Category: News

Over a year ago, fifteen major companies joined forces to create DMARC, a “technical working group” to develop antiphishing standards. The companies were: Google, Facebook, LinkedIn AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal (eBay), Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and Trusted Domain Project.

Today, Twitter announced that it is using the DMARC technology with its emails, making it less likely that users will see any email pretneding to be from a Twitter.com address.

“We send out lots of emails every day to our users letting them know what’s happening on Twitter. But there’s no shortage of bad actors sending emails that appear to come from a Twitter.com address in order to trick you into giving away key details about your Twitter account, or other personal information, commonly called ‘phishing’,” said Twitter Postmaster Josh Aberant.

“Without getting too technical, DMARC solves a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols,” he said. “It builds on established authentication protocols (DKIM and SPF) to give email providers a way to block email from forged domains popping up in inboxes. And that in turn lessens the risk users face of mistakenly giving away personal information.”

Twitter began using DMARC earlier this month. AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook and Yahoo Mail all take advantage of the technology.

Last month, a leaked video teased that Google was working on something called Chromebook Pixel. It was reportedly a high-powered Chromebook with a 2560×1700 display that would rival Apple’s own retina display MacBooks. Now Google has made it officially known that the Chromebook Pixel is a reality.

The Chromebook Pixel is similar to what we saw last month in the leaked video. The screen is a 12.85-inch touch display with a resolution of 2560×1700. That’s a whopping 239 ppi, or 4.3 million pixels. Other hardware specs include an Intel Core i5 processor clocked at 1.8GHz, integrated Intel HD Graphics, 4GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD.

Another rumor regarding the Pixel that’s been confirmed by Google is that the laptop will come in two flavors. The basic Pixel will feature Wi-Fi connectivity only, while the other features LTE connectivity. The LTE connection allows for 100MB/month through Verizon.

Of course, some may be concerned about the paltry 32GB SSD storage on the Pixel, but Google has your back with its usual offer of extra storage via Google Drive. Those who purchase the Chromebook Pixel will get a terabyte of storage in the cloud for everything from videos and music to pictures and documents.

The Wi-Fi Chromebook Pixel is available starting today in the Google Play store, and will be on Best Buy’s Web site soon. It will retail for $1,299. Preorders will start shipping out next week. The LTE Chromebook Pixel will retail for $1,449 and ship out in April.

Three sisters were raped, killed, and dumped in a well in India on Valentine’s Day; their bodies were found two days after their grandfather reported that they hadn’t returned home from school.

The girls, aged between five and eleven years old, are the latest victims in a wave of sexual violence to sweep India. After the brutal rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi, more and more citizens are speaking out against the violence aimed at women and girls there. After the sisters were found, thousands of people from Murmadi, Lakhani reportedly blocked the highway in a protest, demanding justice be done.

The family of the girls say that the Police Inspector, Prakash Munde, was partially to blame for a delay in a search for the girls; he has since been suspended. The government has awarded the children’s mother a financial compensation, but she refused, saying instead she wanted them to use it to find the murderers.

“When my granddaughters did not return home on February 14, we searched around and at 9 p.m., we went to the Lakhani police station to lodge a complaint. But our complaint was registered only at 1.30 am next day,” the girls’ grandfather–who helped raise them–said.

Police have organized several investigation teams for the case and, as of this week, had three suspects in custody for interrogation. But, they say, that doesn’t mean the men are the suspects. They are also looking at people who knew the family, saying they suspect the girls knew their killers.

Eddie the geriatric sea otter, other than being really cute, also likes to play a bit of basketball. The Oregon Zoo had to find some way to get Eddie to work those arthritic elbows, and they thought what better way than with a little bit of b-ball.

You won’t see Eddie hooping during exhibits. This is just for medical purposes. But thanks to the power of the internet, you can watch this little guy do something that I’ve wished I could do since I was six years old: Slam dunk a basketball.

[Oregon Zoo]

Skyera, the startup that is bringing the cost of Flash-based storage down by using consumer-grade chips, said it has closed $51.6 million in Series B financing led by Dell Ventures. The deal, announced on Thursday, included participation from other strategic investors and is Skyera’s second round.

It’s also a huge amount of money, but Skyera is riding a wave of interest in solid state storage, which is both faster and consumes less power than traditional hard drives. But Flash-based SSDs are also more expensive than hard drives on a per gigabyte basis — which has limited their use to places where companies can’t afford not to pay for faster performance.

As my colleague Barb Darrow noted in a profile on Skyera last year, the company brags that it can achieve a $3 per GB cost which is still pricier than a hard drive but less than what Fusion-io recently announced with its latest NAND flash card product. Fusion said it could achieve per GB prices of around $3.89. From Barb’s profile:

To get to cheap flash enterprise storage, Skyera uses inexpensive Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash, but found a way to do it to prolong the lifespan of the media. It is able to use high-density sub-20-nm MLC flash because its controller dynamically adjusts as the medium ages to reduce damage over time.

The funding will be used to integrate next-generation flash memory chips produced at 20 nanometers into Skyera’s product as well as boost sales.

As for Dell, which is setting itself up to be the provider of hardware for webscale and cloud vendors with its DCS division, investing in SSDs makes absolute sense, especially if there are ways it can integrate Skyera’s technology more deeply in its gear. For Skyera, having Dell as an investor might help it build out a lucrative sales channel.

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The rumors were true! Google developed a touchscreen Chromebook for release this year. Like today! No one should misunderstand what the computer means competitively. Already, four Microsoft Windows partners produce Chromebooks — Acer, HP, Lenovo and Samsung. Chromebook Pixel promises to do for the Chrome OS platform what Nexus devices did for Android smartphones and tablets: Establish a reference design for hardware partners and provide developers base system to develop apps for the platform. But it’s also a competitive move against PCs running OS X or Windows and Google pushing Chrome OS into the premium notebook market.

Today Google unveiled Chromebook Pixel, following weeks of rumors. The company also extended a vision for Chrome OS. Bottom line: Commitment to the operating system is strong. The search and information giant briefed journalists in different cities. I had to turn down an invite to the San Francisco briefing because of family matters. Do I feel left out! But, hey.

The computer is available now for order from Google Play — and you’ll pay, too. This isn’t the value-system touted in “For Everyone” marketing. Chromebook Pixel is for anyone willing to spend $1,299 or $1,449. Orders made right now ship in three to five days for the lower-cost model, 6 to 7 weeks for the other.

Specs: 12.85-inch touchscreen, 2560 x 1700 resolution, 239 pixels per inch, 3:2 aspect ratio; 400-nit brightness; 1.8GHz Core i5 processor; Intel HD graphics 4000; 4GB DDR3 RAM; 32GB or 64GB of storage; HD WebCam; backlit keyboard; dual-band WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n 2×2; 4G LTE (on one model); Bluetooth 3.0; mini-display port; two USB ports; Chrome OS Measures: 297.7 x 224.6 x 16.2 mm. Weighs: 1.52 kg (3.35 pounds. Cost: $1,299 (32GB WiFi); $1,449 (64GB WiFi/4G LTE). 1TB Google Drive storage is included free, for three years.

Crazy Concept

Let’s step back and look at the larger context. The concept is crazy. Who launches a new PC operating system and succeeds (look for the answer in the next subhead)? Suddenly Chrome OS poses a credible threat to Windows and OS X. The four OEM partners is a sign, as is the success of Google’s “For Everyone” holiday campaign for Chromebooks.

There’s a concept called “six degrees of separation”, which Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy proposed in the 1929 short story “Chains”. No two people are separated by more than five intermediaries, which works out to six degrees of separation. If I ask any four people in my social circles if they have Chromebook, at least one answers yes.

Google is on the fast-track. In less time than Microsoft developed and released Windows 8, Google released the first Chromebook prototypes (December 2010), the first commercial models went on sale (June 2011), second-generation Chromebooks launched (May 2012), new-gen ARM model debuted (October 2012) and two of the three largest PC OEMs started selling Chromebooks (January-February 2013). Meanwhile, since October, two major Chrome OS updates released — yeah, months, not the years from Apple or Microsoft.

Google’s big play is value. OEMs pay nothing to license Chrome OS and consumers pay much less for the computers. I could buy four Samsung Series 3 ARM-based Chromebooks for the price of one MacBook Air and get system of similar size, weight and ergonomics. See yesterday’s post “Why I love Chromebook“, as reference.

Browser OS

Chrome OS success so far is a water-shed development that Microsoft feared long ago. In May 2011 post “Chrome OS: The ghost of Netscape rises go haunt Microsoft“, I explained how Google’s operating system fulfills ambitions of the original, commercial developer. During the late 199os, Microsoft integrated Internet Explorer into Windows partly to prevent Netscape from creating, in the browser, a rival platform for applications development. Google has created the rival platform Netscape product managers envisioned 17 years ago. The browser is the operating system — or the front end running on top of Linux.

In June 2007, I wrote “Why Google Succeeds” — in parts one and two — for Microsoft Watch; the content remains hugely relevant six years later. “Unchecked, Google is on course to be the next hugely successful computing platform”, I wrote.

Netscape wasn’t really Microsoft’s competitive problem in the late 1990s but the web itself. Already, by the mid Noughties many developers had made the web priority over Windows. Where do you think cloud computing comes from? “Developer interest in the Web platform — and the promise of information access anytime, anywhere and on anything — shifts standards away from Microsoft’s dominant platforms”, I explained six years ago. Google rode the web platform’s coattails, pushing adopted or open standards along the way.

Smartphone and tablet platforms shift applications development, but ultimately the web remains, if for nothing else than the browser engine being used in many applications.

Chrome OS success to date is contrary-thinking. The old axiom is this: no one launches a new PC operating system and succeeds, because:

• There aren’t enough applications
• Switching costs are too high, particularly for businesses
• The new thing doesn’t fit in with what people already have

The first of these is typically the most difficult. Operating systems like BeOS failed if for no other reason than apps and the typical chicken-egg scenario. Which comes first? Platforms need applications to succeed, but developers have little incentive to create them if there is little adoption. If there are no apps, people don’t adopt the platform.

Google has apps. Lots of them, because of the browser. Chrome OS benefits from more than two decades of browser development. Additionally, Google had the foresight to launch the Chrome Web Store nearly three years ago. In May 2010, I gave five reasons for the move. The first: “Google is launching a new operating system”.

Chrome web apps run in the browser or Google OS. So anyone using Chrome can carry them to Chrome OS. Google also provides a tightly-integrated suite of cloud services, such as Apps and Gmail, that cover categories businesses already use. Switching is as easy as logging into a Google account on a new PC. Chrome OS fits because the browser is the most familiar motif people use every day.

Contextual Computing

Some people may wonder why Google invests so much in a laptop, when smartphones and tablets are the future of computing. There is no post-PC era. That’s marketing propaganda from the mouth of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. The PC’s role changes, but not disappear. The personal computer goes from being the device hub to one of many connected to the cloud. What matters more is context, how your digital lifestyle moves from device to device adapting differently to your needs in various situations.

The cloud is all about context. Content follows users everywhere, independent of device. Your music is available anytime, anywhere, on anything. On the airplane, there is no HDTV, but you want to watch a movie. So you start on a tablet and finish on the big screen at home. The content remains the same, but devices and locations change, as does the context.

Google product and services are highly contextual. Context is in the corporate DNA. Overture, which Yahoo acquired in 2003, invented the business model Google perfected, selling keywords and ads around search. Hell, it’s called contextual advertising — for a reason.

The search and information giant started making key contextual cloud investments in the late Noughties, with 2008 releases Android (September/October) and Chrome (December) being among the most important platforms. Then there is Chrome OS.

In 2011 and 2012, Google starred to bring together a larger package of contextually-oriented offerings alongside Google+ and Search, plus your World. These services are all about context, providing what you want where you need it. Google offers many services, but search, alongside these nine — Apps; Drive, Gmail; Google Now; Google+; Maps; Search, plus your World; Talk; YouTube — forms the current contextual platform that culminates in one service.

Three platforms (Android, Chrome and Chrome OS) are the contextual gateways to Google products and services and those from its development and advertising partners. Chrome on OS X and Windows is where Google citizens live because they have to. Chrome OS is their country, where they have full and easy access to all contextual services.

Touch Me

As part of its contextual push, Google advances concepts around natural user interfaces — that make you more part of the UI. Touch is among the most important, and there are good reasons why Apple and Microsoft support touch in their operating systems.

Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, is an expert in user experiences. He says that a good natural user interface must address four human skill sets:

• Motor sensory skills
• Cognitive skills
• Social skill
• Emotional skills

Stated differently, good natural user interfaces answer the question: “How do people function?”

Human beings are tool users who experience and manipulate the world through five senses. While the eyes are the gateway, they are passive instruments. Hands and fingers are more important because they are active — they’re how people tactilely manipulate the world around them. People examine objects they desire as much with their hands as their eyes. Watch how people interact with items for sale — first people look, and then they touch.

The keyboard is a particularly unnatural construct, in which organization is based on the number of times letters are likely to be used. The mouse is more natural than the keyboard, because of the hand and finger-clicking movement. But the mouse is still a makeshift extension of the human being.

The finger and touch are more natural, because they extend you. Same goes for voice, when used to command, which many NUIs allow. Good user interfaces build on the familiar — and there is nothing more familiar than me, myself and I. See, say, hear and touch.

The point: Computing devices that capture the senses are seemingly living things with some human-like qualities. Chromebook is dead without touch.

If you use Google Compute Engine or Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, or BigQuery —  there are new support options at your disposal.

Google is offering a new tiered structure that includes a basic free level offering online documentation, forums and billing support; a Silver tier that adds best practices, email access to the support team for $150 per month; and a Gold level which layers 24X7 phone support and app development or architecture consultation atop all the rest starting at $400 per month. And then there’s the super-duper Platinum support that Google won’t even tell you about on its blog — you have to call in for details.

Before now, “premier” users of the Google App Engine platform as a service had access to advanced support, but users of the other products had to tap Google Groups and Stack Overflow for support. That sort of informal structure is not copacetic with most IT buyers.

The new options, announced on the Google Enterprise Blog Thursday, show that Amazon isn’t the only big cloud provider that’s trying to lure business customers into the fold. While Amazon Web Services (AWS)  is by far the leader in public cloud services, Google is one of a handful of vendors that even skeptics think can provide comparable compute and storage scale. The fact that third-party cloud providers like Cloudscaling — are adding support for Google Compute Engine APIs in addition to Amazon’s also shows that folks are looking for an alternative — or at least a backup — to AWS.

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A new study by ocean conservation group Oceana has shown that one-third of the seafood sold in the U.S. could be mislabeled. Many of the mislabeled sea food products were a different type of fish than what was put on the label.

“The kind of mislabeling we’re talking about in this study is substituting one species of fish for the type that you ordered.” said Kimberly Warner, author of the report and a senior scientist at Oceana. “Say you ordered red snapper but you got a different type of snapper, or even another completely different species such as tilapia or rockfish.”

The study looked at 1,215 seafood samples from 674 different retail locations in 21 different states during the years 2010 to 2012. Of those samples, around 33% would be considered mislabeled by us. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines. Over 50% of the seafood tested from Southern California was found to be mislabeled.

Seafood samples labeled as snapper and tuna were the most likely types to be mislabeled. Of the 120 samples of snapper tested, 113 of them (87%) were found to be another type of fish.

In light of their findings, Oceana has called for a transparent national tracking system for seafood that tracks fish from boats all the way to consumers. It has also called on federal and state governments to ramp up inspections and enforcement of labeling violations.

Like Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) is in a period of transition. Both companies cut their teeth in software and grew to lead their respective industries, but then they came to a realization: unless a company controls all aspects of the user experience — software and hardware — a product will never take shape in the manner they intended. On Microsoft’s end, the company is changing that with its Surface lineup. Google, on the other hand, bought Motorola for $12.5 billion.

Continue reading…

As you might guess the week before Mobile World Congress, there’s a lot of mobile chip news coming out, but on Thursday Qualcomm released a doozey. It unveiled a new radio chip that the silicon vendor claims can support all of the world’s LTE bands in a single device, helping to overcome the fragmentation problems that plague 4G device makers.

Qualcomm’s baseband chips and integrated applications processors have long supported all cellular technologies and bands, but they’ve never been able to produce a truely global phone. That’s because the other hardware components of the phone have never supported the same breadth of frequencies. Consequently, LTE devices have always been region-specific. Even Apple had to can its usual of strategy of producing a single global device and design three different variants of the iPhone 5.

But Qualcomm’s new front-end chip, called the RF360, can supposedly support up to 40 LTE bands, both the time division and frequency division variants of LTE and all legacy 3G and 2G technologies to boot. Qualcomm created a 3D chip that utilizes a separate sophisticated antenna tuner that can latch onto any of 40 LTE frequencies between 600 MHz and 2.7 GHz – pretty much the entire range of current 4G spectrum.

This technology will be a key element in creating the future universal LTE phone, but — before you get too excited — it’s not the only necessary element. Other components in the RF chain such as the antenna will need to catch up before a device could feasible work on every LTE network in the world. Smart antenna makers like SkyCross and Ethertronics have designed antennas that can support a dozen bands or so, but they’re not quite ready for 40.

But Qualcomm EVP and co-president of mobile and computing technologies Murthy Renduchintala said that the RF360 would allow device makers to make far fewer variants of their phones. In order to cover all of the world’s LTE networks, a vendor is faced with the prospect of designing as many as 10 different devices. The capabilities of RF360 could cut that number down to as few as three, he said.

“There will always be more problems to solve,” Renduchintala said an interview with GigaOM. “What we’ve done here is remove one of the most enormous obstacles.”

One of the problems this technology could overcome is the 4G fragmentation problem that’s already emerging in the U.S. All four of major operators are deploying LTE on different frequencies, while the rural and many regional operators are off on their lonesome in a neglected portion of the 700 MHz band. Clearwire isn’t just launching LTE on it’s own 2.5 GHz band, it’s the only U.S. carrier using TD-LTE. Maybe the RF360 can’t yet produce a global 4G phone, but it could produce a universal phone for the U.S. — and maybe ensure that smaller operators aren’t left out of the 4G revolution.

Also, Apple could conceivably use the technology to combine all of its iPhone 5 variants into a single device, but it still wouldn’t have a universal iPhone. Apple’s three iPhone models still leave out a good deal of the world’s current LTE frequencies, and with current technology it couldn’t cram 30 or 40 bands into a single device.

But wait, there’s more! Qualcomm has also introduced its own envelope tracking technology into the module, which will help sate LTE device’s notorious hunger for power. Envelope tracking helps control the enormous energy spikes inherent in LTE, reducing device power consumption by as much as 30 percent. Other silicon vendors like Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor have announced support for envelope tracking in their new super-chips, but support doesn’t necessarily equate inclusion. Qualcomm developed its technology in-house and is embedding envelope trackers directly into its future RF products.

Renduchintala said the module has already begun sampling and is in the hands of phone manufacturers. The first commercial devices with the new capabilities should start appearing in the latter half of the year.

This post was updated at 12:05 PM, Thursday, with new information on the implications of the technology for the iPhone.

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OTI Greentech Group AG said it raised about $4.4 million in a deal led by Wermuth Asset Management’s Green Gateway Fund, also known as the Europe Tatarstan Cleantech Fund. The funding is the first tranche in a commitment that will grow to about $7.7 million. The second tranche is expected later in 2013.

PRES RELEASE

OTI Greentech successfully completes expansion funding with Green Gateway Fund as lead investor

§  OTI Greentech raises c. CHF 4 million (EUR 3.4 million) for long-term expansion
§  Green Gateway Fund has committed total funding of CHF 7.2 million (EUR 6 million), second tranche planned to invest later this year
§  Funds will be used to expand business mainly in North America, the Middle East and Russia
§  Green Gateway to appoint a Non-Executive Director to the OTI Greentech Board of Directors

Zug, Frankfurt am Main, 21 February 2013. OTI Greentech Group AG, a leading provider of sustainable cleantech solutions successfully closed a round of expansion financing, raising a total of CHF 4 million (EUR 3.3 million). The funding was led by Wermuth Asset Management’s Green Gateway Fund, which invests in best-in-class energy and resource efficiency growth companies throughout Europe. The funding marks a solid base for the long-term expansion plans of the company. In total, the financial commitment of Green Gateway Fund is CHF 7.2 million. The second tranche is expected in 2013

With the cleaning of tanks and ships, the remediation of oil-contaminated land or the separation and recycling of oil from waste streams, OTI Greentech covers a broad range of next generation applications for oil-related contamination and waste. OTI Greentech’s awarded and patented EcoSOLUT™ products have been used by various international shipping, oil service and waste management companies. EcoSOLUT™ products are high-performance “green” chemicals, which reduce cleaning cycles and meet more advanced health, safety and environmental standards than traditional chemicals used in the industry. Demand for the products has increased significantly, requiring the company to expand its international distribution network as a matter of priority. The funds will be used to expand the business mainly in North America, the Middle East and Russia and to strengthen the company’s intellectual property portfolio.

“We have seen strong interest from international investors in general. Completing the expansion funding was an important milestone for OTI Greentech. We are redefining standards in the industry in regards to efficiency, safety and sustainability. In the Oil and Energy sector our products show unique characteristics in treating waste streams from oil production, particularly with unconventional oil reservoirs such as oil sands and heavy oil”, stated Stephan Rind, President of OTI Greentech AG. “We are also pleased by our new Lead Investor, the Green Gateway Fund. The fund’s principals have vast experience in the energy and resource efficiency sector and a powerful network to support our business growth.” The Green Gateway Fund will appoint one non-executive member to the Board of Directors of OTI Greentech Group.

Green Gateway Fund Partner Casper Heijsteeg said: “We are delighted to have completed our investment in OTI Greentech. We see substantial potential for the company’s continued growth, and we believe we can support its expansion by investing new capital into the business, as well as by leveraging our own expertise and networks in this field and helping the company to access new growth markets, including Russia.”

Mountain Partners AG advised OTI Greentech in respect of this funding round.

About OTI Greentech AG

OTI Greentech is an internationally leading cleantech engineering group based in Switzerland. The company provides environmentally friendly solutions and a patented technology for cleaning, recovery and disposal of oil in a wide variety of applications. This includes the cleaning of tanks, ships and industrial machinery, oil recovery from sludge, soil remediation and the processing and extraction of oil from conventional and unconventional deposits.

About the Green Gateway Fund

The Green Gateway Fund was launched in the presence of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russia’s then President Dmitry Medvedev as the Europe Tatarstan Cleantech Fund (“ETCF LP”). The aim of the Green Gateway Fund is to invest in international best-in-class energy and resource efficiency growth companies, with an additional unique selling point of actively helping portfolio companies to access the fast-growing Russian and CIS markets through the gateway of Tatarstan, where fund adviser Wermuth Asset Management has more than a decade of successful experience investing and doing business. The fund is operational, has hard commitments of €110m and is targeting a final closing size of €250m.

About Wermuth Asset Management

Wermuth Asset Management GmbH, founded in the late 1990’s, is a German family investment firm that acts as an adviser on alternative and sustainable investments in Europe. WAM headquarters are located in Mainz, Germany with additional offices in Amsterdam, Moscow and Wiesbaden. WAM is the exclusive investment adviser to several funds and SPVs whose investors include high net worth individuals, family offices, funds of funds, banks, pension funds, endowments and sovereign wealth funds. WAM has attracted over $1bn into the Russian economy since it began operating in the region.

The post OTI Greentech Raises About $4.4M From Green Gateway Fund appeared first on peHUB.

How many times have you seen an incentive system produce the exact opposite of the desired behavior? Why is that? And why can’t organizations see, let alone fix, the problem?

For example, I (Srikanth) went to visit a client in an Asian city. I stayed in a hotel in the middle of the city, and had to meet the client at his factory location that was quite far away. The client suggested that I catch the bus and gave me instructions. I went to the bus stop and waited. Several buses came close to the stop, but they all whizzed by without stopping. It wasn’t that the buses were full. In fact there were plenty of empty seats. After half a dozen buses came tantalizingly close but without stopping to pick up passengers, I finally caught a cab. Upon my later than planned arrival at the factory, I apologized to the client and told him the cause for my delay. The client laughed and said, “The driver’s bonus depends on whether or not he reaches his destination on time. So during peak traffic when they find they are running behind, they don’t bother picking up passengers!”

Here was the height of insanity — an incentive system that succeeded only in defeating its original purpose. At peak time, exactly when more passengers need to be picked up, it was better for the driver to go empty. Frustrated citizens, lost revenue and increased costs all thanks to the incentive system and the driver’s desire to maximize his individual gain. Further, every “man on the street” seemed to know the problem, but not the organization that ran the buses. Or, equally baffling, they knew it and chose to ignore it.

Ever since this incident, we have become more attuned to seeing the misalignment between what people do (reach destination on time) and their underlying purpose (carry passengers to their destination). It turns out this misalignment is far more wide spread than we realized:

• Bankers maximize their bonuses and forget about the health and integrity of the financial system;
• Call center employees hurry you up or transfer you so they can meet their quota of number of calls per hour;
• Sales people maximize their commissions and forget about what best meets client needs (they “upsell,” “supersize,” or promote what has the best commission potential), or what is best aligned with firm capabilities (they sell what doesn’t quite yet exist, as has been the case with many software firms). And when it is the “C” level executive incentivized to maximize their bonus and options, the result is “channel stuffing” — overloading retailers with goods just prior to the end of reporting periods, as was the case with Sara Lee;
• Wherever production is incentivized on units produced or unit costs, organizations produce in bigger batches. As a result, there is more inventory, more cash tied up in inventory and, at the same time, there is less flexibility to cope with changing demand.

If you look around, you will realize that what we have listed here is but a tip of the iceberg; we are sure you will start noticing misalignments all around, and at every level. Steve Kerr, in one of the most popular academic articles ever published, mentions several such instances of improper incentives .

Why are organizations oblivious to these frustrating, and costly, mismatches?

Awareness of the problem can help organizations take the next step — effective measures to correct it. Once management teams understand the behaviors that are driven by their measurement and reward systems, they should calibrate to make sure they are incentivizing exactly the behaviors they want from their people. They should remind managers and employees alike of what should be measured and rewarded. They should also be on alert and watch for undesirable behaviors and trace back its connection with reward systems.

But even the best designed incentive systems can only go so far. In the final analysis, it is essential that leaders have a strong inner compass to do the right thing in spite of measurement and incentive systems. Purpose has to shine through loud and clear. Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH) is one such organization where purpose shines through in everything they do: “affordable, quality cardiac care for the masses.” In spite of the fact that only 40% of the patients pay the full fee and they are cheaper than comparable Indian hospitals by at least 50% (and much cheaper by international standards), they are a profitable organization. How did they do it? Because they started with the question, “How can we provide quality, affordable care to the masses?“; not with, “How do we maximize stockholder returns by designing the right incentives?“. That led them to a strategy that involved attracting paying patients with its reputation for high quality and, at the same time, having a relentless focus on lowering costs; and to use the surplus gained from the paying patients to subsidize the rest. With the large volume of surgeries performed and with specialization of surgeons, their productivity was high and the quality outcomes were world class, but at a fraction of the cost. There are no incentives based on volume or revenue for the surgeons or for the employees. Purpose was the driver. Profits were the enabler of their dreams.

Clearly, there are no easy answers. On the one hand, good measurement systems are needed to track progress, and incentive systems are needed to motivate and align people. On the other hand, it is far more important to stay true to the purpose. We believe the pendulum has swung too far one way, and that balance needs to be restored.

Here’s a roundup of recent headlines from the data center industry around the world:

Level 3 selected to expand Rocket Internet to Brazil.  Level 3 Communications (LVLT) announced Rocket Internet, a global e-commerce website developer headquartered in Germany, is expanding its reach in Brazil by using Level 3′s hosting and network services for its servers. “We chose Level 3 because of its recognized position in the e-commerce market and the amount of value-added services it provides,” said Fabricio Pettena, CIO at Rocket Brazil. “Our relationship with Level 3 already exists in Europe and now expands to one of the most promising e-commerce markets in South America.” Level 3 will provide hosting services for Rocket’s websites at its data center located in Cotia, Sao Paulo. Operating in Brazil since 2011, Rocket Internet develops retail websites with a focus on sportswear, children’s products, handicrafts and home goods.

Alcatel-Lucent to boost network in Belgium.  Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and Belgium service provider Belgacom announced plans to expand its network infrastructure as it continues to address the exponential growth in bandwidth demand driven by demand from customers, businesses, data centers and content platforms. To meet current and future bandwidth needs Belgacom will deploy Alcatel-Lucent’s Extensible Routing System (XRS). The 7950 XRS allows Belgacom to support the rapid adoption of ‘cloud’ applications, the explosion in video traffic and the widespread use of smartphones and tablets and prepares the core of their network for the next decade of growth. “The XRS is a truly groundbreaking innovation, capable of reinventing the very heart of the Internet,” said Luis Martinez Amago, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s EMEA region. “It will benefit Belgacom significantly in both meeting the needs of home and institutional customers, and in lowering the operational cost of running an IP network, while at the same time reinforcing our long-term relationship and cooperation in bringing innovations to market that improve the experience of consumers.”

Juniper selected by Finland mobile services provider. Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced Elisa, a leading mobile services provider in Finland, has deployed Juniper Networks MobileNext mobile packet core solution to support the future data growth in its network. Elisa is expecting a significant growth in data traffic primarily driven by the increased use of LTE-enabled mobile devices. “Juniper’s MobileNext solution has enabled Elisa to not only meet the demands of today’s highly mobile world but also prepares us for the next generation of “anytime, anywhere” services,” said Timo Katajisto, executive vice president, Production, Elisa. ”We methodically selected Juniper for our LTE expansion because they clearly understand mobile network innovation, and will deliver strategic value as our business partner rather than just a supplier.” Built on a foundation of MX Series Universal Edge Routers Elisa’s deployment uses the Juniper MobileNext solution to focus on service-specific performance and scalability with resilient security capabilities.

Google today announced Chromebook Pixel, its next-generation cloud computer that is powered by an Intel Core i5 processor and comes ready to connect to Verizon’s LTE network is based on its Chrome OS. It will ship in about three months. The device is going to cost $1,499 with LTE and $1,299 with just Wi-Fi and it is available to order on Google Play today and from Best Buy tomorrow morning. The Wi-Fi version will be available in the U.K. as well.

The Mountain View, Calif-based company has designed and built this new machine to carefully integrate the software, its web services and the hardware in a seamless manner. “About two years ago, we decided to rethink the laptop,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Google Chrome. The big idea: re-imagine the laptop for cloud services.

For instance, since the web-oriented machine’s primary task is to use the web, the size of the screen has been modified from 16:9 size to 3:2, a development that is going to delight the fans of classic IBM ThinkPad. The device’s screen is reminiscent of Apple’s Retina display and is powered by the Intel Core i5 processor and uses SSD flash. It delivers about five hours of battery time. The Wi-Fi version has 32 GB of flash, and the LTE version has 64 GB of flash as storage. ”We think our ecosystem will respond with new devices that use touch and Chrome OS,” said Pichai.

“It brings best of Google together — everything is built right in,” said Pichai. Gmail, the Chrome browser and other Google apps are integrated into this device.The device also has built-in QuickOffice, a mobile productivity suite Google acquired in 2012. And the big news: Google Drive will come with 1 TB of storage space. Why? Photos, of course.

If you have photos on an SD card, then the device will automatically find and upload them to Google Plus Photos, a somewhat creepy and evil tactic by Google to goose its Google Plus un-social network. Of course you can share those photos via Google Plus and other Google services — nevermind the fact that we like to use Twitter and Facebook and Instagram to share. Pichai said that services such as Twitter and Facebook can write to their hardware APIs to do seamless uploads.

“Web hasn’t had touch and high-resolution screens before,” said Pichai. He argued that opens up whole different opportunities for developers. It goes without saying that the emergence of the iPad has changed our expectations of how we interact and consume information. The new Chromebook Pixel is a tip of the hat to that new reality of today’s computing environment. “In the future all laptops will have touch built into them,” Pichai said.

In a quick hands-on, the device met the claims made by Pichai and his team. The build quality is top notch, reminiscent of Macbook Pros. The 3.3-pound device has a great keyboard and the screen is indeed a good rival to the Retina display. The device is really speedy, but it is the network speeds that will define how one experiences the Chromebook Pixel.

I surfed through a few websites — and clicked on a lot of ads, unintentionally. I used Google Maps and Google Photos and used touch to experience them. I am guessing that there is a growing number of people who want touch on their laptops — I simply use the iPad for all things cloud.

That said, I have some reservations about the device and its positioning. It is hard to pay $1,299 for a device when I can get a better-equipped MacBook Air, which despite its age is a lot more flexible and expandable. Pichai said that he wanted to focus on the high end of the market because they want power users, early adopters and developers to embrace this platform.

A good idea in theory — except that for developers to develop on this platform, Google needs scale for Chromebook Pixel and that means it needs a whole lot of machines in the hands of people. A Wall Street Journal report from Wednesday indicated that Google sold a mere 100,000 of these devices in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Pichai and I argued a bit about the pricing strategy: my belief is that they need to sell a lot more devices so the price has to be much much lower. Pichai argues that one needs to be able to open our mind to the possibilities of a cloud-based machine. He said that one shouldn’t look at the 32 GB of storage, but instead focus on the terabyte of storage space that comes as part of Google Drive.

“The device is for a segment committed to living to the cloud, and who really want a good, high-end laptop, and we believe we have built the best laptop for that experience,” he added.

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Remember the heady days of 2012, when analysts would issue price targets in above $1,111 on Apple (AAPL) shares and everybody took them seriously? Well those days may be gone for Apple, but Business Insider notes that Street analysts have picked a new golden goose to bless (or curse) with sky-high price targets: Google (GOOG). CLSA was the first to get in on the action by raising its target to $1,000 based on Google’s “ability to charge more for clicks on its ads,” Business Insider writes. And per Forbes, Bernstein Research analyst Carlos Kirjner has also raised his price target to $1,000 because he thinks that “mass adoption of smart phones, tablets and the mobile Web is a large value creation opportunity for Google.”

Continue reading…

Cloud computing and the growing usage of the Internet has placed even greater demands on a corporate data center. Now, organizations are relying more and more on their IT infrastructure to be the mechanism to drive growth and enable agility. Because of this focus on the data center, concerns around security have continued to grow as well. As a result, the growing scale and frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are taking a toll on these businesses.

The creativity in attacks has evolved with the growth in data center utilization. Where “volumetric” attacks were common, now organizations have to deal with advanced application-layer attacks. Furthermore, they are seeing greater amounts of attack-based data being thrown at an organization. The challenge now becomes understanding how modern security system interact with DDoS attacks.

IPS devices, firewalls and other security products are essential elements of a layered-defense strategy, but they are designed to solve security problems that are fundamentally different from dedicated DDoS detection and mitigation products. When analyzing the structure and impact of a DDoS attack, administrators must understand that their current security infrastructure may not necessarily protect them against a denial of service attack. This is where working with Intelligent DDoS Mitigation Systems is a must. IDMS solutions are placed within a data center to help prevent both volumetric and application-layer attacks. Arbor Networks outlines the key features of IDMS and how they can benefit an organization. These features include:

• Stateless
• Inline and Out-of-Band Deployment Options
• Scalable DDoS Mitigation
• Ability to Stop “Distributed” DoS Attacks
• Multiple Attack Countermeasures
• Comprehensive Reporting
• Industry Track Record and Enterprise

Download this white paper to see where current security devices fall short and how a DDoS attack can actually maneuver around modern firewalls and IPS solutions. By securing both internal and external data center components, security administrators create a logical layered defense strategy. By doing so, managers are able to be proactive against attacks and help prevent data loss, unwanted intrusions, and increase uptime.

If you could ask a stranger any question, what would it be? This is the question Davy Rothbart set out to answer when he embarked on a nationwide tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his magazine, Found. Rothbart — a writer, reporter and documentary filmmaker known for his curiosity about other people’s lives — traveled across North America, trying to discover what people most wanted to know about each other. At every Found event, he would hand out slips of paper to the audience that asked some variation of the question: “If you could ask a stranger any question, what would it be?” The answers he got back were surprising, hilarious, sad, strange and heartfelt. Most interestingly, patterns started to emerge; people with drastically different backgrounds were curious about similar issues.

That’s when Rothbart realized he had collected a treasure trove — that he could gather these questions together to create a guidebook for people who want to get to know those around them. His new TED Book, How Did You End Up Here?: The Surprising Ways Our Questions Connect Us, is a collection of more than 100 of Rothbart’s all-time favorite questions. It also includes essays on connection and curiosity, stories from the road and strategies for getting people you don’t know (yet) to open up.

Eager to try out asking a stranger some questions, we decided to start with Rothbart himself:

What inspired you to collect questions from people around the country?

I’ve been collecting personal notes and letters for the past 10 years and publishing them in Found; each find gives us a glimpse into other people’s lives in an incredibly raw and intimate way. But why wait for these revealing tumbleweeds to cross our path? The opportunity to connect with someone new is always hovering close by. On last fall’s 79-city tour to celebrate Found‘s 10th anniversary, I asked members of the audience in each city to generate questions they’d want to ask a stranger. Then I invited a volunteer from the crowd onstage and put these questions to them. Their answers were always deeply meaningful.

What do you think we gain from posing questions to people we don’t know?

We’re surrounded by strangers all the time — on the bus, on the elevator, walking down the street. I think it’s natural to be curious what other people’s experience of being human is like. When we ask odd and surprising questions to people we don’t know, we come to learn how similar our hopes and dreams are to the people around us. Sharing our own stories with another person and getting a chance to hear theirs — it’s a transaction which leaves both sides feeling far richer.

With all the technological tools we have for communicating, is our culture past this sort of real time, face-to-face engagement? Why is it still necessary?

Facebook, Twitter, email and texts offer us a way to be constantly engaged with a wide social network, but how much can really be communicated in 140 characters? Personally, I love these tools, but they must be balanced with connecting “IRL” — in real life. In Real Life, our connections are deeper, more meaningful and more enduring. Questions about someone’s life, asked with genuine curiosity, interest and empathy, are generally answered with deep openness. It’s hard to replicate this kind of exchange through text messages.

Are we particularly disconnected from each other at this point in history?

I do think that the rise in cell phone use has coincided with a diminishing rate of genial exchange between strangers. When we can be texting, emailing, movie-watching and game-playing wherever we are, we have less downtime in our travels through the world and fewer opportunities to engage with the people around us. I’m no soapbox preacher — I get devoured by my smartphone myself. But I miss those moments waiting in line at the supermarket, on an airplane before takeoff, or sitting at the counter at a diner that used to be spent chatting with the folks around me. Now there’s a social contract that states that these times are to be spent checking our phones, not interacting with strangers, and something has been lost there.

Some of the questions in this book are particularly challenging. What do you find is the hardest type of question to ask a stranger?

I think the first question is always the toughest. Simply beginning a conversation with a stranger can feel like a difficult thing to do. That’s why I like to start off with the most innocuous kinds of questions — What’s your name? How was your day? What did you do today? — and then move on and mine more deeply.

I’ve found that questions about challenging topics — death, grief, sex, money — are generally received with great warmth when asked with genuine curiosity. People are very willing — even eager and relieved — to speak about things they don’t often get the chance to.

How do you imagine people using this book?

My hope is that people will use this book in any number of ways — as an icebreaker with people they’ve just met at a conference (hint: at TED2013, TEDActive, or a local TEDxLive screening next week), an orientation, at high school or college; with the person sitting next to them on a plane or a Greyhound bus; with a beloved grandparent or aunt or uncle or cousin; with friends and acquaintances on a road trip; with a prospective boyfriend or girlfriend on a second or third date; with themselves, to spur personal writing and reflection.

I’ve already seen these questions work to bring people closer together and connect more deeply, and I’m excited to get these questions into other folks’ hands so they can also see how real the rewards can be once we take a chance and engage with the people around us.

How Did You End Up Here? is part of the TED Books series. It is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone, and get a subscription with a new TED Book every two weeks.

When we first began putting together the schedule for Structure: Data several months ago, we knew that running SQL queries on Hadoop would be a big deal — we just didn’t know how big a deal it would actually become. Fast-forward to today, a mere month away from the event (March 20-21 in New York), and the writing on the wall is a lot clearer. SQL support isn’t the end-game for Hadoop, but it’s the feature that will help Hadoop find its way into more places in more companies that understand the importance of next-generation analytics but don’t want to (or can’t yet) re-invent the wheel by becoming MapReduce experts.

In fact, there are now so many products and projects pushing SQL queries and interactive data analysis on Hadoop — including two more announced this week — that it’s getting hard to keep track. But I’ll do my best.

Of course, Facebook began this whole movement to bring SQL database-like functionality to Hadoop when it created Hive in 2009. Hive, now an Apache project, includes a data-management layer and SQL-like query language called HiveQL. It has proven rather useful and popular over the years, but Hive’s reliance on MapReduce makes it somewhat slow by nature — MapReduce scans the entire data set and moves a lot of data over the network while processing a job — and there hasn’t been much effort to package it in a manner that might attract mainstream users.

And keep in mind that this next generation of SQL-on-Hadoop tools aren’t just business intelligence or database products that can access data stored in Hadoop; EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica, IBM Netezza, ParAccel, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata/Aster Data (which this week released some cool new features for just this purpose) all allow some sort of access to Hadoop data. Rather, these are applications, frameworks and engines that let users query Hadoop data from inside Hadoop, sometimes by re-architecting the underlying compute and data infrastructures. The beauty of this approach is that data is usable in its existing form and, in theory, doesn’t require two separate data stores for analytic applications.

Data warehouses and BI: The Structure: Data set

I’m highlighting this group of companies first, not because I think they’re the best (although that might well be), but because I’m truly excited about the panel they’ll be featured on at our conference next month. The panel is moderated by Facebook engineering manager Ravi Murthy– a guy who knows his way around a database — so they’ll have to answer some tough questions from one of the most-advanced and most-aggressive Hadoop and analytics tools users out there:

Apache Drill: Drill is a MapR-led effort to create a Google Dremel-like (or BigQuery-like) interactive query engine on top of Hadoop. First announced in August, the project is still under development and in the incubator program within Apache. According to its web site, “One explicitly stated design goal is that Drill is able to scale to 10,000 servers or more and to be able to process petabyes of data and trillions of records in seconds.”

Hadapt: Hadapt, which actually launched at Structure: Data in 2011, was the first of the SQL on Hadoop vendors and is somewhat unique in that it has a real product on the market and real users in production. Its unique architecture includes tools for advanced SQL functions and a split-execution engine for MapReduce and relational tasks, and both HDFS and relational storage. In October, the company announced a tight integration with Tableau Software around advanced visual analytics.

Platfora: Technically not a SQL product, Platfora is red-hot right now and is trying to re-imagine the world of business intelligence for a big data world. Essentially an HTML5 canvas laid atop Hadoop and an in-memory, massively parallel processing engine, the company’s software, which it unveiled in October, is designed to make analyzing data stored in Hadoop a fast and visually intuitive process.

Qubole: Qubole is an interesting case in that it’s essentially a cloud-based version of the popular Apache Hive framework launched by the guys who created Hive while working at Facebook. Qubole claims it auto-scaling abilities, optimized Hadoop code and columnar data cache make its service run much faster than Hive alone — and running on Amazon Web Services makes it easier than maintaining a physical cluster.

Data warehouses and BI: The rest

Citus Data: Citus Data’s CitusDB isn’t just about Hadoop, but rather wants to bring the power of its distributed Postgres implementation to all types of data. It relies on Postgres’s foreign data wrappers feature to convert disparate data types into the database’s native format, and then on its own distributed-processing technology to carry out queries in seconds or less. Because of its Postgres foundation, CitusDB can join data from different data sources and retains all the native features that come with that database.

Cloudera Impala:  Cloudera’s Impala might just be the most-important SQL-on-Hadoop effort around because of Cloudera’s expansive installation and partner footprints. It’s a massively parallel processing engine that bypasses MapReduce to enable interactive queries on data stored in either HDFS or HBase, using the same variant of SQL that Hive uses. However, because Cloudera doesn’t build applications, it’s relying on higher-level BI and analytics partners to provide the user interface.

Karmasphere: Karmasphere is one of the first startups to build an analytic application atop Hadoop, and in its 2.0 release last year the company added support for SQL queries of data in HDFS. Like Hive, Karmasphere still relies on MapReduce to process queries, which means it’s inherently slower than newer approaches. However, unlike Hive, Karmasphere allows for parallel queries to run at the same time and includes a visual interface for writing queries and filtering results.

Lingual: Lingual is a new open source project from Concurrent (see disclosure), the parent company of the Cascading framework for Hadoop. Announced on Wednesday, Lingual runs on Cascading and gives developers and analysts a true ANSI SQL interface from which to run analytics or build applications. Lingual is compatible with traditional BI tools, JDBC  and the Cascading family of APIs.

Phoenix: Phoenix is a new and relatively unknown open source project that comes out of Salesforce.com and aims to allow fast SQL queries of data stored in HBase, the NoSQL database built atop HDFS. Its stated mission: “Become the standard means of accessing HBase data through a well-defined, industry standard API.” Users interact with it through JDBC interfaces, and its developers claim its sub-second response times for small queries and seconds-long response for querying tens of millions of rows.

Shark: Shark isn’t technically Hadoop, but it’s cut from the same cloth. Shark, in this case, stands for “Hive on Spark,” with Hive meaning the same thing it does to Hadoop, but with Spark being an in-memory platform designed to run parallel-processing jobs 100 times faster than MapReduce (a speed improve over traditional Hive that Shark also claims). Shark also includes APIs for turning query results into a type of data format amenable to machine learning algorithms. Both Shark and Spark are developed by the University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab.

Stinger Initiative: Launched on Wednesday (along with a security gateway called Knox and a faster, simpler processing framework called Tez), the Stinger Initiative is a Hortonworks-led effort to make Hive faster — up too 100x — and more functional. Stinger adds more SQL analytics capabilities to Hive, but the most-important aspects are infrastructural: an optimized execution engine, a columnar file format and the ability to avoid MapReduce bottlenecks by running atop Tez.

Operational SQL

Drawn to Scale: Drawn to Scale is a startup that has built an operational SQL database on top of HBase. The key word here is database, as its product, called Spire, is modeled after Google’s F1 designed to power transactional applications as analytic ones. Spire has a fully distributed index and queries are sent only to the node with the relevant data, so reads and writes are fast and the system can handle lots of concurrent users without falling down.

Splice Machine: Database startup Splice Machine is also trying to get into the operational space by building its Splice SQL Engine atop the naturally distributed HBase database. Splice Machine focuses its message on transactional integrity, which is really where it separates itself from scalable NoSQL databases and analytics-focused SQL-on-Hadoop efforts. It relies on HBase’s aut0-sharding feature in order to making scaling an easy process.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user hauhu.

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In eight days, harmful automatic cuts are slated to take effect, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cutting vital services for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and women in uniform.

Only Congress can avoid this self-inflicted wound to our economy and middle class families, and the only thing standing in the way of a solution today is Congressional Republicans’ refusal to even consider closing tax loopholes that benefit wealthy Americans and well-connected corporations. The President and Congressional Democrats have put forward solutions to avoid these cuts and allow time for both sides to work on a long-term, balanced solution to our deficit challenges. 

The President is serious about cutting spending, reforming entitlements and the tax code to reduce the deficit in a balanced way.  The question is, will Congressional Republicans come to the table to get something done?

Let’s take a moment to look what we’ve done so far: The President has already reduced the deficit by over $2.5 trillion, cutting spending by over $1.4 trillion, bringing domestic discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower era [see below]. As a result of these savings, together with a strengthening economy, the deficit is coming down at the fastest pace of anytime in American history other than the demobilization from World War II.

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