DALLAS, Aug. 21, 2014 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Amid the proliferation of real time data from sources such as mobile devices, web, social media, sensors, log files and transactional applications, Big Data has found a host of vertical market applications, ranging from fraud detection to R&D.; Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140821/138541 "Big Data Market: 2014 – 2020 – Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies, Industry Verticals & Forecasts" Key Findings: In 2014 Big Data vendors will pocket nearly $30 Billion from hardware, software and professional services revenues Big Data investments are further expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 17% over the next 6 years, eventually accounting for $76 Billion by the end of 2020 The market is ripe for acquisitions of pure-play Big Data startups, as competition heats up between IT incumbents Nearly every large scale IT ven... (more)

Microsoft To Push Two Main Win7 SKUs

Microsoft – which has yet to get its tit out of the legal wringer it got caught it because of the famous “Vista Capable” promotion – has started trying to discriminate between Windows 7 SKUs now, a year ahead of the operating system’s ostensible due date. The company said Tuesday that of the myriad versions of Windows 7 it intends to propagate, most consumers will be best served by Windows 7 Home Premium and most businesses by Windows 7 Professional, the latter described as a logical alternative to Vista Business. It says Windows 7 is different from XP or Vista in that its editions are supersets of one another and keep the features and functionality of the versions below them. And apparently all the versions can run on all hardware from netbooks on up to fancy gamer rigs on the theory that people have more than one device. Enterprise customers will be encouraged to... (more)

The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem

In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem. I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing. Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites of the companies themselves. Omissions to this Top 250 list should be sent to me via Twitter (twitter.com/jg21) and I will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this newly expanded rou... (more)

Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?

I wonder how many people, as I did, found themselves thrown into confusion by the death last week of Jean Ichbiah (pictured), inventor of Ada.  Learning that the inventor of a computer programming language is already old enough to have lived 66 years (Ichbiah was 66 when he succumbed to brain cancer) is a little like learning that your 11-year-old daughter has grown up and left home or that the first car you ever bought no longer is legal because it runs on gasoline in an age where all automobiles must run on water. How can something as novel, as new, as a computing language possibly already be so old-fangled that an early practitioner like Ichbiah can already no longer be with us? The thought was so disquieting that it took me immediately back to the last time I wrote about Ichbiah, and indeed about Ada Lovelace for whom his language was named. It was in the context ... (more)

Telling Stories: Mashups in Action

Here at JackBe we’re always trying to move the state of the mashup art forward. In past posts we’ve described mashup best practices like the 5Cs of Enterprise Mashups, mashup security, the integration of mashups with important enterprise solutions technologies like your SOA, and products like Oracle and HP Systinet. Last week, while listening to one of my customers enthusiastically describe his enterprise mashup, it occurred to me that we’ve neglected one of the simplest and most useful ways to move the state of the art forward: telling the mashup story. That is why we’re starting a regular blog topic we’re calling ‘Mashups in Action’. Here we’ll share any real-world story that shows the value of enterprise mashups. So here’s my inaugural entry... I recently visited with a CIO at a major medical research facility. He described the complex processes his researchers d... (more)

WorkLight: Bringing Enterprise 2.0 to a Widget Near You

It’s no longer an issue of whether enterprise services should be 2.0′d via widgets, RSS, and the like. CIOs & CSOs grasp the undeniability of this paradigm. But there is still a gap between the desire and reality of getting these enterprise services out the door. It’s one thing to design a Facebook application, it’s another getting it to interact with the backend systems commonly deployed in enterprise IT setups. Enter WorkLight, an Israeli startup with $17M in its war chest whose mission is to assist enterprises to get their services working in places where their users and customers are actually frequenting online. WorkLight discovered that large companies in sectors such as financial services, retail, telcos and travel, are looking for better ways to connect with customers and partners residing outside their firewall. If the “internal portal” was ever effective i... (more)

Keys To Web 3.0 Design and Development When Using ASP.NET

Even as I study (ever so slowly) for MCPD certification for my own reasons while I'm at home (spare me the biased anti-Microsoft flames on that, I don't care) I'm finding that Microsoft end developers (Morts) and Microsofties (Redmondites) alike are struggling with the bulk of their own technology and are heaping up upon themselves the knowledge of their own infrastructure before fully appreciating the beauty and the simplicity of the pure basics. ... (more)

Elevator Pitch Friday: HerHotSpot Is A Social Network Merged With Cosmopolitan Magazine

This week’s elevator pitch comes from HerHotSpot.com, an online community for Gen Y women to share stories, ask questions, and get advice on life, love, fashion, work and health. While the name is regrettable, the pitch by founder Brette Borow is well articulated and she does a good job of getting her points across. Launched last year, HerHotSpot is trying to merge the social features of Twitter and Facebook with the content that magazines like Glamour or Cosmopolitan provide. The site itself is geared towards several major issues in a Gen Y woman’s life—health, style, love, post-college life, work and pop culture. Part commentary from professional writers and part user-generated content, the site allows readers to post their own content and, like with Twitter, readers can follow other participants. Users can post video content as well. HerHotSpot is trying to be ... (more)

Yahoo Launches Slick Desktop AIR App For Monitoring Twitter

Yahoo has launched an Adobe AIR-powered desktop application called Sideline yesterday, once again validating the power of Twitter for real-time search. After taking it for a spin, I have to say it looks and feels really nice, but other than that there’s no real incentive for me to keep using it on a regular basis. So what does it do? Sideline is a straight-forward Twitter monitoring tool, giving you the opportunity to stay on top of the latest trends on the microsharing service and/or keywords you feed into the application. It has an auto-refresh feature (which you can tweak to have the search results reload between 1 minute and 1 hour), a notification system that alerts you of new keyword mentions in an overlay that appears whatever you’re doing and the ability to only look for favorited tweets containing the keywords you’re tracking. So far, nothing special, but ... (more)

MyWay Village Offers Seniors Social Media

MyWay Village, the first senior-focused technology company to help seniors get online in an easy and social way, today announced it is a seeing dramatic increase in users at senior living communities throughout the country. The company just finished rolling out its Connected Living(TM) program with Chicago-based Brookdale in Boston and Chicago. Residents at communities in both cities have shown up in record numbers for the launch events. The initial participation has jumped from three percent to 36 percent active senior users who are now using the social media technology and personal training to stay connected with other residents, family and friends. More than 66 percent of residents have signed on to the community digital directory to put in a profile for others to see. Brookdale residents can access a customized home page that allows them to choose from a variet... (more)

VIDEO MARKETING

I WAS READING a new post on one of my favorite blogs and I had to laugh at the synergy between the subject matter and some of my own recent thinking. It all has to do with the rising use of video as a marketing tool. The author, Dean Rodgers over at KoiFish Communications, points out that videos can make people feel happy. An innocuous enough statement but don’t discount the implications. Thanks in large part to the growing importance of social media as a communications tool, marketing and public relations can be as much about entertainment and making customers “feel happy” as it does anything else. Social network sites such as YouTube and MySpace represent a goldmine of potential new customers…if your PR pro knows how to reach them. You can’t expect to reach much of an audience on FaceBook, for instance, if you offer little more than dry product information. A YouTu... (more)