So What Comes After the Cloud? Try the Fog

ieee spectrum - 2.8.13 by Tekla Perry

When a Symform customer uploads a file to the fog, Symform’s software replicates it for redundancy, shreds it into tiny pieces, encrypts each piece, and then distributes it to other Symform customers around the continent or multiple continents.

The world has embraced the cloud. What’s not to like? Startups can grow rapidly without investing in racks of computers, companies can back up data easily, consumers can travel light and still have access to their huge photo libraries and other personal files.

Back in October, however, real clouds clashed with metaphorical clouds when Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath took down some key data centers in New York and New Jersey; a serious problem for businesses who had their main servers in New York and their backup servers in nearby New Jersey. Commercial cloud service providers, for the most part, did pretty well; perhaps because some of the largest data centers, like Amazon’s northern Virginia server farm, were not in the disaster zone. But Sandy certainly reminded cloud service providers that redundant files have to be separated by more than a couple of racks, or even a couple of miles.

Continue Reading>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read More...

In Cloud We Trust - Who needs economists?

New York Times (Bits) - 3.15.12 by Quentin Hardy

GT Nexus used shipment data to track countries’ import-export balance in 2008, left, and 2011. The diagonal line represents balanced trade.

Someday soon, the Federal Reserve may be dead, at least for economic information. Blame it on, or credit it to, cloud computing.

I recently visited the Oakland, Calif., headquarters of GT Nexus, a company that monitors supply chain information — things like ordering, payment, manufacture and logistics — for 100 major companies. Think of GT Nexus as a Facebook for corporate behavior: business partners are friends, and the completion of tasks are status updates.

The clients inside this cloud-based system include Home Depot, Sears Holdings, Adidas, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and Fiat Industrial. Each giant company typically has about 1,000 other organizations involved in its business, including suppliers and manufacturers, freight companies, customs officials and banks. GT Nexus keeps straight all their goods, services and the payments involved, in real time, on a cloud-based computing platform. It is possible because so many people, things and computers are now connected to the Internet.

Read more>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read More...

The cloud flexes its muscle

Clouds are wispy, ephemeral things, until you get inside one. The digital cloud sounds wispy and soft too, but its awesome power has already been felt on Android phones. That amazingly accurate and speedy voice recognition isn't being processed by your phone's CPU, but by the powerhouses in the cloud.

Google steps it up again with this:

Technology Review - 8.20.10 by Tom Simonite

From Amazon's product recommendations to Pandora's ability to find us new songs we like, the smartest Web services around rely on machine learning--algorithms that enable software to learn how to respond with a degree of intelligence to new information or events.

Now Google has launched a service that could bring such smarts to many more apps. Google Prediction API provides a simple way for developers to create software that learns how to handle incoming data. For example, the Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for "complaints" and "praise" using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds. Future e-mails could then be screened by software using that API, and handled accordingly.

Read more>>

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read More...