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Ericsson has revealed its Cloud System, a product for orchestrating private cloud capabilities across the network that effectively ties together previously announced moves such as its membership of OpenStack and redefinition of the concept of software-defined networking (SDN).

Ericsson Cloud System, which will hit availability in the first quarter of 2014, targets mobile operators in particular. It incorporates an upgraded Cloud Manager, which is Ericsson’s operations support system, alongside a new Cloud Execution Environment that’s based on OpenStack and the KVM hypervisor.

This all runs on existing Ericsson Blade System (EBS) server clusters and Smart Services Routers (SSR), and the general idea is to enable virtualized environments across the network, from the base station to aggregation nodes and business support systems.

“Cloud services need to be distributed and networks — including computing and storage capabilities — need to be elastic on an end-to-end basis,” an Ericsson statement reads. “This combination will bring a new set of capabilities that doesn’t exist today… It enables distributed cloud capabilities such as computing and storage capabilities in the network, resulting in a better experience when using cloud applications, and more efficient utilization of network resources.

Ericsson’s take on SDN is key to this approach. The company sees most people’s interpretation of the concept as overly focused on the data center, whereas it wants to push the idea of SDN as covering a carrier’s entire network, with operational and business support systems also in the mix.

The benefit, it argues, would be to make resources elastic, to cope with an application’s bandwidth or quality-of-service requirements on-the-fly. By doing so, Ericsson says, the operator can make its own business more efficient, then perhaps use freed-up resources to provide cloud compute and storage services to others.

“There are lots of advantages,” Magnus Furustam, the head of Ericsson’s Core and IMS business, told me today. “Time to market, simplifying operations, but also the innovation that is enabled. By providing a virtualization layer, you make it possible for the operator to [insert] new functionality in the network where it is needed.

“We think it’s important that this is not a disruption –- we’re not asking our operators to throw away their existing infrastructure. Based on that hardware we can upgrade that to support first of all virtualized environments, and if that is not the case we can add hardware, say a board that supports virtualized environments.”

The Ericsson Cloud System will be shown off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, where the company will also launch a new “unified” content delivery network (CDN) system called Media Delivery Network.

The new CDN system, designed to help both fixed and mobile operators get into video delivery, combines Ericsson’s existing packet core and radio technologies with new management and service exposure layers. This will let operators do things like select the best CDN in order to optimize traffic, and cache over-the-top (OTT) content — in other words, third-party content — in order to offer the OTT content providers new guaranteed quality-of-service levels.

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The Android Developers Office Hours for the EMEA region recently took place, and the entire session is now up on YouTube. The team covers a number of topics that are relevant to the Android developer, regardless of region, like authentication issues, certain devices not supporting apps, and other problems that plague developers.

Check it out:

Rapper DMX was arrested for driving without a license early this morning, and his infant daughter was in the car with him at the time.

The performer–whose real name is Earl Simmons–was pulled over in South Carolina after an officer spotted him at a convenience store and recognized him as someone who’d had previous driving offenses. After Simmons drove off, he was quickly stopped by the officer and taken into custody for driving without a license. The car was turned over to a licensed passenger in the car.

Simmons had already been issued tickets for the same offense in and around the county he was pulled over in, but said he was willing to pay the fine on the spot to avoid having to go to jail. Instead, he was taken in to a detention center, where he was made to wait five hours before he was released.

“When I could have just paid the money right there on the spot,” Simmons said. “Basically it was just five hours wasted for nothing. I don’t have a court date or a court appearance.”

FOX Carolina 21

Google has released a new Webmaster Help video. This time, Matt Cutts shares some statistics about the messages it sends webmasters. The video is a response to this user-submitted question:

You’ve been sending us various kinds of messages via WMT to improve transparency. It’s a good move. How many types of messages do you send now? And how do you decide what message you send?

“At this point we do send hundreds of thousands of messages each month,” says Cutts. “That might sound like a lot, but for example, one search engine named blekko estimated that a million spam pages are created every hour. The web is very large, so we shouldn’t be surprised that some percentage of it is spam, and as a result, we do spend a lot of time finding that spam, and since we automatically send messages and notifications when we find it, there are a lot – hundreds of thousands of notifications we send out each month.”

Cutts notes that there’s a lot of different categories of spam covered in Google’s webmaster guidelines, but that they all lead to about ten different kinds of messages that Google sends. Hidden text, keyword stuffing, etc. would all go into one kind of message.

He then goes on to share some stats from “earlier this year,” as he says, indicating that they’re from January and February. It’s not entirely clear when this video was made. Since it’s still early in February, we’re not sure if the video was recorded before the New Year or not. Cutts does tend to film a bunch of these videos at a time. Either way, it probably makes little difference if they’re putting the video out now.

“Out of the hundreds of thousands of messages that we sent over that time period, roughly 90% of those were for what we call ‘black hat’,” says Cutts. “That’s pure egregious spam (clear cut), so anybody sufficiently tech savvy would probably be able to recognize that it’s spam. It’s the stuff that you think of as traditional junk that you just don’t want to show up in your results because it is very clearly spam.”

“About four percent of the messages were because the content had little or no added value, and so it’s not ranking as highly in our search results,” he continues. “About three percent of the messages that we sent were related to hacking, so hacking is a big attack as far as black hats, and even though it’s illegal, there’s a lot of people that do that, trying to promote their pharmacy pills or whatever…that sort of thing. Something like two percent of the messages that we sent out were related to link buying, and about one percent were related to link selling. So overall, between two and three precent related to links and link spam overall – about buying and selling links.”

He leaves it at that.

Earlier this week, Google put out a video of Cutts explaining how to figure out which links to remove if you got an unnatural link warning.

Adobe Flash was recently hit by two zero-day exploits that the company quickly worked to patch up. Now one of Adobe’s other popular Web plugins – Reader – has been hit.

Computer security company FireEye found yesterday that Adobe Reader was hit by a zero-day exploit. The exploit is currently found in the latest Adobe Reader versions – 9.5.3, 10.1.5 and 11.0.1. Here’s what the exploit does:

Upon successful exploitation, it will drop two DLLs. The first DLL shows a fake error message and opens a decoy PDF document, which is usually common in targeted attacks. The second DLL in turn drops the callback component, which talks to a remote domain.

FireEye has alerted Adobe to the threat, and the company is now investigating the report. It will have an update on what actions it plans to take soon.

Instead of waiting for Adobe to act, you should probably switch to a different PDF reader. There are numerous free, open-source PDF readers that do a marvelous job without relying on a Web browser plugin that can be exploited to insert malware onto your system.

The Firefox 19 Beta is also testing out a new native HTML5 PDF reader plugin that would be far more secure than traditional plugins. It’s only a matter of time before the HTML5-friendly Chrome follows suit with its own.

[h/t: The Next Web]

There’s a new viral share hoax going around Facebook involving a photo of Bill Gates.

“Hey Facebook, As some of you may know, I’m Bill Gates. If you click that share link, I will give you $5,000. I always deliver, I mean, I brought your Windows XP, right?” says a sign in the hands of the Microsoft founder.

The photo already has over 200,000 shares.

In reality, Bill Gates isn’t going to give you $5,000 for clicking share. Nobody is, for that matter. The photo was taken from Gates’ first-ever reddit AMA, which he hosted on Monday. Here’s the original image:

Clearly, the text inside the piece of paper has simply been shopped. It also looks like they’ve replaced the little reddit alien in the background with a sex toy or something. Cool.

There’s no doubt that some people shared this simply because they thought it was funny – they know it’s fake. But there are plenty of people (evidenced by the comments) that believe sharing this photo will net them five grand from one of the richest men in the world.

In either case, just don’t share it. You may know it’s a joke but thousands of others don’t. And it’s all over my news feed. And it’s annoying. So stop. Thanks.

Occupy Wall Street’s slogan “We are the 99%” had been echoing through the United States and the world for just over a month when James B. Glattfelder and his co-authors released the study “The Network of Global Corporate Control” in October 2011. The study was a scientific look at our global economy, revealing how control flows like water through pipes — some thin, some thick — between people and companies. The finding: that control of our economy is highly tightly concentrated into a small core of top players, leaving us all vulnerable to fast-spreading economic distress.

James B. Glattfelder: Who controls the world?

In today’s talk, filmed at TEDxZurich, Glattfelder reveals that the impetus of the study wasn’t at all to validate global protesters. Instead, the study was conducted out of a desire to understand the laws that govern our economy, in the same way that we understand the laws that govern the physical world around us. Glattfelder and his co-authors Stefania Vitali and Stefano Battiston are complex systems theorists, meaning that they study a whole — for example, an ant colony or the human brain — as more than just the sum of its part. Complexity theory examines interactions between parts, looking for the simple rules that emerge when viewed en masse.

“Ideas relating to finance, economics and politics are very often tainted by people’s personal ideologies. I hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found, “ Glattfelder says in today’s talk. “It would be great if it has the power to help end the gridlock of conflicting ideas, which appear to be paralyzing our global world. Reality is so complex — we need to move away from dogma. But this is only my personal ideology.”

To hear more about how the study was conducted, watch this talk. And to learn more about the results, and how they were received, keep reading.

To answer the question, “Who controls the world?” the study looked at ownership networks, breaking it down to nodes (such as firms, people, governments, foundations), links (the percentage of ownership) and value. Overall, the study looked at:

• 13 million ownership relations
• 43,000 transnational corporations
• 600,000 nodes
• 1 million links

At the top of this post is a 3D rendering of all the connections in this study. The dots represent the transnational corporations, nodes and links. Any section of it looks something like this.

As Glattfelder explains, in this ecosystem of transnational corporations, there is a periphery and there is a center — a connected network that contains about 75% of all the players. Nestled in this center is what the study calls the core. This core contains 1,300 highly connected nodes. While only 36% of transnational corporations are in this core, they make up 95% of the value of the entire network. This image will help to illustrate the core.

The authors of this study also assigned each player in this system a degree of influence. And overall, they found that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to control 80% of all the transnational corporations’ value. These top shareholders are mostly financial institutions in the US and UK. The first 10 on the list:

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc.
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co.
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc.
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc.

Download the full list here »

But their findings get even more extreme. The 146 top players in the core — representing just .024% of all the nodes studied — have the ability to control about 40% of transnational corporations’ value. This high degree of interconnectivity means that not only are we all highly influenced by a few — but that their distress is able to spread like wildfire.

The study, published in PLOS ONE at just the right time, quickly went viral. Read the study in its entirety »

Or check out some of the stories that ran about it:

• The New Scientist: Revealed — the capitalist network that runs the world (Oct. 24, 2011)
• The Montreal Review: Decoding Complexity (April 2012)
• Public Intelligence: Network of 147 companies control nearly 40% of global economic value of transnational corporations (Oct. 21, 2011)
• Science News: Financial world dominated by a few deep pockets (Sept. 24, 2011)
• Huffington Post: ‘Super-Entity’ of 147 companies at center of world’s economy, study claims (Oct. 24, 2011)
• Media Freedom International: Small network of corporations run the global Economy (April 4, 2012)
• Global Research: Bankers rule the world (Dec. 16, 2011)

As the story spread, Glattfeld and his co-authors took on the issue of whether their study was a proof of a conspiracy.

“Our study does NOT claim that the actors in the core are colluding. NOR does it claim that this structure is the result of some intentional design. We actually think that it probably emerges ‘naturally,’ as a result of simple mechanisms that are at work in the market,” they write here. “What we claim is that further studies are needed to investigate the implications of such a structure, because it is very well possible that it is [endangers] market competition and financial stability.”

Taco Bell, one of the best companies around in terms of social media presence, has just announced the official launch date of their new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos on Twitter, with a Vine video.

We already knew that the Cool Ranch followup to Taco Bell’s Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Taco was coming soon, but today’s announcement gives us a specific date: March 7th.

“On March 7, 2013, Doritos Cool Ranch fans won`t have to wait any longer. Today Taco Bell announced it will launch another soon-to-be blockbuster Doritos flavor to the Doritos Locos Tacos line-up: Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos. The
announcement was made today directly to Taco Bell`s most ardent fans across social and digital media channels, and via a six-second Vine video announcement, the first-ever product announcement made by Taco Bell using the Vine platform,” said the company in a press release.

But here’s how most people saw the announcement today:

It’s out of the bag. Coming March 7th. #CoolRanchDLT vine.co/v/bvlaYggdIiU

— TACO BELL (@TacoBell) February 13, 2013

In case you were wondering about pricing, caloric intake, and all that other stuff that you shouldn’t really care about when you’re stuffing Taco Bell into your face, the new Cool Ranch Dortios Locos Taco will be $1.39 and will pack 160 calories. The supreme (with sour cream and tomatoes) will run $1.69 and have 200 calories.

A Brazilian regulatory agency on Wednesday ruled that Apple is not the only company that can exclusively sell smartphones bearing the iPhone name in the country. Gradiente Electronica, a local company that had registered the name in 2000, is the other, the BBC reported.

Gradiente was granted the iPhone trademark in 2008. Apple began selling its iPhone in 2007. Though the company has a different name now (IGB Electronica SA) it began selling a device in the country it calls the iPhone in December 2012. (To add a little insult to injury, the device runs Android.)

Both companies can use the trademark, the Institute of Industrial Property ruled, but Gradiente has the option of suing for exclusive use of it since it registered the name first, according to the report. Apple, meanwhile, is still the only company that can legally sell software, clothing and publications with the iPhone trademark. So, there’s that.

The agency told the BBC that Apple is already planning to appeal. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the story.

The Brazilian company is said to be willing to make a deal with Apple. IGB Chairman Eugenio Emilio Staub told Bloomberg last week his company was “open to a dialogue for anything, anytime … We’re not radicals.”

This is perhaps a temporary setback for Apple, which has high hopes for the country as a market for iPhones and other products. Last year, CEO Tim Cook specifically mentioned Brazil as the most interesting emerging market — after China – for Apple.

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Astronomers have found evidence that suggests the youngest black hole in the Milky Way galaxy may reside in the remnants of a rare supernova.

The remnant, named W49B, is only around 1,000 years old and only 26,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers have called the object “rare” because of the way the supernova took place. Instead of explosively ejecting matter in all directions the way an supernova does, W49B is the result of a supernova that ejected material from a star’s poles at a higher speeds than other material, creating jets that shaped the remnant.

A paper on the phenomenon is to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“W49B is the first of its kind to be discovered in the galaxy,” said Laura Lopez, lead researcher on the study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “It appears its parent star ended its life in a way that most others don’t.”

The data used in the study was obtained using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. W49B now glows brightly with X-rays, and Chandra was able to determine the distribution of elements in the remnant. The researchers found an uneven distribution of iron, matching predictions for asymmetric supernovae.

Astronomers searched for X-ray or radio pulses from the remnant, which would provide evidence for a neutron star, but found none. This suggests that a new black hole could have been formed at the core of the supernova.

“It’s a bit circumstantial, but we have intriguing evidence the W49B supernova also created a black hole,” said Daniel Castro, co-author of the paper. “If that is the case, we have a rare opportunity to study a supernova responsible for creating a young black hole.”

(Image courtesy NASA/CXC/MIT/L.Lopez et al/Palomar/NSF/NRAO/VLA)

For marketers, there was much to like about the broadcast era. It was easy to pretend things were simple, even when they weren’t: general aggregate numbers and basic demographic data served were “close enough” for understanding audiences.

Now, though, media content is controlled as much by the audience as by traditional distributors. We find ourselves in the age of what my coauthors and I call spreadable media. Sharing articles, video, and other content is an everyday part of life for a significant portion of the population. “Close enough” really doesn’t work all that well anymore.

Still, corporate logics have tried to preserve the old models and to fit new phenomena into familiar management patterns. Here are three fundamental ways companies are trying to resist the nature of today’s media environment.

1. Transforming People into Data. As companies became their own online publishers, they used the logic of “stickiness” to maintain an impressions-based model for understanding audiences, defining success by visits, clicks, likes, time spent per page, and so on, and turning audiences into quantitative data that can be easily collected and compared.

Similarly, as companies monitor what people say outside corporate-owned platforms, they often convert conversation into stats. In Spreadable Media, we call this “hearing,” because it focuses primarily on recording what has been said. Companies have invested deeply in making sure they have collected most or all mentions of the company and that they have easy ways to convert that to “sentiment” and “share of voice.”

But most companies put little emphasis on “listening,” an active process focused on the context of what the audience is saying. As “Big Data” becomes the predominant buzzword across marketing disciplines, companies risk paying even less attention to deeply understanding the full context of the communities they are trying to reach.

2. Maintaining a Distance. How we talk about content makes it the active ingredient and audience members the passive carriers. “Going viral” insinuates some scientific phenomenon through which audiences have no choice but to spread certain content. “Meme” adopts the language of gene replication to describe how material spreads. It’s implied that you don’t need to “know” the audience members themselves but rather just track the resulting pandemic.

Some marketers do see audiences as socially connected networks rather than aggregate data but still have the impulse to find some other shortcut to actual, meaningful participation in those communities. One of the most popular concepts in marketing today is “the influencer,” a model which presumes that any community includes a few people who, if they get on board with an idea, will bring everyone else along for the ride. Once again, the company doesn’t have to actually participate in relationships with most of their audience — just the shepherds who everyone else follows mindlessly.

3. Making Them Come to You. A core myth has traditionally governed marketing: that the industry is solely focused on the art of persuasion, on trying to align audiences with whatever the corporation wants them to do. Marketers still see their calling much the same as they did in the broadcast era: to pump out one-way messages and get audiences to buy whatever the company is selling (figuratively and literally).

The era of spreadability provides a transformational opportunity: for marketing and communications to act as the listening ear of the company, and to help better align the company to address the wants and needs of its various constituencies. Often, the information, service and expertise companies provide customers are as important as products and services themselves. Marketing and communications will best serve an organization when they put their primary emphasis on serving its audiences.

AMC announced this week that it will be streaming the midseason premiere of The Walking Dead online for free until March 10. Today, the network also announced that the episode is now available for a limited time (presumably the same period of time) on the AMC Mobile app for Android, iPhone, iPad and Kindle Fire.

The app also provides behind-the-scenes video content, and previews.

The episode has received mixed reviews from fans of the show, but it also set a series record for viewers when it premiered on Sunday.

Here are a couple of behind-the-scenes videos AMC has posted to accompany the episode. They’ve also posted a preview for the upcoming episode.

AMC will be showing episodes of The Walking Dead from seasons 1 and 2 in black and white regularly on Thursdays, beginning on February 14th.

More The Walking Dead fun here.

You’ve probably seen the news. With over the top (OTT) voice and SMS, telecom is not just for dial tone providers anymore.

OTT refers to services being carried “over the top” of another carrier’s network through the use of APIs, SDKs and other online tools. The openness and availability of the internet and its increasing bandwidth for fixed and mobile users have made OTT possible, creating new, disruptive markets where application developers can compete.

But how can you bring new two-way communications capabilities that integrate into the nation’s public switched telephone network (PSTN) into your application? Bandwidth, the wholesale telecom company that thinks like a software developer and powers leading OTT providers, has prepared a new ebook to help you get started.

Download this ebook to learn:

Examples of OTT services currently available
The regulatory landscape
What to look for in an OTT voice and SMS provider

The Surface Pro is selling out pretty much everywhere. Consumers hoping to grab Microsoft’s latest tablet/laptop hybrids have been met with disappointment after stores across the nation sold out almost immediately. Now Microsoft is working to get more stock into stores by the end of the week, but you still might not get one.

In a quick post from the Surface team last night, the group acknowledged that “some retail and online locations have been low or out of stick of Surface Pro.” Here’s what the company will be doing to ensure stock will be back in stores by the end of the week:

In the U.S., we are shipping additional units of the 64GB SKU to Best Buy, Staples and Microsoft Store now. We are shipping 128GB SKU later this week to retailers, with some units available by the end of the week. Our priority (and that of our retail partners) is to fulfill orders from customers who made a reservation first. Canada is following a similar timeline but may take an extra few days to start arriving.

As you can see, those who had reservations will be taken care of first. That means the stragglers may have to wait more than a week to get their hands on the Surface Pro.

The team concludes that they’re “working as quickly as [they] can to get Surface Pro to market.” If you find that stores are still out of stock, they ask that you just wait a few days for more to show up.

[via Kotaku]

For the Super Bowl, Volkswagen chose to run a fairly innocuous ad that for some reason generated a bunch of controversy. It featured a while guy from Minnesota going around his office speaking in a Jamaican accent, who eventually gets his coworkers to “get happy” by speaking in the same fashion – all because they enjoyed a wonderful ride in a new Volkswagen Beetle.

That ad, though controversial (still, why?), wasn’t as great as VW Super Bowl offerings of the past. Then again, VW has quite the pedigree. They’re responsible for one of the most-beloved Super Bowl ads of all time – the one featuring that cute kid in the Darth Vader mask.

Here’s a new ad for the Beetle, and it’s awesome. I mean, it has the Trololo song playing in the background. Check it out:

Daniel Radcliffe has made great efforts in recent years to move away from his “Harry Potter” persona, taking a highly talked-about role in the stage production of “Eqqus” in 2007–in which he appeared nude–and a controversial role in the upcoming Allen Ginsberg flick “Kill Your Darlings”, in which he’ll participate in a gay love scene.

Radcliffe spoke recently about the film and about all the talk the movie is generating, saying he doesn’t see anything “shocking” about the scene.

”It’s interesting that it’s deemed shocking,” Radcliffe said. “For me, there’s something very strange about that because we see straight sex scenes all the time. We’ve seen gay sex scenes before. I don’t know why a gay sex scene should be any more shocking than a straight sex scene. Or both of them are equally un-shocking.”

In the new issue of Out Magazine, Radcliffe addresses the scene again and says it wasn’t that hard to get into the mindset of a gay man for the role.

“You never see a gay actor getting asked what it’s like to play straight — to my knowledge, at least, there is no difference in how heterosexual and homosexual people fall in love,” he said.

On playing controversial Beat poet Ginsberg, Radcliffe acknowledges that it might be odd for some viewers, whether because they’re fans of the “Harry Potter” series or of Ginsberg’s. But, he says, that’s what makes it exciting.

“I can see why people are skeptical about me playing Allen Ginsberg. I don’t look like him, and I’m English and middle-class and not from New Jersey. But that’s what I think is so exciting about it, because people have no idea.”

Image: Out Magazine

Last week, Google unveiled “Enhanced Campaigns” sending ripples of both worry and elation throughout the marketing world. Google describes it as an evolution of AdWords, but critics are worried about the control they’re forced to give up, among other things.

Google said on Wednesday that it will begin supporting enhanced campaigns in DoubleClick Search in the coming weeks “to help marketers run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels.”

As noted, not everyone is a critic of Google’s move toward enhanced campaigns. We spoke with Larry Kim, founder and CTO of Wordstream, whcih was one of three companies outside of Google that worked with the company on the project in the months leading up to its launch.

“Enhanced Campaigns represent the biggest single change to the basic structure of AdWords campaigns in the past 10 years,” he told us. “The new campaign structure will greatly simplify targeting and bidding for different devices and locations. It’s a win-win for both Google and advertisers.”

You can read more about Enhanced Campaigns here.