Crowdsourcing work: Labour on demand or digital sweatshop?
There are not many chief executives who can boast a workforce of half a million people around the globe.
But then Lukas Biewald’s workforce is not your traditional one.
As boss of San Francisco-based CrowdFlower, he says that his company offers "labour on demand".
His employees are crowdsourced – people who work from home, when needed, on specific projects.
"It doesn’t make sense to build a box around people, put in internet and plumbing and everything else, make them drive to work and have managers for them," Mr Biewald says.
OpenStack to Be Production-Ready by January
Deduplication solutions ‘should be taken up by more companies’
A large number of companies could benefit from using deduplication solutions at their businesses.
This is according to Data Storage Connection columnist Charles Butler, who explained that many organisations are reporting rapid data growth of a more complex and dispersed nature than previously seen.
He said that deduplication solutions can play a part in tackling this problem, by dramatically reducing bandwidth and storage requirements, as well as centralising backup data to make disaster recovery planning easier to manage.
GigaSpaces Integrates With Citrix OpenCloud Platform To Ease Creation Of Elastic Data Center Environments
Did Cloud Computing Jump the Shark?
Read the headlines and talk to some of the vendors, and it’s easy to believe that there isn’t an organization not deploying applications to the cloud.
IDC, long been a champion of cloud computing, certainly to believes that’s where the future lies. More than 18 months ago, Senior Vice President and chief analyst Frank Gens claimed that although the adoption rate for clouds at the time was around 15 percent, it would account for 25 percent of the net growth of technology from 2011 to 2012, and 30 percent of growth from 2012 to 2013.
Mating Grid And Cloud Software With Hardware
Like politics or economics, computing goes through cycles. Corporate computing started out highly centralized on mainframes and other room-size machines, but since the introduction of the PC has been going through swings between the autonomy of the individual computer user and centralized management by the IT department.
A conversation with Nati Shalom, chief technology officer of GigaSpaces, got me thinking about another pendulum swing: the one between making applications optimized for specific hardware vs. being independent of it.
Cloud Computing Shines At Interop New York
Cloud computing is taking center stage at this week’s Interop New York 2010, with dozens of cloud players showcasing their latest and greatest solutions to make the leap to the cloud a smooth one.
Cloud computing ‘to have bigger impact than internet’
Cloud computing is one of the leading technological developments that will help transform the IT industry over the next decade, a new report has forecast.
According to a study by Gartner, cloud computing is one of four main trends that will develop the economy over the next ten years – the others being the business impact of social computing, context aware computing and pattern-based strategy.
Getting started on cloud with Microsoft Windows Azure
With cloud computing, you can host your enterprise applications and data at an external data center that can scale to meet your computing demands. Rightfully, IT managers are apprehensive about cloud computing:
Microsoft software head Ray Ozzie resigns
Ray Ozzie, chief software architect of Microsoft and proponent of cloud computing, has resigned unexpectedly.
Mr Ozzie was a top member of the company’s management, having taken over the software role from Bill Gates.
Chief executive Steve Ballmer announced his colleague’s departure in an email to company staff.
He said Mr Ozzie would remain with Microsoft during a transitional period, and that the company was not looking for anyone to replace him.
Microsoft shares dropped 2.2% in after-hours trading on the news.