New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Transporter 15 and 30 appliances Key features: Private cloud file sync and share appliances that have been designed to deliver critical business-class file sharing features, performance and capacity to small businesses, departments and remote offices. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Acer is getting a head-start on Windows 10, releasing a new smartphone that comes with Windows Phone 8.1 but which it promises will be upgradeable to the new OS when it arrives later this year.Called the Liquid M220, it’s priced from €79 (US$89) and will go on sale in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Acer couldn’t immediately say if it will be sold in the U.S., but it’s been focussing on EMEA lately for its mobiles and wearables.It is one of many low-cost phones Acer is announcing at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The others run Android.The M220 has a 4-inch screen, which is similar to other low-cost Windows handsets like the Lumia 435 and Lumia 512. It has a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front camera, and comes with a bevy of Microsoft apps including Cortana and OneDrive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Acer is getting a head-start on Windows 10, releasing a new smartphone that comes with Windows Phone 8.1 but which it promises will be upgradeable to the new OS when it arrives later this year.
Called the Liquid M220, it’s priced from €79 (US$89) and will go on sale in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Acer couldn’t immediately say if it will be sold in the U.S., but it’s been focussing on EMEA lately for its mobiles and wearables.
It is one of many low-cost phones Acer is announcing at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The others run Android.+ See our full coverage of MWC 2015 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Happy Pi Day!Image by Shutterstock/Stephen SauerHas it really been three years? The Raspberry Pi has been through several updates, new models and sold more than 5 million units since its launch in February 2012 – sounds like a good excuse for a party to us! Here are some suggestions for a fun Pi Day.Play EliteOne of the major early backers of the Raspberry Pi project was David Braben, PC gaming pioneer and creator of the classic spaceship title Elite. An open-source version, Oolite, is still available to play for free, but if you’ve got money and a modern computer, you might try the swanky, impressive new reboot, Elite: Dangerous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
By opening its first store in the Ivory Coast, VMK, based in the Republic of the Congo, is taking a big step in its expansion plans and potentially setting up a designed-in-Africa brand competition with RLG.VMK has up to now offered products manufactured in China but has plans to start making phones in Africa. RLG, which has global headquarters in Dubai, runs its West African phone-assembling operation from Ghana.VMK’s move into West Africa from its Central Africa base in Brazzaville coincided with the Ivory Coast’s launch of a project aimed at equipping 500,000 families with a computer or a tablet, plus an Internet broadband connection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Using Hangouts, Google is testing a search feature that enables users to conduct live chats with businesses directly from their search results.
Google confirmed to Computerworld that it is running a test on the technology, but declined to offer any specific details about the size of the test or which businesses are participating.
Matt Gibstein seems to be the first one who spotted the test, tweeting, "Super interesting: @Google search now offering the ability to chat with local businesses (a la @Path Talk)."
The feature has a live chat, or Hangout, feature pop up in the search results if a business has someone available to communicate with the user. The Hangout can be launched on a desktop system or mobile device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’d pay good money to watch Ken Burns watch this hilarious YouTube video: “Facebook Statuses About the Boston Snowstorm With Sad Civil War Fiddle Music.” (Some NSFW language.)
Thanks, Safety Whale Comedy Collective; we needed that.One of the voices on the video, actor and filmmaker Harry Aspinwall, tells me the back story via email: “My friend Luke Palmer made it after I wrote the final quote, about eating dogs and so on, as a Facebook status. He commented by posting Ashokan Farewell (the fiddle piece, which has been used in Ken Burns' stuff about the Civil War) and it sort of went from there. He got me to record the male voices.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Better batteries? In the words of one Reddit user: "OMG, not this again."But wait, there's more, as the expression goes. There's a reason that new battery technology piques our interest whenever we hear about it. Batteries are the last insurmountable hindrance to the seductive idea of total nomadism and blissful un-tethered freedom.Murphy's LawBatteries are one technology that haven't really seen a Moore's law-esque periodic doubling of capacity. Moore's law says that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM will dedicate $4 billion in spending this year to the cloud, analytics and mobile technologies, as it struggles with seismic shifts that are changing the computing landscape it once dominated,
In return, by 2018 IBM expects to reap a combined $40 billion in annual revenue from the areas in which it's investing, which also include social and security, the company said at an annual meeting on Thursday.
It could use the growth. IBM's sales declined to about $93 billion last year, from just over $98 billion in 2013, thanks to declines in some of its traditional businesses and the sale of two big hardware divisions to Lenovo and GlobalFoundries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT leaders will see bigger technology budgets in the coming year, according to CIO’s most recent Tech Poll, which is conducted regularly to gauge IT spending and stages of implementation in key technology categories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Samsung is mass producing the industry's first 128GB embedded flash memory based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard.The memory will be targeted for use in next-generation flagship smartphones and will offer 2.7 times the performance of today's embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) flash memory.Samsung is touting the new memory's ability to offer smoother ultra-high definition video streaming, more efficient multitasking and reduced power use.The UFS 2.0 specification, released in 2013, offers a multi-lane, serial bus versus the single-lane, parallel bus used in today's eMMC flash.The UFS 2.0 specification boasts up to 600MBps (megabytes per second) of throughput, but because it can use two serial lanes, it has a total of 1,200MBps, or 12Gbps, Samsung stated. That compares with the eMMC 5.0 spec, which has a 400MBps maximum performance over a single parallel bus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As adoption of the Docker virtualization container grows, the namesake company behind the open source technology has released three tools for managing large scale deployments.Docker Machine, Swarm and Compose are collectively designed to make containers more portable and scalable, so they can be deployed and managed more easily en masse. Machine and Swarm are in a beta stage of development.Debuting in 2013, Docker has become popular with developers and organizations, having been downloaded over 100 million times. The software provides a way to package an application along with its dependent libraries so it can be easily and quickly run on any Linux platform. All the major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Joyent, and Microsoft, can host Docker containers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It was just about two weeks ago that Box set out to remove a major barrier to the cloud for security-minded organizations with its Encryption Key Management capability. Now, it's taken that focus a step further with a full-fledged cloud storage service aimed squarely at financial services firms.The aim behind Box's EKM, now in beta, is to give businesses in highly regulated industries such as finance the ability to maintain exclusive control over the digital keys used to encrypt their data.Historically, the lack of that kind of control is a big part of what has kept many companies in such industries off of the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics will freeze the salary of all its employees in South Korea this year as the company struggles to improve its bottom line in an ever more competitive global smartphone market.The salary freeze, the company’s first since 2009, won’t affect bonuses and performance-based incentives, the company said Thursday.Samsung hopes the move will help it survive a challenging business environment. The world’s largest smartphone maker reported plunging profits throughout last year as the popularity of its premium Galaxy smartphone series lagged compared to that of low-priced Android devices from Chinese brands such as Xiaomi and Lenovo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google will submit plans this week to build a new headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.The company, which already has a large multi-building campus in Mountain View, confirmed to Computerworld that it plans to lay out its plans for a new development Friday. At that point, Google is expected to release information about the size, design and specific location of the new development.Earlier today, The New York Times reported that Google representatives have discussed the plan with the Mountain View city council.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprise IT shops are finding that artificial intelligence isn't just for robotics anymore.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
One of the founders of Facebook’s Open Compute Project has launched a new company that aims to cut the cost of running data centers using “community-based analytics.”Coolan announced a beta version of its first product on Wednesday, a service that collects and aggregates data about its customers’ server environments and uses it to predict failures, prevent outages and allow companies to benchmark themselves against peers.The company was cofounded by Amir Michael, a former Facebook engineer who led development of the Open Compute Project’s first server designs. That group aims to give customers more control over how their equipment gets designed and built, and Coolan aims to have a similar empowering effect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple has been ordered to pay US$532.9 million after a U.S. jury found that its iTunes software infringed three patents owned by Smartflash, a Texas-based technology licensing company.That figure is less than the $852 million that Smartflash was seeking, but is still a blow to Apple. Smartflash said it was entitled to a percentage of sales from Apple devices like Mac computers, iPhones and iPads that were used to access iTunes.Apple tried to have the case thrown out, saying that it never used Smartflash's technology. Apple also argued the patents in question are invalid because previous patented innovations from other companies covered the same technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As recently as a week ago, in a February 17th, 2015, Financial Times newspaper article, investor analysts were speculating as to just what U.S. satellite TV company Dish was going to do with its massive hoard of unused, cached mobile-suitable spectrum that it's been accumulating over the years.Well, we might have just learned the answer. Artemis Networks, a wireless startup, has reached a deal to lease some of that spectrum, for a while, in San Francisco. It wants to use it to experiment with its unusual pCell technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I recently had the great pleasure to sit down with community-elected OpenStack board member and Crowbar co-creator, Rob Hirschfeld. Rob shared awesome nuggets of wisdom on data center and cloud operations. You can view the video and the full transcript below:
Art Fewell: Welcome to Open Networking TV. This is the Catch Up, I’m your host Art Fewell. Today we will be catching up with the OpenStack guru, Rob Hirschfeld.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here