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Following a number of reports claiming Microsoft’s (MSFT) next-generation video game console, codenamed “Durango,” will block users’ ability to play preowned games, a new report appears to back up those claims. In a series of purported screenshots from Microsoft’s Durango SDK published by Vgleaks.com, several earlier rumors regarding Microsoft’s next console appear to have been confirmed. Among them is the claim that game play from a disk will not be supported, and users will instead have to install games to the device’s hard drive in order to play.

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Here you have it, the car I have been lusting after for about 15 years. This is a 1970 Plymouth Sport Fury, and in my eyes it’s one of the coolest road-sleds ever made. About the size of a Chevrolet Suburban, the ’70 Sport Fury is one of the cars that you either love or hate. Men seem to gravitate towards it, while women are generally repulsed. The fuselage styling, considered to be cutting edge in the 1970′s, gives the car a wonderfully aggressive look. Combine that with a blacked-out grille and the option of a 7.2-liter 440 cubic inch V8 with a Six-Pack set-up, and we’re talking about a car that has “EVIL” written all over it.

So, let’s hear it – what’s the one car that you’d eventually love to have in your garage?

Yahoo announced on Wednesday that the company has acquired Jybe, a social recommendation startup that aimed to give users a sense of the books, movies, and restaurants their friends like, in an attempt to be a more personalized, accurate version of Yelp. By acquiring Jybe, Yahoo gains a set of engineers who understood how to build social software, providing some insight into where Yahoo is headed in terms of recommendations and social cues.

Jybe was founded in 2011 by former Yahoo employees, so both the startup and Yahoo noted that the acquisition, which will shut down Jybe and have the founders working on projects at Yahoo, is something of a homecoming. Yahoo wrote in a blog post on the acquisition:

“As part of this acquisition, we’re welcoming an extremely talented group of engineers and data scientists who will join Yahoo!’s platform organization, focused on targeting and personalization. This will be a “coming home” for the team — all five are former Yahoos. Arnab Bhattacharjee was the VP of Yahoo! Search Technology (YST), one of the most well respected engineering and platforms groups in the company. He returns together with former key members of the YST and Hadoop teams — Tim Converse, Christian Kunz, Sameer Paranjpye, and Karthik Krishnamurthy.

While the Jybe app has closed, we’re confident that their data- and science-driven experience will supercharge our efforts to build great products and experiences for the millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day.”

The Jybe employees wrote in a blog post about the decision to re-join with Yahoo:

“The Jybe team first set off two years ago to bring mobile users smart, personalized recomendations on food and entertainment. This has been a fun and furious journey for our tiny startup, as we applied our various technology backgrounds to recommendation and mobile app design. It’s now time to move ahead to join a larger company, and Yahoo! is the perfect match.

For the five of us who will be joining Yahoo! this is a coming home – we are all former Yahoos. Three of us left Yahoo! to pursue our passion at Jybe, and two of us took a longer path via other startups and search-engine companies. We can’t wait to apply what we’ve learned about recommendation, personalization and the mobile experience to the hundreds of millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day. We look forward to (re)joining the world-class talent already working at Yahoo! and are excited to hit the ground running.”

Jybe had just launched its iPhone recommendation app in March 2012, allowing consumers to see reviews and recommendations, but then also move toward making a purchase on the app. For example, customers could see restaurant recommendations and then book an OpenTable reservation, or see book recommendations and get the barcode and the ability to download it from Amazon.

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Thanks to spy movies and other entertainment fare, we all have our own picture of what the Central Intelligence Agency is like — but the agency’s chief technology officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, told attendees at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference that just like any other company, the intelligence division has to somehow find the signal in an ever-increasing volume of noise. And that problem is getting harder and harder all the time.

For the CIA, Hunt said, there are three lines of “business” that are required: to collect information on America’s adversaries, to produce timely analysis, and to conduct covert action based on that analysis. All three of these jobs rely on understanding and interpreting increasing volumes of data, he said — not just from human beings and the vast quantities of social data that come from Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, but also from devices and the growing field of smart machines and sensors.

As all of those forces combine to generate more information, the CIA’s analysts not only have to sort through it all somehow, but they need to be able to combine data in ways that they may not even know they require until the moment arrives where they need a specific kind of information, said Hunt. That means the agency needs to develop algorithms and tools that have some intelligence of their own built into them, so that analysts can sort through data in the same way they build an Excel spreadsheet.

That day isn’t here yet, the CIA official said, but it is coming. And just as Google and other companies are trying to find smarter and smarter ways of filtering the world’s information, so is the CIA, using many of the same tools and technologies — it is just doing so for a different purpose.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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Concurrent, Inc. said it raised $4 million of Series A funding in a deal led by True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. The San Francisco company previously raised a $900,000 seed investment in August 2011. The new money will go to product development and for new hires. Concurrent also named Gary Nakamura as CEO.

PRESS RELEASE

Concurrent Closes $4 Million in Series A Funding, Appoints Gary Nakamura as CEO

New Funding and Leadership Will Accelerate Product Development and Grow Core Team

SAN FRANCISCO – March 20, 2013 – Concurrent, Inc., the enterprise Big Data application platform company, today announced it has raised $4 million in Series A funding. The investment, led by True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners, will be used to fuel product development, grow the core team and further deliver on the company’s vision to simplify Big Data application development on Apache Hadoop™. Concurrent is also announcing the appointment of Gary Nakamura as CEO, a high-tech executive with a winning track record and more than 20 years of experience.

Corporate Milestones
•    Today’s $4 million in Series A financing follows a $900,000 seed investment in August 2011.
•    Launched Cascading 2.1, the most widely used and deployed application framework for building robust, enterprise Big Data applications on Hadoop.
•    User downloads of Cascading have surpassed more than 75,000 per month.
•    Companies including The Climate Corporation, eBay, Etsy, FlightCaster, iCrossing, Razorfish, Trulia, TeleNav and Twitter are using Cascading to streamline data processing, data filtering and workflow optimization for large volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data.
•    Launched Lingual, an open source project that delivers ANSI-standard SQL technology to easily build new and integrate existing applications onto Hadoop.
•    Entered into partnerships with technology leaders including, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, SpringSource, MapR, Greenplum, Karmasphere, Think Big Analytics and Scale Unlimited.
•    Industry recognition includes 2012 InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software award win in the “Best Open Source Databases” category.

In conjunction with the funding news, Concurrent is pleased to welcome Gary Nakamura as CEO, effective immediately. Prior to joining Concurrent, Nakamura served as senior vice president and general manager of Terracotta, Inc., which was recently acquired by Software AG. There he led strategy, oversaw operating profit and loss, and ran business operations including sales, marketing and product management.

Founder Chris Wensel will take on a new role as CTO, where he will lead product innovation and Cascading community engagement for the company. “We are extremely excited to welcome Gary to Concurrent,” Wensel said. “His deep experience in the enterprise Big Data market will help us take the company to the next level.”

Supporting Quotes
“Our investors’ confidence in Concurrent validates our strategy and the pioneering work we have done since the launch of Cascading in 2008. This new investment will enable us to build on this foundation and accelerate our growth as we work to deliver our commercial product and grow the core team. I am excited to be joining Concurrent at such a pivotal time and look forward to driving the company’s continued growth and development.”
-Gary Nakamura, CEO, Concurrent, Inc.

“After our initial investment, we have watched Concurrent grow substantially and lead the Big Data application development market. The promise of its core technology, combined with the management team’s pedigree and Cascading’s success, continue to make this an exciting investment opportunity.”
-Puneet Agarwal, Partner, True Ventures

“Since partnering with Concurrent in 2011, we have been impressed with the widespread adoption of its technology. We believe Cascading is an important innovation and is critical to the growth and sustainability of the Big Data technologies in the enterprise. We are excited about Concurrent’s success, and this additional financing from Rembrandt is a testament to the company’s talent, technology and ability to deliver next-generation Big Data application development and management solutions to the enterprise.”
-In Sik Rhee, General Partner, Rembrandt Venture Partners

Supporting Resources
●    Company: http://concurrentinc.com
●    Cascading website: http://cascading.org
●    Contact us: http://concurrentinc.com/contact
●    Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/concurrent

About Concurrent, Inc.
Concurrent, Inc. is the enterprise Big Data application platform company. Founded in 2008, Concurrent simplifies Big Data application development, deployment and management on Apache Hadoop. We are the company behind Cascading, the most widely used and deployed technology for building Big Data applications with more than 75,000 user downloads a month. Enterprises including Twitter, eBay, The Climate Corporation and Etsy all rely on Concurrent’s technology to drive their Big Data deployments.  Concurrent is headquartered in San Francisco. Visit Concurrent online athttp://concurrentinc.com.

The post Concurrent Raises $4M From True, Rembrandt appeared first on peHUB.

A Wisconsin pension fund and research organization have formed a $30 million venture capital fund to focus on early stage IT companies. Called 4490 Ventures, a reference to the 44O N latitude and 90O W longitude lines that approximate the center of the state, the fund is being backed by the State of Wisconsin Investment Board and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation are creating an early-stage venture capital fund focused on information technology.

PRESS RELEASE

With $30 million to begin, 4490 Ventures will focus on IT startups in Wisconsin

MADISON, Wis. — The State of Wisconsin Investment Board and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation are creating an early-stage venture capital fund focused on information technology.

Called 4490 Ventures, a reference to the 44O N latitude and 90O W longitude lines that approximate the center of the state of Wisconsin, the $30 million fund will focus on early-stage companies primarily in Wisconsin. The private fund, capitalized jointly by SWIB and WARF, is intended to generate attractive returns and build value for state retirement fund participants and WARF’s primary beneficiary, the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Carl Gulbrandsen, WARF’s managing director, said work on the fund has been underway for more than a year and involved significant staff effort from both organizations as well as independent research to help define the fund’s focus and scope.

“WARF has recognized for some time that there is a significant opportunity in Madison and other regions of the state in information technology startup companies, but experienced venture management and funding for such companies has been lagging our peer states,” Gulbrandsen said. “We appreciate the opportunity to work with SWIB on this effort and we all agree there are some excellent investment opportunities here.”

Michael Williamson, SWIB executive director, said the fund will build upon the partners’ previous success with startups in a variety of industries.

“We are pleased to be able to launch this effort with WARF and believe that together, we have the ingredients necessary for success,” Williamson said. “Our previous experience has proven that early- stage investments can play a valuable role by diversifying our portfolio.”

Regarding the rationale behind the investment, Williamson said, “Make no mistake about it. We are creating this fund to make money for our participants in the Wisconsin Retirement System.”

Gulbrandsen said the market research helped confirm the value of information technology being developed here and highlighted the strength of Wisconsin’s IT workforce skills. However, capturing value from IT innovations may call for an approach different from the licensing activity used in other industries because young IT companies may not rely on patentable technology.As a result, an important way to capture returns and create value is to invest in the companies themselves. Williamson noted there is industry consensus regarding the need for seed-stage funding in the $500,000 to $2 million range for the kinds of companies the new fund will target.

The technologies involved might include, but not be limited to, data management, informatics, data storage, social grid computing, hardware, new materials, software, mobile technology security and health care information technology, such as the operating systems for medical devices or patient record keeping.

“We hope that the establishment of this fund will bring attention to the many investment opportunities that exist in this state,” Gulbrandsen said. “Past experience has shown that these types of funds often attract the talent, capital and resources necessary to create high-performing startup companies. Given the consistent top-10 ranking of UW–Madison’s computer sciences department and the high-quality work going on at other state campuses and companies, we know there are plenty of excellent ideas here.”

SWIB and WARF have retained a recruiting firm that specializes in private markets investment professionals to conduct a nationwide search for a qualified fund manager with operational experience.

About SWIB

Assets under management at SWIB are about $90 billion as of December 31, 2012. This includes approximately $85 billion in Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) trust funds, which provide benefits to more than 572,000 current or former employees of state agencies, the university system, school districts and most local governments. The WRS is the 9th largest U.S. public pension fund and the 30th largest public or private pension fund in the world. For more information, visit www.swib.state.wi.us.

About WARF

WARF has assets under management of more than $2 billion. In addition to investment management, WARF, a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, is the patent and licensing organization for the University of Wisconsin–Madison. WARF’s mission is to support scientific investigation and research at UW–Madison and to assist in moving technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace for benefit of humankind. Since its founding in 1925, WARF has contributed more than $1 billion in grants and gifts to UW–Madison. For more information, visit www.warf.org.

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Wall Street believes that BlackBerry (BBRY) will ship between 300,000 and 800,000 new BlackBerry Z10 smartphones during the February quarter. This is the most widely discussed number for BlackBerry’s fiscal fourth quarter, but it’s far from the most important metric. Since the Z10 was not shipping to the U.S. market and was available only in select countries for a fraction of the quarter, the Z10 shipment figure is going to be open to interpretation. Instead, the firm’s total subscriber base is the number that is going to be highly relevant. This is because in the August quarter, BlackBerry added 2 million net subscribers and in the November quarter, the company lost 1 million subscribers. Late autumn appeared to mark a dramatic turning point. The subscriber growth in emerging markets slowed down so much that it no longer was able to offset the base erosion in the U.S. and the U.K.

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With 30 million customers and more historical and new data information coming in all the time, Aetna has big data. Under a new initiative, Aetna Innovation Labs, the insurer is trying out several approaches to use all that data to keep patients healthy, lower customer costs and decrease the company’s own spending on health care.

Speaking with my colleague Ki Mae Heussner at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference on Wednesday, Aetna’s head of innovation, Michael Palmer, opened up about the Innovation Labs’ initiatives, the challenges they face and the neat opportunities ahead.

The Innovation Labs has focused on a few conditions since starting last year, including cancer, heart disease and metabolic syndrome. There are five telling signs to metabolic syndrome, including a large waist circumference and high blood pressure. Metabolic syndrome is a sort of gateway for diabetes, cardiovascular issues and other conditions, so Aetna wants to prevent patients from getting metabolic syndrome in the first place. It has started using data on 18 million of its customers’ employees to tell doctors which of the five signs of metabolic syndrome their patients are likely to get in the next year, Palmer said.

Aetna appears to want to pull in more kinds of data for patients and physicians to examine to provide better care. Asked if Aetna will start working in genomic data, Palmer said the Aetna Innovation Labs are running a pilot with some companies to allow patients to get their own genetic information and receive genetic counseling. “That will drive a wellness program driven around genomics,” he said.

And social information from patients could provide much-needed feedback to show how effective a medication is in real time, for that patient and for others. “Some companies are doing that,” Palmer said, referring to incorporating social streams into health care. “The challenge is, a lot of HIPAA laws prevent the ability to connect those two in a way that would be ultimately useful,” he said.

Aside from regulatory compliance, patients simply might not want to share as much data as insurers and doctors want them to, as it could get out to the wider public. Keeping health data out of employers’ hands, for example, is playing out right now, as Ki Mae mentioned, with media outlets reporting on Wednesday that CVS employees provide health information or pay up. But Palmer said Aetna has been working with large patient data sets for many years, though, and is cognizant of complying with HIPAA laws.

It’s ironic, but Aetna — and probably others in the health care community — finds a challenge in getting people to work on their own health. Companies want to see that, so their employees will stay healthier and work more, Palmer said.

Toward that end, Aetna is looking to work with other companies, mainly small startups, on what Palmer called “medication adherence” — texting, calling or otherwise contacting patients about taking their medications and doing other things to improve their health. It’s not easy, though, because, as Palmer said, what works for some patients doesn’t necessarily work for others.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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While most managers complain about being overloaded with responsibilities, very few are willing to give up any of them. It’s one of the great contradictions of organizational life: People are great at starting new things — projects, meetings, initiatives, task forces — but have a much harder time stopping the ones that already exist.

Take this example: The CEO of a large consumer products company was concerned that the organization was becoming too complex and unwieldy — which was adding to costs and slowing down decisions. After a long discussion with her senior team, everyone agreed to identify committees, projects, and studies that could be stopped across the firm. However, when the executive team reconvened the next month to review the ideas, everyone pointed out activities that other teams should stop instead of opportunities in their own domains. They then spent an hour justifying why everything that they were doing was critical and couldn’t be stopped.

There are several deep psychological reasons why stopping activities is so hard to do in organizations. First, while people complain about being too busy, they also take a certain amount of satisfaction and pride in being needed at all hours of the day and night. In other words, being busy is a status symbol. In fact a few years ago we asked senior managers in a research organization — all of whom were complaining about being too busy — to voluntarily give up one or two of their committee assignments. Nobody took the bait because being on numerous committees was a source of prestige.

Managers also hesitate to stop things because they don’t want to admit that they are doing low-value or unnecessary work. Particularly at a time of layoffs, high unemployment, and a focus on cost reduction, managers want to believe (and convince others) that what they are doing is absolutely critical and can’t possibly be stopped. So while it’s somewhat easier to identify unnecessary activities that others are doing, it’s risky to volunteer that my own activities aren’t adding value. After all, if I stop doing them, then what would I do?

The final reason that unnecessary tasks continue is that managers become emotionally attached to them. We see this often with “zombie projects,” activities that are seemingly killed or deprioritized but somehow keep going because managers just don’t want to let go. Once people have invested in creating projects, committees, or processes, they feel a sense of ownership. Getting rid of them is like killing their own offspring.

Given these powerful underlying dynamics, what can you do to stop excessive activities in your own organization? Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

Separate cost-reduction from work-reduction. Since people are naturally (and understandably) protective of their livelihoods and careers, it’s difficult to ask them to do things that will result in the loss of their own job. So if cost-reduction is a key driver, try your best to eliminate jobs first. Only then should you work with the “survivors” to eliminate the unnecessary work.

Make work elimination a group activity. While managers are hesitant to point out stoppage possibilities in their own areas, they often can see opportunities elsewhere. By bringing teams together across different business units and functions, you stand a better chance of surfacing activities that can be brought to a halt.

Insert a “sunset clause” in the charter of all new committees, teams, and projects. Instead of swimming against the tide in trying to stop ongoing endeavors, make the shut-down process a natural event in the life cycle of organizational activities. If people know from the start that there is a beginning and an end, then managers will start to expect that things will be turned off at a specific time and can plan accordingly.

All organizations need to periodically hit the “off” button on activities that add unnecessary costs and complexity. Doing so however requires that you deal with the psychological dynamics that make it easier to get things started than to get them stopped.

Microsoft announced the coming of Windows Embedded 8, including Industry and Handheld versions, earlier in 2013. The release is today, as both OEM and businesses can begin downloading and implementing various flavors of the newest version of the operating system.

“Edge devices connected and working in unison with an enterprise’s broader IT infrastructure unleash the potential of the Internet of Things by yielding the actionable data and operational intelligence that drive businesses forward”, Kevin Dallas, general manager of Windows Embedded at Microsoft, says.

Windows Embedded versions are all around, though most people do not realize it. The Microsoft OS can be used to run everything from store cash registers to ATM’s. There was even some talk of the Windows 7 version being used to power set-top boxes, though that never materialized. Dallas explained that “From the rich, familiar experience of Windows to integrated management, analytics and cloud platforms, Windows Embedded 8 coupled with the full breadth of Microsoft technologies for intelligent systems helps enterprises gain lasting competitive advantages in retail, manufacturing, healthcare and a variety of industries”.

According to the company, today’s release will not be all — “Businesses will also have the ability to add or buy enterprise-specific functionality for their Windows Embedded 8-based solutions through licensing options Microsoft will make available in July”. The company had previously released a beta version for developers to get started with.

Photo Credit: pixs4u/Shutterstock

Apparently Google doesn’t think Digg is worth much more than a few kilos of panda poop tea these days. Digg.com is currently MIA in Google’s index.

While we’ve yet to hear comment on the matter from either Google or Digg, it looks like Digg has been penalized for something or other. Either that or Google made a huge mistake.

Matt Sawyer first noticed the lack of Digg results, which State of Search picked up. You can see for yourself by searching: site:digg.com on Google and getting no results.

If you just search for “digg,” digg.com is nowhere to be found. Instead, you’ll be treated to the Digg WIkipedia entry, the Digg Twitter account, and various other pieces of content about Digg.

Some are already wondering if Digg was busted for paid links or other some other kind of link scheme kind of thing. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll update as we learn more about what’s really going on.

Digg, as you may know, recently said that it’s working on an alternative to Google Reader.

It would be easy to think that moving companies toward a future in data would be a technological challenge, but Paul Maritz, EMC’s chief strategist and a key member of its Pivotal Initiative spin-off, took a different approach: it’s about human leadership.

Speaking with Om Malik on Wednesday in New York for GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference, Maritz talked about the two potential courses a company might take in heading toward a data-driven future:

“I think there’s two ways. One way is, unfortunately, Darwinian evolutions,” he said. “But others will change and change always comes through leadership, where someone in the organization has to really step up and drive change.”

Maritz said when he was at VMWare, he was fascinated that in looking at different companies in the same businesses, he could see that some would be fifty percent virtualized, and others only ten percent virtualized, simply because of the mindset at the organization that had inspired the change.

“Change really requires leadership. It requires people to understand the organization and get behind it,” he said.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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President Obama, self-proclaimed avid college basketball fan, has just made his predictions for how March Madness will play out. ESPN calls it “Barack-etology. Cute.

This year, the President selects Louisville, Ohio St., Florida, and Indiana to advance to the Final Four. In the final game, he has Louisville facing Indiana. In the end, he thinks Indiana will be the champions of college basketball for 2013.

Last year, the President successfully picked only one of the Final Four teams. Do you think his picks are better this year?

Last night something strange caught my attention, nearly enough to post a late-day story. Then this morning I got a little email nudge from Amazon PR, and thought: “Yeah. Why not?” The timing and broader ecosystem implications are interesting for service “Send to Kindle”. Just as Google whacks RSS — pulling feed icons from its products and setting Reader’s execution — Amazon provides a mechanism for saving content you come across, say, browsing at work for reading at home on your ebook reader or tablet.

The concept is by no means new, not even for Amazon. There are several good cloud services dedicated to saving content for later reading or incorporating the capability. Instapaper comes to mind, and Feedly has an easy tap mechanism to save for later. What makes Send to Kindle different is device/app-specificity. Additionally, websites, including WordPress blogs, can place a button supporting the service.

The button is the new thing, and, according to Amazon’s marketing spiel, “lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there”.

What Amazon needs is developer support, and there is more process than just placing a button here. How little or much depends somewhat on site markup. From the developer info page: “If you use Facebook’s Open Graph, schema.org, or hNews, let us know and we will know where to look. If you don’t use any of these, select Custom CSS Selectors and tell us specifically how you mark the title, author and publication date”.

The question to ask: Why bother? Amazon leads the ebook reader market, but IDC says the market is in steep decline as consumers choose tablets instead. There, Amazon trails Samsung some and iPad by considerable market share — 11.5 percent, 15.1 percent and 43.6 percent, respectively in fourth quarter, according to IDC. Why should any website bother with a Send to Kindle button? Early adopters answer the question — the aforementioned WordPress, Time and Washington Post, for starters. Amazon has fairly tight relationships with newspaper and magazine publishers, offering superb selection of periodicals.

Even if there is only modest adoption of the button, Amazon provides plenty of other options at the “Send to Kindle” site: Browser plug-ins for Chrome and Firefox, OS X and Windows apps, email option and Android app.

From a customer perspective, Send to Kindle fits into the larger Amazon digital lifestyle, for which tablets play a larger role. Only Amazon has done any meaningful Android customization on tablets, creating a curated experience similar to Apple’s. Like iOS, Amazon Android is tightly vertically and horizontally integrated with siloed services. For example, Kindle Fire is designed to mainly work within the Amazon content/retail sphere and little outside it. Amazon runs its own stores — everything from apps to movies — while shunning Google Play. Meanwhile, Kindle Fire supports the custom Silk browser rather than the stock Android one or Chrome.

On devices/apps designed for reading, Send to Kindle fits. The point is digital lifestyle, which Amazon supports on multiple devices — PCs, smartphones and tablets — not just Kindles. Would you or do you use Send to Kindle?

Famed rapper Todd Anthony Shaw, otherwise known as Too Short (or Too $hort if you prefer), has been arrested on suspicion of DUI and drug possession, according to reports.

According to TMZ, law officials claim Shaw attempted to run from the police:

Law enforcement sources tell TMZ, Short — real name Todd Anthony Shaw — was pulled over in L.A. a couple hours ago for some traffic violation … and when cops approached the vehicle, he appeared under the influence.

Now here’s where it gets weird — when police attempted to administer a breathalyzer test, law enforcement sources tell us Too Short took off … and tripped as he ran down the street.

Needless to say, he didn’t get away, and they booked him on DUI and felony narcotics possession, after he allegedly tried to get rid of the druges in the back of the police car.

Too Short’s isn’t the only DUI in the news, as Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham was also arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Walmart is taking the idea of self-checkout to another, more mobile level. The retailer is bringing the “Scan & Go” feature of its Walmart iOS app to 200 stores in the U.S., according to a Reuters report Wednesday. The feature has been in use in some stores already, but at only about 70 near Walmart’s Arkansas headquarters and in Atlanta.

Scan & Go is only available on the iPhone, though Walmart says an Android version is “coming soon.”

Shoppers that have the Walmart app can select “in-store mode” and then scan each item’s barcode as they pick up items throughout the store. Users who have also created shopping lists or budgets within the app will see items scanned “checked off” on their lists. Once finished, they need only go to a self-checkout terminal, scan a barcode on the screen — which reads the items they have in their cart — and pay as usual by swiping a credit card.

It’s not a mobile payment system exactly. And Walmart’s version doesn’t enable the same independence as, say, what Apple has enabled in its own retail stores with the EasyPay option in its Apple Store app or apps from companies like Square and Paypal. With Walmart’s app, you still need to scan one final time at a self-checkout terminal to make your payment through traditional means.

But it’s a step toward easier physical world transactions using mobile technology in the company’s 4,000-store retail empire. Scan & Go could be even more convenient and useful to busy shoppers if Walmart were to enable a payment system within the app.

A lot of companies are being creative with mobile payments and barcode scanning with smartphones. And the success of Square, LevelUp and plenty of others have demonstrated that mainstream users are getting used to the idea of paying with their iPhone — without need for technology like NFC chips inside the device.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Recent reports suggest that Amazon (AMZN) may be the first major vendor to offer a $99 tablet. According to a report from TechCrunch, the company is preparing to offer a Kindle Fire HD tablet equipped with a TI OMAP processor and a 7-inch display with a 1280 × 600 pixel resolution. The report follows Amazon’s announcement earlier this month that it was dropping the prices of its 8.9-inch model in the U.S. The Wi-Fi-only version of the Kindle Fire HD dropped from $299 to $269, while the LTE version was reduced by $100 and is now offered for $399. Amazon’s current 7-inch Kindle Fire costs $199, while an older version can be had for $159. An Amazon spokesperson denied the report, claiming the company is already hitting the “lowest price points possible for that hardware.”

Concurrent, proprietor of the open-source Cascading framework for developing big data workflows, has closed $4 million Series A investment round from True Ventures  (see disclosure) and Rembrandt Partners. Cascading has been around for a few years, actually, but Concurrent only raised seed funding in 2011 and has been riding the wave of interest in making big data easier to do.

In practice, Cascading is generally used as a higher-level method than MapReduce for writing Hadoop jobs, although it’s technically a framework that could support any number of distributed-processing frameworks. It’s used by a number of notable users, including Etsy, Airbnb and Climate Corporation. In February, the Cascading project expanded its scope to address the growing SQL-on-Hadoop trend with a project called Lingual.

Software veteran Gary Nakamura is taking on the role of Concurrent CEO, replacing Cascading creator Chris Wenzel, who’ll stay on as the company’s CTO.

Disclosure: Concurrent 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, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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When the internet of things comes to fruition, the economics of big data analytics will start to pay off, Gaurav Dhillon, founder and CEO of SnapLogic. It will be a world in which sensored devices will grow far beyond the NEST thermostats and Fitbit devices some of us now have.

The foundation of the current  data warehouse business was the simple bar code, used to replenish inventory. Data warehouses are now a $30 billion business. Imagine when there’s input from all these other devices and machines. That’s where the numbers of big data start to ring true, Dhillon said at GigaOM’s Structure Data conference on Wednesday.

There are already apps that will ping a retailer if it notices a shopper wandering aimlessly around a superstore that will send a sales associate to help her find what she’s looking for. “That could be quite useful,” Dhillon said.

Big data in industrial applications is still not being tapped to its full potential, he noted.

There are huge industrial boilers that incorporate a sensor that watches their temperature, he said. “These things cost hundreds of millions of dollars and this sensor looks at the temperature in the infrared spectrum and today just provides a cable feed back to some guy in a baseball cap who watches it. It’s 2013, why couldn’t we put analytics into it that will tell us it will blow in a w eek because we see these hotspots.”

The same sort of technologies could be applied to aircraft engines, cars and other machinery.

Applying the right analytics to the right data, and also ensuring that machine learning data can interoperate with higher level data from CRM or other applications, is where the real payoff of big data begins, said Dhillon, who is an authority on the niceties of data integration. He is former CEO of Informatica.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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