Grazed from Insurance and Technology.  Author: Katherine Burger.

It has been interesting to see insurance companies wade into the exciting but still-untested waters of social media and mobile computing. While the industry’s inherent risk aversion is perhaps somewhat slowing the pace of these initiatives, neither do carriers seem to be taking their traditional wait-and-see approach to new technologies. It’s not so much, "Let’s watch how this plays out," as "What do we need to know and do to take advantage of this?"

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Mike Fratto.

Grazed from BBC.  Author:  Sharif Sakr.

The IMEC laboratory in Belgium is a surprising place. Nestled in the sleepy university town of Leuven, its low-key entrance gives little clue to the high-tech facility within.

The heart of the complex is a massive, dust-free ‘clean room’, staffed by carefully-wrapped technicians. Here, microchips are developed based on sophisticated and carefully guarded designs.

But unlike unlike consumer chips from Intel or AMD, IMEC’s microchips are not meant to be powerful – they are the exact opposite.

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: David F. Carr.

Yes, I clicked the delete button. Yes, I regret it now. Yes, I belatedly realized why the Backupify service makes sense.

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jack Clark.

"With the new free AWS [Amazon Web Services] usage tier, developers will be able to launch applications at no cost. If their new application spikes in popularity, it will seamlessly scale and run on AWS’s inexpensive, pay-as-you-go, standard pricing," the company said in a statement.

The single instance that will be used to run the applications will be a Linux Micro Instance. This is a low-powered 32 or 64-bit virtual machine with 613MB of memory, up to two EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) — which function as virtual processors — and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) storage only. An ECU provides the equivalent processor capacity of a 1-1.2GHz Opteron or Xeon processor.

Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: James Glass.

Businesses should be looking to update their data quality practices over time to as their organisation continues to evolve, it has been suggested.

SmartData Collective blogger Jim Harris explained that companies often employ best practices when first starting data quality initiatives, but many fail to build on these standards.

He added that ensuring data quality requires continual work on the part of a company’s employees.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Brian Prince.

A new report from Forrester Research projects that the cloud security market will grow to $1.5 billion by 2015—a shift that will disrupt what Forrester calls the "security solution ecosystem."

In a report entitled "Security and the Cloud," Forrester analyst Jonathan Penn predicted that rather than reallocating portions of existing security budgets to cloud computing, organizations will allocate money to security within cloud projects—creating "a whole new category of revenue for the security market."

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Author Cole.

Grazed from ServerWatch.  Author:  Michael Kerner.

After only three short months of life, the OpenStack open source cloud computing initiative is out with its first public release of production quality code.

The first OpenStack release is codenamed Austin and includes both storage and cloud compute fabric technologies that can be used by enterprises to deliver cloud services. Originally an effort kick-started by NASA and Rackspace, OpenStack is now benefiting from the support and contributions of more than 35 technology vendors.

Grazed from MIT Technology Review.   Author: Steve Hsu

I was floored today when the director of BGI told me they would soon reach a sequencing rate of 1000 (human) genomes per day (so, 10^5 to 10^6 genomes per year is right on the horizon). According to him, they can be profitable at a price of $5k per genome! [Clarification: I later learned this might mean at 10x coverage … not exactly sure, although I tried to get a more precise statement.]