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Workday FYQ1 Rev, Net Loss Beat, Q2 Rev View In Line, Shares Rise

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:11:47 -0400

Hosted software vendor Workday (WDAY) this afternoon reported fiscal Q1 revenue above analysts’ expectations, and a net loss that was smaller than expected, and forecast this quarter’s revenue in line with consensus. Revenue in the three months ended in April rose to $91.6 million, yielding a net loss of 15 cents. Analysts had been modeling [...]

HP Jumps 12%: FYQ2 Revenue Misses, EPS Beats; Q3, Year EPS Views Beat

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:07:17 -0400

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) this afternoon reported fiscal Q2 revenue that missed analysts’ estimates, and profit per share above consensus, and offered a profit outlook slightly above what the Street has been looking for. Revenue in the three months ended in April fell 10%, year over year, to $27.6 billion, yielding EPS of 87 cents. Analysts had [...]

Company Update - Wed 22 May, 2013

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:27:02 -0400

Enterprise Announces Closing of $6 Million Convertible Debentures
NOT FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OR THROUGH U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES Click here for the full news release.

Runscope Lands $1.1M From True Ventures And Andreessen Horowitz For Tools That Address The Broken API Plague

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:12:46 -0400

Runscope launched at the Glue conference today with $1.1 million in seed funding from True Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz for its tools that monitor API traffic and address the problems with broken APIs. Also participating were Lerer Ventures, and a group of prominent angel investors.

Skyhigh Networks Raises $20M For Service That Discovers, Analyzes And Controls Apps Employees Use

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:27:13 -0400

Skyhigh Networks discovers,manages and analyzes data from all the apps that people use at work. Today the company raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from existing investor Greylock Partners. Skyhigh discovers, analyzes and controls the cloud services that a customer’s employee uses. It sees the cloud services customers use and all the associated security issues associated with it. It analyzes the services to find the abnormalities and ways the company can save costs on subscriptions. It also adds an element of control by enforcing IT policies. The difference for Skyhigh is in the fine grain controls. When it finds abnormalities it can provide encryption, access control and other security features. The discover is based on existing logs and data from proxy and doing analytics. It has a registry of 2,600 services with 500 added every six weeks. For each service they create an independent score across 30 criteria. For the analysis the company has a Hadoop infrastructure. For the control the company has a reverse proxy and associated services it runs through its data centers. The company is about 18 months old. It raised a Series A round last March from Greylock. Skyhigh will primarily use the funding for sales, marketing, and engineering. Skyhigh has a platform that provides services with aspects of what you see in something like Splunk. It’s a market that security providers might serve as potential competitors. Skyhigh is leveraging the bring your own device movement (BYOD), which it addresses at its intersection with the thousands of services employees use but can’t afford to keep exposed to security risks.

Scale Out Provider Cloudscaling Raises $10M With Investment From Juniper And Seagate, Networking Takes Center Stage

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:18:37 -0400

Cloudscaling has raised $10 million from Trinity Ventures, Juniper Networks, and Seagate Technologies in a deal that shows how software defined networking has become a focal issue for companies building out their own clouds. Cloudscaling delivers an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure system for enterprises, SaaS providers and cloud service providers. The company foreshadowed a deal with Juniper when it announced the company would provide Cloudscaling with its virtualized networking controller. That deal was precipitated by Juniper’s acquisition of Contrail Systems. The startup raised $10 million last July from Khosla Ventures. By December, Juniper had snatched up the company for $176 million. Network controllers have become a hot topic as more cloud projects get underway. The importance stems from the need to scale out networks in an affordable manner. Adding more hardware just gets too expensive. Virtualizing the controller means that the data flowing through the pipes can be managed in a granular way, optimized through software so the network can be used efficiently without lots of spillover costs for additional hardware. Contrail points to how Cloudscaling has positioned itself with a focus on providing networking for its customers building out enterprise and SaaS clouds. It puts the company in the same space as VMware-owned Nicira and BigSwitch. The difference for Cloudscaling comes in its dual focus on software to build out programmed cloud systems and SDN to give it scale and better manageability. Juniper, for its part, has spent a lot of time focusing on advancing its silicon and keeping on pace or even in front of the likes of Intel, Bias said. The company has also hired top-talent. For example, they hired Bob Muglia, a lead executive at Microsoft who oversaw the development of Windows Azure. Muglia now heads an entire division at Juniper dedicated to software. For Seagate, a traditional hard drive company, the opportunity is in providing the storage infrastructure and partnering with Cloudscaling and other providers such as Egnyte. It is also active in OpenStack and OpenCompute, the Facebook-led effort to open hardware to make it more adaptable for the new, cloud oriented infrastructures of the world. Cloudscaling represents the demand for scale out infrastructures. Data is spreading but for companies to keep up, they need the networking to extend but without adding a sprawling array of big hardware boxes. Instead they need software to virtualize the network so it can spread far and wide.

This Morning: NetApp Rising, Expanding Xbox, Sony Strategizes

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:40:59 -0400

Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech: Shares of Microsoft (MSFT) are down 40 cents, or 1%, at $34.45, as the Street digests yesterday’s announcement by the company of the next Xbox video game console, “Xbox One.” Brad Reback, who follows Microsoft for Stifel Nicolaus, this morning writes ” [...]

Truecaller Opens Paid API To Select Developers To Monetise Its Global Phone Directory

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:20:08 -0400

Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of "handpicked" developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 600 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with other directory services.

Blue Coat Buys Solera Networks To Beef Up In Big Data, Encrypted Data Security

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:32:01 -0400

Web security provider Blue Coat Systems -- itself acquired in a $1.3 billion deal by Thoma Bravo at the end of December 2011 -- is making an acquisition today: it's buying Solera Networks, a specialist in big data security, for an undisclosed sum (although we have reached out to the company to ask). The deal is expected to close in the next thirty days.

Basho Co-Founder Raises $3M To Launch Orchestrate.io, A Twilio For Databases

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:45:48 -0400

Basho Co-Founder Antony Falco has raised $3 million for Orchestrate.io, a database API similar to Twilio in its capability to ease the complexity of adding features to mobile and web applications. True Ventures led this initial round joined by Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners. Falco, who left Basho a few months ago, said Orchestrate.io solves the problems that developers face when building feature-rich applications. Often it means adding multiple databases for geo-spatial, time series or any number of other features. The database problem has been ongoing. It in part stems from the limits of scale with relational databases. Over the years, companies like Amazon and Google reached their own ceilings and were forced to develop new kinds of databases for high-volume queries. The result is a lot of time spent babysitting databases so the applications run well. Orchestrate.io acts as a service on a service, abstracting the database layer. Twilio successfully simplified the way developers accessed services, such as SMS and voice. Falco sees a service that also allows developers to add features by pulling the data through an API . “The comparison with Twilio and Sendgrid is not around the problem we solve but the pattern,” Falco said in an email interview. “We are taking a complex and burdensome task — running lots of databases — and putting it behind an API that programmers can use to more quickly build apps. Twilio and Sendgrid both do a similar thing, vastly simplifying the complex, for telecom and email infrastructure, respectively. Orchestrate.io uses in-memory technology for its service. “Memory — storing indexes and hot data in memory — will be critical to performance,” Falco said. “There are three tiers – the active data and indexes in memory, disk storage for durability and data less often accessed, and as data ages and becomes inactive, a cheaper tier of fault-tolerant storage. The more we serve reads out of the memory, the better our performance will be and, without a lot of latency, users will be able to execute relatively rich queries that might require three or four queries, made sequentially, to separate databases.” Orchestrate.io is using open source databases to build the service. “We aren’t going to build databases,” Falco said. “The databases themselves can change; we are not tied to any one database. Riak (a Basho service) is of course ideal for this use case — for forming part of the

Producteev's Social Task Manager Now Free And Enterprise-Ready As It Preps For Full Jive Integration Later This Year

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:28:45 -0400

In November, Jive Software acquired Israeli-American cloud-based, collaborative task manager, Producteev, to boost its social business platform. Going forward, as Alex wrote at the time, Salesforce.com and Jive will increasingly butt heads as they compete for mindshare in the enterprise. With Producteev's multi-platform task management system that allows users to create tasks from emails and collaborate around projects in teams, Jive acquired a service that was already beginning to compete with Asana and Salesforce.com's Do.com.

Microsoft: UBS Ups Target to $40 on Five Things that Could Move Stock Higher

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:39:32 -0400

Shares of Microsoft (MSFT) today are down 15 cents, or 0.4%, at $34.93, in advance of a media event at 1 pm today, when the company is expected to unveil its next model of Xbox game console. The stock today gets another thumbs up from the Street, with UBS’s Brent Thill reiterating a Buy rating [...]

This Morning: CLWR Catches a Higher Bid, Mr. Cook Goes to Washington, MSFT Rising

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:54:53 -0400

Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech: Sprint-Nextel (S) this morning raised its bid to acquire the 50% of its broadband wireless partner, Clearwire (CLWR), that it doesn’t already own, offering $3.40 per Clearwire share, above the $2.97 it previously bid. Clearwire shares were up 20 cents, or 6%, [...]

CRM Morgan Stanley Top Pick in Lackluster Software Landscape

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:53:41 -0400

Morgan Stanley software analyst Keith Weiss this afternoon offers his impressions after reviewing industry results for Q1, concluding that application software has been doing better than infrastructure software, of late, and that a “low bar” is set for results this quarter. Writes Weiss, who covers outfits such as Adobe Systems (ADBE), Autodesk (ADSK), Brightcover (BCOV), NetSuite [...]

CSCO, JNPR, EMC: Storage, Networking Suffer from ‘Transition,’ Says Oppenheimer

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:38:05 -0400

Oppenheimer & Co.‘s Ittai Kidron late on Friday issued the only issued the only Street sell-side research to cite French playwright Molière, as far as I can see. The note was published to clients this morning by Oppenheimer. Kidron, who follows outfits such as Cisco Systems (CSCO) Juniper Networks (JNPR), and EMC (EMC), compares investors’ worries [...]

NetApp: Baird Cuts to Sell; EMC, Others Gaining

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:21:00 -0400

Shares of NetApp (NTAP) are down 49 cents, or 1.3%, at $37.35, in advance of tomorrow afternoon’s fiscal Q4 report, after R.W. Baird‘s Jayson Noland cut his rating on the stock to Underperform from Neutral, with a $34 price target, writing that despite what may be an “OK” report, the company faces multiple challenges. “We [...]

This Morning: Yahoo!’s Paying What!? UNXL Rebounds, DDD Rising

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:04:32 -0400

Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech: The Financial Times‘s Venessa Houlder late yesterday wrote that a former Google (GOOG) employee has told the U.K.‘s government that Google’s arrangements for paying less tax in that country is “immoral,” testimony that was used in a parliamentary hearing last week over [...]

Alteryx Raises $12M For Data Analytics Platform That Shapes Data Into Apps

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:30:50 -0400

Alteryx has raised $12 million for its business intelligence service designed for data analysts to build tools out of their own internal data and that from third parties. The investment comes from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital, a new firm founded by former Quest Founder and CEO Vinny Smith.

What Sets The Google Cloud Platform Apart From The Rest

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:00:23 -0400

There is a misperception about the new Google Cloud Platform that the company put into general availability last week at Google I/O. It's not a brand new platform. It's what Google has used for years. It is Google's foundation. It is what makes Google, Google. And now it's open for the first time to developers and businesses. Google Platform is new in the sense that anyone can now use it. But until now only a relative few number of people have had access to the platform.

Tableau Soars: Banking on a Consumer Answer to Complex Questions

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:38:36 -0400

Shares of Tableau Software (DATA), the Seattle, Washington-based startup providing programs for Big Data, continue to rocket following their initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. The shares are up $17.43, or 56%, at $48.43, after opening at $47, above the $31 offer price, and hitting as high as $50.25. Shares [...]

QLIK Rising: As DATA Soars, BMO Cheers New Analytics Approach

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:04:32 -0400

The Nasdaq welcomed a darling of Big Data today with the initial public offering of Tableau Software (DATA), which burst out of the gate at $47, well above the offer price of $31, and is now up $17, or 55%, at $48. But there is already a pure play on Big Data and data analytics [...]

Big Data Visualization Goes Public As Tableau Software Raises $254M, Shares Pop 58%

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:24:35 -0400

The march of the enterprise software IPOs continues, with not one but two companies debuting on New York stock exchanges today. Business intelligence provider Tableau Software, trading as "DATA", is one of the more highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and so far it has not disappointed. It priced its IPO at $31 per share, and it has popped 58% to nearly $49/share in early trading on the NYSE. Marketo, a cloud-based marketing services company, priced its IPO at about half that, at $13 per share. It will be trading as MKTO, but has yet to trade this morning.

This Morning: DELL Autopsy, ARUN Plunges, Tableau on Tap

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:28:42 -0400

Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech: Shares of Aruba Networks (ARUN) are down $4.68, or almost 27%, at $12.92 in early trading, extending losses suffered in last night’s late session following yesterday afternoon’s report of fiscal Q3 revenue and earnings that missed expectations, and a weaker-than-expected outlook. The [...]

Cisco Gains in Servers at HP, Dell, IBM Expense, Says Raymond James

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:09:41 -0400

At least one analyst today opined that Cisco Systems (CSCO) is taking share from Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in the server computer business, where Cisco saw 77% year-over-year revenue growth in its “data center” product unit in the fiscal Q3 reported yesterday afternoon, including sales of server computers. Raymond James‘s Brian Alexander, whose colleague Simon [...]

ADSK Falls 8%: FYQ1 Misses, Q2 View Misses

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:30:12 -0400

Shares of design software maker Autodesk (ADSK) are down $3.18, or 8%, at $36.60,, after the company reported fiscal Q1 revenue and earnings per share that missed consensus expectations, and projected this quarter’s results lower as well, citing global economic weakness. Revenue in the three months ended in April fell 3%, year over year, to [...]

CSCO: Bulls Cheers Stability in a Gloomy Neighborhood

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:43:19 -0400

Shares of Cisco Systems (CSCO) are up 42.77, or 13%, at $23.98, and earlier went as high as $24.24, following better-than-expected fiscal Q3 revenue and profit per share last night, and a more-or-less in-line outlook for revenue. Analysts are impressed with the company’s ability to hang onto gross margin, and the ability to beat, if [...]

SAP: Hana Viable Threat to ORCL, Says Pac Crest; Not Yet, Says BMO

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:14:07 -0400

The Street has been mulling over SAP AG (SAP) “Sapphire” user conference in Orlando, Florida this week, where the company was placing a big emphasis on its “Hana” in-memory database technology. It announced yesterday several of its business applications can now use the Hana database; announced the ability to mine geospatial data, and a partnership [...]

“In The Studio,” VMware's Parth Shah Helps Explain The World Of Enterprise IT

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:00:02 -0400

This is the final episode of my show on TCTV, "In The Studio." The final guest is a good friend, Parth Shah (no relation), an engineer with VMware, and before that, at Yahoo! Parth combines the precision of CMU CS graduate's take on web development with a hacker mentality, and has the rare skill of being able to explain some of the most complex enterprise IT concepts to those who don't have as much context -- such as me! In this short conversation, Parth shares with us his work at VMware and his generalized thoughts on how the enterprise stack is being disrupted today. This video would be a great primer for anyone who wants to begin to learn about the enterprise world.

NetApp Surges 8%: Elliot Pushing for Change, Say Bloomberg, CNBC

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:58:38 -0400

Shares of enterprise networked filed server technology vendor NetApp (NTAP) are higher by $2.41, or almost 7%, at $38.63, after Bloomberg‘s Serena Saitto this morning reported that activist investors Elliot Management have taken a “significant” stake in the firm, and is “pressing the data-storage company to change its board and study options to boost shareholder [...]

BonitaSoft Raises $13M Series C For Its Open Source Business Process Management Solution

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:10:12 -0400

BonitaSoft, a provider of an open source business process management (BPM) solution, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by the FSN PME Fund, a French government initiative to invest in technology companies to help them scale globally. Also joining the round are previous investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital. The new funding round brings the total raised by the company to just over $28 million since being founded in 2009, and follows an $11m Series B in late 2011. BonitaSoft is headquartered in Grenoble, France — hence the French government’s backing — although it also has a U.S. office in San Francisco where I’m told CEO Miguel Valdes Faura spends half his time, as well an another office in Paris. It operates in the BPM space, competing with the likes of Pegasystems, Appian, LongJump, and a number of other open source players. Companies use BPM software to automate their processes, particularly where these operate at the intersection of machines and people. For example, insurance companies might employ a BPM suite to design software to automate the claims process when a customer is involved in a car accident. Or to streamline and make accountable any business process where without systems in place things would otherwise fall through the cracks, especially at scale. To that end, BonitaSoft’s solution includes a design studio to model business processes, a BPM engine that adapts to various information systems architectures, and an end-user interface for managing and interacting with processes. It also has support for a range of internal and external systems via a library of hundreds of ‘Connectors’ and a strong developer community (due to its open source nature) who contribute connectors, business processes and other extensions. BonitaSoft says that it serves more than 600 companies and governments worldwide, claiming customers such as Accenture, DirectTV, Old Dominion University, Trane, Teach For America and Michelin. Its software has seen more than 2 million downloads, while the open source community is said to be 60,000 member-strong. Like other open source business models, BonitaSoft makes money by charging for additional add-ons and support. It plans to use the new capital to “fuel its global expansion plans in the USA, Europe, and Latin America”, specifically increasing its marketshare of mid and large-sized businesses who currently rely on proprietary and aging BPM solutions. It also plans to plough some of that cash into developing next-generation BPM

Enterprise Mobility, BYOD Startup AirWatch Adds $25M From Accel To Take Its Series A Total To $225M, As It Preps For Acquisitions

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:29:19 -0400

AirWatch, the startup that helps businesses manage security and more on employees' mobile devices, is today announcing that it has raised another $25 million, led by Accel with participation also from Insight Venture Partners. The funds come as part of an expanded Series A round, originally for $200 million, which the company announced with a splash in February during Mobile World Congress. This Series A is the first outside money raised by AirWatch, and values the company at just over $1 billion, according to sources.

Google Stock Price Closes At 52-Week High Of $915 On First Day Of Google I/O As Apple Takes Another Drop

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:35:32 -0400

Google’s stock price came close to its 52-week high on the first day of Google I/O today, hitting $915 per share at close. In comparison, Apple today dropped 15 points to close at $428 per share, 277 points off its 52-week high. This morning, Google stock jumped to $909 per share from its opening price of $895 when Co-Founder Larry Page hit the stage at around 11:45. It is now trading at $916.50 in after-hours trading. One analyst I talked to attributed the increase to Google’s announcement of its “all access” streaming service and the rotation out of hardware makers such as Apple and HP. The difference between Google and Apple’s share price is a barometer of the tech landscape. Google is a data company. Apple is more about design, creating beautiful devices. The difference is evident here at Google I/O. Google has built its infrastructure to manage more data than arguably any company in the world. It uses ths data to provide services that it highlighted today in its keynote. This includes its Google Translate APIs and the next generation of its Google Maps. The iPhone will always be elegant. As my colleague Josh Constine points out, the beauty of a device is just not as important, as the entire world becomes a fabric of data objects.

Twitter Archiving Service TweetBackup Hits The Deadpool As Owner Backupify Focuses More On Enterprise

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:30:21 -0400

Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify -- the cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services -- is shutting down its TweetBackup service for Twitter users. The company has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as -- yes -- on its Twitter account, noting that new signups are stopping as of today, and that existing users will have 30 days, until June 28, to keep logging into their accounts and back up their data.

Google Cloud Platform Opens To General Availability With New Pricing And Data Tools To Compete With AWS

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:34:36 -0400

Google announced today at I/O that it made Google Cloud Platform generally available, marking a milestone for the cloud community and the real arrival of a giant to contend with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its pay-as-you-go pricing.

Whitney Tilson: Car Rental Prices Will Continue to Rise

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:40:11 -0400

Expect big changes from Hertz (NYSE: HTZ), Avis (NASDAQ: CAR), Enterprise and the entire industry over the next 10 years.

Whitney Tilson, the founder and Managing Partner of Kase Capital, believes that the U.S. car rental segment will begin to resemble the railroad industry's transformation over the

Google I/O Session Totals Show Deeper Importance Of Google Cloud Platform

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:13:51 -0400

We are more than two hours into the Google I/O keynote, the kickoff to a three-day event with 171 sessions. But something is quite different from last year. Google Cloud Platform now represents about 14% of all the sessions at the event, second to only Google Chrome and Google Android. Last year, Google Cloud Platform had just been launched and so the sessions were more introductory in nature. This year, the 25 sessions show how Google Cloud Platform is stretching across the entire Google organization.

Business Intelligence Startup RJMetrics Raises $6.25M From Trinity Ventures For Ecommerce Boom

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:02:38 -0400

In the big new world of business intelligence, RJMetrics has found a market helping ecommerce companies easily analyze operations data and make smarter decisions as a result. Big startups have signed on, including Fab, Bonobos, Threadless and thousands of smaller businesses. Today, the momentum has landed the Philadelphia enterprise startup a $6.5 million first venture round led by Trinity Ventures.

Auvik, Started By A Sandvine Co-Founder And An Ex-BlackBerry CTO, Gets $6M To Take Enterprise Network Control To The Cloud

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:26:36 -0400

Auvik Networks, a Canadian enterprise networking startup co-founded by repeat entrepreneur Marc Morin (co-founder of now-public Sandvine and of PixStream, sold to Cisco); David Yach, a former CTO of BlackBerry's software division; and ex-Sandvine product manager Alex Hoff, is today announcing that it's raised it first round of outside funding: $6 million from Celtic House Venture Partners, Rho Canada Ventures, and BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, along with more contributions from Auvik's founders, who have been backing it internally it to date. Auvik is part of a wider trend of companies working in software-defined networking, in its case developing a cloud-based platform for enterprises to manage IP networks built out of hardware from multiple vendors. Auvik has yet to release a commercial product: that will only come at the beginning of 2014, according to Morin, who is the company's CEO.

Bits of Proof launches worlds's first enterprise-ready Bitcoin server

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:04:27 -0400

Want to let users test-drive your server apps? Devops outfit ComodIT has a button for you.

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:00:56 -0400

ComodIT's "direct install" button allows for quick installation of apps on on-premise or cloud-based servers, and even makes it possible to test-drive apps for free in a ComodIT-sponsored EC2 micro instance.

Collaaj Launches An Easy Way To Create, Store And Send Video Messages

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:13 -0400

Collaaj has launched a service designed to make it easy to create videos and send them as messages. The SaaS tool includes an editor that people can use to make the videos, which might be in the form of a demo recording of an app, a drawing, annotations on a presentation or someone sending a video message of themselves to an individual or a group. The data is managed through the Collaaj platform that includes a backend to a store, stream and securely share with other team members. The video can be saved as an MP4 and sent to other people as a link.

BBRY: Jefferies Cheers BES, RBC Sees ‘Q5? Filling Channel

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:35:55 -0400

Some of the Street folks attending BlackBerry (BBRY) BlackBerry Live user conference in Orlando, Florida, this week, are reporting back their observations. The stock is currently down 73 cents, or 4.6%, at $15.15. Among the announcements this morning during CEO Thorsten Heins‘s keynote were that the company will introduce a lower-cost device with a keyboard, [...]

Fusion-io Rising: Street Encouraged by CEO Chat, FB, AAPL Comments

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:44:42 -0400

Shares of Fusion-io (FIO) are up 62 cents, over 4% at $15.13after several analysts met yesterday with incoming CEO Shane Robison, who replaces founder David Flynn, who departed abruptly last week. The stock got one upgrade, from UBS’s Steve Milunovich, who raised his rating to Buy from Neutral, and raised his price target to $19 [...]

This Morning: BlackBerry BBM Comes to IOS, Android, Cheers for FIO, YHOO

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:44:10 -0400

Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech: Shares of BlackBerry (BBRY) are down 29 cents, or 1.9%, at $15.58 this morning, as chief executive Thorsten Heins holds court at opening keynote of the company’s BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando, Florida. The company announced an operating system update to its [...]

GraphLab Raises $6.75M For Data Analysis Used In Consumer Recommendation Services

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:30:53 -0400

GraphLab, the open-source distributed database, has received $6.75 million from Madrona Venture Group and NEA for its machine learning technology used to analyze data graphs for recommendation engines. Developed five years ago at Carnegie Mellon University five years ago, the open-source data analysis platform takes semi-structured data that describe relationships between people, web traffic, product purchases and other data. It then analyzes that data for services to provide online recommendations. Graph databases, similar to Graphlab, have increased in use as more data needs correlating to better understand its meaning. Wikiepdia describes graph database in the context of graph theory. It applies mathematical structures “used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of vertices or nodes and lines called edges that connect them.” It’s the ability to make the connections between billions of nodes and lines that forms the basis for making recommendations. Dr. Carlos Guestrin is GraphLab’s CEO. He is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington, who developed the technology at Carnegie Mellon. He says it is GraphLab’s flexibility and better machine learning capabilities that makes it better in comparison to other data analytics tools such as Mahout, the open-source machine learning technology. GraphLab has gained adoption in the market. It is used by a number of consumer services to drive millions of transactions. Pandora and Walmart Labs are cited as users of the technology. (Graph image courtesy of Wikipedia)

As Google I/O Approaches, Microsoft Hires A High-Profile Team To Attract Outside Developers

Tue, 14 May 2013 05:00:23 -0400

Just before Google I/O, Microsoft is making a big pitch for developers with a high-profile announcement about a new team that will focus on building outside interest in app development on the Azure platform. The group, which will have a base in San Francisco, is part of the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group led by Technical Fellow John Shewchuk. As Mary Jo Foley wrote, the new developer team is part of Microsoft’s effort to be a platform provider more so than a software purveyor. Here’s what Shewchuk wrote recently about the effort: We’re building out the team by adding top-notch developers and evangelists from across the industry. Two recent examples: James Whittaker – a known industry disruptor and incredible speaker joins us from Bing where he has been leading the development team making Bing knowledge available programmatically – many people may know him from his viral blog post on why he left Google for Microsoft. And Patrick Chanezon just joined us from VMware where he was driving their cloud and tools developer relations – he has a ton of expertise in the open source space which will be increasingly important given our new Azure IaaS support for Linux. Of particular note is the hiring of Chanezon, who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. In a blog post, Chanezon puts an emphasis on Microsoft’s Azure platform and its readiness. Interestingly, he says that Azure “is more open than people think.” I take that as he and the development team have some work in growing awareness about the Azure infrastructure. Chanezon leaves a job at VMware where he managed developer relations for Spring and Cloud Foundry. Spring and Cloud Foundry were recently spun out into a separate company called Pivotal that is positioning as a platform for data analytics and app development. Chanezon worked at Google on the Cloud Platform Advocacy Team manager before leaving for VMware. It’s apparent that Microsoft has built a world-class development platform but getting people to use it has posed its challenges. This is in part due to Microsoft’s past focus on its insistence that developers uses Microsoft technology at every level of the stack. That attitude has shifted as symbolized in the news today and a series of announcements over the past several months related to Azure. It has launched new mobile features for iOS and Android development. In March they offered support For PhoneGap, Dropbox and Hadoop. Arguably the

Zapier Launches API-Monitoring Service To Catch Issues And Outages

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:12:58 -0400

Zapier, a service that automates tasks between online services, has launched a tool that monitors 200 APIs, sometimes catching an outage before the provider does. The new tool monitors the uptime and downtime of every API on Zapier. It is designed to monitor the realtime status of popular web APIs and their impact on customers that use the Zapier service or just want a good resource to monitor how APIs are behaving. Each API can be monitored via SMS, instant message, email or any number of methods that are supported by Zapier's core product.

How A Car Crash Changed Vishal Sikka And The Direction Of SAP

Sun, 12 May 2013 17:30:42 -0400

It’s a rare fall rainy day in Palo Alto and SAP Executive Board Member Dr. Vishal Sikka is as sick as a dog. It’s less than a week until SAP Sapphire in Madrid and the community around him are like a worrying family. I had told them that it is okay. I could make the trip another time. But they were insistent I make the trip. Fast forward to May. It has been several months since that cold rainy week in Palo Alto. We’re on the eve of the next Sapphire conference in Orlando this week. Last week, Plattner and Sikka held a press conference, announcing the new HANA Enterprise Cloud. HANA is an in-memory database that Sikka and Plattner developed with a team of about a dozen people around the world. SAP has built four data centers for HANA — two in Europe and two in the United States. It would not be an overstatement to say that HANA is SAP’s future, the first technology in a long time from the German giant that is getting buzz for what it can do. It potentially puts the company into play as a key developer platform for real-time analytics in the evolving world of technology spanning both consumer and the enterprise services that are the company’s legacy (and slightly stale bread and butter). The big question is can SAP show the world that HANA is a bona fide developer platform with visionary use cases and clear customer examples. Jon Reed is a longtime SAP Mentor and expert about the company. He is a great sounding board, someone who talked me through a lot of this story. He has a lot of respect for Sikka and Plattner. But he is skeptical, too, as am I about HANA and its direction. The potential is without question. And Sikka shows signs he has that rare combination of intellectual curiosity, technology credibility and passion that makes for a great leader. And he’s a humanist. He is impassioned about the potential for cancer research with HANA as much as he sees SAP transforming from an inward looking business software company to one that is outward facing, used for research and predictive analytics. “It makes him a compelling figure,” Reed said. “You do get the sense that if the work is not purposeful, he won’t stick around. He really does believe HANA and interrelated innovations can change the world.”

CamCard, A Card-Scanning App That's Dominating Asian Markets, Reaches 50M Users

Sun, 12 May 2013 04:41:20 -0400

While there's a perennial debate on the West Coast about whether and when business cards might become irrelevant, they continue to be at the center of business customs in China and Japan. That's why it's natural that a Chinese company -- not an American one -- might be able to dominate this market and behavior globally.

Dell: Mike Dell Is ‘Not the Guy at This Point’ Icahn Tells Bloomberg

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:15:41 -0400

Following Carl Icahn‘s announcement this morning he proposed a leveraged recapitalization of Dell (DELL), in partnership with Southeastern Asset Management, in competition with CEO Mike Dell and private equity firm SilverLake‘s proposed leveraged buyout, Icahn spent some substantial time with Bloomberg‘s Trish Regan discussing the details of raising the money and why investors should like [...]