Five questions for Google to answer at its big I/O conference

Google’s I/O developer conference starts Wednesday and some big announcements are expected during the opening two-hour keynote, likely around virtual reality, Android and the Internet of Things.In a change of pace, the show is being held outdoors at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, and Google has advised the press to pack sunscreen along with laptops and mobile devices. Here are five questions I want company executives to answer during the course of this year's keynote. What’s the company’s plan for the Internet of Things? Google has made some big bets on the Internet of Things, with its Brillo and Weave developer tools, along with its acquisition of Nest in 2014. Then, there’s the OnHub wireless router Google announced last year. It’s clear that the company is interested in playing a major role as part of the growing world of internet-connected devices, but it’s been a while since we’ve heard anything major from the company in the IoT realm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Label Switched Multicast — Q&A

This post is the last one I'm planning in this series on Label Switched Multicast (LSM). The questions & answers below are meant to expand on topics from the previous posts or address topics that weren't mentioned in the previous posts at all.

If you're not familiar with LSM yet then this Q&A likely won't make much sense to you and I recommend you go back and read through the previous posts.

Please post a comment if one of the answers isn't clear or you have additional questions!

Slack has hired away a new engineering chief from Pinterest

Slack, the fast-growing workplace collaboration startup, has snagged a new engineering chief from Pinterest.Michael Lopp left the social bookmarking site earlier this month to become Slack's vice president of engineering, according to his LinkedIn profile.Lopp is a Silicon Valley veteran with experience at companies including Apple and Netscape. Prior to Pinterest, he was a director at Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto firm focused on using big data analysis for business and government applications."We’d like to thank Lopp for his contributions to Pinterest and wish him well. We’re fortunate to have strong technical leaders throughout the engineering team as we look ahead to growing the company and the product," Pinterest said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey: Should The Packet Pushers Host A Conference?

Deep inside the virtual ideas lab at Packet Pushers, we’ve been debating the merits of organizing a two-day Packet Pushers conference. We love live events because there’s no better way to strengthen a community and share ideas. And because at a live event there’s no fast-forward button–we can lock the conference doors so that you […]

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Survey: Should The Packet Pushers Host A Conference?

Deep inside the virtual ideas lab at Packet Pushers, we’ve been debating the merits of organizing a two-day Packet Pushers conference. We love live events because there’s no better way to strengthen a community and share ideas. And because at a live event there’s no fast-forward button–we can lock the conference doors so that you […]

The post Survey: Should The Packet Pushers Host A Conference? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

A new app from SAP helps line managers keep track of their budgets

It's not often easy for line-of-business managers to get a real-time view of their budgets and spending, but a new app from SAP aims to change that.Based on SAP's Hana Cloud Platform, the app pulls data from core financial reporting systems and makes it searchable, so that line managers can do ad hoc spend analyses and other on-the-fly calculations.Called SAP RealSpend, the app lets managers drill down and perform a fine-grained analysis of actual and future spending. It can also deliver related forecast and budget plans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ONUG Hopes to Nudge Networks Toward Real Interoperability

ONUG plans to give standards bodies a push.

Nearly all App Store sales come from a handful of vendors

The top 1 percent of U.S. publishers on the iOS App Store with paid or in-app purchase (IAP)-supported apps accounted for approximately 94 percent of all revenue on the store.That’s according to Sensor Tower, a vendor of App Store marketing and sales tracking software, which published its latest findings in its Store Intelligence blog. The company monitored app store revenue and download estimates from Jan. 1, 2016, to March 31, 2016. It compared the estimated net revenue of publishers on the U.S. App Store with at least one actively ranking paid or IAP-supported app. It does not include Google Play or Android.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Backup and recovery tools: Users identify the good, bad and ugly

The most important criteria for choosing a backup solution include short backup windows, ease-of-recovery and role-based access management, according to IT Central Station, a peer review site for IT users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Microsoft makes final, aggressive Windows 10 upgrade push

Microsoft has launched the final push in its nine-and-a-half-month upgrade offensive against consumers and businesses running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.Last week, Microsoft switched the automatically-offered Windows 10 upgrade to a "Recommended" download that in turn scheduled the upgrade process unless the user interfered."As we shared in October, Windows 10 will be offered as a 'Recommended' update for Windows 7 and 8.1 customers whose Windows Update settings are configured to accept 'Recommended' updates," a Microsoft spokesman said Friday in an email reply to questions.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10 Those questions were spurred by reports from Computerworld readers, who said that they'd again been offered an upgrade after months of either ignoring the campaign or dodging the transmutation of their PCs from Windows 7 or 8.1 to 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google I/O: Expect A.I., virtual reality

For a conference that has been used to advance Android and Chrome, and introduce Google Glass with users parachuting from a plane, people are expecting to hear about virtual reality and artificial intelligence at this week's Google I/O conference."This year's focus will be virtual reality, no doubt," said Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst. "I believe Google wants to be a leader in virtual reality and, in this marketplace where there are no leaders yet, I think they will try and secure their place in the front of the line."Kagan said Google may even roll out its own early- generation virtual reality device at I/O, the company's annual developer conference, which generally draws more than 6,000 attendees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Challenges for IoT: Connectivity, protocols, funding

Connectivity and protocols are the largest technical challenges business people face as they attempt to adopt Internet of Things (IoT) projects, according to a new report.Those connectivity and protocol issue apparently come up in both planning and deployment, and then again in the analysis of IoT data, the study says.The industry survey was performed in Europe recently by U.S.-based PLAT.ONE, a software and industrial solutions firm specializing in IoT development. The survey asked executives what kinds of trouble they experienced with IoT projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nyansa launches Voyance Live, a public networking statistics portal

IT analytics company Nyansa today rolled out a public web portal, offering anonymized data pulled from instances of its flagship Voyance product in operation around the world.The idea behind Voyance Live, according to CEO Abe Ankumah, is to provide insight into common enterprise network problems and suggest possible solutions to IT departments.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Software audits: How high tech plays hardball + Washington nudges Verizon, striking unions back to bargaining tableTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Six Tips for Securing BGP

There are different initiatives working on the problem of authenticating incoming BGP routes. The key technology is to use certificates, but doing so leads to a lot of implications, such as more route churn, larger BGP tables, and the need to learn how to exchange certificates and handle unsigned routes. Considering the difficulties we have today to get ISPs to implement even basic protection mechanisms, I don’t expect authentication of BGP routes to reach widespread usage for a long time. So what are some of the things we can do today to improve BGP security? Here are six tips. -via Network Computing

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Here’s how one enterprise is using Google’s cloud, along with many other providers

Land O'Lakes picked Google to run the backend when it decided to launch a new application that connects a bunch of different cloud services to one another for the sake of improving farmers' decisions.It's something of a surprising choice for the decades-old company. Much of the company is built on Microsoft technology, said Teddy Bekele, the vice president of IT for Land O'Lakes's WinField division. While Microsoft's Azure cloud platform was in the running to host the new WinField Data Silo tool, Microsoft ended up losing out to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).It's a major win for Google, which has been trying to entice more large companies over to its cloud platform. And Land O'Lakes's decision is emblematic of the way that companies -- especially those with decades of technology history -- are approaching the public cloud. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Google will not announce a VR headset at Google I/O 2016

Rumors are flying that Google will announce a virtual reality (VR) headset this week at the company’s annual software developer conference Google I/O. The rumors sound ridiculous to me. Here’s why.Today, the Verge and Android Police sparked more speculation based on a VR category showing up on the seller’s Google Play console and a year-old Wall Street Journal story that Google was working on a VR headset. Well, not exactly, but let’s take a minute, cut through the hype and think through this rationally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to watch Google I/O 2016

Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference that takes place May 18-20 in Mountain View, Calif., can be a tough ticket to get – there’s a lottery just to get the opportunity to buy one. Academic tickets are $300, and general admission is a weighty $900. So there are a lot of interested folks who might not have the time, money, or opportunity to get to Mountain View this year.Fortunately, Google’s got a number of ways to watch the events of I/O unfold, most notably live video streaming, which you ought to be able to stream it on their site here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How third-party tools can fill a need in complex cloud environments

Awhile ago I wrote a about Dome 9's security offering and was skeptical about its long-term opportunity. As I saw it, offering an add-on security product to a platform as voracious as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a recipe for disruption. AWS has a history of intense innovation, and often ecosystem partners have been steamrolled by that process. As I saw it, Dome 9 filled a short-term opportunity that would soon be fulfilled by AWS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How third-party tools can fill a need in complex cloud environments

Awhile ago I wrote a about Dome 9's security offering and was skeptical about its long-term opportunity. As I saw it, offering an add-on security product to a platform as voracious as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a recipe for disruption. AWS has a history of intense innovation, and often ecosystem partners have been steamrolled by that process. As I saw it, Dome 9 filled a short-term opportunity that would soon be fulfilled by AWS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An HTTPS hijacking click-fraud botnet infects almost 1 million computers

Over the past two years, a group of cybercriminals has infected almost 1 million computers with malware that hijacks search results, even when they're served over encrypted HTTPS connections.The click-fraud botnet earns its creators money through Google's AdSense for Search program, according to researchers from security firm Bitdefender. The affiliate program, intended for website owners, allows them to place a Google-powered custom search engine on their websites to generate revenue when users click on ads displayed in the search results.Instead of doing that, this botnet's operators intercept Google, Bing, and Yahoo searches performed by users on their own computers and replace the legitimate results with those generated by their custom search engine. They do this using a malware program that Bitdefender products detect as Redirector.Paco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here