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Americans and people all over the world have been moved by the images of courageous Syrians standing up to a brutal regime, even as they suffer the consequences of the violence waged against them by the Assad government. Right now, humanitarian conditions in Syria are deteriorating in the face of a massive, man-made humanitarian emergency. People have been forced from their homes; schools, clinics and bakeries continue to be targeted; and food prices are on the rise as winter takes hold.

The numbers are staggering. According to the United Nations, an estimated 2.5 million people are displaced inside of Syria, and over 678,000 people have fled to neighboring countries. Their stories touch us all, and the American people will continue to stand with them. That is why President Obama announced today that he has approved a new round of humanitarian assistance, an additional $155 million to provide for the urgent and pressing needs of civilians in Syria and refugees forced to flee the violence of the Assad regime. This brings America’s contribution to date to $365 million, making the United States the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people. 

Read the President's message in Arabic (pdf). You can also watch the video with Arabic subtitles.

Our assistance is being delivered all across Syria and is providing food, clean water, medicines and medical treatment for hundreds of thousands of people. It will expand the delivery of vaccines for children and clothing and winter supplies for millions of people facing both the regime’s brutality and the hardships of winter. It will supply flour to bakeries in Aleppo to provide daily bread, and allow families to feed their children; it will finance field hospitals to care for those who are wounded; and it will provide care and services for the growing number of victims of sexual violence. Our assistance also supports a growing number of refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. 

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According to Microsoft, the company has officially sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses. The number accounts for upgrades, individual purchase and the bulk purchases made by OEMs. It seems many of the latter licenses haven’t been put in use yet as Windows 8 has yet to hit a growth explosion.

Net Applications recently updated its desktop OS market share numbers for December 2012, and Windows 8 is still having a rough time of it. At the end of December, Windows 8 only made up 1.72 percent of the entire desktop OS market. That’s only a .63 percent jump from November’s numbers. We can give Windows 8 some slack because it’s still relatively new, but it’s still looking a little sluggish.

As for Windows in general, Windows 7 is obviously still on top after it finally dethroned Windows XP in September of last year. Since then, you can see that Windows 7 has been growing at almost the exact same rate at which Windows XP is declining. That means Windows XP users are upgrading to Windows 7 instead of 8. Not exactly the best news for Microsoft, but it shows that people may finally be wising up to the security risks the outdated Windows XP poses. It could also just mean that PC gamers are finally starting to realize that they need Windows 7 if they want to take advantage of DirectX 11.

Just like with mobile browsers, Apple still rules the mobile OS scene. iOS has a majority of the market with 60.13 percent. Android is lagging far behind with only 24.6 percent. Samsung may finally be beating Apple in handset sales, but the numbers also account for tablets. Apple’s iPad is unmatched in sales so it makes sense for iOS to have such a large presence here.

Of particular interest, however, is the growth of Windows Phone. Microsoft launched Windows Phone 8 in November with the hopes of finally becoming a major player in the smartphone market. Did it work? Not really, but it was enough to finally push Windows Phone over 1 percent.

It will be interesting to see how Windows 8 and Windows Phone both grow in the coming year. Microsoft has bet a lot on these two products, but it doesn’t look like either is gaining much traction as of yet. There’s talk of a “relaunch” for Windows 8 happening in February that would help Microsoft refocus its efforts on getting the OS into the hand of more consumers. If successful, we could see a marked jump in market share in February’s numbers.

Across cultures, dining together is a common part of the process of reaching negotiated agreements. In Russia and Japan, important business dealings are conducted almost exclusively while dining and drinking and in the U.S., many negotiations begin with “Let’s do lunch.” But are business deals actually improved when people discuss important matters over a meal?

To explore this question, I conducted two experiments. The first compared negotiations that took place over a meal in restaurants to negotiations in conference rooms, without any food to eat. In the second, negotiations were conducted with or without a meal in a business conference room. In the experiments, 132 MBA students negotiated a complex joint venture agreement between two companies. In the simulation, a provisional deal is in place, but a variety of terms must still be considered and agreed upon to maximize profits for their companies. The negotiators must determine how to handle each term of the deal. As is typical in many negotiations, in order to maximize their profits, the negotiators must share information and work together with the other side to learn where the most value can be created.

The greatest possible profits were created by the parties who were able to discern the other side’s preferences and then work collectively to discover the profit maximizing outcomes for the joint venture, rather than merely considering their own company’s profits. In the simulation, this can only be accomplished when the negotiators make trade-offs and then compensate each other from the net gains to the joint venture. The maximum value that can be created jointly for both companies is $75 million. Deals can be struck at lower combined values, down to as low as $38 million. To explore how eating together affected negotiation outcomes, I considered the total value created by both companies.

The students who ate together while negotiating — either at a restaurant or over food brought into a business conference room — created significantly increased profits compared to those who negotiated without dining. (Individuals who negotiated in restaurants created 11% greater profits and those who negotiated over food in a conference room created 12% greater profits.) This suggests that eating while deciding important matters offers profitable, measurable benefits through mutually productive discussions.

I designed a third experiment to test if it was in fact the act of eating together and not merely sharing a separate task that led to the better negotiated outcomes. I had 45 MBA students negotiate the same simulation, but instead of negotiating while eating, half of the groups negotiated while completing a jigsaw puzzle that had nothing to do with the negotiation. In this experiment, I found that the negotiators who shared a common task did not create better negotiation outcomes than those who only negotiated the deal.

I expected that both sharing a meal and collaborating on an activity would increase trust between the participants — and perhaps that the cultural history attached to eating together would increase trust more than sharing other activities — but when I surveyed participants in both studies, the trust levels they reported did not increase.

Why else might eating together improve the outcome of negotiations? There may be biological factors at work. When the negotiators in my first two studies ate, they immediately increased their glucose levels. Research has shown that the consumption of glucose enhances complex brain activities, bolstering self-control and regulating prejudice and aggressive behaviors. Other research
has shown that unconscious mimicking behaviors of others leads to increased pro-social behaviors; when individuals eat together they enact the same movements. This unconscious mimicking of each other may induce positive feelings towards both the other party and the matter under discussion.

In future experiments, I will continue to explore the reasons why eating while deciding important matters increases the productivity of discussions. In the meantime, you would be wise to suggest “doing lunch” whenever you meet to negotiate.

As technological innovation changes the way we work, skill sets and career paths follow suit. For many of us, a job for life is no longer an option, and the disruption of entire industries is making us multidisciplinarians by necessity.

In the media and content industries, where disruption is threatening artist incomes, many have responded by attempting to diversify their revenue streams. Essentially, they are building a brand around themselves rather than relying on a single competency.

Services like Bandcamp and Kindle Direct Publishing are helping to enable this process by reducing the barriers to distribution, allowing artists and authors to harness the relationship they have with their fans.

It’s a model spreading to other industries. TeacherPayTeachers is a platform for educators to sell lesson plans to one another directly, and here too building a personal brand is important (the first teacher to pass $1 million in sales amassed 17,000 followers).

We’re also branding our professional selves by accident. As the boundary between work and personal life continues to blur, social networking accounts are increasingly becoming expressions of our interests and opinions. In response, services like Trustcloud and Klout are trying to add transparency and legitimacy to our online presence.

Ultimately, with the employer-employee relationship becoming more flexible and our online presence becoming more fully formed, 2013 is the time to start managing our personal brands a little more proactively.

You can download a free copy of GfK’s Tech Trends 2013 here.

If 64GB isn’t enough storage space for you to deal with on your iPad, Apple’s got another option for you. Starting next Tuesday, Apple will begin selling a 128GB iPad, the company announced Tuesday. It will come in black or white and will be available with Wi-Fi only for $799 or Wi-Fi + Cellular for $929.

It’s unusual to move from an Apple rumor to actual product in the course of just a few days, but that’s what happened this week. In a press release, Apple framed the move to release its biggest-ever capacity mobile device as a way to help professionals in a variety of industries replace their traditional computers with the iPad; it mentioned the need for designers, the recording industry and professional athletes to use software on their iPads that requires a lot of storage space.

“With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs,” said Philip Schiller, Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing, in a statement. “With twice the storage capacity and an unparalleled selection of over 300,000 native iPad apps, enterprises, educators and artists have even more reasons to use iPad for all their business and personal needs.”

The best-known site for online restaurant reservations will acquire one of the original food photo mobile apps, Foodspotting, both companies announced Tuesday morning. OpenTable will get the three-year-old San Francisco-based company for $10 million in cash.

“We’re so happy to have found a home for Foodspotting where our community can continue to thrive while our entire team continues to focus on creating great dining experiences,” Alexa Andrzejewski, co-founder and CEO of Foodspotting, said in a statement. “While working with OpenTable as partners we realized we could create more intelligent, seamless and beautiful experiences if we had the opportunity to integrate our products more deeply.  We look forward to contributing our mobile, social and design expertise in ways that will delight both diners and restaurants.”

Andrezejewski will join OpenTable as a lead user interface designer. Foodspotting, currently available for iOS, Android and Blackberry users, will remain a standalone product.

In his own statement, OpenTable CEO Matt Roberts said he looked forward to using Foodspotting to add ”more visually compelling content to help people decide where to dine and discover dishes they’ll love.”

OpenTable and Foodspotting first worked together starting in May 2012, when Foodspotting added the ability to book restaurant reservations through OpenTable from within the Foodspotting app. In recent months, Foodspotting appeared to lose its original buzz, as dozens of food-related apps and mobile photo networks like Instagram became the go-to app for snapping and sharing pictures of food. OpenTable appears a good fit for Foodspotting’s original mission, however: to find the best dishes in a given city.

In joining OpenTable, Foodspotting brings 10 employees and 3 million dishes spotted since the app first went live in 2010.

The House Of Tuerck, the place where professional drifter, stunt guy and all around hoonigan Ryan Tuerck lives. Nestled in the New Hampshire hillside, Tuerck has managed to build his own little slice of drift car heaven complete with explosions, ramps and of course, a bulldozer. Check it out after the jump.

Source: Youtube.com

Right after Kim Dotcom launched Mega on January 19 I succumbed to temptation and registered for a new account. My initial foray was, however, short lived as no confirmation email arrived in my Outlook.com inbox. Clearly, Microsoft’s service and Mega did not play well together.

Dotcom shed some light on the matter when he posted the following on Twitter: “Don’t use Hotmail to register on Mega. They have mysteriously black holed emails from our domain. Gmail works fine”, He shortly followed this up with: “We are working on the ‘confirmation email’ issue. Some mail services react allergic to an unknown domain sending millions of confirmations”. Intrigued by the issue I asked Microsoft for a statement concerning the confirmation email issue with Outlook.com accounts.

A spokesperson for the software giant acknowledged the issue and confirmed that it has since been fixed, stating the following for BetaNews:

As you may have seen, Kim Dotcom has updated his Twitter followers, explaining that Mega is working on the “email confirmation” issue that has impacted some email providers. To-date, the existing issue that we became aware of has been resolved per Mega’s request.

Today I verified Microsoft’s response and, indeed, a Mega confirmation email finally made its way into my Outlook.com inbox after registering. But there’s still an issue and this time, as per Dotcom’s second tweet, it lies at Mega’s end. Although the newly created account is confirmed, the cloud service says that the email address and/or password is incorrect, after displaying a vague “something went wrong” message.

NetCitadel, a company based in Mountain View, Calif., emerges today from stealth mode with a network-security virtual appliance that intends to simplify the security complexities of cloud computing.

NetCitadel Co-Founder and Chief Engineer Vadim Kurland’s experience on Google’s network-operations team inspired the new product, said Mike Horn, NetCitadel’s CEO and another co-founder. As is the case with other companies operating large data centers, Google’s cloud infrastructure was often in flux. “They’re really these dynamic environments that are changing frequently,” Horn said. As Kurland developed network security to fit the Google infrastructure, he figured other companies faced similar challenges and might want external providers to take care of that responsibility, Horn said.

The process of rolling out a security update over a security network is tedious. For example, a system administrator must find out about a firewall change request, such as adding another server. Then he or she needs to figure out the impact of the change, update the firewall or firewalls, deploy the change and make sure everything was done correctly.

Enter NetCitadel’s Security Orchestration Platform, a virtual appliance that automates that process, Horn said. As a result, network-security staff can focus on more critical matters than manual, time-consuming policy changes. Besides firewalls, the Security Orchestration Platform can also manage a network’s routers and switches.

Comparable offerings from Cisco and Juniper Networks support only cloud instances but not virtualization, or vice-versa, and they don’t accommodate network-security devices from other suppliers, Horn said.

NetCitadel was formed in 2010 and raised capital from venture-capital company NEA in 2011 – Horn wouldn’t say how much. It has since taken on 25 employees. Current customers include financial-services institutions, retailers and a university, Horn said. An annual subscription costs $25,000 or more per year.

The story of how technological progress is affecting employment — whether, in other words, the robots are eating our jobs — is clearly an important one. But who’s telling it correctly? I believe that technological unemployment (and underemployment) is a real and growing phenomenon.

But since Erik Brynjolfsson and I appeared on 60 Minutes in January for “March of the Machines,” a story that examined the labor force implications of advanced digital technologies like robots and other forms of automation, we’ve been accused of being unclear on the concept.

For example, the Association for Advancing Automation said in response that we “are missing the bigger picture” by not recognizing that American companies are “successfully implement[ing] automation technologies instead of going out of business or sending manufacturing overseas.” They add: “American manufacturing’s embrace of robotics will ensure a new manufacturing renaissance in this country.”

If the A3, or anyone else, thinks that lots more manufacturing jobs will accompany this renaissance, they’re just dead wrong. The facts are too clear, and they all point in the other direction. For example:

• Manufacturing employment has been on a steady downward trend in the U.S. since 1980 (it increased some after the end of the Great Recession, but this boost appears to be leveling out).
• Manufacturing jobs have also been trending downward in Japan and Germany since at least 1990 and, as I wrote earlier, in China since 1996.
• Manufacturing employment decline is a global phenomenon. As a Bloomberg story summarized: “Some 22 million manufacturing jobs were lost globally between 1995 and 2002 as industrial output soared 30 percent. … It seems that devilish productivity is wreaking havoc with jobs both at home and abroad.”

Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, is another of our detractors. He takes the argument up a level across industries. Even if total manufacturing employment goes down because of automation, he writes, other industries will pick up the slack by employing more people. This is because:

“…most of the savings [from automation] would flow back to consumers in the form of lower prices. Consumers would then use the savings to buy things (e.g., go out to dinner, buy books, go on travel). This economic activity stimulates demand that other companies (e.g., restaurants, book stores, and hotels) respond to by hiring more workers.”

Fair enough, but what if those other companies are also automating? One of the most striking phenomena of recent years is the encroachment of automation into tasks, skills and abilities that used to belong to people alone. As we document in Race Against the Machine, this includes driving cars, responding accurately to natural language questions, understanding and producing human speech, writing prose, reviewing documents and many others. Some combination of these will be valuable in every industry.

Previous waves of automation, like the mechanization of agriculture and the advent of electric power to factories, have not resulted in large-scale unemployment or impoverishment of the average worker. But the historical pattern isn’t giving me a lot of comfort these days, simply because we’ve never before seen automation encroach so broadly and deeply, while also improving so quickly at the same time.

I don’t know what all the consequences of the current wave of digital automation will be — no one does. But I’m not blithe about its consequences for the labor force, because that would be ignoring the data and missing the big picture.

If I’m being totally honest, I’d tell you I don’t like video. Sure, I’ll settle in to watch a movie at the theater, but when it comes to short clips posted on the web? I’ll pass. I’d much prefer to scan text than watch a video, and unless your clip is a few seconds long, I’m not going to wait for it to buffer. Got a transcript? Please post.

I probably have less tolerance for video than most people, but in looking through the number of social video products in just my first six months at GigaOM and watching companies struggle for traction, I was convinced video still has hurdles to overcome before it becomes a successful social product on mobile. Which is why Vine, Twitter’s new video-sharing service that debuted last week, has me somewhat intrigued. It’s not clear that Vine is the answer to the social video problem, but it does appear that the service has solved a number of obstacles inherent to video that have traditionally kept it from mainstream success. And despite myself, I had fun putting together my first Vine.

The benchmark for that success, of course, is Instagram. The company that became the poster child for social photo-sharing proved there’s money to be made in translating a new medium to the masses on mobile; at least for the entrepreneurs. Instagram’s success hinged on simple editing that made your photos look beautiful, a fast and reliable product experience, and a strong sense of user community. But when Om asked Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom last November at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference whether Instagram would ever tackle video, Systrom outlined his reservations about the medium:

“No one wants to sit outside at a ballpark waiting for a video to load while there are 100,000 people around you wandering and you’re trying to get network signal. It’s hard enough for us to push an image down to you, I can only imagine a moving image,” he said. “[Videos] are just innately harder to produce and consume.  In order to consume a video you don’t swing past it and then you’re done. You actually have to sit and engage with it and watch it the full length — I think that’s one of the harder parts of consuming. And producing, you’re sitting there trying to frame the shot and you’re trying to get the interesting part of the video in it, but it turns out that no one wants to sit there editing a video for four minutes on their small little device. So I think what we have to do is figure out the balance of production and consumption that makes it really interesting and fast to do.”

The genius with Vine is that you can upload only six seconds of footage. Six seconds is nothing — more like an animated GIF. And Vine’s editing process is stupidly simple. Our data networks might not be much faster than they were in November when Systrom expressed doubts, but uploading or downloading six seconds of video is going to be much easier than uploading or downloading a three minute video to YouTube. And the editing process is about as simple and intuitive as you could imagine — hold your finger down to capture video, lift it up to pause recording, and keep pausing and lifting until you hit six seconds of footage. Upload, share, and you’re done. I completely understood how it worked on my first try.

People are fascinated by Vine right now, as evidenced by VinePeek, the site that loops Vine videos as they’re uploaded. It’s mesmerizing in the way Chatroulette was — it gives you a peek into other people’s lives. The concern for Twitter is that Vine will go the way of Chatroulette, and people will quickly lose interest amid a sea of naked men. Some users already have their doubts – the footage is mundane, it’s completely new territory for Twitter to take on, and naked pics are already cropping up and causing issues.

But frankly, acquiring the three-man Vine team for a non-disclosed amount seems like a relatively small investment on Twitter’s part. Because there’s potential for a huge payoff for the company that finally gets social video right.

Another day, another Galaxy smartphone. On Tuesday, Samsung unveiled a new handset as part of the company’s ever expanding Galaxy lineup, this one dubbed the Galaxy Express.

The new device slots in-between the Galaxy S III Mini and the Galaxy S III, with similar design characteristics including the traditional rounded corners. Samsung could have named the new device the Galaxy S III Average, as the handset features a 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display with a resolution of 800 by 480 and a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, both of which are in-between the specs of the two S-branded smartphones.

The Galaxy Express also sports 1GB of RAM and a decently-sized 2,000mAh battery. The device comes with 8GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot that can house up to 32GB of extra storage. On the back there is a 5MP camera with LED flash, while a 1.3MP shooter takes care of the business up front.

One of the highlights of the Galaxy Express is 4G LTE cellular connectivity, although judging by past models there’s a very good chance that an HSPA+ variant will also be available so as to reach more markets worldwide.

Other specs include: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n; Wi-Fi Direct; MHL, NFC (Near Field Communication); USB 2.0; Bluetooth 4.0; GPS with Glonass support. The usual array of sensors, such as light and proximity ones; accelerometer; digital compass and gyro are also onboard.

The Galaxy Express comes in at 132.2 x 69.1 x 9.3 mm and 139.1 grams. It’s basically shorter, narrower and thicker than the Galaxy S III and longer, wider and thinner when compared to the Galaxy S III Mini. Only the weight is heavier than for the other two.

Samsung did not provide any details regarding the availability and pricing of the new smartphone.

It really comes as no surprise that the newest announced member of the Galaxy lineup ships with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and Touch Wiz on top. Samsung also throws in some branded apps including ChatOn, AllShare Play, and S Beam.

Shutting down your PC is often simple and straightforward. You finish what you’re doing, save your work, close any applications and hit the shutdown button: done.

Sometimes, though, life is more complicated. Maybe you want to leave your PC running and have it automatically close at a particular time, say; when a program has finished running, or on some similar event. And that can be more difficult to organize — unless you get a little help from Shutter.

This compact tool comes in a tiny 430KB download, and there’s no installation required, no adware or any other concerns: just unzip it and you’re ready to go.

And, while there’s no local help, the straightforward interface means you’re unlikely to have any major questions about its core functionality. Take the default “Countdown” event, for instance: all you have to do is set a timer to 5 minutes, 1 hour or whatever, choose the action you’d like performed at the end of that time (Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, Logoff and so on), and click Start. Shutter will begin the countdown and carry out your chosen action after the defined time.

Countdowns are just the start, though. You can also tell Shutter to activate at a specific time; if your CPU usage drops below a certain level; if your battery is low; when a user is inactive; when a window closes, or a process stops; when a ping is no longer returned, when a file exceeds a given size, and more.

Despite its name, Shutter isn’t just about shutting down. You can alternatively have the program sleep or hibernate your system, turn off your monitor, mute or unmute the master volume, play an alarm, and more.

And the Options dialog reveals even more power. You can have the program run specific programs when the defined event occurs, for instance, play a sound, or close named windows. There are lots of ways to fine tune things, including the ability to restart an event when it’s been triggered. You even get a web interface to control the program remotely.

Yet all of this comes in a tiny program, requiring less than 1MB hard drive space and 3MB RAM, which is entirely free for personal use.

If we go looking for problems, then the fact that there have been no updates since 2010 might be a minor issue. There’s also no local documentation, and the online help isn’t particularly good (although you won’t need it very often).

For the most part, though, Shutter is a very capable shutdown tool with a great deal of features and options, and it’s well worth a closer look.

Dr. Nic Williams, a “developer’s developer” who was also VP of engineering at Engine Yard, is on to new things and a new Platform as a Service. He’s founded Stark & Wayne, a consultancy that will focus on helping companies deploy the Cloud Foundry PaaS that VMware spun off to the Pivotal Initiative.

Williams appears tightly aligned with Cloud Foundry —  one of two customers mentioned on his web page is the Pivotal Initiative and he is working out of the Pivotal Labs office in San Francisco. Pivotal Labs, now part of EMC, is contributing technology to the Pivotal Initiative. Confused? Sorry.

Stark & Wayne is thus far a one-man show. According to  Williams blog post, the company name comes from “the two most famous fictional tool creators – Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne. Every developer can be a super hero. You just need the right tools. Batmobile optional.”

The goal of the startup is to help companies adopt PaaSes. And that’s important — many developers within companies love the freedom and flexibility of building and deploying their applications on a third party pay-as-you-go platform but often their corporate IT overlords are not so enamored of the model. That’s because sticky questions arise if, for example, your PaaS of choice goes away. 

Per Williams’ blog post announcing his move:

“If you’ve used Heroku for your pet projects, then we want to bring you Cloud Foundry for your work projects. We also want to work with you on your projects. If your workplace cares about continuously improving development and operations, then you qualify.”

VMware pushed Cloud Foundry as an open-source foundation for other PaaSes  like AppFog, Uhuru, Stackato, and others. Presumably the Pivotal Initiative will continue down that path although it’s not saying.  Salesforce.com’s Heroku is another market leader. It is unclear how much traction Engine Yard has relatively speaking although Oracle bought a stake in it in November.

Secretive startup DataGravity wants to give customers an easy all-in-one way to wring value from their data and has $30 million in fresh cash to make that happen. Andreessen Horowitz led a new Series B round with contributions from Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. The latter two ponied up $12 million last April to back the startup founded by EqualLogic veterans Paula Long and John Joseph.

The new money will fund sales and marketing activities for the product that has not yet reached beta. The Nashua, N.H. company now has 30 employees and will probably hit 45 to 50 within the year as it biulds out those go-to-market activities, Long said in an interview.

Goal: make info analytics easier for the masses

Long is coy about product details — it took quite a bit to get her to say they’re working on an appliance — but DataGravity is ripping a page out of EqualLogic’s playbook. Take a tech area that is now way too hard and too expensive for many smaller businesses to use productively and then make it easier for them to buy and deploy an all-in-one solution. The idea is that solution — whether it’s an EqualLogic SAN or a DataGravity information appliance, meets the needs of 80 percent of the market.

Putting a data scientist into every array

“The idea at EqualLogic was that storage was really complicated and you needed expensive storage admins who understood foreign protocols. We wanted to make it simple enough that an IT admin with broad knowledge could do storage. Now it’s really expensive to do data intelligence without a putting a staff together including data scientists and four or five products,” Long said.”In EqualLogic we put an A+ storage admin into every array, now we want to put an A+ data scientist into every array.”

Indeed, most companies doing advanced data analysis need the database, an ETL tool, analytics software and some sort of data visualization tool set, not to mention very pricey data scientists.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Levine is sold. “DataGravity is all about going from dumb storage to intelligent storage. Now storage is just blocks and files with no contextual meaning until an app or a database does something with that dumb data. These guys are moving into the world of intelligent storage,” he said in an interview.

As part of this funding Levine will join General Catalysts’ David Orfao and Charles River’s Bruce Sachs on the DataGravity board.

The strategy certainly worked for EqualLogic, which was founded in 2001 and sold to Dell  six years later for $1.4 billion in cash. Now we’ll see if Long and Joseph can replicate that success.

Red seems to be the in color for mobile devices at the moment. First Verizon gave the world a red edition of Nokia’s mid-range Lumia 822 smartphone, and now Samsung has introduced a Garnet Red version of its popular Galaxy Tab 2 slate. This isn’t the first Samsung device to come in the bloody hue — AT&T offered a Garnet Red edition of the Galaxy S III last summer.

Currently only available for the US market, the striking tablet comes with a matching case and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean onboard, in place of Ice Cream Sandwich. All the other specs remain the same, such as the 7 inch 1024 by 600 screen, 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, and 8GB of internal storage.

“This new eye-catching version of the Galaxy Tab 2 offers endless entertainment in the palm of your hand, while the stylish Garnet Red look will set you apart from the crowd,” Samsung senior vice president Michael Abary said. “The Garnet Red version of the Galaxy S III has been incredibly well-received, so we are happy to make the same brilliant color available for our Galaxy Tab 2 as well”.

The tablet is available from the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Office Depot, Fry’s Electronics and Toys R Us, and priced at around $220. If you like the look of it, you’ll want to act quickly as the Garnet Red edition will only be available for a short time.

Social networks are great, in theory. But then you run into problems with other users, advertising, spam, unexpected and unnecessary interface redesigns, security issues, privacy problems and the list goes on.

If you’re in the mood to try something different, then, you might be interested in RetroShare. It’s a cross-platform, open source tool which provides a rich set of features — instant messaging, voice chat, forums, channels, file sharing and more — but in a peer-to-peer form, so you only get to connect to people that you’ve specifically invited.

Unsurprisingly, getting this all set up requires a little work. RetroShare encrypts you connections with GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), for instance, so you’ll need to generate a key to establish your identity, then exchange keys with friends when authenticating your connection. This isn’t difficult (creating a key is just a matter of filling in a form, and you only need to exchange keys once), but it’s undeniably more complicated than signing up with Facebook.

And there may be issues in connecting from behind a firewall, too, although it all depends on your setup: if UPnP is working then all should be well, if not then there may be some further configuration necessary (the official documentation explains more).

Once everything is working, though, browsing the RetroShare toolbar will quickly reveal a very rich set of features. You get file sharing, for instance. Instant messaging. Chat rooms. An email-type system, forums, channels and more.

We’re not just talking some pre-built configuration, either. You can add as many forums as you or your friends would like to use, for instance. Each of them get your choice of custom name and description. Messages within them can be authenticated, or anonymous (so a network of work colleagues could allow anonymous messaging to encourage users to speak openly, for example). And if you’ve a lot of forums then you can even subscribe to your favorites, say, making it easier to find new messages to you at some later date.

The core file sharing mechanisms are just as versatile. You can attach files to individual messages, for instance, or share entire folders and allow others to browse them. A detailed Transfers window keeps you up-to-date with your own downloads and there are plenty of useful configuration options (you can set a maximum number of simultaneous transfers to avoid sapping your bandwidth, for example).

And of course all this is decentralized, peer-to-peer, so there’s no central server, no-one else monitoring things: it’s just you and the people you’ve invited.

RetroShare won’t be for everyone, then. And if you really just want a simple way to display last night’s photos to as many people as possible then maybe Facebook really is the best solution, after all.

But, if you’d like something more private, more secure, an environment which is just for you and those you invite, then the program could be the ideal choice. Just keep in mind that there will be quite an initial learning curve as you figure out how everything works.

Photo Credit: Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock

Budapest developer FinalWire Ltd has released AIDA64 Extreme Edition 2.80.2300 and AIDA64 Business Edition 2.80.2300, new versions of its streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking tools. The Extreme Edition is aimed at home users, while the Business Edition is designed to work with small and medium scale enterprises.

Version 2.80 is a relatively minor upgrade, refreshing and improving the benchmarking and diagnostic tool’s support for newer technologies, including the Intel Atom Z2760 and OCZ Vector SSD.

FinalWire is keen to promote the fact that AIDA 2.80 now boasts optimized benchmarks for Intel’s low-powered Atom 2760 (“Cloverview”) processor. It also adds preliminary support for AMD’s upcoming “Richland” APU and Intel’s next-generation Atom processor, codenamed “Valleyview”, which Intel promises will double the performance on its low-powered chip range when it debuts towards the end of the year.

In addition to extending support, AIDA 2.80 also improves its support of Intel’s “Haswell” range of APUs and its “Lynx Point” PCH. There’s also support for APP SDK 2.8, OpenCL 1.2 Update, OpenGL ES 3.0 and Simple Firmware Interfaces.

SSD controller support has also been extended to include the OCZ Vector and Indilinx Barefoot 3 SSD ranges. Version 2.80 also adds details for a selection of newer GPUs, including the AMD Radeon HD 7470 and 7870 “Tahiti LE”, and nVIDIA’s GeForce GT 635M and GTX 680MX.

Since AIDA 2.0 was released, the tool has added support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 RTM editions, integrated enhanced UPS support, plus added support for numerous other chipsets, processors, SSD drives and motherboards, along with updated standards such as ACPI 5.0 and CUDA 5.0.

Free function-limited trials of both AIDA64 Extreme Edition 2.80.2300 and AIDA64 Business Edition 2.80.2300 are available to download for PCs running Windows 95 or later. Hardware system requirements are minimal, and the full versions can be purchased with prices starting at $39.95 (Extreme Edition) and $79.95 (Business Edition).

Plenty of new apps promise to put a personal trainer in your pocket, but GAIN Fitness doesn’t just want to offer quality workouts, it plans to provide a whole marketplace of them.

With its new strategy, GAIN won’t focus on promoting its own line of exercise apps but will partner with other fitness experts, training centers and franchises to provide the underlying technology for their content.  For example, it’s created a basketball app with the Peak Performance Project in Santa Barbara, Calif. and a weight-training app with DF Keifer, a nutrition and training expert. Soon, the workouts won’t just be available as in-app purchases, but as stand-alone apps in Apple’s app store.

Since launching in 2011, the company said it’s logged about two million users (on the Web and iOS) and about 600,000 downloads.  From within its iPhone app, yogis, weight-lifters and other exercise enthusiasts have been able to buy (for $1 to $7) workouts that include audio coaching from trainers, animated illustrations and video, personalization options and progress tracking.

But after two years of offering its workouts under one umbrella, founder and CEO Nick Gammell said GAIN Fitness plans to take a platform approach.

“Fitness is an industry of niches,” said Gammell, who formerly worked at Google. And while GAIN’s initial course was to aggregate the different markets, “in the past year, we’ve focused on creating a tech platform and features that can be useful across different types of fitness instruction,” Gammell continued.

In addition to launching the new marketplace on its website, Gammell also said the company had raised $550,000 on top of the $650,000 round it had previously announced, bringing its total amount raised to $1.2 million. Funders include InterWest Partners, former Square COO Keith Rabois and Practice Fusion co-founder Matthew Douglass.

GAIN’s pitch to potential partners is that with its technology, it can provide a higher quality app in less time and with more exposure. Each deal is different, Gammell said, but they all include a revenue share and co-marketing.  So far, it’s attracted five partners but it plans to release a new app every month going forward.  And its pricing strategy could entice partners reluctant to cheapen their products in an App marketplace that favors apps in the $1 to $2 range.

Instead of charging users a subscription fee or a higher flat fee, GAIN lets people pick and choose the kinds of exercises they want, a la carte. For example, aspiring yogis can pay $6.99 for a basic yoga class and then purchase additional $3.99 “packs” on balance, strength or focus areas.  Strength trainers can purchase packs that target their glutes or abs, or push them to a higher level.

For users who want a convenient way to exercise while traveling or coping with a busy schedule, GAIN provides the ability to buy and customize the content most relevant to their level and goals. And for companies and franchises that have made their names with pricey offline classes or cheaper (but still potentially pricey) DVDs, the company’s approach could be a way to reach a greater audience.

GAIN will have to prove to consumers that its paid apps are better than other free and lower-priced options. And it will need to convince more “celebrities,” popular trainers and organizations to join its site. That could be a challenge if companies have deep enough pockets and think their brand is big enough to stand alone. But given the rise of quantified self-type tracking devices, like the Fitbit and Nike Fuelband, it’s clear that consumer interest in fitness-related technology is growing. It seems only natural that they’d have a strong appetite for quality mobile fitness content as well.

After teasers and tweets, it’s really no secret that today is the big day when Microsoft launches Office 2013. The suite has already been available for TechNet users since mid-November, but in typical Microsoft fashion the consumers are the last to get their hands on the goodies.

Office 2013 Home and Student, Home and Business, and Professional, as well as Office 365, are currently available for purchase in different markets, including United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia, with pricing adjusted depending on the region.

US pricing goes as follows: Office Home and Student 2013 is the cheapest available version at $139.99, while Office Professional 2013 goes for broke at a whopping $399.99. The in-between, Office Home and Business 2013 is available for purchase at $219.99.

Prospective customers can also purchase individual Office 2013 products, such as Word 2013, Excel 2013 and PowerPoint 2013 for $109.99 or $79.99, with the latter pricing available with a non-commercial license. In contrast to the previously mentioned products, OneNote 2013 goes for less, $69.99 or $49.99, respectively (again the second price is for the non-commercial license).

Microsoft also offers Outlook 2013, Publisher 2013 and Access 2013 for $109.99, Visio Standard 2013 runs for $299.99, Visio Professional 2013 and Project Standard 2013 go for $589.99, with Project Professional 2013 topping the charts at $1,159.99.

At a first glance Office 365 Home Premium is the cheapest entry to the club, but unlike its other siblings Microsoft demands $99.99 for a one-year subscription to use the office suite, whereas the others come without an expiration date. The upside, however, is that Office 365 Home Premium can be run on 5 PCs or Macs and it comes with 27GB of cloud storage via SkyDrive. Office 365 University is available for $79.99, $20 less than the standard edition.