Upcoming Gigaom Event: How good were Werner Vogels’ cloud predictions in 2012?, and more for Thursday, February 5, 2015

Upcoming Gigaom Event: How good were Werner Vogels’ cloud predictions in 2012? Gigaom Feb 5 2015, 5:55am PDT Werner Vogels, CTO and VP at Amazon Web Services, has been a featured guest at Gigaom’s Structure conference for the last eight years.  Way back in 2012, Vogels made a few predictions on how the cloud industry would develop into 2017. Before he takes the stage […] Read More » Oracle paid north of $1.2B for Datalogix, says WSJ Barb Darrow Feb 5 2015, 5:49am PDT Right before Christmas, when announced plans to buy Datalogix it didn’t detail price. Now, TheWall Street Journal, (paywall)  is filling in the blanks, reporting that the price tag is $1.2 billion, according to two anonymous sources “familiar with the deal.” Oracle did not comment for the Journal; I have requested comment here, […] Read More » Stellar, South African nonprofit to bring digital savings to young girls Biz Carson Feb 5 2015, 5:00am PDT When Stellar launched last summer, Joyce Kim like any other startup exec wasn’t getting much sleep and found herself trolling Twitter in the middle of the night, San Francisco time. In September, Kim, the co-founder and executive director of the Stellar Foundation, posted a tweet, asking […] Read More » ClusterHQ rakes in $12M to make containers play nice with data Jonathan Vanian Feb 5 2015, 5:00am PDT Big data startup ClusterHQ sees a lot of opportunity in capitalizing on container and database technology and, with a $12 million series A funding round that the company plans to announce on Thursday, it’s got a nice chunk of cash to help it do so. ClusterHQ’s […] Read More » BT agrees to $19B takeover of EE, paving way for close DT relationship David Meyer Feb 5 2015, 12:13am PDT The negotiations are over: pending regulatory approval, BT will get back into the U.K.’s mobile scene in a big way by buying EE from Deutsche Telekom and Orange for £12.5 billion ($19 billion). This means BT will be able to sell fully-converged bundles of fixed and […] Read More » VMware wants all those cloud workloads “marooned” in AWS Barb Darrow Feb 4 2015, 11:44pm PDT Even though VMware initially called its Amazon competitor vCloud Hybrid Services, make no mistake, it’s the company’s public cloud (now renamed vCloud Air.) And, really wants workloads that might run ow on Web Services to come on over, says Bill Fathers, EVP and GM of cloud services for […] Read More » Report: You will start seeing more tweets in your Google searches Carmel DeAmicis Feb 4 2015, 5:37pm PDT Google and Twitter have rekindled their friendship, according to a new report out from Bloomberg. Twitter will grant access to its tweets to Google, which will start displaying them in search results. Bloomberg says we can expect to see this happen in the first half of 2015. […] Read More » Real-time brand tweeting is an art, not a science Carmel DeAmicis Feb 4 2015, 5:11pm PDT As everyone knows, there’s a second kind of competition going on during the Super Bowl, and it has nothing to do with football, commercials, or puppies: The Twitter Bowl. Which brand can win the pithy, real-time Twitter conversation? Oreo famously slam-dunked this in 2013 with its “dunk […] Read More » How can a baby have three parents? Lasers, software, and a joystick Elizabeth Armstrong Moore Feb 4 2015, 1:56pm PDT After spending several years interviewing scientists and holding public forums to debate ethics and air concerns, the U.K.’s lower house of Parliament this week voted to allow babies to be born with three genetic parents. While some call it a perversion, the procedure has nothing at […] Read More » Report: 80% of all mobile data is consumed by just 10% of users Kevin Fitchard Feb 4 2015, 1:40pm PDT Cisco Systems this week offered some insight into just how much mobile data the world is consuming — 2.5 exabytes a month, to be exact – and now a new report from Amdocs sheds a little light on who among those billions of users is consuming […] Read More » The FCC’s net neutrality proposal is awesome, but has a loophole Stacey Higginbotham Feb 4 2015, 1:05pm PDT FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has taken the unprecedented and awesome step of using Title II to ensure that the internet remains open and that ISPs cannot discriminate against the type of traffic flowing across their networks. This is a big deal, as I explained earlier, and […] Read More » Google had its biggest quarter ever for data center spending. Again Derrick Harris Feb 4 2015, 11:30am PDT Google just finished off another record-setting quarter and year for infrastructure spending, according to the company’s earnings report released last week. The web giant spent more than $3.5 billion on “real estate purchases, production equipment, and data center construction” during the fourth quarter of 2014 and […] Read More » Nice! Wheeler steps up with real proposal for net neutrality Stacey Higginbotham Feb 4 2015, 8:52am PDT FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Wednesday unveiled his plans for mandating real network neutrality and preventing ISPs from discriminating against traffic on their pipes in an opinion piece in Wired. While much of the plan was leaked to the press earlier in the week, and the […] Read More » This Berkeley startup & its energy machines are about to take off Katie Fehrenbacher Feb 4 2015, 7:00am PDT A decade ago the sprawling artist compound just off of Ashby Avenue in an industrial part of West Berkeley, Calif, was filled with flame-throwing robots, stacks of shipping containers and towering Burning Man-inspired sculptures. During my college years at the University of California, Berkeley, and for […] Read More » What happens when too few databases become too many databases? Barb Darrow Feb 4 2015, 5:00am PDT So here’s some irony for you: For years, Andy Palmer and his oft-time startup partner Michael Stonebraker have pointed out that database software is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Companies, they said, would be better off with a specialized database for certain tasks rather than using a general-purpose database […] Read More » Technical preview of Vivaldi browser had 400K downloads in a week David Meyer Feb 4 2015, 2:48am PDT The new Vivaldi browser, unveiled a week ago by Opera founder Jon von Tetzchner, is off to a roaring start. Its first technical preview – the thing isn’t even in beta yet – has already had 400,000 downloads. As von Tetzchner said in a Wednesday update […] Read More » Sony: Pictures hack cost $15M; 2,100 smartphone job cuts coming David Meyer Feb 4 2015, 2:25am PDT Last year’s massive hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, which the U.S. administration has blamed on North Korea, cost the Sony division around $15 million. In ‘s results (PDF) for the third quarter of its fiscal year (the fourth quarter of 2014 proper), the company had to […] Read More » Startup founder offers free legal help to startups hit by patent troll Jeff John Roberts Feb 3 2015, 3:19pm PDT Chris Hulls got mugged on payday. The founder of Life360 had just raised $50 million to expand his business, a social network app for families, when a patent troll came calling with an invitation to discuss how Hulls could hand over a cut of that money. According […] Read More » Competition could cost US ISPs $24B a year, says report Stacey Higginbotham Feb 3 2015, 11:58am PDT With rumors of Verizon seeking to sell a significant chunk of its wireline assets and as the government continues its review of Comcast’s attempt to take over Time Warner Cable, which could lead to further consolidation in the broadband market, a new report out from a […] Read More » Guardian digital editor is right — ending comments is a mistake Mathew Ingram Feb 3 2015, 10:56am PDT Guardian digital editor and former New York Times staffer Aron Pilhofer says media outlets are making a monumental mistake by ending comments, instead of focusing on how they can use them to build a true community and two-way relationship with their readers Read More »