Category: News

I’ve been using Sonos’ brand new PLAYBAR for over a week, but it was apparent that the product is a hit even after just a few hours of use. The Sonos PLAYBAR is a sound bar, a high quality bar-shaped speaker enclosure that can be mounted below your television on the wall, or placed on your entertainment console to combine three front speakers into one. What makes the Sonos PLAYBAR so amazing is that it finally tackles a space that was so confusing, so commercialized, and so devoid of any innovation whatsoever.

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When movies were first introduced in the late 1800’s, they were silent. Three decades later, the invention of synchronized soundtracks satisfied our natural desire to hear what is seen. Soundtracks unleashed a wave of creativity in filmmaking that transformed the audience experience. ET would not be the same without the famous score. Jaws would just be a silly robotic fish rather than a movie that kept people out of the water. Today, it’s hard to imagine movies without sound. Sound made movies whole.

Television is undergoing an analogous transformation. Although we sometimes watch with family or friends, we mostly experience TV in relative social isolation. We are disconnected from most of the people watching with us, deaf to the roar of the crowd during a game or the laughter of the audience after a punch line. We have learned to suppress our urge to talk about what moves us, settling instead for chance meetings at the water cooler the day after.

But all that has changed with the sudden rise of realtime social media, particularly Twitter. Just in the United States, tens of millions of people are talking to each other as they watch TV. This year’s Super Bowl alone spurred over 24 million tweets. After 80 years of sequestered viewing, television audiences worldwide have forged Twitter into a social soundtrack for TV. If you are not part of the soundtrack yet, chances are that you will be soon.

I personally felt the impact of the social soundtrack last year as my wife Rupal and I watched the second U.S. presidential debate. When Mitt Romney blurted out “binders full of women,” I recognized he had said something offensive but I wondered, just how bad was that? Rupal thought it was really bad, but I was less sure. Then I glanced down at my phone and saw my Twitter feed light up with negative reactions. In that instant, my mind was made up: realtime social influence nudged me to conclude that far from a harmless slip of the tongue, Romney had inadvertently provided a glimpse of his troubling position on gender equality. I had no need for post-debate pundits to opine on the matter, my social network settled the issue. During that same debate just a few minutes later I found myself asking, “Did President Obama really just say gangbanger?” Rupal was not so sure. In a moment I had my answer in a tweet (*): “Prediction: we will soon learn about binders full of gangbangers.” I read the tweet to my wife, we shared a laugh, and so the social soundtrack flowed naturally into our home, making our TV experience whole.

While this exemplifies the social soundtrack’s impact on live TV viewing, it’s also perceptible before and after a show airs. Hearing chatter about a show is becoming a common way to discover new programs and decide what to watch. After a show airs, social commentary often spills over for hours if not days. As a result, content creators, TV networks, and advertisers have new opportunities to engage their audience over longer spans of time.

As I recently wrote, this shift in audience behavior is driving deep changes in the global media landscape:

We are witnessing the creation of a fundamentally new mode of human communication. One-way broadcast TV has been augmented with millions of real-time audience feedback signals that are shaping audience decisions of what to watch and how to interpret what they see. This new force promises to redefine how political campaigns of the future will be won, how marketers will sell, and over time this mass-interactive medium will give rise to new forms of news and entertainment.

Although audience voices predominantly fill the social soundtrack, there is ample room for all constituents of the TV ecosystem to join the conversation. Marketers are experimenting with campaigns that seamlessly span TV and Twitter. Integrating hashtags into TV ads leads TV audiences to participate in authentic conversations about brands and products. Marketers are using Twitter for realtime response to TV — see Oreo. In the future, marketers will be able to synchronize and coordinate their messaging automatically at scale across TV and Twitter to provide the combined benefits of TV’s sight, sound, and motion with social media’s contextualized targeting and canvas for authentic engagement.

Most exciting for me, however, is the future of content creation. What new TV shows will be created from the ground up to leverage the social soundtrack? What will be the Jaws or ET of social TV? What yet-to-be-invented genres of content will emerge? As social TV finds its stride, we’ll gradually forget that TV ever existed in a social vacuum. Just as the distinction between movies and “talkies” faded as sound became an expected part of movies, we will shift from “social TV” back to just “TV” and simply expect all TV to include a social soundtrack. At that point, a deep transformation of TV will be complete.

(*) This tweet came from Brian Bedol, Bluefin Labs investor and board member. Coincidentally, it was Brian who first suggested to me the analogy of realtime social media as a soundtrack for TV.

Prospect Capital provided a a $70 million term loan to support the recapitalization of subsidiaries of Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp., the company announced. New York-based Cinedigm makes digital cinema distribution and exhibition software.

PRESS RELEASE
Prospect Capital Corporation PSEC -0.13% (“Prospect”) announced today that Prospect has provided a $70 million term loan to support the recapitalization of subsidiaries of Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp. CIDM +9.49% (“Cinedigm”).

Headquartered in New York, New York, Cinedigm is a leader in the digital entertainment revolution. Cinedigm’s pioneering digital cinema deployment and servicing efforts, and its state-of-the-art distribution and exhibition software, are cornerstones of the digital cinema transformation. Cinedigm is also the leading digital aggregator of independent content in the world, providing end-to-end digital content delivery to theaters, digital and on-demand platforms, and DVD/Blu-ray. Through partnerships with iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Google, Hulu, Vudu, Xbox, Playstation, and others, Cinedigm reaches a global digital audience. Cinedigm’s library of over 18,000 movies and television episodes includes award-winning documentaries from Docurama Films(R), next-generation independents from Flatiron Film Company(R), and acclaimed independent films and festival picks through partnerships with the Sundance Institute and Tribeca Film.

“We appreciate Prospect’s creativity with this complex transaction, which positions Cinedigm for growth in the digital entertainment marketplace,” said Adam Mizel, COO and CFO of Cinedigm.

“With our deep expertise in media and technology industries, as well as other verticals, Prospect is pleased to support Cinedigm, a market leader in its industry,” said Ted Fowler, Managing Director of Prospect Capital Management LLC. “We are interested in pursuing other large financing and investment opportunities with small-cap public companies like Cinedigm, closely held private companies, and private equity owned companies.”

ABOUT PROSPECT CAPITAL CORPORATION
Prospect Capital Corporation (www.prospectstreet.com) is a closed-end investment company that lends to and invests in private and microcap public businesses. Our investment objective is to generate both current income and long-term capital appreciation through debt and equity investments.

We have elected to be treated as a business development company under the Investment Company Act of 1940 (“1940 Act”). We are required to comply with a series of regulatory requirements under the 1940 Act as well as applicable NASDAQ, federal and state rules and regulations. We have elected to be treated as a regulated investment company under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. Failure to comply with any of the laws and regulations that apply to us could have an adverse effect on us and our shareholders.

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, whose safe harbor for forward-looking statements does not apply to business development companies. Any such statements, other than statements of historical fact, are highly likely to be affected by other unknowable future events and conditions, including elements of the future that are or are not under our control, and that we may or may not have considered; accordingly, such statements cannot be guarantees or assurances of any aspect of future performance. Actual developments and results are highly likely to vary materially from any forward-looking statements. Such statements speak only as of the time when made, and we undertake no obligation to update any such statement now or in the future.

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Carlsberg has launched a partial take-over bid worth 2.65 billion Danish crowns ($461.49 million) for 30.31 percent of the shares in Chongqing Brewery Company, Reuters reported Monday. If the bid of RMB 20 per share is successful Carlsberg, which announced its immediate plans to up its stake in the Chinese brewery last week, will gain control of CBC and potentially own up to 60 percent of the shares.

(Reuters) – Carlsberg (CARLb.CO) has launched a partial take-over bid worth 2.65 billion Danish crowns ($461.49 million) for 30.31 percent of the shares in Chongqing Brewery Company (600132.SS), the Danish brewer said on Monday.

If the bid of RMB 20 per share is successful Carlsberg, which announced its immediate plans to up its stake in the Chinese brewery last week, will gain control of CBC and potentially own up to 60 percent of the shares.

The second largest shareholder in CBC, Chongqing Beer Co, has committed to selling its shares with the aim of disposing of its remaining 20 percent stake in CBC,” Carlsberg said in a statement.

“Our Asian business is very important for our long-term growth strategy and we are very pleased that we now can take this important step forward in China”, Carlsberg CEO and President, Jorgen Buhl Rasmussen, said in the statement.

Carlsberg, which inherited a stake in Chongqing Brewery through its takeover of Britain’s Scottish and Newcastle, raised it in 2010 to make it the biggest shareholder in the Chinese company with 29.7 percent.

Asia has become the main battle ground for the world’s biggest brewers. The region accounted for 18 percent of Carlsberg’s total sales volume in 2011 and 12 percent of its operating profit.

Carlsberg, like other beer companies, has been relying on high-growth emerging markets to compensate for weak sales in Europe. But in February the Danish brewer reported that sales growth had stalled in key market Russia.

Last year, Carlsberg said it aimed to increase its stake in Chongqing Brewery to 100 percent as the company tries to offset Europe’s weakness, much like bigger rivals AB Inbev (ABI.BR), SABMiller (SAB.L) and Heineken (HEIN.AS).

The Carlsberg share is up 0.1 percent at 1047 GMT, underperforming the Copenhagen main index .OMXC20, which rises 0.6 percent.

($1 = 5.7423 Danish crowns)

(Reporting by Johan Ahlander; editing by Niklas Pollard)

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U.K. supermarket chain Tesco on Monday announced three new hires to oversee its forthcoming digital entertainment services. Tesco plans to launch an ebookstore called blinkboxbooks and a digital music store called blinkboxmusic later this year, and will roll out Clubcard TV, an ad-supported streaming TV and movie site, soon.

Gavin Sathianathan, who was Facebook’s head of retail for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will be managing director of blinkboxbooks. Mark Bennett, who was head of digital at U.K. supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, will be managing director of blinkboxmusic. And Scott Deutrom, who was director of advertising at blinkbox, will be managing director of Clubcard TV.

Tesco bought a majority stake in video streaming site blinkbox in 2011 and acquired white-label ebook service Mobcast and streaming music service We7 last year. Those services will be the foundations of the new blinkbox sites.

The Telegraph has more:

“The three Blinkbox retail sites will sit separately from Tesco’s main online store and will only carry subtle Tesco branding. However, the supermarket will advertise the sites heavily in store and use them to ensure that customers in search of specialist online sites for books, music, films and TV box sets continue buying from the Tesco empire instead of falling into the habit of shopping for entertainment products elsewhere. It will target the millions of customers who still haven’t started shopping online in a big way.”

“The development of these new services demonstrates our total commitment to providing the very best entertainment as easily as possible for our customers,” Michael Comish, Tesco’s CEO of digital entertainment, said in a statement. “They allow us to provide even more choice in how customers buy and enjoy their entertainment.”

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Today, Google is celebrating South African singer and political activist Miriam Makeba.

Makeba was born in Johannesburg in 1932. Her professional career began in 1950 as part of the jazz group the Manhattan Brothers. Shortly after that, Makeba joined an all-female group called the Skylarks. In 1956, she scored her first hit “Pata Pata.”

After visiting the United States, Makeba was denied entry back into South Africa in 1960. For thirty years, Makeba lived in exile. She returned to her home country in 1990, shortly after Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

In her long career, Makeba won a Grammy award, sang for President John F. Kennedy, and became a “citizen of the world.” In her lifetime, Makeba held nine different passports and honorary citizenship in ten different countries. Throughout her exile, Makeba was a strong anti-apartheid activist.

Makeba died in 2008 after suffering a heart attack performing her first hit, “Pata Pata.” Today would have been her 81st birthday.

In today’s Google Doodle, the famed singer serves at the second “g” in the refashioned logo.

Here we go again. Amazon is offering a month-long free trial of its Trusted Advisor cloud services monitoring tool. That may seem kind of ho-hum news for rank-and-file Amazon Web Services observers, but for a half dozen or so small companies that hoped to make their living providing similar services, this freebie is a big deal.

News of an updated version of Trusted Advisor — complete with new features and its free trial (for the month of March) was unveiled on the AWS blog early Monday morning. Before now Trusted Advisor was available to customers that signed up for enterprise or business class AWS support.

According to the blog, Trusted Advisor looks over a  customers’ AWS environment and makes suggestions on how to save money, boost performance and shutter security gaps:

“Because the AWS Trusted Advisor draws upon the aggregated operational history of hundreds of thousands of AWS customers, you can be confident that the recommendations that it makes can help you to save money, bolster your security profile, improve the fault tolerance of your application, and  increase overall performance. This is a unique and powerful benefit that is only possible with cloud-based, API-enabled infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, companies like Newvem, Cloudyn, Cloud Vertical and Cloudability have to be more than a little worried about this new tool, although they’d be the first to tell you that their own respective offerings watch and measure AWS better than Amazon itself does.

A Newvem spokesman characterized the freebie as big news for AWS users and “a great value as a broken-to-fix support play  as in something is wrong with my security, I’ll use Trusted Advisor to fix it.” But, he added, Newvem provides more insights on how to improve a user’s AWS resource usage and to evaluate costs, risks and assets. Newvem started charging for its service late last year.

Amazon’s news is a no-brainer for a company that knows it needs to provide more enterprise-class support and monitoring options to placate enterprises used to having such tools, as GigaOM reported last summer.  But it also illustrates the issue that, to grow, Amazon is encroaching more and more on spaces pioneered by small members of its ecosystem.  Being an AWS technology partner is a risky proposition that is not for the faint-of-heart or the slow-of-foot.

What about the little guys?

Usually, when small companies characterize a huge company’s incursion into their territory as a validation of their strategy, it’s time to pat them on the head and offer condolences. In this case, however, there is some truth that a smaller, more nimble third party (aka Newvem, Cloudyn, et al) can offer more value.

As Forrester Research analyst Dave Bartoletti told me last month with regard to some Cloudyn news:

“Amazon’s tools will get better and better but Amazon has no desire to get you to use less of its services. It’s like in storage — You’d think EMC would be the best vendor of storage management but historically they haven’t been.”

 

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Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. announced the appointments of Hiro Shimizu and Sakae Suzuki as directors for KKR Japan. Shimizu joined from Goldman Sachs Japan, where he served as Managing Director and Head of the Financial Institutions Group within the Financing Group. Suzuki joins from McKinsey & Company, where he most recently served as a principal.

PRESS RELEASE
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. (together with its affiliates, “KKR”) today announced the appointment of Hiro Shimizu and Sakae Suzuki as Directors for KKR Japan. Mr. Shimizu joined KKR Capital Markets from Goldman Sachs Japan, where he most recently served as Managing Director and Head of the Financial Institutions Group within the Financing Group. Mr. Suzuki joins KKR Capstone from McKinsey & Company, where he most recently served as a Principal with particular expertise in telecom, media & technology, and operations.

In their new roles, Mr. Shimizu and Mr. Suzuki will work alongside KKR’s team in Tokyo led by Shusaku Minoda, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of KKR Japan. This increases KKR Japan’s team to 12 people based in Tokyo.

“The addition of directors for both KKR Capital Markets and KKR Capstone in Tokyo evidences KKR’s optimism for and commitment to the Japan market,” said Joseph Y. Bae, Managing Partner of KKR Asia. “Hiro and Sakae will increase KKR’s ability to bring value-add to Japanese companies as they increase their global competitiveness.”

“We are pleased to welcome world-class talent like Hiro and Sakae to the KKR Japan team,” said Shusaku Minoda. “Hiro will use his extensive experience to expand the presence of KKR Capital Markets in Japan, while supporting and expanding our large and growing base of Japanese investors. As a member of the global KKR Capstone team, Sakae will apply his skills in operational improvement across a wide range of industries to support the growth of KKR investments in Japan and worldwide.”

Mr. Shimizu spent 14 years at Goldman Sachs, where he held various positions during his tenure, including Head of Credit and Alternative Sales within FICC as well as Head of Distribution for Japan within the Special Situations Group. He has extensive experience in marketing alternative products across a broad spectrum of credit, equity and real estate products, which he marketed to institutional clients. Mr. Shimizu holds a BA in Economics from Vassar College.

Mr. Suzuki began his career at McKinsey & Company, where he worked for three years before moving to Gateway Japan, where he served as Senior Manager Business Planning and Online Sales. He then joined Global Freight Exchange (GF-X), where he held the titles of Senior Vice President of GF-X and President of GF-X Japan. Following GF-X, he moved to ZS Associates, where he served as Senior Manager, overseeing sales force effectiveness improvement at medical diagnostic and medical device companies, before returning to McKinsey. Mr. Suzuki holds a BA from Reed College, and a PhD from California Institute of Technology in Physical Chemistry.

About KKR

Founded in 1976 and led by Henry Kravis and George Roberts, KKR is a leading global investment firm with US$75.5 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2012. With offices around the world, KKR manages assets through a variety of investment funds and accounts covering multiple asset classes. KKR Japan, established in 2006, is an integral part of KKR’s Asia Pacific team, which consists of more than 90 executives in seven offices across the region. KKR Japan’s experienced team of executives has established itself as a key player in Japan’s evolving private equity marketplace. In 2010, KKR completed an investment in a leading recruitment services firm Intelligence Ltd. from Usen Corporation. In 2011, KKR and Itochu Corporation were co-investors in Samson Investment Company, one of the largest private exploration and production companies in the United States. Also that year, KKR, Google and Recurrent Energy, a U.S. subsidiary of Sharp Corporation, formed a venture to invest in solar projects in the US. KKR has pan-Asian pool of capital of more than US$5 billion invested in 28 companies across the region. KKR’s portfolio is mixed by country, industry and sector and includes both minority and control investments. KKR seeks to create value by bringing operational expertise to its portfolio companies and through active oversight and monitoring of its investments. KKR complements its investment expertise and strengthens interactions with investors through its client relationships and capital markets platform. KKR & Co. L.P. is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange KKR +0.38% , and “KKR,” as used in this release, includes its subsidiaries, their managed investment funds and accounts, and/or their affiliated investment vehicles, as appropriate. For additional information on KKR, please visit KKR’s website at www.kkr.com.

KKR Capital Markets (KCM) has a platform of more than 30 investment professionals globally across debt and equity capital markets. KCM supports our firm, our portfolio companies and select third-party clients by providing tailored capital markets advice and by developing and implementing both traditional and non-traditional capital solutions for investments and companies seeking financing. Our capital markets services include arranging debt and equity financing for transactions, placing and underwriting securities offerings, structuring new investment products and providing capital markets services.

KKR Capstone is a team of more than 60 operating executives across North America, Europe, and Asia who work exclusively with KKR portfolio companies to drive operational improvements. KKR Capstone is dedicated to delivering management expertise in functional areas such as pricing, organizational design, sales force effectiveness, and operational efficiency. This integrated, global team is one of the most experienced in the private equity industry. KKR Capstone is a consulting firm owned and controlled by their senior management and is not a subsidiary of KKR.

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What we have here is a nice driver quality 1963 Chevrolet Corvette split window coupe. One of the rarest Corvettes ever produced, the split window was available for one model year only. What I like about this ad is that the owner seems to be giving a very fair and honest description of the car. The Ermine white lacquer paint for instance is said to be in nice shape, but does have some cracking and the undercarriage, although clean, is not detailed. Equipped with a numbers matching 327 cu.in. V8, a Borg Warner T-10 4-speed and showing a very nice a red interior, this beautiful coupe is sure to stand out wherever it’s driven. The “buy it now” price is set at $65,000.00 U.S. which seems in line with other ’63 Corvettes on the market. So, if you’re interested you can click through to see a few more pics, or go directly to the eBay link below.

Source: eBayMotors.com

BGR confirmed some of the best news BlackBerry could possibly get late last week, but not everyone is convinced that the BlackBerry Z10 will have the same draw in the United States. The nation’s No.3 carrier Sprint (S) recently confirmed to Bloomberg that it will be the only top carrier in the U.S. to pass on BlackBerry’s (BBRY) first next-generation smartphone. Instead, Sprint will wait for the BlackBerry Q10 before it gives the new BlackBerry 10 platform any support. “We aren’t saying there’s anything different about our customers,” a Sprint spokesperson said. “We think our customers will be happy with the qwerty keyboard and touch screen on the Q10.”

Buyout group CVC Capital Partners has appointed former Lloyds Banking Group boss Eric Daniels as a senior adviser in its Global Financial Institutions Group. Daniels was group chief executive at Lloyds. He stepped down in 2011 from Lloyds, which he first joined in 2001 as a group executive director, Reuters wrote..

(Reuters) – Buyout group CVC Capital Partners has appointed former Lloyds Banking Group boss Eric Daniels as a senior adviser in its Global Financial Institutions Group (FIG).

In a statement on Monday, CVC said Daniels starts in his new position immediately.

“With (Daniels’) breadth of knowledge and understanding in banking, insurance and wealth management we hope to further strengthen our capabilities and build on the success the FIG team has achieved over the past four years,” CVC Managing Partner Jonathan Feuer said.

Daniels was group chief executive at Lloyds. He stepped down om 2011 from Lloyds, which he first joined in 2001 as a group executive director.

He holds a similar advisory position at investment banking boutique StormHarbour.

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Canon today announced the successful creation of a new full-frame CMOS sensor, designed exclusively for shooting video. The new sensor can capture full-HD video with extremely low noise in settings where it has been hard for traditional cameras to even operate at all in the past. The sensor will have immediate benefits for astrophotography and for use in security systems, but the developments here could eventually help improve the quality of professional and consumer cameras, too.

The new sensor from Canon features large pixels, each of which measure around 7.5x those found on the sensor Canon uses in its EOS-1DX DSLR. The larger pixels are paired with new noise reduction technologies that counteract the added noise effect of using larger pixels, which allows for full HD video shooting in environments as dark as an outdoor setting with just a crescent moon providing illumination. That means it can capture video with fully visible objects even in situations where the human eye would be hard-pressed to make out any definite shapes.

Canon has already built a prototype device to test out the new sensor, and captured things like footage from a room where only lit incense sticks provided any light, the Geminid meteor shower and other night sky scenes. The prototype would be most useful in the immediate future for astronomical and nature photography, medial research and security implementations, but through “further development,” Canon imagines similar CMOS sensor tech will also be able to greatly improve other more creative pursuits.

Low light video is already an impressive feature of full-frame DSLR cameras, but a sensor like this that takes things to the extreme could take nighttime video capture to a whole new level. Imagine greatly reducing the cost of filming at night, for instance, or, depending on how things progress, bringing similar improvements to mobile and smartphone shooters. We’re still a long way off from that, but this is a very impressive first step, as you can see from the sample video available on Canon’s own site.

Prepublication Now Available

The childhood obesity epidemic is an urgent public health problem. The most recent data available show that nearly 19 percent of boys and about 15 percent of girls aged 2-19 are obese, and almost a third of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight or obese (Ogden et al., 2012). The obesity epidemic will continue to take a substantial toll on the health of Americans. In the midst of this epidemic, children are exposed to an enormous amount of commercial advertising and marketing for food. In 2009, children aged 2-11 saw an average of more than 10 television food ads per day (Powell et al., 2011). Children see and hear advertising and marketing messages for food through many other channels as well, including radio, movies, billboards, and print media. Most notably, many new digital media venues and vehicles for food marketing have emerged in recent years, including Internet-based advergames, couponing on cell phones, and marketing on social networks, and much of this advertising is invisible to parents.

The marketing of high-calorie, low-nutrient foods and beverages is linked to overweight and obesity. A major 2006 report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) documents evidence that television advertising influences the food and beverage preferences, requests, and short-term consumption of children aged 2-11 (IOM, 2006). Challenges and Opportunities for Change in Food Marketing to Children and Youth also documents a body of evidence showing an association of television advertising with the adiposity of children and adolescents aged 2-18. The report notes the prevailing pattern that food and beverage products marketed to children and youth are often high in calories, fat, sugar, and sodium; are of low nutritional value; and tend to be from food groups Americans are already overconsuming. Furthermore, marketing messages that promote nutrition, healthful foods, or physical activity are scarce (IOM, 2006). To review progress and explore opportunities for action on food and beverage marketing that targets children and youth, the IOM’s Standing Committee on Childhood Obesity Prevention held a workshop in Washington, DC, on November 5, 2012, titled “New Challenges and Opportunities in Food Marketing to Children and Youth.”

[Read the full report]

Topics: Food and Nutrition

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is on the hunt for more deals like its planned purchase of H.J. Heinz Co, Warren Buffett, the conglomerate’s chief executive, said on Monday, Reuters reported. Berkshire likes the ketchup maker’s business, the price of the $23 billion deal, and its partner in the transaction, private equity firm 3G Capital, Buffett said in an extended interview.

(Reuters) – Berkshire Hathaway Inc is on the hunt for more deals like its planned purchase of H.J. Heinz Co, Warren Buffett, the conglomerate’s chief executive, said on Monday.

“If we get a chance to buy another Heinz, we will do that,” Buffett said on CNBC.

Berkshire likes the ketchup maker’s business, the price of the $23 billion deal, and its partner in the transaction, private equity firm 3G Capital, Buffett said in an extended interview.

“We hope to own Heinz 100 years from now,” Buffett said. “If you own great brands and you take care of them, they’re terrific assets,” he said.

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Markley Group, which made its name as a colocation, peering and data center provider in the heart of Boston, is adding business-class cloud capabilities to the mix with its new Markley Cloud Services, slated to debut on Tuesday.

The move shows that data center providers — companies like Equinix and Markley — see the need to add cloud services to their repertory. “Data center customers who buy cage space are all asking for additional services — it’s ‘bring me a cloud or I’m leaving’” said Carl Brooks, analyst at The 451 Group. One of Markley’s aces in the hole is that this Boston site sits smack dab atop the biggest telco and ISP interconnect site in the region. And, as we all now know, proximity to those fiber pipes is gold for data center customers who want the fastest possible connections to their end users and partners.

The new services take advantage of Markley’s data center know-how and its proximity to those telcos and ISPs which are colocated in this Downtown Crossing facility.

The initial Markley Cloud implementation builds on VMware technology, and Cisco Unified Compute Systems, NetApp storage, and Juniper routers but Markley is also “playing around with OpenStack,” said  Joshua Myles, product manager. “We polled 200 or so of our customers and 87 percent of them are VMware shops so we went with what they were comfortable with,” Myles said in a recent interview.

The new services mean that existing Markley business customers who want to try out a hybrid cloud model can “burst” workloads as needed from their own resources to Markley’s cloud.

The direct fiber links between Markley’s data center and the carrier hotel in the same building is a huge benefit to Markley and its customers, which include The New York Times, W.B. Mason, the Boston Red Sox, MIT, Harvard University, the Boston Internet Peering Exchange and other companies which prefer not to be named.

Initially, the new cloud services will be offered from this site, but will roll out at other Markley data centers across the country later, Myles said.  In total, Markley runs 13 data center sites in the U.S. and Europe.

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Depending on how one defines its birth, Hadoop is now 10 years old. In that decade, Hadoop has gone from being the hopeful answer to Yahoo’s search-engine woes to a general-purpose computing platform that’s poised to be the foundation for the next generation of data-based applications.

Alone, Hadoop is a software market that IDC predicts will be worth $813 million in 2016 (although that number is likely very low), but it’s also driving a big data market the research firm predicts will hit more than $23 billion by 2016. Since Cloudera launched in 2008, Hadoop has spawned dozens of startups and spurred hundreds of millions in venture capital investment since 2008.

In this four-part series, we’ll explain everything anyone concerned with information technology needs to know about Hadoop. Part I is the history of Hadoop from the people who willed it into existence and took it mainstream. Part II is more graphic; a map of the now-large and complex ecosystem of companies selling Hadoop products. Part III is a look into the future of Hadoop that should serve as an opening salvo for much of the discussion at our Structure: Data conference March 20-21 in New York. Finally, Part IV will highlight some the best Hadoop applications and seminal moments in Hadoop history, as reported by GigaOM over the years.

Wanted: A better search engine

Almost everywhere you go online now, Hadoop is there in some capacity. Facebook, eBay, Etsy, Yelp , Twitter, Salesforce.com — you name a popular web site or service, and the chances are it’s using Hadoop to analyze the mountains of data it’s generating about user behavior and even its own operations. Even in the physical world, forward-thinking companies in fields ranging from entertainment to energy management to satellite imagery are using Hadoop to analyze the unique types of data they’re collecting and generating.

Everyone involved with information technology at least knows what it is. Hadoop even serves as the foundation for new-school graph and NoSQL databases, as well as bigger, badder versions of relational databases that have been around for decades.

But it wasn’t always this way, and today’s uses are a long way off from the original vision of what Hadoop could be.

When the seeds of Hadoop were first planted in 2002, the world just wanted a better open-source search engine. So then-Internet Archive search director Doug Cutting and University of Washington graduate student Mike Cafarella set out to build it. They called their project Nutch and it was designed with that era’s web in mind.

Looking back on it today, early iterations of Nutch were kind of laughable. About a year into their work on it, Cutting and Cafarella thought things were going pretty well because Nutch was already able to crawl and index hundreds of millions of pages. “At the time, when we started, we were sort of thinking that a web search engine was around a billion pages,” Cutting explained to me, “so we were getting up there.”

There are now about 700 million web sites and, according to Wired’s Kevin Kelly, well over a trillion web pages.

But getting Nutch to work wasn’t easy. It could only run across a handful of machines, and someone had to watch it around the clock to make sure it didn’t fall down.

“I remember working on it for several months, being quite proud of what we had been doing, and then the Google File System paper came out and I realized ‘Oh, that’s a much better way of doing it. We should do it that way,’” reminisced Cafarella. “Then, by the time we had a first working version, the MapReduce paper came out and that seemed like a pretty good idea, too.”

Google released the Google File System paper in October 2003 and the MapReduce paper in December 2004. The latter would prove especially revelatory to the two engineers building Nutch.

“What they spent a lot of time doing was generalizing this into a framework that automated all these steps that we were doing manually,” Cutting explained.

Raymie Stata, founder and CEO of Hadoop startup VertiCloud (and former Yahoo CTO), calls MapReduce “a fantastic kind of abstraction” over the distributed computing methods and algorithms most search companies were already using:

“Everyone had something that pretty much was like MapReduce because we were all solving the same problems. We were trying to handle literally billions of web pages on machines that are probably, if you go back and check, epsilon more powerful than today’s cell phones. … So there was no option but to latch hundreds to thousands of machines together to build the index. So it was out of desperation that MapReduce was invented.”

Over the course of a few months, Cutting and Cafarella built up the underlying file systems and processing framework that would become Hadoop (in Java, notably, whereas Google’s MapReduce used C++) and ported Nutch on top of it. Now, instead of having one guy watch a handful of machines all day long, Cutting explained, they could just set it running on between 20 and 40 machines that he and Cafarella were able to scrape together from their employers.

Bringing Hadoop to life (but not in search)

Anyone vaguely familiar with the history of Hadoop can guess what happens next: In 2006, Cutting went to work with Yahoo, which was equally impressed by the Google File System and MapReduce papers and wanted to build open source technologies based on them. They spun out the storage and processing parts of Nutch to form Hadoop (named after Cutting’s son’s stuffed elephant) as an open-source Apache Software Foundation project and the Nutch web crawler remained its own separate project.

“This seem like a perfect fit because I was looking for more people to work on it, and people who had thousands of computers to run it on,” Cutting said.

Cafarella, now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, opted to forgo a career in corporate IT and focus on his education. He’s happy as a professor — and currently working on a Hadoop-complementary project called RecordBreaker — but, he joked, “My dad calls me the Pete Best of the big data world.”

Ironically, though, the 2006-era Hadoop was nowhere near ready to handle production search workloads at webscale — the very task it was created to do. “The thing you gotta remember,” explained Hortonworks Co-founder and CEO Eric Baldeschwieler (who was previously VP of Hadoop software development at Yahoo), “is at the time we started adopting it, the aspiration was definitely to rebuild Yahoo’s web search infrastructure, but Hadoop only really worked on 5 to 20 nodes at that point, and it wasn’t very performant, either.”

Stata recalls a “slow march” of horizontal scalability, growing Hadoop’s capabilities from the single digits of nodes into the tens of nodes and ultimately into the thousands. “It was just an ongoing slog … every factor of 2 or 1.5 even was serious engineering work,” he said. But Yahoo was determined to scale Hadoop as far as it needed to go, and it continued investing heavy resources into the project.

It actually took years for Yahoo to moves its web index onto Hadoop, but in the meantime the company made what would be a fortuitous decision to set up what it called a “research grid” for the company’s data scientists, to use today’s parlance. It started with dozens of nodes and ultimately grew to hundreds as they added more and more data and Hadoop’s technology matured. What began life as a proof of concept fast became a whole lot more.

“This very quickly kind of exploded and became our core mission,” Baldeschwieler said, “because what happened is the data scientists not only got interesting research results — what we had anticipated — but they also prototyped new applications and demonstrated that those applications could substantially improve Yahoo’s search relevance or Yahoo’s advertising revenue.”

Shortly thereafter, Yahoo began rolling out Hadoop to power analytics for various production applications. Eventually, Stata explained, Hadoop had proven so effective that Yahoo merged its search and advertising into one unit so that Yahoo’s bread-and-butter sponsored search business could benefit from the new technology.

And that’s exactly what happened, because although data scientists didn’t need things like service-level agreements, business leaders did. So, Stata said, Yahoo implemented some scheduling changes within Hadoop. And although data scientists didn’t need security, Securities and Exchange Commission requirements mandated a certain level of security when Yahoo moved its sponsored search data onto it.

“That drove a certain level of maturity,” Stata said. “… We ran all the money in Yahoo through it, eventually.”

The transformation into Hadoop being “behind every click” (or every batch process, technically) at Yahoo was pretty much complete by 2008, Baldeschwieler said. That meant doing everything from these line-of-business applications to spam filtering to personalized display decisions on the Yahoo front page. By the time Yahoo spun out Hortonworks into a separate, Hadoop-focused software company in 2011, Yahoo’s Hadoop infrastructure consisted of 42,000 nodes and hundreds of petabytes of storage.

From the classroom …

However, although Yahoo was responsible for the vast majority of development during its formative years, Hadoop didn’t exist in a bubble inside Yahoo’s headquarters. It was a full-on Apache project that attracted users and contributors from around the world. Guys like Tom White, a Welshman who actually wrote O’Reilly Media’s book Hadoop: The Definitive Guide despite being what Cutting describes as a guy who just liked software and played with Hadoop at night.

Up in Seattle in 2006, a young Google engineer named Christophe Bisciglia was using his 20 percent time to teach a computer science course at the University of Washington. Google wanted to hire new employees with experience working on webscale data, but its MapReduce code was proprietary, so it bought a rack of servers and used Hadoop as a proxy.

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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• A near-term outlook for big data
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
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Last week, we challenged you to name all 6 major full-size truck dashes apart. How did you do?

In case you missed it, here is the link to the post with the dashes for you to guess.
Without further delay here are the answers.

How did you do? Which ones tripped you up the most Nissan, Honda, Ford?

Search terms people used to find this page:

• 2014 toyota sequoia spy
• 2014 tundra
• tundra 2014
• 2014 tundra pictures
• future toyota sequoia 2014
• 2014 toyota tundra spy
• tundra 2014 pictures
• pictures of 2014 tundra
• tundra supercharger 2013
• تندرا 2014

The post Name that Full-Size Truck Dash – Answers appeared first on Tundra Headquarters Blog.

The flash-storage world keeps getting hotter. Ahead of its expected IPO, Violin Memory, which already offers flash memory arrays, is adding solid-state PCI-Express cards for servers to its lineup.

As the company branches out with four PCIe cards, with memory capacity ranging from 1.37 terabytes to 11 terabytes, it will bump up against several competitors, including Fusion-io, LSI and Virident.

The Violin Memory cards are bootable, which can save time and minimize frustration. They also use less air flow than other flash memory cards, so customers can pack more cards onto servers. The lowest-capacity card costs $3 per gigabyte, and the price goes up to $6 per gigabyte for the others.

“We believe this (1.37 terabyte) card, with its price-performance level density, will allow the industry to start a broad adoption over the next several years,” said Don Basile, Violin Memory’s CEO.

The company can rest assured of a market for the new cards. Toshiba, already a major flash memory vendor for consumer products, will have licensing and distribution rights for the new Violin Memory intellectual property.

Violin Memory is planning to go public at the beginning of May, All Things D reported. Basile declined to discuss the timing of the product launch in relation to the IPO.

The flash storage market is nothing if not active. Last May, EMC acquired XtremIO; two months later, IBM bought Texas Memory Systems, and Pure Storage said it had secured a $40 million Series D investment. Just two weeks ago, flash storage array vendor Skyera announced a $51.6 million Series B round of funding.

Widespread enterprise adoption of flash memory seems to be a matter of time. With its new products, Violin Memory appears to be in a better position to ride the market wave.

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In the corner of my home office sits a cabinet full of tchotchkes and gifts that neither I nor my wife can quite bear to part with. It includes a silver Tiffany picture frame I received from Columbia Business School for 10 years of teaching and a company-embossed Swiss army knife that my wife got one Christmas, back in her days as a consultant.

While many might see this sort of gift giving as a sign of the boss’s kindness and generosity, economists mostly see inefficiency: why can’t Columbia just pay me a cash bonus rather than offering presents that collect dust? One answer comes from a classic study by Nobel Laureate George Akerlof, a pioneer in the field of behavioral economics, which focuses on the idea of gift exchange in the workplace. Acts of kindness by employers, the reasoning goes, elicit more effort from their employees in return, hence the utility knives and picture frames. But Akerlof mostly had in mind monetary rewards — you pay me above-market wages, and I’ll repay the favor by working harder — which can’t quite account for the booming corporate gift business.

A study published last year by German and Swiss researchers took a more literal position on the gift exchange hypothesis, suggesting that economists’ focus on cash might often be misplaced. The researchers found that gifts were far more motivating to short-term employees than unexpected cash bonuses, effectively paying for themselves by improving productivity. The findings provide some guidance on the types of gifts that are likely to engender the greatest motivation and loyalty.

The study was inspired, in part, by the need to catalog books at a German university’s economics library. Student catalogers were recruited to spend half a day helping out, with an advertised hourly wage of 12 Euros. While somewhat removed from the corporate context that most managers inhabit, the study has the merit of focusing on a task for which it’s easy to measure productivity: how fast and accurately employees catalog their books. It was also a situation in which employees wouldn’t expect their productivity to elicit further gifts or payments later on, since they were told explicitly that the job wouldn’t continue past the morning’s work.

Before the students started to catalog the books, the experimenters told some of them that they would receive an unexpected seven-Euro bonus — a 20% pay hike relative to the promised wage of 36 Euros for the three-hour job. Another group was given a gift-wrapped water bottle that was worth around seven Euros. (In some versions of the experiment, a price tag was left on and catalogers were informed of the present’s value, to ensure that the employees didn’t overestimate it.) Crucially, a separate set of students didn’t receive any bonus at all, to serve as a baseline to measure the effects of gifts and extra cash.

The cash bonus didn’t have any effect on the speed or accuracy with which the students did their jobs. However, those receiving the free bottle reciprocated by upping their data entry rate by 25%, a productivity increase that more than offset the cost of the bottle itself.

It’s not that the workers particularly loved their bottles — in fact, in a separate experiment in which catalogers were offered the choice between a bottle versus seven Euros, 80% took the cash (and still worked a lot harder). Rather, it was the thought that counted, and simply handing out a few more Euros hardly takes much thought. Even offering the option of a gift showed that the employer cared.

An intriguing final version of the experiment underscored the importance, in the eyes of the employees, of the thought and effort bosses put into their gifts. In this treatment, the cash was delivered as a five-Euro note folded into an origami shirt and a two-Euro coin with a smiley face painted on it. The origami money-gift generated the highest increase in productivity of all. (While the researchers never handed out gift cards or other easy-to-obtain cash equivalents that are common and efficient employee rewards, one can imagine that a Starbucks gift card doesn’t exactly scream “I Care.”)

The study has its limitations. It’s hard to imagine that the average Wall Street trader would work harder for a pink Cadillac than a six-figure bonus. The motivational effects of cash surely become more important when the stakes get higher, and gifts probably work best when tailored to the particular set of employees involved. That’s how you really show you care.

And that, more than gifts versus cash, is really the study’s takeaway. Many employees toiling away in stores, factories, and cubicles are desperate for a sense of meaning in their work lives. Even the smallest gesture of kindness that shows they’re part of an organization that actually cares can give them purpose — and that leads to motivation.