be a nightmare to stitch together so many different products into a single security strategy.

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• How direct-access solutions can speed up cloud adoption
• The role of converged infrastructure in the data center
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Biofuel upstart Kior has an annual meeting scheduled for next month in Houston Texas, in which shareholders will vote on such issues like electing seven people to the Board of Directors (one of those is Condoleezza Rice), as well as approving the compensation of Kior’s executives. Just some pretty basic stuff.

And the Kior letter to shareholders starts out in the usual way, asking shareholders to make sure to vote:

Your vote is important. Whether or not you plan to attend the meeting, we hope that you will vote as soon as possible.

But then a few pages into the SEC filing you get into the funny thing about Kior. It’s dominated by its investor, the venture firm run by Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures, which owns 80.5 percent of the total voting power. It’s officially a “controlled company” under The Nasdaq Global Select Market corporate governance standards.

Most of that voting control is through its 46.2 million class B shares (which are equal to ten votes per share). Class A shares only get one vote per share. No other entities own even close to that amount of class B shares — they’re like those invincibility stars on Super Mario: you got some of those and no one can touch you.

Scroll down a few pages and it says:

The vote of the shares held by affiliates of Khosla Ventures is sufficient to determine the outcome of all of the proposals to be voted on at the annual meeting.

Well, that’s that. Quick, get your votes in!

Check out my long opus on Kior and the perils of cleantech investing from about a year ago: The perils of cleantech investing: KiOR & the long term, high risk view. They’ve seemed to have hit some milestones recently. Kior makes a biocrude from grass, wood and plant waste using a thermochemical process that’s been used in the oil industry for decades.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• The perils of cleantech investing: KiOR and the long-term, high-risk view
• Defining success for cleantech companies
• Defining success for cleantech companies

Apple reinvigorated the media tablet market when it launched the iPad in 2010, and it created a multi-billion dollar industry that most consumer electronics companies are still scrambling to grab a piece of. As rivals toyed with various tablet sizes in an effort to put some space between their offerings and the iPad, Apple once again managed to find a new sweet spot in 2012 with the iPad mini’s 8-inch display: According to China-based market research firm TrendForce, the iPad mini and new tablets with similar screen sizes will grow to control 11.9% of the tablet market in 2013.

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IT services in Macomb County, Michigan are offline after a fire damaged the building that houses the county’s data center. Macomb County, which is just west of Detroit and has 850,000 resident, did not have a backup data center.

The fire Wednesday was in the basement of the Old County Building. The data center is on an upper floor, but the county is unable to assess damage to the equipment because the building has no electricity. County Executive Mark Hackel declared a state of emergency Thursday, saying the building could be closed for months and require millions of dollars’ worth of repairs and upgrades

The fire left county staff without Internet or phone service. “We ask the public to be patient with us while we assess the damage to our IT, internet and phone systems to determine the extent of damage,” the county said on its web site.

Email is available due to a recent shift to Gmail, but with many other county computer systems unavailable, Macomb officials are resorting to pen and paper, carbon copies, and makeshift networks of laptops to try and maintain services. “The computers are down. What to do?” County Clerk Carmella Sabaugh told the Macomb Daily. “We have to go old-school and do everything on paper.”

Old Buildings, Inadequate DR Planning

The outage in Macomb County is the latest in a series of incidents that have underscored the vulnerability of local governments, who often have data centers in older buildings and maintain inadequate backup and disaster recovery plans.

Last year a data center fire in a Shaw Communications facility in Calgary, Alberta crippled city services and delayed hundreds of surgeries at local hospitals. The incident knocked out both the primary and backup systems that supported key public services, providing a wake-up call for government agencies to ensure that the data centers that manage emergency services have recovery and failover systems that can survive a series of adversities.

Macomb County was in the process of building a new data center, but never established a backup site for the existing facility at the Old County Building, a 13-story structure that was built in the 1930s and lacked a modern fire suppression system.

Hackel, the county administrator, said he had warned county officials about the need for a backup facility, but the county was unable to implement a plan before the fire.

The Macomb County Circuit Court is operating, but its case management system also is down, Court Administrator Jennifer Phillips said. “We’re up and running, but we’re asking people to be very patient,” Phillips told the Detroit Free Press. “We’re reverting back to processes not as efficient and not used in a long time.”

As the Portland OpenStack Summit draws to a close this week,  Hortonworks, VMware, and NetApp all had announcements.

Hortonworks, Mirantis and Red Hat boost Project Savanna.  Leading Hadoop contributor Hortonworks announced that it was working with OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis, and large OpenStack contributor RedHat (RHT) to contribute significantly to Project Savanna under the OpenStack community guidelines to deliver Apache Hadoop on OpenStack. This collaboration aims to provide many benefits including providing open source APIs and simpler transitions when moving Hadoop workloads between public and private clouds. Getting its start as an OpenStack project by Mirantis, project Savanna enables users to easily provision and manage elastic Hadoop clusters to speed the development and deployment of cost-effective Hadoop on OpenStack. “With its efficient use of hardware and unparalleled agility, the cloud is a logical deployment platform for Apache Hadoop and one that we see many of our customers preferring,” said Bob Page, vice president, products, Hortonworks. “Coupled with the fact that Hadoop is a net new workload for many organizations, deployment on OpenStack is a logical fit. By committing efforts to simplify the deployment and management of Hadoop on OpenStack through linkage with Ambari, we believe we can meaningfully accelerate the time to production for organizations building out new Hadoop projects.”

Cananical and VMware Collaborate for OpenStack clouds. Canonical and VMware (VMW) announced a collaboration that will enable organizations to deploy VMware technologies, including VMware vSphere and Nicira NVP, with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution. The Canonical Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure will now include the plugins required to use OpenStack with vSphere and NVP. VMware reaffirms its support of Ubuntu as a fully supported guest operating system (OS) on vSphere. “By fulfilling our promise to deliver VMware vSphere support in OpenStack, and teaming with Canonical to serve our collective customers, we’re delivering customer choice by providing a powerful platform for those interested in OpenStack clouds,” Joshua Goodman, vice president, Product Management, vSphere, VMware. “Canonical’s Ubuntu technology is widely used by those deploying OpenStack, and joint customers will be able leverage the familiar and proven capabilities of the vSphere infrastructure in which they’ve already invested.”

NetApp Proposes FileShare service for OpenStack. NetApp (NTAP) announced it has submitted a prototype and proposal for a file share service capability for consideration by the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and community at large. The proposal will be a topic for discussion for inclusion in the Havana release. Native management support for file-based storage systems is not a part of OpenStack, and NetApp is proposing adding a “file share service” that is broad enough to address a range of file system types, either as an extension to the existing Cinder project or implemented as a separate project. ”NetApp is eager to work with the OpenStack community to establish the optimal path for bringing critical shared file services capabilities into the core of OpenStack,” said Jeffrey O’Neal, senior director, Solutions Integration Group, NetApp. “We have received good feedback to our blueprint through the Grizzly development cycle and look forward to identifying the best path for adoption in the Havana release. Our proposal is constructed to be broadly applicable, with the file system type abstracted to address any number of shared or distributed file system types, from CIFS and NFS/pNFS to something such as Gluster or Ceph.”

Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center have developed a technique that induces the body’s own immune cells to attack and destroy cancerous tumors. The therapy is part of a new approach in cancer treatment that seeks to mobilize the body’s own immune system…

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(NaturalNews)Yesterday, I covered the mystery of the pressure-cooker bomb. Where are all the holes in the remains of the cooker that should be there, owing to the fact that ball bearings and nails were packed around the explosive material, and all this shrapnel would have been driven…