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Here’s why Destiny is a winner post-Alpha
I can't wait for Destiny to be released for all platforms. It's developed on an in-house engine, looks like a combination of Star Wars* and Halo, and it sounds nice … Continue reading
Samsung may purchase voice assistant company Nuance
Nuance Communications, who champion the popular Dragon voice-to-text assistant, are reportedly entertaining buyout offers. The company is said to have begun discussions with several suitors, according to those familiar with … Continue reading
Facebook’s iPad app wants to be your entertainment hub
The Facebook iPad app has been given a revamp, though it's around the edges where the social network has focused most of its attention this time around. Flip the tablet … Continue reading
Galaxy Tab S vs iPad Air: Spec War
If you're thinking of picking up a tablet in the near future, two clear options will hit you direct in the face as soon as you enter a store like … Continue reading
Five things we need to see from Amazon’s smartphone
As Amazon prepares to give us something new, we've been wondering just what we should be looking for from them. We've all but confirmed we're getting a smartphone from Amazon, … Continue reading
Was Steve Jobs against Tim Cook’s iPad mini?
The iPad mini may be one of Apple's hit products, but controversy over whether a smaller version of the tablet was right for the range has reignited after one board … Continue reading
Destiny Alpha extended: Expert Mode activated
The Alpha for Destiny was supposed to have ended last night - but to most players' surprise, it's still around. The Alpha test mode for Destiny for the PlayStation 4 … Continue reading
Amazon wants you to know its phone will have lots of apps
Amazon's first smartphone isn't expected to get its official reveal until this Wednesday, but the retailer isn't leaving anything to chance when it comes to ecosystem with a renewed push … Continue reading
Google marks Project Loon’s balloon birthday with LTE tests
Google's Project Loon has celebrated its first birthday by delivering internet access to a remote Brazilian school, floating a balloon-borne LTE connection as it demonstrates the system has wings rather … Continue reading
Spurs joined by Jay Z and Beats Music in remix campaign
Facing off against the Miami Heat this week were the San Antonio Spurs, finding victory in five games to take the NBA championship. Viewers of the program on ESPN will … Continue reading
Tim Cook hands-off with Apple iWatch say insiders
Apple CEO Tim Cook may be building a smartwatch but he's taken a hands-off approach to the rumored wrist-worn wearable, it's suggested, at odds to the notoriously micro-managing Steve Jobs. … Continue reading
Angry Birds Transformers release Autobirds and Deceptihogs
There's little doubt now that Rovio's Angry Birds franchise has convinced Hollywood that they're an immortal brand name as Transformers steps up to the plate. Angry Birds Transformers, the next … Continue reading
SanDisk grabs Fusion-io for flash storage expansion
SanDisk is snapping up speed-obsessed flash storage specialist Fusion-io, potentially bringing the company's high-bandwidth PCIe drives to a broader audience of enthusiasts. The deal, worth $1.1bn in cash, will see … Continue reading
Honeywell evohome thermostats add Pebble control
Honeywell's new Lyric isn't the only smart thermostat system the HVAC company offers, with its evohome Smart Zoning Thermostat gaining support for Pebble in a new update. Wearers of the … Continue reading
SIM support on LG G Watch rumored for Korea only
It may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how badly you want the feature. The LG G Watch was once rumored to come with a standalone … Continue reading
Facebook Paper sharpens its news game with “Trending” section
In an effort to further augment its Creative Labs experiment Paper, Facebook announced Monday that the latest update to the mobile app includes new information-gathering and customization features for users. One of those is a new “Trending” section, a more extensive version of the similarly-titled section on the website, with 10 news topics instead of three, that allows users to see what others are sharing in Paper in real-time. For directed coverage, users can also search via hashtag for specific content. Additionally, the update includes the ability to update profile photos, tag pictures, mention friends and selectively share content.
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Box acquires Streem to add streaming technology to its cloud storage prowess
Box is buying Streem, a startup specializing in streaming. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Box said that the four-members of Streem, a Y Combinator summer class of 2012 company, will be working with with Box's engineering department to sync up Streem’s streaming know how with Box’s file-share and sync service.
Streem has developed amazing technology that allows you to mount a cloud drive onto your computer — making documents, presentations, videos and files available to you without the limitations of your local hard-disk, effectively turning the cloud into an "unlimited" drive.
Streem's technology allows users to “mount a cloud drive” onto their computers so that documents, videos, files, etc. are available and their use is unconstrained by a local hard disk, wrote Box CEO Aaron Levie.
In theory, this converged service will benefit the healthcare, oil and gas and manufacturing industries where fast access to data is crucial; Streem's technology lets a user tap into more data than what used to be stored on his hard drive, wrote Levie.
The acquisition comes rather soon for Streem, considering that in late April it raised $875 thousand in seed funding.
Earlier in May, the Los Altos-based Box signed a coveted deal with General Electric in which GE would use Box's file-share and storage product as its standard for 300,000 employees.
Streem’s CEO and co-founder Ritik Malhotra was a 2012 Thiel Fellow.
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Sprint plans to expand LTE into rural nooks with 12 roaming deals
Sprint's LTE rollout may be behind those of its nationwide competitors, but it appears to be getting close to completion. Its 4G network now covers 225 million people, and it plans to hit the 250 million mark by mid-year. On Monday it kicked off a program that brings its 4G coverage to small markets and rural areas it never planned to target with 4G service.
Sprint announced roaming agreements with 12 regional and rural carriers as part of a LTE network sharing agreement with the Competitive Carrier Association and the NetAmerica Alliance. The idea is to create a common device portfolio and nationwide LTE footprint that Sprint and all its regional partners can share in.
Source: Shutterstock / Nneirda
The 12 partners are SouthernLINC Wireless, nTelos, C Spire Wireless, Nex-Tech Wireless Flat Wireless, MobileNation, Inland Cellular, Illinois Valley Cellular, Carolina West Wireless, James Valley Telecommunications, VTel Wireless and Phoenix Wireless. Combined, those 12 carriers cover 34 million people in 23 states.
While there is likely some overlap between Sprint's own network coverage and that of its new partners, many of these carriers are in small towns outside of Sprint's more city-focused coverage footprint. In trade, those carriers will be able to offer national LTE coverage by letting their customers onto Sprint's network. In addition, these carriers will have the option of using Sprint's spectrum to fill out their LTE capacity in areas where Sprint isn't planning to build its own networks.
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In Hadoop, Yahoo is still Hortonworks’ secret weapon
When a team of Yahoo engineers left the company in 2011 to spin out Hadoop startup Hortonworks, the change wasn’t as stark to either company as one might have expected. That’s because Yahoo didn’t just invest in Hortonworks and let it go on its way transforming the big data technology, which during its formative years was largely developed within Yahoo, into a commercial software product. In some ways, the two companies never really parted ways.
“We more or less virtualized the engineering departments between the two companies,” said Hortonworks Vice President of Engineering Greg Pavlik, in a recent interview. “… There’s a pretty tight overlap between what Yahoo needs and what Hortonworks is looking to productize.”
In fact, Yahoo Senior Vice President of Platforms and Personalization Jay Rossiter noted, “not a week goes by” where engineers from the two companies aren’t getting together and working closely on building new Hadoop technologies or improving the existing ones. On the surface, it’s not such a big deal given how Hortonworks came to be, but it’s definitely an advantage.
L to R: Sumeet Singh (Yahoo), Jay Rossiter (Yahoo), Greg Pavlik (Hortonworks), Tim Hall (Hortonworks). Source: John Curley
Early on, debate among Hadoop vendors — particularly Cloudera and Hortonworks – was as much about its engineers’ pedigrees and whose business model was best as it was about actual technology. But now that all the vendors in the space are largely staking out their own paths technologically — at least when it comes to non-core technologies such as security, interactive queries and cluster management – an engineering agreement with a large end-user seems pretty meaningful.
“I believe that the most interesting data management work happening on the planet right now is happening in the consumer internet, in general, and at Google in particular," Cloudera co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olson said on the Structure Show podcast in February. "We watch very carefully what is happening at the big scale-out web properties as basically a prediction of what more traditional enterprises are going to want in the future.”
Say what you will about its business, but Yahoo, which operates a many, many-petabyte Hadoop environment and runs 26 million Hadoop jobs a month, probably counts, too.
And its insights have already paid dividends for Hortonworks. Consider, for example, the rollout of the Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0, the second generation of the company’s Hadoop distribution, in October 2013. Its release was timed to coincide with its technological foundation — Hadoop 2 — achieving general availability status as an Apache project. Yahoo played a big role in getting Hadoop 2 GA-ready by stress-testing it across its massive Hadoop environment.
“When you drive a system at that scale, you shake out a lot of bugs, you shake out a lot of problems and you make it really real,” Rossiter said. Listen to the Structure Show embed below to hear former Yahoo CTO and current Altiscale CEO Raymie Stata talk about the importance of webscale experience in building out Hadoop software.
Hortonworks was working right alongside Yahoo all through that process. They’ve also worked together on things like rolling upgrades so Hadoop users can upgrade software without taking down a cluster. However, as Cloudera’s Olson alluded to, the more important thing going forward might be how the companies can collaborate on those pieces of satellite Hadoop technology that are really helping to clear up the distinctions among competing platforms.
Already, Hortonworks created Stinger — an evolution of Apache Hive capable of running faster SQL queries — and Yahoo is now running it in production (and, presumably, troubleshooting it) to the tune of 2.5 million jobs per month. Yahoo is working on capabilities such as Pig on Tez, HBase multitenancy, and Storm on YARN that aren’t part of the Hortonworks commercial distribution but could make their way in if customers start asking for them. (Apologies for the preceding mess of Hadoop jargon.)
Of course, none of this is to say that it takes a partnership with a large user like Yahoo in order to successfully build commercial Hadoop software. Cloudera has a mega engineering and corporate partnership in place with microprocessor giant Intel, and enough cash on hand to buy some innovative startups where needed. Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR have all developed some impressive technologies entirely in-house, as well. Pivotal, the data- and cloud-centric spinoff of EMC and VMware, likes to tout the hundreds of engineers working on its Hadoop software.
A Facebook engineer presenting at its Analytics@Webscale event that also featured LinkedIn and Twitter. Source: Jordan Novet
There’s also a set of web companies beside Yahoo and Google (which technically isn’t even a Hadoop shop) building and open sourcing some impressive Hadoop technologies. Facebook and Twitter are probably the most active, although even Microsoft and Netflix have gotten into the act. The Hadoop vendor community is no doubt watching what they’re doing, whether their projects are catching on among the greater user community, and assessing how or when to integrate them or turn them into enterprise software.
But considering the complexity of Hadoop, both as a distributed system expected to run at scale and as a technology expected to plug into myriad existing enterprise data systems, any sort of meaningful engineering partnerships really have to help. “Is it possible for a company to move the tech forward on its own? Yes,” Hortonworks’ Pavlik said. “Is it desirable? Our view is no.”
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Facebook for iPad brings new channel for trending topics, popular games
Facebook is separating its tablet experience from its smartphone experience. The company announced on Monday that the latest update to its iPad app includes a new look: when the app is used in landscape mode, a new column now pops up to provide information that mirrors the Facebook web browser experience.
According to the company, the new column is inspired by what it says are the primary functions of tablet use: read news, watch videos and play games. The column appears on the righthand side of the screen, provides birthday and event information as well as a “Trending” column — a feature that debuted on the web experience in January. Additionally, the column displays trending videos and offers “My Games,” a section that allows users to easily access Facebook games. According to the company, more than 70 percent of people who use Facebook for iPad have played a game in the past 90 days.
The decision to put games front and center for the tablet does more than differentiate the app from both the mobile and desktop version it also opens the door for the company to roll out ads.
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Check out what SDN can do! Google lets you load balance across regions
Google is adding two new storage and networking features to its Google Cloud Platform ahead of its user conference next week, both designed to make its cloud offerings faster and easier when compared to competing products from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. Google is adding persistent flash storage, which my colleague Barb Darrow has already covered, and HTTP load balancing across regions.
The load balancing is a fulfillment of the hope for automatic shifting of compute resources from data center to data center without disrupting the workload. It offers developers the opportunity to scale up compute in certain regions closest to demand and could theoretically offer a developer a chance to follow the cheapest computing costs around the globe if Google offered something like spot pricing.
This is a pretty big deal, so I asked Tom Kershaw, product management lead at Google, how the company manages it. He credited three things: the Andromeda software-defined networking platform underlying all of Google's Cloud Platform, algorithms that can detect networking constraints and then figure out where to move them, and the fact that Google broadcasts a single IP address for its entire cloud.
That's fairly unique, but lets Google take incoming requests and route them on its own equipment for the benefit of the developer (and requesting users). It also makes the networking side of managing a cloud computing platform a bit easier on the developer. From the Google blog post:
HTTP Load Balancing can easily scale to support more than 1 million requests per second with no "warm up." It also supports content-based routing and allows you to capture the benefits of Google's global network infrastructure. More importantly, and for the first time, users can take advantage of load balancing across different regions — balancing traffic among compute resources that are located in different data centres in different parts of the world.
Both the persistent storage and http load balancing are available in limited preview. I expect these are topics that Google SVP and cloud master Urs Hölzle can talk about when he's on stage this week at Structure on June 18.
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Here’s Kopi, the keyboarded phone that couldn’t save BlackBerry
After BlackBerry tried to reinvent itself with new software and a full-touchscreen phone, the company later considered returning to its roots. And those roots run deep with hardware keyboard fans as BlackBerry devices were widely considered to have the best buttons for typing. Following falling sales that never turned around, BlackBerry shelved its new phone, code-named Kopi, with its combination of touchscreen and hardware keyboard.
You could have just bought one, however.
The never-released handset was available on eBay with a starting price of $500, according to CrackBerry and the listing now shows the phone as sold with the best offer taken. The phone is in working condition, running BlackBerry 10.2.1 but won’t likely get any software updates or future support. Clearly someone was looking for a piece of history from the one-time leader of the smartphone industry.
When I look at the Kopi, I’m reminded of both BlackBerry’s rich heritage and also its sad failure to change with the times.
Instead of considering the 2007 iPhone and other touchscreen phones to follow it as potential challengers, BlackBerry didn’t take the competition seriously until it was too late. An attempt at a quick transition — by grafting a touchscreen with a non-touch optimized operating system — didn’t help and by the time BlackBerry had a potentially credible challenger in its BlackBerry Z10 handset, the smartphone world had moved on.
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Patents that fuel Microsoft’s “Android tax” revealed in Chinese blog post
Microsoft has long demanded licensing payments from Android device makers, but the identity of the relevant patents — which Microsoft uses to justify a so-called “Android tax” — has until now been something of a mystery.
The nature of those patents is now clearer, however, after the Chinese government published a list of 310 patents as part of an antitrust review into Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia.
The patents on the list, as reported by Ars Technica, cover everything from GPS features to custom search tools to browsing functions. They also include standard-essential patents, as well as ones obtained in the “Rockstar” deal, in which a consortium of Google rivals jointly bought the intellectual property of defunct Canadian telco Nortel.
While Microsoft had announced in an April blog past that the Chinese government had identified “approximately 200 patent families that are necessary to build an Android smartphone,” it did not say which ones.
What it means
The fact that the patent list is now public could make it harder for Microsoft to browbeat companies into licensing deals. Until now, Microsoft’s strategy has involved telling the world that device makers are paying up, but failing to explain what exactly they are paying for — and, most likely, wrapping the whole process in non-disclosure deals.
The public nature of the list could make it easier for Android makers to design around the patents or else try to invalidate them in court. It could also trigger renewed debate in the U.S. over the country’s dysfunctional patent system which, by one account, has produced more than 250,000 smartphone-related patents.
For Microsoft, a lot is riding on the future of its Android licensing business. Recent reports suggest that the company could earn nearly $6 billion a year by 2017 if it gets a cut on even half of every Android device sold worldwide. Consumers, meanwhile, are less likely to be buoyed by the news that the Android platform, which is billed as free and open, could require a long-term Microsoft tax of $1 to $8 per device.
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Apple smart watch is coming, NYT profile of Tim Cook suggests
A new profile of Apple CEO Tim Cook was published in the New York Times on Sunday, and although the national newspaper of record couldn’t get Cook to speak on the record, it was able to get some interesting details from one of his closest advisors. How much has Apple changed during the Cook era? According to design VP Jony Ive, not a lot: “Honestly, I don’t think anything’s changed” in the three years since Cook took over after former CEO Steve Jobs’ death, he told the paper.
Unnamed sources quoted in the piece said Cook is less hands-on than Jobs was during his tenure, especially when designing new products, like the health-focused smart watch Apple is expected to launch later this year. “Mr. Cook is less involved in the minutiae of product engineering for the watch, and has instead delegated those duties to members of his executive cabinet, including Mr. Ive, according to people involved in the project,” authors Matt Richtel and Brian Chen write. Cook is reportedly interested in the device’s broader implications, such as the ability to improve health or curtail unnecessary doctors’ visits.
Singer and U2 frontman Bono is also quoted, saying that Cook is amassing a staff of creatively-minded executives, including his friend Jimmy Iovine, who is joining Apple’s executive team as part of its $3 billion purchase of Beats Electronics. While it is interesting to consider how Cook is hiring advisors to compensate for his weaknesses, I am confident that Bono does not have any special insight into Apple’s hiring decisions.
Tim Cook is unusually secretive for an American executive, and there’s a lot about him that isn’t touched on in the story: for instance, his sexuality. Cook doesn’t talk about his private life, but it is an open secret that he is likely the most powerful gay executive in the technology industry. The profile does touch on Cook’s approach to social issues, including quoting his speech at the United Nations where he obliquely referenced his experiences with discrimination. Under Cook, Apple is embracing environmental sustainability, charitable contributions and a corporate attitude that addresses and considers the common good.
While it’s not the long-form, uncut interview with Tim Cook that Apple-watchers have been waiting for, the profile is one of the most complete looks at the enigmatic CEO we’ve received so far in his tenure. While it raises concerns that Apple may struggle to keep up with the unprecedented growth it has displayed over the past decade, it’s clear the wheels are not falling off under Cook: Apple still has $150 billion in cash and is the market profit leader in the mobile space.
The whole piece is worth a read over at the New York Times.
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Look out LG G3, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 tipped to have same screen resolution
The race to pack more pixels into a phone display is on, with the LG G3 out of the blocks first. That phone’s screen is better than full HD, cramming 3,686,400 pixels into its 5.5-inch display. Reports indicate that Samsung’s next Galaxy Note will have the same 2560 x 1440 resolution as Samsung races to catch up.
SlashGear noted Monday that Samsung itself has published data on the Galaxy Note 4 that shows the screen resolution for the fourth “phablet” in the Galaxy Note line. Samsung typically refreshes the Note with an announcement in late summer or early fall, so we still have a few months to wait and see what’s new with the Note.
You can pretty much bet with certainty, however, that it will have one feature that the comparably-screened G3 won’t have: A digital pen. By definition, all products in the Samsung Note include the company’s S-Pen and supporting apps for note-taking, photo annotations and more. That could be an advantage for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 over the G3.
While I originally thought having a phone screen better than 1080p resolution was overkill, some hands-on time with the LG G3 has me reconsidering. Text is super-crisp and video content looks fantastic. As long as all those pixels have a screen large enough to appear on, they can add to the experience.
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