Industry glitterati have stuffed $26 million in the pockets of Shape Security, a start-up promising to deliver a mysterious new kind of web protection that will make it harder and pricier for hackers to ply their trade. The company says the number of large-scale web security incidents has increased exponentially in the past decade. Symantec estimates the overall cybercrime market at $388 billion a year. Last month the FBI took down a single botnet that alone stole over $850 million. Ray Rothrock, a partner in Venrock, the pioneering high-tech venture capital firm started by the Rockefellers and led the new $20 million B round in Shape, said, "The rise of botnets and crimeware-as-a-service have led to an untenable situation where web sites are now cheap to attack and expensive to defend. Shape's technology will alter this balance. It is unlike anything the industry... (more)

Schmidt Tells North Korea to Drop Internet Barriers

When Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt returned to Beijing Thursday from his controversial three-day "private visit" to North Korea he said that he told officials in Pyongyang that they must open the country up to Internet access or it would be "harder for them to catch up economically. We made that alternative very, very clear." The Internet is only accessible to the government, military and universities. Its use is monitored. There's a national intranet with an information portal. The Internet isn't accessible through the country's cellular network although Schmidt said i... (more)

InsideView(R) Relationship Manager Reduces Account Churn by 25% With New People Alerts

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/07/13 -- InsideView, the sales intelligence leader that empowers sales and marketing professionals to get in and win, today showcased Relationship Manager™ People Alerts, new functionality within its flagship customer intelligence product that monitors organizational changes that affect decision makers within key accounts. The new feature within Relationship Manager monitors key individuals within target accounts to track and alert about organization changes such as resignations, new hires, changes in reporting structure or title. "The cos... (more)

Windows Azure Mobile Services Update

It has been less than four months since we introduced the first public preview for Windows Azure Mobile Services and in this short time we have seen continual improvements to the service offering including: SDKs for Windows Store, Windows Phone 8 and iOS app Auth using Microsoft Account, Facebook, Google and Twitter Push Notification support via WNS, MPNS and APNS Structured storage Deployments in East and West US datacenters What’s New We are continuing this great momentum and I’m happy to announce another round of exciting updates to Windows Azure Mobile Services. Rapid Developme... (more)

Will IT Operations Analytics Platforms Replace APM Suites?

Gartner recently published an important report titled "Will IT Operations Analytics Platforms Replace APM Suites?" The report is based on Gartner client Inquiries about enterprise performance and availability strategies and these enterprises report a near-universal commitment to the idea that monitoring, performance and availability should be application-centric. At the same time the report suggests the rate at which investments in new on-premises Application Performance Monitoring (APM) technology appears to be slowing down. It attributes this to observations that enterprises ha... (more)