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Over the past couple of years, Jawbone has been building up its position in wearable computing and health tracking with the launch of its Up wristband and the purchase of MassiveHealth and Visere. But with the acquisition of BodyMedia – a pioneer in wearable body monitoring technology – Jawbone is showing its deepest commitment yet to the space.

Announced Tuesday, the acquisition was a cash and stock deal valued at north of $100 million, according to sources close to the matter. With BodyMedia’s technology and expertise, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said, his company plans to further its innovation in health and wellness, as well as uncover new applications for wearable computing in general.

“We think that everything in the world is going to be smart and interconnected with lots of sensors,” said Rahman. “The more interconnecting points you have, the more signals you integrate in that system, the more intelligent things you can do for the user.”

BodyMedia: more than 500 trillion sensor points collected and analyzed

In the past few years, health tracking has become more en vogue with the launch of devices like the Nike Fuelband, Fitbit (see disclosure) and Up. But BodyMedia’s creators John (Ivo) Stivoric, an early innovator in wearable sensors and the co-founder of two design studios at Carnegie Mellon University, and Astro Teller, a former Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and entrepreneur, launched their company in 1999.

Since then, the company says its multi-sensor body monitors (like the armband worn by contestants on the TV show The Biggest Loser) have collected and analyzed more than 500 trillion sensor points. Unlike other consumer fitness trackers, BodyMedia’s devices have also received FDA clearance and are backed by clinical outcomes. In addition to selling direct-to-consumer, the company targets health professionals with wearable monitors that enable them to help people with obesity, diabetes and other conditions.

The 14-year-old company has raised $49 million from investors including Comcast Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet , Draper Triangle Ventures , Ascension Health Ventures and InCube Ventures.

Three phases for the wearable computing market

Right now, the wearables market is mostly in the accelerometer phase, said Rahman. With that technology, the Up wristband, for example, enables Jawbone to collect and provide users with information on their activity and sleep. But, he added, the BodyMedia acquisition will allow Jawbone to stake out a leading position in the next two phases of the market, which will revolve around multiple sensors on the body and the services and applications that connect and make sense of all that data.

As part of the acquisition, BodyMedia’s 60 employees will join Jawbone. For now, Rahman said, BodyMedia’s devices will continue to be sold under the BodyMedia brand. In time, he said the goal is for all of the devices to be part of the same “unified service system.” For example, if a person who uses an Up wristband to track day-to-day activity needs to share health information with a clinician for a condition, he could use a different monitoring device but it would integrate with the same software system.

“You have different events in your life that you need to be able to track and understand – this broadens and enriches our [suite of products] we can [offer] in the context of all of those life moments,” Rahman said.

The shift to passive tracking

Beyond health care, he added, “everything in the world is moving to passive tracking.” Consumers increasingly want their devices to just know where they are, how much they slept, how much they moved and what they might be interested in. More sensors means Jawbone can better understand its users and provide better services, he said.

In addition to announcing the BodyMedia acquisition, Jawbone said it had launched an “Up Platform” for iOS with 10 partners, including IFTTT, LoseIt, MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, Notch.me, RunKeeper, Sleepio, Wello and Withings. Users can merge their data from those apps with their Up data. For example, they can log a run in RunKeeper and then view the data in Up or step on a Withings scale and then monitor their weight in Up.  The company also said that it soon plans to extend the ecosystem of Up-integrated services by opening its API.

Jawbone declined to disclose how many people use the Up wristband, but said, in aggregate, the system tracks more than a billion steps and 610,000 hours of sleep each day and that, on average, users check their app five times a day and sync their data twice a day.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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Jawbone is doing something a lot of developers will probably be interested in, by opening up the UP fitness tracking wristband as a platform play, with an open API coming soon. Jawbone’s new version 2.5 update for the iOS UP app allows you to integrate with IFTTT, MapMyFitness, Withings, Sleepio, Wello, RunKeeper, Notch.me, Maxwell Health, Lose It!, and MyFitnessPal.

The new integrations mean that data gathered from those apps and devices like the Withings Smart Body Analyzer can now be pulled into the UP app itself, and combined with information gathered from the Jawbone wristband to provide a more complete picture of a user’s health. The IFTTT integration can be used to help you create your own motivational alerts when you’ve been inactive for too long, or to brag when you’ve blown past your daily step count goal.

The information from the UP can also go out to some specific apps, providing them with data on your sleep patterns and daily movement activity. And this is just the start: Jawbone is starting things off with a few select partners, but after that it intends to open up the API for any developers interested in building Jawbone UP integration into their own apps.

“We are now unstoppable in terms of leadership in today’s market,” explained Hosain Rahman, Jawbone CEO. “The platform we see the API is the first step of that; a limited set of partners with unique experiences, but the whole experience is much deeper.”

Jawbone made its reputation on building Bluetooth products like stereo headsets and earpieces, but then moved into audio equipment like the Jawbone speakers and health monitoring devices like the UP. Other competitors in the space have already moved to open up third-party integrations, like the Nike+ Fuelband, which plugs into Path and Lose It! Jawbone’s platform plans are much broader and deeper than the ones of some of its competitors, however, according to Rahman.

“A lot of these platform announcements like API releases are more PR than they are actual real developers on a platform building value for users,” he said. “We spent a lot of time sitting with developers, looking at what they can enable, what their data structure was, how to pull their experience back into UP, how you really create robustness around them, how to build APIs that work dependably and how we can make sure users can get this stuff.”

This should open the door for a much more holistic picture of personal health, available across a wide range of devices. Individually, these devices have been doing well, but the real opportunity is when apps and hardware start working with one another. Jawbone is taking a great first step towards that end with this API release, but it’ll be interesting to see how the UP platform handles normalizing a huge volume of data from a wide variety of partners in a way that doesn’t overwhelm individual users.

Although it doesn’t show up explicitly in any personality test, some people seem to be more prone to creating complexity than others. Instead of cutting to the heart of an issue, they tangle it further; rather than narrowing down projects, they allow the scope to keep expanding; and instead of making decisions, they defer until there is more data and better analysis.

These behaviors are characteristics of people that I call “complexifiers.” Like Pig-Pen, the Peanuts character who carries around his own cloud of dust, complexifiers seem to leave complexity in their wake, making it more difficult for subordinates, colleagues, customers, and even family members to get things done. Here’s a brief (disguised) example:

Due to changing market conditions, price compression, and the slow introduction of new products, a billion-dollar consumer products unit was starting to see erosion in market share and profitability. To turn things around, senior management brought in a new general manager, an industry expert named Phillip who had previously run the consumer products practice for a large consulting firm.

Phillip turned out to be a classic complexifier. At every meeting with his team he asked for additional data and berated his people for not knowing the answers to every detailed question he could think of. And although he seemed to be dissatisfied with some members of his team, he kept telling HR that he wanted more time to evaluate them, so no changes were made. Eventually he reorganized the unit into a functional/geographic matrix that he explained through an intricate series of slides that most of his people didn’t fully understand. He also created additional metrics that required people to spend more time on reporting. The net result of all this work was that people in the unit were busier and under more pressure than ever before — but market share and profitability continued to decline.

Obviously Phillip represents an extreme example of a complexifier with his insatiable hunger for additional data and inability to make fast decisions. But all of us fall into this category from time to time. If this kind of pattern seems all too familiar to you, and you want to learn how to think more like a “simplifier,” here are four questions that you can ask yourself and/or discuss with your team:

How much data is enough? Complexifiers always want more information, with the hope (or fantasy) that the next bit or byte will answer all questions and hold the key to success. Simplifiers understand that there will never be complete data and that it’s necessary to create hypotheses and action plans based on an intuitive sense of how much is enough.

Have we agreed on the key priorities? Complexifiers like to hedge their bets and not commit to a definitive course of action, particularly since some new information might surface that will change the plan. So rather than get locked in to a few things, complexifiers ask their people to keep multiple balls in the air. Simplifiers on the other hand narrow the focus to a few key things and give their people permission to stop doing things that don’t make the cut.

Do we have an efficient process for rapid review and course correction? Complexifiers like to spend their time in long meetings, sorting through reports and analyses, and trying to manage lots of disparate and unfocused work streams. Simplifiers have focused reviews of the key priorities and hold people accountable for their commitments and results. They also learn as they go, continually testing their hypotheses about what should be done against the reality of what’s working and what is not. This allows them to shift course whenever it seems appropriate or necessary.

Can we explain our plan to others? Complexifiers have a hard time communicating their plans to colleagues and customers, relying on intricate charts and diagrams and convoluted slides rather than simple, straightforward messages. One of the key characteristics of a simplifier is the ability to tell stories that convey the situation, the goals, and the plans — in a way that helps people understand what they need to do and how their work fits with everything else.

Some people are naturals at simplification. But for the rest of us, asking these questions can help keep us honest about whether we are slicing through complexity, or creating it.

Everyone’s favorite electronics hobby shop, Adafruit has posted instructions for building your own HAL 9000 replica out of a big red button, an Arduino board, and some cleverly cut plastic. Best of all? With the press of a button you can make HAL tell you want to do – until you kill it.

HAL is mostly made of laser cut plastic parts and a few nice decals. His brains are a Arduino Uno R3 with speakers attached and his jolly red button is a $10 arcade button. Best of all, the buttons come in white, blue, and green so you can make your own weird version of HAL that lives in an alternate 2001 universe.

To be clear, this is not an exact replica. However, it’s cool enough to, say, act as a cubicle charm or workspace novelty that will allow you, the human, to triumph over the encroaching hellfire of technological domination.

Rob Solomon, the former president and chief operating officer for Groupon, has joined Silicon Valley venture firm Accel Partners as a venture partner. He will focus on evaluating early stage and growth equity opportunities with Accel. Prior to Groupon, Solomon was a venture partner at TCV and also worked as chief executive of travel-focused search engine SideStep.

PRESS RELEASE
Accel Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm focusing on early stage and growth equity investments, today announced the addition of Rob Solomon as Venture Partner. Most recently, he served as President & COO for Groupon responsible for sales, marketing, business development, operations & international as the company experienced rapid growth going from 100 employees to 6,000.

As Venture Partner, Rob will be evaluating early stage and growth equity opportunities with Accel. He will also play a major role in advising the firm’s portfolio companies on a wide range of strategic and operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions. Accel Partners has been an early investor in leading consumer internet companies including Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Kayak, Prezi, Rovio (Angry Birds), Trulia, and Vox Media.

“Rob is a successful and proven executive and investor who adds tremendous value to our firm and we are excited to have him join us,” said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia. “He has been at the helm of some of the most high profile consumer internet brands and has demonstrated a unique ability to inspire and lead teams through both rapid growth and challenging times.”

Solomon brings more than 18 years of experience as an investor and consumer technology executive to Accel. Prior to Groupon he was a Venture Partner at TCV and CEO of SideStep, the web’s first real-time vertical search engine in the travel category. Under his leadership the company experienced a successful turnaround and merger with Kayak. Prior to SideStep, Solomon was a member of Yahoo!’s executive management team and served as Senior Vice President, Commerce.

“Accel has an excellent reputation for putting their portfolio companies at the center of everything that they do, and I believe that philosophy has been core to their success over the past 30 years,” said Solomon. “I’m very excited to be working along side the brightest investors and entrepreneurs around, to help identify and scale Internet technologies that will transform our world.”

Over the course of his career, Solomon has served on a number of boards and currently sits on the board of directors for HomeAway AWAY -0.16% , HighGear Media (Accel Partners and Greylock) and the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA. Solomon holds a bachelor’s in history from the University of California, Berkeley.

Accel BackgroundFounded in 1983, and managing over $9.6 billion in capital, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London, and Bangalore, as well as in China via its partnership with IDG-Accel.

Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful technology companies, many of which have defined their categories, including 99designs, Actuate, AdMob, Agile Software, Alfresco, Angry Birds (Rovio), Atlassian, BBN, Bonobos, Braintree, Brightcove, Cloudera, ComScore, Diapers.com (Quidsi), Dropbox, Etsy, Exclusively.in, Facebook, Flipkart, Fusion-IO, Gameforge, GlamMedia, Groupon, Imperva, Infinera, Interwoven, IronPlanet, JBoss, Kayak, Lookout, Macromedia, metroPCS, MoPub, Myntra, OPOWER, Polycom/PictureTel, Playfish, Portal Software, QlikTech, Rapt, Real Networks, Redback, Responsys, Riverbed, Spotify, Squarespace, SunRun, Trulia, UUNet, Veritas, Walmart.com, Webroot, Wonga, XenSource and Zimbra.

The post Accel Partners Names Rob Solomon a Venture Partner appeared first on peHUB.

Big Data is enabling organizations to create new products, outpace their competitors and save tens of millions of dollars. These innovations are not driven primarily by growing data volumes. Instead, they are fueled by the need to cope with increasingly complex data variety and velocity and to operationalize Big Data, building new applications that create better customer experiences. With Big Data, organizations:

1. Build new applications that were not possible before, like a major US city that cuts crime with MongoDB using real-time analysis.
2. Adapt and develop competitive advantages, like a global telco that built an online streaming video service on MongoDB to compete with Netflix and Amazon.
3. Make customers happy, like a top 5 insurance company that improves customer service by generating a 360-degree view of over 100 million customers using MongoDB.
4. Reduce costs, like a Tier 1 bank that saves tens of millions of dollars and meets new compliance standards by replacing legacy technology with MongoDB.

Why are organizations using MongoDB?

1. Online Big Data. MongoDB is the best database for taking your Big Data online.
2. Open-Source. MongoDB’s open-source model lowers costs and accelerates time to market.
3. Community. MongoDB has the largest developer community of any Big Data technology, and is the leading NoSQL database.
4. Agility. With MongoDB your application development is agile so your business can be agile, too.
5. General Purpose. Organizations use MongoDB to solve dozens of problems, building their expertise and amortizing their investment across the entire organization. 

Nielsen is planning to announce a tool on Tuesday that will track online TV viewing, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The tool, called “Nielsen Digital Program Ratings,” will primarily allow networks track viewing of the shows that they stream on their own websites.

Pilot partners include Fox, NBC, ABC, Univision, Discovery and A+E. AOL is the only digital video company participating in the pilot; Hulu and YouTube aren’t participating yet. The tool will open up to others this fall.

The tool can’t be used yet to track viewing on mobile devices, though Nielsen said that capability is coming, and because it does not include many online sites, it can’t give advertisers and networks a full view of how viewers are watching TV online.

Nielsen also announced in February that it plans to add cord cutters to the households whose TV watching habits it tracks.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Mehmet Dilsiz

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Unlike many other Android devices, Google’s Nexus smartphones and tablets do little to spoil the fun for avid modders. The bootloaders are unlockable and root is a just few steps away. It’s no wonder then that the Nexus threads on forums are crawling with custom kernels and green droid distributions and all sorts of apps meant to provide even more functionality than what Google throws in out-of-the-box.

As a result, the fact that Google Glass comes with a modder-friendly software shouldn’t come as a surprise to any Android enthusiast. The idea is fairly simple — get developers involved in the process of improving the pair of smart glasses. Why? If Android 4.2 is of any indication, the software giant can take some good custom bits and add then into what will be the next Android iteration available for Google Glass.

Stephen Lau, who is a software engineer and technical lead working at Google’s Project Glass, sums it up nicely: “Not to bring anybody down… but seriously… we intentionally left the device unlocked so you guys could hack it and do crazy fun **** with it. I mean, FFS, you paid $1500 for it… go to town on it. Show me something cool”.

The developer and enthusiast community provides more relevant feedback than Google can most likely ever get by asking customers. The former group doesn’t wait around for the search giant to release something new and often adds a feature or creates a new app that will be used by users everywhere. Ahead of the curve is where Google Glass aims to be, so this is a step in the right direction.

Because Google posted the source code for the Google Glass kernel it shouldn’t take long for Android developers to fiddle with it and, judging by what’s out there at the moment for other devices, make Glass run faster, smoother and sip less power from the internal battery.

What would you like to see being released by Android developers?

Continue reading…

Chad Johnson made quite a few headlines last year after being arrested for a domestic violence dispute–in which he was accused of headbutting his wife, sending her to the hospital–and subsequently being released from his contract with the Miami Dolphins. He went on Twitter around that time to vent about being unemployed, and it looks like things haven’t changed much on the job front…but he’s making the most of it.

Johnson recently met a homeless man named “Pork Chop” and decided to buy him more than just the beer he asked for. The two hit the town, going on a shopping trip and then out to some clubs, with Johnson tweeting updates about it the entire time. When asked later if he had a long-term plan to help his new friend, Johnson said he’s doing everything in his power to change things for Pork Chop.

Gave dude a G-shock watch I had in the car so he can tell time, we’re listening to Frankie Beverly n Maze on my iPhone living it up

I recently travelled to Herat, a beautiful city in the west of the country, with my economist colleague Kevin. Kevin has kindly agreed to write a guest blog about our trip:

Kevin, Economist in DFID Afghanistan. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

As someone returning to Afghanistan, I have found progress in the space of three years – the last time I worked here – extremely encouraging if signs are anything to go by. Literally. Outside our Embassy in Kabul, a giant TV screen advertising 3G mobile phone services acts as a makeshift street light. Other parts of the city too are bustling with growing Afghan consumerism – neighbourhoods specialising in the selling of toy cars, fast food and phone credit. All of this would not look too out of place in Piccadilly Circus!

My day job can be best summarised as helping the Afghan government improve the nitty-gritty aspects of public finances. This includes raising more taxes and spending public money according to need. Or, as a colleague puts it, ensuring that the financial pipes work. Better services provided by government are expected to follow, such as in education, health, roads and access to water. Whilst it is fascinating to have a national perspective from Kabul, I occasionally yearn to see what is happening out in the rest of the country, just as I did when I was in Helmand back in 2009.

You can imagine that I jumped at the chance to join Christa to discover ground truths in Herat. Together we flew on a freezing Saturday morning due west of Kabul. My first impression when we landed was how steeped in history the city is, like many other parts of Afghanistan. Some things have not changed – the remnants of a giant city wall, said to have been constructed by Alexander the Great, can still be seen. Interestingly, for me as an economist, Herat still is the trade route to Iran. Sadly, Herat still suffers from a significant number of landmines from a previous conflict though DFID is financing a project which will eventually make Herat mine-free.

We packed in a lot during the visit. We built on lessons learned from Helmand, on issues that still persist in getting public money into the provinces. I recall a great discussion with provincial directorate officials on where they believe the blockages in the national budget lie. The health sector director eloquently and diplomatically likened this to a tailor having your measurements but giving you a random suit – budgets are not always based on local needs. On a more positive note, we also saw examples of local government and politics working very well, when locally-elected representatives outside the city showed us a school built and maintained by them. This is the water pump that serves the school and houses around it.

Local representatives prioritised the building of a water pump, paid for by the UK via the World Bank’s National Solidarity Programme. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

When visiting the provincial tax office we also stumbled on a poster informing officials of an upcoming training event provided by DFID. This was a pleasant surprise and perhaps the most joy I have felt looking at essentially an official mandate. You can find out more about how tax collection is helping the country here.

Village representatives of Baland shahi. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

One highlight I did not expect was culinary – we had lunch with Afghan counterparts in a restaurant overlooking the town, with delicious local food.

We also met with the provincial governor during our visit, to talk about an existing DFID support to his office. The conversation was in English (Christa an Austrian, he an Afghan and me originally coming from Hong Kong) as he sat in front of a wall filled with pictures of the last two centuries of Herat’s governors. He wheeled out his economic strategy; music to an economist’s ears. We were even luckier to be invited by him to see the old citadel, used by previous emperors of the city before it was even part of Afghanistan. The panoramic views of the city on offer inside the fort are a sight to behold. This reminded me of something a colleague recently mentioned, having seen it inscribed on a stone outside the Kabul museum: a nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.

The impressive Qala Iktyaruddin citadel. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

Microsoft’s Brian Janous was the keynote speaker at Data Center World Spring 2013, which got underway yesterday at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. (Photo: Josh Ater)

LAS VEGAS – Microsoft is looking deeply into energy efficiency and insists that that its gaze must encompass the entire system – not just on a the level of the data center, but scrutinizing what it takes to create a unit of content.

We are now in an era of centralization, Microsoft Director of Energy Strategy Brian Janous said yesterday in his keynote address at Data Center World Spring 2013 at the Mandalay Bay, drawing many parellels between the data center and energy industries at the turn of the last century.

While the talk was dubbed “commoditization of the cloud,” a key theme was the centralization of data that is occurring thanks to cloud, and the efficiencies this is driving in terms of energy – the oxygen of the cloud.

Energy is Critical

Cloud is driving centralization, which is in turn driving the need for efficiencies. “There’s probably no other industry, at this point, where energy is more critical,” said  Janous.

Janous oversees energy agreements for Microsoft, as well as strategic partnerships to make sure the company’s power supply is reliable and sustainable. Joining Microsoft in 2011, his career had largely been focused in the energy sector. Janous believes data center operators must look into the entire supply chain for opportunities. This includes “out of the box thinking” on topics such as fuel cells, methane, solar and everything in between.

“Physicists believe it’s possible to create a perpetual motion machine, if this happens, everything I talk about will be irrevelant,” Janous joked.

What Microsoft is Doing and How They’re Doing It

Microsoft has been moving from a traditional box software company to an online services company. Microsoft runs 200 online services worldwide. Office365 is the fastest growing product in the company’s history, Janous said, serving more than 1 billion customers in the cloud. Janous provided a quick snapshot of where Microsoft’s data centers are and noted that the company is still in rapid expansion mode. ““It’s an exciting time to be on the forefront,” he said.

The company sees the evolution of efficiency in the data center occurring over five generations. The first was colocation; multi-tenancy to take advantage of scale. The second generation was a focus on density. The third on containment. The fourth generation is modular. The fifth generation is Integration, is this is where Janous says PUE will approach the 1.0 mark.

“Integration is thinking about system on a chip, and it’s a little broader than that. It’s about what it takes to make a data center work. “What integration means is thinking about upstream and downstream value chain and how we optimize it,” said Janous.

In short, efficiency isn’t just about the facility. “Let’s figure it out all the way to creating a unit of content,” said Janous.

Centralization Drives Efficiency

Janous spoke of parallels between online services and the energy sector, particularly the electricity sector. “Beyond the dependencies, there are a lot of similarities: large centralized plants, a network, and we have a need to balance supply and demand on a near instantaneous basis,” said Janous. “There’s not a lot of industries that need to do this.”

“On a macro level, I think of the development of the electricity sector and over the last 100-150 years, it developed as starting as bunch of components, and then became centralized in plants. This is what we’re seeing in data centers these days.”

Janous notes that there were roughly 50,000 power plants distributed across the United States at the turn of the previous century. “Businesses didn’t trust utilities,” he said. “Then we had a massive revolution, not just on the tech side, but the business side. Centralization meant you could spread costs over customers, driving costs down and driving up demand.”

Janous believes the data center industry needn’t fear commoditization. He uses the example of the light bulb. Electric companies believed that because the light bulb was 4 times more efficient, it would drive them out of business. Instead, it created 4 times more lights. The corollary: as we get more energy efficient in the data center, it creates a bigger demand.

Gary Bunyan is Global DCIM Solutions Specialist at iTRACS Corporation, a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) company. This is the 11th in a series of columns by Gary about “the user experience”. See Gary’s most recent columns: Keep Your Servers Cool – And Your Business Hot, Turning DCIM’s Big Data into Actionable Insight and Unlock Your Capacity By Unplugging Your Ghost Servers.

GARY BUNYAN
iTRACS

If you’re like me, then the data center is the center of your professional universe. With tens of thousands of assets co-habitating in a vast web of inter-relationships and inter-dependencies, it’s one of the most complex entities on the planet and a simply amazing environment in which to work.

But for the millions and millions of technology users and consumers out there, they barely know that we, and our data centers, even exist. And that’s the way it should be.

Consumers can’t – nor should they — be bothered with the mind-boggling challenge of keeping all of those IT, facilities, and building management systems purring in harmony on the data center floor. All they want is the information those systems deliver in milliseconds so they can pursue their professional and personal lives with maximum freedom, choice, and success.

And I don’t blame them.

In fact, I’m very much like them.

Immediate and Valuable Information

I, too, want holistic information at my fingertips. But the information that I want, instantly and effortlessly, is a different kind of information. My colleagues and I want context-rich information about all of the assets, systems, applications, and workflows that feed into the operation of the data center so we can manage the physical infrastructure smarter.

I don’t want to be buried in massive amounts of unrelated and indecipherable spreadsheets. I don’t want to be overwhelmed with tons of infrastructure-level minutia, literally trying to “connect the dots.”

Instead, I want holistic management information – instantly – at my fingertips. Information that is already “connected” and is contextually-rich, meaningful, and actionable so I can clearly see the disposition of the entire physical ecosystem and how to optimize it.

I want to be in what I call, the “Information Bubble.”

The Information Bubble

DCIM with interactive 3D visualization creates what I describe as an “information bubble” – a holistic, intuitive, real-time management environment, which, both literally and figuratively, immerses you in analytics, dashboards, and management tools giving you complete command-and-control over the physical ecosystem.

I call it a “bubble” because all of the information you need is right at your fingertips – and all of underlying data that got you there is beyond the bubble, outside of your periphery. So you’re neither distracted nor confused.

Inside the bubble:

• You are navigating within a living, breathing 3D model of your infrastructure so you can see, understand, and manage it with unparalleled clarity.
• You are immersed in deep-dive reports, dashboards, and analytics.
• Information comes to you intuitively and holistically – you don’t have to go get it

The “information bubble” is like your own private operations center. Everything you need at your fingertips. Image courtesy of iTRACS software.

The Value of Interconnected Data

So how does DCIM take all of the underlying data about the infrastructure and present it contextually and holistically inside the “bubble?”

By collecting, aggregating and analyzing data about both individual assets and the interconnected environment in which they are operating.

Think of it this way:

The amount of data collected from today’s physical infrastructure is increasing exponentially. This includes data about power, space, network connectivity, cooling, server utilization, business output, work-per-watt, facilities loads, and much more. But this data isn’t information. And the proliferation of this data isn’t insight. It’s the interconnectedness and context of the data that creates the value.

Data becomes information when it is presented in context, with an awareness of the interconnected whole and a complete real-time view into the environment ¬– not just a portion of the environment over a “slice” of time.

Inside the “bubble,” the exact disposition of your assets, and what you need to do about it, is crystal clear. Image courtesy of iTRACS software.

Remember: Give someone a piece of data and you haven’t changed anything. Teach them how to turn it into information and you’ll change the world.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

Opera may be thought of as just a web browser, but the company looks to change that by branching out to the connected devices market. This includes smart TV’s, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes and provides a path for Opera to become mainstream, even though many of those customers may never realize they are using it.

Today the Norwegian company announces that it is partnering with Korean hardware maker Samsung to power the 2013 line of Blu-ray players. The Opera Devices Software Development Kit (SDK) will offer video support for YouTube, BBC iPlayer and more. “The new Opera-powered Samsung Blu-ray players provide viewers with the ultimate home entertainment experience by not only allowing viewers to watch their favorite Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, but also to enjoy various streaming video services with ease” Opera says in a statement.

The Opera Devices SDK supports HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, 2D Canvas and WebGL and promises better web-content rendering and streaming performance. “Samsung’s Blu-ray players powered by Opera offer great performance and support for the latest web technology, resulting in easier and better access to popular online video services” Opera tells us.

Meanwhile, Aneesh Rajaram, Senior Vice President of TV & Devices for Opera Software boasts “With best-in-class support for web and TV standards, plus unmatched rendering performance, the new Samsung Blu-ray players with popular web-based online video will make it even more tempting to stay on the couch”.

The new Opera-powered Samsung 2013 Blu-ray players will be available globally soon, but an actual release date has not yet been announced. Samsung Blu-ray players support YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora and many more apps.

Photo Credit: Mikael Damkier/Shutterstock

Service providers are quickly coming up with big data solutions in a turnkey fashion, as cloud presents a massive opportunity for big data going forward. Global cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer and distributed systems company Basho have teamed up on a big data solution. Riak and Riak Enterprise are now available on SoftLayer infrastructure on a consumption-based pricing basis. Riak is an open source, distributed database.

The combination, dubbed SoftLayer big data solution: Riak, will provide database administration and infrastructure management with the flexibility of SoftLayer’s consumption-based pricing. Common use cases for Riak include content delivery platforms and global session stores; aggregating large amounts of data for logging, sear and analytics; and managing, storing and streaming unstructured data and general-purpose data stores.

“The customer demand for easy to deploy and manage big data cloud-based solutions continues to rise,” says Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer. “We are seeing substantial adoption through joint customers, such as Bump, who want to leverage this joint offering. Our SoftLayer big data solution: Riak offering is further validation of our commitment to deliver big data solutions that can run over our highly scalable, automated cloud platform.”

The customer mentioned, Bump, is one of the most popular mobile apps on the market today. The app makes it easy for users to share their contact information, photos, and other objects by simply “bumping” their smartphones. Bump runs on SoftLayer’s infrastructure while using Riak to store user data including events, communications sent and received, handset information and tokens needed to authenticate using social networks.

“Operational ease is key to our business success.” says Mark Smith, Operations Lead at Bump. “The combination of Softlayer, who we already trust with our business and data, and Basho, who makes the database that we trust at scale, saves us time and effort and allows us to focus on our business, not our data infrastructure.”

The new solution makes it easier to create and configure customize Riak clusters at the push of a button. Deployment is standardized, reducing risk of human error. It uses pre-engineered systems that are optimized for Riak including dedicated bare metal servers, for high performance and high reliability. The solution uses best practices based on joint insights, expertise and experience. This allows Riak users to run optimized hardware and OS configurations, automated deployment of multi-data center fault-tolerant clusters, and integrated monitoring and support in the cloud.

High Performance, Scalable Riak Environments in the Cloud

The combination means a more accessible and more flexible, pay as you go option for Riak distributed databases. It’s purchasable in an a la carte fashion through SoftLayer, enabling organizations to quickly deploy big data applications. Organizations can start using Riak more quickly by provisioning a complete solution set through SoftLayer’s portal or API for ease of management, administration and support.

“Basho and SoftLayer have long catered to innovative developers building the next generation of web, social and mobile applications. Today, enterprise customers are demanding the same, an architecture that provides for zero-data loss and ensures zero-downtime.” says Bobby Patrick, Executive Vice President and CMO of Basho. “We believe distributed systems software, such as Riak, and distributed infrastructure is required to help customers truly achieve these ambitions. Basho is excited to partner with SoftLayer to help
companies easily deploy applications that are truly distributed, scalable, and always available.”

Basho is a distributed systems company dedicated to making software that is highly available, fault-tolerant and easy-to-operate at scale. Basho’s distributed NoSQL database, Riak and Basho’s cloud storage software, Riak CS, are used by fast growing Web businesses and by over 25% of the Fortune 50 to power their critical Web, mobile and social applications and their public and private cloud platforms.

SoftLayer’s Riak solutions are available immediately with prices starting at $359 per month. This price includes an Intel Xeon 1270-based server with 8GB of RAM and two 500GB SATA storage drives.

The open space inside CyrusOne’s 680,000 square foot facility in Carrollton, Texas, along with one of the golf carts used to transport staff across the vast expanse of space. (Photo: Rich Miller)

CARROLLTON, Texas – If the air is whooshing past your ears inside the data center, it usually means it’s time to turn down the airflow from the CRAC units.

But in this case, at the CyrusOne data center north of Dallas, the whooshing noise is from the speed of the HoverBoard scooters that staffers use to zoom across the huge expanse of open space inside the 680,000 square-foot facility.

The need for scooters and a brigade of golf carts is a sign of the scale of CyrusOne ‘s ambitions with the facility in Carrollton, which has just opened its first phase of colocation space. The 47,000 square-foot data hall is the first of six phases planned for the enormous facility. The data hall is housed in the rear of the building, hence the need for speedy transport across the nearly quarter-mile distance to the office space at the front of the building.

Success Story Rooted in Texas

Texans like to build big. And perhaps no company knows the Texas market better than CyrusOne, which operates nine data centers at campuses in Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas.

“We feel good about committing to an asset like this when we have a success story in a given market, and we have that in Dallas,” said Kevin Timmons, the CTO of CyrusOne.

The Carrollton data center is the showpiece for Timmons’ “massively modular” approach to design, which seeks to take the scale and advanced design of the largest web-scale data centers and bring them to enterprise customers in a multi-tenant environment.

It’s a large canvas on which to paint. The Carrollton data center is more than 1,428 feet long and 480 feet across. It’s large enough to house six 747 airplanes, four football fields, a dozen space shuttles, or two Washington Monuments. It could eventually support up to 60 megawatts of critical IT load.

CyrusOne has moved quickly to bring the facility online and begin leasing space. It took just 14 weeks from the start of work to commissioning the first phase of the data center. Several customers have already been installed.

Big Facilities for Growing Markets

It’s been a whirlwind year for CyrusOne, which had its IPO in January and is making a big bet on big campuses. In Phoenix the company has opened the first data center on a new campus designed to house seven facilities and more than 1 million square feet of space. In Houston,CyrusOne has just purchased another 32 acres of land to expand its campus, which is being built around the infrastructure requirements of the oil and gas industry.

And then there’s Dallas, where CyrusOne is rolling out a massive facility in one of the nation’s most competitive markets. The company offers both colocation and wholesale data center suites, and has recently introduced an interconnection offering, allowing it to play on several levels of the complex Dallas market.

CyrusOne isn’t alone in its confidence in demand in the Dallas market  One of its major competitors believes that demand for wholesale space continues to outpace supply in Dallas.

SoftLayer, the cloud and hosting provider that you may or may not know, has been busy again. It’s added a hosted Riak database service to its portfolio.

It worked with  Basho, the Cambridge, Mass. company behind both the Riak NoSQL distributed database and RiakCS  storage to do the integration work.  Both Riak and Riak Enterprise now run on SoftLayer’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

As GigaOM’s Jordan Novet recently reported, Riak is used by companies including Github because it stores, replicates and retrieves data, even when multiple nodes fail.

According to a statement by the two companies, the Riak solution makes it easier and faster for companies to “deploy scalable production-grade systems”at the click of a button.”

In March, Basho made its Riak CS distributed storage  available under the Apache 2 license. Late last year, Softlayer worked with 10Gen to put the popular MongoDB database on its infrastructure as an option. It’s clearly filling in its NoSQL check boxes here.

Dallas-based SoftLayer’s been the subject of acquisition rumors lately. IBM is (or was) reportedly interested in buying the company.

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There’s a new contender in the document-sharing space, with security features that should ingratiate it to businesses and differentiate it from Dropbox and other cloud-storage providers. But the name of the vendor is not new.

Novell — the company that dominated the network operating system market with NetWare before running into the Microsoft Windows NT/Windows Server buzzsaw and coming out with open enterprise server and identity and access management software — is releasing Filr. It’s the first Novell product that doesn’t build on existing products since Novell was acquired by the Attachmate Group.

Bob Flynn, Novell’s president and general manager, wants to reposition the company as lively and innovative but also reliable in its core strengths in networking and file management. Flynn sees the company’s software assets as strong but said the brand still suffers in the aftermath of the company’s rough patch. Whenever he hears from a company that doesn’t want to buy from Novell anymore, he asks why. It’s usually not the technology or the user experience that gets in the way. Rather, it’s the company itself. “Well, I haven’t heard from you guys in years, and you’re sitting right in the middle of my infrastructure, running mission-critical stuff for me. Where are you going? What do you expect me to do?” he said, representing the sentiments of an unhappy customer. That’s what Flynn is trying to change.

So here comes Filr, which will be generally available on Tuesday. On the front end, browser, desktop, iPad, iPhone and Android applications keep files arranged in neat areas: those available inside an enterprise’s network, those that people have shared with a user and those that are exclusive to the user. On the back end, the software runs as a virtual appliance, files can sync up, and deployments can be made to comply with security standards a customer has in place.

Novell Filr iPhone and iPad apps.

Companies that already pay Novell for maintenance of Open Enterprise Server software will get complimentary access to Filr. Others can get the product for $45 per user per year.

Bringing a safe solution to the bring-your-own-device party isn’t the most surprising move. Arguably it should have come sooner. Flynn said the idea was on the drawing board soon after the Attachmate Group closed on its acquisition of Novell in 2011, but executives wanted to focus on rolling out additions to existing products first. Now that Novell has introduced Filr, it, along with a dozen other companies, will try to become the Dropbox of the enterprise, and with an on-premise option it will compete with Microsoft SharePoint, FileReflex, mobilEcho and others.

Novell might not succeed at this — the company shuttered its Vibe Cloud collaboration offering a couple of years ago. Then again, maybe the company is different now. Flynn certainly seems up for leading the charge of a turnaround.

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Telecom giant Verizon is expected to announce on Tuesday that it plans to spend $100 million on clean power projects, including installing solar panels and fuel cells at 19 locations to help power its buildings and network infrastructure. Verizon’s Chief Sustainability Officer James Gowen plans to make the announcement at Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference on Tuesday.

Verizon plans to buy fuel cells from ClearEdge Power and solar panels from SunPower. The amount of power from the solar panels and fuel cells, which will be installed across seven states, will be 70 million kilowatt hours of electricity. That’s enough to power 6,000 homes per year.

Fuel cells look like industrial refrigerators, and they use a chemical reaction to produce electricity and heat. They are filled with large stacks that are lined with catalysts (a metal, sometimes platinum), and a fuel (commonly natural gas) is inserted in one side and runs over the stack. Electricity and heat flow out the other side. The benefits of fuel cells are that the electricity can be created on site where it is used, and if the fuel used is biogas, then the electricity is also free of carbon emissions.

Verizon has been using a small amount of solar and fuel cell technology for awhile, but this move represents the company’s largest commitment to clean power projects to date. Verizon is looking to cut its carbon emissions footprint substantially by 2020.

Gowen told me in an interview that this initiative is being driven both by the desire to add energy resiliency to Verizon’s facilities as well as the company’s sustainability goals. During superstorm Sandy, a fuel cell installation that Verizon had in Long Island that powered a switching station (using fuel cells from UTC Power, which was acquired by ClearEdge Power) never went down. Gowen said he wanted that type of off-grid resiliency through out Verizon’s facilities.

All of the solar panel installations in 2013 will be pretty large ones. For example, Verizon is putting solar panels on the roof of a data center in New Jersey, as well as on the ground next to the data center. The return on investment for the combined clean power projects is supposed to be around ten years, said Gowen.

Deploying clean power technologies — both solar panels and fuel cells — at data centers is a growing trend for internet and telecom companies in the U.S. Apple (a AAPL), Google, eBay, and Microsoft are all deploying clean power at data centers to help add off grid resiliency, as well as lower carbon emissions.

Apple is building its own solar panel farms and fuel cell farms at its data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Google has spent over a $1 billion investing in clean power projects and recently started working with Duke Energy on a clean power initiative in North Carolina. AT&T has large fuel cell farms powering its operations in California and Connecticut, using technology from Bloom Energy.

In a call last week, ClearEdge Power’s CEO David Wright called Verizon’s commitment to clean power technology “a stake in the ground for other technology companies.”

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At 4:26 a.m. one morning last December, an email from our COO arrived in our inboxes. “Literally can’t sleep — thinking about [your data presentation]…” As a data scientist, if your data causes co-workers to lose sleep, you’ve done your job, perhaps too well. The rest of the email outlined new strategies for member acquisition and engagement that will save our organization over $200,000. The inspiration? One map. It was a simple depiction of the U.S., which showed member engagement by city, but also hinted at the potential of segmenting our users in order to give them the right content at the right time.

Our data hasn’t always prompted action. There have been plenty of times when it has hit the cutting room floor, even if the insights were technically valuable (they would save us money or acquire members). But data is only valuable if people are willing to act on it. Which means, as a data analyst, you’ve got to sell it.

Data visualizations are not art, they’re advertisements.

Data presentations often feel like window-shopping — the data looks pretty, but co-workers aren’t buying. This is especially true when people feel like they’re at an art gallery looking at beautiful pictures rather than at a meeting discussing business problems. How do you make your data visually appealing, but also compelling enough that your colleagues are willing to spend their resources to act on it?

The world of product design points to two different approaches. The first is the “predictive” black-box approach: Build a big, fancy visualization in private, release it to the world in your presentation, and assume it will succeed. This rarely works. Data scientists are not often trained artists or designers who know exactly what their audience wants. The second, more successful tactic is an “agile” approach, similar to how restaurants use test kitchens: Create variations on a theme and see what sticks. This means crafting and testing ten different scallop dishes and recognizing that at best, one will make it to the menu.

Going with your first best idea is a high risk, low probability recipe for success. The sauce could be wrong, the portion size off, or the coloration may be unappetizing. Diners might love scallops, just not what you’ve created.

At most companies, failing is risky, because failure can be read as weakness. But here’s a way to minimize risk: Make it part of your culture. We do that three ways at DoSomething.org:

1. We hold an annual event called “Fail Fest,” during which staff members speak about what they learned from a failure while wearing a pink boa.
2. We A/B test new product features.
3. We test our content, including data visualizations. To create the one map that impressed our COO, we failed at least 10 times.

Ten failures for one success. Quantity over quality is a common strategy in the natural world. When a fern unfurls in spring, it releases hundreds of thousands of spores, the vast majority of which never take root — some are caught by the wind, others stray onto tree branches. Of those that reach soil and germinate, many are trampled, eaten, or starved. Only a few reach adulthood and start the process again.

The lesson from nature is simple: The more we try, the more we succeed, even if the quality of each subsequent attempt does not improve.

It’s foolhardy to believe that your first best-effort attempt is going to be the right one. But producing many quality versions is resource intensive. So you’ve got to move from many possible versions to the right one in an efficient way.

Sequence development to save time.

We do this by sequencing development phases: First, we make prototypes. Second, we test them. Third, we go to production. Many of our prototypes are nothing more than sketches on a whiteboard. Often we test five versions of an idea on co-workers, see what resonates, and then create five robust versions of the best one. We minimize the risks inherent in making just one visualization, while effectively allocating time away from ultimately doomed iterations.

For our engagement visual, we knew our goal was to convey that user segmentation is valuable. But which variable should we show: age, gender, mobile carrier, city, or first name? To answer this, we created simple chart visualizations of all five like this one:

Instead of perfecting the form, we showed these basic mock-ups to co-workers. Their responses were clear: the city data resonated most. So the next step was to create five more visualizations with that data, fleshing out the form.

Here we struggled with questions like: Should we show data in a table, a bar chart, or on a map? Should engagement be represented by a two-color scale, or one? So again we created five rough versions, collected informal feedback from co-workers, and iterated quickly. In the end, we created 10 visualizations, but covered a multitude of possibilities.

Below is the rough visual that resonated most with colleagues — they responded to seeing our membership engagement by city in a real-world context, but had trouble seeing patterns in the data.

In our final visualization, we moved to a two-color scale to highlight relative differences in engagement between cities. We also added lists of the five most and least-engaged cities. The lists alone provide the insight; the map adds depth and credibility.

There are lots of ways to sequence development. But the end principle is simple: create more data visualizations than you need to show, because your first idea is unlikely to be your best. Even for this article, we pitched five headlines and synopses to HBR editors. We then wrote five versions of their favorite. So, this article is one of the best of 25 permutations.

But is it good enough to change your behavior?