Category: News

One North Carolina church is taking a stand for marriage equality by refusing to marry anyone until the right is granted to all people.

Green Street United Methodist Church in Winston-Salem, NC, has asked that its pastors refrain from signing any marriage licenses issued by the state of North Carolina (or any other same-sex marriage-restricting state) until “full privilege is offered to same sex couples.” Pastors are being directed to conduct “relationship blessings” instead.

Here’s how the church explains their position:

As an Anti-Racist, Reconciling Congregation, Green Street United Methodist Church seeks to be in faithful ministry with all people in the brokenness of our world. This statement is being adopted as a sign of our commitment to love and justice for all people.

The Marriage Covenant between two people is a ministry of the church. Couples making a commitment to one another need a supportive community of faith to sustain and uphold them so as to grow in faith and love. Weddings are the occasion for covenant making, a time to seek God’s blessing on their commitment to one another. When a couple chooses to be married in the church, they should also be conscious that they are making a declaration of their relationship as a new ministry for the congregation and the world. At Green Street Church, we claim the committed same-sex relationships as no less sacred in their ministry to us and the community.

But sadly, at this time in the United Methodist Church, marriages, weddings and holy unions are limited to heterosexual couples. As our nation struggles to provide legal recognition to people in same-sex relationships and provide them the privileges allotted to opposite-sex married couples, our denomination struggles to overcome the sin of reserving these sacramental privileges for straight people only. We, the leaders of Green Street Church, see people in same-sex relationships as completely worthy of the Sacrament of Marriage. We reject any notion that they are second class citizens in the Kingdom of God.

The move looks to pressure the Methodist denomination, who currently bans the performance of same-sex marriages, into allowing such ceremonies.

The church is receiving both positive and negative feedback over the decision on their Facebook page, as would be expected. This post announcing the move has become a verbal battleground:

Green Street United Methodist Church3 days ago

From Equality NC!

Timeline Photos

Powered by socialditto  159 likes ·  193 comments

“This so called church…must not read the book they preach…What a mess…” says one commenter.

“How sad. The last days…right is wrong, and wrong is right. Just throw your bibles away,” says another.

“So you must believe that all things are moral. Adultery, beastiality, and the like. Is this what being a Christian means?”

The back-and-forth is fairly equal:

“You folks are awesome! Thank you very much for your support and compassion,” says one supporter.

“Thank you, Green Street. I hope your courage will inspire other churches to follow suit,” says another.

Angry Facebook users are also taking to the page’s recommendations, using the Timeline widget to sound off at the church.

“Some people see this as unfair to straight couples, but the Leadership Council of GSUMC sees this as an invitation to stand in solidarity with LGBTQ people. Straight couples have many more options to get married than same-sex couples,” says the church.

“The scattered verses of Scripture that refer to homosexual behavior and desire have sparked many debates in the faith community. It is clear from a reading of all such passages that long-term, committed, monogamous relationships between people of the same gender was not a concept at the time of the writing of Scripture.”

Buying your way into more social media analytics capabilities is all the rage.  Oracle bought Vitrue last year and then Eloqua for $871 million; Salesforce.com dropped $689 million on Buddy Media. And now Microsoft is buying Netbreeze, a Swiss company that it says will beef up its CRM play. This, just five months after Microsoft acquired MarketingPilot, a marketing automation specialist. Terms of those deals were not disclosed.

From the blog post by Microsoft corporate VP Bob Stutz outlining the deal:

“[Netbreeze]… combines modern methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), data mining and semantic text analysis to support 28 different writing systems including German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Traditional Chinese or Mandarin.  This is a huge benefit over competing solutions that translate to a common language then analyze sentiment from there.  Additionally, they offer their customers the ability to monitor a wide array of social channels including Facebook, YouTubeand Twitter, as well as 6,000 online news websites, 18 million blogs and 500,000 message boards.”

Netbreeze combines this native language analytics with data mining and transactional and text analysis capabilities, Microsoft said in a statement announcing the deal. It plans to provide that data via its Dynamics CRM software, so customers’ marketing, sales and service teams will have more information at — if you’re pardon the cliche — their fingertips.

InterArbor Solutions principal and GigaOM PRO analyst Dana Gardner says vendors need to help their business customers better grok what’s being said about them online and react quickly. And that takes significant technological prowess given the sheer amount of Tweets, Facebook likes and the like floating around out there.

“The true picture or critical information about a business’s actual performance can’t be had without including social media data. But to make that social data into good, clean — and, therefore, actionable — data means you have to capture it at scale and integrate it swiftly, to make it something your systems can digest to analyze it. And so we’re seeing a rush to build, buy or partner to gain the means to do just that,” Gardner said via email.

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We brought you word yesterday that the House Judiciary Committee would be holding a hearing on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA. One of the people called in to testify is Google’s Legal Director of Law Enforcement and Information Security, Richard Salgado. We weren’t sure exactly which way he would go with his testimony, but it appears that privacy advocates have a friend in Google.

Google published Salgado’s written testimony to give us an idea of what he will bring to the table this morning during the hearing. Contained therein is an argument for ECPA reform that addresses how we use the Internet today:

ECPA was enacted in 1986 — well before the web as we know it today even existed. The ways in which people use the Internet in 2013 are dramatically different than 25 years ago.

In 1986, there was no generally available way to browse the World Wide Web, and commercial email had yet to be offered to the general public. Only 340,000 Americans subscribed to cell phone service, and not one of them was able to send a text message, surf the web, or download applications. To the extent that email was used, users had to download messages from a remote server onto their personal computer, holding and storing data was expensive, and storage devices were limited by technology and size.

In 2013, hundreds of millions of Americans use the web every day — to work, learn, connect with friends and family, entertain themselves, and more. Data transfer rates are significantly faster than when ECPA became law — making it possible to share richer data, collaborate with many people, and perform more complicated tasks in a fraction of the time. Video sharing sites, video conferencing applications, search engines, and social networks — all the stuff of science fiction in 1986 — are now commonplace. Many of these services are free.

The distinctions that ECPA made in 1986 were foresighted in light of technology at the time. But in 2013, ECPA frustrates users’ reasonable expectations of privacy. Users expect, as they should, that the documents they store online have the same Fourth Amendment protections as they do when the government wants to enter the home to seize documents stored in a desk drawer. There is no compelling policy or legal rationale for this dichotomy.

Later in the testimony, Salgado dives into how ECPA reform is needed to preserve innovation and keep everybody on the same page when it comes to the law:

ECPA worked well for many years, and much of it remains vibrant and relevant. In significant places, however, a large gap has grown between the technological assumptions made in ECPA and the reality of how the Internet works today. This leaves us, in some circumstances, with complex and baffling rules that are both difficult to explain to users and difficult to apply.

The current complexity can be demonstrated by the requirements to compel production of communications content such as email. ECPA provides that the government can compel a service provider to disclose the contents of an email that is older than 180 days with nothing more than a subpoena (and notice to the user, which can be delayed in certain circumstances). If the email is 180 days or newer, the government will need a search warrant. The Department of Justice also takes the position that a subpoena is appropriate to compel the service provider to disclose the contents of an email even if it is not older than 180 days if the user has already opened it. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected this view.

In 2010, the Sixth Circuit held in United States v. Warshak that ECPA violates the Fourth Amendment to the extent that it does not require law enforcement to obtain a warrant for email content. Google believes the Sixth Circuit’s interpretation in Warshak is correct, and we require a search warrant when law enforcement requests the contents of Gmail accounts and other services. Warshak lays bare the constitutional infirmities with the statute and underscores the importance of updating ECPA to ensure that a warrant is uniformly required when government entities seek to compel production of the content of electronic communications.

The inconsistent, confusing, and uncertain standards that currently exist under ECPA illustrate how the law fails to preserve the reasonable privacy expectations of Americans today. Moreover, providers, judges, and law enforcement alike have difficulty understanding and applying the law to today’s technology and business practices. By creating inconsistent privacy protection for users of cloud services and inefficient, confusing compliance hurdles for service providers, ECPA has created an unnecessary disincentive to move to a more efficient, more productive method of computing. ECPA must be updated to help encourage the continued growth of the cloud and our economy.

If the above is any indication, Salgado will a solid testimony ready for the House this morning. The other party arguing for ECPA reform – George Washington University Law Professor Orin Kerr – will likely have a similar argument. It will be interesting to see what the representatives of law enforcement – who have a vested interest in keeping the ECPA as is – say in response to these privacy proponents.

Smartphones have a lot of on-board sensors, but do they really have enough? No way, say a slew of recent hardware startups, of which Danish Vavuud is only the most recent. Vavuud is turning to Kickstarter to help build a smartphone-compatible wind meter, one that miraculously contains no electronics and yet still can communicate accurate wind speed measurements wirelessly to iPhones and Galaxy devices.

The Vavuud wind meter provides an easy way to measure wind speed exactly where you are, with a device that’s remarkably inexpensive and deceptively simple. It plugs into the headphone jack of your device, but that’s to give it a stable base; it actually uses two magnets in the rotor, which generate a magnetic field that the smartphone can pick up and process using algorithms normally used for sound processing to translate it to wind speed data. Vavuud co-founder Thomas P. Helms says it’s been tested with iPhone 4, 4S, and 5, as well as Galaxy SII and SIII so far, and it has been calibrated in a wind tunnel at the University of Denmark to ensure accuracy.

“To our knowledge we are the first to use the magnetometer in smartphones in this way, so we of course think the technology itself is kind of cool,” Helms explained via email. “It’s also cool because on a mechanical level it appears quite simple, but there is some relatively complex math behind it .”

It’s likely that Vavuud will be able to work with any modern advanced smartphone with built-in magnetic field sensors (which is pretty much all of them), so the limited existing test pool shouldn’t frighten away potential backers. The Vavuud is designed to be used by anyone who might find accurate current windspeed readings useful – a potential group of users that includes windsurfers, sailors, paragliders, model plane pilots and more.

“Surfers, sailors, paragliders etc. have needed an online anemometer for ages to be able to create and share crowd-sourced wind information,” Helms explained. “Because conditions at your favorite spots may depend on very local factors like mountains, could be affected by thermal conditions, and on and on.”

Vavuud is looking to ship the Wind Meter by June of this year, with pre-orders beginning at the £15 level. iOS and Android apps from Vavuud itself are expected to become available at the same time, but it’s easy to imagine how, as with the Thermodo, the developer community might embrace another means of collecting information about the world around you and integrate Vavuud into their own apps.

We already heard that the HTC One was going to have supply issues because of component shortages related to the UltraPixel camera, and shortly after, the phone was delayed by two weeks in the UK. According to the Wall Street Journal, several retailers have been informed of the delay, including Vodafone and Best Buy. Best Buy stated that the plan was for a release in the 3rd week of March, “but the date has been pushed back.”

HTC executives did confirm the UltraPixel was the culprit, but also mentioned some shortages with metal casings. Previous reports indicated a production issue, but now we are hearing the problem lies with last year’s dismal performance. ”The company has a problem managing its component suppliers as it has changed its order forecasts drastically and frequently following last year’s unexpected slump in shipments,” said an HTC executive. “HTC has had difficulty in securing adequate camera components as it is no longer a tier-one customer.”

Unfortunately when it rains it pours, so the big question is how much of a delay are we really going to see? Unfortunately we don’t have an answer, and even when they do officially launch the device, will there be enough supply? At the event in February, they stated that the HTC One would be available in more than 80 countries through more than 185 carriers by the end of March, but right now it’s non existent.

I don’t have to tell you how bad this is for HTC since they are coming off a 3 year low in sales. What’s most interesting is the UltraPixel camera is the culprit, and it’s my opinion that consumers aren’t going to buy into the “lesser pixels” argument. So the phone is delayed for what HTC believes will be a big reason why they will sell more units this year, but “that reason” might actually hurt their sales.

source: WSJ

Come comment on this article: HTC One component shortages are real, HTC ‘no longer a tier-one customer’ for component suppliers

Artemis Capital Partners has led a recapitalization of Ohio Tool Works Corp., a manufacturer of industrial honing machines, tooling, and abrasives. The company is based in Ashland, Ohio. Financial terms were not released.

PRESS RELEASE
Boston, MA (March 19, 2013) – Artemis Capital Partners (Artemis) announced today that it has led the recapitalization of Ohio Tool Works Corporation (OTW), a leading manufacturer of industrial honing machines, tooling, and abrasives. Headquartered in Ashland, Ohio, OTW designs and builds both standard and custom honing products for a diverse and growing base of customers across the global oil and gas, industrial, aerospace, and metal working industries. OTW’s highly-engineered systems and consumables ensure that its customers’ own mission- critical products – such as down-hole piping and high pressure cylinders – are precisely finished for performance and reliability.
OTW’s executive management team – consisting of John Hovsepian, President & General Manager, David McCormic, VP of Engineering, and Randy Iselt, VP of Sales – will continue as owners and operators of the business.
According to Peter Hunter, managing director at Artemis, OTW’s unique mix of quality and technical expertise has fueled its growth and positioned the company for continued success. “Since its founding just nine years ago, OTW has achieved a leading position in the industrial honing market by working closely with its customers on value- added applications engineering, delivering best-in-class product quality and customer service, consistently introducing new products, and growing its sales channels,” He added: “We are delighted to partner with the OTW team to build upon these growth efforts and take the company to the next level.”
John Hovsepian, President of OTW, concurred: “We are excited about our partnership with Artemis. By adding Artemis’s strategic and operational expertise, we feel we are poised to systematically address a growing number of end markets, applications, and opportunities. Our customers can count on a seamless transition and our steadfast focus on quality, innovation, and service.”
About Ohio Tool Works
Founded in 2004, Ohio Tool Works is a leading manufacturer of industrial honing machines, tooling, and abrasives. OTW operates a 50,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Ashland, Ohio, with sales offices in Houston and expanding distribution channels worldwide. For more information about Ohio Tool Works and its leading lineup of honing machines, tooling, and abrasives, please visit: www.ohiotoolworks.com.
About Artemis Capital Partners
Founded in 2010, Artemis Capital Partners is a Boston-based private equity firm focusing on buyout and growth equity investments in outstanding ‘industrial technology’ companies. With typical target company revenues of $5- $50 million, Artemis seeks to partner with companies that have strong established management teams, outstanding engineering capabilities, unique products, and expanding niche markets. By leveraging the deep manufacturing experience and extensive industry networks of its General Partner and advisors, Artemis looks to unlock the full growth potential of its portfolio companies by adding value across the strategic spectrum.

The post Artemis Capital Partners Recaps Ohio Tool Works appeared first on peHUB.

A 64-year-old Pennsylvania pastor has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his wife in 2008.

According to an Associated Press report, Arthur Schirmer was convicted of first-degree murder for the death of his second wife, Betty. Schirmer was found to have killed Betty with a crowbar, then staged a car accident to explain her injuries.

The report states that police originally accepted the murder as a car accident. A thorough investigation began, however, when Schirmer’s affair with his church secretary led to the woman’s husband committing suicide in Schirmer’s office. Along with evidence from Betty’s autopsy, police found her blood on the floor of Schirmer’s garage.

Schirmer has also been charged with the murder of his first wife, Jewel. In that case, according to the AP, Schirmer claims he was out running and found Jewel dead when he returned home. The trial for Jewel’s murder has yet to begin.

Schirmer has a girlfriend and two daughters, who all told the AP that they believe the man is innocent.

Windows Phone 8 device owners might want to take an extra minute to check on their appearance if they plan to make any Skype video calls. Version 2.4 of the Skype software preview now includes support for 720p video calling, a first for Skype on any mobile platform. The update also brings Skype contacts into the Windows Phone 8 People Hub for one-tap video calls.

Not every Windows Phone 8 model can take advantage of the HD video calling feature, but the software should also improve video quality on low- to mid-range smartphones while also smartly adjusting video quality based on connection speeds:

“We have significantly improved video calling quality for all users, offering VGA video on lower end handsets and 720P HD on higher-end devices including the Nokia Lumia 920, HTC 8X and Samsung Ativ S. And the app even intelligently determines the best quality available based on the speed of your connection. Additionally, we’ve added landscape mode for calls, and the ability to switch between front and back cameras for you to chat in the most comfortable way possible.”

Given that Microsoft purchased Skype for $8.5 billion in May, 2011, it shouldn’t surprise that the video calling software will be improved first for Microsoft’s own smartphone platform before iOS, Android or other mobile operating systems. Hopefully, however, these will see support for HD video calling in Skype over time.

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WASHINGTON D.C. — IER Director of Regulatory and State Affairs Daniel Simmons will testify at 11:00AM ET today before the Ohio Senate Public Utilities Committee. In his role at IER, Simmons oversees energy research and outreach at the state level. …

Sure it’s taken some time for us to fully embrace AT&T’s Mobile Share Data Plans, but now that it’s fully implemented— AT&T is now looking to expand the option for business users. Beginning this Friday, March 22nd, AT&T is expanding the Mobile Share Data Plans to include 30GB  for $300/monthly, 40GB for $400/monthly and 50GB for $500/monthly— all with unlimited talk and text as part of plan. Naturally AT&T is also offering a wider range of devices that can be attached to the data plans with the number going anywhere from 15 to 25 devices. And for those of you businesses out there that need data sharing for more than 25 devices will have AT&T’s Business Pooled Nation for Data options, which includes data options from 300 MB to 10 GB and monthly prices from $20 to $80 for eligible devices.

Expanded flexibility and options never sounded sweeter.

source: AT&T

Come comment on this article: AT&T set to introduce expanded Mobile Share Plans, aiming its bullseye at business users in the process

There’s a huge amount of value in location-based services, and I’m not even necessarily talking about shopping deals and the like. Maps are the ideal way to both collect and present localized data on all sorts of things, from crime to potholes — the only issue is setting up such services and, as it happens, a Finnish outfit called Grafetee has just launched tools to make that task a lot easier.

Grafetee lets you set up a new embeddable, interactive map on the Grafetee website, for free and within a minute or two. This service was already available, but now bloggers and businesses can pay $20 a month for a premium version that includes a channel in the Grafetee mobile app (for Android and iOS), customizable graphics and tools for moderating user submissions. Enterprise and governmental users can also pay $200 a month to get a webpage under their own domain, along with premium support and API access to their content.

The Finnish police force was an early Grafetee user, having set up a map so citizens could, for example, notify the cops that a certain park should be patrolled on weekends due to troublesome teenagers hanging out there. Since then, others picked up on the idea, such as animal shelters wanting people to flag strays, and mobile operators looking to crowdsource coverage data. According to founder Juha Huttunen, someone even set up a Grafetee map for tracking toxic seaweed during the Finnish summer.

And yes, it can be used for offers too. “If you have a chain of cafes or whatever you can send your own offers to your customers,” Huttunen explained to me. “You would have a channel in the Grafetee app and, using the toolkit, the cafeteria would upload their offers. Anyone subscribing to the channel in the app would see those offers whenever they are close by.”

A couple of Finnish startups have already built their services using Grafetee, and they actually provide a pretty good insight into the range that’s on offer. One, kidd.io, is on the simple side, collecting and displaying the locations of child-friendly services around Helsinki. Hoods.fi, a location-based flea market and garage sale service, shows greater complexity.

There are other services in this space — AmigoCloud targets the enterprise and public administrations, Ushahidi’s Crowdmap (currently in closed beta) is for aid groups tracking crises, and Everplaces is all about community-sourced recommendations – but none that I’ve seen have quite the combination of simplicity and breadth that Grafetee offers.

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The tiniest of details can sometimes lead to the thorniest of problems, which Google may discover with its brand new Nexus 10 ad which debuted today. The video seems innocent enough — it follows a young couple through nine months of pregnancy as they plan for their new bundle of joy and discuss what to name the baby boy.

However, if you scroll through the comments of the just-posted one minute ad, you will find something interesting. Commentor Ram Gadde points out that “sex determination of fetus is prohibited in India”. He then later opines that he thinks, for that reason, “this ad will be banned in India”.

The commercial, for the most part has received a positive responses with ericcartmansh saying “steppin it up. Good stuff le Goog” and VaeVictus 666 chiming in “really well done ad. Good job Google”.

After some quick digging, I determined that the aforementioned Indian law is actually in effect so, while if Google actually plans to run the ad in India, there is a chance it could be banned, it is likely not of any major concern to the company. Google will reap benefits from almost anywhere the clever little video is shown and can always make a separate ad for any markets that block it. The global market continues to make everything much simpler and yet much more complicated.

Honing in further on the enterprise market, MongoDB creator 10gen is bringing out features for enterprise customers and announcing upgrades of existing products for all users of its open-source non-relational database.

10gen had greater business adoption in mind last year when it raised $42 million and vowed to focus on research and development to improve MongoDB. Now, around 60 percent of customers are enterprises, said Kelly Stirman, the company’s direct of product marketing.

Once signed up for the MongoDB Enterprise software, customers can use their own on-premise hardware to run an extension of the MongoDB Monitoring Service to track MongoDB deployments with more than 100 metrics and receive alerts. MongoDB Enterprise comes certified for deployment on several operating systems. It also supports the Kerberos authentication protocol, which is popular among insurance companies and banks, and can hook in to customers’ existing monitoring services, such as Nagios. And it introduces roles for giving certain abilities to certain database users.

New features in the MongoDB 2.4 release available to all users include full-text search for querying the database, an option to evenly shard data across machines, more accurate measurements of the distance between locations, the ability to count items in a database 20 times faster than before and the ability to maintain and query leaderboards of, say, the top 50 scorers in a baseball league.

The NoSQL database market is crowded, and differentiation is important. That’s why it’s a good thing 10gen, which is based in New York and Palo Alto, Calif.-and has other offices in Australia, England, Ireland and Spain, will increase its headcount by 75 percent in the next year, Stirman said. The time between product releases is getting shorter and shorter, he said, which means that still more improvements could be just a few months away.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user junyaogura.

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More than ever before, people see through the self-serving tactics and techniques that others use to persuade them. They don’t like being pushed, played or nudged to comply, and they resist and resent agenda-driven influencers.

The alternative is to use real influence to inspire buy-in and commitment. To learn how the best-of-the-best do it, we conducted over 100 extensive interviews with highly respected influencers from all walks of life for our recent book.

We found that great influencers follow a pattern of four steps that we can use too. An earlier post covered Step 1: Go for great outcomes. Later we’ll cover Step 3: Engage them in “their there;” and Step 4: When you’ve done enough… do more.

Here we cover Step 2: Listen past your blind spots.

To invite genuine buy-in and engagement, we need to listen with a strong personal motive to learn and understand. But we have a “blind spot” in our brains that gets in the way. What we hear is easily distorted with our own needs, biases, experiences and agenda, even when our intentions are good. We often hear what others say without understanding what they mean. We hear what it means to us, not what it means to them.

We outline four different levels of listening, and the first three fall short of what’s needed for achieve real influence.

Level One: Avoidance Listening = Listening Over
Listeners who listen over others are the people who say, “Uh huh,” while clearly showing no interest in what the other person is saying. They look preoccupied, and they usually are. Sometimes they don’t even stop checking their e-mail or texting on their phones while they’re “listening.” Level one listening can annoy, exasperate, or even infuriate the person who’s talking.

Level Two: Defensive Listening = Listening At
This is listening with your defenses up, preparing your counterpoints while the person is talking. It’s being quick to react and slow to consider. They’re often seen as high maintenance, and over time, people avoid them because they’re exhausting. This is the kind of listening that prompted Mark Twain to say, “Most conversations are monologues in the presence of witnesses.”

Level Three: Problem-Solving Listening = Listening To
This is listening in order to accomplish things. Problem-solving listeners listen in order to move things forward. If people want your solutions, this is the right approach. But people will feel frustrated, misunderstood and even resentful if you presume to offer “fixes” they don’t want or need.

Level Four: Connective Listening = Listening Into
This is listening of the highest order, and it’s the human listening that all of us crave. It’s listening into other people to discover what’s going on inside them. It’s listening on their terms, not yours. It’s understanding where people are coming from to establish genuine rapport.

To master the art of Level Four Listening, resist the urge to defend yourself, explain yourself, or offer quick fixes. You can help more effectively later, when the time is right, if you don’t pre-judge what another person needs (which might be very different than you think). Instead, remember that you are listening to learn. Ask questions like these:

What does that mean for you?
How do you feel about . . . ?
What do you think about . . . ?
What’s your take on . . . ?
What’s your perspective on . . . ?
What was your first reaction when you heard?
What’s the best thing about that?
What else comes to mind?

To put Level 4 Listening into practice, consider these questions:

• Who has modeled Level Four Listening for you in your life?
• When do you find yourself most challenged to use Level 4 Listening?
• With whom is it most important that you raise your level of listening?

Using Level Four Listening isn’t always easy, but it leads to real insight and real influence.

In the last three decades, we’ve seen a shift in enterprise information technology, from mainframes that automated our financial information, to the client-server and web-based world that aimed to replace most paper-based processes with “systems” like CRM, ERP, e-commerce and email. And now, in the cloud era, we find ourselves on the brink of another transformative shift. This one is driven by the explosion of data and the need for traditional enterprises to find new business value through new business models and building better customer experiences.

A key question becomes how this shift will become a reality and where we will look for a blueprint to begin. I think the answer, or at least the opportunity to see further, comes from “standing on the shoulders of giants.” And in this case specifically, I’m talking about the consumer internet giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

These companies have created significant new business value and blazed new trails in developing ways to manage and extract meaning from massive amounts of data. As a result, they’re able to deliver meaningful products, features, and experiences rapidly to their customers — essentially,giving customers what they want, when they want it and where they want it. Wouldn’t it be nice for traditional enterprises to have the same capabilities?

The traditional enterprise must learn from internet technology

Powered by new data fabrics with custom-built infrastructure, these consumer internet companies interact and serve their customers in the context of who their customers are, where they are and what they are doing in the moment. They are building, deploying and scaling at an unprecedented pace. They are storing, managing and delivering value from large data sets, and they knit all of this together on one unified platform that supports their businesses.

Paul Maritz at Structure 2011
(c) Pinar Ozger

Now add to this mix the emergence of the “internet of things,” the fact that telemetry will become pervasive in coming years. Everything from a fridge to a jet engine will be dialing home in the future, constantly reporting its state. This will drive a new avalanche of data that will arrive in huge quantities and will need to be ingested and reacted to in real time.

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Hudson Booksellers, the airport bookstore chain, has launched an online bookstore where it will sell both print and ebooks. The move is intended to induce readers who discover books while traveling to buy them through Hudson once they get home.

HudsonBooksellers.com is run through the American Booksellers Association’s IndieBound program and sells ebooks through the ABA’s partnership with Kobo. Hudson has 66 bookstores at airports and train stations throughout North America, and sells books at an additional 365 newsstands as well.

The website focuses on curation — “no impersonal algorithms here” — and features staff picks, an “Ask a Bookseller” feature, a “Rediscover” section for “books you might have missed” and a deal of the day.

via Shelf Awareness

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Those of you living in Europe are about to find it just a little easier to search for flights thanks to Google.  The Mountain View giant has released its Flight Search service to those of you living out in the UK, France, Italy, Spain or the Netherlands will be able to utilize the awesome service to not only search for flights, but quickly find, compare and book flights originating from each of these countries to any airport in the world. Additionally, the service will utilize English, French, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Dutch, giving some added ease for most users in that region. Oh and best of all, the service utilizes Google’s simplistic, yet clean and easy-to-use interface— so it should be easy for folks to pick up and start using in no time.

As previously mentioned, the service is now live for those you of living in Europe, so head on down to google.com/flights and give this service a try today. Trust us— you’ll be glad you did.

source: ITA Software by Google

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By Stephen Eisenhammer

Over the past few years we’ve become used to the global economy resting on a knife-edge. So when dramatic events like the levy on bank deposits in Cyprus happen we wait for the dominoes to fall. Two days on we’re still waiting…

The recovery in the euro zone, so vital to Europe’s emerging markets,  is undoubtedly fragile but the incident in Cyprus doesn’t seem to be enough to knock it all down now that the European Central Bank seems willing to step in if borrowing rates go to high.

Overall, this should not be read as a game-changer for the global markets but more as background noise creating indeed some volatility, on top of the uncertainty created after the Italian elections – Societe Generale.

Cyprus is unique due to the size of the economy (the bail-out is 56 percent of the country’s GDP) and the role of the country as an off-shore tax haven, according to Societe Generale.

The major question mark hangs over Russia, however. The majority of large depositors in Cypriot banks are Russian companies, banks and individuals. Moscow’s blue chip RTS stock index subsequently lost 3 percent as markets opened after the announcement. But falls have been minimal since and the index is largely flat on Tuesday.

Despite the fact that Russian banks and companies stand to be among the biggest losers of the deal, the effect on the Russian economy or the banking system as a whole should be limited – Capital Economics.

The bank notes that data on Russian deposits in Cyprus is patchy but estimates that any losses wouldn’t harm the economy considerably.

If the deal goes ahead as currently proposed, Russian depositors may lose around $3bn. This is equivalent to 0.4% of Russia’s total bank deposits and just 0.15% of Russia’s GDP. Accordingly, these losses look manageable for Russia.

The main question for Timothy Ash, analyst at Standard Bank, is whether Russia will step into protect its citizens’ savings. The matter is complicated with a lot of the money suspected of being dodgy.

Russians look set to be hit as well – and likely wealthly/connected individuals, so the question is will Russia finally step in, especially if the Cypriot parliament rejects the latest bail-out plan and more of the burden extends to larger (likely Russian) depositors.

The impact on Russia, Ash says, might even boost the currency.

Interesting, in terms of capital flight, whether this latest move brings a reversal of capital flight from Russia, which we estimate at $40 billion per annum, at least for the past decade. Arguably the latest Cyprus news could actually be a rouble positive!