by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
CoTweet, a start-up that helps businesses manage their Twitter accounts, is rolling out its first fee-based services, with McDonald’s, Ford and SunTrust among its paying customers.
The San Francisco company said over the summer, when it announced $1.1 million in funding, that it would eventually charge for some offerings.
by Justin Scheck, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Until three weeks ago, few people outside corporate data centers knew much about deduplication technology, which makes data storage more efficient by culling repetitive documents. That changed when data storage companies NetApp and EMC got into a bidding war last month for a leading provider of the heretofore obscure software.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Shares of both Seagate and Western Digital are getting battered on fears that the hard-drive sector could once again soon find itself with a glut of supply.
At least in part, the Street is reacting to this morning’s downgrade of Marvell by Barclays Capital, which as I noted earlier was in response to indications from Taiwanese component makers of a slowdown PC demand.
by Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer, Ars Technica
Amazon has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution.
by William M. Bulkeley, Staff Writer, The Wall Street Journal
“Like the physical universe, the digital universe is expanding. In fact, exploding,” says John Gantz, a researcher for IDC.
For the last three years, Mr. Gantz has been commissioned by storage provider EMC to count the number of bits created each year. And each year he reports that IDC previously underestimated the explosion of information.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Qwest plans to announce a new wireless Internet offering that lets broadband customers access AT&T hotspots around the country.
The deal, whose terms are undisclosed, gives Qwest customers free use of some 17,000 wireless areas on AT&T’s network, including locations at Starbucks and McDonald’s.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Business at Sun Microsystems continues to, well, stink.
For the fiscal third quarter ended March 29, the server, storage and software company posted revenue of $2.614 billion, down 20 percent from a year ago, off 18.8 percent sequentially, and well short of the Street consensus of $2.86 billion.
“The cloud” has come to represent the bright future of computing, a world where processing and storage become as ubiquitous, cheap and accessible as electricity. But for big business, one researcher argues that “cloud” metaphor may be economically apt: The closer you look at the much-hyped technology’s price advantages, the fuzzier they seem.
by Matt Richtel, Staff Writer, Bits, New York Times
Everything is lost… unless you buy a Seagate hard drive. Picture a young mother fretting over losing photos of her adorable brood, or a 30-something man afraid he might lose the countless hours of music he’s stored on his PC.
There’s a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data.
The other day I was sitting in the bank watching a clerk copy information off a paper bank transfer to initiate a new wire transfer. Being a busy person I hate inefficiencies, and this was just plain bad. When I asked why the bank didn’t use an electronic copy to speed up the process, the clerk replied that using an electronic copy can create mistakes and cause liability for the bank. In the same way that people are mistrustful of electronic elections, they believe that a human being copying from a piece of paper is less prone to make mistakes than doing the same thing electronically. I smiled when I heard that, because I know it isn’t going to last.
A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free-versus-pay online are ending. In 2007 the New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. … The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.
by Michael Kanellos, Editor at Large, CNET News.com
Companies used to give away pens, squishy balls and coffee cups to worm their ways into the hearts of customers. Now, they pass out database software. That is, in a sense, Sun Microsystems’ strategy with its $1 billion purchase of MySQL, said Sun CFO Mike Lehman at Sun’s Global Media Summit here today. Very few [...]
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