Volume XLXI, Issue 10

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In This Issue

FCC Sets Net Neutrality Rules

Excerpted from NY Times Report by Rebecca Ruizmarch

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday released extensive details of how it would regulate broadband Internet providers as a public utility, producing official wording that almost certainly sets the stage for extended legal fights.

The release of the rules had been eagerly anticipated by advocates and lawmakers, as well as broadband and technology companies, since the agency approved new rules for Internet service two weeks ago. The details came in a 313-page document that included the new rules and the legal justifications for them.

The rules revealed how the strict laws would be modified for Internet providers, exempting the companies from the sort of price controls typically applied to utilities, for example. But the full text of the new order also raised uncertainties about broad and subjective regulation.

One catchall provision, requiring “just and reasonable” conduct, allows the FCC to decide what is acceptable on a case-by-case basis.

Opponents of the rules, including many of the leading Internet providers, spent Thursday poring over the document… Read More

GOP Fault Lines Form in Web Fight

Excerpted from The Hill Report by Mario Trujillo

Some House Republicans are refusing to fully endorse a compromise on Net Neutrality floated earlier this year by their party’s Committee Chairmen.

While not ruling out future support for the draft bill, many in the party are pushing a hardline approach to undo the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) newly approved rules straight away.

“Now, I still am one of those that says, as far as I’m concerned, we should just take a hands-off policy,” Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said. “The Internet does not need the intervention of the FCC, so let’s nail that down first, and then let’s decide if it needs any other assistance or oversight or rules put in place by Congress.”

Any Congressional action on Net Neutrality faces long odds of ever being enacted. The proposals to block the FCC rules without a replacement would almost certainly run into a Presidential veto. A less partisan push hinges on finding Democratic support, but further compromise could alienate other Republicans.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD), House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Technology, Greg Walden (R-OR)… Read More

DCIA’s IoT Marathon Webcast

The DCIA’s Internet of Things (IoT) Marathon webcast, recorded live during the 2015 International CES, features twelve hours of demos, displays, and discussions from DCIA’s HD-video production studio and on location in meeting rooms, hospitality suites, and exhibit booths throughout CES.

The subject matter is the distributed computing industry’s newest and largest ever trend — explosive growth in all kinds of connected devices along with the novel and life-changing applications that run on them.

The webcast can be viewed in its entirety here, or by major sections including Welcome; Smart Objects for Fitness & Healthcare; Programmable Homes & Energy Management; Media Entertainment & Social Networking; Geolocation Services & Vehicular Automation; Retail, Public Space & Manufacturing Environments; and Power Consumption, Cybersecurity, and Interoperability.

The IoT is transforming everyday objects into an ecosystem of information that will enrich our lives. It will help us optimize our wellness. Programmable homes and energy management will provide increased physical security and savings in power consumption. Media entertainment and social networking will become seamless. Geolocation services and vehicular automation will be integrated. New services based on sensors, motors, and other machines will revolutionize transportation… Read More

Report from DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty

The DCIA is partnering with Mediaplanet in an exciting new marketing campaign entitled Future of Business & Tech in which industry participants are joining forces to raise awareness of the importance of cloud computing to drive innovation and efficiency for businesses and individuals around the globe.

This major initiative seeks to inform readers worldwide about various cloud solutions that are now available, as well as provide them with valuable insights into closely related information technology (IT) services as well as such vital topics as cybersecurity.

The campaign was launched in a special technology edition of the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday March 13th and is now also published online.

Through targeted print and digital distribution, Future of Business & Tech will initially reach more than two million readers.

Prominently featured in this effort are the DCIA’s Cloud Technologies Will Take Our Connected Lives to a Whole New Level, DDN’s The Growing Trend in High Performance Data Storage, and IBM’s Three Reasons Why the Cloud Is Critical to Your Small Business.

Here’s the introduction to our commentary:

“From social networking to big data, 2015 is positioned to become the year businesses of all shapes and sizes finally move to the cloud. Nearly three out of five companies have integrated cloud services into their information technology (IT) strategy and are spending more than 10 percent of their total operating expenses on cloud services. The increase in IT spending puts the cloud services market on track to surpass $250 billion in annual revenue by 2017.

Let’s take a closer look at five key trends driving this phenomenon: Mobile Cloud, Big Data, DevOps, Social Networking, and Internet of Things (IoT).”

Read the full article here and visit the Future of Business & Tech website to gain new insights into cloud-based IT solutions for creating safer platforms for storing data and leveraging the power of software. Share wisely, and take care.

New Datacloud South East Asia Speakers

Discover Johor, Asia’s newest cloud and datacenter location at South East Asia’s newest congress Datacloud South East Asia, co-sponsored by BroadGroup and the DCIA, and taking place on April 8th and 9th.

Join the region’s business leadership at this 2nd annual conference, which highlights the unique value of information technology (IT) infrastructure across the region. The event has also been expanded to include a finance and investment symposium for datacenter and cloud, bringing investors and business owners together in a unique networking platform.

The newest wave of speakers includes Shinya Kukita, Chief Engineer, Global Business Unit, NEC Corporation; Zou Xiaoteng, Chief Engineer of Data Center Infrastructure Solution, Huawei Technologies; Ir Ramli Bin Abdullah, Deputy Chief Engineer, Special Projects, TNB; Ronald Fung, Director, Group COO Office, Ping An Financial Group; Matthew Hunter, Associate, Olswang Asia; Asher Ling, Chief Operating Officer, Kingsland Development; Adlin Abdul Majid, Partner, Lee Hishammuddin Allen & Gledhill; and Sameer Puranik, Global Head – Cloud Solutions, Telstra.

Gain deep insight from global keynotes covering topics including cloud, energy, modular, and investment by leading international experts. Network with peers from across the South East Asia region and internationally… Read More

Are You Ready for Data Science?

Excerpted from Shelly’s Blog by Shelly Palmer

Data science is all the rage. Almost every CMO I know wants a data scientist for their very own — they are the status symbol du jour for senior executives everywhere. But… building the right data science team for your organization is not as easy as picking the right data scientist. Data science starts by asking the right questions, and the first question to ask is: What is data science?

Some people believe that data science is just a sexy name that mathletes made up to get better-paying jobs. For the sake of this writing, let’s define data science as “the analysis of data using the scientific method with the primary goal of turning information into action.”

How do they do it? Data scientists use a variety of mathematical tools to help answer questions and uncover patterns that contribute to the results, but it’s not just math… it’s much, much more.

In order to turn information into action, you need a team that is proficient in the three foundational skills: Domain Expertise — to define the problem space; Mathematics — for theoretical structure and problem solving; and Computer Science — to provide the environment where data is manipulated.

Data science exists at the intersection of these three foundational skills… Read More

Uber-Vulnerable for Cloud Disruption?

Excerpted from Forbes Report by Gordon Ritter

Uber, Lending Club, and Airbnb have all upended long-standing, traditional business models, replacing them with cloud-enabled marketplaces, and making headlines in the process. Industry-focused cloud applications, the engines driving the upheaval in those industries, have only begun to realize their potential. What other industries are Uber-vulnerable for industry cloud disruption, and what do the disruptors have in common?

We’d recently seen the sizable impact that industry-focused vertical cloud applications (“industry cloud”) can have, as companies like Veeva Systems, Opower, and Guidewire have become some of the fastest growing technology companies in the last decade. They sell cloud applications to industry leaders and enable sales and process improvements in life sciences, energy, and insurance, respectively.

At the same time, new companies are emerging with the intention of disrupting an entire industry. Disruptors are a new breed of industry cloud, with a different set of ambitions and skills relative to the enablers. They don’t work within current organizational structures, but instead, build entirely new ones. Think Uber for transportation, AirBnB for hospitality, Lending Club in fintech, and Zillow in real estate. These companies leapfrogged existing industry constructs and built direct consumer-to-provider marketplaces where none previously existed… Read More

IBM Bets Big on Mobile Cloud Explosive Growth

Excerpted from The Street Report by Scott Gamm

For a consumer, making a mobile purchase ideally only involves a few taps on a device, but what happens on the back end is significantly more complicated.

Huge amounts of data are involved, prompting major companies to rely on mainframe computing systems, such as IBM’s z13, to record and analyze all that information.

IBM’s new system, which cost the company $1 billion to develop over the course of 5 years, aims to tackle the explosive growth in mobile transactions, which the company says will reach 40 trillion daily transactions by 2025. The z13, which began shipping Monday, can process 2.5 billion transactions, or the equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays, per day, according to the firm.

Aside from the 300% increase in memory and 40% jump in processing capacity from IBM’s previous mainframe product, the z13 can handle both analytics and transactions within a single system.

“In the past you would have to move the data off the mainframe and do your analytics on the side,” said Tom Macpherson, Vice President of Z Systems Development at IBM… Read More

Big Data’s Increasing Impact in Your Business Life

Excerpted from The Street Report by Bret Kenwell

Big Data has already made an impact in the technology world and now it’s moving into Wall Street.

Steve Lohr, author of “Data-Ism,” describes the title of his book as three things: The first is about “raw material” data, such as smartphone tracking and website trails, he said. The second is making sense of all the data collected and the third — this is where the “-ism” part comes in — is finding patterns in data.

In other words, it’s about increasingly making our decisions based on data analysis rather than intuition and experience. “More science and less gut feel,” he explained.

Right now, Big Data is mainly being used for marketing on the Internet, Lohr said. Companies are able to analyze data on consumers such which websites they frequent, what products they search for, and what interests they have.

From there, advertisers can more accurately pinpoint what consumers want to see in their ads, increasing the odds of a potential sale.

One of the companies looking to harvest the big data market is IBM, whose stock has struggled, down 23% over the past three years. The question really becomes how soon Big Data really makes an impact, Lohr said… Read More

Social Networks & Long-Distance Romantic Relationships

Excerpted from HealthCanal Report

Social network sites such as Facebook play an important role in maintaining relationships, including romantic relationships, whether individuals are involved in a geographically close or long-distance romantic relationship.

A new study that compares the relative importance of social networks and explores the role they play in helping to maintain a close-by versus a long-distance romantic relationship is published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Lieber.

In the article “The Use of Social Network Sites for Relationship Maintenance in Long-Distance and Geographically-Close Romantic Relationships,” co-authors Cherrie Joy Billedo, Peter Kerkhof, and Catrin Finkenauer, VU University Amsterdam and University of the Philippines, describe differences in the intensity of use and the types of uses of social network sites between the two groups studied.

They report how use of social network sites allows individuals to access information about, and monitor the activities of, romantic partners and how that can be used to gauge a partner’s involvement in the relationship and loyalty, with potentially positive or detrimental effects. “Social network sites are used more frequently by those in long-distance relationships,” says Editor-in-Chief Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCB, BCN, Interactive Media Institute, San Diego,CA… Read More

Will the Internet of Things Come of Age in 5 Years?

Excerpted from AdWeek Report by Christopher Heine

Will consumers take smart mowers with lawn data lying down? South by Southwest (SXSW) attendees think so, but obstacles remain.

Technologists are holding court at SXSW this weekend on the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), a future reality where data will be gathered and used for everything from cars and lawn mowers to refrigerators and toothbrushes. Many of these connected products are already available, but when will they become so ubiquitous that marketers must change course — as when smartphones became part of non-techies’ lives half a decade ago?

The truth of the matter is there’s still infrastructure work to be done. Telecoms and governments have to create digital avenues that would let all software-powered items talk to one another. And we need super-techie advances with microprocessors and batteries that will last for years. But SXSW goers generally agree with Samsung’s prediction that products will be routinely connected within the next five years.

“As microprocessors and bandwidth become greater and less expensive, converging with nanotechnology as wearables with sensors, the Internet of Things is already here but will gain exponential acceleration and become more utilitarian as we move into the future,” said Richard Hollis, CEO of digital commerce player Holonis… Read More

Industrial Net: Big Machines, Big Data, Big Impact

Excerpted from Forbes Report by Jacob Morgan

You may be familiar with the Internet of Things (IoT), a network of connected devices (and people) that is expected to number around 50 billion by the year 2020. To better understand IoT, I recommend that you read two articles. The first is A Simple Explanation of the Internet of Things and the second is Everything You Need to Know About the Internet of Things.

The industrial Internet builds on this concept by focusing on connecting large, complex machines such as jet engines, turbines, locomotives, and the like.

What will a world look like when devices as small as your watch to as large as a jet engine are all connected to each other and to people?

In this episode of the future of work podcast, I speak with Rich Carpenter who is the Chief of Strategy for GE in its Intelligent Platforms division. Carpenter shares fascinating insight around how connected machines (usually very large machines) and devices are going to impact our economy, our jobs, and our future.

He shares several examples and provides some great advice for business leaders and employees alike… Read More

The $270 Billion Cloud Computing Market

Excerpted from 24/7WallSt Report by Douglas McIntyre

With every major tech company in the world chasing part of the cloud computing market, what are they fighting for? Close to $300 billion. The business, however, may not be terribly profitable.

According to Market Research Media:

The global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a 30% CAGR reaching $270 billion in 2020, concludes the latest research report covering the cloud computing products, technologies and services for the global market

The base year for the forecast is 2015.

As huge corporations jockey for leadership in the cloud business, price may be as important differentiator as anything else. Amazon dropped the price of its product last year as a means to match a discount offered by Google.

The Amazon Web Services cloud business eventually could be larger than Amazon’s e-commerce business, says Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Since Amazon’s core business has revenue of nearly $100 billion a year, Bezos might assume that Amazon will have a huge share of the market within a few years. Among the companies chasing Amazon are Microsoft, where new CEO Satya Nadella has made cloud revenue his top priority… Read More

The Rise of Semi-Autonomous Cloud Computing

Excerpted from Talkin’ Cloud Report by Mike Vizard

Despite best of intentions as a practical matter, vendors for one reason or another wind-up supporting proprietary technologies despite any previous avowals to the contrary. For partners of Hewlett-Packard (HP) that may turn out to be a very good thing.

HP recently refreshed its Helion cloud management portfolio, which now includes version 4.1 of HP Helion Eucalyptus, which is an implementation of a private cloud based on application programming interfaces (APIs) as defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that HP gained when it acquired Eucalyptus for $100 million last year. Prior to that acquisition HP had stated that it would only support open APIs such as OpenStack in the cloud.

Fortunately for HP partners it looks like a more pragmatic approach to the cloud is starting to prevail inside HP. In fact, Bill Hilf, senior vice president of Helion product management at HP, said the best way to think about the cloud today is as a series of semi-autonomous stacks of computing services rather than one homogeneous hybrid cloud.

Case in point, Hilf notes that many IT organizations are now looking to repatriate applications that were originally deployed on AWS back into the enterprise.

The reasons for that shift span everything from security and compliance to cost and performance… Read More

BitTorrent Delivers Cloud-Free “Dropbox for Business”

Excerpted from InfoWorld Report by Serdar Yegulalp

BitTorrent originated as a file sharing and distributed download technology, powering downloads of content both legitimate (such as Linux ISOs) and not (Taylor Swift albums).

With BitTorrent Sync, the technology’s creators have turned to a new use case: a decentralized substitute for file sync-and-share services like Dropbox.

The new BitTorrent Sync 2.0 ups the ante by providing a “pro” tier, with what BitTorrent describes as “additional functionality for business workgroups and individuals that need more capabilities and controls from Sync.”

BitTorrent Sync itself, even in its nonpro incarnation, is a handy little tool. Install it on two or more devices — Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, or Windows Phone — and you can elect to synchronize up to 10 folders among those machines. The synchronization process — the actual shuttling of data — is done entirely peer-to-peer. Any folder can be synced, even those on a removable drive. Versions of Sync are also available for many popular NAS devices from Seagate, Western Digital, Netgear, and others, allowing content on those devices to be synced.

Setting up a folder to sync involves passing an alphanumeric “secret key” between the peer machines… Read More

Apple Watch: It’s an Internet of Things Play

Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Larry Dignan

Apple Watch appears to be designed to plug Apple’s emerging ecosystem of Internet of Things (IoT) services. Sure, it’ll sell iPhones too, but the real win may be Apple’s various platforms for the car, health and commerce.

Apple Watch has been billed as a fashion statement, the emergence of the smart watch as a real device and a way to generate iPhone sales. Perhaps it’s more about the Internet of things ecosystem.

When Apple Watch was revealed on Monday, a lot of the moving parts were already known. And then Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped a few items that were begging to be connected.

Among them: ResearchKit; HealthKit; HomeKit; 700 million iPhones sold; Apple Pay; and Car Play.

Whether it’s medical research — you and your health as a medical research tool — a Coca Cola vending machine, health monitoring and payments it all adds up to a touch point for Apple. As Apple blends its way into home security and other things in your life — appliances, diagnostics, diabetes checkers — it becomes a consumer front end device. Rest assured that the Apple TV will be another end point in Apple’s IoT strategy.

JMP Securities research analyst Alex Gauna didn’t go too deep, but he highlighted the IoT potential… Read More

Coming Events of Interest

Datacloud South East Asia — April 8th-9th in Johor, Malaysia. Datacloud South East Asia will assess the energy, scalability, security, architecture, and software challenges confronting operators of data centers and enterprises engaged in or considering transitions to the cloud.

NAB Show — April 11th-16th in Las Vegas, NV. Popular and fresh attractions for 2015 include the Cloud Pavilion (CP) for asset management; Connected Media Live (CML), focusing on the consumer experience; the Drone Pavilion (DP), featuring a fully enclosed “flying cage” for demonstrations; and the New Media Expo (NMX).

Internet of Things Conference — April 15th-17th in San Diego, CA. The IoT Con will focus on how companies are using a variety of technologies, including ZigBee radios, Wi-Fi, and machine-to-machine (M2M)software, to connect things to the Internet, and how they are achieving real business benefits from doing so.

All That Matters — May 20th-23rd in Singapore. Packed with influencers, content creators, platforms and marketers, ATM drives business and global collaboration for decision makers in the entertainment, media, and marketing industries.

CES Asia — May 25th-27th in Shanghai, China. The success of the 2015 International CES builds strong momentum for CES Asia. With strong exhibitor demand for CEA’s inaugural event, the show will be curated with select qualifying companies permitted to exhibit.

Data Center and Cloud Awards — June 2nd in Monaco. Europe’s most prestigious awards for data center and cloud achievements will be announced at an evening ceremony prior to the opening of Europe’s ‘must-attend’ Datacloud Europe conference and exhibition.

Freescale Technology Forum — June 22nd-25th in Austin, TX. FTF, this year focusing on the Internet of Things (IoT), is the heart of discovery, imagination and innovation. Together we will strategize and design the next market-shifting products.

Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) — October (2015 Dates TBD) in Dubai, UAE. IoTWF is an exclusive event that brings together the best and brightest thinkers, practitioners, and innovators from business, government, and academia to accelerate the market adoption of the Internet of Things.

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