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A new class of entrepreneurs is getting ready to take on the Windy City. On Thursday, TechStars Chicago, which was formed earlier this year when the Boulder, Colo.-based TechStars program joined forces with the local Excelerate Labs, announced its first cohort of startups.

Troy Henikoff, the program’s managing director, said the 10 startups were selected from an applicant pool of 904, which was double the size of the applicant pool last year. The 10 companies not only reflect a range of industries, he said, the new cohort is geographically diverse, with just three startups from Chicago and a couple from outside the U.S.

Launched three years ago, Excelerate Labs was led by a group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including Henikoff (founder of SurePayroll), OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, Sandbox Industries’ Nick Rosa and New World Ventures’ Adam Koopersmith. Its 30 companies have raised a total of $30 million, the group said. But teaming up with TechStars elevates the program and gives startups access to a national network of mentors and investors.

Here are the program’s 10 new startups:

CaptureProof (www.captureproof.com) – Currently in beta, CaptureProof gives patients a secure site for tracking their health with photos and video and then sharing them with their doctors. Through the site, doctors can monitor patients’ health trends and progress remotely.

HIPOM (www.myHIPOM.com) – For parents who want to limit their kids’ access to the internet, HIPOM provides a cloud-based solution for controlling any individual device in the home.

Nexercise (www.nexercise.com) – Nexercise is an iPhone and Android app that helps people lose weight and improve their fitness through competitions with friends, alerts and rewards.

Pathful (www.pathful.com) – A web analytics service, Pathful says it tracks all kinds of visitor interactions and doesn’t require tagging.

Peoplematics (www.peoplematics.com) – Peoplematics is a service that enables employees to find and share information across their personal cloud.

Project Fixup (www.projectfixup.com) – A matchmaking service, Project Fixup pairs up people for one-on-one dates based on their schedules and interests.

SimpleRelevance (www.simplerelevance.com) – An email marketing platform, SimpleRelevance says its analytics-driven approach can improve revenue per message by 30-300 percent.

SocialCrunch (http://about.socialcrunch.com) – SocialCrunch says it builds a “behavior graph” of internet users to help marketers learn about and reach a target audience.

Sqord (www.sqord.com) – A “Fitbit for kids” (see disclosure), Sqord’s watch-like fitness tracking device promotes activity through friendly competition.

TradingView (www.tradingview.com) – An online community of investors and traders, TradingView aggregates web stock charts and enables investors to share their ideas.

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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The EU has finally come out with a public document discussing Google’s proposal to end a lengthy antitrust investigation, and addressing the previously reported “market test,” which will give competitors and all those concerned a chance to offer feedback.

Should Google be required to change its search results? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The Commission is seeking feedback on the commitments Google has offered to address concerns.

On why it feels the need to intervene, the Commission says, “In high-tech markets in particular, network effects may lead to entrenched market positions. Google has had a strong position in web search in most European countries for a number of years now. It does not seem likely that another web search service will replace it as European users’ web search service of choice.”

“In this context, it is important for the Commission to intervene in order to ensure that Google’s prominent market position in web search does not affect the possibility for other competitors to innovate in neighbouring markets, including in the long-term,” it adds.

The Commission views Google as dominant in search and search advertising, and says it is abusing its dominant position in four areas: specialized search, content usage, exclusivity agreements with publishers for the provision of online search advertising on their sites, and contractual restrictions on the portability and management of online search advertising campaigns across AdWords and competing platforms.

Google has, of course, settled similar concerns here in the U.S. with the Federal Trade Commission, where it agreed to let sites remove content from specialized search results pages while allowing them to keep results in regular Google results (they recently released a tool for this), and to enable advertisers to “mix and copy ad campaign data” within third-party services that use the AdWords API.

Some competitors felt that the settlement did not go far enough. The proposal in Europe goes further. Here is the list of Google’s proposals verbatim (per the EU’s announcement):

Google offers for a period of 5 years to:

(iv) no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

A third party would be required to monitor Google’s implementation of its commitments.

Already, despite the increased responsibilities on Google’s part, competitors don’t think the proposals go far enough this time either.

Interestingly, FairSearch, the group of Google competitors, which has been most vocal about its opposition to Google’s practices since its incarnation when Google announced its intent to acquire ITA software three years ago, issued a statement on the market test before the EU’s document came out.

“The most important remedy to Google’s abuse of dominance is to require the search monopoly, which controls 94 percent of the market in Europe, to subject its own products and services to the same policy it uses to rank and display all other Websites,” the group said. “Since it has taken a year to extract a final proposal from Google, FairSearch believes the ‘market test’ should last three months to ensure that interested parties have enough time to carefully provide the European Commission with their expertise on the effectiveness of Google’s proposal. As we have said, we will comment on Google’s proposed remedies after the Commission shares them.”

FairSearch intends to study the “effects” of Google’s proposal, and has implied that it will have more suggestions for how to make things better.

Separately, FairSearch recently filed a complaint with the EU saying that Google is using its Android operating system to give it an additional unfair advantage in search. This is not addressed in Google’s current proposals, but the EU isn’t ignoring it. Here’s what the commission had to say about “other Google-related allegations”:

This process covers the four competition concerns that have been investigated as a matter of priority. The Commission is, however, thoroughly examining all other allegations brought to its attention by different market players with a view to deciding whether or not a further investigation of those issues is warranted. Google’s Android related business practices are part of those issues.

To be continued…

All those concerned with Google’s current proposals have a month to submit their feedback to the EU.

Do Google’s proposals go far enough? Should Google even be required to do all of what it has proposed? Will this help competitors significantly? Will it hurt Google significantly? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Opscode’s been on a bit of a roll. The devops fan favorite is the foundation of Amazon Web Services new Opsworks application lifecycle management capability and now it’s being embraced and integrated into IBM’s SmartCloud and will work with Microsoft Azure, via a collaboration with Microsoft Open Technologies. The news comes out of Opscode’s ChefConf, kicking off Thursday in San Francisco.

Opscode, the name behind the Chef tools that many developers use to automate the configuration and deployment of IT, has got more than a toehold in the cloud landscape. Earlier this week Joyent, another cloud provider, said it was integrating Chef into the Joyent cloud.

As I wrote at that time, tools like Chef, CFEngine and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. A key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud.

Opscode VP of marketing Jay Wampold says IBM and Microsoft’s moves show that enterprise customers are ready for cloud-type deployments. “If you look back over a decade, you see that Google, Facebook and Amazon figured out how to leverage large-scale infrastructure to deliver to consumers built from the ground up on code. Now you’re seeing major [older] enterprises moving IT from a back-office support function for internal operations into a front-office effort that is a touch point for consumers.”

As part of this deal, Opscode has agreed to support IBM’s AIX Unix operating system.

That means they need to develop, configure, test, deploy and monitor applications in web time and at web scale, which is where the devops movement and tools like Chef and Puppet come in. The devops school pushes developers and IT people to work together on fast, incremental tech deployments rather than at cross-purposes. Where Chef and Puppet differ is that Chef focuses more on developers while Puppet concentrates on admins — the “ops” side of devops.

The news of the past few months seems to indicate that Chef has momentum  – although one IT person who watches this space would not give Chef the edge, necessarily. “Chef and Puppet both seem to be doing great. The push by AWS and Joyent is probably more a function of the fact that Chef is easier to stand up as a hosted service than Puppet,” he said.

Another factor could be that VMware recently invested $30 million more in Puppet, something that makes some businesses wary> The fear is that Puppet won’t be totally dedicated to heterogeneous environments, a worry that Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies denies. The VMware relationship does help Puppet in the private cloud market  but “we’re not changing our roadmap for VMware, and they don’t have anything resembling a controlling stake,” Kanies said via email.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs 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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Today is the biggest day of the off-season for NFL fans. We all wait to see who our favorite team selects when the pick rolls around. We wonder if the player will be boon or bust. After all, the Draft is little more than a crap shoot — ask the San Diego Chargers how that Ryan Leaf kid worked out. On the other hand, there are late round gems to be found — Terrell Davis was a sixth round pick and Davone Bess went undrafted.

Either way, the whole show, live from Radio City in New York, will go down beginning tonight at 8pm ET and the spectacle can be watched on the NFL Network.

What if you are not near a TV or simply do not get the channel in your subscription package? The league wants you to be able to watch the Draft anyway, and of course, the ads as well.

The show, in its entirety, can be seen live on the NFL Draft website. If you are out and about then you can catch the action on your mobile device via the NFL app, but if you want to actually see the streaming video then you’d better be a Verizon customer because the league has an exclusive deal with the mobile carrier. Alternatively, you can follow the NFL on Twitter to keep up on the happenings.

The Kansas City Chiefs are now on the clock. Will it be Luke Joeckel or Eric Fisher? What will your team do? All of these questions are about to be answered.

Traditional development trends has ensured that the C and C++ programming languages remain popular even decades after their creation. Despite being created in the same year as C++, Objective-C was never as popular. That all changed with the advent of the iPhone, but things are starting to slow down.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index, an index that charts the popularity of programming languages, has found that Objective-C’s popularity has stopped growing after its meteoric rise from rank 42 in 2008 to rank 4 in 2012.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the popularity of Objective-C will start to dramatically decrease. The popularity of iOS devices and Apple’s insistence that Objective-C be the only language used in iOS development ensures that the language will have a long life ahead of it.

We can always make a few assumptions based on these findings though. One is that iOS development isn’t growing as fast as it used to. Developers building apps for iOS will continue to do so, but this stall in growth seems to indicate that new developers are not flocking to the platform.

It could all change at a moment’s notice, however, especially if Apple does release a cheaper iPhone for emerging markets this year. The development communities in China, India and elsewhere could help catapult Objective-C to even greater heights as these teams scramble to get apps on the Apple App Store.

As for the other languages, the top eight languages didn’t see a rise or decline in popularity compared to last year. C remains the most popular with Java and C++ taking up second and third place respectively. As you already read, Objective-C is at the number four spot, and C# rounds out the top five.

Here’s the full chart showing the top 20 programming languages this month:

You can check out the rest of the stats including a list of the top 50 programming languages in the world over at the TIOBE Programming Community Index page.

42nd President of the United States Bill Clinton appears to be using Twitter at his own behest.

As you may remember, earlier this month Stephen Colbert kind of sort of forced the former president to join Twitter. At a Clinton Global Initiative forum, Colbert created a profile for Clinton and tweeted out his first tweet for him. The account was @PrezBillyJeff, and it was that because Colbert couldn’t find any other username that was open. There sure are a lot of parody Bill Clinton Twitter accounts out there.

Now, it looks like Clinton has wrangled one of those handles away from its previous owner – the most obvious one too. Clinton’s Twitter account now resides at @BillClinton. He’s verified too, with approaching 300,000 followers.

In the past few hours, Clinton has sent out a couple of tweets. Before today, he hadn’t tweeted since April 6th, and that wasn’t really him in the first place.

Both of his new tweets reference Colbert, and one says that he’s excited to join his daughter, Chelsea, on Twitter.

Excited to join @chelseaclinton and my good friend @stephenathome on Twitter!

— Bill Clinton (@billclinton) April 25, 2013

Sorry I couldn’t make it @stephenathome. I’ve been busy with @clintonfdn work on global heath. Thrs is #WorldMalariaDay you know #Raincheck?

— Bill Clinton (@billclinton) April 25, 2013

Does this mean that he’s planning on doing some real tweeting? We can only hope. And let’s also hope that he gets some replies and retweets. As he said when Colbert first signed him up, “there’s nothing worse than a friendless Tweeter.”

I don’t think he’ll have any problems making an impact on the site.

A NexGen hybrid storage appliance, which combines Fusion-io Flash memory with the company’s software. Fusion-io has now acquired NexGen.

Marking a strategic expansion of its product portfolio, Fusion-io (FIO) announced that it has acquired hybrid storage appliance company NexGen Storage for $119 milion. NexGen appliances are based on Fusion ioMemory, and targeted at small to medium size enterprises. By using software in combination with ioMemory and standard disk drives, NexGen transforms industry-leading x86 server platforms into hybrid storage systems that provide the performance of an all-flash array at a fraction of the cost.

At the core of the NexGen hybrid storage system is ioControl Management software, which shares all storage resources and maintains simultaneous performance targets for multiple applications. It enables IT teams to control and prioritize acceleration for applications.

“Many SME businesses have lean IT teams and budgets, making it critical to offer an integrated and affordable entry point for flash powered application acceleration that delivers consistent performance, even under demanding workloads like VDI and analytics,” said David Flynn, Fusion-io CEO and Chairman. “The hybrid NexGen solution combines memory attached flash and disk on leading server platforms to provide a system tuned to deliver performance, price and capacity. With this acquisition, we will maintain the current NexGen product model as we transition to supporting customers’ preferred server platforms with our OEM partners.”

Paying approximately $114 million in cash and $5 million in stock for all of the outstanding stock, warrants and vested equity awards of NexGen, Fusion-io will add around 50 NexGen employees to its team. NexGen Storage CEO John Spiers posted a note on the company blog that there really never was an exit strategy – but that he sees this next phase of growth as a new beginning rather than the end.

“We architected our solution around Fusion-ioMemory because it offered the highest reliability, the most predicable performance, and because it is built as a platform for easy developer integration,” said Spiers, co-founder of NexGen and new Fusion-io Senior Vice President and General Manager, NexGen Products. “The NexGen ioControl software uniquely eliminates the need for another layer of latency in storage tiering and the bottlenecks introduced by SSD storage controllers, making it the ideal hybrid system to evolve into an open, software defined platform at Fusion-io.”

Fusion-io also reported financial results for the quarter Wednesday. The NexGen Storage acquisition directly addresses a strategy for the small and medium size businesses, while progress continues to be made with system vendor partners such as HP, IBM and Dell. During the quarterly earnings call the company noted that in the last quarter four customers placed orders in excess of $5 million, and that its “relationship with Facebook and Apple is strong”.  It was also noted that global music streaming service Spotify was added as a Fusion-io customer.

A couple of weeks ago we heard that LG is ahead of Samsung in terms of bringing a flexible display to market. Now LG is saying they will unveil a smartphone with a flexible OLED display towards the end of the year according to LG’s vice president of mobile Yoon Bu-hyun. Samsung, on the other hand, hasn’t committed to when we will see their first offering.

It will be interesting to see if either company will utilize these displays on one of their flagship devices at first or offer a completely different phone. I can’t imagine either company will have a tremendous supply at the beginning, so don’t expect to see them on popular models such as the Optimus G 2, Galaxy S 5, or Galaxy Note III.

source: WSJ

Come comment on this article: LG will show off a smartphone with a flexible OLED display this year

It’s hard to imagine there’s a person out there who feels like they don’t have enough networking and contacting opportunities on LinkedIn. But the company aims to reach just those people on Thursday with the launch of its new product, a standalone mobile app that integrates (only some) of a user’s contacts across different social and web services into one app, called Contacts, that’s meant to help you keep in touch with more professional contacts outside of the existing LinkedIn app. And get you hooked on more of LinkedIn’s products while you’re at it.

The LinkedIn Contacts app, which will launch just on iOS for U.S. users on an invite-only basis at first, allows you to pull together your Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and phone contacts into one contact database hosted on the app. (It also supports integration with some apps like Tripit or Cardmunch.) Contacts then lets you sort and filter people based on how often you contact them and lets you add details about your relationship to serve as personal reminders.

For instance, I can mark when and where I first met one of my LinkedIn conections, see when I last emailed that person in Gmail, call them on the phone (if they list their number), and see when I last met with them according to my Outlook calendar (if I used one of those).

These seem like useful features that could help you sort and categorize professional contacts, and it’s cool to see how LinkedIn has used algorithims and data to put together individual relationship histories for each contact without much work required from the user. However, it’s unclear why LinkedIn felt that these features should exist in a standalone app.

Will people really download a second LinkedIn app if they already have one that works just fine? These features seem like they’d be more useful if they were integrated into the existing app rather than launched in a second one. The company did indicate that it will evaluate how the product does on mobile in deciding whether to add features into the existing app, and users who gain access to the new Contacts app will have this data integrated into their contacts section of LinkedIn.com, which is smart.

Sachin Rekhi, the former CEO of the address book company Connected, which LinkedIn acquired in 2011, is now heading up the Contacts app, and he explained that LinkedIn wanted to keep the contact info in a separate app to better target the specific audience that would find it useful. Namely, professionals who want networking info on mobile. But it’s unclear which of LinkedIn’s existing members wouldn’t fit that description.

“We’re taking a multi-app strategy across different use cases and target audiences,” Rekhi said.

The other major downside to the app is that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook or Twitter, so it’s fairly limited in the types of information it can actually import. The company would not indicate whether this was because Facebook and Twitter refused to provide access to those social graphs, or whether LinkedIn wasn’t interested in adding them. Rekhi said it’s because the Contacts app just focuses on professional contacts rather than more social features, so starting with apps like Gmail and Outlook made sense.

However, the increasing reality is that a lot of people do make professional contacts over Facebook and Twitter, and as Facebook improves its messaging and contacts products, it seems like a major downside that the LinkedIn app wouldn’t include those. Presumably, LinkedIn wants you connect with people over its own social network, wishing them happy birthday, calling them, and catching up with them on the Contacts app rather than through Facebook. But by not including Facebook’s social graph, it makes the app a lot less complete for younger users like myself.

So what’s the benefit for LinkedIn in producing this app? Of course, more eyeballs focused on LinkedIn and more screentime with the company’s products are always good for the company, and messaging and calling apps have become popular recently as companies try to hook users into communicating through their services. Importing all of your contacts and email information gives LinkedIn much more data to use as it turns your information into value for professional recruiters, who drive most of the company’s revenue.

Plus, as LinkedIn focuses its site on producing more news and media content, as evidenced by the Pulse acquisition, it’s possible it wants to make the main LinkedIn app more of a news reader and the Contacts app where you communicate with other individuals. But the company has a long way to go before it builds the equivalent of Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

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This week Eric Schmidt of Google went on record saying that cheap, miniature “everyman” drones should be banned by international treaties. Not only does he want to keep such devices from falling into the hands of terrorists, he also worries about their potential to invade privacy. Let’s say, for example, you were having a dispute with a neighbor. “How would you feel if your neighbor went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day,” Schmidt asked. “How would you feel about it?”

This is the kind of worry, as I discussed in an earlier piece, that is driving many state and local governments to enact bans and restrictions on the use of unmanned aircraft in advance of 2015 FAA rules that will allow them into US airspace.

Unfortunately, most of these drone regulators are seriously jumping the gun. Legislating ahead of emerging technologies, history has made amply clear, is always a recipe for unintended negative consequences. And as a general rule, regulation by torch-wielding mobs never leads to optimal, or even helpful, solutions. Lawmaking, to work, needs to be deliberative and rational.

And regulating the design and use of drones according to fifty different sets of state preferences, not to mention counties and cities, can’t possibly be efficient or effective. It’s not clear that anybody except the FAA even has authority to regulate here, or at least not at altitudes over 400 feet. Which would be just as well. One set of rules, whatever they are, would be far better, especially for technically-complex and rapidly-changing products such as drones.

To introduce some rationality to this debate, it’s probably a good idea to separate private uses of drones from use by law enforcement. The first poses much less of a threat. Your neighbor might post a YouTube video of a raucous party in your backyard, after all, but only law enforcement uses have the potential to put you in jail.

What’s more, regulations against the private use of information-gathering and reporting technologies often run afoul of the First Amendment, which broadly protects freedom of speech. So even if state and local laws against drones aren’t preempted by the FAA, they may otherwise be held unconstitutional.

The real concern with privacy rights ought to be with law enforcement uses. Here, the U.S. Constitution breaks in the other direction. The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures” by government, a clause that has been interpreted since the 1960s to provide Americans with a “reasonable expectation of privacy” that limits the ability of law enforcement agents to collect without a warrant not only tangible items but also information.

What constitutes a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” however, is intentionally unclear. Since the Supreme Court first articulated the “right to privacy,” courts have regularly been called upon to decide if some new form of technologically-enabled electronic surveillance — wiretapping, GPS, heat sensors, DNA tests, ultra-sensitive microphones — does or does not violate the Fourth Amendment.

In each case, the court asks whether the warrantless collection of information violated the defendant’s expectation of privacy, and whether that expectation was “reasonable.” Each new technology gets its own analysis. In a 2012 case, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the police in a case involving GPS tracking devices. Attaching one to a suspect’s car without a warrant, the Court said, violated the defendant’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

Over time, of course, we get used to the fact that new technologies make it harder for us to operate in secret, especially outside of our homes. Put another way — the way law enforcement often puts it when novel uses come under judicial scrutiny — what constitutes a “reasonable” expectation of privacy is constantly changing … and usually shrinking.

(Law breakers, at the same time, can also make use of new technologies to hide their activities, creating a kind of arms race.)

But even if the courts ultimately decide that drones are or will become so commonplace that it’s no longer reasonable to expect that police aren’t using them, Congress or individual states can still impose a warrant requirement on police if they want to make use of drone-collected evidence. They can also ban them outright — at least for law enforcement.

Today, for example, no one should be surprised to learn that it’s easy for police to record calls over either wired or wireless telephone networks. But a 1968 law nonetheless requires a warrant to record domestic calls; a 1986 amendment similarly protects locally-stored emails. The same model could well be applied to drones, for whatever length of time lawmakers decide is appropriate, including permanently.

As for the private uses, legislative efficiency as well as the danger of crushing a potentially valuable industry in its infancy suggests the wiser course is to wait to see what, if anything, goes wrong.

Once it’s clear what the real harms are, and equally clear that market forces have failed to correct them, then legislators — the fewer the better — can step in and fashion rules carefully crafted to fix the intractable problems. Assuming, of course, that existing laws are found not to apply, or to apply effectively. The kind of harassment suggested by Eric Schmidt’s hypothetical, for example, is certainly already illegal, whether by drone or otherwise.

Drones will by no means be the last Big Bang technology to invoke the creepy factor. So it’s worth underscoring the fact that in privacy law, a little outrage can go a long way, and often in the wrong direction. Caution is a virtue more honored in the breach, unfortunately.

Even today, for example, the most influential law review article on privacy is one that was written for the Harvard Law Review in 1890 by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren. The two, outraged by new technological advances that challenged their notion of personal privacy, called on governments to enact strong new protections to safeguard what they called “the right to be let alone.”

Few states took up the call, and those that did have largely backtracked. Which is probably just as well. The creepy new technology that upset Brandeis and Warren was short-exposure photography and the ability it gave newspapers to capture and report news events with pictures.

For better and for worse, it’s hard to imagine the world without those developments. Just as someday it may be hard to imagine a world without millions of drones flying around, doing our bidding.

The weather is warming up and our thoughts are turning towards vacation time. Where are you heading on that big summer trip? Regardless of the destination you decide on, Gogobot in conjunction with HomeAway can make sure you get the most from your time away with its new social-based guides covering many popular destinations.

Insider Guides is a new social sharing service which allows individual vacation rental owners to create customizable guidebooks for their guests, packed with local tips and recommendations covering favorite restaurants, attractions and activities. The guidebooks combine the property owners’ local expertise with Gogobot’s destination content, photos, reviews and social functionality. The service boasts over 2.5 million contributing members.

This is not Frommer’s, but more of a real-world type of guide such as this example for Austin, Texas or this one for Tuscany. The information is incorporated into Gogobot’s overall content.

“At its core, Gogobot is about connecting people with trusted information to help them plan their next trip,” says Gogobot Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Travis Katz.

The new partnership launches today, so now you have a bit more information for planning the big family getaway. Both Gogobot and its newly integrated guides are free to use. The guides can also be synced with Gogobot’s iOS and Android apps so you can take them along on the trip as a reference.

Photo credit: Wayne Williams

Database vendor Actian has acquired ParAccel, a scale-out, analytic database company whose technology underpins part of the Amazon Web Services Redshift data warehouse service. Terms of the deal are undisclosed.

For Actian, the deal means it has a big data offering to round out its current suite of database product that include the Ingres relational database, the Versant object database and the Vectorwise analytic database. Vectorwise is a single-server product best suited for data volumes between 1 and 50 terabytes, CEO Steve Shine told me, but ParAccel is a true big data technology designed to scale across many machines and potentially petabytes of data.

ParAccel has a litany list of big customers, as well as some major license deals for its massively parallel database technology. The most impressive is probably AWS, which uses ParAccel to power the analytic capabilities of its cloud-based Redshift data warehouse service. Amazon actually led a sizeable investment round in ParAccel that closed in July 2011. (I’ve seen it estimated between $15 million and $20 million.)

Actian is a relatively quiet company given its roughly $150 million in annual revenue — mostly outside the United States — but it could get a lot more attention soon. This is its fourth acquisition in the past five months, with the most recent being data integration and big data analytics specialist Pervasive Software, a deal that closed earlier in April. Now, Shine explained, it has database products to cover numerous use cases, as well as the tools to ensure quality control and merge data from many sources. Actian closed its acquisition of Versant in December.

The company also has a Hadoop story now. Pervasive’s DataRush platform can run on top of Hadoop and churn through lots of data MapReduce-style, but, it claims, much faster. ParAccel also integrates with Hadoop, meaning users can move data from Hadoop to ParAccel for faster, deeper analysis than MapReduce enables.

One has to assume ParAccel didn’t come cheap for Actian. ParAccel has raised, I believe, $93 million in venture capital since 2007 (it’s somewhat opaque about this information), and its competitors have sold for between $300 million (Greenplum to EMC) and $1.7 billion (Netezza to IBM) in 2010. HP also bought Vertica for an undisclosed amount in 2011.

Actian CEO Shine wouldn’t comment on the price, other than to say he expects big data will easily be the company’s biggest growth sector in terms of revenue over the next several years and that he wasn’t about to miss out on it.

“The market opportunity is enormous,” he said. “Absolutely enormous.”

I must say, though, I did not see the Actian acquisition coming. I predicted in 2011 that ParAccel would be acquired, but I expected it would happen a lot sooner and the buyer would be a much larger company.

For a little more on ParAccel, here’s an interview GigaOM did with Co-founder and CTO Barry Zane at our Structure: Data conference in 2011.

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Drippler, a free app arriving on iOS Thursday, is a great example of one of the things our mobile devices are increasingly getting better at: doing things for us automatically through personalization. Just by detecting your phone model, your carrier, the operating system you’re running, and finding out a few of your preferences, the Drippler app will curate content for you into a kind of digital how-to manual for your iPhone. Besides suggesting software updates and personalized tech advice related your phone, or a new service from your carrier, it can also send you recommendations for iPhone apps and accessories you might like.

The app has a customized, scrollable feed of the latest news stories that are relevant to your device. If you click on a story, say a review of Twitter’s new iOS Music app, Drippler inserts a link to the app at the bottom of the screen. If you click install, it leads you right to the App Store.

The items that appear in your Drippler feed are crowdsourced — if other users similar to you like the stories, they’ll appear in your feed. As you click on items, download apps or “like” content, Drippler’s algorithm will get better at determining what is and is not interesting to you. If you’d rather not have to scroll through the Drippler feed every day, you can opt to receive “daily drips,” which are personalized items that arrive via a push notification once a day.

Android first

Drippler is one of those rarities: an app that started out and gained its popularity on Android before landing on the iOS platform; in the last year it’s racked up 5 million downloads in the Google Play store. CEO Matan Talmi told me last week that route was necessary because of his core audience. “We started on Android because [the app] is device-specific, and there are more Android devices” in his company’s home country of Israel. “But now we have to be on iOS,” he said.

The goal is “to make the iPhone better for mainstream users,” Talmi said. In that case, his timing isn’t bad. Apple has entered a new era of the iPhone — one where more than ever it’s putting older, discounted iPhone models in the hands of customers who’ve never owned a smartphone before. It’s these kinds of customers — the opposite of early adopters — that may benefit the most from a personalized service like Drippler.

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If only people knew when to stop while they’re ahead.

This latest installment of the moronic Facebook chronicles takes us to North Olmstead, Ohio, where a man has been sentenced to 17 months in prison plus he’s been forced to undergo anger management counseling thanks to a few Facebook posts.

27-year-old William Bement was furious with the justice system. He had just been given probation for a drunk driving incident, and he wasn’t happy about it.

So where do people go these days when they want to vent to hundreds of people? Facebook, of course.

Shortly after his probation sentence, Bement decided that it was a good idea to post vague threats on Facebook. “Stop shooting up schools and start shooting cops in courthouses!” said one post. “Kill you local judges,” said another.

After one of Bement’s friends notified a court employee of the alarming posts, Bement was hauled back into court – this time receiving a much lengthier sentence for one count of “attempted retaliation.”

He claimed that he was simply talking out of his ass – or doing it for “shock factor” as he put it. But it just goes to show you – it’s hard to communicate jest via social media. Joking or not, you can’t just instruct people to murder officers and judges online. You. Just. Can’t. Do. It.

[The Plain Dealer via The Daily Dot]

Marina Thiry is director of strategic marketing – data centers for ABB.

MARINA THIRY
ABB

As we celebrated Earth Day this week, many corporations are looking at their environmental strategies and are seeking to become more “green.” This begs the question: for organizations that are seeking to reduce their energy footprint, is it possible for a data center to employ distributed energy resources, like incorporating solar power, without giving up reliability? This is a worthy goal but there may be major issues that need to be addressed as the organization sets about working toward this goal.

First, let’s be clear. Yes, it is possible! The characteristics of distributed energy resources for the data center include distributed energy sources (that is, beyond the emergency back-up generator) and – this is key – centralized control that may operate with the main power grid, but can operate independently of it, too. Sometimes the latter is referred to as on-site generation. Another characteristic of a distributed energy resource system is energy storage, but no one really has this, yet, in the spirit of how we are discussing it.

Resilience and Sustanability

One of the advantages of distributed energy resources is that they add resilience and sustainability to the total energy system within the data center. A distributed energy unit can achieve as high or higher level of reliability than any single resource. The challenge is to manage, utilize and optimize the unit in a dynamically changing fashion.

From what I see, as businesses recognize the competitive advantages that an agile data center enables, they begin to invest in modernizing their data center infrastructure and operations so they can keep up with business requirements –whatever it takes to deliver more web services faster, and in a sustainable way. So, at ABB, we’re constantly innovating energy solutions so our customers can respond this demand.

Consider, for example, mobile applications. Apple reported that customers downloaded over 40 billion apps, with nearly 20 billion in 2012 alone. These mobile apps, and the information and transactions collected from them, create enormous increases in data, as well as huge increases in the IT infrastructure and the energy required to support the business requirements behind those apps. At the same time, data centers are faced with the challenge of consolidating their resources. So data center operators are in dire need of finding significant ways to optimize.

DCIM Allows For Energy Monitoring & Management

If you are interested in reducing your energy footprint, then one of the most effective strategies for attaining aggressive – yet sustainable – growth is using a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system. A DCIM system capable of managing those energy assets is vital to lowering the operating costs while maximizing availability and reliability. This approach helps extend the life of the data center by safely and reliably boosting the productivity of existing assets, getting more from less while keeping check of the return from sustainable energy investments that also help to reduce the energy footprint.

The combination of distributed energy resources and DCIM offers significant reliability and efficiency improvements that begin with the energy source and purchase, and extends to improving energy utilization. A DCIM system like Decathlon provides the granular visibility, decision support and centralized control technologies—including the energy trading capabilities that enable data centers to exploit these new efficiencies safely and reliably.

Tips for Managing Distributed Energy

We recognize that every data center is different, and one data center’s successful approach may not work for another. Talk to experts who are well versed with power conversion and delivery technologies, utilities, and DCIM. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you proceed in using distributed energy resources and DCIM:

• To enable the near instantaneous balance of the data center infrastructure energy supply and demand, you will need two-way communications to deliver real-time information. Consider how your approach will manage multiple levels of integration and interoperability among various components of your data center.
• As distributed energy technologies evolve, so will the applications and benefits. Think beyond the sources of energy. Consider, too, how your data center infrastructure will be able to manage distributed power generation, storage, process automation and demand response technology.
• Examine effective ways of integrating different forms of distributed energy resources. Depending on your data center geography, some energy sources may be more practical or offer better economies of scale.
• Finally, don’t underestimate the significance of the monitoring, decision support and process automation capabilities in your DCIM system. For example, consider the extent and depth of energy management capabilities, such as alerting you to purchase energy when it’s cheaper, and when to use more energy or less by scheduling compute loads during less expensive times. It won’t matter how robust or technically advanced your energy delivery network is if your data center infrastructure management is inadequate for the task.

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.

The New York Times Company posted its latest earnings on Thursday morning, and the results show the company moving forward at a plodding pace. Its earnings per share came in at $0.04, excluding special items, which was slightly below the $0.05 analysts had predicted. Operating profit for the quarter was $22.9 million.

Overall advertising declined 11.2 percent — 13 percent in print and 4 precent in digital — from the same quarter a year ago, while circulation revenues rose 6.2%. As in previous quarters, the company did not break out how much of this increase was the result of digital income versus increases in the price of its print products.

The Times’ total number of digital subscribers, a figure closely watched by investors and media observers, rose from 668,000 to 708,000 across the company. This number includes totals from the International Herald Tribune and soon-to-be-sold Boston Globe.

The company also announced a “new strategy for growth,” in which CEO Mark Thompson says the Times will begin offering lower-priced products to attract a broader paying audience. The release suggests the company will begin breaking out certain speciality segments like food and travel as standalone paid offerings. A few bullets:

• “A lower-priced paid product designed to allow access to The Times’s most important and interesting stories in a convenient, media-rich package for consumers looking for an efficient way to stay informed.”

• “Other new products, also at lower price points, that would offer deep access and additional content and other new features in specific content areas such as politics, technology, opinion, the arts and food.”

The Times will discuss the results and the new strategy on an 11:00 AM ET earnings call. We will post highlights from the call.

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One of the more startling moves of the week was the fresh rally in euro government debt – with 10-year Italian and Spanish borrowing rates falling to their lowest since late 2010 when the euro crisis was just erupting and 2-year Italian yields even falling to 1999 euro launch levels. The trigger? There’s been a slow build up for weeks on the prospect of new Japanese investor flows  seeking liquid overseas government bonds  – but it was signs of a sharp slowdown in Germany’s economy that seems to have had a perversely positive effect on the region’s asset markets as a whole. The logic is that German objections to another ECB rate cut will ebb, as will its refusal to ease up on front-loaded fiscal austerity across Europe. If its own economic engine is now suffering along with the rest, significantly just five months ahead of German Federal elections, then a tilt toward growth in the regional policy mix may not seem so bad for Berlin after all. And if euro economies are more in synch, albeit in recession rather than growth, then perhaps it will lead to a more effective regional policy response.

All that plays into the intensifying “growth vs austerity” debate, which had already shifted at the Washington IMF meetings last week and was sharpened this week by by EU Commission chief Barroso’s claim that the high watermark of EU’s austerity push had passed. On top of the Reinhart/Rogoff research farrago, it’s been a bad couple of weeks for the “austerians”, with only a UK Q1 GDP bounceback of any support for case of ever deeper fiscal cuts,  and investors smell a change of tack. Their reaction? Not only have euro government borrowing costs fallen  further, but euro equities too rallied for 4 straight days through Wednesday. Those arguing that investors would run screaming at the sight of a more growth-tilted policy mix in Europe may have some explaining to do.

Next week is back on monetary policy watch however. The ECB takes centre stage amid rate cut talks hopes for help for credit-starved SMEs. The FOMC meets stateside aswell just ahead of the critical US April employment report.

Major events next week:

Iceland/Malatsia elections Sat

EZ biz/consumer confidence Mon

German April inflation Mon

Italy/France/Belgium govt bond auctions Mon

Europe Q1 earnings Mon: Fiat, Volkswagen, Deutsche Boerse

US March pending home sales Mon

Japan March jobless, spending, production, housing Tues

Europe Q1 earnings Tues: BP, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Lloyds, EdF, Whitbread

German April unemployment Tues

EZ April inflation Tues

UK March mortgage/credit data Tues

US Q1 earnings Tues: Marathon, Pfizer, FMC

US April consumer confidence, Chicago PMI Tues

ADB meeting in New Delhi, Weds-Sun

UK local elections Weds

US April manufacturing ISM Weds

FOMC decision Weds

Global manufacturing PMIs Thurs

European Commission Spring forecasts Thurs

ECB decision/presser Thurs

BoE decision Thurs

US Q1 earnings Thurs:  AIG, Kraft, International Paper

US March trade Thurs

BOJ minutes Fri

India monetary policy statement Fri

US Q1 earnings Fri: ADP, Moody’s, Duke Energy

US April employment report/Services PMI Fri

If you don’t mind overpaying for a cup of coffee then you must read this story. Charitybuzz lists an auction which gives the highest bidder the opportunity to have coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook at the fruit-logo company’s headquarters in Cuppertino, California. The proceeds of the auction will be donated by the man himself to the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.

The only thing that’s stopping you from grabbing that cup of coffee with one of the most influential men in tech history is, at least at the moment, a $180,000 bid. Truth be told you have to pay at least $185,000, according to Charitybuzz, in order to outbid the current leader. That’s a lot by most people’s standards (well, unless you’re a billionaire who has a thing for charity). Well at least the terms of the auction are in your favor.

To simply earn $180,000 one would have to work for a whole year, 22 days per month, eight hours per day and make a tad over $85 per hour. That without paying any tax or spending even a cent on living costs.

You still have to pay a processing and handling charge after winning the auction — that runs for a minimum of $9.95 according to Charitybuzz — which is kinda amusing considering that the initial estimated winning bid was $50,000. Nonetheless, the auction is valid for two people (and cannot be resold) and you can schedule that coffee meeting with Tim Cook, “at a mutually agreed upon date”, up to one year after the auction closes.

Charitybuzz also says: “Travel and accommodations are not included. Winning bidder and guest(s) subject to security screening. We expect all winning bidders and their guests to conduct themselves appropriately when attending an experience won at Charitybuzz. Polite manners and respect for the generous donor and adherence to any rules or parameters are a must”.

So asking why Apple is no longer the innovation leader that it once was is out of the question.

Truth be told if I had $180,000 I’d get something else. I’m a big car fan and for the money (if I had it) I could get a brand new Porsche 911 GT3 which costs $130,400, slap on a couple of options and still have some spare change left to pay for running costs. Or I could buy a pretty nice vacation house somewhere sunny. The possibilities are not endless, but with a bit of imagination I’m sure I could get plenty, like each and every device Apple sells right now and still have something left.

But what would you do? If money wasn’t really an issue, would you bid or would you buy something else?

What would you ask Tim Cook if you could win the auction?

Microsoft gets a lot of press coverage for its Scroogled campaign, but little of it positive. Fortunately, the software giant has other advertising strategies that people do like, one of the better ones being The Browser You Love to Hate for Internet Explorer 10.

As part of that campaign, Column Five, a creative agency in Newport Beach, California was tasked with coming up with an internet commercial and the result was a nostalgic romp through 1990s that hit 28 million views in just three months and earned it a Webby nomination (voting for that ends today).

To celebrate racking up an impressive number views in such a short time span, Column Five has posted a behind the scenes look at the creation of its Child of the 90s video which explains the strategy, how it was put into practice, and why it worked.

To sum up, the agency wanted to come up with an ad that was appealing, newsworthy and share-worthy — which it certainly is.

Explaining how it helped the brand, Column Five says:

If all we cared about was getting content noticed, we would film cats roaming around the office all day and slap a logo at the end of the video. But this wouldn’t help Microsoft — and our goal is always to be impactful for the brand. With Internet Explorer, we wanted to change how Gen Y felt about the browser. We wanted the video to be a walk down memory lane, to feel conversational and familiar. We wanted the audience to think, “Maybe Internet Explorer can relate to me better than I thought; the new browser could exceed my expectations”.

We certainly wanted to drive viewers to the site to rediscover Internet Explorer. But even if they didn’t, by sharing the video, they were sharing the story — a story inextricably connected to Internet Explorer, a story that might not lead everyone to switch browsers that day, but that would linger and grow in a generation’s mind. That story has been told more than 27 million times to date, and that’s the impact we wanted more than anything: a reframing of IE’s relationship with Gen Y.

Sadly the video has the comments disabled on YouTube. It would have been good to read viewers’ nostalgic recollections, but seeing as any online commercial for Microsoft and/or Internet Explorer usually brings out the trolls — and not the crazy-haired plastic variety featured in the video either — it’s easy to understand why the IE team made that decision.

I personally have something of a love/hate relationship with nostalgia — I created Retro Gamer magazine in the UK, but also co-authored The Crap Old Days — and although I loved the video, it didn’t make me want to try out Internet Explorer (even though, ironically, I ended up doing so anyway).

What did you think of the ad? Did it make you think “Maybe Internet Explorer can relate to me better than I thought; the new browser could exceed my expectations”?