Author: David

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

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…

Grazed from TechWorld.  Author: Sophie Curtis.

Grazed from FierceBioTech IT.  Author:  Suzanne Elvidge.

Many companies, especially biopharma and bioinformatics companies, end up with a pool of unstructured and semistructured data, these days dubbed "Big Data." U.S.-based global IT company EMC is planning an R&D center in the Skolkovo Foundation’s Innovation Hub in Russia to create cloud infrastructure solutions and Big Data analytics technologies focusing on bioinformatics, as well as energy efficiency.

The innovation hub, which is also known as "Russian Silicon Valley," is still in the planning and construction stages but will be a high-tech business area to include the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skolkovotech), research institutes, a business incubator, and R&D, technologies development and commercialization centers, as well as housing. EMC will also collaborate with Russian universities, government agencies, and local and multinational companies in the local area…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

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…

Grazed from Cloud Pro.  Author:  Jennifer Scott.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Jean-Marc Seguin.

In our last installments on the benefits of cloud computing, we started looking at the maturity of IT – people, processes and technology. Before you start making changes in the organization steam rolling toward the goal of a private cloud, it’s important that you understand where you are today so that you can plot the right trajectory, and as you progress toward your goal, make course corrections as needed.

As I mentioned recently, this is not a clean-cut exercise. As we try to examine these areas in your organization and rank them, you will find areas that can be scored more mature and other areas that can be scored less mature on the same topic. This is normal. Depending on the areas of focus, improvement may vary. Let’s take a look at those areas:…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

It’s like 1999 all over again. The rise of the cloud, and thus the movement to the placement of data and applications outside of the firewall, leads to the reemergence of application integration. That’s why several new companies are coming online that support cloud computing integration directly, and why existing enterprise application integration (EAI) providers are dusting off their integration technology and pushing it at the cloud.

I get a kick out of these small companies that believe that integration is something they just thought about. Indeed, I hear many of the same arguments from then that now-traditional enterprise providers made back in the late 1990s when integration debuted as an architectural discipline…

Grazed from Tech Crunch.  Author: Mike Butcher.

BaltCap, a leading venture investor in startups in the Baltics region, has signed a €1 million investment in Clusterpoint, an enterprise software startup created by Latvian programmers and backed by seed investors in the UK and Baltics.

Clusterpoint has built a database platform designed for cloud computing infrastructure which they claim is highly scalable. They are competing against open source solutions such as MongoDB…

Grazed from Dark Reading.  Author:  PR Announcement.

CloudPassage, the leading cloud server security company, today unveils Halo NetSec, an easy and automated solution that provides advanced network access control for servers running in public clouds. Halo NetSec provides administrators with easy-to-manage perimeter controls designed for dynamic cloud environments, addressing a top security concern related to cloud adoption. “Cloud computing has ushered in a new set of security risks and challenges that are not addressed at the IaaS level, and traditional firewall defenses do not adequately translate into the cloud,” said Andrew Hay, senior security analyst for 451 Research.

“A host-based server security solution designed specifically for cloud environments picks up where the IaaS leaves off, providing organizations with the scalable security they need to consider when migrating traditional on-premise systems to the cloud.” A recent CloudPassage survey of IT managers revealed that the lack of perimeter defenses in the public cloud is a critical issue, with 45 percent indicating it’s their top concern. Halo NetSec addresses this concern head-on by combining centralized host–based firewall management that is purpose-built for dynamic cloud environments with two-factor authentication and a powerful API…

Grazed from The Washington Post.  Author: Michael Chertoff.

A grave threat is said to be stalking Europe. No, it isn’t the financial crisis and the potential demise of the euro. It’s the “rapacious” U.S. approach to privacy — which portends, for those engaged in the development of cloud architecture, a coming “clash” of privacy laws.

According to Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, cloud-based companies that collect personal data are violating fundamental human rights. “We . . . believe that companies who direct their services to European consumers should be subject to EU data protection laws. Otherwise, they should not be able to do business on our internal market,” Reding wrote in November. “This also applies to social networks with users in the EU. We have to make sure that they comply with EU law and that EU law is enforced, even if it is based in a third country and even if its data are stored in a ‘cloud.’ ”…