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If, like many industry watchers, you’ve been confused about EMC Greenplum’s Hadoop strategy over the past couple years, Scott Yara has a message for you: “We’re all in on Hadoop, period.”

Yara, Greenplum’s co-founder and senior vice president of products, has a not-so-coded message for his big data market competitors, too. Put simply, he doesn’t think they stand a chance against his company, and he served notice on Monday morning with the unveiling of the company’s new Pivotal HD Hadoop distribution and Project Hawq in a staged event at San Francisco’s Dogpatch Studios.

Pivotal HD is a completely re-architected Hadoop distribution that has been natively fused with Greenplum’s analytic database (that’s the Project Hawq part), but Yara thinks it’s a bigger deal than just another SQL-on-Hadoop play. In an interview last week, Yara told me that Project Hawq is the manifestation of Greenplum’s decision to sell itself to EMC in 2010, a move he thought would would kickstart his company’s founding vision of becoming the leading big data platform.

Building a data platform costs money, and lots of it

But before the details, a little history. Greenplum’s flagship product is an analytic database powered by a massively parallel processing (MPP) and query engine. The company had raised nearly $100 million in venture capital around this technology since launching in 2003, but doing business in the enterprise software world is hard and expensive, and Greenplum needed more money.

“I thought it was going to take another couple hundred million dollars in investment for us to complete the technical vision we had and go to market,” Yara explained. But finding that kind of money wasn’t so easy in an investment environment where everyone was gaga over social apps like Facebook and Zynga. When EMC approached with a deal like it gave VMware in 2003 — essentially near complete independence bolstered by a huge R&D and marketing budget — Greenplum couldn’t refuse.

Yara said Greenplum had known for a while that Hadoop was the key to any big data strategy going forward, but that it would take some time to build up its own technology. So, in 2011, it entered into a reseller agreement with Hadoop startup MapR to offer a premium product to appease enterprise customers while Greenplum’s engineers got to work on what would become Pivotal HD. That deal with MapR is still in place, but it’s no longer the focal point of Greenplum’s Hadoop strategy.

Big investment, big aspirations

The technology inside Pivotal HD is what companies should come to expect from a Hadoop distribution, Yara explained. It’s essentially the Greenplum Database with its POSIX file system ripped out and replaced by the Hadoop Distributed File System. Whatever users can do on Greenplum’s flagship database, they can do on Pivotal HD, only they can run Hadoop MapReduce jobs and house an HBase database, too.

And when SQL-like features become an important part of Hadoop because it’s so broadly installed that users are now seeking out broader utility, “that’s when the bar gets raised in terms of the amount of capability that’s required,” Yara said. He said Pivotal HD includes years worth of investment in Hadoop cluster-management technology and professional support, too, and that they will cost half as much as what Cloudera and Hortonworks charge. It’s designed to run smoothly wherever customers want it to — physical servers, virtual servers or even cloud servers.

Because they’re so new, he said, competitive SQL-on-Hadoop offerings such as Cloudera’s Impala can only handle about 20 percent of real-world workloads. Looking back at the capital investment in analytics and big data technologies past, things like Netezza, Teradata and Aster Data, Yara proffered, “I don’t think you could build [a full SQL-on-Hadoop] system for less than $25 to $50 million over five years.” (Some of those new technologies, by the way, will have a chance to state their cases during a Structure: Data panel on March 21 that’s all about Hadoop as the next-generation business intelligence platform.)

Greenplum, by contrast, rebuilt its entire R&D team to focus on bringing 10 years of database technology to Hadoop. “We literally have over 300 engineers working on our Hadoop platform,” Yara said. “… We’re bringing all the power of EMC and VMware behind it.”

The data warehouse is the new mainframe

Looking past his competitive boasting, though, it’s easy to see Yara’s greater point when you ask him what all this Hadoop talks means for the data warehouse business on which Greenplum was built. He points to the mainframe business that fell from its high perch decades ago but still drives billions a year in revenue. A single MPP database system is still faster on certain workloads than SQL on Hadoop, but that gap will close over time and  “I do think the center of gravity will move toward HDFS,” he said.

Josh Klahr, a Pivotal HD product manager, noted the importance of being able to process all of a company’s data right in a single scalable data store rather than operating numerous systems. He pointed to one customer that’s storing a petabyte of data in Greenplum Database but wants to grow its data volume to 20 petabyes over the next few years and needs something like Hadoop to do that both financially and technically. He said Netflix’s decision to store all its data in Amazon S3 and bring analytic services to it is a good indicator of where the market is headed.

A few years ago, Yara acknowledged, embracing Hadoop as the future might have been a scary proposition. However, he said, “Now, if you don’t embrace Hadooop as the new database platform, if you’re a database vendor, that’s a grave mistake.”

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It appears that 2013 will be the year of the competitor. Already we’ve seen BlackBerry’s attempt with BlackBerry 10 phones. Microsoft figures to get more competitive with its Windows 8 phones this year, especially as more PC users upgrade to the newest version of the Windows OS. Yet they are not the only players gunning for a market that Android and Apple dominate. Tizen, a Linux-based mobile OS, will see releases in 2013. Today at Mobile World Congress, we learned that Mozilla plans to release the first round of Firefox OS phones this year.

Will any of them make a difference? Anyone who professes to have an answer this point is full of it. There is no way to gauge consumer reaction to device that haven’t yet been released. Even then, the market is always slow to adopt new platforms. Android, released in 2008, didn’t really gain traction until late 2009/early 2010, and didn’t come to full dominance until 2012. Who’s to say that a slow start for any of these platforms will spell its death?

Yet that won’t stop us from speculating. Here are a few ideas about the players vying for No. 3 in the mobile market.

Dinosaurs: Microsoft and BlackBerry

Like many people, I have my mobile roots in BlackBerry. My first smartphonw was a BlackBerry 8700 series, which I quickly upgraded to the 8830. From there I owned three more BlackBerry models — the 8330, the 9530, and the 9930 — while receiving review units of many more. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed by the BlackBerry 10 launch. It actually looks like a useful platform that could continue to grow.

Only it won’t.

The same goes for Windows Phone. Both have realized industry success in the past, but the market has moved on — particularly from BlackBerry. Consumers were never really the main target of BlackBerry, anyway. Enterprise has always been their bread and butter, and it’s clear that both Apple and Android have made serious enterprise inroads. Apple is already growing faster than BlackBerry for corporate clients, and it’s difficult to see that slowing down.

Microsoft might squeak by, if only because their mobile OS is directly compatible with their desktop. Since the great, great majority of PCs run Windows, and many will upgrade to Windows 8, there is a chance that some consumers will find appeal with the platform. But mass market appeal? It probably won’t happen from Microsoft, try as they might.

Mozilla: low-cost solution?

In an article titled Why Carriers Just Love Firefox OS, All Things D’s Ina Fried hits one crucially important note: “[Firefox OS] is designed to run well on low-end hardware where Android performs poorly or can’t run at all.” This could lead to a solution for carriers that seek to eliminate subsidies, in addition to those that don’t offer them to begin with.

Prepaid carriers such as MetroPCs and Cricket struggle with this concept constantly. They offer no-contract monthly service, so they can’t reasonably offer the same kind of subsidies that Verizon and AT&T offer. They don’t have that two-year guarantee. Yet they need to provide cost-effective solutions for their customers, many of whom are lower on the income scale than the average Verizon or AT&T customer.

It doesn’t end with prepaid carriers, though. T-Mobile is doing away with subsidies, moving in more of a no-contract direction. They do offer handset financing, which allows their customers to more easily afford high-end handsets. But what about those who don’t want to go in debt for a smartphone? The answer could lie with Firefox OS and the low-cost hardware that it runs on.

Tizen: potential titan?

What happens when the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer buys into a new OS? You have some potential. True, Samsung rode to dominance on Android’s fuel, but along the way it picked up credentials of its own. Could it spin those credentials into a new mobile OS? We might see the beginnings of that in 2013 with Tizen.

Over the weekend we learned that Samsung will ditch its native Bada OS in favor of Tizen, an open-source Linux-based mobile OS. True, Samsung didn’t do much to move Bada devices in the US, so why would they do the same with Tizen? For starters, Samsung has admitted that Bada wasn’t ideal for smartphones. Tizen will be more powerful, and its open source nature will lead to more rapid improvements than the proprietary Bada.

The biggest advantage, though, could be through Samsung’s sheer size. It can afford to run experiments, releasing Tizen on devices that are very similar to their existing Android devices — almost like an A/B test. If people are buying because of the Samsung brand rather than Android, perhaps Samsung could help create another competitor in the mobile OS space.

The post Apple and Android Meet New Competitors in Firefox, Tizen appeared first on MobileMoo.

After HP bought Palm in 2010, the company promptly proceeded to run the webOS operating system into the ground with a series of lackluster products. The HP TouchPad was the company’s final official webOS product, and the company ended up dropping the tablet’s price to $100 after it became a marketplace failure.

In December of 2011, HP announced that is would publish the webOS source code and open-source it for developers who might want to use it. It was an honorable, yet disappointing ending for a mobile OS that was generally well-loved.

Today, as the Mobile World Congress is just beginning, CNET has broken the story that webOS may have been resurrected: LG has bought webOS from HP. According to the report, LG has purchased the webOS source code and all webOS-related patents, as well as webOS web sites, “related documentation,” and “engineering talent.”

LG isn’t looking to switch its smartphone lineup to webOS, though. Instead, the company told CNET that webOS software will be repurposed to power LG’s lineup of smart TVs. LG stated that a new location in Sunnyvale, California called LG Silicon Valley Lab will be headed by whatever is left of the “webOS team.”

No price has been mentioned for the deal, and HP has not yet commented on it. It is also unknown whether the Chubby Checker lawsuit will be affected as a result.

The New York Times has taken another step in its strategy of becoming a global news brand. On Monday, the company announced it will rename the International Herald Tribune and officially launch a publication called the “International New York Times” later this year.

The Times has wholly owned the IHT since 2003 and merged the websites of the two publications in 2009. The IHT is distributed in print around the world and contains large selections of New York Times content (including the crossword) as well as content from affiliates like Spain’s El Pais.

From a branding perspective, the decision to rename the IHT is consistent with the Times’ larger strategy of finding growth in international markets. Part of this strategy involves divesting regional and non-core properties; the New York Times Company has already sold its chain of southern newspapers as well as About.com and, last week, it put the Boston Globe up for sale.

In this new global newspaper paradigm, the Times is primarily competing with two other publications — the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times — for an international audience.

“Our goal is to capitalize on the great journalistic traditions of both newspapers, further invest in our international journalism and expand our global base while continuing to serve the many loyal readers of the IHT,” explained New York Times Company CEO Mark Thomspon in a news release.

In regard to digital growth — an area of critical importance for the Times — it’s difficult to evaluate the IHT’s performance since the company includes digital subscriptions to the IHT with those to the NYT. At the end of 2012, combined total subscriptions to both publications was around 640,000 (it’s a safe bet the vast majority of those are to the NYT).

In its release on Monday, the company said the International New York Times will be tailored and edited specifically for global audiences.

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I think Zynga learned its lesson about studio closures after it tried to sneakily layoff over 100 employees during an Apple event. Now the company is being more open about its closures and layoffs with the latest round affecting many of its operations around the country.

Zynga COO David Ko announced today that the company would be closing or consolidating a number of studios around the country to cut costs and remain profitable. The good news is that hardly anybody is losing their jobs this time around as Zynga is only closing studios, not actually letting go of people.

The big news, of course, is that Zynga Baltimore is no more. The studio will be closed, and the employees that requested a transfer will be able to relocate to another one of Zynga’s studios. It’s not said what became of those who didn’t relocate, but Zynga says the “overall impact of the consolidations on our team is minimal.”

Speaking of consolidation, Zynga also closed its McKinney, Texas, downtown Austin and NYC offices. Team members in these offices will be moved to Zynga’s existing offices in Dallas, North Austin and NYC mobile studio respectively.

Besides closing down studios, Zynga has also shut down a number of games. The latest casualties included CityVille 2, The Friend Game and Party Place. Games like FarmVille 2 and its mobile gambling titles continue to bring in revenue. Future games from the company will probably focus more on simulated gambling going forward, but the company will also be investing in mid-core titles.

The Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro, rivals from the first day they met. They both pack big power and high style, but over the last few years something strange has happened. You see these two pony cars have turned into handlers capable of competing with some of Europe’s best. But how do they compare with each other? Motor Trend recently grabbed a 2013 Mustang GT Track Pack and a 2013 Camaro 1LE to see who’s got the biggest track day bragging rights. Click through for the video.

Source: MotorTrend.com

Back in November, Nokia announced that it would be relaunching its maps service as Here. Despite its silly name, it was an effort on the part of Nokia to become a major player in the Maps app scene. Now the company is starting to roll it out to mobile devices.

Nokia announced today that its Here app services, which includes Drive, Maps and Transit, will be launching exclusively across Windows Phone 8. That being said, Nokia says the best Here experience will be had on its own Lumia hardware, including the recently announced Nokia Lumia 720 and 520.

The most exciting part about Here is the integration of Nokia’s AR technology. In essence, a user can hold the phone up, and have the name of restaurants and other locations displayed across the landscape. It might not be exactly useful in a real word setting, but it’s incredibly cool nonetheless.

Here Maps and other services are now available for Windows Phone 8.

Here is already available on iOS, and will be launching on Firefox OS later this year. An Android version was apparently available via Amazon’s Appstore for Android, but the link to it is longer working.

Happy birthday EMBI! The index group, the main benchmark for emerging market bond investors, turns 20 this year.  When officially launched on Dec 31 1993, the world was a different place. The Mexican, Asian and Russian financial crises were still ahead, as was Argentina’s $100 billion debt default. The euro zone didn’t exist, let alone its debt crisis. Emerging debt was something only the most reckless investors dabbled in.

To mark the upcoming anniversary, JPMorgan – the owner of the indices – has published some interesting data that shows how the asset class has been transformed in the past two decades.  In 1993:
– The emerging debt universe was worth just $422 billion, the EMBI Global had 14 sovereign bonds in it with a market capitalisation of $112 billion.
– The average credit rating on the index was BB.
– Public debt-to-GDP was almost 100 percent back then for emerging markets, compared to 69 percent for developed markets.
– Forex reserves for EMBI countries stood at $116 billion
– Per capita annual GDP for index countries was less than $3000.
Now fast forward 20 years:
– The emerging debt universe is close to $10 trillion, there are 55 countries in the EMBIG index and the market capitalisation of the three main JPM indices has swollen to $2.7 trillion.
– The EMBIG has an average Baa3 credit rating (investment grade) with 62 percent of its market cap investment-grade rated.
– Public debt is now 34 percent of GDP on average in emerging markets, while developed world debt ratios have ballooned to 119 percent of GDP.
– Forex reserves for EMBIG members stand at $6.1 trillion
– Per capita annual income has risen 2.5 times to $7,373.

What next? The thinking at JPM seems to be that the day is not far off when a country “graduates” from the EMBI and joins the developed world.  To be excluded from the EMBI group of indices, a country’s gross national income must exceed the bank’s “index income ceiling” (calculated using World Bank methodology) for three years in a row or have a sovereign credit rating of A3/A- for three consecutive years.

Website owners drool at the prospect of TV ad dollars pouring into online video. The medium, which is growing rapidly and commands prices far above the sickly display ad market, also offers advertisers a chance to interact with viewers in a way they can’t do through TV.

To spur interest in new video ad formats, the Interactive Advertising Bureau on Monday announced five winners in a contest called “Rising Stars” that is intended to create standards for the emerging industry. The idea of the contest is also to facilitate large-scale video ad-buying through the creation of interactive formats that are “built to work on a range of video players across multiple devices.”

Here’s a short summary of the contest winners along with my quick thoughts:

Ad Control Bar: an interactive tool bar that sits in the ad, inviting viewers to interact (good idea — provided ad makers can come up with reasons for people to interact with an ad in the first place)

Filmstrip (shown at right): a “scrollable, multipanel, horizontal” ad unit that can be stuffed with ad content (is this content overload for someone already trying to watch a video?)

Extender: invites viewers to watch a longer version of the ad (not a bad idea but sounds like wishful thinking that viewers will use it)

TimeSync: a way to insert rich media at the right time in order to invite “interaction at the most appropriate moments”; a visual display of TimeSync shows an American Apparel ad appearing when hands clasp in a Bruno Mars video (this idea of context sensitive ads within a video is impressive but can it work in practice?)

FullScreen: a viewer who clicks will see screen taken over with “a full canvas of interaction possibilities, including more video, social and catalogs” (this sounds intrusive but could be valuable to an advertiser who gets it right).

The IAB only provided short descriptions of the winners so it’s unclear when (or if) these tools will get adopted by ad buyers. The potential seems enormous, however, as a recent report says online ad impressions grew 52 percent in the last quarter of 2012.

The contest winners included a broad spectrum of media and ad tech partners, including CBS Interactive, Microsoft, DoubleClick and Tremor Video.

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Google’s Matt Cutts discusses loss of PageRank from 301 redirects in the latest Webmaster Help video. Specifically, he answers the following user-submitted question:

Roughly what percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?

After providing some history about the context of this question, Cutts says, “I sent an email to the team who is in charge of this, and of course the implementation of this can very over time, but this has been roughly the same for quite a while. The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link. So they are utterly the same in terms of the amount of PageRank that dissipates going through a 301 versus through a link. So that doesn’t mean use a 301. It doesn’t mean use a link. It means use whatever is best for your purposes because you don’t get to hoard or conserve any more PageRank if you use a 301, and likewise it doesn’t hurt you if you use a 301.”

He is careful to point out that this could change in the future.

“That’s the current implementation,” he says. “We don’t promise it will be that way for all time and eternity, but I don’t see any reason why in particular it would change.”

Nokia is to be commended for sparing everyone the groans a mini-tablet announcement would have caused. Instead of launching itself into that quickly-flooding category, the company decided to focus on what it is good at: budget-priced phones.

At the Mobile World Congress event today, Nokia announced several new Windows Phone 8 Lumia devices, including the Lumia 720 and Lumia 520, as well as budget phones called the Nokia 105 and Nokia 301.

The Lumia smartphones are similar in design to Nokia’s premium Windows Phone 8 devices, the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 822, but feature less expensive hardware. The Lumia 720, for example, features a 1GHZ processor and 512MB of memory, while the Lumia 520 has a smaller 4-inch display. The 720 will sell for €249 and the 520 will sell for €139. Both will be out in March.

The really interesting portion of Nokia’s announcements was the reveal of very inexpensive feature phones the company hopes to push in developing nations such as China.

The Nokia 105 will sell for just €15 and offers the bare minimum of features. It offers support for phone calls and SMS, and also features an FM radio, flashlight, and 35 days of standby battery power. The Nokia 301 is a small step up and offers a camera and more feature phone perks such as social media apps. It will retail for €65.

By Stephen Eisenhammer

Mexico appears to be the new Latin American darling for investors. With Brazil stalling, Latin America’s second largest economy is back in, after nearly two decades out in the cold.

Rising transport costs and higher wages in China are tipping manufacturing competitiveness  back in favour of Mexico for the first time since the Asian giant joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Pena Nieto of the PRI party which governed continuously for 71 years until 2000, appears serious about wringing necessary changes to the state-run oil company – Pemex, the education system, and the monopolised telecoms sector.

JP Morgan said the improvements could call for an outlook upgrade from the ratings agencies in the near future.

“The approval of the labor reform last year was quickly followed by important first steps to overhaul the educational system, signalling the administration’s commitment to the reform agenda,” the bank said in a note.

A ratings upgrade from the current triple-B investment grade was probably further away, but certainly not out of the question, the note said.

“The prospects for reform progress in Mexico have not been better in over a decade and, if the authorities deliver meaningful fiscal and energy reforms, an upward revision seems very likely.”

The resurrection of Mexico’s manufacturing sector was singled out as a key factor by JP Morgan.

“Part of Mexico’s healthy recovery since mid 2009 likely reflects the improved competitiveness of Mexico’s manufacturing sector – which has outperformed its U.S. counterparts by nearly 6 percentage points since the mid-2009 trough.”

However, a number of severe challenges lie ahead, particularly on the fiscal side. The government takes an embarrassingly small 10 percent of GDP in non-oil tax returns and remains reliant on Pemex, a company starved of investment for decades whose production has been falling since 2004.

It will take some skillful manoeuvering from Pena Nieto to change this, especially from within a political party historically so interlinked with the system he is trying to change.

Mophie announced its second iPhone 5 battery case, the Juicepack Air for iPhone 5 on Monday. Since it’s been just two weeks since its first iPhone 5 battery case was released, one wonders what it could have possibly improved upon. In a word: power.

The main feature Mophie improved with the Juice Pack Air is the size of the embedded lithium battery. While the Helium comes packed with a 1500 mAh batery, the Air comes with a larger 1700 mAh battery. This is the difference of being able to fully charge the iPhone 5 to 100 percent with the new Air, or bring the iPhone 5 up to an 80 percent charge with the Helium.

So what do you give up to gain so much more battery life? Size. The Juice Pack Air’s dimensions are 2.60 x 5.54 x 0.63 inches and it weighs 2.68 ounces, compared to the Helium’s dimensions which are 2.49 x 5.49 x 0.59 inches at a weight of 2.44 ounces. It does not seem like much, but every little bit matters when you are trying to wrap your hands around the longer screen of the iPhone 5.

The one feature that is still missing from both the Air and the Helium when comapred to other Mophie battery pack cases, is the ability to sync via the attached cable. The Mophie Juicepack Air for the iPhone 4/4S will allow you to both charge and sync via the cable. It’s a feature that may be important to you if you still tether your iPhone to offload photos or sync to your music library on your computer.  Mophie claims that both the Juice Pack Helium and Air cases for the iPhone 5 will only allow you to sync wirelessly when charging, hardly a feature of the case, mind you.

The Juice Pack Air will cost you $99.95 compared to the Helium’s price tag of $79.95. The other main difference that the Air has compared to the Helium is color. The black version of the Mophie Juice Pack Air is available now and will ship in seven to 10 days. If, on the other hand, you are interested in either the red or white version, you will just have to wait until March 22.

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Today, TEDActive is teaming up with Skillshare, a platform that helps people learn anything from anyone, to create a free session of mini-lessons today — and you can watch live!

TEDYou: Skillshare Edition Talks
Monday, February 25, 1:30-3pm Pacific time (4:30-6pm Eastern)
Watch a lineup of great 6-minute tutorial talks that can inspire you to learn by doing. The talks are given by TEDActive attendees and inspired by Skillshare, an online platform founded by TED Fellow Michael Karnjanaprakorn. The mission of Skillshare: to help you learn anything from anyone. In this session, you’ll get a mini-tutorial in topics like navigating the healthcare system, reducing food waste, and thinking in new ways.

Bookmark this link now: tedactive.com or on a href=”https://www.facebook.com/pages/TEDActive/137096249545?sk=app_142371818162″>Facebook.

In what will no doubt be just one in a series of security-related news blasts coming out of the RSA Conference this week, Box is unveiling a new set of features for its business-class cloud storage and file-share offering on Monday.

One example of the new Box security features is a tool to allow account administrators to block individual users from sharing a document or documents or creating folders outside the company, said Whitney Bouck, GM of Enterprise for the Los Altos, Calif., company.

Also new from Box:

• Device pinning: Lets administrators authorize a specific device for Box, making it eligible to receive and view company documents.
• Integration with Samsung KNOX mobile device management: All of Samsung’s upcoming mobile devices will ship with KNOX MDM which enables them to run dual personas: One device will support both a work and a personal profile for a given user. The work persona integrates and runs with Box applications. If the owner leaves the company, just that data will be wiped clean.
• Support for CipherCloud and Code Green Networks data loss protection: Box already integrated with ProofPoint on DLP, now it adds CipherCloud and Code Green to its roster.
• Integration with GoodData: This tie-in gives customers a dashboard across multiple applications — now including Box.

Box is making a big effort to solve what some think is the unsolvable bring your own device (BYOD) problem. Companies want employees to use their devices of choice but also want to control what they do with those devices. IT’s nightmare scenario is an accountant emailing herself work documents to a Gmail or Hotmail account or uploading them to Dropbox where they disappear from IT view and control. That kind of stuff happens all the time and poses huge compliance and risk issues.

A crowded cloud file-share-and-sync field

Box competes with Accellion, Egnyte, OwnCloud and others that focus on cloud-based file sync, share and store,  but also with bigger, broader companies that are adding similar capabilities to their own roster — hello Salesforce.com, Microsoft et al.  Those are tough straits to navigate and Box relies on partnerships with big enterprise companies – IBM, Oracle etc.– to boost its credibility in large accounts. But many of those same companies have their own competitive offerings as well.

Box has raised a ton of venture capital but it remains unclear how many of its claimed 15 million users actually move beyond the freemium version. A recent article in Forbes raised some eyebrows when it reported that 3 percent of those 15 million are paying customers. A Box spokesman would not verify that number but did say the company sees 40 percent annual revenue growth.

At some point, Box will have to talk about profitability, not just revenue gains.

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According to a number of reports, beleaguered bookseller Barnes & Noble could be shuttering its Nook hardware division and focusing primarily on connecting its digital content to other tablets and readers. In a related report, B&N founder Leonard Riggio is considering a buy-out of the company’s consumer division and spinning out the Nook and collegiate sales divisions while maintaining the bookstores.

Sales numbers for Nook line look bad. By the end of the holiday, book sales dropped 10.9 percent over last year while Nook sales fell 12.6 percent. Both Amazon and B&N guard their sales numbers and instead crow about short-term percentage gains but little has been said about post-holiday sales barring a short mention last January. Although the Nook is arguably often the better product when compared to similar models from Amazon, neither company can stand up against the Apple/Samsung juggernaut.

An NYT report notes that B&N isn’t completely abandoning hardware but will focus more on partnerships with hardware manufacturers and software distributors like Microsoft.

For its part, B&N claims that there are no plans to discontinue the Nook products. This is all still obviously conjecture at this time and plans could change as partnerships are modified.

What will the ebook market look like without a third ereader? Not much different, sadly. The ereader of choice will always be a general purpose, 8-inch tablet and only a certain subset of customers will want an e-ink device. While the Nook’s Glowlight models were first to market and superior to Amazon’s offering in many ways, the Kindle is still an early adopter’s darling, a market that B&N never cracked.

When we commissioned the Ponemon Institute to examine the efficacy of emerging security technologies, it was on more than just a hunch that reality falls short of promised protections. As a longtime security vendor and purveyor of next-generation firewalls and intrusion prevention systems that make up the emerging security technology sector, we at Juniper wanted to understand how efficient these defenses have been against threats this past year.

It came as no surprise to us that over 4,700 global participating IT professionals and security practitioners told the Ponemon Institute despite current security investments, their cybersecurity posture is at a 4.7 on a scale where 10 is most secure. Further, 60 percent of organizations reported having one or more breaches in the last year.

Addressing cyber-attacks has become the stuff of Presidential State of the Union Addresses and World Economic Forum charters. Today’s hackers are organized, motivated and thanks to cloud and SDN, have virtually unlimited compute and attack surfaces with which to work.

When asked about their biggest security concern, 56 percent of firms identified the need to secure web traffic as top of list. When asked about the top three most serious attacks faced by organizations, respondents reiterated their concerns with outside-in attacks on web applications and data centers:

• 62 percent expressed concerns about web-based attacks
• 60 percent expressed concerns about distributed denial of service attacks as a top concern
• 47 percent specifically calling out SQL injection attempts

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Seth MacFarlane seemed an odd choice to host the Oscars for many, being the mastermind behind decidedly family-unfriendly shows like “Family Guy” and “American Dad”; he sure didn’t disappoint those who had their doubts last night when he began the show with a musical number devoted to whose boobs we’ve all seen and peppered the night’s comedy with sexist and homophobic jokes.

The web is buzzing today about the opening number–”We Saw Your Boobs”–and the subsequent reactions from some of the audience members he called out, including Naomi Watts and Charlize Theron. But the clips of both actresses shown in the audience appear to be from past awards shows; Watts is wearing a totally different dress and has her hair styled differently than she did the rest of the night (though the man sitting beside her does offer a pointed look at her chest when she’s on camera).

Still, even if the reactions from the actual actresses weren’t real, the song didn’t get a lot of love from Twitter users. Some are pointing out today that several of the scenes MacFarlane references were rape scenes and say his use of them as comedy was disrespectful.

The boobs song at the Oscars is… well, puerile doesn’t quite cover it. Offensive? Dumb? Very, very unlikeable @sethmacfarlane.

— fleetstreetfox (@fleetstreetfox) February 25, 2013

Oh MAN rt @airialclark: 4 of the examples in @sethmacfarlane “We Saw Your Boobs” song were rape scenes.

— Jenny Colgan (@jennycolgan) February 25, 2013

Boobs song confirms everything I thought about Seth MacFarlane. #notimpressed #oscars

— Elizabeth Holmes (@EHolmesWSJ) February 25, 2013

The #boobs song is terrible. So is @sethmacfarlane. Terrible choice for a host. Not so family friendly. No morals, America.

— Megan (@ShoeKickChamp) February 25, 2013

Seth Macfarlane classing up the #Oscars with a song called “We Saw Your Boobs.”

— N&O TV Blog (@WarmTV) February 25, 2013

Apple has about 400 stores in 14 countries, and they are at peak traffic — 370 million people walked through their doors last year.  But as the data below shows, while Apple is selling more iPhones, iPads and Macs than ever, it’s having a hard time keeping up on the retail store front. Horace Dediu at Asymco pulled together the data in a chart that shows how Apple isn’t building new stores fast enough relative to its expanding sales.

Apple’s net sales have taken off since the dawning of the iPhone era. New store ribbon cuttings were at their highest in 2008 — 47 opened that year — when net sales were at about $10 billion. But since then, Apple’s net sales per year have reached $40 billion and store openings haven’t been opening at the same rate.

Also during that time, Apple’s revenue from sales in its own stores is compared to its revenues from third-party retail partners have been shrinking: Asymco notes that five years ago its own retail revenue was about $4.7 billion, or about 17 percent, while last year its $19.1 billion in retail revenue represented 12 percent.

Apple Stores are not just a place to sell things, of course. They’re customer service counters, customer education classrooms and show rooms for Apple style and culture. And they’re continuing to bring more customers into Apple’s ranks. But its expanding sales show that it needs more stores.

One of the things CEO Tim Cook mentioned as a priority in 2013 for Apple is that it will be investing “like crazy” in retail, specifically international retail stores in new countries. So far, however, it looks as though he’ll be doing that all without someone dedicated to guiding the retail ship.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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