Ready for a wearable that listens for your snoring — or your stomach? Meet audio machine-learning tech. CES 2014: 8 Technologies To Watch (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) You’re jogging down a hectic city street, cranking tunes to your smartphone, oblivious to the realm around you. The intersection ahead looks clear, and you’re ignorant of loud sirens signaling that a speeding ambulance is coming your way. But before disaster strikes, your smartphone shuts off the music and warns you of the coming vehicle. This is only one of many potential uses of real-time acoustic processing, a machine-learning system that analyzes ambient audio to foretell near-future outcomes. Inside the example above it saved a clueless jogger from being squashed like a bug, however the technology has other potential uses too. It would, as an instance, detect when industrial equipment is set to fail, alert deaf people to alarms and other auditory warnings, helping ornithologists analyze bird calls, or even monitor bodily sounds — equivalent... Read More »

Networking customers are digging into the important points of Cisco’s new software-defined networking strategy, but these big-picture questions also deserve consideration. Cisco recently announced its new software-defined networking strategy, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Last week, I wrote about the various drawbacks of the platform, including its complexity and Cisco’s history of software development. Here I outline another questions customers should ask themselves before venturing into Cisco ACI. How does ACI compare with other platforms? All the signs show that Cisco is rallying behind ACI as its flagship SDN product. But we must keep in mind that Cisco also has Dynamic Fabric Automation, the OpenFlow-based Extensible Network Controller, and the Cisco ONE strategy for third-party software integration. Even as, VMware NSX, Nuage Networks, Midokura, and large Switch, to call a number of, even have products that compete directly — many offering similar benefits for lower costs. When discussing Cisco ACI with anyone, the most typical question I hear is, “How does it compare to VMware... Read More »

PaaS enables moving legacy Java and .Net applications to the cloud, brings slider interface to automatically scaling server instances as demand rises and falls. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (Click image for larger view.) Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, OpenShift, and Cloud Foundry are prominent platform-as-a-service vendors, using cloud techniques to assist developers build cloud apps. But there’s another contender coming at PaaS from contained in the enterprise: Apprenda. Tuesday, Apprenda released the 5.0 version of its PaaS platform, packaged software to present enterprises how to launch PaaS on premises. Considered one of Apprenda’s main differentiators from the opposite PaaS providers is that it doesn’t supply services from a public cloud. Rather, it leaves it as much as customers to launch Apprenda on “any infrastructure that they choose.” There’s nothing stopping someone from using Apprenda on Amazon Web Services. But most customers are running it all alone infrastructure, said Rakesh Malhotra, VP of product, in an interview. In addition, the 5.0 version... Read More »

Red Hat remains open-source’s $1 billion baby, after which some. Billings take off, suggesting the Linux company is heading for a robust conclusion to fiscal 2014. Red Hat reported revenue of $397 million in its third quarter, endeding Nov. 30, up 15% over an analogous period last year. Net income was $52 million or 27 cents per share, in comparison to $35 million or 18 cents per share inside the same quarter a year ago. The revenue slightly outstripped the 14% increase in business operating expenses, including sales and marketing and research and development, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst reported after the close of trading Thursday. Red Hat became the software industry’s first $1 billion open-source company last year, its fiscal 2013. It can be currently reporting fiscal 2014. Red Hat shares were up slightly in the course of the day at $49 just before its quarterly earnings report. After the report, shares rose 11% in afterhours trading to $54.40. Red Hat continues to transform... Read More »

The Weather Company is moving to a NoSQL-powered platform to collect some 20 terabytes of weather data per day. What is the biggest challenge? When this winter’s ice storms, artic deep freezes, and nasty nor’easters hit, it provided a great time to hunker down and get some inside projects done. Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler was engaged on an important one: consolidating 13 datacenters all the way down to four, relying extensively on public cloud providers, and moving to a NoSQL-powered big-data platform. When we last spoke to Koehler his company was preparing to head its Weather Underground business onto the brand new big-data platform, which runs the Riak database on Amazon public cloud computing resources, with backup resources at the Google Compute Cloud. Next up, plans called for the flagship Weather Channel to transport to that very same platform within a question of weeks. Koehler’s team has learned some key lessons along the manner, particularly concerning the challenge of predicting costs when using external cloud services.... Read More »