The tech challenges that accompany IoT projects shouldn't deter companies from attempting to find meaning in data gathered from connected devices. The solutions may be closer than they think.The IT behind the Internet of Things, including sensors, databases and analytics software, has been around for a while. The challenge is getting these disparate systems and components to work together, said Phil Regnault, a senior vice president with Hitachi Consulting, on a panel at MIT's CIO Symposium. MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies
Data analysis tools and data storage, technologies that are key to IoT, are extremely affordable, according to Richard Soley, executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium. "There's no excuse for not using this technology today," he said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Senators block vote extending NSA dragnet powersFour U.S. senators ground the chamber’s business to a halt Wednesday in an effort to prevent voting on a bill that would extend a law that’s legitimized the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone and business records. The relevant section of the Patriot Act expires at the end of the month, and to stop it from being renewed, a bipartisan group took control of the Senate floor in a filibuster mid-Wednesday.Hack hits health care target, reaps data on 1.1 millionTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon.com has expanded its Prime Now one-hour deliveries to include groceries, meals and baked goods from local stores in New York, in a move that will soon be extended to other cities.The deliveries will be available in some Mahattan neighborhoods starting Thursday, and then expand across the island in the coming weeks. The Prime Now website lists 11 zip codes where residents can use the service. Amazon will add local stores in other cities soon, it said.The first batch of stores are D’Agostino, Gourmet Garage and Billy’s Bakery, and Eataly and Westside Market will be the next, according to Amazon.Prime Now and the Android or iOS apps people use to shop were announced in December last year. The service is also available in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Dallas and Miami. It can be used from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. Two-hour delivery is free and one-hour delivery costs US$7.99. As the name implies, users first have to sign up for a regular Prime membership to use the service, which is priced at $99 a year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four U.S. senators ground the chamber’s business to a halt Wednesday in an effort to prevent lawmakers from voting on a bill to extend portions of the Patriot Act used to collect telephone and business records from the country’s residents.Time is running out for the Senate to extend the telephone records collection section of the Patriot Act before it expires at the end of the month. In an effort to block a vote, Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, took control of the Senate floor in a filibuster mid-Wednesday, with Senators Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, joining him later in the day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. Senator Rand Paul spoke on the chamber's floor for more than nine hours Wednesday during a filibuster to prevent lawmakers from voting on a bill to extend portions of the law used by the National Security Agency to collect telephone and business records from the country's residents.Paul, a Kentucky Republican, continued to talk on the Senate floor at 10:25 p.m. EST, after taking control of the chamber earlier in the day. Nine other senators joined him for short stretches throughout the day, including Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat.Time is running out for the Senate to extend the section of the Patriot Act that the NSA uses as authorization to collect telephone and other business records. Section 215 of the Patriot Act expires at the end of the month, and lawmakers are scheduled to take an extended Memorial Day break next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Alcatel-Lucent this week extended its carrier SDN product line with an automation and network control system designed to accelerate service provisioning from multivendor IP and optical infrastructure.The company’s Network Services Platform combines Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN-based software with its 5260 service-aware management system, Service Router operating system and the 1830 Photonic Service Switch GMPLS routing engine algorithms from Bell Labs. It also has a REST API interface to the Nuage Networks Virtual Services Platform SDN controller for data center networks so the IP/MPLS/optical network can be quickly provisioned based on the needs of data center interconnection and virtual machine mobility.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
China's Huawei Technologies is targeting smart homes, cars, wearables and more with its own operating system, Liteos, intended for the international market.On Wednesday Huawei launched the OS to help third-party vendors break into the emerging Internet of Things space. The whole industry is eyeing opportunities to turn household objects and industrial equipment into connect devices, but the development costs still remain high, according to the Chinese company.INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats
Huawei, however, claims its new "lightweight" OS can streamline the whole process. The Liteos software can be as small as 10 kilobytes in size, and is designed to run on minimal power, making it suitable for a wide range of hardware, including microcontrollers and ARM Cortex embedded processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The numbers filed with the SEC seem pretty inarguable. Verizon dominates the U.S. wireless carrier industry, both in terms of total subscribers and in a key metric called ARPU, or average revenue per user. AT&T is maintaining its position in second place, Sprint is headed south in a hurry, and T-Mobile is making some un-profits in its new role as the un-carrier, but showing signs of a recovery.
But the picture of a leader, a runner-up and two also-rans is more complicated than it seems. A saturated market with fewer new customers to compete for means that the big four’s relative positions in terms of size are increasingly stratified.
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Verizon's acquisition of AOL is a move to disrupt the TV market | Apple, Google urge Obama to reject encryption back doors +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The nation’s financial consumer protection watchdog has ordered PayPal to cough up US$25 million in fines for deceptive practices around the company’s credit service, which included signing up customers for the service without their consent.PayPal illegally signed up customers for PayPal Credit, formerly known as Bill Me Later, without their permission, made it their default payment method, and then failed to address disputes when customers complained, said Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray in the agency’s announcement Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
University of Utah researchers are touting an engineering breakthrough that they say could have supercomputers working at the speed of light within three years and other computers including mobile devices doing the same sometime after that.The University's Menon Research Group, led by Associate Professor Rajesh Menon, specializes in the intersection of nanotechnology and optics, and has a good track record of commercializing its work. MORE: 10 cool network and computing research projectsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Obama finally claims his Twitter accountU.S. President Barack Obama is on Twitter for real. The @POTUS account is verified, and unlike @BarackObama which is mostly run by staffers, it will feature tweets by the man himself. The first tweet on the account, sent Monday morning, reads “Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account.” Now, what’s the protocol for turning over control of the Twitter account to your successor on Inauguration Day? Bill Clinton wanted to know, and Obama tweeted back reassuringly, “The handle comes with the house.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you hear the phrase Internet of Things (IoT), you are probably excited, confused, concerned or tired of hearing the buzzphrase -- or maybe all of those things plus a few more. After all, the reality of digital devices acting on their own to capture, transmit and, in some cases, act on data affects everything from home appliances to telehealth is attention-getting.
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Just how many "things" are are talking about? Gartner estimates that by 2020, the IoT will consist of 25 billion devices. Those devices, according to Cisco, will dominate the Internet by 2018. Yep, dominate – meaning machines will communicate over the Internet more than we (i.e. humans) do. So if there’s a little fear, uncertainty and doubt mixed in among the excitement, it’s only natural.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Alibaba Group has been hit with a lawsuit from luxury brands that alleges that the Chinese e-commerce giant has been deliberately promoting the sale of counterfeit products.The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal, comes from Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and other brands owned by Kering. The brands claim that Alibaba has knowingly helped an “army of counterfeiters” to sell their products over its e-commerce sites.These counterfeiters include little-known Chinese vendors that are selling fake Gucci bags for cheap prices, and in wholesale quantities. Alibaba’s search algorithms direct customers to these counterfeits, even when it’s obvious that the products are fakes, the brands alleged in a filing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google will include a “buy” button in its search results on mobile devices in the coming weeks, said a report on Friday in the Wall Street Journal, a move that could give online shoppers an easier way to buy products on small screens.The change might also give consumers an alternative to mobile apps from companies like Amazon and eBay, though it might jeopardize retailers’ ability to directly market to their customers.The buy button will appear on Google’s search results pages when people search for certain products on mobile devices, said the report, which cited unnamed sources. If users click on the buttons, they’ll be taken to another Google page where they can choose among sizes and colors, select shipping options and complete the purchase, the report said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
John Chambers’ last quarterly conference call as Cisco CEO this week was as bullish as it’s ever been, especially on switching. Chambers left little doubt what he thought about prognostications that software-defined networking and whitebox switching would ultimately kill Cisco’s switching dominance:
So all this garbage about new players coming in and software coming in and white label killing our approach was entirely wrong… We are beating our competitors that you all were worried about.
In Cisco’s fiscal Q3, orders for the Nexus 9000 switch and APIC controller, the guts of its SDN – or SDN killing – offering grew sequentially 27%. As we reported earlier, APIC customers just about doubled and Nexus 9000 customers grew 56% since January.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Several European telcos have come out against a scheme by their fellow operators to block advertising as a maneuver to force Google to share its revenue.An executive at a European telecom operator has said it and others are planning to start blocking online ads this year in their respective mobile networks, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.First, the unnamed operator will launch an advertising-free service for its subscribers on an opt-in basis. However, there are also plans to use the technology across its entire network. The plan is to specifically target Google, blocking ads on the company’s websites in an attempt to force the online giant to share its revenue, according to the Financial Times.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here