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

Dropbox has put a renewed focus on enterprise with re-brand of Dropbox for Teams and single sign-on (SSO) log-ins.

The cloud storage provider has renamed its Dropbox for Teams software to Dropbox for Business. To ring in the updated name the firm has also added SSO log-ins to the software.

“With all the changes we’re making to create a Dropbox that’s better for companies both large and small, it’s become clear that the name ‘Dropbox for Teams’ doesn’t quite fit anymore,” said Dropbox for Business manager Anand Subraman in a blog post.

“To better rep the features we’re building and the awesome companies that use Dropbox to create, share, and save their most important work, we realize the time has come to rename to Dropbox for Business.”

One of the major changes coming to Dropbox is the addition of SSO log-ins, which allows users to sign-in only one time to a central identity management provider. Dropbox says that SSO was one of the most requested features for its enterprise focused offering.

According to the company, the SSO feature will give IT admins more control over password management. SSO will allow admins to implement company password policies onto the logins of Dropbox accounts.

For users, the feature will allow for a simpler way of logging into Dropbox. Users will now be able to log-in directly to company systems without the need to sign-in to Dropbox separately.

The SSO feature was built using the industry-standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) allowing it work in conjunction with a variety of identity providors. Dropbox reports that the feature can be used on internally built SAML-based federated systems.

Dropbox’s changes come as the firm continues to put a focus on enterprise tools. Last month, the firm brought an admin console to its software to give IT admins more control and visibility in the cloud.

The firm also made waves earlier this month when it signed a partnership with Yahoo. Dropbox’s partnership allows Yahoo Mail users to save email attachments directly to the Dropbox cloud.

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Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime services suffered prolonged outages overnight, leaving millions of customers unable to use the features.

An update on Apple’s status page confirmed that between 8pm and 1am [PST] the two services were unavailable.

No specific information was provided by Apple beyond a message saying, “Users were unable to place FaceTime/iMessage calls”.

V3 contacted Apple for further comment on the outages but it said it had no additional information to share.

The incident is the latest in a series of recent cloud outages to hit popular services, such as Google’s Drive service that went offline for two hours in March, leaving millions without access to their accounts.

Microsoft’s consumer Outlook service was also hit by problems in a datacentre when it began overheating and so took itself offline to prevent the problem spreading, which caused email access to disappear.

Last week the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a warning to its agent that the security in the iMessage service made it hard for them to eavesdrop on conversations, thereby hindering their efforts, although some security experts dismissed these concerns.

Were you affected by the outage or are still seeing problems today Let us know below.

Dell’s second-largest shareholder, Southeastern Asset Management, has gone on record claiming the company has no reason to go private.

In a public letter to investors, Southeastern said that Dell’s recent proxy statement gives no concrete reason why the company should go private. The firm accuses Dell’s Board of offering Michael Dell the opportunity to buy the firm instead of addressing the real issue at the company.

“The proxy statement does not contain any sound reasoning for why, at this stage in the transformation, the company needs to be taken private,” wrote Southeastern in its letter.

“In the entire proxy statement, we found only one page devoted to Mr. Dell’s plans for the company following the transaction. That single page is consistent with the company’s prior public statements, and nothing about these plans requires that the company be private.”

In its proxy statement, Dell argues that the firm must go private for the long-term interest of the company. The firm says that it will have to invest in options that will not see immediate return-on-investment.

Specifically, the company reports that the quarterly results driven paradigm of publicly held companies makes it hard for Dell to invest in long-term options.

If Dell were to go private it says it would begin to invest heavily in research and development. Dell wrote in its proxy statement that it would make investments in technologies such as cloud services, infrastructure services, and managed security services.

The company says it would do that with the goal of becoming an integrated provider of end-to-end IT solutions. However, the company warns that to achieve its goal it would have to invest aggressively and would likely see objections from stockholders.

“While the Parent Parties believe that these plans for [Dell] after the merger are in the company’s best interests in the long term,” wrote Dell in its proxy statement.

“The Parent Parties believe that, were the company to undertake these actions as a public company, many stockholders would be likely to object and the company’s stock price could suffer a significant decline.”

Southeastern disagrees with Dell’s assessment. The shareholder says that Dell’s enterprise software solutions (ESS) are a growth sector and should be invested in. Southeastern believes that Dell would be able to invest in IT solutions even if it stayed a public company.

Salesforce.com has released a set of developer tools which the company hopes will allow firms to build and support better mobile applications.

The company said that its Mobile SDK package would allow vendors to make better use of their customer data stored within the Salesforce.com CRM service. The kit will include a framework and developer tools for crafting mobile applications.

In addition to the mobile SDK, Salesforce is releasing a Mobile Pack JavaScript framework package and a Mobile Accelerator Program designed to help support developers looking to launch mobile applications.

The company is also looking to kick off a weeklong global event which will begin on 22 April and will include events in 32 cities around the world.

Salesforce hopes that the release will allow companies to overhaul their customer-facing platforms and provide better services and applications to customers.

Adam Seligman, vice president of developer relations for Salesforce, said that as users become more familiar with mobile applications and interfaces, pressure is building on companies to improve their apps.

“Customer data makes all that happen,” he told V3.

“What we are trying to do here is make it easy to get the customer data into the application.”

Once the data is integrated with the application, Salesforce.com hopes that it will allow developers to completely change the way they design applications. By easing access to customer data, applications can become more interactive and be better-equipped to support customers.

“It opens up a whole new world of applications,” Seligman said.

“There is this great set of meaningful, important customer data in Salesforce and that data is going to make that whole generation of apps better.”

HP has given more details on its Project Moonshot, explaining the platform is not intended to replace existing servers, but instead target the requirements of scale-out datacentre applications such as web hosting and cloud services, where energy costs and space requirements are more important than processing power.

Launched this week, the second generation Moonshot platform comprises a rack-mount enclosure designed to hold 45 individual server modules, each one based on an Intel Atom S1200 system-on-a-chip (SoC) that consumes 6W of energy, but with other options in the pipeline.

This is clearly a market where HP sees an opportunity, as companies operating web hosting and other cloud-based services are now looking at deployments that may run to tens of thousands of server nodes, possibly extending to millions in some cases.

Hence, HP is going out of its way with Moonshot to closely match the requirements of these customers, even down to promises of server modules tailored to running specific workloads as efficiently as possible.

It turns out that many of these service providers are operating on very thin margins, according to HP, and so the cost of the IT infrastructure operating them can be the difference between profit and loss.

Energy costs in particular are a key factor, so power efficiency is considered more important than raw processing power.

“Even back in 2007, the energy consumption of the cloud would have made it count as the fifth largest country in the world, if added together,” claimed Paolo Faraboschi, distinguished technologist at HP Labs, and one of the brains behind Project Moonshot.

When HP first started looking at what would become Moonshot, “we started realising that we were leveraging (processors) in servers that are generalised. If you are only processing web pages, you’re not really doing a lot of work, and so the processor is wasting energy,” Faraboschi said.

Further analysis showed that a lot of energy gets wasted when data is shuffled around the system, from processor to processor, for example.

“Aggressive integration, such as with an SoC, means there is less need to move data around from chip to chip, so we decided that maybe we should start building servers based on SoC,” he explained.

One customer that has been trialling the new Moonshot hardware over the past year is hosting firm Leaseweb, who pronounced it an ideal platform for entry-level services.

“We’re seeing an 80 percent reduction in power consumption, but with 50 percent of the performance level of the existing HP servers we had been using before,” said Marc Burkels, manager of dedicated hosting at Leaseweb.

There are so many great phones hitting the market it can be hard to know where to invest your hard earned cash, especially as once you make a decision you’re tied in for up to two years. As such, getting it right is vital.

This is no doubt why our head-to-head video reviews always prove popular, with the latest, the iPhone 5 v Sony Xperia Z the most read, well watched, story of last week. You’ll have to watch it to see which devices ran out the winner.

Clearly the pressure is building on Apple, though, as analyst reports showed that sales of the iPhone are slowing as demand for Android devices – like the Xperia Z – rise and Windows Phone also grows its market share, albeit slowly.

Another interesting story was that of Rackspace hitting out at Parallel Iron, accusing it of being a patent troll. The story generated some strong responses in the comments sections from readers disagreeing over who’s in the right in the case.

Security warnings saw reports of malware hitting firms every three minutes of interest, and no doubt concern, to readers, while the risk of fraudulent apps on the Google Play store unveiled by Symantec also proved of interest.

The celebration of the mobile phone’s fortieth birthday also generated some interesting coverage and news editor Dan Worth’s claims the device as we know it will be obsolete within the next 40 years was well-read too.

Sony Xperia Z vs Apple iPhone 5 head to head
How do the new innovations in Sony’s latest offering compare with the iPhone’s

Rackspace hits out at patent troll Parallel Iron in Hadoop spat
Cloud services provider says its 500 percent rise in legal bills meant it had to take a more aggressive stance 

Apple iPhone sales stutter as Microsoft Windows Phone market share creeps up
Analyst firm Kantar reveals a 3.5 percent drop in global sales during the first quarter of 2013

Symantec finds plethora of fraud apps on Google Play market
A widespread fraud ring has sold hundreds of dodgy applications on the Google Play Android marketplace

 
Nokia Lumia 920 tips and tricks [Video]
V3 puts Nokia’s latest phone through its paces

 
Malware attacks hitting firms every three minutes
Cyber crooks are targeting businesses with advanced malware capable of avoiding detection from traditional tools

 
The mobile phone will be obsolete in 40 years
As the mobile phone celebrates its 40th birthday, Dan Worth looks at what the next 40 years could have in store

 
Facebook users warned over fake security page phishing scam
Trend Micro warns of a malicious, fake security check page

 
Bitcoin storage firm shuttered following hack
Instawallet victim of a backdoor hack on its systems

 
Zeus retains botnet crown, according to McAfee
Malware continues to be a scourge on users, with researchers reporting it remains the most popular botnet family on the web