Use Android apps on HP’s upcoming $189 Chromebook 11 G5

If you're looking for alternatives to Windows laptops, there's a new incentive to consider Chromebooks: some of them can run Android apps.And if you're looking for such a device under $200, HP just announced its Chromebook 11 G5. The entry-level laptop starts at $189 and offers 12.5 hours of battery life.The laptop is available with or without a touchscreen. Just as touchscreens are used for smartphone and tablet apps, touch capabilities are important in running many Android apps, and more Chromebooks could have touchscreens going forward.You could, however, still use Android productivity apps and software like Skype on the non-touch version of the Chromebook 11 G5, which will have access to the Google Play store, HP said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Facebook Live Streams to 800,000 Simultaneous Viewers

Fewer companies know how to build world spanning distributed services than there are countries with nuclear weapons. Facebook is one of those companies and Facebook Live, Facebook’s new live video streaming product, is one one of those services.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: 

The big decision we made was to shift a lot of our video efforts to focus on Live, because it is this emerging new format; not the kind of videos that have been online for the past five or ten years...We’re entering this new golden age of video. I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.

If you are in the advertising business what could better than a supply of advertising ready content that is never ending, always expanding, and freely generated? It’s the same economics Google exploited when it started slapping ads on an exponentially growing web.

An example of Facebook’s streaming prowess is a 45 minute video of two people exploding a watermelon with rubber bands. It reached a peak of over 800,000 simultaneous viewers who also racked up over 300,000 comments. That’s Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How IPv6 lays the foundation for a smarter network

By now we all know that IPv6 is a powerful solution to a pressing problem. The world has run out of new IPv4 addressing space, and the internet needs IPv6 to grow. What’s less widely discussed—but potentially more exciting—is how the modern version of the internet protocol won’t just make the internet bigger, but it will make it smarter.For years, IPv6 was a tough sell. Few organizations were eager to invest in something that just made the addressing space bigger, particularly if IPv4 was already meeting their needs. Now that the pool of IPv4 addresses has run dry, the pace of transition has increased significantly. And it will only accelerate as we start to explore the full potential for network innovation that IPv6 brings to the table.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Net Neutrality as a good start

Within the net neutrality arrangements, the incumbent operators will now have to treat their broadband businesses in exactly the same way as, in the past, they had to provide other telecoms services such as telephony. In other words, they can’t discriminate by giving preference to their own content service, or on the basis of others paying them premium prices for premium services aimed at favouring certain services over others. -CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Net Neutrality as a good start appeared first on 'net work.

IDG Contributor Network: Phones will capture video continuously to help us remember

In the future, personal assistant-like smartphones will capture images of what users see, all day and every day, researchers say. And if devices can see what their owners can see, they’ll remember it and help organize their owners' lives. Add artificial intelligence (AI) to the users' camera, and the days of forgetting things are over.But there’s a problem and that’s battery life. It’s one of the reasons devices aren’t attempting this organizational feat now, the scientists from Rice University say.+ Also on Network World: 5 business uses for wearable technology +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mitigating MPI Message Matching Issues

Since the 1990s, MPI (Message Passing Interface) has been the dominant communications protocol for high-performance scientific and commercial distributed computing. Designed in an era when processors with two or four cores were considered high-end parallel devices, the recent move to processors containing tens to a few hundred cores (as exemplified by the current Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi processor families) has exacerbated scaling issues inside MPI itself. Increased network traffic, amplified by high performance communications fabrics such as InfiniBand and Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) manifest an MPI performance and scaling issue.

In recognition of their outstanding research and …

Mitigating MPI Message Matching Issues was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

20% off Nest Learning Thermostat Through July 4 – Deal Alert

The Nest learning thermostat learns from you and programs itself, so it is cooling and heating more efficiently and saving you money. Plus, it can be controlled from anywhere on earth through your mobile device. So coming home from vacation no longer means coming back to a blisteringly hot house. Nest claims that on average people save 10% to 15% on heating and cooling bills, so this is one of those products that aims to pay for itself. Nest also works with "Alexa". It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 4,600 people (84% rate it 5 stars -- read reviews). It typically lists for $249, but through July 4th it's being discounted 20%, down to $199. Learn more or purchase the discounted Nest (3rd generation - current model) at Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook, Google dominate list of top 15 mobile apps

Facebook and Google have a deepening duopoly of apps adult U.S. smartphone owners use, according to the most recent monthly "Mobile Metrix" report from web metrics company comScore. The two giants own and operate every one of the eight most popular apps, based on the number of adults who used them in May 2016. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Bold IT leadership is crucial, but difficult to find

Bold leadership is essential for companies to achieve breakthrough performance, but according to the 2016 Deloitte Business Confidence Report, 90 percent of the 600 C-suite executives (CXOs) and C-suite executives-in-waiting (CXOWs) admit to not regularly demonstrating bold leadership.Deloitte uses six characteristics to assess bold leadership: someone who sets ambitious goals; invites feedback from colleagues at all levels of seniority; innovates and looks for new ways of doing things; proposes ideas their company might consider controversial; takes risks; and builds strong teams and empowers them to succeed. Further, 52 percent of CXOWs and 60 percent of CXOs doubt that there are enough bold leaders at the highest ranks in their company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile management takes on apps, content

Corporate mobile infrastructures continue to grow, with both company-issued and employee-owned devices playing a key role in supporting business processes. Enterprise mobility management (EMM) suites are often the way enterprises manage these increasingly complex environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Mobile management vendors compared

Enterprise mobility management (EMM) helps companies secure their mobile infrastructure, as well as control device policies and manage mobile apps, content, networks and services. The platforms have been around for a while; some might know them as mobile device management (MDM) suites. But those suites have matured and adopted new features.Editor's note: This chart was originally posted in May 2013 and was updated in March 2015 and again on June 27, 2016. We chose the vendors and products listed here based on conversations with independent analysts about which have significant market share or are important to include for other reasons such as features and functions. All information in the chart about the products and services comes from the respective vendors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Don’t let stress and a crazy pace kill your culture

Tech companies have a reputation of being high pressure and fast-paced -- especially startups. That culture can quickly erode morale as employees begin to feel the strain of the long hours and rapid, and sometimes confusing, change.A 2015 study from VitalSmarts, a leadership training company, interviewed 827 tech employees, to look at how culture affects performance in tech companies. The study identified some key ideas around culture and how it can positively or negatively affect the overall performance of the company.David Maxfield, New York Times bestselling author and vice president of research at VitalSmarts, has been conducting social science research around Fortune 500 companies for the past 30 years. Based on his research, he offer these suggestions on what needs to change in the tech world, and how to change it. But if you think improving work-place culture in tech is about building a cutting edge office or offering the best benefits, you're probably wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Report: Security teams plagued by poorly managed identity data

Security teams handling Identity and access management (IAM) are hampered by dirty data and need management help from a chief data officer, according to a new report by TechVision Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Report: Security teams plagued by poorly managed identity data

Security teams handling Identity and access management (IAM) are hampered by dirty data and need management help from a chief data officer, according to a new report by TechVision Research.IAM is typically defined as a “security discipline that enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons.” But identity data is riddled with errors, which ultimately raise security and privacy risks, the report says.The problems include multiple versions of employee names and titles in various systems — and even “ghost” employees. “We find a plethora of identity data challenges, including multiple authoritative sources of data, inconsistent data, redundant data, old data and misclassification of data,” the report says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Boost your security: Get IT and HR to collaborate

Ask what department is responsible for data security in an organization and the most likely answer is, “IT.” But some experts are saying it shouldn’t be IT alone – that better security requires a closer collaboration with Human Resources (HR).One example, they say, is a breach this past Feb. 26 at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), when a departing employee inadvertently downloaded 44,000 customer records, including personally identifiable information (PII), to a USB thumb drive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Boost your security: Get IT and HR to collaborate

Ask what department is responsible for data security in an organization and the most likely answer is, “IT.” But some experts are saying it shouldn’t be IT alone – that better security requires a closer collaboration with Human Resources (HR).One example, they say, is a breach this past Feb. 26 at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), when a departing employee inadvertently downloaded 44,000 customer records, including personally identifiable information (PII), to a USB thumb drive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ZeroStack offers a private ‘cloud in a box’

If you’re in my age bracket, you might remember this clip of Yosemite Sam yelling at his camel to slow down. He kept yelling, “Whoa, Camel,” but the headstrong camel wouldn’t stop until Yosemite Sam jumped off and hit him on the head. (For you millennials, it used to be OK for kids to watch this stuff.)A similar trend is happening in IT today. The cloud, specifically public cloud has become all the rage. We’re moving everything to the cloud—storage, apps, compute cycles, communications tools. You name it, there’s a cloud service for it. But are we moving too fast? Should CIOs be yelling, “Whoa cloud, whoa!” And then hitting their IT architects in the head with something?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IRS kills electronic filing PIN feature due to repeated attacks

After repeated attacks, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has decided to retire a Web-based tool for obtaining PINs that taxpayers could use to file tax returns electronically.The Electronic Filing (E-file) PINs Web application is no longer available on the IRS website "because of questionable activity," the agency announced last week.In February, the IRS disclosed that hackers used stolen taxpayer information like names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and full addresses in order to obtain E-file PINs through its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IRS kills electronic filing PIN feature due to repeated attacks

After repeated attacks, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has decided to retire a Web-based tool for obtaining PINs that taxpayers could use to file tax returns electronically. The Electronic Filing (E-file) PINs Web application is no longer available on the IRS website "because of questionable activity," the agency announced last week. In February, the IRS disclosed that hackers used stolen taxpayer information like names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and full addresses in order to obtain E-file PINs through its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 6.27.16

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.eSentire Training DayKey features: The security awareness training solution combines microlearning and gamification to arm your employees against the latest social engineering, spear phishing attacks, and more. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here