Is every dream home a startup? Not yet, but Google’s charge into the smart sensor market should spark more interest on this sector. Listed below are some names to observe. Google’s planned $3.2 billion buyout of Nest — revealed this week — has sparked additional interest inside the already-hot sector of smart sensors for the house. With that during mind, Light Reading has picked out five startups which are worth watching on this area. At the least, Google’s surprise buy has given the sphere additional credibility and can provoke additional buyouts from rivals trying to stay alongside of the hunt giant. (See Google to purchase Nest for $3.2B.) So listed here are our picks of the house bodies to look at: yetu AG, a Berlin-based startup, was founded in 2010 by the previous Chief Product and Innovation Officer from Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT), Christopher Schläffer, who serves as CEO. The corporate makes a “smart home platform” that connects various devices with a house gateway... Read More »

Outlook.com introduces a Gmail migration tool to draw unhappy Google email users. 10 Worst Social Media Meltdowns Of 2013 (click image for larger view) In early 2010, Google tried to accelerate the expansion of Google Apps by launching Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange, server software designed to assist companies move data from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. That was several months after Google launched Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook to assist Outlook users connect with Google Apps as a back end. That very same year, it also debuted Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes and fix for Blackberry Enterprise Server to make it easier for users of these systems to “Go Google.” On Wednesday, Microsoft returned the favor, adding another front in its broad counterattack on Google and at the threat ad-funded software poses to its business model. It introduced a service to simplify the method of importing Gmail messages into Outlook.com, the company’s successor to its Hotmail service. Both Microsoft Outlook and... Read More »

The ease with which software applications will also be created and connected to corporate systems has changed the character of commercial software development. The growing ease of application development has empowered users, enabling them to create software that when required significant time and expense. More users are turning to cloud-based platforms to become developers, building their very own business apps to support a growing range of commercial processes. Often, these apps are considered “disposable,” meaning they’re built for a particular process need after which tossed out, never for use again.  What might sound like a waste of cash is the byproduct of added efficiency within the workplace.  So-called “disposable apps” are showing up across industries and at companies of all styles and sizes. Even large-scale Fortune 100 companies like Kimberly-Clark, Wells Fargo, and Shell have embraced the agility and hyper focus of disposable apps. These global companies can maintain the responsiveness and workflow efficiency of startups by building and running faster business applications — even... Read More »

IBM’s latest global research on cloud computing kicks out a couple of unexpected correlations. Line of commercial decisionmakers are more thinking about cloud computing’s strategic potential than are their IT counterparts. That was one of the most surprises in IBM’s latest global research into the cloud-computing phenomenon. The survey, released in late October, involved 800 companies in 13 countries and 24 industries. LOB executives are embracing software-, platform-, and infrastructure-as-a-service more quickly than their IT peers, the survey found. “Three years from now, 72% of the folks we surveyed within the line of economic believe it’ll be ‘strategically important’ to remodeling their companies,” said IBM’s VP of cloud services Ric Telford, who teased many of the research’s top-level findings during his keynote finally month’s Cloud Connect conference in Chicago. The majority of IT leaders, some 58%, also believe in cloud’s impact, the survey found. Today, it truly is prior to LOB in this dimension, 49% to 34%. [Need to know more about the way it... Read More »