Yahoo has announced the end of several products in an effort to narrow its business focus and reduce losses.

The company said that it would be shutting down six services, including old versions of its Mail service.

“Like we announced last month, we want to bring you experiences that inspire and entertain you every day,” wrote Google executive vice president of platforms Jay Rossiter.

“That means taking a hard look at all of our products to make sure they are still central to your daily habits.”

Among the services set to be dropped are the Yahoo Mail Classic service and the Mail and Messenger platform for feature phones. The company will also be dropping the Yahoo SMS Alerts, Deals and Upcoming services. Also set for the chopping block is the Yahoo for Kids family service.

The cuts come as yahoo attempts to right itself under new chief executive Marissa Mayer. The company has started to see signs of progress as profits have risen under the new boss.

Yahoo had in previous years been notorious for its older and unprofitable services. A former vice president once likened the firm’s web holdings to thinly-spread peanut butter on a slice of bread.

Yahoo is not the only company to cut its old services. Google routinely axes its failed web properties in seasonal ‘cleaning’ audits.

Microsoft moved to shift focus from its Windows PC division to its mobile and cloud operations in what the company and analyst termed a transitional quarter for the Redmond giant.

Microsoft reported that revenues over the first quarter were $20bn up 18 percent on the quarter. The company’s business division posted an 8 percent gain on the quarter while the server and tools branch saw revenues climb by 11 percent.

Riding on the upgrade cycle of Windows 8, the Windows division grew revenues of 23 percent, while the online services division grew by 18 percent.

In outlining the quarter, Microsoft executives noted that the company was continuing to shift its focus toward the cloud services division, a key market for Redmond as it tries to avoid being pulled down by dwindling PC hardware sales.

Speaking to analysts on the report, Microsoft chief financial officer Peter Klein said that the company is working to increase its reach into the tablet market, including expanding the reach of Windows 8 into the small-screen tablet space.

“The biggest thing we are doing is helping them develop new and improved user experiences across the price points,” Klein said.

Rob Helm, managing vice president of research for Directions on Microsoft, said that the company would likely be looking to smaller form factors with both its branded hardware lines and OEM partners as it moves to take a cut out of the fastest-growing portions of the tablet space.

“Microsoft, like Apple, was late recognise how important smaller tablets were going to be market,” Helm told V3.

“I think it is going to turn rapidly around on that, by Christmas or back-to-school we will see devices more like the Nexus 7 or Kindle that are more portable and cheaper.”

Helm noted that Microsoft’s increased efforts to ink its business customers to Windows enterprise agreement contracts will allow the company to collect Windows licencing fees up front and get past a changing upgrade cycle as customers hang on to older systems.

That shift, along with the movement into cloud computing services, looks to be Microsoft’s strategy for overcoming the drop in PC sales.

Canonical and VMware have announced a collaboration that enables Canonical’s Ubuntu-based implementation of the OpenStack cloud computing framework to integrate with VMware-based infrastructure.

Announced at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon, the collaboration involves Canonical shipping its Ubuntu/OpenStack build with the plug-ins required to make it operate with VMware’s vSphere and Nicira network virtualisation platform.

The plug-ins, developed by VMware as part of a commitment to deliver vSphere support in OpenStack, provides improved support for an OpenStack Compute node to run atop VMware’s hypervisor.

This move enables those interested in building an OpenStack cloud to preserve any investments they may have already made in vSphere infrastructure, VMware said.

“By fulfilling our promise to deliver VMware vSphere support in OpenStack, and teaming with Canonical to serve our collective customers, we’re delivering customer choice by providing a powerful platform for those interested in OpenStack clouds,” said VMware vice president for Product Management, Joshua Goodman.

Canonical and VMware said they will work together on software testing, deployment automation, technical support and reference designs for interested customers.

VMware’s plug-ins were delivered as part of the latest OpenStack release, codenamed Grizzly, unveiled earlier this month. This extended VMware’s existing code contributions to the OpenStack Networking project, based on its Nicira NVP technology.

Google has announced two major updates to its Chrome for Business suite of tools including a cloud-based management system for IT teams.

The cloud platform is designed to let firms running Google’s suite of business apps put access control policies in place, with over 100 different settings available, so staff can access their accounts from either work or personal devices.

Senior product manager for Chrome for Business, Cyrus Mistry said in a blog post the updates would help meet the needs of the increasing numbers of firms with mobile workforces.

“Now, whether employees are working from the company’s desktop or their personal laptop, they will be able to access default applications, custom themes, or a curated app web store when they sign-in to Chrome with their work account,” he said.

“With cloud-based management, IT administrators can customise more than 100 Chrome policies and preferences for their employees from the Google Admin panel.”

The second update, Legacy Browser Support, targets firms running older apps that do not run in Chrome. 

This means if an employee tries to access a legacy app still in use, it can be automatically opened in a browser that will run the app, as defined by IT.

With Legacy Browser Support, employees on Chrome are automatically switched to a legacy browser when they begin using an older app,” said Mistry.

“IT managers simply define which sites should launch from Chrome into an alternate browser, and then set this Chrome policy for all employees.”

Google recently improved the search and sharing features for its Chrome browser running on Apple’s iOS smartphone and tablet platform. Chrome’s update includes features that allow users to share web pages via email, messages and Facebook.

Microsoft is aiming to build its Windows Azure platform into the public cloud service of choice for enterprise customers with the official introduction of its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities, enabling firms to seamlessly extend their corporate network into Microsoft’s cloud.

First announced last year, Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service enables customers to operate virtual infrastructure on Azure, moving workloads between Microsoft’s cloud and their own datacentre as necessary.

However, a key point for enterprises is that Microsoft enables customers to link the virtual infrastructure with their on-premise network, enabling virtual servers and their workloads to appear as if they were part of a customer’s corporate domain and be controlled using the same management tools.

This move brings Microsoft’s Azure into direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS), currently the largest provider of public cloud services globally.

As if to drive this point home, Microsoft announced it intends to match AWS on price for services like compute, storage and bandwidth. Amazon aggressively cut its cloud subscription prices earlier this month, following on from similar cuts last year.

A vital feature of today’s update is the Windows Azure Management Portal, a browser-based console that an administrator is expected to use as the primary point of control for creating an organisation’s virtual infrastructure.

David Aiken, Azure technical product manager at Microsoft, demonstrated how the portal can be used by a customer to create a virtual network on Azure, then populate this with virtual servers and link it all via a virtual private network (VPN) to a customer’s own premises.

“This is no different to doing things on premise. Can I install and run third party software Can I manage it with System Center The answer is yes – Windows Azure makes it easy to create virtual machines and provision resources, but once you’ve got them, it’s just Windows,” said Aiken.

The Linux Foundation has taken over development of virtualization platform Xen from Citrix.

Xen is a virtualization offering that Citrix began sponsoring as a community project in 2007. The 10-year old platform is used by a variety of cloud service providers. At the Linux Foundation, Xen will be worked on collaboratively by firms such as Amazon, Intel, and AMD.

“Industry interest in Xen has been growing rapidly over the past few years, thriving on strong industry support and commitment from the project’s founding members,” said Citrix vice president of open source solutions Peder Ulander in a statement.

“By widening the scope of collaboration under The Linux Foundation, the Xen Project community can set the bar even higher for innovation. Citrix will remain committed to the project and advancing the technology for Xen Project-based products across the industry, including its own Citrix XenServer.”

Citrix had been looking to find a neutral community to lead development of Xen for the past year. For the last six years Citrix had been sponsoring the development of the open-source software.

By handing over responsibility of the software to the Linux Foundation, Citrix will be able to work on the product without leading its development. The Linux Foundation has a large base of community developers that work together to build out open-source technologies.

Xen is a hypervisor platform that allows multiple computer systems to work off the same computer hardware at the same time. The cloud offering is used by products such as RackSpace’s public cloud and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

Following the news, the Linux Foundation will handle development for both Xen and KVM virtualization tools. According to the foundation, being able to advance both platforms will help promote its open-source philosophy.

“Virtualization is important to Linux and the open source community and both Xen and KVM are widely accepted by users and developers. The advancement of both benefits developers, users and vendors,” wrote Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin in a blog post.

“The open source model is predicated upon freedom of choice, so supporting a range of open source virtualization platforms and facilitating collaboration across open source communities is a priority for The Linux Foundation.”

Last year, Citrix made a similar move when it donated CloudStack to the Apache Foundation. The cloud service provider gave CloudStack to the foundation last April.

Red Hat has launched a pair of initiatives aimed at increasing the use of its Enterprise Linux platforms in OpenStack clouds.

The company said that it would be launching a partner programme along with an early adopter programme aimed at getting updates to users with greater frequency.

Known as RDO, the OpenStack build will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora and other versions of the Red Hat Linux platform.

Designed to function as a community-supported version of OpenStack for early adopters, the RDO will be closely integrated with OpenStack’s development channel and will get new updates and editions quickly.

Additionally, the company said that it would be launching a partner programme for other OpenStack developers. Designed to operate as an ecosystem for public and private cloud computing deployments, the partner programme will support partners working on Red Hat Linux-based OpenStack clouds.

Though Red Hat said that it was the single biggest contributor to the latest version of OpenStack, chief technology officer Brian Stevens said that in order to further advance OpenStack on Red Hat Linux it will need to reach out to third parties.

“You are no longer seeing one company solely lead the effort,” Stevens explained.

“It has become a more-balanced network.”

The Red Hat news comes in the wake of the release of OpenStack’s ‘Grizzly’ release. The cloud platform was updated to provide improved storage support.

Hosting firm Rackspace is offering to build and manage cloud computing infrastructure for service providers, in a bid to promote broader uptake of the OpenStack platform it co-founded.

Announced at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon, the Global Cloud Network initiative is aimed at telecommunications operators and service providers looking to get into the cloud computing business.

“We have had, for many years, interest from a variety of telcos and other service providers approaching us and asking for help in building their clouds. They look at us and see that we seem to be doing it right,” Rackspace chief technology officer John Engates told V3.

To this end, Rackspace is offering a complete managed service, providing the hardware and software and assistance to help build the cloud computing infrastructure, followed by monitoring, patching and tuning once the cloud is operational.

“It’s much more than a partner agreement. We will literally be operating their cloud for them in their datacentre. They will provide the network connectivity, and we will provide the operational management for the entire cloud, using the same technology we use ourselves,” Engates said.

While the move will help some cloud service providers to get up and running more quickly, it will have the knock-on effect of boosting interoperability between public clouds if more providers opt for OpenStack rather than alternative platforms, and this could also benefit end users.

Rackspace will clearly benefit if the technology behind its own cloud services becomes more widely adopted, but Engates claimed that the firm is not doing this purely out of concern for its own bottom line.

“It’s not just a ‘Rackspace wants more revenue’ thing – we want to extend the network effect of this,” he said, explaining it would help OpenStack spread to territories where Rackspace itself is unlikely to ever have a point of presence.

In addition, customers of any of the service providers in the network will have access to resources throughout the global network, according to Rackspace, enabling providers to boost growth by selling through others in the network, hence the Global Cloud Network name.

“If you can link those clouds together and create a network of clouds, then everyone can start to take advantage of everybody else’s locations. You can drive a common experience across clouds and give customers more choice,” he added.

Meanwhile, the OpenStack project has just released the latest update to the cloud computing framework. Codenamed “Grizzly”, it brings a number of enhancements across the board.

Google has donated $3m to three firms that are using big data to aide in the fight against human trafficking.

The search giant announced the launch of the Google Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network at event in Washington DC. Google’s project will bring together a variety of human trafficking hotlines to create a consolidated base of data that will be able to identify trafficking hotspots around the world.

Google will fund the project with three advocacy groups. The Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and La Strada International will begin to work together by sharing data from their human trafficking hotlines.

The collective will share data with the aim of creating stronger prevention strategies and work to identify which countries are currently witnessing the largest cases of abductions.

“Together, these partners will not only be able to help more trafficking survivors, but will also move the global conversation forward by dramatically increasing the amount of useful data being shared,” wrote director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen and director of Google Giving Jacquelline Fuller in a blog post.

“Appropriate data can tell the anti-trafficking community which campaigns are most effective at reducing slavery, what sectors are undergoing global spikes in slavery, or if the reduction of slavery in one country coincides with an increase right across the border.”

The Polaris Project has collected over 72,000 hotline calls in the US alone. Polaris Hotline’s data has aided local and global authorities in creating better strategies to combat human trafficking.

Polaris has already begun to work with tech firms like Salesforce to expand its infrastructure. Salesforce recently helped Polaris scale its hotline operations globally.

“Hotlines are a crucial part of an effective anti-trafficking response in any country,” said Polaris Project’s deputy director Sarah Jakiel.

“By leveraging new technologies that enable information sharing, and by incorporating new modes of communication like text messaging, hotlines can reach more survivors, support safe migration, and offer better resources to vulnerable communities.”

Google reports that human trafficking leads to over 21 million people being enslaved each year. Traffickers are reported to earn as much as $32bn a year through their illicit practices.

The search giant has been fighting against human trafficking for the past three years. Following its $3m donation to the hotline network, Google will have invested over $14m in efforts to end the human trafficking trade.

Google just announced its plans to enlist big data in the fight against human trafficking. The search giant will work with three advocacy groups to collect and analyze data from human trafficking hotlines.

The work is aimed to stifle human trafficking by bringing about a shared data platform for anti-trafficking groups. By using big data, advocacy groups can identify trafficking hotspots and create stronger strategies to put an end to traffickers.

Google’s work in the field is an illuminating reminder of the types of projects big data can take on. Big data doesn’t have to be used just to create the perfect targeted ad or discover the biggest IT bottleneck.

Big data can also be used to solve a variety of the world’s ills. The potential big data holds for the greater good can’t be underestimated. From being able to project future crime sprees to solving big city traffic jams, big data holds the key to fighting a variety of societal troubles.

That is one of the reasons why the lack of qualified big data analysts is so troubling. We can have all the data in the world but if we don’t have qualified analysts it won’t mean anything.

Knowledgeable and creative big data scientist will be crucial if the industry ever hopes to create some sort of major social change. The world will need scientists who not only know what they are doing technically, but also have the creativity needed to use data in unique ways.

Last year, Oracle president Mark Hurd made the comment that most big data is “worthless”. According to Hurd, 99.9 percent of big data is unusable.

His assessment may hold weight in the sense that most data will not help a business improve its infrastructure. However, the idea that most big data is useless in the greater context of society is off base.

To truly use data to uncover societal truths we need imaginative analysts, who can take seemingly benign data and transform it into real-world solutions.

It’s already being done to some extent. Analysts are already finding data links between things like home census data and food shortages or telecommunications and natural disasters.

By now it’s become a cliché to say the world needs more Steve Jobs, but it’s the truth. Steve Jobs (and the many pioneers of the computing age) took the technology of their time and brought a sense of creative thinking to it.

We need a generation of Steve Jobs. The technology exists to such a point that creative thinking can change the world. Tech like big data can be used to revolutionize how we think about the world’s problems.

With creativity and know-how a data analyst can do amazing things. Not just in business, but also for society as a whole.

Now, it’s up to clever people to take up an interest in the field. To do that people will need equal parts ingenuity and opportunity. They’ll need the opportunity to learn and discover the power of the trade. They’ll also need to understand big data is more than just statistics.

11 Apr 2013