Blog

Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 flagship smartphone is now upon us, and early signs are pointing to a big launch. Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley doesn’t formally cover Samsung, but he fancies himself as being plugged into wireless retail and he suggested in a recent research note that Samsung’s new king is off to a solid start.

Continue reading…

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk thinks that autonomous vehicles that drive themselves may not be as far off in the future as the auto industry makes them out to be. The big sensor arrays that Google, Toyota and Ford are testing in their autonomous car prototypes are a long ways from becoming commercially viable or affordable, Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg. But he said a scaled down version of such sensor systems relying on camera imaging could power a form of car autopilot that automates many of the ordinary tasks of driving.

“I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self-driving,” Musk said in the interview. “Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”

Musk told Bloomberg that he’s discussed the autopilot concept with Google’s engineers and even mentioned the possibility of Tesla and Google jointly developing such a system. But Musk later tweeted from his Twitter account that his comments to Bloomberg were meant to be off the cuff, and that Tesla and Google weren’t announcing any big new initiative.

“Creating an autopilot for cars at Tesla is an important, but not yet top priority,” Musk tweeted. “Still a few years from production.”

Musk’s notion of an inexpensive autonomous driving system is an interesting one as it does away with the complex light detection and ranging — or Lidar — sensors that use 360-degree scanning lasers to render a 3D construct of the world around the vehicle. You’ve seen such funky laser arrays on top of mapping vehicles before, so the technology is readily available, but even a scaled down version of such systems would add enormous cost to car. According to Ford engineers, those costs are among the principal reasons why fully autonomous cars are still many years away from becoming reality.

But Musk posited that a car could simply use cameras to collect the data the car needs from its surroundings. The approach has its limitations compared to lasers. Cameras take pictures, while Lidar is registering physical objects, tracking their distance and relative speed to your car. Cameras would extrapolate that data from images. Stereoscopic lenses could allow for better depth perception on the road, but ultimately a camera-based system would depend on a lot of image-processing muscle to cull critical life-saving information from a massive pool of pixels.

Luckily for Musk, he’s not the only one thinking this way. Many of the new advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) systems that warn drivers of impending accidents or alert them to lane drifting are camera based. It’s also no coincidence that graphics card giant Nvidia is making a big play in the connected car space. The silicon vendor believes that its years of crunching real-time image and spatial data in PCs and game consoles make it the ideal company to power future car sensor systems.

Eventually cars won’t just sense the other vehicles and objects in their vicinity. Those vehicles will actively communicate with one another and those objects. Using a secure form of long-range Wi-Fi, a car will tell all the vehicles behind its about brake or change lanes. Transmitters on the highway will tell you a big curve is coming up. (For more info on the connected car see our infographic.)

Such vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications could never replace sensors entirely since it would take decades for every vehicle on the road and every stretch of asphalt to become connected. But those technologies would allow cars to evolve cars beyond autonomy into a kind of ad hoc network, in which they would collectively make decisions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions.

Returning to Musk’s remarks, though, I find it particularly interesting how he’s positioning the concept of the driverless car. He’s calling it a form of autopilot not too far off from the adaptive cruise control we use in our vehicles. Musk is downplaying the idea of car usurping control from the driver. He’s keyed in on the biggest obstacle facing the autonomous vehicle today: consumer perception. Few people are ready to cede act of driving to computer.

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

• Electric vehicle outlook: 2012–2017
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010

Darby Private Equity, the private equity arm of Franklin Templeton Investments, announced that its Darby Converging Europe Mezzanine Fund will exit its holdings in Sirma, a Turkish bottled water and beverage manufacturer. The firm is selling a majority interest in Sirma to Danone. Darby made a mezzanine investment in Sirma in 2010, and a follow-on equity and mezzanine investment in 2011. Terms of the deal were not released.

PRESS RELEASE
Darby Private Equity (“Darby”), the private equity arm of Franklin Templeton Investments, announced that its Darby Converging Europe Mezzanine Fund (“DCEMF”) signed an agreement to exit its equity and mezzanine holdings in Sirma, one of the leading Turkish bottled water and beverage manufacturers, in connection with a strategic sale of a majority interest in Sirma to Danone. DCEMF’s exit is subject to the closing of the transaction with Danone. The transaction terms were not disclosed.

DCEMF made a mezzanine investment in Sirma in 2010 to provide long-term funding for the growth of the company. DCEMF made a follow-on equity and mezzanine investment in 2011 to finance Sirma’s new factory .

Robert Graffam, Darby’s Senior Managing Director for Europe, commented: “We are the first and leading mezzanine and equity fund with a dedicated presence in Turkey. This transaction reinforces our track record in supporting middle-market companies with long-term growth capital in the region.”

Nicholas Kabcenell, Darby Managing Director commented: “During our involvement Sirma has strengthened its position as a leading company in its sector through new products, new factory investments and successful branding. We look forward to seeing the company continue to prosper in the future.”

Burak Dalgin, Darby Managing Director added: “We have done six investments to date in Turkey and Sirma will be our third exit in Turkey. Two of these new investments and two of the exists, including the potential Sirma exit, happened over the past twelve months.”

The Darby Converging Europe Mezzanine Fund is focused on providing growth capital to middle-market companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Sirma will be the eighth exit for the Fund.

Darby has been a pioneer in providing mezzanine products – a hybrid of both debt and equity – to various emerging market regions, including Latin America, Asia, and more recently Central and Eastern Europe. The firm has been managing mezzanine and equity funds in Latin America since the close of its first Latin American private equity fund in 1994.

Darby was founded in 1994 by The Honorable Nicholas F. Brady, who served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury between 1988 and 1993. Richard Frank joined the firm as CEO in 1997 after his career at the International Finance Corporation (IFC)/World Bank. In 2003, Darby became a fully owned subsidiary of Franklin Resources, Inc. [NYSE:BEN], a global investment management organization operating as Franklin Templeton Investments. For more information please visit darbyoverseas.com.

Franklin Templeton Investments provides global and domestic investment management solutions managed by its Franklin, Templeton, Mutual Series, Bissett, Fiduciary Trust, Darby, Balanced Equity Management and K2 investment teams. The San Mateo, CA-based company has more than 65 years of investment experience and over US$823 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2013.

The post Darby Private Equity Exits Sirma appeared first on peHUB.

Sen. Rob Portman has smoked marijuana. That was the big reveal during the senator’s interview with BuzzFeed Brews on Monday evening. Since then, the video blew up as people are somehow drawn to stories of drug use and politicians.

Of course, Portman doesn’t smoke anymore. That was only during his younger days in the 70s and 80s when BuzzFeed’s John Stanton said the senator looked “a bit like a dirty hippie with long hair.” He didn’t elaborate on if he used the drug more than once. He did, however, talk about his efforts as a senator to stop drug use in Ohio and around the nation.

Marijuana use among politicians is a popular question to ask during interviews as it always draws a humorous or awkward response. One of the more famous was when former President Bill Clinton was asked if he smoked pot during a 1992 interview. He admitted that he did, but claimed that he didn’t inhale.

[h/t: ABC News]

Audi’s latest ad is titled: “Zachary Quinto vs. Leonard Nimoy: “The Challenge”. This features the original Star Trek’s Spock (Nimoy) and the new Star Trek’s Spock (Quinto).

As an added bonus, it also features Nemoy doing his Bilbo Baggins song.

The man who helped rescue three women being held captive in Ohio yesterday is hilarious, and I suspect it’s a matter of time before a new crop of memes begin popping up in his honor.

Charles Ramsey, who lived next door to the home, heard the screams of a frantic young woman and helped her open the door after she told him she’d been kidnapped and couldn’t get out. She turned out to be Amanda Berry, who has been held captive in that house with two other missing women for ten years. Berry also had a child with her.

“I’m eating my McDonald’s; I come outside; I see this girl going nuts,” he said. “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!”

Ramsey, like everyone else in Cleveland, was shocked and elated to discover that the women were alive, unharmed, and finally free after a decade of being held against their will. His joy manifested itself as an awesome sense of humor.

“I barbecued with this dude! We ate ribs and whatnot, and listened to salsa music!” Ramsey said of Ariel Castro, the man accused of kidnapping the women.

An investigation is obviously pending, but the women and Berry’s daughter have been released from an area hospital, where they underwent evaluation to determine what condition they were in. All are said to be healthy and elated to be reunited with friends and family; the three of them all went missing at different times and have been presumed dead for years.

Ramsey’s 911 call is also pretty funny, now that we know the context and that the women are all ok. NSFW unless you work with people who say f**k a lot.

Although we likely won’t see driverless cars on the roads for at least another decade or two, there’s a chance that the first driverless cars we do see will be electric. Bloomberg reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk “has talked with Google about the self-driving technology it’s been developing, though he prefers to think of applications that are more like an airplane’s autopilot system.” While Musk has been impressed with what Google has done with driverless cars so far, he did say that the company’s current approach of using sensors is “too expensive” and that “it’s better to have an optical system, basically cameras with software that is able to figure out what’s going on just by looking at things.” Musk said that Tesla would work on its own autopilot system for its cars, although he provided no information about when Tesla’s own system would be ready for road tests.

There are many ways to share files between the computers on your network — simple folder sharing, or cloud-based file syncing are just two ideas that come to mind. But when Apple introduced AirDrop in OS X Lion, it added another way – an elegant, simple means of simply dragging and dropping files to quickly distribute them to other Macs on your network.

The only problem with AirDrop is that you require other Macs, running OS X Lion or later no less, for it to work. Thankfully, third parties have finally come around to developing cross-platform alternatives to AirDrop, and another promising example has just poked its head above the parapet in the form of Filedrop.

It’s still early days for Filedrop, as its version number (0.3.214) attests. At the present time there are just two clients available, for Windows and Mac, with the promise of Android and iOS apps to follow. But even at this early stage in its development, Filedrop is already delivering on its promise.

Like AirDrop, Filedrop works across your local network only. Once installed, fire it up on each of your computers and it’ll immediately display a floating box with all other available desktops (and computer names) shown. Transferring a file from one to the other is as simple as dragging it on to the desktop you wish the file to be copied to.

When someone attempts to send a file via Filedrop, a pop-up dialog will alert the target user, giving them the opportunity to decline or accept the file transfer. By default, all files are copied into the target computer’s Downloads directory, but this can be changed for the specified file transfer by clicking the Downloads link that appears in the confirmation pop-up.

There’s a Downloads button at the bottom of the main window too — this works in a similar way to the downloads button in Firefox, allowing you to open files or their parent folder directly from Filedrop. You can also set a different default folder for all file transfers from here, too, say your desktop or a specific Filedrop folder.

And that’s basically it: Filedrop works with multiple PCs and Macs to give you a simple, fuss-free way of quickly sharing files across your local network. There are some glitches of course, despite opening with modest memory requirements for example (under 30MB in Windows), Filedrop slowly increases its demands as time goes on without appearing to release memory back, certainly not in the short term, so that’s something that will hopefully be rectified in a future release.

But there’s more to come too with the iOS and Android apps currently in development. These will allow you to transfer files to and from your mobile, enabling it to be used as a “wi-fi USB stick”, plus there will be options for streaming photos and music from your mobile to other Filedrop-enabled devices too. The apps should hopefully be appearing sometime this month.

In the meantime, Filedrop 0.3.214 is available as a freeware download for PCs running Windows XP or later, and Macs running OS X 10.6.8 or later.

Photo Credit: mojito.mak[dog]gmail[dot]com/Shutterstock

When the reporting team at Planet Money — a joint venture between PRI’s This American Life and National Public Radio — decided to do a series tracing the creation of a T-shirt all the way from the cotton fields to the department store, producer Alex Blumberg says that Kickstarter seemed like a natural way to engage listeners in the project. In a sense, he told me in an interview, the web-based crowdfunding platform is really just a more modern way of doing what public radio has always done, which is to allow fans to support journalism they care about.

If launching the project via Kickstarter was a gamble — and one that apparently took a certain amount of convincing before Planet Money’s corporate masters would sign off on it, according to Blumberg — it certainly seems to have paid off: the campaign hit its goal in a single day, and has since raised about $300,000 or six times as much as it was originally looking for (the audio of my interview with Blumberg is on SoundCloud and also embedded below).

Crowdfunding and public radio both go direct

Blumberg, who works for This American Life and created the Planet Money show in 2008 along with NPR economics reporter Adam Davidson, said that when the show decided to set up the T-shirt project — an idea that stemmed from a book by Pietra Rivoli called “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy” — he thought Kickstarter was the most obvious way of allowing listeners to not only follow the experiment, but to become participants in it as well.

“We wanted to try and figure out a way to do the project, to do the journalism, but also to sell the T-shirts to people who wanted them, as a way of involving them in the project — so you can either guess about how many you need and borrow the money or sort of get it pre-funded, or you could just go on Kickstarter and find out exactly.”

One of the reasons why it seemed like such a good fit, Blumberg said, is that public radio and the NPR model already involve reaching out to listeners and supporters directly, so it seemed natural to blend the two (a public radio podcast called 99% Invisible took a similar route last year and raised more than $180,000).

“The other part about Kickstarter is that it’s just a great way of sort of involving folks in the project as you go along, and… it felt like with our audience there’d be some interesting overlap there between Kickstarter and public radio — it felt like they would sort of feed on each other. The public radio audience and the Kickstarter model are so close anyway, so why not combine them — it’s sort of surprising that it hasn’t happened before.”

The internet turns everything into public radio

In fact, Blumberg said, it feels like “the internet is driving the entire world towards a public-radio model” in a way, as more media companies — and even individuals such as Daily Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is relying on direct reader funding for support — try to find a way of surviving when advertising revenue is declining and other business models are not obvious.

“You can get lots of stuff for free now, and so the trick is to get people to pay for stuff they can get for free. It’s a trick that public radio has gotten pretty good at, but now other people are sort of eclipsing us — Kickstarter is very ingenious in the way you can involve people in the story, you can build all sorts of different levels, and it’s very very easy. So part of it is about learning what we can from our Kickstarter experience and then feeding that back into the public-radio world.”

Blumberg said that he was pleasantly surprised at the amount of money the project has been able to raise, and that he originally expected it would take most of the campaign’s time limit to even get to the $50,000 goal. The majority of the money raised will go towards travel and production costs, as well as the cost of buying and making the shirts, he said — and anything left over will be used to create a development fund for NPR member stations and put on a series of workshops about the kind of reporting Planet Money does.

A chance for a public-funding revolution

And will evangelizing Kickstarter be part of that program? Blumberg said that the project seems to be doing its own evangelizing, just because of the overwhelming response, which he says executives at NPR and throughout the public-media world are watching closely and are “very excited about.” The American Life producer said he also hopes the project will spark more discussion about the ways in which public radio can use crowdfunding platforms.

“Public radio has been a little insulated from some of the ways the internet has changed other media organizations, but the internet is upending radio as well, in a way that I think can be very advantageous, it just depends on how you do it. I think there’s always been a realization within the public radio system that there’s revolutionary potential, and I think this will add to that conversation and hopefully move it forward.”

Blumberg said that he believes public radio can learn a lot from seeing how crowdfunding works in practice with a focused project like the T-shirt campaign, and that the connection between fans and creators that Kickstarter and other platforms help to create is very much like what public media has been doing for some time without the internet. “I feel like we’ve been out ahead of this whole thing for a long time,” he says, “and we didn’t even know it.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz and Shutterstock / Wilson Rosa and Shutterstock / higyu

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

• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

For years, Adobe has sold its professional design software under the Creative Suite banner. There were hints that was going to change when Adobe stopped selling CS6 at retail, but the company has moved to kill Creative Suite faster than anybody expected.

Adobe announced at its annual MAX conference that it will no longer be releasing new versions of its software under the Creative Suite banner. Instead, all future updates and features will be delivered via Creative Cloud. In other words, those who buy Creative Suite 6 will only get just that while all new features to Photoshop and the like will only be available via Creative Cloud.

The move to Creative Cloud, which is a subscription service, has upset some members of the Adobe user community. The complaints were excellently captured in a new video released by our favorite Taiwanese animators at NMA:

Adobe says that it’s moving to a subscription-only model because it will allow them to deliver updates to users at a faster rate:

“We launched Creative Cloud a year ago and it has been a runaway success,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “By focusing our energy — and our talented engineers — on Creative Cloud, we’re able to put innovation in our members’ hands at a much faster pace.”

To convince current CS6 users to move to Creative Cloud, Adobe is offering discounts on the subscription service for a limited time. You can check out all the different Creative Cloud plans here.

Menlo Ventures has added Avery More as a venture partner and Alex Gorelik as an EIR, according to a blog post. More will source enterprise deals at the firm, and Gorelik will incubate a company and offer advice on the cloud and big data investments.

More founded and was CEO of CompuCom and is chairman of Aeroscout, a Menlo company bought by Stanley Healthcare Solutions last year. He also chairs Menlo company Vidyo as well as QualiSystems and BuzzStream.

Gorelik founded Exeros, acquired by IBM, and Acta Technology, acquired by Business Objects. He has held executive positions at Informatica and was a distinguished engineer for information integration at IBM.

See the Menlo blog post here.

The post Menlo Adds More As Venture Partner, Gorelik As EIR appeared first on peHUB.

A woman who won $14 million in the California Lottery this week claims that she hadn’t meant to purchase the ticket.

Thuan Le, a single mother of four, told lottery officials last week that she normally purchases $4 of Powerball tickets and $1 of SuperLotto Plus tickets on a regular basis. On May 1, however, Le accidentally put $6 into the self-serve lottery machine at her local CVS store. With the extra dollar she purchased an extra SuperLotto Plus ticket, which ended up being worth $14 million.

Le reportedly ran screaming from the store when she verified her ticket numbers had won. She immediately called her sons and traveled to the California Lotto’s local district office to claim her $14 million prize. Le has stated that she plans to use the money to buy a house, travel, and visit her parents, who live in Vietnam.

“We thought she was joking, but we thought would she really joke like this?” said one of Le’s sons. “My older brother said, ‘yes, she would’.”

In a recent financial filing, Yahoo cited that Microsoft extended its revenue guarantee in the two companies’ ongoing “search alliance”. This is a guarantee that Microsoft has so far failed to live up to, but continues to extend, presumably, to keep Yahoo from walking away from the deal, and potentially into the arms of a certain competitor.

Reuters reports:

The U.S. revenue-per-search guarantee, which had expired on March 31, will be extended for one year, and took effect on April 1, Yahoo said in its 10Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.

…

Extension of the search revenue guarantee marks Yahoo’s first agreement with Microsoft since Marissa Mayer became Chief Executive of Yahoo in July. Mayer, who is seeking to reverse a multi-year decline in Yahoo’s revenue and in its online traffic, has been critical of the Microsoft partnership struck by former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.

Indeed she has. At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in February, she expressed her disappointment, saying that they need to see monetization working better, “because we know that it can and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”

There have been rumors in the past that Yahoo would kill its deal with Microsoft prematurely, but Microsoft has indicated that it would not make it easy for Yahoo to pull out. Of course, there has also been plenty of speculation that Yahoo could try a deal with Google again. Yahoo initially tried to partner with Google, but potential regulatory hurdles led to that falling through and Yahoo settling for Microsoft.

But that was a long time ago, and under different leadership.

The Microsoft Yahoo Search Alliance could still fall apart.

“On March 31, because of the failure with RPS, Yahoo potentially could have terminated its deal with Microsoft on February 23, 2015,” explains Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. “That’s the five year mark into the ten year agreement, where there’s an out for both sides.”

“That’s still a date to watch, but April 1, 2014 is more important,” he adds. “If Microsoft fails to deliver for a third time, maybe by then, Yahoo will want to move on. Assuming, of course, that US regulatory bodies even allow it to partner with Google.”

Google has cleared some significant regulatory hurdles since it tried to partner with Yahoo before. It would be interesting to see how such a scenario would develop in the future.

In semi-related news, Chitika announced a multi-year extension of its advertising agreement with Yahoo.

“Yahoo! has a proven track record of capitalizing on strong, successful partnerships, helping the organization meet and exceed its business goals,” said Venkat Kolluri, Chitika’s CEO. “Extending and expanding our relationship with Yahoo! reaffirms our commitment to deliver innovative online and mobile ad technology solutions, which will help contribute to the growth of Yahoo!’s search marketplace.”

BitTorrent just added another incentive for creators to give their content away to file sharers: On Tuesday, the company will introduce Bundles, a new product that turns torrents into promotional campaigns, and possibly even online stores.

The first bundle released by BitTorrent comes courtesy of Ultra Music. Fans of dance music producer Kaskade will get a free MP3 of one of his tracks, as well as a trailer for the release of Kaskade’s upcoming tour DVD as soon as they download the torrent. An additional 10 minute concert video and an exclusive booklet can be unlocked by signing up for a Kaskade newsletter.

However, this is only one iteration of the bundle. Artists can also elect to use torrent bundles to directly sell additional content to their fans. From BitTorrent’s blog post:

“We don’t need another digital radio station. We don’t need another walled garden or standalone content store. We need ways to place value exchanges within the content itself – allowing these exchanges to travel freely, without barriers or limitations; allowing these exchanges to multiply as content is shared. Our goal is to move the interaction to where it matters; making it a property of the file, versus the distribution framework; giving artists real data about, and real access to, their fans.”

This isn’t the first time BitTorrent is trying to sell content to file sharers. The company launched a digital download store dubbed the BitTorrent Entertainment Network in 2007. The store featured DRM-protected movies from major Hollywood studios — and was largely ignored by the file sharing masses. BitTorrent eventually shut down the BitTorrent Entertainment Network at the end of 2008.

The company went through a bit or a rough patch in the following years, but has since recovered, and put a bigger emphasis on working with independent artists in recent months. Asked whether the company wants to take a cut when people start to sell their music or movies through bundles, a spokesperson told me that there are “no immediate plans for this.”

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

• Are Torrents a Tool for Predicting the Future?
• Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age
• Personal tools lead to practical business

When Apple unveiled the iPad in 2010, smartphone vendors were caught off guard and they rushed to launch similar tablets to take advantage of the new market that had been created. Their early efforts were absolutely awful, however. Android slates have gotten much, much better since those early days and now Android vendors’ combined tablet market share looks ready to pass Apple’s share. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company isn’t done setting trends though, and its iPad mini is the latest device Android vendors will look to base their new models on moving forward.

Continue reading…

 

Sony’s new mid-range offering the CX190 (not to be confused with the recently leaked Sony C3) has found its way online in the form of a Picasa sample shown above. Currently codenamed the Xperia C, the modest device is rumored to pack a dual-core Qualcomm processor (either the MSM8627 or the MSM8230), 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of storage and a microSD card. It is also expected to have a 4″ display with a 480 x 854 resolution.

 

Come comment on this article: Sony’s new mid-range CX190 leaked specs and camera sample surface

At the EMC World event this week in Las Vegas Brocade announced that its SAN solutions are integrated with EMC’s new ViPR platform, and Dimension Data adds tiered EMC storage to its Public Compute-as-a-Service offering.

Brocade integrated in EMC ViPR

Brocade (BRCD) announced its Gen 5 Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) solutions are integrated with the new EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform. This solution will allow more than 50,000 joint EMC and Brocade customers to immediately realize the virtualization benefits of the new EMC ViPR software-defined storage platform within highly virtualized cloud environments.

With Brocade technology integration, EMC Connectrix SAN customers can now utilize the EMC ViPR platform to enable existing SAN infrastructure to leverage existing storage infrastructures for traditional data center workloads, as well as provision new EMC ViPR Object Data Service and EMC ViPR HDFS Service through access to Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift for next-generation workloads. This complete spectrum of capabilities can be run against enterprise or commodity storage.

“As a crucial component of today’s storage infrastructure we are very excited with the work we’ve done with Brocade to ensure seamless integration of the networking stack with ViPR,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, vice president of marketing, Advanced Software Division, EMC Corporation. “The ability to automate and define policy across the entire storage environment extends our common vision to deliver proven, simple-to-use solutions for storage networks and private clouds with unparalleled ability to transform enterprise data centers. We look forward to continuing our long term strategic relationship to further improve the utilization of our customers’ existing and future storage investments.”

Dimension Data Tiered storage

Dimension Data announced the availability of tiered storage options as part of its enterprise-class Public Compute-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering. Public cloud clients can now access three tiers of block-based storage at $0.07 to $0.44 per GB per month, enabling businesses to increase efficiencies in the cloud and significantly reduce total storage cost by matching the level of protection, performance and accessibility of data to the storage media that best suits an application.

The offering uses the EMC VNX storage platform, and is provisioned through a web-based user interface or API, enabling organizations to change the type of storage required for cloud servers on the fly. The new service leverages solid state drives (SSD) to accelerate performance for both the High-Performance and Standard options.

“Dimension Data is committed to providing a high-performance cloud that is easy to use and customize,” said Steve Nola, Cloud Solutions Business Unit CEO at Dimension Data. ”Providing additional options around storage media is an important innovation that enables our clients to leverage the cloud for a variety of applications including high-performance databases, as well as less demanding applications such as archiving, backup and long-term data retention.”

TenFarms, a Los Angeles, Calif.-based startup focused on advertising technologies for smartphones and tablets, has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed sources, in what the company is characterizing simply as “angel funding.” The money, says TenFarms, will be used for further development of its applications.

PRESS RELEASE:

TenFarms today announced a $2.7M angel funding round that will be used to fuel the continued development of its Photopoll app for iOS devices and bring Adtile, a new advertising solution for smartphones and tablets, to market. Unlike existing banner advertisements on mobile devices, Adtile is built on patent-pending technology and will deliver geo-targeted ads through native and web applications, fully embedded for a more user-friendly and engaging design.

“Banner ads might still function well in print and on desktop computers, but it’s clear that they just don’t work on mobile devices,” said Nils Forsblom, Founder & CEO of TenFarms. “Not only are banner ads intrusive to mobile users, but the limited space and inadvertent taps from the ‘fat finger’ effect doesn’t offer advertisers a reliable platform for quality engagement. Adtile will change all of this with a simple and automated method for integrating ads into mobile apps and websites. We believe the best way to revolutionize advertising is to create an entirely new design that embraces the needs of mobile users and publishers, making it part of the user experience.”

The Adtile mobile advertising solution consists of a customizable SDK that enables easy integration into mobile applications and websites, complete with a dashboard to deploy and analyze campaigns. Adtile’s unique algorithm has the ability to determine a user’s location and deliver smart ads based on that data. Additionally, ads are served based on specific keywords, categories and more, ensuring that relevant ads reach consumers, which offers developers and brands options for a fully automated but very targeted and tailored campaign. Adtile will also allow flexibility in the delivery approach based on the type of mobile application, whether it is music, games, lifestyle, shopping, or any other category.

TenFarms most recently introduced Photopoll, the world’s first mobile app for iOS devices that allows users to group and share multiple photos into a feed for instant polling. Compared to other apps that only allow feedback on one or two photos, Photopoll empowers users to share their stories through up to five photos, or poll the open community to access public opinion on any given topic. Part of the new funding will go towards further development of the application and experience, and growing its user base.

For more information about Adtile and to learn more, visit www.adtile.me.

For more information about Photopoll, visit www.photopoll.com.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/photopoll
Twitter: www.twitter.com/photopoll
App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photopoll/id456863839?ls=1&mt=8
About TenFarms

TenFarms is a startup company based in Los Angeles, California. The company’s purpose and mission is to design and build mobile products with substance, style and simplicity. With the introduction of Photopoll, TenFarms is the first company ever to introduce a multi-photo sharing solution that integrates polling. Its latest offering includes Adtile, a mobile advertising solution set to launch in 2013. TenFarms also holds six patents pending on mobile solutions and technology that drives its products and services. For more information, please visit www.tenfarms.com.

The post TenFarms Raises $2.7M in Angel Funding appeared first on peHUB.

Google is running a doodle celebrating the birthday of graphic designer and typographer Saul Bass in parts of the world where the date has changed to May 8th.

Also a filmmaker, Bass is best known for his work on movie title sequences, posters and corporate logos. How many films can you pick out from Google’s animation?

Saul Bass did title sequences for the following films:

Carmen Jones (1954)
The Big Knife (1955)
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
The Racers (1955)
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
The Shrike (1955)
Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
Storm Center (1956)
Attack (1956)
Edge of the City (1957)
Saint Joan (1957)
The Pride and the Passion (1957)
The Young Stranger (1957)
Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
Cowboy (1958)
Vertigo (1958)
The Big Country (1958)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
North by Northwest (1959)
Psycho (1960)
Spartacus (1960)
The Facts of Life (1960)
Exodus (1960)
Ocean’s 11 (1960)
West Side Story (1961)
Something Wild (1961)
Advise and Consent (1962)
Walk on the Wild Side (1962)
The Victors (1963)
Nine Hours to Rama (1963)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Cardinal (1963)
In Harm’s Way (1965)
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Grand Prix (1966)
Not with My Wife, You Don’t! (1966)
Seconds (1966)
Such Good Friends (1971)
That’s Entertainment, Part II (1976)
Broadcast News (1987)
Big (1988)
The War of the Roses (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
Cape Fear (1991)
Doc Hollywood (1991)
Mr. Saturday Night (1992)
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Higher Learning (1995)
Casino (1995)

He did movie posters for:

Carmen Jones (1954)
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
Edge of the City (1956)
Storm Center (1956)
Love in the Afternoon (1957)
Saint Joan (1957)
Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
The Big Country (1958) (style b poster)
Vertigo (1958)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Exodus (1960)
The Magnificent Seven (1960) (design not used)
One, Two, Three (1961)
Advise & Consent (1962)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Cardinal (1963)
In Harm’s Way (1964)
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
The Two of Us (1967)
Why Man Creates (1968)
Very Happy Alexander (1969)
Exodus (1960)
The Magnificent Seven (1960) (design not used)
One, Two, Three (1961)
Advise & Consent (1962)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Cardinal (1963)
In Harm’s Way (1964)
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
The Two of Us (1967)
Why Man Creates (1968)
Very Happy Alexander (1969)
Such Good Friends (1971)
Rosebud (1975)
Brothers (1977)
Notes on the Popular Arts (1977)
Bass on Titles (1978)
The Human Factor (1979)
The Shining (1980)
The Solar Film (1980)
Return from the River Kwai (1989)
Schindler’s List (1993)

Bass also did logos and designs for:

Alcoa (1963)
AT&T Corporation (1969 and 1983)
Avery International (1975)
Boys & Girls Clubs of America (1980)
Celanese (1965)
Continental Airlines (1968)[10]
Dixie (1969)
Frontier Airlines (1978)
Fuller Paints (1962)
Geffen Records (1980)
General Foods (1984)
Girl Scouts of the USA (1978)
Japan Energy Corporation (1993)
J. Paul Getty Trust (1993)
Kibun Foods (1984)
Kose Cosmetics (1991)
Lawry’s Foods (1959)
Minami Sports (1991)
Minolta (1978)
NCR Corporation (1996)
Quaker Oats (1969)
Rockwell International (1968)
Security Pacific Bank (1966)
United Airlines (1974)
United Way (1972)
US Postage (1983)[11]
Warner Communications (1974)
Wienerschnitzel (1978)
Wesson Oil (1964)
YWCA (1988)

Hat tip to Patrick from DoodleShow, Lists from Wikipedia

It’s been said that the greatest things in life come in the smallest packages, and the Fiat 500 is the perfect example. It’s got zero cargo space, is slower than the fastest snail, and is about as reliable as well – a Fiat. However what this little bugger loses in performance, it more than makes up for in personality. You see this is a car that makes you smile. It makes the sun come out on a cloudy day while at the same time, bringing joy to all those who see it. The Fiat 500 is not just a car per say, but moreover, it’s a little bit of joy that rolls slowly on four wheels.

Source: Petrolicious.com