Microsoft’s cloud services, including Xbox Live, were disrupted Thursday because of a DNS error. Services connected to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud suffered a disruption Thursday — the second one interruption in a under a month. Online reports indicate impacted services included Microsoft.com, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Xbox Live. Microsoft had resolved lots of the problems by Thursday night, avoiding the possibly cataclysmic possibility that Xbox Live will be down when Xbox One units went on sale just after midnight Friday morning. The disruptions began at 2:22 p.m. PT and stretched across multiple regions. Microsoft corporate vice chairman Scott Guthrie confirmed via Twitter that the issue failed to involve Azure itself. Rather, “The issue is a DNS name server issue outside of azure.” Microsoft said Thursday evening that Azure was running normally. As of Friday morning, the Azure service dashboard showed most services were functioning as intended, though partial interruptions were plaguing compute functions in Asia, Europe, and the u. s. . Despite the outage, Windows... Read More »
Google Analytics Gets New Custom Dimensions
Google announced today that it has added “many” new dimensions to traditional reports in Google Analytics. Included is Custom Dimensions, which Google says was a highly requested feature. Here, you can find example custom dimensions “user tier,” “is logged in,” “friendly page name,” and “is internal”. “Custom Dimensions is a brand new Universal Analytics feature as a way to bring custom business data into Google Analytics,” says Google Analytics API product manager Nick Mihailovski. “For example, a custom dimension may be used to gather friendly page names, whether the user is logged in, or a user tier (like Gold, Platinum, or Diamond).” “By using Custom Dimensions in secondary dimensions, now you can refine standard reports to acquire deeper insights,” he adds. The feedback on custom dimensions is extremely positive thus far, as will be expected. Image: Google
Q&A: FedRAMP Director Discusses Cloud Security Innovation
Maria Roat After leaving the location of CIO for the U.S. Department of Transportation, I co-founded a marketplace called GOVonomy, designed to compare government needs and opportunities with emerging technology products from startups and growth companies. These kind of products are cloud-based and should require the government’s FedRAMP security assessment. Yet most private companies don’t seem to be attentive to the FedRAMP program and process, or the way it may also help improve their cloud security. In order portion of a brand new series of discussions with top government leaders for InformationWeek Government, I interviewed Maria Roat, the FedRAMP director at GSA. The FedRAMP program offers a very good opportunity for all enterprise cloud products and repair providers, although they don’t seem to be immediately planning to market to government, because the rigor can help improve the safety of all their products and decrease liability. On areas of improvement for GSA and the FedRAMP to think about, it’s going to help to have the third... Read More »
LinkedIn Opens Up Company Page APIs
LinkedIn just announced that it’s opening up its company page APIs. This implies developers can enable marketers to publish content to LinkedIn Company Pages, monitor conversations in real time and get analytics from the pages. “Initially available to a select group of partners, including Hootsuite, HubSpot, Spredfast, Adobe, Shoutlet, Percolate, Salesforce, and Sprinklr, the outlet of LinkedIn’s Company Pages API implies that all applications may have access to LinkedIn Company Pages,” a LinkedIn spokesperson tells WebProNews. “This will make it easier for marketers to generate and manage content on LinkedIn and use LinkedIn’s new Sponsored Updates option to extend the reach of that content.” “We wish to enable our clients to administer their content marketing from any tool they’re comfortable using,” says LinkedIn’s Keith Cowing in a blog post. “Opening our Company Page APIs suggests that all applications may have access to LinkedIn Company Pages. This may make it even easier for marketers to generate and manage content on LinkedIn and use our new Sponsored... Read More »
App Translations Boost Online Sales
A recent study from an internet translation firm, determined that almost all applications developed anywhere on the earth are written in English even if the developers aren’t from English speaking countries. 40% of the surveyed translations were general business applications, 30% were games (excluding gambling), and the rest 30% were applications from different categories. App developers generally cater to precise markets, in order that they translate their applications into the most languages in their target audience. To illustrate, developers targeting the South American market (about 40% of the translated applications) translate their applications into Latin America Spanish and to Brazilian Portuguese. Developers targeting the ecu market (35% of the translated applications) translate their applications into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Russian. Applications targeted at East Asian markets (about 20% of the applications) are translated into Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hindi. Finally, about 15% of applications are translated into Scandinavian languages including Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish. Other markets, equivalent to the massive market... Read More »