Posts tagged Technologies
Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012
Oct 21st
At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, the analyst firm rolled out its top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 this week. It should come as no surprise that cloud is one of the technologies tapped for top ten.
What’s a “strategic technology”? The short version is that a strategic technology is one that has the potential for “significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.”
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That means either an existing technology that’s matured or become suitable for wider use, or it’s an emerging technology that could provide a strategic business advantage for early adopters. If it’s new(ish) and going to impact your organization’s long-term plans or initiatives.
Cloud computing is a no-brainer, of course. It’s already impacting business, and will continue to do so in 2012. But the rest of the ten is just as interesting:
- Big Data
- Extreme Low-Energy Servers
- Next-Generation Analytics
- App Stores and Marketplaces
- In-Memory Computing
- Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces
- Contextual and Social User Experience
- Internet of Things
- Media Tablets
Of course, many of these go together. For instance, contextual and social user experience and Internet of Things depend on one another. App stores and marketplaces and tablet computing go hand-in-hand. Next generation analytics depends on big data and in-memory computing, in many cases.
And, as usual, Gartner’s picks are largely things we’ve been covering here at ReadWriteWeb for some time. I might add, we provide the coverage a lot less expensively, too. Interested in Big Data? Check out our Age of Exabytes report from last year on tools and approaches for managing big data.
It is, however, a good list of technologies to watch. What technologies are you keeping an eye on? Anything not on Gartner’s list?
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Professional SEO Copywriting Services Offered at Oregon Technologies – Stock Markets Review (press release)
Sep 30th
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Professional SEO Copywriting Services Offered at Oregon Technologies
Stock Markets Review (press release) Serving as a leading SEO Company in India, Oregon Technologies provides professional SEO copywriting services. Professional SEO copywriting services from Oregon Technologies could bring about that perfect balance. Our team knows how to get your website … Leading SEO services company Techmagnate announces SEO Copywriting packages |
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Red Orange Technologies Pvt. Ltd.: Unveiling India’s Biggest SEO Platform – PR.com (press release)
Jul 30th
A New Two-Factor Mobile Solution from Confident Technologies
Jul 26th
We have written earlier this summer about the need for two-factor authentication solutions in the wake of various hacking scandals with compromised account sign-ons. A new solution from Confident Technologies called Multifactor Authentication is now available that makes two-factor as easy as clicking on a sequence of images on your smartphone. For those of us that are numerically challenged, it is an intriguing idea.
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Like any two-factor notion, you have something that you carry around with you such as your cellphone, combined with a secret password to lock your account from intruders. Confident has you specify a sequence of images – such as dog, bird, and cars – that you have tap on your phone before you are allowed into your account. It is that simple. Even if someone else gained access to your phone, they still would have a hard time guessing the correct image sequence, even if they installed keyloggers on your phone to try to capture this information.
You can see a short video of how it works here, and you can try a live demo for yourself here. The service is priced at $5 per user per year. One small knock on the company’s demo site is that it shows an error code when you enter a slightly different URL. A security site should have better error trapping.
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Comcast Teams With Elemental Technologies to Stay Ahead of Netflix and Hulu
Jul 25th
Comcast is making its push against the over-the-top content distributors like Netflix and Hulu and today took another step towards evening the playing field by enlisting Elemental Technologies, a video processing company that specializes in sending content to tablets and smartphones.
It is an interesting move by Comcast and it is one of the first cable companies to meaningfully compete in the content market, as opposed to just being a “dumb pipe” operator. Comcast’s desire to be in the content business became apparent with its massive take over of NBC Universal that was approved last year. In terms of content monetization against the other operators like Verizon, AT&T or Time Warner, Comcast is now ahead of the curve.
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Included in this partnership is video management and publishing company thePlatform. Elemental and thePlatform are working together to bring more than 10,000 hours of Comcast/NBC Universal content to Comcast’s XFinity application on iOS devices.
It is an interesting move by Comcast and not unexpected. NBC now has its own dedicated streaming application, just like ABC does with its ABC Player. The intrigue comes when you put the XFinity streaming app in context against Hulu Plus, which is reportedly looking to sell and has a number of possible suitors. Per its agreement with federal regulators when the NBC Universal takeover was granted, Comcast does not have a seat on Hulu’s board and has no say in decisions that happen at the company. It is unlikely that the Federal Trade Commission would allow Comcast to buy Hulu outright from the other network partners (Fox and ABC) so coming up with a robust streaming application of its own makes a lot of sense.
“Because of Hulu and Netflix, Comcast has been incredibly agile for a $60 billion company,” said Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental.
For its part, Elemental is a company on the rise. It has been developing its IP-streaming product for years and is gaining steam with the Era of the iPad. See the infographic to the right to see how closely correlated Elemental’s growth is to that of the iPad.
Instead of being a CPU-intensive video processor, Elemental is primarily GPU (graphic processor unit) in its video processing, which makes it a lot more scalable than competitors that rely on CPU. Its technology allows content to be streamed across almost any device and over almost any bit-rate, making it very versatile and flexible. With the rise of IP content-streaming devices (like an actual Apple TV or Internet connected TVs), Elemental is only going to keep growing.
Comcast is also a partner in the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem consortium that is developing UltraViolet, the digital rights management solution kicked off by the networks and studios. Elemental is not a partner in DECE but it is following UltraViolet closely and will be able to conform to the standards (Common File Format) that UltraViolet is creating.
The question for Comcast is whether or not users will flock to the XFinity app like they have with Hulu and Netflix or even the ABC Player or HBO Go. This type of application was precisely what Comcast had in mind when it rebranded Comcast cable and Internet service to XFinity several years ago.
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The Hottest New News Technologies in the World: Knight News Challenge 2011 Winners
Jun 22nd
Who’s building the hottest news media technologies in the world? Every year the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation takes on the challenge of judging from hundreds of entrants in the Knight News Challenge and selecting a small number of them to fund with up to $5 million in total backing.
This year 16 winners from 4 countries were selected and they are very consistent with cutting edge trends in the tech industry at large. They range from government accountability tracking systems to a tool that sends an SMS to people in water deprived areas when water is available. John S. Bracken runs the Foundation’s grant making in digital media and wrote today on the Knight blog that this year’s winners seemed to touch on three common themes: the rise of the hacker/data journalist, a broad interpretation of “news” and the need to make better sense of the stream.
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Below we offer our small contribution to the discussion, with a list of winners and their descriptions embedded in a world map and a Twitter list that will let you follow all the winners all year long.
It is important to note that there may be even more exciting news technologies being built around the world that didn’t fit the Knight criteria, which includes some open source technology requirements and an extensive application process. None the less – this is a pretty inspiring group and a good place to look to get some ideas about how the web and world will change in the next few years.
Knight News Challenge 2011 Winners Around the World
View Knight Foundation 2011 Winners in a larger map
Below, a Twitter list. To subscribe to all 16 of the winners on Twitter, click the words “join the conversation” in the widget below, then click “follow this list.”
Congratulations to all the winners – now please go forth and change the way we learn about the world each day!
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Osirion System Technologies Launches Their SEO and SEM Services – AddPR.com (press release)
Jun 22nd
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Osirion System Technologies Launches Their SEO and SEM Services
AddPR.com (press release) SEO refers to the wide array of concepts and strategies that are employed in boosting sales revenue and maximizing the return on investment. Osirion System Technologies is a reliable provider of SEO services and web optimization for various kinds of … SEO blogging tips for business If You Need To Rank In The Search Engines Follow These SEO Techniques SEO is Never Done |
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Parents Rejoice: New Technologies Will End “Sexting,” Driving While Texting & More
Apr 22nd
Mobile carriers in the U.S. will soon have expanded Family Locator solutions in place that offer far more controls than simply tracking family members’ whereabouts. Instead, these services will offer tools that allow parents to stop teens from texting while driving, stop “sexting” from occurring and stop kids from communicating with unwanted parties. Parents will also be able to read the content of text messages, preview mobile photos before being posted publicly on the Internet or sent to friends and will be able to specify what types of applications can be downloaded to kids’ phones and when those apps can be used.
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Personal Security is Big Money Maker in Location-Based Services Market
For those who grew up before the era of mobile phones, these type of “mom and dad are your Big Brother” services may strike you as a bit disconcerting with the level of access they provide. But for mobile operators and the service providers, that access has proved both valuable in retaining customers, as well as quite lucrative (to the tune of a $50 billion personal securities market, no less.)
According to the CEO of one such service provider, Tasso Roumeliotis, founder and CEO of Location Labs, there’s a high willingness to pay for “Family Locator” services like AT&T’s FamilyMap, T-Mobile’s FamilyWhere and Sprint’s Family Locator, for example.
Carriers like selling such services, too. When a mobile operator is able to convert an account to a family plan, it reduces its churn rate by 75%, Roumeliotis says. Currently, 65% of subscribers in the U.S. are on this type of plan. Within this market, there are now millions of users who are happy to pay for Family Locator solutions at a cost of $5 to $15 dollars per month, generally speaking.
While there’s much debate over the future of location-based “checkin” services like Silicon Valley darling Foursquare or Facebook’s Places, there’s no question that families are finding the real value of location-based services in tracking their family members’ movements. To put these numbers in perspective, Roumeliotis says there were more “paid-for locates” last year than there were Foursquare checkins. And according to Foursquare’s own data, there were 381,576,305 checkins in 2010, to give you an idea.
Parental Controls and Access Baked Into Handsets
But while location-based tracking and alerts (child arrives at school, spouse left the office) have been available for some time, other types of services are now on their way to users’ handsets, too.
Location Labs is now providing solutions that address the texting-while-driving problem, via partnerships with both Sprint and T-Mobile at present, and more are on the way. Unlike smartphone applications, these services reside deep in the phone’s firmware and cannot simply be switched off by closing an app or turning off GPS. Instead, the service, provided by Location Labs’ security platform called “Sparkle,” works by using APIs (application programming interfaces) that provide developers access to location, velocity plus controls for data, voice and text. And it works on both smartphones (iPhone, Android and BlackBerry) and select feature phones (Brew Mobile for now).
In addition to being able to track where a family member is located, or turn off the ability for someone to text while the car is in motion, this service also provides access to other data and activity taking place on the device. For parents, this means that they’ll soon be able to observe and control more aspects of how their children are using their phones.
Parents will be able to preview photos before they leave the device, read the content of text messages, stop kids from downloading apps or games, restrict Web searches, restrict when apps or other features of the phone can and cannot be used, whitelist or blacklist specific applications, restrict who can contact kids (and vice versa) and much more.
And unlike some of the Internet “net nanny” solutions from days past, those being tracked on their mobiles are never unaware. The service sends out messages at intermittent (but for security reasons, random) intervals, alerting users that they are being located or monitored.
While these advanced features are not available on phones today, their arrival is just around the corner. Location Labs says it will make an announcement related to this technology in Q3 2011 involving at least one major carrier here in the U.S. And in two years time, says Roumeliotis, ubiquitous parental controls like this will be the norm on all carriers.
Come to the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, where danah boyd of Microsoft Research will explore the practice of teen sexting, highlighting why entrepreneurs should care, what the social and legal implications of this practice are, and how technology companies should respond. Learn more.
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