Google outbid itself by 33 percent in Motorola Mobility acquisition, SEC filing reveals originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Sep 2011 04:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jim Baum, IBM Netezza, at Structure Big Data 2011

IBM shares were trading up Tuesday morning after it reported strong first-quarter results yesterday. While Big Blue got a profit boost from recently released mainframe products, it also gave us some indications for the future growth of the cloud and big data. Mark Loughridge, IBM’s senior vice president and CFO for Finance and Enterprise Transformation, said IBM is still on track to double its cloud revenue in 2011 compared with the year before.

Because IBM’s definition of cloud can be pretty loose (i.e., it sells a lot of software, servers and services that conceivably could be labeled as cloud) take that with a grain of salt. However, here’s what we can learn:

The private cloud business is doing well. So much so that Loughridge said, “In private cloud, IBM’s average transaction size more than tripled from a year ago.” It also released new software to create private clouds during the quarter.

New products can keep revenue growth up. IBM has made more in the first of 2011 in cloud than it did the year before and said it had 2,000 cloud wins to date, but some of that success comes from new products such as the new private cloud software mentioned above as well as the “IBM Smart Cloud” infrastructure as a service product that launched also during the quarter.

New markets help boost growth too. IBM saw strong growth in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) but also growth in cloud deployments in places like Africa. Many emerging economies are turning to cloud computing as they build out their IT infrastructure, leapfrogging the legacy client server paradigm. IBM appears to be benefitting from this trend.

Big data is big business. IBM’s business analytics software grew by double digits for the seventh consecutive quarter. The company’s distributed database products experienced double-digit growth in the base business, and Netezza’s transactional volumes were up 70 percent versus a year ago,according to Loughridge’s prepared remarks.

Is it time to say sayonara to Sun gear? IBM’s Power brand of servers are winning over the competition, especially the former Sun boxes now owned by Oracle. Loughridge said that IBM had 250 competitive displacements that resulted in more than 0 million of business. About 60 percent of these wins came from Oracle’s legacy Sun-installed accounts, and 30 percent came from HP-installed accounts–a ratio holding steady from the previous quarter.

So there we have it. IBM has long been seen as a bellwether for the overall IT industry and for business spending on technology in general, and now it can help us predict the future for the cloud and big data.

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A common misperception is that the bulk of the energy consumption associated with the Internet and connected-computing comes from massive data centers. In reality the billions of end devices — computers, set-top-boxes — are currently the bigger and more wasteful culprits behind the energy consumption of information and communication technology. Though, that could one day change.

Turns out set top boxes are one of the more egregious power hogs out there. The New York Times details in a weekend story that the 160 million set top boxes delivering entertainment to American homes are consuming around billion in electricity per year, according to a study from the Natural Resources Defense Council. That eye-opening figure is so high because set top boxes commonly run at full power 24-hours a day, and most don’t utilize a low power state when not in use. As a result, 66 percent of that energy is basically wasted, and consumed when no one is watching, or recording, shows.

At Google’s second annual data center energy summit in May, Google’s senior vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle, pointed out how the size of the energy consumption attributed to data centers is often times misquoted as using 2 percent of the world’s energy. Using numbers from the Climate Group’s Smart 2020 report, Hoelzle said that the real numbers are that information and communication technology (ICT) is responsible for 2 percent of the world’s green house gas emissions, and ICT can be broken down into data centers, which generate 14 percent of those green house gas emissions, PCs and peripherals (not all of which are connected to the Internet), which accounted for 49 percent of those emissions, and telecommunications (both the networks and cell phones and routers), which produced 37 percent of those emissions.

The Numbers

The Smart 2020 report was put out in 2008, and those figures are for 2007. The bulk of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with PCs and peripherals comes from their lifetime of energy consumption, while a small portion of their green house gas emissions comes from the embodied energy use associated with manufacturing, shipment and end of life.

So essentially computing end devices, not including cell phones, were already responsible for about half of ICT’s green house gas emissions, and were consuming around that same percentage of energy in 2007. Of course, not all computers are connected to the Internet at all times, but the trend is towards all computers being able to be connected to the Internet.

By 2020, PCs and peripherals will be generating 57 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with ICT, says the Smart 2020 report. The growth in emissions, is due to the fact that there will just be a whole lot more PCs out there — an estimated 4 billion — by 2020. The rise in carbon emissions from PCs would be a whole lot higher by 2020, if there weren’t a couple positive energy trends coming: many desktops will be replaced by laptops that consume less energy, and screens in newer computers consume less energy than the older ones in use.

PCs, peripherals and printers are energy hogs, partly because they are plugged in most of the time. On the other hand, cell phones were responsible for only 3 percent of the total green house gas emissions for ICT in 2002, and that will actually drop to 1 percent of ICT’s emissions by 2020, due to much smart mobile phone chargers expected to be on the market. The bulk of the emissions from cell phones today comes from phantom power, or having cell phones plugged in when not in use and when already charged.

So you can see the trend is that when networked devices are smaller, use less energy, and are only plugged in and charging when they need to, the network actually starts to become the dominant power hog. The Smart 2020 report, which classifies telecom devices as mobile phones, IPTV boxes, and broadband modems, says that by 2020, the mobile network will dominate the carbon footprint of the telecommunications sector.

It’s A Mobile World

Clearly the Smart 2020 report doesn’t do such a good job in terms of looking at the trend of computing going mobile. Computing devices are getting smaller and smaller — hello iPad — and eventually the lines between mobile phones and computers could be erased completely. As we get closer to this mobile reality, it’s possible that the network, and the data centers needed to keep the network up and running, could come to generate the same, or even more, than the computing devices attached to the network. However, it’s hard to predict how fast energy efficiency technologies will be adopted.

There’s some nuggets of good news in all of this bleak rise in energy consumption from ICT. First, as more devices get connected to the network, it’s easier to make networked devices more energy efficient, because the industry can use the network for energy software upgrades. Second, the energy efficiency of connected devices has made a lot of progress in recent years, particularly in Europe, turning to lower power screens and smarter charging devices.

Lastly, while many bemoan the growing energy footprint of the Internet, information technology actually has a unique ability to make other sectors more efficient, via smart software, including the power grid, and transportation. The Smart 2020 report says that by 2020 ICT technologies could actually reduce green house gas emissions from other sectors, below business as usual growth, by 15 percent.

Image courtesy of re-ality, Bigpresh, phil_g, jon_a_ross, huanghiahui.

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Cablevision is now offering its cable customers cable modem speeds over its Optimum Wi-Fi network of hotspots, hitting 15 megabits per second down and 4 megabits per second on the uplink. The upgrade is a vast improvement over the previous speeds, which hit 3 mbps down and 1.5 mbps up.

The faster performance is available at tens of thousands of Optimum Wi-Fi locations around the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area such as downtown areas, parks, commuter rail platforms, as well as 7,000 indoor hotspots built by Cablevision business customers. Cablevision said half a million of its 3 million cable subscribers have accessed its Wi-Fi network while out of the home. The upgrade should also be available to Time Warner Cable (s TWX0 and Comcast subscribers, who have access to the Optimum Wi-Fi network in New York.

“This is a huge enhancement for our customers and a significant step forward for mobile online access.  With this increase, Optimum WiFi not only blows away 3G and
4G cellular data speeds, it’s three times faster than the average wired residential broadband service across the country,” said Kevin Curran, Cablevision’s senior vice president of wireless product management.

And that “blows away 3G and 4G cellular data speeds” element is a large component of the shift as cable providers realize they not only have to compete against Verizon and AT&T’s wireline networks, but increasingly with their newly launched 4G networks. Sure, Wi-Fi can help ease the mobile bandwidth crunch, by offloading big traffic from cellular networks, which is why AT&T and Verizon are so keen, but it’s also a way to keep wireline customers loyal and seeing the value of sticking with Cablevision.

New York City is getting some Wi-Fi love lately. AT&T just announced it was launching Wi-Fi hotspots in 20 New York parks. The DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, home to a number of startups, also recently received free Wi-Fi thanks to a local improvement district and management company. The city also has big Wi-Fi deployments from AT&T and Towerstream in Manhattan. It’s a good thing because cellular service can be extremely trying in New York, where getting and holding on to a signal can be tough.

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On the same day that IBM passed Microsoft in market cap, Big Blue showed how it will ride the growth of big data to continue its momentum. IBM announced a new 0 million investment for future data analytics along with new services and software aimed at helping improve data analysis and new services for IT professionals.

The news, shared at an event at its Watson Research Center, highlights the work IBM has done in assembling a broad portfolio of big data tools for enterprise customers. It has spent billion in the last five years on two dozen acquisitions. Increasingly, the company sees its future pinned to its ability to help customers manage and learn from the vast amounts of data produced today.

The company released 20 new services with 28 analytical tools designed to help CIOs apply data analysis more effectively. There is also new InfoSphere BigInsights and Streams software that allow clients to analyze both structured and unstructured with sub-millisecond response times, allowing companies to respond with much more speed. InfoSphere Streams, which analyzes incoming data for patterns and trends, is now able to analyze Tweets, blog posts, stock market data, GPS information and video frames up to 350 times faster. The BigInsights software, which is based on Hadoop, analyzes and stores petabyes of data, is updated with new data governance and security features along with more developer tools and easier enterprise integration.

IBM said it was also investing 0 million to fuel research on massive-scale analytics through advanced software and services.

The goal is to put all of this analytics work together into tools that help companies and clients anticipate the future, said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group president of IBM Software & Systems. He said companies are looking for better headlights to illuminate where they’re going and where they need to go.

“The more predictive you can be, the faster you can move, the better value you can extract from your business,” Mills said.

One key tool in IBM’s growing arsenal is Watson, the natural language system that won a much publicized Jeopardy challenge against former champions. IBM officials on Friday shared more how the system can be used to help companies ingest and analyze data and flesh out intelligent insights. David Ferrucci, IBM fellow and principal investigator on the Watson/Deep QA Project, said Watson’s first job will be in health care, which is fitting because Watson is built to handle information in a similar way to how doctors narrow down diagnoses for patients. He said the system essentially analyzes questions by generating queries against a number of sources and creating hypotheses that are scored on a variety of factors.

Ferrucci said IBM was able to feed Watson medical specific domain information and turn it into a budding physician’s assistant after just three months. He said Watson will be able to collaborate with doctors, helping surface possible diagnoses, ask for additional information and learn from feedback from doctors.

The future of Watson within IBM is still being sorted out and reflects the new challenges for the company, said Katherine Frase, vice president of emerging technologies and industry solutions. The company is still figuring out how it will mix and match its big data tools with Watson and what kind of business models and arrangements will work for customers. She said Watson will get deployed in two or three custom pilot programs this year in health care and likely in financial services. But it’s still unclear how Watson will ultimately get sold to users, as an entire unit, as a modular piece paired with other tools or perhaps as a cloud service.

“The problem is what should we try first and what business scenario do we do first?” she said. “He have a lot of technical and strategy work to do. But it’s a good problem to have.”

To hear more about cloud computing and Big Data, check out GigaOM’s Structure conference on June 22-23.

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Starting Thursday, Comcast will add TV shows from ABC and Fox to its video on-demand library, making it the only provider that offers shows from all four broadcast networks (including NBC and CBS) as soon as the day after they air. There’s a list of all the TV shows Comcast will be offering in the press release after the break — no Modern Family or House? weak — so the next time you forget to DVR Cops, you’re covered. Also, now that DirecTV has broken the seal on premium VOD early release movies, Comcast also mentioned it is still in negotiations to provide similar access to flicks. With no specifics to announce it’s possible the pricing or windows could differ from what we’ve seen so far, so we’ll just advise Senior Vice President and General Manager of Comcast Video Services Marcien Jenkes to take a long look at our poll results before signing anything.

Continue reading Comcast is first with VOD from all four major networks, still negotiating for early release movies

Comcast is first with VOD from all four major networks, still negotiating for early release movies originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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