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Depending on how one defines its birth, Hadoop is now 10 years old. In that decade, Hadoop has gone from being the hopeful answer to Yahoo’s search-engine woes to a general-purpose computing platform that’s poised to be the foundation for the next generation of data-based applications.

Alone, Hadoop is a software market that IDC predicts will be worth $813 million in 2016 (although that number is likely very low), but it’s also driving a big data market the research firm predicts will hit more than $23 billion by 2016. Since Cloudera launched in 2008, Hadoop has spawned dozens of startups and spurred hundreds of millions in venture capital investment since 2008.

In this four-part series, we’ll explain everything anyone concerned with information technology needs to know about Hadoop. Part I is the history of Hadoop from the people who willed it into existence and took it mainstream. Part II is more graphic; a map of the now-large and complex ecosystem of companies selling Hadoop products. Part III is a look into the future of Hadoop that should serve as an opening salvo for much of the discussion at our Structure: Data conference March 20-21 in New York. Finally, Part IV will highlight some the best Hadoop applications and seminal moments in Hadoop history, as reported by GigaOM over the years.

Wanted: A better search engine

Almost everywhere you go online now, Hadoop is there in some capacity. Facebook, eBay, Etsy, Yelp , Twitter, Salesforce.com — you name a popular web site or service, and the chances are it’s using Hadoop to analyze the mountains of data it’s generating about user behavior and even its own operations. Even in the physical world, forward-thinking companies in fields ranging from entertainment to energy management to satellite imagery are using Hadoop to analyze the unique types of data they’re collecting and generating.

Everyone involved with information technology at least knows what it is. Hadoop even serves as the foundation for new-school graph and NoSQL databases, as well as bigger, badder versions of relational databases that have been around for decades.

But it wasn’t always this way, and today’s uses are a long way off from the original vision of what Hadoop could be.

Doug Cutting

When the seeds of Hadoop were first planted in 2002, the world just wanted a better open-source search engine. So then-Internet Archive search director Doug Cutting and University of Washington graduate student Mike Cafarella set out to build it. They called their project Nutch and it was designed with that era’s web in mind.

Looking back on it today, early iterations of Nutch were kind of laughable. About a year into their work on it, Cutting and Cafarella thought things were going pretty well because Nutch was already able to crawl and index hundreds of millions of pages. “At the time, when we started, we were sort of thinking that a web search engine was around a billion pages,” Cutting explained to me, “so we were getting up there.”

There are now about 700 million web sites and, according to Wired’s Kevin Kelly, well over a trillion web pages.

But getting Nutch to work wasn’t easy. It could only run across a handful of machines, and someone had to watch it around the clock to make sure it didn’t fall down.

Mike Cafarella

“I remember working on it for several months, being quite proud of what we had been doing, and then the Google File System paper came out and I realized ‘Oh, that’s a much better way of doing it. We should do it that way,’” reminisced Cafarella. “Then, by the time we had a first working version, the MapReduce paper came out and that seemed like a pretty good idea, too.”

Google released the Google File System paper in October 2003 and the MapReduce paper in December 2004. The latter would prove especially revelatory to the two engineers building Nutch.

“What they spent a lot of time doing was generalizing this into a framework that automated all these steps that we were doing manually,” Cutting explained.

Raymie Stata, founder and CEO of Hadoop startup VertiCloud (and former Yahoo CTO), calls MapReduce “a fantastic kind of abstraction” over the distributed computing methods and algorithms most search companies were already using:

“Everyone had something that pretty much was like MapReduce because we were all solving the same problems. We were trying to handle literally billions of web pages on machines that are probably, if you go back and check, epsilon more powerful than today’s cell phones. … So there was no option but to latch hundreds to thousands of machines together to build the index. So it was out of desperation that MapReduce was invented.”

Parallel processing in MapReduce, from the Google paper

Over the course of a few months, Cutting and Cafarella built up the underlying file systems and processing framework that would become Hadoop (in Java, notably, whereas Google’s MapReduce used C++) and ported Nutch on top of it. Now, instead of having one guy watch a handful of machines all day long, Cutting explained, they could just set it running on between 20 and 40 machines that he and Cafarella were able to scrape together from their employers.

Bringing Hadoop to life (but not in search)

Anyone vaguely familiar with the history of Hadoop can guess what happens next: In 2006, Cutting went to work with Yahoo, which was equally impressed by the Google File System and MapReduce papers and wanted to build open source technologies based on them. They spun out the storage and processing parts of Nutch to form Hadoop (named after Cutting’s son’s stuffed elephant) as an open-source Apache Software Foundation project and the Nutch web crawler remained its own separate project.

“This seem like a perfect fit because I was looking for more people to work on it, and people who had thousands of computers to run it on,” Cutting said.

Cafarella, now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, opted to forgo a career in corporate IT and focus on his education. He’s happy as a professor — and currently working on a Hadoop-complementary project called RecordBreaker — but, he joked, “My dad calls me the Pete Best of the big data world.”

Ironically, though, the 2006-era Hadoop was nowhere near ready to handle production search workloads at webscale — the very task it was created to do. “The thing you gotta remember,” explained Hortonworks Co-founder and CEO Eric Baldeschwieler (who was previously VP of Hadoop software development at Yahoo), “is at the time we started adopting it, the aspiration was definitely to rebuild Yahoo’s web search infrastructure, but Hadoop only really worked on 5 to 20 nodes at that point, and it wasn’t very performant, either.”

Baldeschwieler at Hadoop Summit 2010. Source: Yodel Anectdotal

Stata recalls a “slow march” of horizontal scalability, growing Hadoop’s capabilities from the single digits of nodes into the tens of nodes and ultimately into the thousands. “It was just an ongoing slog … every factor of 2 or 1.5 even was serious engineering work,” he said. But Yahoo was determined to scale Hadoop as far as it needed to go, and it continued investing heavy resources into the project.

It actually took years for Yahoo to moves its web index onto Hadoop, but in the meantime the company made what would be a fortuitous decision to set up what it called a “research grid” for the company’s data scientists, to use today’s parlance. It started with dozens of nodes and ultimately grew to hundreds as they added more and more data and Hadoop’s technology matured. What began life as a proof of concept fast became a whole lot more.

“This very quickly kind of exploded and became our core mission,” Baldeschwieler said, “because what happened is the data scientists not only got interesting research results — what we had anticipated — but they also prototyped new applications and demonstrated that those applications could substantially improve Yahoo’s search relevance or Yahoo’s advertising revenue.”

Shortly thereafter, Yahoo began rolling out Hadoop to power analytics for various production applications. Eventually, Stata explained, Hadoop had proven so effective that Yahoo merged its search and advertising into one unit so that Yahoo’s bread-and-butter sponsored search business could benefit from the new technology.

Cutting (center) flanked by Baldeschwieler and Om Malik at GigaOM’s Hadoop Meetup in 2008.

And that’s exactly what happened, because although data scientists didn’t need things like service-level agreements, business leaders did. So, Stata said, Yahoo implemented some scheduling changes within Hadoop. And although data scientists didn’t need security, Securities and Exchange Commission requirements mandated a certain level of security when Yahoo moved its sponsored search data onto it.

“That drove a certain level of maturity,” Stata said. “… We ran all the money in Yahoo through it, eventually.”

The transformation into Hadoop being “behind every click” (or every batch process, technically) at Yahoo was pretty much complete by 2008, Baldeschwieler said. That meant doing everything from these line-of-business applications to spam filtering to personalized display decisions on the Yahoo front page. By the time Yahoo spun out Hortonworks into a separate, Hadoop-focused software company in 2011, Yahoo’s Hadoop infrastructure consisted of 42,000 nodes and hundreds of petabytes of storage.

From the classroom …

However, although Yahoo was responsible for the vast majority of development during its formative years, Hadoop didn’t exist in a bubble inside Yahoo’s headquarters. It was a full-on Apache project that attracted users and contributors from around the world. Guys like Tom White, a Welshman who actually wrote O’Reilly Media’s book Hadoop: The Definitive Guide despite being what Cutting describes as a guy who just liked software and played with Hadoop at night.

Up in Seattle in 2006, a young Google engineer named Christophe Bisciglia was using his 20 percent time to teach a computer science course at the University of Washington. Google wanted to hire new employees with experience working on webscale data, but its MapReduce code was proprietary, so it bought a rack of servers and used Hadoop as a proxy.

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• A near-term outlook for big data
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Real-­time query for Hadoop democratizes access to big data analytics

Last week, we challenged you to name all 6 major full-size truck dashes apart. How did you do?

How well did you guess the dashes apart? Here are the answers.

In case you missed it, here is the link to the post with the dashes for you to guess.
Without further delay here are the answers.

How did you do? Which ones tripped you up the most Nissan, Honda, Ford?

Search terms people used to find this page:

• 2014 toyota sequoia spy
• 2014 tundra
• tundra 2014
• 2014 tundra pictures
• future toyota sequoia 2014
• 2014 toyota tundra spy
• tundra 2014 pictures
• pictures of 2014 tundra
• tundra supercharger 2013
• تندرا 2014

The post Name that Full-Size Truck Dash – Answers appeared first on Tundra Headquarters Blog.

The flash-storage world keeps getting hotter. Ahead of its expected IPO, Violin Memory, which already offers flash memory arrays, is adding solid-state PCI-Express cards for servers to its lineup.

As the company branches out with four PCIe cards, with memory capacity ranging from 1.37 terabytes to 11 terabytes, it will bump up against several competitors, including Fusion-io, LSI and Virident.

The Violin Memory cards are bootable, which can save time and minimize frustration. They also use less air flow than other flash memory cards, so customers can pack more cards onto servers. The lowest-capacity card costs $3 per gigabyte, and the price goes up to $6 per gigabyte for the others.

“We believe this (1.37 terabyte) card, with its price-performance level density, will allow the industry to start a broad adoption over the next several years,” said Don Basile, Violin Memory’s CEO.

The company can rest assured of a market for the new cards. Toshiba, already a major flash memory vendor for consumer products, will have licensing and distribution rights for the new Violin Memory intellectual property.

Violin Memory is planning to go public at the beginning of May, All Things D reported. Basile declined to discuss the timing of the product launch in relation to the IPO.

The flash storage market is nothing if not active. Last May, EMC acquired XtremIO; two months later, IBM bought Texas Memory Systems, and Pure Storage said it had secured a $40 million Series D investment. Just two weeks ago, flash storage array vendor Skyera announced a $51.6 million Series B round of funding.

Widespread enterprise adoption of flash memory seems to be a matter of time. With its new products, Violin Memory appears to be in a better position to ride the market wave.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

In the corner of my home office sits a cabinet full of tchotchkes and gifts that neither I nor my wife can quite bear to part with. It includes a silver Tiffany picture frame I received from Columbia Business School for 10 years of teaching and a company-embossed Swiss army knife that my wife got one Christmas, back in her days as a consultant.

While many might see this sort of gift giving as a sign of the boss’s kindness and generosity, economists mostly see inefficiency: why can’t Columbia just pay me a cash bonus rather than offering presents that collect dust? One answer comes from a classic study by Nobel Laureate George Akerlof, a pioneer in the field of behavioral economics, which focuses on the idea of gift exchange in the workplace. Acts of kindness by employers, the reasoning goes, elicit more effort from their employees in return, hence the utility knives and picture frames. But Akerlof mostly had in mind monetary rewards — you pay me above-market wages, and I’ll repay the favor by working harder — which can’t quite account for the booming corporate gift business.

A study published last year by German and Swiss researchers took a more literal position on the gift exchange hypothesis, suggesting that economists’ focus on cash might often be misplaced. The researchers found that gifts were far more motivating to short-term employees than unexpected cash bonuses, effectively paying for themselves by improving productivity. The findings provide some guidance on the types of gifts that are likely to engender the greatest motivation and loyalty.

The study was inspired, in part, by the need to catalog books at a German university’s economics library. Student catalogers were recruited to spend half a day helping out, with an advertised hourly wage of 12 Euros. While somewhat removed from the corporate context that most managers inhabit, the study has the merit of focusing on a task for which it’s easy to measure productivity: how fast and accurately employees catalog their books. It was also a situation in which employees wouldn’t expect their productivity to elicit further gifts or payments later on, since they were told explicitly that the job wouldn’t continue past the morning’s work.

Before the students started to catalog the books, the experimenters told some of them that they would receive an unexpected seven-Euro bonus — a 20% pay hike relative to the promised wage of 36 Euros for the three-hour job. Another group was given a gift-wrapped water bottle that was worth around seven Euros. (In some versions of the experiment, a price tag was left on and catalogers were informed of the present’s value, to ensure that the employees didn’t overestimate it.) Crucially, a separate set of students didn’t receive any bonus at all, to serve as a baseline to measure the effects of gifts and extra cash.

The cash bonus didn’t have any effect on the speed or accuracy with which the students did their jobs. However, those receiving the free bottle reciprocated by upping their data entry rate by 25%, a productivity increase that more than offset the cost of the bottle itself.

It’s not that the workers particularly loved their bottles — in fact, in a separate experiment in which catalogers were offered the choice between a bottle versus seven Euros, 80% took the cash (and still worked a lot harder). Rather, it was the thought that counted, and simply handing out a few more Euros hardly takes much thought. Even offering the option of a gift showed that the employer cared.

An intriguing final version of the experiment underscored the importance, in the eyes of the employees, of the thought and effort bosses put into their gifts. In this treatment, the cash was delivered as a five-Euro note folded into an origami shirt and a two-Euro coin with a smiley face painted on it. The origami money-gift generated the highest increase in productivity of all. (While the researchers never handed out gift cards or other easy-to-obtain cash equivalents that are common and efficient employee rewards, one can imagine that a Starbucks gift card doesn’t exactly scream “I Care.”)

The study has its limitations. It’s hard to imagine that the average Wall Street trader would work harder for a pink Cadillac than a six-figure bonus. The motivational effects of cash surely become more important when the stakes get higher, and gifts probably work best when tailored to the particular set of employees involved. That’s how you really show you care.

And that, more than gifts versus cash, is really the study’s takeaway. Many employees toiling away in stores, factories, and cubicles are desperate for a sense of meaning in their work lives. Even the smallest gesture of kindness that shows they’re part of an organization that actually cares can give them purpose — and that leads to motivation.

Little less than a week after the last build, Team Win Recovery Project has released a new version of the popular custom Android recovery TWRP. The newest iteration features a number of bug fixes and general improvements.

TWRP 2.4.3.0 touts fixing the persistence of the 24 hour time setting, which was introduced alongside TWRP 2.4.2.0, the loading of the screen timeout setting during start-up, the file selector crash (which is attributed to the multi-threaded design of TWRP), as well as two bugs related to restores. For users who have encountered issues with restoring backups, the functionality should work as intended with the latest version.

File selectors and listboxes now feature a scroll bar for easier navigation, libblkid is used for a more accurate file system detection, and a screen dim effect has been added two seconds before the screen turns off. The third feature is only available for a limited number of devices. There are also bug fixes and improvements relating to the screen timeout functionality.

TWRP 2.4.3.0 is available to download from the Team Win Recovery Project site.

Magazine publisher Condé Nast International has led a $20 million investment round for farfetch, an e-commerce marketplace for independent fashion boutiques. Existing investors Advent Venture Partners, Index Ventures and e.ventures also participated in the fundraising.

PRESS RELEASE
Condé Nast International has led a $20m investment in farfetch – www.farfetch.com -, the world’s leading e-commerce marketplace for independent fashion boutiques; it was announced today by Jonathan Newhouse, Chairman and Chief Executive. Existing investors Advent Venture Partners, Index Ventures and e.ventures also participated in the fundraising.

“This investment will fuel our entry to new markets while assisting our growth in existing ones. Our goal to build a unique curated global franchise in online designer fashion is brought several steps closer through the exciting involvement of Condé Nast.”

“farfetch has a unique position, connecting boutiques around the world by e-commerce to sophisticated fashion customers like our magazine readers and website users. It’s a natural for Condé Nast,” commented Newhouse.

José Neves, Founder and Chief Executive of farfetch, remarked “This investment will fuel our entry to new markets while assisting our growth in existing ones. Our goal to build a unique curated global franchise in online designer fashion is brought several steps closer through the exciting involvement of Condé Nast.”

James Bilefield, President of Condé Nast International Digital, adds “As the leading multimedia publisher connecting people to the fashion brands they love, this investment underlines our commitment to extend the scope of our activities and back great entrepreneurs. It follows the recent news of our involvement with the e-commerce businesses Monoqi and Renesim in Germany, plus the investment activity of our parent company Advance Publications in the USA.” As part of the investment, James Bilefield will join the farfetch board.

farfetch launched in 2008 and brings together luxury brands from over 250 of the world’s most respected independent fashion boutiques for men and women. With 82,000 highly curated products from over 2,000 of the world’s best brands, farfetch currently has 150,000 customers in over 140 countries. farfetch is backed by Advent Venture Partners, Index Ventures, e.ventures and Condé Nast International.

Editor’s note:

Condé Nast International, a division of Advance Publications, sets the benchmark for multimedia publishing excellence. Condé Nast currently operates in 25 markets, publishing 139 magazines, over 100 websites and over 170 tablet and Smartphone apps under iconic brands such as Vogue, GQ, Glamour, Wired, Condé Nast Traveller, and Vanity Fair. Recent launches include Condé Nast Traveller in India and Russia, GQ in Brazil and Turkey, Allure in Russia, AD in China and India, Glamour in Brazil, and Vogue in Thailand and Ukraine.

farfetch is the curated online marketplace that brings together over 250 of the best independent global fashion stores, making their 82,000 highly curated products available at the click of a button. With its head office in London and satellite offices in Portugal, L.A and Brazil, farfetch forms the hub of a global fashion community that unites independent boutiques with fashion lovers. This pioneering concept brings together the collections of Europe and North America’s most influential, multi-brand designer boutiques, and so provides customers with an unrivalled range of labels and products in one easy-to-shop website.

farfetch facts and figures

250 boutiques globally
82,000 highly curated products from over 2,000 of the world’s best brands
4.3 million site visits per month
150,000 customers in over 140 countries spending on average $638 per order
The top farfetch customer to date spent nearly $320,000 since launch on over 280 orders including 51 sandals, 48 pairs of boots and 39 pairs of pumps
$129m annual sales with current growth rate of over 145%
The biggest single farfetch order so far was for 36 items from 15 different boutiques at a value of over $34,400
Sales are spread around the globe, with 65% of sales coming from markets outside the UK and US
The farfetch boutiques occupy a total of 844,500 square feet of retail space, the size of 11 football fields

Advent Venture Partners is one of Europe’s most successful venture capital investors with a track-record of partnering with the most ambitious entrepreneurs building tech-driven businesses. We invest in proven, highly differentiated businesses with exceptional capital efficient growth, in areas where we have both expertise and high conviction. Recent successes include the sale of Zong to ebay, the sale of Qype to Yelp, the sale of Vitrue to Oracle, the sale of Dailymotion to Orange.

Since its inception in the early 1990s, Index Ventures has been dedicated to building world-class information technology and life sciences companies. As one of the early venture firms in Europe, they are committed to the development of the venture capital industry across the continent and UK.

Founded in 1998 e.ventures is a venture capital firm with global scale. The firm invests out of dedicated funds in five geographies, namely BV e.ventures (U.S.), e.ventures Europe, e.ventures Russia, Infinity e.ventures (China and Japan) and Redpoint e.ventures (Brazil and Latin America).

The post Condé Nast Leads $20M Round for farfetch appeared first on peHUB.

Samsung is set to launch its flagship Galaxy S IV smartphone in New York as part of the Samsung Unpacked event on March 14. In order to start building some hype (not that the successor to the world’s best smartphone needs it), the South Korean corporation has unveiled the first in a series of teaser trailers.

The advert introduces us to Jeremy Maxwell, a young child given the task of looking after a cardboard box with Un Packed on the side. In the teaser he is briefly shown the contents of the container, of which we see nothing, aside from the fact that whatever is inside glows very brightly (as someone says on YouTube, “it seems that inside the box there’s a photocopier”), and then takes it home with him.

The teaser gives away nothing about the device, but then it is a teaser, so that’s to be expected. As the series of adverts unfolds, no doubt we’ll get a few clues as to what delights the grand unveiling will hold.

Although very little is known about the Galaxy S IV, it’s a major launch for Samsung and perfectly timed for the South Korean firm which is currently on a high after having had the amount of money it was due to pay arch rival Apple for patent infringement slashed by 40 percent.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is back in the loan market with an eye on a jumbo financing of up to $8 billion to refinance existing debts, barely a year after borrowing $4 billion in loans, according to Basis Point. The borrower is said to have approached lenders seeking proposals for the loan, proceeds from which will refinance US$4bn in loans put in place last year as well as fund Alibaba’s obligations under a $7.1 billion share buyback deal it struck with Yahoo Inc. last May.

(Basis Point) – Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is back in the loan market with an eye on a jumbo financing of up to $8 billion to refinance existing debts, barely a year after borrowing $4 billion in loans, according to sources.

The borrower is said to have approached lenders seeking proposals for the loan, proceeds from which will refinance US$4bn in loans put in place last year as well as fund Alibaba’s obligations under a $7.1 billion share buyback deal it struck with Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) last May.

The Chinese internet company is refinancing its outstanding loans with a new borrowing to free itself from covenants that capped its borrowings to $4 billion.

The additional $4 billion it is raising from the latest borrowing will finance its share buyback deal with Yahoo.

As reported earlier, the buyback, agreed by Alibaba and Yahoo on 21 May 2012, will cost $7.1 billion and will be funded by $6.3 billion in cash and $800 million through a new issue of preferred stock by Alibaba to Yahoo.

Sources expect Alibaba to pay lower pricing than on its loans signed last year, which were well received.

The $4 billion in loans completed last year comprised a $1 billion four-year facility signed in July by eight banks and three other loans of $1 billion each signed in June.

The three other loans include two bilaterals of three and four years from China Development Bank (CDB) CHDB.UL, and a $1 billion three-year facility from a group of 19 lenders. The three-year facility from 19 banks was part of a $3 billion dual-tranche debut which also comprised a $2 billion bridge that was taken out by CDB’s bilaterals.

The $1 billion three-year loan from the 19 banks paid a top-level upfront fee of 300 basis points, while the $2 billion 12-month bridge paid 175 basis points.

The $4 billion in loans last year funded the privatization of Hong Kong-listed Alibaba.com and financed the buyback of half of the 40 percent stake Yahoo held in Alibaba.

(Reporting by Prakash Chakravarti)

The post Reuters – Alibaba Eyes Up to $8B Jumbo Loans appeared first on peHUB.

On the way to work one day last week, I caught myself having a terrible thought.

“Let’s see,” I mused. “No more vacations coming up soon. In fact, probably no more long vacations this year. Excellent.”

It’s not that I don’t like vacations. It’s just that returning from them, as I was doing last week, is such a pain.

I had pretty wiped out my to-do list before I left, so it wasn’t that I was way behind. I’d also spent 20 minutes every day during vacation checking my emails and responding to the handful of urgent ones, so I didn’t return to a scary backlog. But there was still no avoiding a big post-vacation pile of little questions and proposals begging for responses. And, because I’d told people who I’m working on things with that I’d be back in the office on Tuesday, there was some big stuff, too. By the end of the day I had five article drafts and a book manuscript in my inbox, all requiring some sort of response. Plus I had a moderately busy calendar of meetings and events for the week.

The result: I started the week playing catch-up, yet never really caught up. I wasn’t working on the things I really wanted to be working on, I was feeling guilty about not getting back to people, and I didn’t feel like I was making much progress. It seemed like it would take a week or two to get back to where I felt in control again — which is what got me looking forward to the long stretch of vacation-free months ahead of me.

Not all jobs are like this. Back when I was a newspaper reporter, a colleague would simply cover for me when I was gone. When I got back, I’d have to do a little bit of catching up on what I’d missed, but there wasn’t ever any kind of backlog I needed to work through — if something really important happened on my beat, the paper had already run an article on it. Same goes for any job where someone else has to take over your duties while you’re on vacation.

Interestingly, bank regulators in the U.S. require that bank employees “in key or influential positions” take off at least two straight weeks every year — long enough that someone else has to take over their duties for that time, making it harder to cover up any ongoing shenanigans.

I’m not going to hold my breath for a similar decree from magazine regulators. For one thing, there aren’t really any magazine regulators, at least not in my country. And the nature of the job that I do — which is, at least in this respect, similar to the work of most white-collar workers these days — doesn’t lend itself to vacation handoffs. I work on projects with durations in the weeks, months, and sometimes years, usually involving several people, with each playing a distinct role. It’s usually easy enough to put off my part of the work for a week, while it would take tons of coordination and bringing-up-to-speed to hand it to somebody else. So, most of the time, finding someone to take over for me isn’t practical — and vacations become postponements of work rather than vacations from it.

This wouldn’t be a problem if I perfectly calibrated my workload to leave room for a few weeks of vacation a year. I have lots of freedom to decide how much work to take on, so in theory this would be possible. But in practice, I’m quite impressed with myself when I get the work/time balance right for a single workweek. Adding in the vacation calculation is simply beyond me.

Seeking advice, or maybe just solace, I typed “vacation” into the hbr.org search box. It turns out that if we wanted to start a spinoff publication called the Harvard Vacation Review, we’d totally be able to fill it. We’ve run lots of pieces on the importance of vacations — so okay, I’ll keep taking vacations.

There was also Dorie Clark’s piece on “How to Take a Month Off,” which I remembered reading when it came out. But part of the attraction of taking a week off is that you don’t have to spend a year planning for it, as Dorie did for her big trip.

Then I came across Peter Bregman’s “The Right Way to Come Back from Vacation,” which addressed exactly the catch-up problem I was facing. Peter’s advice was basically stop trying so hard to catch up. Block out lots of time for activities that aren’t related to clearing out your backlog, and spend time thinking about who you are at your best and what your goals are. Then tackle the inbox, but with a clear sense of what’s important and what you can leave hanging.

There was no way I was going to exactly what Peter advised. I’m too wary of self-help advice for that, especially when it’s self-help advice from a guy I’ve known since he was a freshman in college (and I was a junior). But I found myself nonetheless following his recommendations in spirit, by ignoring my to-do list for three hours and writing this. And now I really do feel much better — I took control, I accomplished something tangible, and I forced myself to think about things bigger than just catching up. True, I’m still far from caught up. But I’m no longer resolving never to take another vacation.

Tech geeks around the world are using connected devices to measure everything from their daily activity and heart rates to their sleep patterns and blood glucose levels. But ask the average American about this so-called Quantified Self movement and you’ll likely get a blank face.

WebMD and Qualcomm, however, believe they can bring the latest wave of digital health technology to millions more. On Monday, the two companies announced a partnership to provide a “connected personal health hub” to consumers by combining the power of WebMD’s brand with the Qualcomm’s FDA-approved technology.

“We think there’s a real opportunity to give users insights around what their data means,” said Bill Pence, WebMD’s CTO. “[It’s like] bringing wireless health to consumers on a mass scale.”

Launched in 2011, Qualcomm’s 2net platform provides a secure, universally-interoperable network for collecting and sharing data from connected fitness and health devices, like blood glucose meters, health monitors and other gadgets. The platform currently integrates with about 250 device partners, including AliveCor and BodyMedia, but WebMD says it is the first major brand to partner with the platform.

The “health hub,” Pence said, is “a cloud-based system for the problem of having to integrate with different devices.” Through a WebMD app, for example, users would be able purchase devices from a curated in-app marketplace, and then store and aggregate data from those devices. The app, Pence continued, would be able to generate insights based on that data as well as other information users provide about their health. Instead of just getting generic information from a WebMD search on diabetes, for example, users could get results more specific to their individual needs. (At GigaOM’s upcoming Structure:Data conference, I’ll be speaking with Aetna’s head of innovation about other ways big data can improve health care.)

For WebMD, the partnership highlights the company’s shift from offering “trusted content to [being] a full-service engagement platform for patients,” said Pence. Even though the company is known for its consumer information sites and apps, like WebMD.com and its various mobile apps, the company says it’s grown a strong physician audience through its registration-based Medscape medical news site. It also offers employers a subscription-based patient-engagement platform and provides consumers with Personal Health Records software.  As digital health tools proliferate, Pence said, consumers will increasingly have opportunities to connect with their physician and care providers, more closely monitor their own health and interact with the health care system in new ways. WebMD, he said, sees a role for itself in being a one stop shop for digital health services and helping to guide consumers through the growing new landscape.

Down the road, he said, the company will begin to integrate the various parts of its business, giving consumers the opportunity to securely interact with doctors on Medscape or helping consumers analyze their medical records, for example.

Other startups, like Tictrac, also aim to aggregate an individual’s personal health data and help them derive meaning from it. But, given WebMD’s name recognition, it could certainly help introduce connected health technology to a new swath of consumers. Still, it will be interesting to see the kinds of insights the new “hub” will be able to generate. Some could see a novelty in storing and tracking their data but, if the app doesn’t generate meaningful enough insights, they may not see a reason to stick around.

Also, even though WebMD’s brand is strong, consumers see it as a health information company, not a health services company prepared to handle potentially sensitive personal information. And it may take time for the company to earn consumer trust and awareness on that front.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• The quantified self: hacking the body for better health
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Open-source Windows defrag tool UltraDefrag 6.0 FINAL has been released along with a 64-bit build and portable editions. The new build promises optimized disk processing algorithms for speed and efficiency, support for optimizing FAT disks and the ability to minimize the main window to the Taskbar Notification area.

Ultra Defrag comes with a graphical interface for less experienced users as well as options for defragging individual files, folders and drives from the Explorer context menu, but power users can also control it via a console, with options for batch processing and setting up scheduled tasks available. It also comes with boot-time options for defragging system files and Registry hives.

The key improvement in UltraDefrag 6.0 is the reimplementation of all the disk processing algorithms. This optimization improves the program’s overall speed through more efficient and therefore shorter processing times.

Version 6 also allows users to optimize FAT disks for the first time, plus users can now sort files on the disk by optimization as well as path, size and one of creation, modification or last accessed times. The program’s optimization tools now also make full use of all specified filters.

The GUI has been tweaked with redesigned icons aimed at making the program look better on Windows Vista and above. Users also gain a few additional options, including one to minimize the program to its Taskbar Notification area icon, and another that allows them to suspend and resume running jobs.

Windows 7 and 8 users can also view a progress of any currently running jobs through the program’s Taskbar Notification area icon with this latest release. Like many other settings, this can be switched off by clicking the program’s Options button, which opens its configuration file in Notepad for editing manually.

All file fragmentation reports are no longer stored on the root directory of each analyzed drive; instead they can be found in the Reports sub-folder inside the program’s own folder.

The new release, which went through two beta and three Release Candidate versions, is rounded off with one new language (Bengali) added alongside numerous language updates (including Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Russian and Spanish), plus the usual gamut of bug fixes and behind-the-scenes tweaks.

UltraDefrag 6.0 FINAL and UltraDefrag 6.0 FINAL 64-bit, along with UltraDefrag Portable 6.0 32-bit and UltraDefrag Portable 6.0 64-bit, are all available as open-source downloads for PCs running Windows NT 4.0 or later.

Photo Credit: Balandina G/Shutterstock

Koushik Dutta, the developer behind Android apps like Carbon, ROM Manager and the popular ClockworkMod custom recovery, has released a new open-source root access management app called Superuser.

Explaining the reason for making it open-source, Dutta says that in his opinion a root access management app should be open to “independent security analysis” and that “obscurity (closed source) is not security”. He also places a great deal of value on making the app “AOSP buildable” so that developers can include it in custom Android distributions.

But let’s see what the new player can do. Superuser is designed as an alternative to SuperSU (which is closed-source ) and offers a range of interesting features. The app comes with multiple user support, pin protection, root request timeout, notifications and an UI (User Interface) suited for tablets, among its main features.

Superuser also includes support for manifest permission, logging and per-app configuration. Users coming from previous, unofficial, versions of the app will benefit from a higher number of translations, notification after boot for an incompatible su binary, and fixes for “embarrassing spelling mistakes”.

Superuser is available to download from Google Play. The app requires a rooted Android device in order to function.

Democracy in Africa – is it worth the effort? And why should foreigners help a country like Kenya to run its elections?

It’s Monday 4 March, and millions of Kenyans are already standing in long queues – many in intense heat – so they can vote. Democracy clearly means something to them. Many are first-time voters, in a country where well over half the population is under 25. Some Kenyans are cynical about their entire political class, writing them off as a corrupt, self-interested elite (a charge not unique to Kenya). Many will vote purely by tribe – though a new generation reject the ethnic maths of previous elections and want to choose based on personality and values, if not yet policies. Some might vote because they have been paid to (an electoral offence, yet still common). But for whatever reason, most Kenyans care enough to vote – and to throw the rascals out. In 2007, over two-thirds of MPs lost their seats.

This is a historic election – the first under Kenya’s progressive 2010 constitution – with voters having six choices: President, County Governor, Senator, MP, County Assembly Representative, and Women’s Representative in Parliament. That makes for a complicated voting process (and long queues). But it also gives Kenyans a big set of choices on who they want to run their country.

The six ballot boxes awaiting Kenyan voters today – Photo: Muratha Kinuthia, DFID

The six ballot vote represents a further step in Kenya’s journey away from its political past. Power is being spread and devolved from an all-powerful Presidency and a centralised government to a bicameral Parliament and 47 county governments. Particularly for Kenyans who lived through the less democratic presidencies of Daniel arap Moi (1978-2002) and Jomo Kenyatta (1963-1978), this is progress. The chair of the Kenyan Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, Ahmed Issack Hassan, is a big fan of Winston Churchill, who observed that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those others that have been tried”.

So what have aid and poverty reduction got to do with democracy? On the one hand, Kenya is a terrible example of what can happen when democracy goes wrong. In 2007-8, over a thousand people were killed and 600,000 became homeless, over a billion dollars of damage was caused, and economic growth fell from a promising 7.1% in 2007 to a sluggish 1.7% (below population growth) in 2008. World Bank analysis shows that from 1980-2010, growth averaged 3.9% in non-election years and only 2.4% in election years. Most of those elections have been marred by violence. Democracy should increase stability, not reduce it.

On the other hand, there’s strong evidence across Africa and elsewhere that not only do people want democracy (see eg Afrobarometer’s work), but that when it works well, it’s an important part of what drives growth and poverty reduction (see eg Radelet on Emerging Africa). This informs British Prime Minister David Cameron’s development thinking – that there is a “golden thread” of conditions enabling open societies and open economies to thrive, and address the root causes of poverty and under-development. Supporting this is a better exit strategy for aid than addressing the symptoms for ever more. Cameron recognises that democracy is not just about holding elections: “it’s about establishing the building blocks of democracy, the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law, with the majority prepared to defend the rights of the minority, the freedom of the media, a proper place for the army in society, and the development of effective state institutions, political parties and wider civil society”.

And poverty? Poor people in Kenya are less likely to vote. In Turkana, Kenya’s poorest county (with over 90% of the population under the poverty line), less than a third are registered to vote. Poor people are also more vulnerable to having their votes bought, or suppressed. When you’ve got seven hungry children and someone offers you a few quid for your ID card, what do you do? When you’re young with no hope of a job and someone offers you money to join an armed gang, what do you do?

Democracy should be delivering for the poorest people in Kenya. And the more stable Kenya is, the more elections are about candidates’ policies and spending plans and the less they’re about tribal alliances and mudslinging, the more candidates will have to focus on meeting the needs of the poor. Reducing poverty should also make democracy work better. All the analysis of the 2007-8 violence pointed at underlying causes that are intimately connected to poverty – unemployment, land disputes, corruption.

The future of Kenya – Photo: Joyce Njuguna, DFID

So there are good reasons why foreign donors committed to reducing poverty, such as the UK Government, should offer support to elections in countries like Kenya (without even considering the benefits to the UK of stability in Kenya). And that help is usually warmly welcomed, by people and organisations who don’t just want our money, but want to be part of the international community of democratic countries. DFID’s aid includes funding and advice to the election commission, voter education, domestic observation, training of judges to deal with election disputes, local conflict prevention, and other measures to reduce the risks of violence.

The National Tallying Centre, where Kenya’s next President will be announced – Photo: Alistair Fernie, DFID

We’re working with Kenyans who are determined to see a peaceful election today, and want all the help they can get. They’ve achieved a huge amount in the last five years. There’s more to do. Whether it’s been worth the effort may be decided in the next two days. Polling has got off to a good start this morning – there are the inevitable technical problems with an exercise of this scale, and a couple of nasty but relatively minor security incidents. Some results may be challenged – hopefully in the courts, not the streets. But Kenyans are out in large numbers, voting patiently and peacefully. They deserve a successful election. They believe in democracy, warts and all. So should we.

ASUS Transformer Pad owners are in for a treat, the latest treat in the candy jar in fact — the Taiwanese manufacturer has announced that it will upgrade the popular tablet to Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

On its Facebook page, ASUS revealed that the Transformer Pad, in TF300 trim, is set to receive an update to Android 4.2 Jelly Bean this month, although there’s no exact date as to when the roll-out will begin. According to the company, the Transformer Pad is the first non-Nexus device to receive the upgrade to the newest iteration of the popular green droid operating system.

ASUS has also yet to provide specific details as to what is included alongside the base Android 4.2 flavor, but it’s safe to assume that the usual branded apps will make an appearance. Transformer Pad owners will also have access to lockscreen widgets, multiple user support, and swipe gestures for the keyboard, as well as other features.

CoBe Capital has hired Dr. Knuth Schmidt as a director of operations for DACH. CoBe Capital is a global private investment firm focused on the acquisition and management of non-core business units from large corporations.

PRESS RELEASE

CoBe Capital, a global private investment firm focused on the acquisition and management of non-core business units from large corporations, is pleased to announce the hiring of Dr. Knuth Schmidt as a Director of Operations for DACH.
An engineer by training, Dr. Knuth Schmidt has far reaching international business experience from his tenure as the General Manager of a diverse set of manufacturing companies from across the DACH region – Dynamit Nobel Kunstsstoff, Lista AG , Fridola Tech and TCG-Holding. Dr. Schmidt draws on his engineering and operations experience at companies including Daimler and Siemens, to bring a unique perspective on achieving growth and profitability at industrial manufacturers through strategic management, corporate development, international sales expansion, cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
Dr. Schmidt received his Diplom Ingenieur degree at the RWTH-Aachen and earned his Dr. Ingenieur title at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institute for Reactor Materials. He also earned a Diplom Wirtschaftsingenieur at the Hochschule für Berufstätige (AKAD) and further pursued advanced studies through Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. He is fluent in English and German and conversant in French and Spanish.
“We welcome Knuth to our family and believe he brings tremendous strengths to our investment model as we continue to build on our track record of successful turnaround of industrial operations in Europe,” said Neal Cohen, Founder and Managing Director of CoBe Capital.
About CoBe Capital
CoBe Capital, a global private investment firm with a permanent capital base, specializes in the acquisition and operation of non-core and underperforming business units in the Americas and Europe from leading global corporations. CoBe Capital owns and operates a diversified portfolio of companies and strives to achieve long-term growth based on lean management and continuous improvement business philosophies. CoBe Capital was founded by Neal Cohen in 1994.
Contact

Jordan Garner
Tel. +1 (212) 338-0235 x1102
Email [email protected]

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BB&T Capital Partners has sold The Cline Company to Rexnord Corporation. The Cline Company, headquartered in Greenville, SC is a provider of aftermarket power transmission services to the pulp and paper, steel and other industries.

PRESS RELEASE

BB&T Capital Partners (“BBTCP”) is pleased to announce the successful divestiture of The Cline Company (“Cline”) to Rexnord Corporation (NYSE:RXN).
About The Cline Company:
The Cline Company, headquartered in Greenville, SC is a premium, high quality provider of aftermarket power transmission services to the pulp and paper, steel and other industries. Cline specializes in providing full-service power transmission solutions and has a high degree of technical expertise in advising clients in the inspection, repair, replacement or maintenance of mission critical components such as industrial drive shafts, clutches and brakes that are used in production equipment. Cline offers its customers a wide breadth of critical services, including inspection, repair, replacement and spare parts, as well as predictive and preventative maintenance and other on-site technical field services.
About Rexnord Corporation:
Rexnord Corporation is a leading worldwide industrial company comprised of two strategic platforms: Process & Motion Control and Water Management. Within its platforms, Rexnord serves a diverse array of growing, global end markets with the broadest, most reliable product portfolios and trusted brands in its industries, backed by thousands of associates that share a common goal: providing superior customer satisfaction. Cline will reside in Process & Motion Control where Rexnord designs, manufactures, markets and services specified, highly engineered mechanical components used within complex systems where its customers’ reliability requirements and the cost of failure or downtime is extremely high.

About BB&T Capital Partners
BB&T Capital Partners (www.bbtcp.com) manages committed capital across three fund strategies, all of which are focused on the middle market. The firm makes direct equity investments in control transactions of privately-held companies; provides subordinated debt or mezzanine capital in support of transactions led by financial sponsors and others; and invests in other private equity funds. Since 1998, BBTCP has invested in over 45 privately-held, middle-market companies in a variety of industries, providing patient capital to facilitate buyout, acquisition, growth and recapitalization transactions. BBTCP’s investing strategy focuses on a partnership approach with management with a common goal of long-term value creation.
For additional information on this transaction, please contact Brent Kulman at 336-733-0354 or [email protected].

BB&T Capital Partners
101 N. Cherry St.
Suite 700
Winston-Salem, NC 27101-4019

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Private equity firm CVC is in talks on a bid for Britain’s largest retirement home builder McCarthy & Stone, writes Reuters. The firm is expected to team up with Alan Bowkett, who resigned as McCarthy & Stone chairman last week, to try to buy the company, which is owned by a number of banks and hedge funds.

Reuters – Private equity firm CVC is in talks on a bid for Britain’s largest retirement home builder McCarthy & Stone, sources close to the proposed deal said on Sunday.

The firm is expected to team up with Alan Bowkett, who resigned as McCarthy & Stone chairman last week, to try to buy the company, which is owned by a number of banks and hedge funds.

Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper said the deal would be worth around 500 million pounds ($750.5 million).

A source close to the proposed deal said the talks were still in the early stages, adding the deal would be on a standalone basis and not linked to Acromas, owner of over-50s insurance and holiday provider Saga, which is controlled by a CVC-led private equity consortium.

McCarthy & Stone said it had appointed as chairman Jeremy Jensen, previously a non-executive director, who in 2011, with other landlords, led the break-up of care home provider Southern Cross. The firm declined to comment on the bid speculation.

McCarthy & Stone was taken private in 2006 in a 1.1 billion pound deal by a consortium led by HBOS, now part of Lloyds Banking Group Plc.

Chief Executive Mark Elliott drafted in investment bankers from Moelis to advise on the firm’s 500 million pound debt pile and explore options for the business when he was appointed in November.

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