Mobile phone service provider Sprint announced this morning that it has taken a 33 percent stake in Tidal, one of the few music-streaming services to offer high-resolution audio streams. As part of the deal, Sprint says its customers will get exclusive access to certain content. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will also join Tidal’s board of directors.“Sprint shares our view of revolutionizing the creative industry to allow artists to connect directly with their fans and reach their fullest, shared potential,” Tidal owner Jay Z (née Shawn Carter) said in a press release. “Marcelo understood our goal right away and together we are excited to bring Sprint’s 45 million customers an unmatched entertainment experience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple is reportedly considering moving some of its iPhone production to the United States. Taiwanese iPhone producer Foxconn is considering a $7 billion joint investment in a display production facility, the company’s chairman told reporters.According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou said “Apple is willing to invest in the facility together” because it needs display panels for its products. The plant could create 30,000 to 50,000 jobs.But Gou said U.S.-made iPhones would likely cost more than those produced at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou, China facility, which churns out more than 100 million iPhones per year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company inherited a venerable Unix solution that was already in decline. The Solaris operating system on Sun’s SPARC hardware was losing ground to x86 running Linux (or Windows Server) already, and IBM was cleaning its clock by stealing away SPARC customers to its Power series of servers. Larry Ellison promised to stop the bleeding. He promised investment in the line, and by and large has kept his promise, especially on the chip side. The SPARC line has seen considerable investment and some impressive new releases. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to turn things around. Solaris on Sparc continued to lose ground to competitors and Oracle’s own hardware, the x86-based Exadata and Exalogic. One thing Oracle would never own up to was SPARC sales to new customers vs. existing customers replacing aging hardware. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IPS panel technology for ultra wide viewing, from almost any angle. 1920 x 1080 resolution for a sharp, detailed view. Bezel-less design maximizes your viewing area and makes for seamless multi-monitor set-ups. And LED backlighting enables high screen performance. Ultra slim and Energy-Star compliant design. The HP 23er 23-inch IPS LED backlit monitor is currently super-affordable ($119.99) with a 33% off deal happening now on Amazon, where it's averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 270 reviewers. See the deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Surveys of IT users are a dime a dozen, but every once in a while one pops with a surprising statistic. Like this one: A poll of more than 300 IT works by UBM found that 8% didn’t event know what an application container is.Containers have been the buzzword du jour for the past couple of years in cloud and application development circles. But surveys like this independent are a reminder that new technology is slow to catch on.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Oracle outlines plans to take on Amazon in the cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM Security plans to buy San Francisco-based Agile 3 Solutions, which makes software for visualizing data risk for analysis by senior executives.The deal is expected to close within weeks, but the financial terms were not released. It will include the purchase of Ravy Technologies, an Agile 3 subcontractor based in India.Agile 3’s software identifies risks to business programs and assets, and enables actions to head off possible exploits that could affect business processes. It provides a dashboard for measuring compliance with regulations and legislation.NEWSLETTERS: Get the latest tech news sent directly to your in-box
IBM Security customers will be able to buy Agile 3 technology as a service through IBM Data Security Services or as features rolled into IBM Guardian, the company’s data-protection software. The company says the addition of the software will help identify and protect critical data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Free and open source software is an absolutely critical part of our world—and the future of technology and computing. One problem that consistently plagues many free software projects, though, is the challenge of funding ongoing development (and support and documentation). With that in mind, I have finally settled on a New Year’s resolution for 2017: to donate to one free software project (or group) every month—or the whole year. After all, these projects are saving me a boatload of money because I don’t need to buy expensive, proprietary packages to accomplish the same things.+ Also on Network World: Free Software Foundation shakes up its list of priority projects +
I’m not setting some crazy goal here—not requiring that I donate beyond my means. Heck, some months I may be able to donate only a few bucks. But every little bit helps, right? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the sixth year in a year, SplashData has released its list of worst passwords.According to SplashData, the list is based on over five million leaked passwords, which are used by users in North America and Western Europe, that were posted for sale online.I thought it might be interesting to compare SplashData’s newest list with the top 25 most common password list released last week by rival firm Keeper Security. According to the two companies, these were the top 25 worst passwords people used in 2016:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The debate on public versus private cloud is a fierce one with advocates on both sides. Security experts, however, consistently fall in the pro-private camp. As a compliance and security expert, I have to agree.First, let’s be clear on the definitions.The public cloud is available to the public—in a free or pay-per-use capacity—and is accessible via the web. Some examples include Google Apps, Office 365, file sharing applications such as Box or Dropbox, and so on. The private cloud, on the other hand, is the same service, but it sits behind your firewall and limits access to your internal departments, employees, customers, etc. in your organization. The private cloud is either run by your IT department or your data center. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Avaya Holdings has withdrawn the $1 billion IPO offering it filed more than 5 years ago in the wake of last week's filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy by principal U.S. subsidiary Avaya, Inc.
Avaya was taken private in 2007 after being acquired by two private equity firms for $8.2 billion.
Enterprise networking and collaboration vendor Avaya said last week that its Chapter 11 filing is part of its transition from a hardware to software and services company. The company, which is looking to shed its $6 billion debt load, last week reported decreased revenue and an operating loss for its fiscal year ended Sept. 30.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Whether it’s a new exercise program, volunteering for charitable causes or deciding to go gluten-free, studies have shown that nearly half of people who fully commit to New Year’s resolutions were over 10 times more likely to succeed at realizing real change as compared to 4 percent who do not.The concept of New Year’s resolutions dates back to the Babylonians, who at the start of each year made promises to their gods to return borrowed objects and pay their debts. Romans, too, would begin each year by making promises to Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, for whom the month of January is named.+ Also on Network World: More proof the cloud is winning big +
But wait, dear data center manager. You say you don’t have time to do gut-crunchers every morning and balk at the prospect of giving up bread and pasta? To be perfectly clear, I understand but do not condone your lack of commitment. Change is difficult. And besides, some who follow cultural trends claim that dad bods are slowly coming into fashion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Late last year, ESG published a research report titled, Through the Eyes of Cyber Security Professionals, in collaboration with the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA). As part of this report, 437 cybersecurity professionals and ISSA members were asked if they’d experienced a number of types of security incidents. The research revealed that:
39% of organizations experienced one or several security incidents resulting in the need to reimage one or several endpoints or servers.
27% of organizations experienced one or several incidents of ransomware.
20% of organizations experienced one or several incidents resulting in the disruption of a business application.
19% of organizations experienced one or several incidents resulting in the disruption of a business process.
It should be noted that between 23% and 30% of the survey population responded “don’t know” or “prefer not to say” when asked about different types of security incidents so the percentages represented above are likely much higher.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hugo Barra is returning to Silicon Valley, just over three years after he left Google to help turn Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi into a global company.During Barra's time in Beijing, Xiaomi has grown far beyond its home market with its strategy of selling stylish Android phones on thin profit margins. In January, it made a splash at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, capping a series of international launches that had taken the company into over 20 countries, including India, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia, Mexico and Poland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Banks all around the world are re-imagining their businesses to put customer demands front and center. They are undergoing massive digital transformation processes to do so; however, these transformations, coupled with an always-connected, digitally savvy customer and an emerging “hacker industry,” create new and heightened security risks that banks must deal with immediately.This is a new normal for banks, as evidenced by recent attacks such as the SWIFT hack, and maintaining the security of their systems and customer data will require them to follow new rules and regulations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Software testing has always been “a thing.” It has always been necessary to test the various aspects of the software solutions that enterprises create before putting them out in the wild.But the thing that has changed is that software is now incredibly more pervasive than it has ever been before. There are orders of magnitude more software solutions than at any time in the past. Add to that the fact that the complexity of software is always increasing, and you have a real challenge from the perspective of testing.So, it should come as no surprise to see an increasing number of tools and solutions that aim to solve the testing issue—from crowd-sourcing platforms that allow the “wisdom of the masses” to help worth an organization’s testing process to platforms that offer to “automate” all or part of the testing process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With an increased focus on wearables, the IoT, machine learning and virtual reality, CIOs will need to ensure their enterprise mobility management (EMM) strategies can scale. Mobile devices aren't going away, and they're only getting more difficult to manage. Whether it's employees or customers, the number of potential hardware and software exchanging corporate data day in and day out can be staggering."If EMM is managing millions of devices today it will manage billions of other assets in the future," says Clare Grant, general manager of Red Hat Mobile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the beginning, life in the cloud was simple. Type in your credit card number and—voilà—you had root on a machine you didn’t have to unpack, plug in, or bolt into a rack.That has changed drastically. The cloud has grown so complex and multifunctional that it’s hard to jam all the activity into one word, even a word as protean and unstructured as “cloud.” There are still root logins on machines to rent, but there are also services for slicing, dicing, and storing your data. Programmers don’t need to write and install as much as subscribe and configure.[ Download the public cloud megaguide PDF: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Joyent compared. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ]
Here, Amazon has led the way. That’s not to say there isn’t competition. Microsoft, Google, IBM, Rackspace, and Joyent are all churning out brilliant solutions and clever software packages for the cloud, but no company has done more to create feature-rich bundles of services for the cloud than Amazon. Now Amazon Web Services is zooming ahead with a collection of new products that blow apart the idea of the cloud as a blank Continue reading
New technology such as low-cost video motion sensors and low-power, wide-area wireless networks are now driving smart-city pilot projects to reduce energy used by buildings and to cut traffic delays.While the promise of these innovations is great, that doesn't make it any easier to get city bureaucracies, local businesses and citizens on board to adopt the tech."There are a lot of pain points in cities with traffic congestion and housing needs, and also a lot of technology delivering results. The challenge is working with organizations and changing mindsets and building up awareness of what's possible with internet of things technology and low-power, wide-area networks," said Jamie Cudden, smart city program manager with the city of Dublin, Ireland, in an interview.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Artificial intelligence is affecting everything from automobiles to health care to home automation and even sports. It's also going to have a measurable impact on software development, with developers becoming more like data scientists, an AI official with Nvidia believes.AI and deep learning will mean changes in how software is written, said Jim McHugh, vice president and general manager for Nvidia's DGX-1 supercomputer, which is used in deep learning and accelerated analytics. The long-standing paradigm of developers spending months simply writing features will change, he explained.[ Jump into Microsoft’s drag-and-drop machine learning studio: Get started with Azure Machine Learning. | The InfoWorld review roundup: AWS, Microsoft, Databricks, Google, HPE, and IBM machine learning in the cloud. ]
With the advent of AI, data is incorporated to create the insight for software. "We're using data to train the software to make it more intelligent," said McHugh. Data will drive the software release because the data is going to give the software the ability to interact.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mmm...Nougat. What better way to start a new year than with a fresh flavor for your favorite Android phone?Google's latest major Android release may have officially launched last fall, but if you're like most folks, you'll probably be getting your first taste of Nougat -- also known as Android 7 -- in 2017. If you want timely Android updates, Google's own Nexus and Pixel phones are the only way to go -- all other devices depend on third-party manufacturers to prepare and provide rollouts. And as we see time and time again, that tends to result in slow and uncertain progress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here