Should Marc Andreessen Become HP’s Interim CEO?
Continuity Disaster Recovery Software Gets Private Cloud Advisor
Putting the Cloud to Use for Video Encoding
In a world with millions of different mobile devices, televisions, screen sizes and video formats, something has to give. But instead of giving in, device proliferation combined with content producers’ desire to deliver clean video is giving rise to a new market for hosted video encoding, sometimes called transcoding. The goal is simple: provide the right format to the right screen at the right time without requiring content producers to invest in infrastructure. Done right, content producers should be able to dial up a video encoding service in the cloud.
Murphy’s Law of Disaster Recovery Strikes Retailer
In July, American Eagle Outfitters — which has a market capitalization of $2.52 billion — had the sort of apocalyptic outage that many companies fear. Its e-commerce site was down for eight days. Both a primary and a secondary storage system failed, backups wouldn’t restore properly, and a disaster recovery site wasn’t provisioned properly.
These are the sorts of nightmare scenarios that drive many companies to turn to outsourcers, data center specialists that have the resources to protect against this sort of worst-case scenario.
Google Buys Jambool to Rival Facebook Credits
Google confirmed that it acquired Jambool, whose Solid Gold platform provides a virtual currency service for providers of online games and others who want to put payment options in their applications.
TechCrunch broke the news Aug. 9, saying the deal was worth $70 million. Jambool and Google confirmed the deal Aug. 13.
Jambool’s Solid Gold virtual payment platform lets application developers insert payment options into online games and other applications.
How To Find a Customer in a Divided IT Universe
As the Clouds Approach, Hardware Vendors Must Change Their Tunes
Facebook Fixes Privacy Bug
Facebook has fixed a bug that could have been abused by someone looking to get their hands on the full names and photos of users.
Atul Agarwal of Secfence Technologies posted information about the issue to the Full Disclosure mailing list Aug. 11. If someone entered a user’s e-mail address and the wrong password in the log-in page, the site coughed up the user’s full name and profile picture in addition to an incorrect password message.
3 (Easy) Keys to a Successful CRM Application
Few would argue that CRM has been one of the most significant business trends and application categories to emerge over the past few decades. Wikipedia, reference of the masses, defines CRM as a "broadly recognized, widely implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects, using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes."
The Cloud Cozies Up to Healthcare
The Obama administration has plans to release $44 billion in stimulus money aimed at getting doctors to adopt electronic health records (EHR), and the programs are helping fuel innovation in the cloud. I recently posted a story contending that cloud applications can create a statistical goldmine. This goldmine exists not only in commercial settings, but also in areas that could directly benefit all citizens, such as in electronic health records.