The right to free speech isn’t a license to threaten, harass, or intimidate. A protest group calling itself Counterforce on Tuesday demonstrated in front of the Berkeley, Calif., home of Google engineer Anthony Levandowski and distributed leaflets to his neighbors to bring attention to “the evil he brings into this world” through involvement in technology projects like Google’s self-driving car and investment in a neighborhood condominium development (with required low-income units). To fight this evil, the gang advocates that folk “steal from the techies you babysit for” and vandalize surveillance cameras. In a post on local news website Indybay, a presumed representative of the gang conflates several different issues into one vague, anti-capitalist platform: dissatisfaction with the buses tech companies use to shuttle workers; with real estate development, gentrification, and high tech-industry salaries; with the NSA and surveillance; with the labor conditions in Congo mines that supply the raw materials of electronics; and with the “out-of-touch and indulgent lifestyles” of Google employees. “Our... Read More »

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison predicts database consolidation, a promised in-memory option, and occasional-end engineered systems will accelerate growth in 2014. Oracle reported better-than-expected financial results for the newest quarter, and in a conference call with financial analysts Wednesday, CEO Larry Ellison predicted that its flagship 12c Database, a growing portfolio of engineered systems, and cloud software subscriptions will drive growth within the year ahead. Results for the fiscal second quarter of 2014, which ended Nov. 30, were highlighted by a 2% revenue increase from a year earlier to $9.3 billion and earnings of 69 cents per share. Wall Street were expecting $9.2 billion of revenue and income of 67 cents per share. The gains came against a sturdy prior-year quarter, and sales were flat overall. New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenue was unchanged at $2.4 billion. Hardware systems revenue, including gross sales and support, was unchanged at $1.3 billion. Looking ahead, Ellison and Oracle president Mark Hurd said sales of the 12c database,... Read More »

Microsoft’s enterprise sales are booming, but Surface remains no match for the iPad. 7 Mistakes Microsoft Made In 2013 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Microsoft handily beat Wall Street estimates Thursday, announcing revenue of $24.52 billion for its second fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 31. The very best-grossing quarter in company history, Microsoft’s second quarter, was up from $21.5 billion within the same quarter last year. Net income was $6.6 billion, which translated to 78 cents per share. Analysts had expected net income of $5.8 billion and revenue of $23.7 billion, in step with Thomson Reuters. If Thursday marked the last earnings report for outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, he’ll have exited on a high note. Since announcing his retirement plans in August, Ballmer have been a punching bag within the press, with reports not just critiquing his previous leadership but additionally implying that he and Bill Gates are getting impediments to the quest for Ballmer’s successor. But since bottoming... Read More »

BI giants IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP grew little in 2013, but nimble, visual-data-discovery leaders Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and QlikTech soared. Here’s why. The business intelligence market in 2013 could best be described as tepid. As one vendor CEO put it, “I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse.” The “better” was the mid-1990s, when BI software sales were growing 40% per year. The “worse” was the peak of the recession in 2008, when BI growth limped along at 2%. A study vendor revenues and product releases in 2013 reveals a tale of 2 worlds: the giant BI-platform vendors and the nimbler visual-data-discovery vendors. For essentially the mostsome of the most part, large BI vendors showed flat or low-single-digit revenue growth while companies akin to Tableau (75%), TIBCO Spotfire (30%), and QlikTech (23%) have all shown strong, double-digit growth during the first three quarters of 2013. Their secret? Agility. In the now-normal frenetic pace of economic, users can now not watch for that completely architected, IT-sanctioned reports... Read More »

Fast-growing cloud startup plans to rent more engineers and build new data centers. DigitalOcean, the cloud organisation with facilities in Ny, Amsterdam, Singapore, and San Francisco, has received a hefty $37.2 million in its first round of funding as a way to build out its service. The round was led by Adreesen Horowitz of Menlo Park, Calif., and could be used to rent engineers to construct out infrastructure and add cloud service features. DigitalOcean is a service primarily oriented toward developers, providing simple, basic virtual servers equipped with solid state storage. Its prices are under Amazon Web Services. On the most simple level, developers may use a virtual server for 7 cents an hour or 2.1 cents for 3 hours, or a for flat fee of $5 a month. In mid-2013, DigitalOcean was cited by Netcraft because the cloud service adding web-facing servers at one of the vital fastest rates on the earth. At first of 2013, it ranked 568th among cloud services. On the... Read More »