Sooner than expected, Apple Thursday started previewing a developer-directed beta of Mountain Lion, its next-generation Mac OS X 10.8, due out late this summer. It’s borrowed some more features from iOS like the popular and unlimited iChat-replacing iMessages IM as well as Notes, Games Center and Reminders and changed the names of Mac’s Address Book to Contacts and iCalc to Calendar, making the two operating systems more alike – you can see where this is going, right? Mountain Lion also integrates with Twitter and Apple’s own iCloud. Documents created on Macs will be available and synced with iPhone and iPad. There’s a Gatekeeper system to vet software, a way to use Apple TV as a screen, and it adds features for the Chinese market in support of Chinese web sites like Baidu. All told there are reportedly 100 new features.
Just when the US Postal Service looks down for the count, a self-funded Seattle start-up called PaperKarma figures its destiny is to suppress junk mail on which the post office depends. The company was started by Sean Mortazavi, who hasn’t given up his day job at Microsoft yet, and PaperKarma’s sole employee Brendan Ribera. The pair has developed a free multi-platform mobile app that lets junk mail-inundated protesters take a picture of the junk mail flooding their mailbox, hit an “Unsubscribe” button and send it to PaperKarma. The start-up will automatically pass it on to the mailer with Federal Trade Commission-enforced instructions that the recipient be dropped from its mailing list. Mortazavi and Ribera reportedly spent a year collecting the names of the appropriate people at 10,000 of the biggest junk mailers such as the so-called privacy officers or customer advocates responsible for deleting names from mailing lists and its system automatically matches them to the e-mailed suppression request. It’s a system that’s constantly being updated and expanded.
Centrify is going into the mobile business in support of iOS and Android phones and tablets. The move involves putting its multi-platform support for Microsoft’s Active Directory on its own cloud so companies can protect the increasing ubiquitous BYOD they need to control and secure whether they’re on the corporate network or not. It promises an organization can re-use its Active Directory investment without deploying a complex new infrastructure or dealing with yet another “pane of glass” in the form of another standalone management console. Its new enterprise-scale subscription-based cloud service is called DirectControl for Mobile and harnesses a company’s existing on-premise Active Directory infrastructure, skill sets, familiar processes, and group policy-based management tools to enforce and update mobile security settings, lock or remotely wipe devices, automate the configuration of each user’s authentication credentials, e-mail, Wi-Fi and VPN settings and reduce helpdesk traffic.
Centrify is going into the mobile business in support of iOS and Android phones and tablets. The move involves putting its multi-platform support for Microsoft’s Active Directory on its own cloud so companies can protect the increasing ubiquitous BYOD they need to control and secure whether they’re on the corporate network or not. It promises an organization can re-use its Active Directory investment without deploying a complex new infrastructure or dealing with yet another “pane of glass” in the form of another standalone management console. Its new enterprise-scale subscription-based cloud service is called DirectControl for Mobile and harnesses a company’s existing on-premise Active Directory infrastructure, skill sets, familiar processes, and group policy-based management tools to enforce and update mobile security settings, lock or remotely wipe devices, automate the configuration of each user’s authentication credentials, e-mail, Wi-Fi and VPN settings and reduce helpdesk traffic.
Sooner than expected, Apple Thursday started previewing a developer-directed beta of Mountain Lion, its next-generation Mac OS X 10.8, due out late this summer. It’s borrowed some more features from iOS like the popular and unlimited iChat-replacing iMessages IM as well as Notes, Games Center and Reminders and changed the names of Mac’s Address Book to Contacts and iCalc to Calendar, making the two operating systems more alike – you can see where this is going, right? Mountain Lion also integrates with Twitter and Apple’s own iCloud. Documents created on Macs will be available and synced with iPhone and iPad. There’s a Gatekeeper system to vet software, a way to use Apple TV as a screen, and it adds features for the Chinese market in support of Chinese web sites like Baidu. All told there are reportedly 100 new features.
Fresh off a happy quarter, Rackspace said Thursday that it’s bought SharePoint911, one of those you-never-heard-of-them outfits that does SharePoint consulting, training and JumpStart services so it can deliver newfangled SharePoint services along with its existing SharePoint hosting. It didn’t say how much it paid for the self-funded unit so it’s obviously immaterial. Eight-year-old SharePoint911 includes six Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) and the authors of over 10 SharePoint books and nine SharePoint training courses. It’s thought Rackspace is fattening up because of AWS. Microsoft’s SharePoint operation is a billion-dollar-a-year business with tens of millions of users. As popular as it is, the software can be crotchety to set up and handle.
A Tel Aviv start-up called Porticor that’s just hit the radar says it’s got a way to secure the cloud, any cloud. Fancy that, a trustworthy cloud. And Porticor delivers its data encryption solution to IaaS and PaaS users through the cloud in minutes. Fancy that. It’s supposed to solve the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud – storing keys. It promises that a user’s data encryption key will never be exposed and that it can deliver data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems. All this wonderfulness, called the Porticor Virtual Private Data (VPD) System, a combination of the start-up’s Virtual Appliance and Virtual Key Management Service, comes complements of its patent-pending homomorphic split-key encryption technology, which is supposed to increase security by an order of magnitude through hosted key management.
Apple sent the Fair Labor Association (FLA) in Monday to start inspecting the conditions under which its widgets are made including Foxconn’s factories in China, the recent subject of an Upton Sinclair-like exposé by the New York Times. Apple said the FLA and its labor rights experts are supposed to interview thousands of workers about their living and working conditions including health and safety, wages, hours and communication with management, checking the plant floor, dorms and other facilities and reviewing documents relating to all stages of employment. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement that “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”
A Munich court Thursday found Motorola Mobility guilty of infringing an Apple patent and handed Apple a permanent injunction against two Android smartphones. Apple can enforce the injunction after posting a bond lest MMI succeed in invalidating the slide-to-unlock patent (EP1964022) that opens a device with a gesture on an unlock image. Patent watcher Florian Mueller, who was in court for the trial in December and again on Thursday when the decision came down, apparently expected the court to stay its hand pending a decision on the patent’s validity but evidently Apple’s post-trial pleadings persuaded Judge Peter Guntz that the patent would ultimately stand. Guntz only upheld Apple’s complaints against MMI’s phones, not its complaint against MMI’s Xoom tablet.
Red Hat on Thursday announced that JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.1.0 and 5.1.1 have been awarded Common Criteria certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+) under the Common Criteria Evaluation and Certification Scheme (CCS). Common Criteria is a set of internationally approved criteria for evaluating and certifying the information security of IT products and information systems, and EAL4+ is the highest assurance level that is recognized globally by all signatories under the Common Criteria Recognition Agreement for this category of solutions. This certification also marks the highest level of Common Criteria certification for the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. “Security remains one of the most important considerations for security-conscious industries like government, financial services and healthcare considering new technology solutions, and achieving Common Criteria certification gives customers the added confidence that our solutions meet specific, internationally recognized benchmarks for security performance,” explained Paul Smith, general manager and vice president, public sector operations, Red Hat. “We made the commitment to upgrade our Common Criteria certification for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform from EAL2 to EAL4+, and achieving the highest available certification level is a testament to our ongoing efforts to meeting the needs of security-conscious government organizations and businesses.”
The Chinese company that claims it owns the iPad trademark says it plans to seek a ban on iPad exports out of China, threatening global supplies. According to what a lawyer for Proview Technology (Shenzhen) Co Ltd told Reuters, the firm is petitioning Chinese customs to stop shipments of the tablet in and out of China. Customs has reportedly not responded to the request. A Chinese court last year found Proview owned the trademark. Apple, which claims it bought global rights to the name from Proview a few years ago, appealed and a final hearing is now set for February 29, Reuters said. Apple says a Hong Kong court supported its position, but that apparently doesn’t mean much.
The Internet highway may start looking like a proverbial New York traffic jam at rush hour soon. Feel free to substitute any town you like because Cisco says there’s going to be a faster-than-expected 18x surge in worldwide mobile data traffic between 2011 and 2016. That’s when mobile cloud traffic should account for 71% of total data traffic, or 10.3 exabytes a month, up from a mere 269 petabytes a month now, outgrowing global fixed data traffic by 3x. That’s like 33 billion DVDs or 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files. There are supposed to be an estimated 10 billion mobile connections by 2016 – more than the 7.3 billion people on earth by then – or more than eight billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and nearly two billion machine-to-machine connections, such as GPS systems in cars, asset tracking systems in shipping and manufacturing and medical applications for making patient records more available.
Graal is a new project to explore implementing a dynamic compiler in Java that can be used in a native JVM as well as meta-circular VM. Graal compiler is a dynamic compiler in Java and it allows to extend its functionality to support the customizations. The Graal compiler allows Java libraries to extend their functionality to support customizations. For example, it enables custom optimization phases that we cannot achieve with the traditional Java compilers. It provides a Java API to control the compiler phases and it even allows us to introduce new phases, thus it opens the door for efficient implementations of new languages.
Contrary to Steve Jobs’ dictum that the 9.7-inch iPad is as small as a tablet can get, Apple is testing a widget that’s around eight inches and has gotten as far as qualifying suppliers for it, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s supposed to be working with screen makers AU Optronics of Taiwan and LG Display of South Korea. The device would reportedly have the same resolution as the current iPad. Apple is expected to unveil an iPad 3 next month with heightened resolution that can also run on Verizon and AT&T’s faster 4G LTE networks. A smaller iPad suggests that Apple may try to broaden its worldwide market share, which stood at 60% in Q3, particularly in developing markets like China and India, and take on competition from the Android mob, which is selling smaller tablets like the seven-inch Amazon Kindle Fire, the 5.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Note and the seven- and 8.9-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Apple wants the Ice Cream-bearing Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone that Samsung worked on with Google banned from the United States because it allegedly infringes four strong Apple technical patents – none of this squishy design stuff like before. Apple quietly asked a district court in California for the preliminary injunction last Thursday as part of a new lawsuit. Patent watcher Florian Mueller calls the patents the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” In Florian’s metaphor, they might to unleash pestilence, war, famine and death on Android 4.0 as it comes from Google – no Samsung features have been added to the so-called stock Android – giving the suit a potentially more crippling arc that implicates all Ice Cream Sandwich widgets. It’s the closest Apple has gotten to taking on Google directly and if Google removes any of the challenged features it’s as good as an admission of an infringement taint, Florian observes.
Within seconds of Wall Street opening Monday morning Apple tore through the $500-a-share barrier for the first time, a little over six months after hitting $400. The talking heads on CNBC say the company has added the value of a Facebook since its legendary founder Steve Jobs died in October. Up $9.44 to $502.86, its market cap was $460 billion.
Apple quietly wrote a letter to ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, in November asking it to set basic rules for the licensing of standards-essential patents and to make its patent-wielding members commit to the principles. Apple clearly had Google and its Android acolytes in mind in writing the letter. Motorola Mobility and Samsung are asking ludicrously high sums to license IP that’s supposed to be available on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). They have also sued alleged infringers like Apple and Microsoft demanding product-stopping injunctions. Apple wants all this to stop. It wants ETSI to insist on appropriate royalties, a common royalty base and no injunctions. Apple’s lead IP lawyer Bruce Watrous told ETSI that the industry lacks consistent adherence to FRAND principles in licensing all the patents necessary to make mobile devices.
Intel has finally seen the back of that 2009 antitrust suit that New York State’s attorney general brought against it that was pretty much a case of New York copying over the charges AMD had made in its massive but now long-settled suit. See, AMD was building a big state-of-art chip plant upstate New York, a project that Globalfoundries inherited when it bought AMD’s factories, and New York figured it could get some easy money. Its mistake was in thinking that cases like AMD’s actually go to a jury – like Intel would ever let that happen – and not realizing that AMD needed the money and would take a settlement and run. When it did, New York was left in district court in Delaware, where it had piggybacked on AMD’s suit, with no home court advantage.
After hearing testimony from World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Netscape co-founder Eroc Bina, HTML embedded tag inventor David Raggetr and prior art inventor Pei-Yuan Wei, who wrote the Viola browser back in 1991, two years before Eolas, and demo’d it to Sun in ’93, a Texas federal jury Thursday – in a district notorious for looking kindly on patent holders – found the patents held by Eolas Technologies, which once nailed Microsoft for a $565 million infringement decision, invalid. The patents claim that Eolas invented the idea of a web browser that supports plug-ins and AJAX development techniques. Eolas was suing YouTube, Adobe, Amazon, JC Penney’s, Staples, CDW and Yahoo before moving on to almost anybody with a web site. Oracle, eBay, Apple, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Playboy and TI previously settled. Eolas could appeal. It’s “evaluating its options.” The University of California co-owns the Eolas patents.
EquaShip, the ambitious start-up that wants to be the fourth US parcel carrier after UPS, FedEx and the USPS, has suspended its weeks-old service to regroup after it couldn’t get packages where they were going in a few days time. CEO Ron Wiener said it could take a year to fix the problem. Its failure to deliver within a closing time window put eBay and Amazon shippers’ critical performance scores at risk. The start-up has been courting the small and medium-sized B2C e-commerce merchants on Amazon and eBay that don’t qualify for FedEx and UPS discounts and are basically stuck subsidizing the unprofitable volumes of the FedEx and UPS mega-shippers. EquaShip’s low rates were supposed to make the discount-disenfranchised competitive so they could blithely offer the free delivery imperative to Internet sales these days without losing their shirt.
In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future. Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have happened recently with the Apache Hadoop project, what is has already accomplished (including real-world examples), and what it is going to make possible in the future.
AMD said late Tuesday that its chief sales officer Emilio Ghilardi had left the company and that CEO and president Rory Read is going to do his job while a replacement is sought. AMD didn’t say why Ghilardi left but it’s assumed Read wants his own people. Read is relatively new to the company so the sales experience will be good for him. He knows how to do it judging from his record at Lenovo although it does leave him with a full plate. Ghilardi joined AMD from HP to run EMEA in 2008 and was named sales chief the next year. Read last week told Wall Street that AMD is switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet.
Apple is going to launch the iPad 3, or whatever they call it, the first week of March at a special event in San Francisco according to AllThingsD, a prophecy the punters regarded as being as good as a statement from the company. As a result Apple Thursday hit an all-time high, teasing the magic $500 number, with a closing price of $493.17, up from $315 last June, after seeing $496.75 during the day. The blog figures street availability a week or so later. The dingus, the same size as the iPad 2, will reportedly be built on a way faster chip with improved graphics and a 2048×1536 Retina Display – “or something close to it,” the blog said.
Apple quietly wrote a letter to ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, in November asking it to set basic rules for the licensing of standards-essential patents and to make its patent-wielding members commit to the principles. Apple clearly had Google and its Android acolytes in mind in writing the letter. Motorola Mobility and Samsung are asking ludicrously high sums to license IP that’s supposed to be available on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). They have also sued alleged infringers like Apple and Microsoft demanding product-stopping injunctions. Apple wants all this to stop. It wants ETSI to insist on appropriate royalties, a common royalty base and no injunctions. Apple’s lead IP lawyer Bruce Watrous told ETSI that the industry lacks consistent adherence to FRAND principles in licensing all the patents necessary to make mobile devices.
The FBI Thursday released a 20-year-old file it had on Steve Jobs. The background check was done on the then-NeXT CEO reportedly because President Bush 41 was considering appointing him to his Export Council. The FBI confirmed in interviews with friends and associates that Jobs was difficult, temperamental, wanted his own way and had used pot, hashish and LSD. The agency wrote in its findings that “Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”