Monday, December 10, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
BBC E-mail: Google reacts to Apple patent win
** Google reacts to Apple patent win **
Google says it does not want Samsung's defeat in last week's patent case to "limit" customers' access to Android.
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19389732 >
** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified.
Google says it does not want Samsung's defeat in last week's patent case to "limit" customers' access to Android.
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19389732 >
** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Can iPhone be Hacked?
LAS VEGAS (CNNMoney) -- The iPhone's baked-in security has improved
dramatically over the past few years, which is great for Apple fans.
In a weird way, it's good for hackers too.
With the "bring your own device" phenomenon in full-swing, Apple
(AAPL, Fortune 500) has been successful at getting its iPhones and
iPads into the hands of Fortune 500 companies and even many government
agencies, including the White House and the U.S. military. To make
those sales, Apple had to update its iOS mobile operating system with
some of the industry's most robust security features.
That had a nasty unintended consequence: Many app developers no longer
put their own safeguards in place, relying instead almost exclusively
on Apple to ensure the security of their applications.
With thousands of apps in the iTunes App store all featuring the same
exact security features, one single vulnerability could have a domino
effect.
"Security is now an afterthought for many app developers," said
Jonathan Zdziarski, senior forensic scientist at viaForensics, in a
presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on
Thursday. "That means if you hack one, you can hack them all."
Apple declined to comment.
The tech giant made its first official appearance at Black Hat this
year with a session on iOS's security features, but the dry
presentation was little more than a public reading of a white paper
Apple recently released. Presenter Dallas De Atley, Apple's platform
security team manager, took no questions after his talk and quickly
escaped out a side door.
A few rooms away, Zdziarski simultaneously delivered his workshop on
"The Dark Art of iOS Application Hacking."
The scenarios Zdziarski outlined are scary, but they're also far-fetched.
To hack all the apps on your phone, a hacker would need to: 1) steal
your iPhone, which isn't so hard, and 2) discover and exploit an iOS
vulnerability before Apple does. That's proven to be very hard. It has
happened before -- most notably when serial Apple hacker Charlie
Miller found a way to sneak a rogue app into Apple's fiercely guarded
iTunes store. (When he publicized the hack, Apple yanked his developer
license.)
Still, so-called "zero day exploits" on iOS have been extremely rare.
dramatically over the past few years, which is great for Apple fans.
In a weird way, it's good for hackers too.
With the "bring your own device" phenomenon in full-swing, Apple
(AAPL, Fortune 500) has been successful at getting its iPhones and
iPads into the hands of Fortune 500 companies and even many government
agencies, including the White House and the U.S. military. To make
those sales, Apple had to update its iOS mobile operating system with
some of the industry's most robust security features.
That had a nasty unintended consequence: Many app developers no longer
put their own safeguards in place, relying instead almost exclusively
on Apple to ensure the security of their applications.
With thousands of apps in the iTunes App store all featuring the same
exact security features, one single vulnerability could have a domino
effect.
"Security is now an afterthought for many app developers," said
Jonathan Zdziarski, senior forensic scientist at viaForensics, in a
presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on
Thursday. "That means if you hack one, you can hack them all."
Apple declined to comment.
The tech giant made its first official appearance at Black Hat this
year with a session on iOS's security features, but the dry
presentation was little more than a public reading of a white paper
Apple recently released. Presenter Dallas De Atley, Apple's platform
security team manager, took no questions after his talk and quickly
escaped out a side door.
A few rooms away, Zdziarski simultaneously delivered his workshop on
"The Dark Art of iOS Application Hacking."
The scenarios Zdziarski outlined are scary, but they're also far-fetched.
To hack all the apps on your phone, a hacker would need to: 1) steal
your iPhone, which isn't so hard, and 2) discover and exploit an iOS
vulnerability before Apple does. That's proven to be very hard. It has
happened before -- most notably when serial Apple hacker Charlie
Miller found a way to sneak a rogue app into Apple's fiercely guarded
iTunes store. (When he publicized the hack, Apple yanked his developer
license.)
Still, so-called "zero day exploits" on iOS have been extremely rare.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Article: They’re Real: Crazy Daredevil Robots That Fly, Build, And Make Their Own Decisions
They're Real: Crazy Daredevil Robots That Fly, Build, And Make Their Own Decisions
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669981/theyre-real-crazy-daredevil-robots-that-fly-build-and-make-their-own-decisions
(Sent from Flipboard)
What linkedin should do now?
Given the recent security breaches (lost password file) and negative
comments about its use of calendar data, I believe that Linkedin needs
some soul searching and find next steps. I have the following
suggestions:
1: Linkedin should take defense in depth approach and revisit the
overall architecture to find potential security holes. One example is
not to use SHA-1 for password hash, use stronger hash algorithm such
as SHA-512 instead. And enforce password policy and complexity, etc.
Linkedin will benefit a lot by hiring a seasoned security director who
has worked extensively in a big consulting firm such as CGI who has
been able to approach the security from defense in depth perspectives
and led many big federal projects (not just one product or one company
like Linkedin) to FISMA compliance and provides high level security.
2: Linkedin recent acquisition of SliderShares is a very smart move.
The next move should target professional video educational service
such as http://www.udemy.com , vimeo, etc.
3: Linkedin should leverage its massive data to do deeper analytic to
predict job trends, company strength, potential merge and acquisition
etc.
4) Linkedin should include a blog site which would not limit the size
of text and allow user to share the blog.
5)Linkedin should create a startup community to link recent startup
companies to share ideas.
6) Linkedin should send more targeted e-mail updates to users based on
its analysis on people's professional interests. For example, my
professional interests are on the cloud, mobile security. I have
joined many such groups and posted many such updates. But, it seems to
me Linkedin did not get it and did not send relevant updates from my
contacts to me via e-mail.
More to follow ...
comments about its use of calendar data, I believe that Linkedin needs
some soul searching and find next steps. I have the following
suggestions:
1: Linkedin should take defense in depth approach and revisit the
overall architecture to find potential security holes. One example is
not to use SHA-1 for password hash, use stronger hash algorithm such
as SHA-512 instead. And enforce password policy and complexity, etc.
Linkedin will benefit a lot by hiring a seasoned security director who
has worked extensively in a big consulting firm such as CGI who has
been able to approach the security from defense in depth perspectives
and led many big federal projects (not just one product or one company
like Linkedin) to FISMA compliance and provides high level security.
2: Linkedin recent acquisition of SliderShares is a very smart move.
The next move should target professional video educational service
such as http://www.udemy.com , vimeo, etc.
3: Linkedin should leverage its massive data to do deeper analytic to
predict job trends, company strength, potential merge and acquisition
etc.
4) Linkedin should include a blog site which would not limit the size
of text and allow user to share the blog.
5)Linkedin should create a startup community to link recent startup
companies to share ideas.
6) Linkedin should send more targeted e-mail updates to users based on
its analysis on people's professional interests. For example, my
professional interests are on the cloud, mobile security. I have
joined many such groups and posted many such updates. But, it seems to
me Linkedin did not get it and did not send relevant updates from my
contacts to me via e-mail.
More to follow ...
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
eWeek Europe : Windows Phones To Include High-End Email Encryption
This post sounds interesting :
<p>Microsoft is partnering with Good Technology for a Windows Phone solution that offers encrypted end-to-end messaging</p>
To continue reading
: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/windows-phones-to-include-high-end-email-encryption-63595
eWeek Europe : Google To Patent Fibre Optic Cable Deployment Method
This post sounds interesting :
<p>The "edging strip" could make fibre-to-the-home installation simpler by removing needed to dig trenches in customers' gardens</p>
To continue reading
: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/google-to-patent-fibre-optic-cable-deployment-method-63776
eWeek Europe : RSA 2012: External Attacks Were The Most Common Breach Vector In 2011
<p>External attackers were behind most 2011 data breaches, using malware or just hacking a way in, according to a Verizon report</p>
To continue reading
Friday, February 3, 2012
Google's automated scanning service, dubbed Bouncer, is to frisk Android Market apps for hidden malware
Google is improving its security measures on Android Market after placing Bouncer on the door, to prevent the entry of undesirable apps. Bouncer has been monitoring the Android Market for several months already, and Google claims it has seen a 40 percent drop in malicious apps between the first half and second half of 2011, Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering for Google's Android group, wrote on the Google Mobile blog 2 February. The service automatically scans Android Market for potentially malicious software without requiring developers to go through an application approval process.
Source: eweek
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Tablets, BYOD Causing Global IT Headaches, Cisco Finds
Tablets, BYOD Causing Global IT Headaches, Cisco Finds
SUMMARY: Growing tablet use at home means growing tablet use at work. A Cisco survey of global IT managers found tablet use is up, but policies are still uncertain.
Tablet use is on the rise, and a recent Cisco survey sought to gauge the effect of these devices as they make their way into the enterprise, by both sanctioned means and otherwise.
Requests for tablets within the enterprise are significant—on average, one tablet is requested for every three smartphones—according to the Cisco poll of 1,500 decision-making IT workers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain, conducted in late 2011.
At 21 percent, workers in the United States and France are asking for them the most, though U.S. IT managers, at 38 percent, are most likely to issue them. Least likely to dole out the devices, at 27 percent, are managers in the U.K.
Sales are a strong niche for tablets, in Germany more so than elsewhere, with 31 percent of German salesforces using the devices, versus the global average of 21 percent.
Spain, however, appears poised for the highest growth, Cisco said in a statement on the survey, "with 90 percent of IT managers believing the tablet will become more popular in the next two years."
The growing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend is causing greater security concerns, according to many IT managers. BYOD, along with access to company servers and lost or stolen devices, was named among managers' most-pressing problems.
The BYOD trend presents benefits and challenges for businesses. Companies save money when employees use their own devices for work rather than having to use company-bought technology, and it also can improve productivity. The challenge comes when trying to protect the company's network and data when employees need access from their privately owned devices.
U.S. IT managers seem the most inclined to put their concerns into action, with 75 percent believing that "new rules must be established around security and device usage."
Nearly half of all those surveyed agreed that company applications should be restricted, and nearly all agreed that custom tablet apps would be good for business. Managers in Canada and the United Kingdom, at 55 percent and 56 percent, respectively, felt the strongest about wanting access to applications on tablets to be restricted.
Despite the security issues prompted by BYOD, managers, the survey found, are largely ignoring the issue.
"Globally, 48 percent said their company would never authorize employees to bring their own devices," Cisco said in the statement, "yet 57 percent agreed that some employees use personal devices without consent."
These rule breakers are most prevalent in the United States—64 percent were said to be bringing in devices without consent—while in Germany, at 49 percent, the issue was most contained.
Ultimately, BYOD issues press on businesses' bottom lines, as globally 44 percent of managers said that BYOD issues divert the attention of IT staff from other "important projects."
Still, tablets aren't seen as all bad, as 75 percent of managers, when pressed for a wish list, named email and document sharing as "must haves" and nearly half agreed that video conferencing, instant messaging, access to company databases and seamless synchronization with other devices are "desirable."
The Pew Internet Project recently reported that ownership of tablets among U.S. adults nearly doubled between just mid-December 2011 and early January—from 10 percent to 19 percent—suggesting IT managers, even more so than during the Cisco survey period, have their work cut out for them.
Tablet use is on the rise, and a recent Cisco survey sought to gauge the effect of these devices as they make their way into the enterprise, by both sanctioned means and otherwise.
Requests for tablets within the enterprise are significant—on average, one tablet is requested for every three smartphones—according to the Cisco poll of 1,500 decision-making IT workers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain, conducted in late 2011.
At 21 percent, workers in the United States and France are asking for them the most, though U.S. IT managers, at 38 percent, are most likely to issue them. Least likely to dole out the devices, at 27 percent, are managers in the U.K.
Sales are a strong niche for tablets, in Germany more so than elsewhere, with 31 percent of German salesforces using the devices, versus the global average of 21 percent.
Spain, however, appears poised for the highest growth, Cisco said in a statement on the survey, "with 90 percent of IT managers believing the tablet will become more popular in the next two years."
The growing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend is causing greater security concerns, according to many IT managers. BYOD, along with access to company servers and lost or stolen devices, was named among managers' most-pressing problems.
The BYOD trend presents benefits and challenges for businesses. Companies save money when employees use their own devices for work rather than having to use company-bought technology, and it also can improve productivity. The challenge comes when trying to protect the company's network and data when employees need access from their privately owned devices.
U.S. IT managers seem the most inclined to put their concerns into action, with 75 percent believing that "new rules must be established around security and device usage."
Nearly half of all those surveyed agreed that company applications should be restricted, and nearly all agreed that custom tablet apps would be good for business. Managers in Canada and the United Kingdom, at 55 percent and 56 percent, respectively, felt the strongest about wanting access to applications on tablets to be restricted.
Despite the security issues prompted by BYOD, managers, the survey found, are largely ignoring the issue.
"Globally, 48 percent said their company would never authorize employees to bring their own devices," Cisco said in the statement, "yet 57 percent agreed that some employees use personal devices without consent."
These rule breakers are most prevalent in the United States—64 percent were said to be bringing in devices without consent—while in Germany, at 49 percent, the issue was most contained.
Ultimately, BYOD issues press on businesses' bottom lines, as globally 44 percent of managers said that BYOD issues divert the attention of IT staff from other "important projects."
Still, tablets aren't seen as all bad, as 75 percent of managers, when pressed for a wish list, named email and document sharing as "must haves" and nearly half agreed that video conferencing, instant messaging, access to company databases and seamless synchronization with other devices are "desirable."
The Pew Internet Project recently reported that ownership of tablets among U.S. adults nearly doubled between just mid-December 2011 and early January—from 10 percent to 19 percent—suggesting IT managers, even more so than during the Cisco survey period, have their work cut out for them.
Amazon Kindle Fire Hijacks Android Tablet Market
Amazon Kindle Fire Hijacks Android Tablet Market
SUMMARY: Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has become a top driver of Android tablet application consumption in less than three months, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry. Amazon's Kindle Fire
SUMMARY: Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has become a top driver of Android tablet application consumption in less than three months, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry.
Amazon's Kindle Fire has managed to become the first tablet based on Google's Android operating system to see demonstrable application usage in a short period, suggesting that the 7-inch slate has become quite the content driver for the e-commerce giant.
The tablet, which only launched Nov. 15, has already matched the Samsung Galaxy Tab in application usage by an Android tablet, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry.
Before the Fire launched in November, the Galaxy Tab comprised 63 percent of Android app sessions. Yet through January, the Galaxy Tab and Kindle Fire each accounted for 36 percent of app usage, showing the Fire paired with Amazon's Appstore has proved to be popular among consumers.
Flurry also looked at data from five popular paid apps and found that the Kindle Fire drove over 2.5 times more paid downloads to consumers than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which has at least twice as many active units in the real world as the Fire.
"This shows that for tablets, the Amazon Appstore can already deliver more direct revenue to developers than the Android Market," noted Flurry, which tracks tens of thousands of Android apps, covering over 20 percent of all consumer sessions on more than 90 percent of all Android devices each day.
These are telling stats at a time when analysts have all but written off Android tablets as non-starters in a young tablet market that industry watchers have taken to calling the iPad market.
Indeed, one of the reasons Apple has crushed the nascent Android slate market in market share and application usage is that consumers don't have enough compelling content or applications to access via Google's Android Market. There are only about 200 or so Android apps designed for tablets based on the Android Honeycomb operating system.
The findings are drenched in irony. Google launched Honeycomb nearly a year ago with the belief that the software would be powerful enough to challenge the popular iPad.
Yet Google never open-sourced Honeycomb, and developers were cool on writing for that branch of Android, even as the smartphone branch became the most popular OS platform in the world. Indeed, Google expected the hardware and OS to sell itself, but it never happened to the point that Google expected it to.
Seizing on this dearth in tablet traffic, Amazon came out of nowhere to offer a $199 tablet–less than half of existing tablets. Moreover, the company eschewed Honeycomb to "fork," or customize, its own Android build, and sold apps through its own Appstore instead of the Android Market.
The successful approach has led RBC Capital analysts to claim Amazon makes $136 from content and service per Kindle Fire unit.
Now Flurry is looking at the Fire as possibly the rising tide the lifts all boats in the Android tablet market. "Total Android tablet sessions in January more than tripled over November, with Galaxy Tab sessions increasing by more than 50 percent," Flurry noted. "Overall, Android tablets are growing aggressively as a category."
This appears to be true, according to recent data culled from Strategy Analytics, which found that Android's tablet market share rose from 29 percent in the third quarter of 2011 to 39 percent by Q4. Conversely, iPad market share fell from 68 percent to 58 percent over the same period.
Amazon's Kindle Fire has managed to become the first tablet based on Google's Android operating system to see demonstrable application usage in a short period, suggesting that the 7-inch slate has become quite the content driver for the e-commerce giant.
The tablet, which only launched Nov. 15, has already matched the Samsung Galaxy Tab in application usage by an Android tablet, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry.
Before the Fire launched in November, the Galaxy Tab comprised 63 percent of Android app sessions. Yet through January, the Galaxy Tab and Kindle Fire each accounted for 36 percent of app usage, showing the Fire paired with Amazon's Appstore has proved to be popular among consumers.
Flurry also looked at data from five popular paid apps and found that the Kindle Fire drove over 2.5 times more paid downloads to consumers than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which has at least twice as many active units in the real world as the Fire.
"This shows that for tablets, the Amazon Appstore can already deliver more direct revenue to developers than the Android Market," noted Flurry, which tracks tens of thousands of Android apps, covering over 20 percent of all consumer sessions on more than 90 percent of all Android devices each day.
These are telling stats at a time when analysts have all but written off Android tablets as non-starters in a young tablet market that industry watchers have taken to calling the iPad market.
Indeed, one of the reasons Apple has crushed the nascent Android slate market in market share and application usage is that consumers don't have enough compelling content or applications to access via Google's Android Market. There are only about 200 or so Android apps designed for tablets based on the Android Honeycomb operating system.
The findings are drenched in irony. Google launched Honeycomb nearly a year ago with the belief that the software would be powerful enough to challenge the popular iPad.
Yet Google never open-sourced Honeycomb, and developers were cool on writing for that branch of Android, even as the smartphone branch became the most popular OS platform in the world. Indeed, Google expected the hardware and OS to sell itself, but it never happened to the point that Google expected it to.
Seizing on this dearth in tablet traffic, Amazon came out of nowhere to offer a $199 tablet–less than half of existing tablets. Moreover, the company eschewed Honeycomb to "fork," or customize, its own Android build, and sold apps through its own Appstore instead of the Android Market.
The successful approach has led RBC Capital analysts to claim Amazon makes $136 from content and service per Kindle Fire unit.
Now Flurry is looking at the Fire as possibly the rising tide the lifts all boats in the Android tablet market. "Total Android tablet sessions in January more than tripled over November, with Galaxy Tab sessions increasing by more than 50 percent," Flurry noted. "Overall, Android tablets are growing aggressively as a category."
This appears to be true, according to recent data culled from Strategy Analytics, which found that Android's tablet market share rose from 29 percent in the third quarter of 2011 to 39 percent by Q4. Conversely, iPad market share fell from 68 percent to 58 percent over the same period.
Nokia Windows Phone Sales Likely Boosted Microsoft Smartphone Share
Nokia Windows Phone Sales Likely Boosted Microsoft Smartphone Share
SUMMARY: Nokia sold 1 million Windows Phone units in the fourth quarter of 2011. That may have nearly doubled Microsoft's smartphone market share. How much was Microsoft willing to pay...
Published: Friday
SUMMARY: Nokia sold 1 million Windows Phone units in the fourth quarter of 2011. That may have nearly doubled Microsoft's smartphone market share.
How much was Microsoft willing to pay Nokia to launch the latter's Windows Phone line?
The answer, according to Nokia's most recent earnings report, was $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2011—and that's only the beginning. "Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments [which Nokia will pay to Microsoft] are expected to measure in the billions of U.S. dollars," read a statement accompanying the numbers.
Having abandoned its own operating systems (such as Symbian) in favor of Windows Phone, Nokia has little choice but to play out the thread of its Microsoft partnership to either its bitter or insanely lucrative end. Certainly the switchover to the new operating system has plunged the Finnish phone maker into a "transition period" of lowered earnings and analyst pessimism: the company's net sales declined 21 percent from the year-ago quarter, while operating profit, device volume and net cash also tumbled.
But there are also signs the partnership could pay off in the longer term. By the end of 2011, Nokia had sold some 1 million smartphones running Windows Phone. "From this beachhead of more than 1 million Lumia devices, you will see us push forward with the sales, marketing and successive product introductions necessary to be successful," Nokia CEO Stephen Elop wrote in a statement accompanying the earnings. "We also plan to bring the Lumia series to additional markets including China and Latin America in the first half of 2012."
Next question: How much has Microsoft benefitted from its Nokia deal?
As a platform, Windows Phone has struggled for adoption in the broader smartphone marketplace, trailing Google Android, Apple iOS, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry franchise. Data from research firm Nielsen suggested that Microsoft owned 7.3 percent of the U.S. smartphone market in the third quarter of 2011, down from 9 percent earlier in the year; much of that decline was due to users abandoning the antiquated Windows Mobile platform, something that Microsoft executives say they anticipated.
While Microsoft regularly declines to provide Windows Phone sales figures, CEO Steve Ballmer described the platform's market share as "very small" during a July 11 keynote speech at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference. Before Nokia began rolling out its first Lumia devices, outsiders estimated total Windows Phone sales at somewhere in the range of 1.4 million to 1.7 million units—the former figure from analyst Horace Dediu, the latter from research firm Gartner (which grouped Windows Mobile into its calculations).
If those analyst numbers are accurate, then Nokia's Lumia sales may have nearly doubled the number of Windows Phone units in consumer hands. Considering the integral role of mobility to Microsoft's overall fortunes—and the lack of a fallback position for either Microsoft or Nokia, in the event of Windows Phone's marketplace demise—that quarterly payout may have been money well-spent.
How much was Microsoft willing to pay Nokia to launch the latter's Windows Phone line?
The answer, according to Nokia's most recent earnings report, was $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2011—and that's only the beginning. "Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments [which Nokia will pay to Microsoft] are expected to measure in the billions of U.S. dollars," read a statement accompanying the numbers.
Having abandoned its own operating systems (such as Symbian) in favor of Windows Phone, Nokia has little choice but to play out the thread of its Microsoft partnership to either its bitter or insanely lucrative end. Certainly the switchover to the new operating system has plunged the Finnish phone maker into a "transition period" of lowered earnings and analyst pessimism: the company's net sales declined 21 percent from the year-ago quarter, while operating profit, device volume and net cash also tumbled.
But there are also signs the partnership could pay off in the longer term. By the end of 2011, Nokia had sold some 1 million smartphones running Windows Phone. "From this beachhead of more than 1 million Lumia devices, you will see us push forward with the sales, marketing and successive product introductions necessary to be successful," Nokia CEO Stephen Elop wrote in a statement accompanying the earnings. "We also plan to bring the Lumia series to additional markets including China and Latin America in the first half of 2012."
Next question: How much has Microsoft benefitted from its Nokia deal?
As a platform, Windows Phone has struggled for adoption in the broader smartphone marketplace, trailing Google Android, Apple iOS, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry franchise. Data from research firm Nielsen suggested that Microsoft owned 7.3 percent of the U.S. smartphone market in the third quarter of 2011, down from 9 percent earlier in the year; much of that decline was due to users abandoning the antiquated Windows Mobile platform, something that Microsoft executives say they anticipated.
While Microsoft regularly declines to provide Windows Phone sales figures, CEO Steve Ballmer described the platform's market share as "very small" during a July 11 keynote speech at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference. Before Nokia began rolling out its first Lumia devices, outsiders estimated total Windows Phone sales at somewhere in the range of 1.4 million to 1.7 million units—the former figure from analyst Horace Dediu, the latter from research firm Gartner (which grouped Windows Mobile into its calculations).
If those analyst numbers are accurate, then Nokia's Lumia sales may have nearly doubled the number of Windows Phone units in consumer hands. Considering the integral role of mobility to Microsoft's overall fortunes—and the lack of a fallback position for either Microsoft or Nokia, in the event of Windows Phone's marketplace demise—that quarterly payout may have been money well-spent.
Monday, January 23, 2012
iPad, Windows 8 Tablets Could Alter the Business Tablet Landscape in 2012
iPad, Windows 8 Tablets Could Alter the Business Tablet Landscape in 2012
SUMMARY: While many enterprises in the past year have turned to Apple's iPad for their business tablet needs, Microsoft is looking to change that in 2012 with its Windows 8...
Published: Tuesday
This article was sent from the eWEEK App.
SUMMARY: While many enterprises in the past year have turned to Apple's iPad for their business tablet needs, Microsoft is looking to change that in 2012 with its Windows 8 operating system.
Despite a host of challengers entering the marketplace throughout 2011, Apple's iPad remained the top choice among consumers and businesses in the market for a tablet. However, 2012 could witness the beginnings of a seismic change in the tablet landscape: If everything proceeds according to rumored schedule, Microsoft will release
Windows 8 on tablets in addition to traditional PCs—forcing Apple into a harder
fight to preserve its dominant market share.
Certainly Apple enters 2012 in a strong position
among business users; according to research firm IHS iSuppli, the company will
hold an estimated 65.6 percent of the global tablet market by the end of the
fourth quarter 2011. During its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, Apple
claimed that 93 percent of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPad.
Meanwhile, Apple's highest-profile rivals for
corporate dollars, including Research In Motion's PlayBook, continue to suffer
from anemic sales. During its Dec. 15 earnings call, RIM executives reported
the company shipped about 150,000 PlayBook tablets during the quarter.
The iPad benefitted from an evolving trend toward
allowing employees to bring their personal devices into their corporation's IT
infrastructure. This is commonly referred to as bring your own device, or BYOD.
But it also came at something of a cost, as IT
administrators scrambled to find a way to integrate the iPad while maintaining
their organization's overall policies.
"A lot of IT administrators wanted to keep the iPad
out of the enterprise, and then they were sort of forced to follow along," Kurt
Roemer, chief security strategist for Citrix Systems, told eWEEK in an
interview. "They needed to find a way to have an acceptable level of security
on a consumer-grade device."
Many of those organizations have solved their
security and compatibility issues, helped in large part by third-party vendors
anxious for their own piece of the burgeoning iPad market. Salesforce.com,
Citrix and other companies all pushed out iOS apps for business users, each
offering their own brand of functionality.
"Tablets are the new way of interacting with
anything," said Peter Coffee, vice president and head of platform research at
Salesforce. "Tablets are not just replacements for PCs. They're a new master
key that we're going to use to unlock data and access function in pretty much
every environment you can imagine."
Those factors combine to make Apple a considerable
opponent for any tablet manufacturer looking to carve off its own piece of the
market in 2012. But Microsoft and its OEMs are going to give it the old-fashioned
college try, with a variety of tablets running Windows 8.
Windows 7 tablets currently have a niche presence—by
the second quarter of 2011, research firm Strategy Analytics pegged their share
at 5 percent of the global market—but businesses whose employees need Windows
applications continue to show interest in them.
"We wanted to find one that was lightweight and easy
to carry," said John Titus, IT manager for Hospice & Palliative Care of
Cape Cod, whose organization has deployed 30 Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 tablets
running Windows 7. Security was also a factor: "All our drives are encrypted;
all these tablets have biometric devices on them," Titus added.
With Windows 8, Microsoft hopes to expand that niche
into something more substantial. While its exact plans remain unconfirmed, Acer
is reportedly planning to release at least one Windows 8 tablet before the end
of 2012. Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman has told the media that her company
(which already produces Windows 7 touch screens) would "certainly" be in the
Windows 8 tablet business.
Acer and HP almost certainly won't be the only ones. The question is whether Microsoft and its Windows operating systems have what it takes to create a blockbuster tablet.
Windows 8's user interface is bifurcated into two separate-but-linked
environments: one filled with colorful tiles linked to applications, supposedly
ideal for tablets, alongside a more traditional desktop familiar to regular
Windows users. The tile interface hews to the same "Metro" design language that
also governs Microsoft's Windows Phone and its newly launched Xbox Live
dashboard; in turn, that has spread rumors that Microsoft will eventually
attempt to unite its disparate platforms into a single, interoperating
ecosystem.
In any case, Microsoft has promised that Windows 8,
most likely due late in 2012, will offer a "no compromises" environment, even
on thin-and-light form-factors such as tablets; if that promise comes to
fruition, then Windows 8 could help further define how tablets are used for productivity
and communication. Certainly some power users and IT administrators would
appreciate the ability to run heavy-duty Windows applications through an
interface more suited to touch than Windows 7.
Microsoft is already ramping up its efforts surrounding the Windows Store, the long-anticipated apps storefront for Windows 8.
"Enterprise developers have been asking about their
path to market with Metro style apps," Ted Dworkin, partner program manager for
the Windows Store, wrote in a Dec. 6 posting on the Windows Store blog. "And,
in turn, IT administrators have been asking about deployment and management
scenarios, such as compliance and security."
In a bid to further appeal to the enterprise-tablet audience, Microsoft will give businesses direct control over app deployment, including the ability to restrict employees from downloading certain apps.
Some analysts seem optimistic about Microsoft's chances in the business tablet space.
"Microsoft, perhaps with the help of Dell, HP and
others, could also make a play for the enterprise tablet market, an area where
Amazon [with its Kindle Fire] and even Apple lack the sales and marketing for
those potential customers," Andrew Eisner, director of community and content
for Retrevo, wrote in a December blog posting.
Others see Microsoft's task as a more complicated one.
"I do think Microsoft can deliver a no-compromises
tablet," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group, "the
question is whether buyers will pay for one and what this will do to laptop and
desktop PC sales where these [tablet-focused] features might not play as well."
Although he thinks Windows 8 tablets won't truly hit
the market in a broad-based way until 2013, "depending on pricing and features,
[Microsoft] could get a late fourth quarter 2012 spike."
Still others think that even 2012 is too late for Microsoft to make a concerted tablet push.
"For tablets… Windows really isn't a fast follower,"
Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder wrote in a Nov. 29 corporate blog posting.
"Rather, it's (at best) a fifth mover after iPad, Android tablets like the
Samsung Galaxy Tab, HP's now-defunct webOS tablet and the BlackBerry Playbook
tablets." In addition, he added, Windows 8 will face pricing pressure from the
cheaper Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook tablet.
Before Windows 8 tablets begin arriving on store
shelves, other tablets will spend 2012 trying to make significant headway
against the iPad. In February, RIM will deliver a long-awaited software update
to the PlayBook, complete with integrated email, a new video store, calendar
and contact apps, and better tethering between the 7-inch tablet and the user's
BlackBerry smartphone.
Whether that will allow the PlayBook to increase its
market share remains to be seen. RIM is planning a new generation of BlackBerry
"superphones" for release in 2012, running a similar QNX-based operating system
to the one present on the PlayBook; presumably, RIM will push its freshly upgraded
tablets as part of its renewed ecosystem.
Research firms estimate that Amazon's Kindle Fire
will swallow up a sizable portion of the Android tablet market in 2012. In a
December report, IHS placed its share at 13.8 percent of the global
media-tablet market, well ahead of Samsung (4.8 percent) and HTC (1.3 percent).
The $199 Kindle Fire is first and foremost a portable vending machine for
Amazon's e-books and streaming content. Although it can store and display
documents, and run productivity apps through Amazon's Android apps storefront,
it is being marketed primarily as a consumer device. Therefore, even as the
device snatches up millions of consumer dollars, it seems unlikely that IT
administrators and procurements specialists will run to buy it in bulk for
employee use.
Samsung, Motorola and other Android tablet makers
will, meanwhile, continue to fight for their own share of the business. A
growing collection of productivity apps makes Android a more viable platform
for businesses, and analysts predict that Android's overall market share will
increase in 2012. However, the next version of the iPad—which, if Apple holds
to its release cadence, will appear early in the year—could force those various
Android manufacturers into playing another round of catch-up against an
aggressive competitor.
Despite a host of challengers entering the marketplace throughout 2011, Apple's iPad remained the top choice among consumers and businesses in the market for a tablet. However, 2012 could witness the beginnings of a seismic change in the tablet landscape: If everything proceeds according to rumored schedule, Microsoft will release
Windows 8 on tablets in addition to traditional PCs—forcing Apple into a harder
fight to preserve its dominant market share.
Certainly Apple enters 2012 in a strong position
among business users; according to research firm IHS iSuppli, the company will
hold an estimated 65.6 percent of the global tablet market by the end of the
fourth quarter 2011. During its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, Apple
claimed that 93 percent of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPad.
Meanwhile, Apple's highest-profile rivals for
corporate dollars, including Research In Motion's PlayBook, continue to suffer
from anemic sales. During its Dec. 15 earnings call, RIM executives reported
the company shipped about 150,000 PlayBook tablets during the quarter.
The iPad benefitted from an evolving trend toward
allowing employees to bring their personal devices into their corporation's IT
infrastructure. This is commonly referred to as bring your own device, or BYOD.
But it also came at something of a cost, as IT
administrators scrambled to find a way to integrate the iPad while maintaining
their organization's overall policies.
"A lot of IT administrators wanted to keep the iPad
out of the enterprise, and then they were sort of forced to follow along," Kurt
Roemer, chief security strategist for Citrix Systems, told eWEEK in an
interview. "They needed to find a way to have an acceptable level of security
on a consumer-grade device."
Many of those organizations have solved their
security and compatibility issues, helped in large part by third-party vendors
anxious for their own piece of the burgeoning iPad market. Salesforce.com,
Citrix and other companies all pushed out iOS apps for business users, each
offering their own brand of functionality.
"Tablets are the new way of interacting with
anything," said Peter Coffee, vice president and head of platform research at
Salesforce. "Tablets are not just replacements for PCs. They're a new master
key that we're going to use to unlock data and access function in pretty much
every environment you can imagine."
Those factors combine to make Apple a considerable
opponent for any tablet manufacturer looking to carve off its own piece of the
market in 2012. But Microsoft and its OEMs are going to give it the old-fashioned
college try, with a variety of tablets running Windows 8.
Windows 7 tablets currently have a niche presence—by
the second quarter of 2011, research firm Strategy Analytics pegged their share
at 5 percent of the global market—but businesses whose employees need Windows
applications continue to show interest in them.
"We wanted to find one that was lightweight and easy
to carry," said John Titus, IT manager for Hospice & Palliative Care of
Cape Cod, whose organization has deployed 30 Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 tablets
running Windows 7. Security was also a factor: "All our drives are encrypted;
all these tablets have biometric devices on them," Titus added.
With Windows 8, Microsoft hopes to expand that niche
into something more substantial. While its exact plans remain unconfirmed, Acer
is reportedly planning to release at least one Windows 8 tablet before the end
of 2012. Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman has told the media that her company
(which already produces Windows 7 touch screens) would "certainly" be in the
Windows 8 tablet business.
Acer and HP almost certainly won't be the only ones. The question is whether Microsoft and its Windows operating systems have what it takes to create a blockbuster tablet.
Windows 8's user interface is bifurcated into two separate-but-linked
environments: one filled with colorful tiles linked to applications, supposedly
ideal for tablets, alongside a more traditional desktop familiar to regular
Windows users. The tile interface hews to the same "Metro" design language that
also governs Microsoft's Windows Phone and its newly launched Xbox Live
dashboard; in turn, that has spread rumors that Microsoft will eventually
attempt to unite its disparate platforms into a single, interoperating
ecosystem.
In any case, Microsoft has promised that Windows 8,
most likely due late in 2012, will offer a "no compromises" environment, even
on thin-and-light form-factors such as tablets; if that promise comes to
fruition, then Windows 8 could help further define how tablets are used for productivity
and communication. Certainly some power users and IT administrators would
appreciate the ability to run heavy-duty Windows applications through an
interface more suited to touch than Windows 7.
Microsoft is already ramping up its efforts surrounding the Windows Store, the long-anticipated apps storefront for Windows 8.
"Enterprise developers have been asking about their
path to market with Metro style apps," Ted Dworkin, partner program manager for
the Windows Store, wrote in a Dec. 6 posting on the Windows Store blog. "And,
in turn, IT administrators have been asking about deployment and management
scenarios, such as compliance and security."
In a bid to further appeal to the enterprise-tablet audience, Microsoft will give businesses direct control over app deployment, including the ability to restrict employees from downloading certain apps.
Some analysts seem optimistic about Microsoft's chances in the business tablet space.
"Microsoft, perhaps with the help of Dell, HP and
others, could also make a play for the enterprise tablet market, an area where
Amazon [with its Kindle Fire] and even Apple lack the sales and marketing for
those potential customers," Andrew Eisner, director of community and content
for Retrevo, wrote in a December blog posting.
Others see Microsoft's task as a more complicated one.
"I do think Microsoft can deliver a no-compromises
tablet," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group, "the
question is whether buyers will pay for one and what this will do to laptop and
desktop PC sales where these [tablet-focused] features might not play as well."
Although he thinks Windows 8 tablets won't truly hit
the market in a broad-based way until 2013, "depending on pricing and features,
[Microsoft] could get a late fourth quarter 2012 spike."
Still others think that even 2012 is too late for Microsoft to make a concerted tablet push.
"For tablets… Windows really isn't a fast follower,"
Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder wrote in a Nov. 29 corporate blog posting.
"Rather, it's (at best) a fifth mover after iPad, Android tablets like the
Samsung Galaxy Tab, HP's now-defunct webOS tablet and the BlackBerry Playbook
tablets." In addition, he added, Windows 8 will face pricing pressure from the
cheaper Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook tablet.
Before Windows 8 tablets begin arriving on store
shelves, other tablets will spend 2012 trying to make significant headway
against the iPad. In February, RIM will deliver a long-awaited software update
to the PlayBook, complete with integrated email, a new video store, calendar
and contact apps, and better tethering between the 7-inch tablet and the user's
BlackBerry smartphone.
Whether that will allow the PlayBook to increase its
market share remains to be seen. RIM is planning a new generation of BlackBerry
"superphones" for release in 2012, running a similar QNX-based operating system
to the one present on the PlayBook; presumably, RIM will push its freshly upgraded
tablets as part of its renewed ecosystem.
Research firms estimate that Amazon's Kindle Fire
will swallow up a sizable portion of the Android tablet market in 2012. In a
December report, IHS placed its share at 13.8 percent of the global
media-tablet market, well ahead of Samsung (4.8 percent) and HTC (1.3 percent).
The $199 Kindle Fire is first and foremost a portable vending machine for
Amazon's e-books and streaming content. Although it can store and display
documents, and run productivity apps through Amazon's Android apps storefront,
it is being marketed primarily as a consumer device. Therefore, even as the
device snatches up millions of consumer dollars, it seems unlikely that IT
administrators and procurements specialists will run to buy it in bulk for
employee use.
Samsung, Motorola and other Android tablet makers
will, meanwhile, continue to fight for their own share of the business. A
growing collection of productivity apps makes Android a more viable platform
for businesses, and analysts predict that Android's overall market share will
increase in 2012. However, the next version of the iPad—which, if Apple holds
to its release cadence, will appear early in the year—could force those various
Android manufacturers into playing another round of catch-up against an
aggressive competitor.
Amazon Web Services Launches DynamoDB, a New NoSQL Database Service
Amazon Web Services Launches DynamoDB, a New NoSQL Database Service
SUMMARY: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a new NoSQL database service known as DynamoDB that delivers fast and predictable performance with all the scalability you can ask for. Amazon Web...
Published: Wednesday
This article was sent from the eWEEK App.
SUMMARY: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a new NoSQL database service known as DynamoDB that delivers fast and predictable performance with all the scalability you can ask for.
Amazon Web Services has again delivered key technology to keep itself ahead of the cloud computing pack with a new high-performance, highly scalable NoSQL database service known as DynamoDB.
AWS quietly keeps delivering new capabilities that help its customers out of jams and continue to confound its competitors. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability, said Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing, sales, product management and support at AWS.
With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a new DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, partitioning, or cluster scaling. To get started with Amazon DynamoDB, visit www.aws.amazon.com/DynamoDB.
"Scaling a database is as easy for a developer as turning up a dial to add database capacity seamlessly or to remove it by turning the dial down again," Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, told eWEEK. "That's it. You tell the service the number of requests it has to handle per second, and it does the rest automatically. So we spread the data across enough hardware to provide consistent performance, which also protects against downtime. Before DynamoDB, this was something developers actually had to manage themselves."
Unlike DynamoDB, traditional databases are not designed to scale to the performance needs of modern applications, which can experience explosive growth and cause a single database to quickly reach its capacity limits. Mitigating this by distributing a workload across multiple database servers is complex and requires significant engineering expertise and time investment by application developers. Amazon DynamoDB addresses the problem of scalability by automatically partitioning and repartitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding applications. Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB's pay-as-you-go pricing enables customers to "dial in" and pay for only the resources they need.
"Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology," Vogels said in a statement. "Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we've learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS.
"Customers can now remove the operational headaches of managing distributed systems and deploy a non-relational database in a matter of minutes. DynamoDB automatically scales to enterprise needs, and is designed for rapid performance no matter the size of the database. Amazon DynamoDB is already in use by many teams and products within Amazon, including the Amazon.com advertising platform, Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb and Kindle."
Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale, and customers typically enjoy single-digit millisecond latencies for database read and write operations. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on solid-state drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability. Businesses can get started with Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that provides 100MB of storage, and five writes and 10 reads per second (up to 40 million requests per month) free of charge, Selipsky said.
Of the new technology, Vogels added: "It's not only about scalability, it's also about performance—it is fast. In the past if database architects and database administrators needed to guarantee the performance of their applications, they needed to buy extremely expensive hardware to be able to scale up or go scale out and do partitioning and things like that, which introduce tremendous complexity. Now, within DynamoDB we've done a lot of innovation to make sure one can make use of ADB at this massive scale to automatically spread data across enough hardware to deliver this consistently fast performance."
Moreover, "Customers should expect single-digit millisecond response times," Vogels told eWEEK. "We are pretty stoked about this one. This is something that our customers have been asking for, for quite a while.
"There are a few big customer groups looking for this: those that already use NoSQL solutions and want a solution that's completely managed and they no longer have to manage the software and the hardware for it. Then there's the group that's coming out of enterprises with data architects that always wanted to start experimenting with or using a NoSQL solution, but just the task of installing software, managing hardware and things like that was too daunting for them. So we take a barrier away for enterprise adoption of NoSQL as well. Then a third big category of customers that have been asking for a solution like this are the ones in the big data area, where they need a very fast key value store that is able to provide them with very high throughput for their big data applications."
Selipsky said Amazon DynamoDB also integrates with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Amazon EMR allows businesses to perform complex analytics of their large datasets using a hosted pay-as-you-go Hadoop framework on AWS. With the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, it is easy for customers to use Amazon EMR to analyze datasets stored in DynamoDB, archive the results in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while keeping the original dataset in DynamoDB intact. Businesses can also use Amazon EMR to access data in multiple stores (i.e., Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS and Amazon S3), do complex analysis over this combined dataset and store the results of this work in Amazon S3.
"A lot of what we've been doing at AWS for years has been trying to help developers spend less time with the complex management of infrastructure that is not necessarily differentiating to their businesses," Selipsky said. "Nowhere is that need more pressing than in the area of databases. Databases traditionally involve a lot of complexity and difficulty in scaling workloads, and incurring a lot of costs or involving downtime for applications. So DynamoDB is aimed squarely at removing all of that muck and providing very predictable performance and high scalability, all without requiring any intervention or management from customers. And the customers we've been working with are excited about that."
"Elsevier is a $3 billion enterprise that provides science and health information to more than 30 million scientists, students and medical professionals worldwide," said Darren Person, chief architect of Elsevier, in a statement. "Each year we publish thousands of books, nearly 2,000 journals and more than 250,000 articles, which means our datasets are constantly and rapidly changing. We are always evaluating new technologies that will enable us to handle our large, varying workloads. Operating a distributed data store on our own is orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive to manage than traditional databases. DynamoDB delivers a high-performance service that can be easily scaled up or down to meet our needs, helping us eliminate complexity and lower costs."
"DynamoDB is a truly revolutionary product which allows SmugMug to finally realize its goal of being 100% cloud-based," added Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, in a statement. "I love how DynamoDB enables us to provision our desired throughput, and achieve low latency and seamless scale, even with our constantly growing workloads. Even though we have years of experience with large, complex architectures, we are happy to be finally out of the business of managing it ourselves, and to be using DynamoDB to get even higher performance and stability than we can achieve on our own. Most importantly, DynamoDB allows SmugMug to spend even more time and energy on what really matters—our product and customer experience."
"DynamoDB solves our problem of distributing and storing high-volume writes in a straightforward and cost-effective way," said Rob Storrs, head of engineering at Formspring, in a statement. "Our rapid growth meant that we were spending significant resources managing our own large-scale database systems. DynamoDB gives us low latency and easy scalability, which allows us to keep our costs low and our engineers focused on building what our customers want. It's another example of AWS listening to their customers and building services that solve real problems."
"Prior to Amazon DynamoDB, many of our customers were forced to spend weeks forecasting, planning, and preparing their database deployments to perform well at peak loads," said Raju Gulabani, vice president of Database Services at AWS, in a statement. "DynamoDB makes those processes obsolete. Now businesses can quickly add capacity with a few clicks in the management console. During our private beta, we saw customers successfully scale up from 100s of writes per second to over 100,000 writes per second without having to change a single line of code. This level of elasticity, coupled with consistent performance, reduces the cost and the risk of building a fast-growing application."
As mentioned earlier, Vogels said DynamoDB is the result of 15 years of learning. More specifically, it is related to an internal technology known as Dynamo that the company began writing about seven or eight years ago, Vogels said. DynamoDB is a follow-on to that research with input from some others areas, he said.
Amazon Web Services has again delivered key technology to keep itself ahead of the cloud computing pack with a new high-performance, highly scalable NoSQL database service known as DynamoDB.
AWS quietly keeps delivering new capabilities that help its customers out of jams and continue to confound its competitors. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability, said Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing, sales, product management and support at AWS.
With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a new DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, partitioning, or cluster scaling. To get started with Amazon DynamoDB, visit www.aws.amazon.com/DynamoDB.
"Scaling a database is as easy for a developer as turning up a dial to add database capacity seamlessly or to remove it by turning the dial down again," Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, told eWEEK. "That's it. You tell the service the number of requests it has to handle per second, and it does the rest automatically. So we spread the data across enough hardware to provide consistent performance, which also protects against downtime. Before DynamoDB, this was something developers actually had to manage themselves."
Unlike DynamoDB, traditional databases are not designed to scale to the performance needs of modern applications, which can experience explosive growth and cause a single database to quickly reach its capacity limits. Mitigating this by distributing a workload across multiple database servers is complex and requires significant engineering expertise and time investment by application developers. Amazon DynamoDB addresses the problem of scalability by automatically partitioning and repartitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding applications. Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB's pay-as-you-go pricing enables customers to "dial in" and pay for only the resources they need.
"Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology," Vogels said in a statement. "Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we've learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS.
"Customers can now remove the operational headaches of managing distributed systems and deploy a non-relational database in a matter of minutes. DynamoDB automatically scales to enterprise needs, and is designed for rapid performance no matter the size of the database. Amazon DynamoDB is already in use by many teams and products within Amazon, including the Amazon.com advertising platform, Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb and Kindle."
Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale, and customers typically enjoy single-digit millisecond latencies for database read and write operations. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on solid-state drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability. Businesses can get started with Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that provides 100MB of storage, and five writes and 10 reads per second (up to 40 million requests per month) free of charge, Selipsky said.
Of the new technology, Vogels added: "It's not only about scalability, it's also about performance—it is fast. In the past if database architects and database administrators needed to guarantee the performance of their applications, they needed to buy extremely expensive hardware to be able to scale up or go scale out and do partitioning and things like that, which introduce tremendous complexity. Now, within DynamoDB we've done a lot of innovation to make sure one can make use of ADB at this massive scale to automatically spread data across enough hardware to deliver this consistently fast performance."
Moreover, "Customers should expect single-digit millisecond response times," Vogels told eWEEK. "We are pretty stoked about this one. This is something that our customers have been asking for, for quite a while.
"There are a few big customer groups looking for this: those that already use NoSQL solutions and want a solution that's completely managed and they no longer have to manage the software and the hardware for it. Then there's the group that's coming out of enterprises with data architects that always wanted to start experimenting with or using a NoSQL solution, but just the task of installing software, managing hardware and things like that was too daunting for them. So we take a barrier away for enterprise adoption of NoSQL as well. Then a third big category of customers that have been asking for a solution like this are the ones in the big data area, where they need a very fast key value store that is able to provide them with very high throughput for their big data applications."
Selipsky said Amazon DynamoDB also integrates with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Amazon EMR allows businesses to perform complex analytics of their large datasets using a hosted pay-as-you-go Hadoop framework on AWS. With the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, it is easy for customers to use Amazon EMR to analyze datasets stored in DynamoDB, archive the results in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while keeping the original dataset in DynamoDB intact. Businesses can also use Amazon EMR to access data in multiple stores (i.e., Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS and Amazon S3), do complex analysis over this combined dataset and store the results of this work in Amazon S3.
"A lot of what we've been doing at AWS for years has been trying to help developers spend less time with the complex management of infrastructure that is not necessarily differentiating to their businesses," Selipsky said. "Nowhere is that need more pressing than in the area of databases. Databases traditionally involve a lot of complexity and difficulty in scaling workloads, and incurring a lot of costs or involving downtime for applications. So DynamoDB is aimed squarely at removing all of that muck and providing very predictable performance and high scalability, all without requiring any intervention or management from customers. And the customers we've been working with are excited about that."
"Elsevier is a $3 billion enterprise that provides science and health information to more than 30 million scientists, students and medical professionals worldwide," said Darren Person, chief architect of Elsevier, in a statement. "Each year we publish thousands of books, nearly 2,000 journals and more than 250,000 articles, which means our datasets are constantly and rapidly changing. We are always evaluating new technologies that will enable us to handle our large, varying workloads. Operating a distributed data store on our own is orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive to manage than traditional databases. DynamoDB delivers a high-performance service that can be easily scaled up or down to meet our needs, helping us eliminate complexity and lower costs."
"DynamoDB is a truly revolutionary product which allows SmugMug to finally realize its goal of being 100% cloud-based," added Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, in a statement. "I love how DynamoDB enables us to provision our desired throughput, and achieve low latency and seamless scale, even with our constantly growing workloads. Even though we have years of experience with large, complex architectures, we are happy to be finally out of the business of managing it ourselves, and to be using DynamoDB to get even higher performance and stability than we can achieve on our own. Most importantly, DynamoDB allows SmugMug to spend even more time and energy on what really matters—our product and customer experience."
"DynamoDB solves our problem of distributing and storing high-volume writes in a straightforward and cost-effective way," said Rob Storrs, head of engineering at Formspring, in a statement. "Our rapid growth meant that we were spending significant resources managing our own large-scale database systems. DynamoDB gives us low latency and easy scalability, which allows us to keep our costs low and our engineers focused on building what our customers want. It's another example of AWS listening to their customers and building services that solve real problems."
"Prior to Amazon DynamoDB, many of our customers were forced to spend weeks forecasting, planning, and preparing their database deployments to perform well at peak loads," said Raju Gulabani, vice president of Database Services at AWS, in a statement. "DynamoDB makes those processes obsolete. Now businesses can quickly add capacity with a few clicks in the management console. During our private beta, we saw customers successfully scale up from 100s of writes per second to over 100,000 writes per second without having to change a single line of code. This level of elasticity, coupled with consistent performance, reduces the cost and the risk of building a fast-growing application."
As mentioned earlier, Vogels said DynamoDB is the result of 15 years of learning. More specifically, it is related to an internal technology known as Dynamo that the company began writing about seven or eight years ago, Vogels said. DynamoDB is a follow-on to that research with input from some others areas, he said.
Linux Adoption Grows on Big Data, Cloud, Virtualization: Survey
Linux Adoption Grows on Big Data, Cloud, Virtualization: Survey
SUMMARY: A new Linux Foundation survey on enterprise adoption of Linux indicates that growth in Linux usage is being driven by factors such as big data, cloud computing and virtualization,...
Published: Thursday
This article was sent from the eWEEK App.
SUMMARY: A new Linux Foundation survey on enterprise adoption of Linux indicates that growth in Linux usage is being driven by factors such as big data, cloud computing and virtualization, among others.
Linux is poised for continued growth among new and existing users thanks to lower total cost of ownership, technical features and security, among other reasons, according a recent Linux Foundation survey.
The January 2012 report from the Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technology Group titled "Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users" claims that affinity among new and veteran Linux users continues to increase at the expense of Windows and Unix. Eighty-four percent of organizations currently using Linux have expanded its usage over the last 12 months and continue to rely on it as their preferred platform for "Greenfield" deployments, as well as for mission-critical applications.
According to the Linux Foundation, part of this growth is due to Linux's role in two of today's biggest IT trends: supporting the increasing level of big data and achieving productivity and security gains with virtualization and cloud computing. Enterprise Linux users show steady progress on all of these fronts and a clear preference for Linux as the foundation for these trends.
Indeed, the survey showed that once enterprises deploy Linux, they stick with Linux and plan to add more Linux because the platform provides sustainable benefits that include a broad feature set, security, cost-savings and flexibility. Linux also supports the next generation of computing, supporting growing levels of data, cloud computing and virtualization. "We also expect to see it support the social enterprise, energy-efficiency projects and an increasingly connected world in the year ahead," the report said.
Although the foundation polled 1,893 enterprise Linux users, the results of this survey were based on responses from 428 IT professionals from organizations with $500 million or more a year in revenue or 500-plus employees. The vast majority, 65.6 percent, identified themselves as IT staff or developers and represented a wide range of industries. Users from the United States and Canada made up 41.6 percent of the respondents, 27.1 percent were from Europe, and 15.2 percent from Asia.
The survey also showed that eight out of 10 respondents say that they have both added Linux servers in the last 12 months and plan to add more in the next 12 months, with the same number planning to add more Linux in the next five years. Only 21.7 percent of respondents said they are planning an increase in Windows servers during that same period—the next five years.
In addition, more than 75 percent of respondents expressed concern about big data, and nearly 72 percent are choosing Linux to support it. Most enterprises expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it. Only 35.9 percent are planning to use Windows to meet the demands of this new environment.
Moreover, Linux users said they see fewer issues impeding the operating system's success. Technical issues cited by Linux users dropped 40 percent, from 20.3 percent in 2010 to 12.2 percent today. Twenty-two percent fewer respondents cited perception by management as an issue, and 10 percent fewer said there are no issues at all impeding the success of Linux.
According to the survey, the top driver for enterprise users adopting Linux was lower total cost of ownership at 70 percent. Second was features and technical superiority at 68.6 percent. And third was security, with 63.6 percent of respondents citing it as their main reason for moving to Linux.
Cloud computing is another growth area for Linux users. For 2012 there is a 34 percent increase in organizations migrating some of their applications to cloud-based computing. Indeed, all told, 61 percent of organizations now cite cloud-based applications, whether public, private or hybrid.
Of those users in the cloud, 66 percent are using Linux as their primary platform, up 4.7 percent from last year. Going forward, 34.9 percent of organizations are planning to migrate more applications to the cloud, up from 26 percent last year.
Virtualization on x86 platforms also continues to rise. The survey showed that 72 percent of organizations said they expect to have 25 percent or more of their servers virtualized by this year's end. More than 46 percent of organizations expect to have 50 percent or more of their platforms virtualized by the end of 2012, an 18 percent increase over 2011.
However, there remain some issues with Linux adoption. For instance, 39.6 percent of respondents said perception issues by their management are an impediment to having more Linux success in their organization.
"When asked what factors were impeding Linux from having more success in their organizations, we found that technical concerns among respondents dropped 40 percent, from 20.3 percent in 2010 to 12.2 percent today," the report said. "Twenty-two percent fewer respondents cite perception by management as an issue—though this remains the number one concern among respondents—and 10 percent fewer say there are no issues at all impeding the success of Linux."
And despite the glowing news of increased adoption, survey respondents cited several remaining concerns about Linux: 35.3 percent cited interoperability with other platforms/applications as a concern, 32.5 percent cited the ability to find talent to support Linux as another concern, and 30.6 percent cited driver availability. Other concerns included fragmentation, legal issues and compliance, dominance of a single vendor, and lack of native features.
Linux is poised for continued growth among new and existing users thanks to lower total cost of ownership, technical features and security, among other reasons, according a recent Linux Foundation survey.
The January 2012 report from the Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technology Group titled "Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users" claims that affinity among new and veteran Linux users continues to increase at the expense of Windows and Unix. Eighty-four percent of organizations currently using Linux have expanded its usage over the last 12 months and continue to rely on it as their preferred platform for "Greenfield" deployments, as well as for mission-critical applications.
According to the Linux Foundation, part of this growth is due to Linux's role in two of today's biggest IT trends: supporting the increasing level of big data and achieving productivity and security gains with virtualization and cloud computing. Enterprise Linux users show steady progress on all of these fronts and a clear preference for Linux as the foundation for these trends.
Indeed, the survey showed that once enterprises deploy Linux, they stick with Linux and plan to add more Linux because the platform provides sustainable benefits that include a broad feature set, security, cost-savings and flexibility. Linux also supports the next generation of computing, supporting growing levels of data, cloud computing and virtualization. "We also expect to see it support the social enterprise, energy-efficiency projects and an increasingly connected world in the year ahead," the report said.
Although the foundation polled 1,893 enterprise Linux users, the results of this survey were based on responses from 428 IT professionals from organizations with $500 million or more a year in revenue or 500-plus employees. The vast majority, 65.6 percent, identified themselves as IT staff or developers and represented a wide range of industries. Users from the United States and Canada made up 41.6 percent of the respondents, 27.1 percent were from Europe, and 15.2 percent from Asia.
The survey also showed that eight out of 10 respondents say that they have both added Linux servers in the last 12 months and plan to add more in the next 12 months, with the same number planning to add more Linux in the next five years. Only 21.7 percent of respondents said they are planning an increase in Windows servers during that same period—the next five years.
In addition, more than 75 percent of respondents expressed concern about big data, and nearly 72 percent are choosing Linux to support it. Most enterprises expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it. Only 35.9 percent are planning to use Windows to meet the demands of this new environment.
Moreover, Linux users said they see fewer issues impeding the operating system's success. Technical issues cited by Linux users dropped 40 percent, from 20.3 percent in 2010 to 12.2 percent today. Twenty-two percent fewer respondents cited perception by management as an issue, and 10 percent fewer said there are no issues at all impeding the success of Linux.
According to the survey, the top driver for enterprise users adopting Linux was lower total cost of ownership at 70 percent. Second was features and technical superiority at 68.6 percent. And third was security, with 63.6 percent of respondents citing it as their main reason for moving to Linux.
Cloud computing is another growth area for Linux users. For 2012 there is a 34 percent increase in organizations migrating some of their applications to cloud-based computing. Indeed, all told, 61 percent of organizations now cite cloud-based applications, whether public, private or hybrid.
Of those users in the cloud, 66 percent are using Linux as their primary platform, up 4.7 percent from last year. Going forward, 34.9 percent of organizations are planning to migrate more applications to the cloud, up from 26 percent last year.
Virtualization on x86 platforms also continues to rise. The survey showed that 72 percent of organizations said they expect to have 25 percent or more of their servers virtualized by this year's end. More than 46 percent of organizations expect to have 50 percent or more of their platforms virtualized by the end of 2012, an 18 percent increase over 2011.
However, there remain some issues with Linux adoption. For instance, 39.6 percent of respondents said perception issues by their management are an impediment to having more Linux success in their organization.
"When asked what factors were impeding Linux from having more success in their organizations, we found that technical concerns among respondents dropped 40 percent, from 20.3 percent in 2010 to 12.2 percent today," the report said. "Twenty-two percent fewer respondents cite perception by management as an issue—though this remains the number one concern among respondents—and 10 percent fewer say there are no issues at all impeding the success of Linux."
And despite the glowing news of increased adoption, survey respondents cited several remaining concerns about Linux: 35.3 percent cited interoperability with other platforms/applications as a concern, 32.5 percent cited the ability to find talent to support Linux as another concern, and 30.6 percent cited driver availability. Other concerns included fragmentation, legal issues and compliance, dominance of a single vendor, and lack of native features.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
2012: A Cloudy Year for Big Data
2012: A Cloudy Year for Big Data
SUMMARY: "Convergence" is the word as big data moves further into the cloud and into the reach of small and midsize enterprises. Truth be told, big data is not a...
Published: Monday
This article was sent from the eWEEK App.
SUMMARY: "Convergence" is the word as big data moves further into the cloud and into the reach of small and midsize enterprises.
Truth be told, big data is not a big or new concept.
The ideology behind big data has been around since the early days of mainframes and scientific computing. What is new about big data is the term itself, which has become part of the nomenclature of today's business speak. Still, for most of its existence, big data has been out of the reach of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) because the storage and processing power needed to make this technology work is too expensive.
The cloud is changing that by bringing the necessary big data components to the masses in the form of hosted solutions. These new cloud-based capabilities are on a growth path and are creating more opportunities for even the smallest of businesses to leverage big data without the traditional expenses of compute farms and massive storage arrays.
Big data analytics comprises three primary elements: volumes of unstructured data, processing power and algorithms. Naturally, the biggest challenge for SMBs is the data itself—finding it, storing it and accessing it.
For it to be true big data, there has to be lots of it, and most SMBs don't generate that volume of data internally, which leads them to seek out alternative data sources. Here, the cloud delivers.
There are several large public data sets that are readily available, containing all types of information, including data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the World Bank and general public data from Google.
Additional data is available from several government agencies, such as Data.gov, while data-focused sites that span everything from Web traffic to social networking can be found in the likes of Crunchbase.com, Kasabi.com, Freebase.com, Infochimps.com and Kaggle.com. These Websites offer a variety of data types for use in analytics.
Throughout 2012, those data sets and others can be expected to grow exponentially. The amount of data being generated globally increases by 40 percent a year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, a data analytics research firm.
However, data is only part of the equation. All this information needs to be organized, sorted and processed, and that takes computing power.
Once again, cloud services can deliver those capabilities. A key example is Amazon's Cluster Compute, a cloud-based supercomputer that offers this service.
Amazon isn't the only one in the game: Companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard are offering private cloud-based big data analytics platforms. However, since this technology is designed as a complete platform and not as a service, these platforms are still out of the reach of the SMB market.
Other companies are looking to fill that void by offering on-demand analytic solutions that can process big data and deliver results quickly and inexpensively. A case in point is Aster Data, which offers a cloud-based, on-demand analytics platform, along with appliance-based and software analytics products. Another company looking to bring big data analytics into the cloud is 1010Data, which has developed a completely hosted big data analytics platform.
Still other firms are developing the momentum to convert big data analytics into cloud services. The most notable of these ventures is Splunk, which is known for software that analyzes large volumes of machine data. The company is currently working on Splunk Storm, a data analytics platform designed for cloud developers to build multitenant solutions. That way, the high costs of big data analytics can be spread out among multiple customers, creating an economy of scale that will increase in affordability over time.
Truth be told, big data is not a big or new concept.
The ideology behind big data has been around since the early days of mainframes and scientific computing. What is new about big data is the term itself, which has become part of the nomenclature of today's business speak. Still, for most of its existence, big data has been out of the reach of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) because the storage and processing power needed to make this technology work is too expensive.
The cloud is changing that by bringing the necessary big data components to the masses in the form of hosted solutions. These new cloud-based capabilities are on a growth path and are creating more opportunities for even the smallest of businesses to leverage big data without the traditional expenses of compute farms and massive storage arrays.
Big data analytics comprises three primary elements: volumes of unstructured data, processing power and algorithms. Naturally, the biggest challenge for SMBs is the data itself—finding it, storing it and accessing it.
For it to be true big data, there has to be lots of it, and most SMBs don't generate that volume of data internally, which leads them to seek out alternative data sources. Here, the cloud delivers.
There are several large public data sets that are readily available, containing all types of information, including data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the World Bank and general public data from Google.
Additional data is available from several government agencies, such as Data.gov, while data-focused sites that span everything from Web traffic to social networking can be found in the likes of Crunchbase.com, Kasabi.com, Freebase.com, Infochimps.com and Kaggle.com. These Websites offer a variety of data types for use in analytics.
Throughout 2012, those data sets and others can be expected to grow exponentially. The amount of data being generated globally increases by 40 percent a year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, a data analytics research firm.
However, data is only part of the equation. All this information needs to be organized, sorted and processed, and that takes computing power.
Once again, cloud services can deliver those capabilities. A key example is Amazon's Cluster Compute, a cloud-based supercomputer that offers this service.
Amazon isn't the only one in the game: Companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard are offering private cloud-based big data analytics platforms. However, since this technology is designed as a complete platform and not as a service, these platforms are still out of the reach of the SMB market.
Other companies are looking to fill that void by offering on-demand analytic solutions that can process big data and deliver results quickly and inexpensively. A case in point is Aster Data, which offers a cloud-based, on-demand analytics platform, along with appliance-based and software analytics products. Another company looking to bring big data analytics into the cloud is 1010Data, which has developed a completely hosted big data analytics platform.
Still other firms are developing the momentum to convert big data analytics into cloud services. The most notable of these ventures is Splunk, which is known for software that analyzes large volumes of machine data. The company is currently working on Splunk Storm, a data analytics platform designed for cloud developers to build multitenant solutions. That way, the high costs of big data analytics can be spread out among multiple customers, creating an economy of scale that will increase in affordability over time.
Top 10 Wireless Industry Predictions for 2012
Top 10 Wireless Industry Predictions for 2012
NEWS ANALYSIS: Once again, Wayne Rash fearlessly predicts what will happen in the mobile and wireless industry in 2012, or in some cases, what won't happen, which might be more...
Published: December 30
This article was sent from the eWEEK App.
NEWS ANALYSIS: Once again, Wayne Rash fearlessly predicts what will happen in the mobile and wireless industry in 2012, or in some cases, what won't happen, which might be more interesting.
For those of us who write about the wireless industry, 2011 was a busy, and sometimes annoying, year. We got to read hundreds of pages of court documents and FCC pleadings for the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile, which fortunately never happened.
We got to see 4G LTE finally get rolling, at least with Verizon Wireless. And of course we got to see LightSquared claim, with an apparently straight face, that it's perfectly OK for them to destroy the entire GPS industry just so they could sell LTE to carriers. But will 2012 be any better? Of course not.
1. AT& T will deploy 4G LTE country wide
AT&T will field 4G LTE on a national basis, proving that it was lying about needing T-Mobile all along. In fact, AT&T has already started lighting up a few cities with LTE, and now that it's closed the spectrum deal with Qualcomm, the pace should increase. The truth is that T-Mobile had nothing to offer AT&T's LTE plans. The whole thing was a sham so they could take out their low-price competition.
2. T-Mobile will find new partners to expand business
T-Mobile USA will find a new partner to help it grow its business. While it will get some spectrum that it badly needs from AT&T's break-up deal with Deutsche Telekom, it probably won't see any of the breakup fees DT expects to get from AT&T. DT has so many intractable legal problems that it needs all of the money it can get its hands on. Will DT sell T-Mobile USA? Probably not, unless some buyer with tons of money and no potential antitrust conflicts comes along. After all, T-Mobile USA is DT's most profitable foreign operation. Who will that new partner be? Maybe Dish Network and maybe there will be a marketing arrangement with AT&T.
3. No roaming on competing carriers' LTE networks
LTE will remain proprietary, despite the lack of any technical justification. The carriers currently fielding LTE could give their devices the ability to roam on each other's network, but they won't. It's all about marketing and who can claim the best 4G service, despite the fact that they're all basically the same.
4. LightSquared wireless data service is doomed
LightSquared will not be allowed to launch its GPS killing data service. Opposition from the military will ensure it won't happen and the suggestions from LightSquared that the Pentagon could keep GPS interference to a minimum with just a simple upgrade will fall on deaf ears in a time of Pentagon budget cutbacks. Besides, this would mean having to retrofit every one of those GPS-guided smart bombs, cruise missiles, drones and other devices. Unless the military weapons people can be absolutely certain that GPS interference won't cause a drone to launch a Hellfire missile into school instead of a group of terrorists, it's not going to happen. Furthermore the civilian GPS industry will lobby relentlessly against the LightSquared plan, which will encourage Congress to keep a close eye on the issue.
5. Nokia Windows Phone 7 handsets will catch on–overseas
Nokia and Windows Phone 7 will start to blossom, but in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East where people need smartphones; where Nokia has a huge installed base; and where nobody can afford an iPhone. Sales will pick up in the U.S., too, but not like sales overseas. Around the end of 2012, Microsoft will start throwing serious marketing money at WP7 wherever there are signs of sales momentum. Despite rumors, Microsoft will not buy Nokia.
6. Look for a 7-inch Apple tablet early in the year
Apple will release a 7-inch (or thereabouts) version of the iPad. Now that Amazon is selling a million 7-inch tablets a week, it's clear that the market exists. While Steve Jobs ridiculed 7-inch tablets before he died, he's not around anymore and Apple executives are smart enough to know a hot market when they see one. Besides, a 7-inch tablet is the perfect size for a lot of tasks where an iPad is just too big. The announcement will be early in the year when the iPad 3 is announced, and the new 7-inch version might not be called an iPad.
7. Amazon will add 3G or 4G connectivity to Kindle Fire
Amazon will introduce 3G (or maybe 4G) capabilities for the Kindle Fire once it starts to look like the market for WiFi-only devices is becoming saturated. However, it won't be an all-you-can-eat plan like the one that the original Kindles came with. The Kindle Fire is far too capable of running data-intensive applications, such as movie watching, for an unlimited data plan to work. So guess what? It'll be the same type of plans that the iPad has and probably with the same carriers.
8. Prices for 7-inch tablets will hover around $225
Competition from the Kindle Fire and the Barnes and Noble Nook as well as the hefty 2011 sales of the HP TouchPad and the BlackBerry PlayBook once their prices were slashed will make $225 the market sweet spot for 7-inch tablets. While Samsung and others will try to keep high-end 7-inch tablet prices close to where they are now, their days are numbered. In fact, Apple's new 7-inch tablet will sell for less than the current iPad because of the competitive price pressure.
9. Using a smartphone will get more costly
As the popularity of 4G wireless grows, the price will go up, data caps will get lower and using a smart phone will get more expensive. WiFi calling, pioneered by T-Mobile, may start to show up with other carriers, most likely Sprint where it would help keep backhaul costs under control.
10. Guerilla WiFi phone access to fight rising 4G costs
The "Occupy" movement will inspire an "Occupy Wireless" concept in which people will take it on themselves to help fight the growing prices of 4G access by opening up their WiFi access points using unregulated guest access, thus offering free wireless service to anyone within range. Some will do this just by changing the settings on their routers, while others will find ways to install rooftop antennas that support 802.11n over a wide area. ISPs will try to fight it, but their efforts will fail. The big wireless companies will ignore this until it becomes clear that a lot of people are using this free WiFi instead of 4G. T-Mobile may see growth in their WiFi-calling equipped phones in areas where this practice is common.
For those of us who write about the wireless industry, 2011 was a busy, and sometimes annoying, year. We got to read hundreds of pages of court documents and FCC pleadings for the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile, which fortunately never happened.
We got to see 4G LTE finally get rolling, at least with Verizon Wireless. And of course we got to see LightSquared claim, with an apparently straight face, that it's perfectly OK for them to destroy the entire GPS industry just so they could sell LTE to carriers. But will 2012 be any better? Of course not.
1. AT& T will deploy 4G LTE country wide
AT&T will field 4G LTE on a national basis, proving that it was lying about needing T-Mobile all along. In fact, AT&T has already started lighting up a few cities with LTE, and now that it's closed the spectrum deal with Qualcomm, the pace should increase. The truth is that T-Mobile had nothing to offer AT&T's LTE plans. The whole thing was a sham so they could take out their low-price competition.
2. T-Mobile will find new partners to expand business
T-Mobile USA will find a new partner to help it grow its business. While it will get some spectrum that it badly needs from AT&T's break-up deal with Deutsche Telekom, it probably won't see any of the breakup fees DT expects to get from AT&T. DT has so many intractable legal problems that it needs all of the money it can get its hands on. Will DT sell T-Mobile USA? Probably not, unless some buyer with tons of money and no potential antitrust conflicts comes along. After all, T-Mobile USA is DT's most profitable foreign operation. Who will that new partner be? Maybe Dish Network and maybe there will be a marketing arrangement with AT&T.
3. No roaming on competing carriers' LTE networks
LTE will remain proprietary, despite the lack of any technical justification. The carriers currently fielding LTE could give their devices the ability to roam on each other's network, but they won't. It's all about marketing and who can claim the best 4G service, despite the fact that they're all basically the same.
4. LightSquared wireless data service is doomed
LightSquared will not be allowed to launch its GPS killing data service. Opposition from the military will ensure it won't happen and the suggestions from LightSquared that the Pentagon could keep GPS interference to a minimum with just a simple upgrade will fall on deaf ears in a time of Pentagon budget cutbacks. Besides, this would mean having to retrofit every one of those GPS-guided smart bombs, cruise missiles, drones and other devices. Unless the military weapons people can be absolutely certain that GPS interference won't cause a drone to launch a Hellfire missile into school instead of a group of terrorists, it's not going to happen. Furthermore the civilian GPS industry will lobby relentlessly against the LightSquared plan, which will encourage Congress to keep a close eye on the issue.
5. Nokia Windows Phone 7 handsets will catch on–overseas
Nokia and Windows Phone 7 will start to blossom, but in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East where people need smartphones; where Nokia has a huge installed base; and where nobody can afford an iPhone. Sales will pick up in the U.S., too, but not like sales overseas. Around the end of 2012, Microsoft will start throwing serious marketing money at WP7 wherever there are signs of sales momentum. Despite rumors, Microsoft will not buy Nokia.
6. Look for a 7-inch Apple tablet early in the year
Apple will release a 7-inch (or thereabouts) version of the iPad. Now that Amazon is selling a million 7-inch tablets a week, it's clear that the market exists. While Steve Jobs ridiculed 7-inch tablets before he died, he's not around anymore and Apple executives are smart enough to know a hot market when they see one. Besides, a 7-inch tablet is the perfect size for a lot of tasks where an iPad is just too big. The announcement will be early in the year when the iPad 3 is announced, and the new 7-inch version might not be called an iPad.
7. Amazon will add 3G or 4G connectivity to Kindle Fire
Amazon will introduce 3G (or maybe 4G) capabilities for the Kindle Fire once it starts to look like the market for WiFi-only devices is becoming saturated. However, it won't be an all-you-can-eat plan like the one that the original Kindles came with. The Kindle Fire is far too capable of running data-intensive applications, such as movie watching, for an unlimited data plan to work. So guess what? It'll be the same type of plans that the iPad has and probably with the same carriers.
8. Prices for 7-inch tablets will hover around $225
Competition from the Kindle Fire and the Barnes and Noble Nook as well as the hefty 2011 sales of the HP TouchPad and the BlackBerry PlayBook once their prices were slashed will make $225 the market sweet spot for 7-inch tablets. While Samsung and others will try to keep high-end 7-inch tablet prices close to where they are now, their days are numbered. In fact, Apple's new 7-inch tablet will sell for less than the current iPad because of the competitive price pressure.
9. Using a smartphone will get more costly
As the popularity of 4G wireless grows, the price will go up, data caps will get lower and using a smart phone will get more expensive. WiFi calling, pioneered by T-Mobile, may start to show up with other carriers, most likely Sprint where it would help keep backhaul costs under control.
10. Guerilla WiFi phone access to fight rising 4G costs
The "Occupy" movement will inspire an "Occupy Wireless" concept in which people will take it on themselves to help fight the growing prices of 4G access by opening up their WiFi access points using unregulated guest access, thus offering free wireless service to anyone within range. Some will do this just by changing the settings on their routers, while others will find ways to install rooftop antennas that support 802.11n over a wide area. ISPs will try to fight it, but their efforts will fail. The big wireless companies will ignore this until it becomes clear that a lot of people are using this free WiFi instead of 4G. T-Mobile may see growth in their WiFi-calling equipped phones in areas where this practice is common.
Smartphones, Tablets, Android Are Why Malware Is Going Mobile in 2012
Smartphones, Tablets, Android Are Why Malware Is Going Mobile in 2012
NEWS ANALYSIS: As 2012 gets going, it's time to accept that malware and cyber-attacks will increasingly target mobile users and Internet applications. For years, computer users' biggest security threats were...
Published: Yesterday
This article was sent from the eWEEK App.
NEWS ANALYSIS: As 2012 gets going, it's time to accept that malware and cyber-attacks will increasingly target mobile users and Internet applications.
For years, computer users' biggest security threats were attacks against their desktop computers and applications. But cyber-criminals increasingly have been turning their sights toward mobile devices and Web applications, as they are fertile new ground for lucrative cyber-attacks.
It won't happen overnight, of course, and there will still be more than enough security flaws impacting Windows and other desktop platforms to keep companies like Symantec and McAfee in business for years to come. But for mobile device users, security applications are as much a requirement for them as they are for desktop computer users.
Cyber-criminals have spent the past several years developing new attack strategies for mobile applications and devices. And this year, they're going to try to break in every chance they get.
Read on to find out why security threats are increasingly going mobile this year.
1. Windows 8′s security
According to Microsoft and the security researchers who have tried out Windows 8, the operating system will be the best yet at protecting users. In fact, some say that all users will need is Microsoft's own security suite to safeguard their computers. That's a major development in the Windows ecosystem. If Microsoft can actually deliver on those lofty promises, cyber-criminals may shift their attention from the desktop to online targets. But a really secure Windows 8 could go a long way toward showing the industry at large how to build security into mobile and Web applications as well as desktop applications.
2. Cloud services are a cash cow
Cloud services are a potential cash cow for cyber-criminals. In enterprise-focused applications, they can include bank information and Social Security numbers to just about anything else. What's worse, enterprises and consumers accessing cloud applications are placing all their hope in the service provider to protect their data when there is a serious risk that cloud services can be penetrated by cyber-criminals, who could reap boatloads of cash from stolen information.
3. Social networks are too
As the Koobface worm has proved, there's an inordinate amount of money in targeting social networking users. A new report from the New York Times claims the people allegedly behind Koobface generated millions of dollars just by taking aim at social network users. Security experts say the cyber-criminals behind Koobface are still active and it's likely that they or copycat hackers will launch new Koobface variants or Koobface-like attacks this year.
4. Android use is exploding
Unfortunately, Android has quickly become an easy target for malicious hackers around the world. The operating system is the most popular mobile OS for cyber-criminals, and most security researchers believe that trend will only continue in 2012. So, why is that happening? For one thing, the operating system doesn't have all the safeguards found in, say, BlackBerry OS. What's more, a tremendous number of people are adopting the software each day. That presents an ever larger and highly lucrative target for cyber-criminals. Keep that in mind.
5. Apps are easy entryways
After Apple launched the App Store and other companies followed suit, smartphone owners around the world assumed they could download any program to their mobile devices with complete confidence and safety. But as last year's Android Market infiltrations showed, that's not the case. Even so, users don't realize the threats associated with apps, and how easily they can be used against them. Even text-messaging applications can deliver malicious payloads. Apps are a unique and hugely profitable opportunity for cyber-criminals, and this year they're not going to let that slip by.
6. Where are all the security apps?
Interestingly, security companies have been somewhat slow to deliver mobile anti-malware applications to safeguard mobile devices. The big firms, like McAfee, offer some apps, of course, but as with early Windows software, they don't appear to be keeping up as well as they could with all the threats out there. Even cloud security solutions are subpar. It's about time the security community gets far more serious about protecting people both online and on the Web.
7. User ignorance is a factor
It's no secret that one of the main reasons Windows became such a security hole was that its users let it happen. Too often, PC owners don't update security software, go to malicious sites and trust sources that they shouldn't. In the mobile and online world, things are even worse. Unfortunately, people have been conditioned to believe that the real threats are on Windows, when in reality, they're also present on the Web and in mobile operating systems. Study after study has shown that people are especially lax about security when using a smartphone. This year, cyber-criminals will capitalize on that in a big way—and we'll all rue the day we failed to acknowledge the importance of security no matter where we are.
8. The enterprise is moving there
If history is to be our guide, it will show that whenever the enterprise goes to a new technology or service, cyber-criminals will follow. Now, the enterprise is shifting to mobile products, like the iPhone and iPad, and cloud services. Seeing a potential cash windfall, cyber-criminals are pouncing. Make no mistake, the enterprise's shift to the Web and mobile is a big reason cyber-criminals are doing the same.
9. Solutions are few and far between
Just about everywhere one turns, they'll find a security company or analyst talking about the increased threats we'll be facing in the coming months. But at what point do all those analysts and researchers deliver a solution to safeguard users? Sure, there's security software and other online safeguard mechanisms, but it's not enough. Solutions are needed to identify cyber-criminals, anticipate their actions and respond with a way to stop them.
10. The opportunities are endless
The move to mobile and cloud computing has brought about an endless universe of inviting targets. No computing device connected to the Internet is immune. New opportunities for cyber-criminals to target users are nearly endless. Should they go after us via email, hacked Websites, SMS messaging or malware-tainted apps? How about social networks? Mobile devices and the Web provide an endless array of opportunities for cyber-criminals to hit us. The challenge is for the technology industry to find innovative and broad solutions to the ever-expanding array of cyber-threats.
For years, computer users' biggest security threats were attacks against their desktop computers and applications. But cyber-criminals increasingly have been turning their sights toward mobile devices and Web applications, as they are fertile new ground for lucrative cyber-attacks.
It won't happen overnight, of course, and there will still be more than enough security flaws impacting Windows and other desktop platforms to keep companies like Symantec and McAfee in business for years to come. But for mobile device users, security applications are as much a requirement for them as they are for desktop computer users.
Cyber-criminals have spent the past several years developing new attack strategies for mobile applications and devices. And this year, they're going to try to break in every chance they get.
Read on to find out why security threats are increasingly going mobile this year.
1. Windows 8′s security
According to Microsoft and the security researchers who have tried out Windows 8, the operating system will be the best yet at protecting users. In fact, some say that all users will need is Microsoft's own security suite to safeguard their computers. That's a major development in the Windows ecosystem. If Microsoft can actually deliver on those lofty promises, cyber-criminals may shift their attention from the desktop to online targets. But a really secure Windows 8 could go a long way toward showing the industry at large how to build security into mobile and Web applications as well as desktop applications.
2. Cloud services are a cash cow
Cloud services are a potential cash cow for cyber-criminals. In enterprise-focused applications, they can include bank information and Social Security numbers to just about anything else. What's worse, enterprises and consumers accessing cloud applications are placing all their hope in the service provider to protect their data when there is a serious risk that cloud services can be penetrated by cyber-criminals, who could reap boatloads of cash from stolen information.
3. Social networks are too
As the Koobface worm has proved, there's an inordinate amount of money in targeting social networking users. A new report from the New York Times claims the people allegedly behind Koobface generated millions of dollars just by taking aim at social network users. Security experts say the cyber-criminals behind Koobface are still active and it's likely that they or copycat hackers will launch new Koobface variants or Koobface-like attacks this year.
4. Android use is exploding
Unfortunately, Android has quickly become an easy target for malicious hackers around the world. The operating system is the most popular mobile OS for cyber-criminals, and most security researchers believe that trend will only continue in 2012. So, why is that happening? For one thing, the operating system doesn't have all the safeguards found in, say, BlackBerry OS. What's more, a tremendous number of people are adopting the software each day. That presents an ever larger and highly lucrative target for cyber-criminals. Keep that in mind.
5. Apps are easy entryways
After Apple launched the App Store and other companies followed suit, smartphone owners around the world assumed they could download any program to their mobile devices with complete confidence and safety. But as last year's Android Market infiltrations showed, that's not the case. Even so, users don't realize the threats associated with apps, and how easily they can be used against them. Even text-messaging applications can deliver malicious payloads. Apps are a unique and hugely profitable opportunity for cyber-criminals, and this year they're not going to let that slip by.
6. Where are all the security apps?
Interestingly, security companies have been somewhat slow to deliver mobile anti-malware applications to safeguard mobile devices. The big firms, like McAfee, offer some apps, of course, but as with early Windows software, they don't appear to be keeping up as well as they could with all the threats out there. Even cloud security solutions are subpar. It's about time the security community gets far more serious about protecting people both online and on the Web.
7. User ignorance is a factor
It's no secret that one of the main reasons Windows became such a security hole was that its users let it happen. Too often, PC owners don't update security software, go to malicious sites and trust sources that they shouldn't. In the mobile and online world, things are even worse. Unfortunately, people have been conditioned to believe that the real threats are on Windows, when in reality, they're also present on the Web and in mobile operating systems. Study after study has shown that people are especially lax about security when using a smartphone. This year, cyber-criminals will capitalize on that in a big way—and we'll all rue the day we failed to acknowledge the importance of security no matter where we are.
8. The enterprise is moving there
If history is to be our guide, it will show that whenever the enterprise goes to a new technology or service, cyber-criminals will follow. Now, the enterprise is shifting to mobile products, like the iPhone and iPad, and cloud services. Seeing a potential cash windfall, cyber-criminals are pouncing. Make no mistake, the enterprise's shift to the Web and mobile is a big reason cyber-criminals are doing the same.
9. Solutions are few and far between
Just about everywhere one turns, they'll find a security company or analyst talking about the increased threats we'll be facing in the coming months. But at what point do all those analysts and researchers deliver a solution to safeguard users? Sure, there's security software and other online safeguard mechanisms, but it's not enough. Solutions are needed to identify cyber-criminals, anticipate their actions and respond with a way to stop them.
10. The opportunities are endless
The move to mobile and cloud computing has brought about an endless universe of inviting targets. No computing device connected to the Internet is immune. New opportunities for cyber-criminals to target users are nearly endless. Should they go after us via email, hacked Websites, SMS messaging or malware-tainted apps? How about social networks? Mobile devices and the Web provide an endless array of opportunities for cyber-criminals to hit us. The challenge is for the technology industry to find innovative and broad solutions to the ever-expanding array of cyber-threats.
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