Category: News

WASHINGTON, D.C. – IER State and Regulatory Affairs Director Dan Simmons testifies today before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources in a hearing titled “U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Hydrocarbon Agreement and Steps Needed for Implementation.” The text of …

Verizon Wireless today announced that it has finally begun taking pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S4. The device will cost $200 (as long as customers remember to send in a $50 mail-in rebate) with a two-year contract.

The carrier expects to have the devices available online and in Verizon Wireless stores on May 30 – long after other carriers will have the device. However, launch dates have become a bit less definite lately, after Samsung issued a statement making it clear that supplies of the Galaxy S4 will be stretched thin throughout the world for weeks.

T-Mobile was originally touting the fact that it would be the first U.S. carrier to sell the Galaxy S4, on April 24, but the carrier yesterday pushed back its launch date for the smartphone to April 29. AT&T’s launch date is currently April 26.

Android fans who want one of Samsung’s new flagship Android devices within a few weeks of its launch will probably need to pre-order with their carrier of choice. The recent popularity of the Galaxy S phones has propelled Samsung into the role of Apple’s main competitor, and not even Samsung’s large manufacturing infrastructure can keep up with the demand.

Yahoo announced a deal with Broadway Video to feature SNL content on Yahoo properties. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the news herself.
tw

Mayer added in a blog post:

Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker, or Tina Fey as Sarah Palin? As a lifelong Saturday Night Live fan, it is nearly impossible for me to pick my favorite skit. And, as a fan, I couldn’t be more excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Broadway Video to feature Saturday Night Live content exclusively on Yahoo! The partnership gives Yahoo! users exclusive access to the entire 38-year archive of SNL content as well as clips from the current season. Blues Brothers, the Coneheads, Church Chat, Wayne’s World, Coffee Talk, Pat, the Hanukkah Song – the list of tremendous clips goes on and on. Saturday Night Live has pervaded and defined our culture for decades.

That’s a lot of SNL. I wonder what percentage of that is actually funny.

The content will be available across Yahoo’s properties in an unspecified format. It’s not available yet. The company says it will announce when it is. More details will likely emerge at that point.

Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S 4 is about to hit shelves as one of the best Android smartphones available on the market.

The device is often compared with HTC One, its main competitor in the high-end tier category. Both smartphones have outstanding new features that compete with one anothe… (read more)

EV Connect said it raised an initial round of financing from 37 Technology Ventures, Jackrel Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, Maverick Angels, Keiretsu Forum and individual investors. The integrator of electric vehicle charging stations offered no additional detail on the financing.

PRESS RELEASE

EV Connect Closes Initial Round of Funding for Sales and Cloud-Based Technology Development

EV Connect’s combination of services allows it to offer corporate and governmental customers their own centrally-managed electric vehicle charge station networks

LOS ANGELES, California, April 25, 2013— EV Connect, the leading full-service provider, manager, and integrator of electric vehicle (EV) charge stations for commercial and government locations, today announced  closure of its initial round of financing.  Funding came from 37 Technology Ventures, Jackrel Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, Maverick Angels, Keiretsu Forum, and other key individual investors that recognize EV Connect for its huge growth potential, well-established market position, strong customer demand, and unique combination of partners, technology, and operating and support programs.

Progressive companies, government and transit agencies, property owners, and leading hotel brands,  select  EV Connect to help define, install, operate, and maintain their network of electric vehicle charge stations.  With this funding, EV Connect will expand its sales, marketing, and software development to capitalize on increasing customer demand.  EV Connect will also build out its already-successful partnership program and fast-track strategic alliances with charge station manufacturers and network system providers.

“From 2011 to 2012, plug-in vehicle sales grew nearly 200 percent.  I’m impressed with EV Connect’s market opportunity,” said Yuri Pikover, Tech Coast Angels.  “EV Connect doesn’t make car charging hardware, rather, it focuses on its differentiated and defensible charge station deployment, management services, and proprietary cloud-based software platform.  This unique combination of services allows EV Connect to offer customers their own branded or centrally-managed charge station network at all of their parking lots.”

“Our goal is to make EV infrastructure more accessible than ever for all companies and organizations,” said Jordan Ramer, CEO, EV Connect.  “We believe in the future, all parking spaces will offer EV charging–and EV Connect will be there to integrate, operate and maintain them, as well as customize their customer-facing features.”

About EV Connect, Inc.
Businesses and governmental organizations turn to EV Connect for a simple and cost-effective way to provide turn-key, customer-owned EV charging programs for their electric-vehicle-driving employees and constituents.  EV Connect offers program design, hardware, deployment, network management, driver support, maintenance, and a software platform to allow for advanced customer-specific features. Collectively, EV Connect’s team has over thirty-five years of EV charging experience and has deployed and managed thousands of charge stations. For more information visit www.EVConnect.com.

The post EV Connect Raises Round From 37 Technology, Jackrel, Tech Coast, Others appeared first on peHUB.

The Design West conference is underway this week in San Jose. It’s a four-day event launched last year as a technical conference for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals. AMD, Emerson and Wind River all have announcements from the event.

AMD announces new System-on-Chip. AMD announced the new AMD Embedded G-Series System-on-Chip (SOC) platform, a single-chip solution based on the AMD “Jaguar” CPU architecture and AMD Radeon 8000 Series graphics. Compared to the prior generation AMD G-Series APU the the new G-Series chip offers up to 113 percent improved CPU performance, and up to a 125 percent advantage when compared to the Intel Atom when running multiple industry-standard compute intensive benchmarks. The new processor family offers superior performance per watt in the low-power x86-compatible product category with 9W – 25W options. “As the Internet of Things permeates every aspect of our life from work to home and everything where in between, devices require high performance, I/O connectivity and energy efficiency in smaller packages,” said Colin Barnden, principal analyst, Semicast Research. “With this new AMD SOC design, the AMD Embedded G-Series platform offers the perfect mix of high performance, a small footprint, low energy use and full I/O integration to enable smaller form-factor embedded designs, cool and efficient operation, and simplified build requirements. AMD has leapfrogged the competition by combining the power of an x86 CPU and the performance of AMD Radeon graphics with the I/O interconnect all on a single die.”

Emerson launches new VPX system. Emerson Network Power (EMR) announced its latest embedded systems VPX system chassis, the KR8-VPX-3-6-1. Designed primarily for development, testing and lab duties, the KR8-VPX-3-6-1 can also be deployed in ground benign installations as it meets Emerson’s standard safety, electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and environmental requirements. The chassis supports up to five 3U and 6U Eurocard formats that are most popular with users of VMEbus. It will enable original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to rapidly develop, test and evolve their applications. “The new VPX-based KR8 chassis is designed to make it as easy as possible for developers to get ahead with their application development,” said Eric Gauthier, vice president product marketing for Emerson Network Power’s Embedded Computing business. “Coming hot on the heels of our recently announced VPX3000 system-level OpenVPX fanless enclosure and iVPX-7225 3U processor blade, this new development and deployment platform underlines Emerson Network Power’s commitment to having the building blocks in place to be a leading provider of custom and complete integrated solutions in this market.”

Wind River launches secure separation kernel.  Intel (INTC) subsidiary Wind River introduced the latest version of its VxWorks MILS Platform, a secure separation kernel that is compliant to the Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP). Part of the Wind River portfolio of trusted systems, the Type 1 hypervisor–based, multiple independent levels of security (MILS) platform is ready for use in security-critical systems that may require system-level high assurance evaluation or certification and accreditation (C&A). VxWorks MILS Platform partitions a single processor among multiple software components, with time and space resource allocation, information flow control, and fault isolation — all strictly enforced to conform to security policies defined by security architects and system integrators. “Companies responsible for creating robust infrastructure systems worldwide are demanding increased functionality and secure operation with high assurance of security from inadvertent or intentional errors or threats,” said Jim Douglas, senior vice president of marketing at Wind River. “VxWorks MILS can serve as the foundation for security-critical devices and systems in applications ranging from military and aerospace to industrial, medical, and automotive.”

Healthy internship programs garner higher quality entry-level candidates, strengthen company mentorship programs, and provide a way for companies to give back to the community. But to make sure that your summer internship program is a success, you need to start planning it now.

In order to ensure a smooth program, every member of the team should be aware of the approved intern tasks. There should be a chain of command established in terms of who provides interns with assignments and who employees should email to request intern assistance.

One of the most common intern complaints is “the company doesn’t pay attention to me and sticks me in the corner to make copies.” Your interns should be assigned a mix of long-term and short-term projects. The short-term projects will most likely pop up on a daily basis and be assigned on the fly. In order to prevent long periods of downtime at the internship, provide the students with long-term assignments that will be due at the end of the internship. These should be assignments that the students can work on when other tasks aren’t provided. If the student has time to surf Facebook while at their internship, they clearly don’t have enough to do. Start collecting projects for interns now so that you can make the most of them when they arrive.

Your program should also have clear start dates, end dates, orientation dates, and mid-way evaluation points. If your HR department hasn’t provided them yet, ask. These mid-way evaluations are especially crucial. Make sure you schedule mid-internship evaluation meetings with your summer interns. This evaluation can be on a conference call or in face-to-face individual or group settings. This is a time to interact with the students and make sure that everything is going well from their perspective, ask them what they like and dislike about the internship, and answer any questions they might have. This is also a time for you to provide each student with some constructive criticism. Since you are speaking to them at a halfway point, this allows time for them to improve.

The interns are only coming into your business for two months over the summer, so it’s essential to on-board them quickly — they’ll be leaving before you know it. One essential way to make them feel part of the team is to invite them to meetings — something supervisors often forget. Well before the interns start, look at your calendar and try to find a handful of regular meetings where they can sit in, observe, and take notes. When I survey interns, they feel they get the strongest learning experience from observing executives in a professional setting. This helps the students understand how the business is run and how to better communicate in the workplace.

In addition, it can be helpful to establish a mentorship program for the interns, whether that is formal programming or fostering one-on-one connections. Some ideas for intern programming include having guest speakers (internal or external co-workers) at intern lunches that the company sponsors once per week. Another idea is assigning each intern a mentor within the company that they must meet with three times over the course of their internship. I also recommend circulating your interns throughout different departments in your company to make sure they leave the experience with a well-rounded perspective of how your business is run.

Finally, think about informal ways you can help the interns network, both with each other and with full-time employees. One idea is to have one or two “outings” planned for the interns (think: field trip). Many companies will treat their interns to a local baseball game or a fun group dinner. You can also plan a company-wide happy hour towards the end of the internship to give the interns a chance to network and meet with other team members. Making the interns feel like part of the team will make for higher retention from intern to entry-level employee, and build the networks of current staff. Remember, they may be interns today, but in five years, they could be valuable industry contacts. Give them a great experience and a leg-up today, and maybe they’ll return the favor just when you need it most.

UPDATE: And it passed.

Last week, Sen. Patrick Leahy said that the Senate Judiciary Committee would be marking up an update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The decades old bill allows law enforcement to obtain emails without a warrant as long as said email is 180 days old.

The Hill reports that both the Senate and the House will be taking up their respective email privacy bills today. The Senate Judiciary Committee will be taking a look at Leahy’s bill – S. 607 – that simply requires the police to obtain a warrant when accessing any electronic communication, including email.

In the original announcement of the mark up, Leahy said that ECPA must be updated to counter concerns over the “growing and unwelcome intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace.” Those concerns certainly came to a head earlier this month when documents obtained by the ACLU revealed that the IRS told its agents that they could obtain emails without a warrant. The agency also said that “Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Since then, IRS Commissioner Steven Miller said that his agency always obtains a warrant before searching emails. Miller also said that his agency never snoops through email during civil investigations. It wasn’t exactly reassuring, but an updated ECPA would ensure that the IRS, or any government agency for that matter, would never be able to obtain emails without a warrant.

It should be noted that the House will be making a mockery of itself this week by discussing an update to the ECPA after passing CISPA. The House Judiciary Committee will be discussing whether or not the ECPA should be updated to require that law enforcement obtain a warrant before accessing geolocation data. The irony here is that CISPA, in its current form, would allow mobile carriers to share geolocation data with the government without a warrant. Even if the carrier was found in violation of an updated ECPA, it would enjoy full legal immunity under CISPA.

Even so, we’ll continue to follow both discussions and keep you up to date on any changes. The Senate seems to have made an updated ECPA a priority so we may see a final vote as early as next week. That is, of course, if the Senate doesn’t run into any problems with its current controversial bill – the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Earlier this week, the space-transport start-up SpaceX had its most successful launch test yet with Grasshopper, the first fully and rapidly reusable rocket. This is the latest step in the company’s journey to dramatically reduce the cost of space travel, and follows the first private resupply of the International Space Station with the launch of their Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft last fall.

Initially when the start-up’s founder, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, looked at the space industry, he faced a quandary about where to innovate, given the restrictions and mandatory performance criteria for space travel. Musk quickly zeroed in on the one area ripe for innovation: cost reduction. He gathered a team with a wide cross-section of expertise and put them to work at trimming the fat.

NASA has tried for decades to provide low-cost space flight — that was the failed promise of the Space Shuttle — a reusable spacecraft to avoid the expensive building of a new craft for each mission. The complexity of the Shuttle and its reliance on 1970’s technology drove costs up. Contractors paid based on their costs, with little incentive to save, increased them even more. Working against NASA as well was a heritage of exploration: unique space missions that pushed technologies and space travel to the edge. It was fundamentally different from the mindset of low-cost frequent and standardized transport that SpaceX embraces today.

SpaceX has learned. With industry veterans and outsiders, they benefit from past experiences but are unconstrained by forces and factors that pushed up NASA costs. It’s not that they threw away the NASA playbook, rather they combined what worked with new ways that have the potential to dramatically reduce costs (as the Grasshopper test flight demonstrates). Their process — having a big goal, learning from the past, looking at the whole picture to find and prioritize opportunities, then refining key aspects of the space flight model to achieve their objective — is an approach that can make any organization more creative about cutting costs.

They think big. In large companies, the task of cost cutting is invariably incremental and left to finance, which works with individuals or small groups within a specific department, region, or area of the business. On the other hand, the SpaceX approach innovates and transforms by looking at the entire business model instead of the parts. Cuts weren’t just made to the physical rocket itself but to everything surrounding it — overhead, support services, development timeframe, and more. With small teams and far lower overhead, SpaceX was able to go from incorporation to first space flight in six years. And we can see this occurring in other businesses too. Though traumatic, the restructuring of GM and Chrysler, including a major reduction in overhead, led to their resurgence since 2009.

They think about the future. SpaceX developed a plan for sustaining the lower-cost business model over many years. To build a business for the long haul, SpaceX wisely recognized it must embark on the complicated and risky task of developing an entirely new rocket engine. Another similar space venture is still using fuel-inefficient surplus Russian rocket engines built in the 1960’s that cost more to run and maintain over time. Due to their finite number, the company has a limited future unless like SpaceX it develops its own engine.

This is where most businesses fail in cutting costs: Its results are typically analyzed narrowly by the financial impact of a reduction in one area or department over a year or two. But shortsightedness can lead to long-term problems. For instance, after one company cut product costs for years, it then looked at the sales force for additional savings. Meanwhile the mix of business had changed such that their high-touch and relatively high-cost sales force was more important than ever before. So when they reduced the sales force, a key competitor was able to gain share even more rapidly than before.

They remember that increasing profits isn’t the only goal. With SpaceX’s cost savings in an era of declining government budgets, reduced costs make the investment in space exploration and big science projects more viable, such as a mission to Mars. In a recent interview, Musk even suggested that a project to develop warp drive could be in the future. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden agreed it’s a possible investment.

In companies, those profits can be invested in other innovation efforts like new products. For example, be savvy when adopting an across-the-board cost reduction strategy. Once identified and implemented, a portion of the savings should be selectively reinvested in products and services that offer the best prospects for future returns. Ultimately the real objective is not about cutting costs at all, but rather a redirection of investments. For a similar example in business, when former Kraft and Gillette CEO Jim Kilts cut overhead costs, he then reinvested the savings in product development and advertising to strengthen brands. Using this strategy, Kilts was able to dramatically improve financial results and stock prices.

Although the business world rarely sees cost cutting as a creative act, Elon Musk is demonstrating how it can open up vast new frontiers and play a critically important role in the innovation process. To date, SpaceX is saving the government billions by self-funding development costs rather than charging them back. Furthermore, according to company projections, their per-launch costs are projected to run 40 to 60 percent less than what’s being charged today.

Developing new products and cutting costs each require an innovation mindset. Creative problem-solving skills, thinking about the long term, and adopting a holistic perspective will lead to savings ranging from incremental to breakthrough. Cost innovation — rather than simple cost reduction — can only occur once an organization broadens its approach and keeps a constant eye on the long term.

I know it’s not in everyone’s backyard, but I thought the following was worth sharing – and maybe worth travel…

STEP-UP Entrepreneurship Training Day

CoCo coworking and collaborative space
Saturday, May 4, 2013 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (CDT)
Minneapolis, MN

 

CoCo, STEP-UP and Google are teaming up! Join us for a one-day Google for Entrepreneurs “entrepreneur-in-training” program for students participating in the Minneapolis Step-Up Program. The purpose of the day is to prepare students for their summer employment at small businesses in Minneapolis by equipping students with the knowledge and tools necessary to help them effectively think through problems, and create a business plan from scratch to solve real world challenges.

Draft Agenda: (9:00a – 4:10p)

• 9:00      – 9:30a Breakfast

• 9:30      – 9:45a Intros/Icebreaker

• 9:45      – 10:15a New technologies at Google/Moonshot projects

• 10:15      – 10:45a Panel on Career (feat. Googler, StepUp member, CoCo member(s))

• 10:45      – 11:30a How to Pitch Investors: Best Practices (CoCo entrepreneur to give presentation?)

• 11:30a      – 12:15p Lunch w. pre-assigned groups

• 12:15      – 1:45p Work groups (Split into 10 groups of 8)

• 1:45      – 2:00p Break

• 2:00      – 4:00p Pitch competition (Two rounds)

• 4:00      – 4:10p Judge/Announcement of winners

In working with today’s business environment – managers now have to answer demands around more users, more data, more cloud and; many more devices. Of course, organizations don’t want to take ownership of user-owned devices. However, they still want to manage and control the workload that is delivered to these end-points.

IT consumerization will only continue to grow and evolve. Even now, users are utilizing 3-5 devices to access the Internet or utilize corporate resource. Because of this, many organizations have run into challenges around engineering and managing a BYOD solution. This includes:

• Onboarding users
• Ensuring high service quality and availability
• Maintaining security and mitigating risk
• Supporting diverse users and devices
• Enable a consistent user experience
• Accelerate deployment cycles with security

This is where an intelligent BYOD design can really help. Instead of deploying fragmented solutions – organizations must look at a unified platform that can help them control devices and still stay secure as well as agile.

 

In designing a unified BYOD environment, it’s important to work with technologies which are capable of supporting this type solution. In this white paper from HP, you will learn about the unified BYOD infrastructure offering. In creating an easy-to-operate platform, administrators are able to gain more control over their infrastructure and the user end-point environment. As outlined in this white paper, HP’s BYOD solution benefits include:

• Universal policy provisioning and enforcement
• Flexible access control with device fingerprinting and self-registration portals
• Device posture assessment and control
• Rich traffic shaping and bandwidth management tools
• Comprehensive usage and performance reporting
• Detailed user behavior analysis
• Single pane-of-glass management across wired and wireless infrastructure
• Unified wired and wireless network
• Network ready for SDN

Download this white paper today to see how HP’s BYOD solution can help your organization deploy a logical, unified BYOD-ready environment. By creating an agile platform ready for IT consumerization, your organization can create a more power data center as well as a more prodtive workforce.

Riptide is a standalone expansion for Dead Island, the game that captured players’ imagination with its superb reveal trailer.

The actual released product delivered a highly divisive experience that was hampered by some post-launch problems and by some weird design decisions, and Riptide was supposed to fix the issues and realize the potential of… (read more)

In my time talking to people about the internet of things, we sometimes get so excited about the possibilities of the technology that we forget about the consumer who has to install it or has their own vision for connected living that they are trying to implement. So this week I brought my colleague Kevin Tofel onto the show to discuss how consumers should literally buy into the internet of things.

Tofel is our gadget and mobile device reporter (he has a podcast too!), and has been trying connected devices in his home (pictured) since 2010, so he has hands on experience setting up a home automation system using an Insteon-based system. But as, we discuss on the podcast, this limits the connected devices he brings into his home and it doesn’t work with his Nest thermostat for example. He offers some good tips for those planning their own connected homes such as planning ahead, picking a protocol and thinking about what you really want to achieve. Toward the end we even debate the merits of apps versus voice and gesture controls for telling our smart homes what to do.

(Download this episode)

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Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: Kevin Tofel

• Kevin’s 41 solar panels aren’t connected to his Nest thermostat. Should they be?
• We offer two practical considerations consumers must think about before buying connected devices. Hint, one is the protocols you’ll be using.
• Why you need to plan ahead when buying connected devices for your home.
• Kevin predicts the death of the remote control and I complain about having too many apps.

PREVIOUS IoT PODCASTS:

Podcast: How the internet of things may make parents less worried but more neurotic

Podcast: Shark Week for the internet of things

What the Internet of Things can learn from Minecraft and Lemmings

Podcast: How IBM uses chaos theory, data and the internet of things to fix traffic

Electric Imp aims to make the Internet of Things devilishly simple

IoT podcast: When devices can talk, will they conspire against you?

What the internet of things can learn from Minecraft and Lemmings

Podcast: Why the internet of things is cool and how Mobiplug is helping make it happen

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters

Competition is grand. With Google planning to build out a fiber-to-the-home network in Austin, Texas next year, the local incumbent broadband providers are tweaking their models. AT&T has threatened to build its own fiber to the home, gigabit network provided it gets the same concessions from state and city officials that Google did. And Time Warner Cable? Well, it’s offering Austin subscribers free Wi-Fi.

In a blog post Wednesday evening, Time Warner said that existing customers with its standard cable package or above can log onto a city-wide Wi-Fi network the cable company is building out. Why now? Time Warner cites Google Fiber’s plans as a reason to kick its free Wi-Fi project into gear.

We’ve been rolling out our free WiFi network across our footprint for some time now, as part of our larger strategy to offer significantly more value to our Internet subscribers. Austin was in the game plan for 2013. But Google’s recent announcement encouraged us to deploy our network more aggressively now. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re ready to compete.

While paying $70 for 30 Mbps internet service from Time Warner Cable and now getting free Wi-Fi around town is nice, if Google offers me a deal where I get a gigabit connection for anywhere near the Kansas City price tag of $70, free Wi-Fi isn’t going to stop me. It won’t even make me pause.

Still while, I wait to hear where Google will deploy fiber and how much it will cost, I’ll gladly check out the TWC Wi-Fi network. So far it’s only in a few locations, but the company plans to expand it around town. Customers can sign into the network, called TWC WiFi and use same username/password combo they use sign log into their account. Non subscribers can also pay $2.95 per hour for access.

As far as responses to the threat of Google Fiber go, Time Warner’s is immediate and measured, especially when compared to AT&T’s. AT&T — with its fiber-to-the-node connections that currently top out at 24 Mbps — has a lot less than TWC has to offer when it comes to fending Google’s gigabit speeds. And after the 2009 experiment in broadband caps that Time Warner Cable attempted in Austin, it’s nice to have the city singled out for a benefit instead of a punitive pricing plan.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: The Ongoing Battle for the Digital Home
• OTT technologies and strategies for broadcasters
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG

Keep moving with your BlackBerry Z10 using these enhanced flow tips!

This video will show you how to peek into the BlackBerry Hub, use the compact side bar, restart the BlackBerry Hub, turn off delete confirmation, access Voice Control and control your music using the volume keys.

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

What is your favorite tip to keep moving while using a BlackBerry Z10? Leave a comment and let us know!

To learn about a feature on your BlackBerry 10 smartphone or troubleshoot an issue, there are several great options available to help. Visit www.blackberry.com/support for access to product manuals, how-to demos, tips and tricks, YouTube videos, support forums, knowledge base articles, Twitter support, and contact information for your region.

Originally posted on the Inside BlackBerry Help blog »

Having been an official company for less than a month, EMC and VMware backed Pivotallaunched as a stand-alone company Wednesday, detailing its new enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, and a $105 million investment from GE.

Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz addressed a webcast press event Wednesday in San Francisco, delivering the story line and mission of the newly formed company, positioning it as a new platform for a new era. Citing the changing market forces of cloud, big data, mobile, and social Maritz said that the enterprise needs a new class of applications that deliver better user experiences and that consumer-grade capabilities are needed in the enterprise. While still servicing the legacy needs of the enterprise, Pivotal One will integrate new data fabrics, modern programming frameworks, cloud portability for legacy systems.

“It is clear that there is a widespread need emerging for new solutions that allow customers to drive new business value by cost-effectively reasoning over large datasets, ingesting information that is rapidly arriving from multiple sources, writing applications that allow real-time reactions, and doing all of this in a cloud-independent or portable manner,’ said Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal. “The need for these solutions can be found across a wide range of industries and it is our belief that these solutions will drive the need for new platforms. Pivotal aims to be a leading provider of such a platform. We are honored to work with GE, as they seek to drive new business value in the age of the Industrial Internet.”

Pivotal One

The Pivotal One enterprise PaaS platform combines cloud fabric, data fabric and application fabric, to address what the company sees as an $8 billion market that is expected to grow to $20 billion in five years. Three components make up the Pivotal One platform: Data Fabric, Cloud and Application Platform, and Pivotal Expert Services. The Pivotal HD  data fabric was announced in February by EMC Greenplum as a SQL parallel database on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System. With the addition of Greenplum HAWQ data services and Pivotal in-memory data grid technology, Pivotal HD provides proven technologies for analytical queries and transactional environments.

Pivotal Cloud and Application Platform is based on Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS, and Spring, the application development framework for enterprise Java. The application fabric provides a rich developer ecosystem that enables rapid application development and support for messaging, database services and robust analytic and visualization instrumentation. Pivotal Expert Services delivers the business value of agile development and sophisticated data analytics to enterprise companies on a project-by-project basis.

As a new stand-alone company Pivotal draws on an experienced set of talent from EMC, VMware, Greenplum, and many other technology giants. Along with Martiz, former EMC Greenplum executives Scott Yara and Bill Cook join Pivotal as Senior Vice President, Products and Platform, and Chief Operating Officer. Pivotal begins operations with 1,250 employees, including over 700 developers.

Strategic investment from GE

At the launch event Wednesday, GE announced its plans to invest approximately $105 million in Pivotal. The companies also announced their intent to enter into a broad research and development and commercial agreement aimed at accelerating GE’s ability to create new analytic services and solutions for its customers. The investment in Pivotal and new business agreement align with GE’s focus on the Industrial Internet. The partnership is key for GE, as it is working to develop a software platform that it will deliver as a service to industrial customers in aviation, transportation, healthcare, energy and manufacturing.

There’s been some confusion in recent months over whether Voyager 1 has actually exited the Solar System. NASA scientists have reported multiple times that they’ve seen indications that the probe may be outside the heliosphere, only to roll back the fanfare with a deeper analysis of the data.

Now, NASA is letting everyone in on the agonizing wait with a new feature incorporated into its Eyes on the Solar System software. Eyes on the Solar System is an interactive, 3-D web app that uses up-to-date NASA mission data to depict the Solar System.

The new module allows users to watch the Voyager 1 probe as it hurtles toward interstellar space. Astronomers believe that Voyager 1 entered a “magnetic highway” at the edge of the Solar System late last year. The ‘Highway” is a region where charged particles can pass both in and out of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles that surrounds the sun.

The app will speed up Voyager 1′s journey to one day per second. Navigation data from the project is used to show the probe roll and maneuver through the Solar System.

NASA researchers are tracking the particles coming from inside the heliosphere and outside of it. They believe that a sustained increase in detected outside charged particles indicates the “magnetic highway” Voyager 1 currently occupies. Scientists are waiting for a magnetic field shift before confirming the probe has left the Solar System.

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Rapper Snoop — formerly known as Snoop Dogg, and now going by the name Snoop Lion — has a new iOS app to promote his latest album, Reincarnated. The app, “Snoop Lion’s Reincarnated: Track Notes,” was developed by creative marketing agency Cashmere and Citia, a New York-based startup that formerly focused on book apps and is now expanding to other forms of media.

The release of Snoop’s new app also marks Citia’s expansion of its offerings from iPad apps only to iPhone and web. The “Reincarnated” app works on Chrome and Safari, as well as on iOS. A free version of the app is available in the iOS App Store today, and Citia plans to release a premium version of the app that includes interviews with Snoop and other exclusive content this summer.

Citia sees the “Reincarnated” app as a demonstration of the capabilities of its platform. Each app — whether it’s for a book or an album — includes a set of virtual “cards” that users can navigate through quickly. A user can also flip a card with a flick of her finger to see a number of buy links. In the case of the “Reincarnated” app, a user can buy Snoop’s DVD, download the Reincarnated album, or buy Snoop’s “house shoes” or “grindtainers.” (See a video preview below.)

In March, Citia CEO Linda Halliday told me that the company now thinks of its clients as the “new content creators,” whether they’re publishers, artists or something else. “We define them either by their audience or by their point of view, and those two things are flip sides of the same coin,” she said. A book is just “a container,” and “I don’t confuse the container and the contents. We can’t hold the book up as some kind of requirement.”

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For those who followed Nokia closely in the past decade, some of Tim Cook’s comments are starting to trigger a weird sense of dislocation. “Our competitors have made some significant tradeoffs in many of these areas to ship a larger display. We would not ship a larger display iPhone while these tradeoffs exist.” Is this Apple’s CEO in 2013 or Nokia’s CEO in 2007? The strongest parallel is in the weird way both companies started fighting the consumer preference for larger displays at the peak of their profitability… and then dug in as margins began eroding rapidly.

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