Grazed from Imaging-Resource. Author: Gannon Burgett.

A recently published patent from Broadcom lays out the framework for a cloud-based infrastructure designed to communicate and share information with your smartphone to improve its imaging capabilities. Surface level, the groundwork laid out in the patent is straightforward – a smartphone communicates with online databases to bring in image-relevant information that can be used to better adjust settings and post-process a photograph. Where things get really interesting is when you dive into the methodology behind where the information is derived from.

The first example laid out in the patent relies on aforementioned databases, such as those provided by weather organizations, to determine the best settings and processing methods for your images. Say for example, you’re shooting outside at 5pm on a sunny day; your smartphone would be able to share its GPS location with the online weather database, and in return, the weather database would be able to send back all relevant weather information to your smartphone…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

A new survey of 930 executives suggests that business leaders are moving as quickly as they can to cloud-based solutions, regardless of whether their IT departments are along for the ride. This apparent disconnect stems from expectations “likely rooted in the business units’ desire for more agility and their concerns that central IT is too cautious in cloud adoption — especially public cloud adoption,” the survey’s authors deduct.

However, the survey, released by Rackspace, also suggests that IT leaders are getting more comfortable with cloud, particularly its security aspects. This may spur IT leaders to get out in front of the cloud movement, and evolve into brokers and advisors to their businesses, versus simply being the people that handle the machines. At least that’s the way IT leaders see their futures unfolding…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

When you look around at the world of 2015, you’ll see many technologies that once belonged purely to science fiction: video phones, tiny handheld computers with incredible processing power, private space flights, and electric cars. There’s only one thing missing. Wasn’t the future supposed to bring us ubiquitous robots?

So far, the robotics industry has not lived up to the dreams of science fiction. That is, until now. As the prices for computing power and sensors drop, robots are starting to become more and more cost-effective. They are already hard at work in the manufacturing sector, but still we see very few robots in our day-to-day life…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

Another supplier of hyperconvergence has arrived on the scene, hoping to get closer to realizing the promise of the entirely software-defined datacenter (SDDC). Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Springpath has come out of stealth mode, with key financial backers and founders who engineered the VMware SDDC and the company’s widely used file system.

Whether it will rise to prominence remains to be seen, but Springpath’s hyperconverged infrastructure aims to displace traditional OSes, virtual machines (VMs) and application programming models. In addition to the VMware veterans, Springpath is debuting with $34 million in backing from key investors with strong track records…

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars.  Author: Tom Rafferty.

Apple had a couple of interesting announcements last week. The first was that they were investing $848m in a 130MW solar farm being built by First Solar in California. With this investment, Apple enters into a 25 year power purchase agreement with the solar farm, guaranteeing income for the solar farm, and securing Apple’s energy bills for the next 25 years in California.

According to First Solar this is the largest agreement in the industry to provide clean energy to a commercial end user, and it will provide enough energy for Apple to fully power its headquarters, operations and retail stores in California, with renewable energy…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

Google’s Compute Engine cloud infrastructure hosting service suffered a nearly two-hour disruption between late Feb. 18 and early Feb. 19 causing disruption for customers on a global scale.  The disruption started at 10:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Feb. 18 and was resolved shortly before 1 a.m. on Feb. 19, a Google incident report noted.

The company blamed the outage on a glitch in an internal software system used to manage virtual machine egress traffic on the Google Compute Engine. According to Google, the software stopped issuing updated routing information bring outbound traffic to a halt…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics.  Author: Drew Amorosi.

The privacy push continues at Microsoft, as the software and now cloud giant announced that its Azure cloud platform, Office 365, and Dynamics CRM Online have been verified by the British Standards Institute (BSI) as complying with guidelines laid out in ISO’s international standard for protecting personal information in the cloud. The company also noted that Bureau Veritas has provided the same verification for Microsoft Intune.

According to two official company blogs, Microsoft is “the first major cloud provider to adopt the world’s first international standard for cloud privacy,” and Azure “is the first cloud platform to adopt ISO 27018.”…

Grazed from WhaTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In November 2013, in a post on the itnews.com.au web site, IT consultant Dez Blanchfield described OpenStack as "the one technology likely to pose a competitive threat to the Amazon Web Services and Google juggernauts."

Citing Gartner, he explained: "AWS now has five times the infrastructure-as-a-service compute capacity of its 14 biggest rivals put together. The individual efforts of Rackspace, Microsoft, IBM, HP, CSC or Telstra are unlikely to create a genuine competitive threat in the near-term."  So, OpenStack is clearly important. Very important. But what exactly is it? And 14 months down the track, how is it faring?…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella remarked in October that the company’s Azure cloud computing platform "supports any OS on any container technology, so we support both Linux and Windows Server," before declaring that "Microsoft loves Linux." Today, as enterprises mull placing their big data workloads on third-party clouds, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is extending its embrace of the rival, open-source operating system.

Linux—indeed the open-source movement in general—has already had a major impact on how Microsoft approaches the exploding market for business cloud solutions, according to Oliver Chiu, product marketing manager for Microsoft Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing. The company "is committed to openness, underscored by recent announcements including 20% of Azure Virtual Machines run on Linux, ‘Microsoft loves Linux’, open sourcing the .NET Core, our contributions to Apache Hadoop, and support for Docker containers," he asserted in Feb. 18 blog post…

Grazed from YouEye. Author: PR Announcement.

YouEye, provider of an Agile Research Platform that decodes customer experiences, today announced that the company was recently a finalist in the prestigious 2014-2015 Cloud Awards Program in the "Data Innovation of the Year" and "Most Promising Start-Up" categories. Other nominees included Cloudera, CloudSigma and the US Energy Information Administration. The quality of the nominees underscores YouEye’s ability to compete with multimillion-dollar programs and well-established industry leaders.

YouEye stands out in the cloud services market by providing an innovative Agile Research Platform that combines powerful study design and multimedia capture tools for desktop and mobile with a best-in-class experience analytics suite that identifies critical behavioral, sentiment, and event trends, providing qualitative context to quantitative data…