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Archive for June, 2011

Smartphone app to help locate friend in crowd

June 24th, 2011

Can a smartphone app enable meaningful, face-to-face conversation? Engineers are trying to figure it out with a software that helps people locate their friends in a crowd — and make new friends sharing similar interests.

For instance, at a business meeting, the software could remind a user of a forgotten acquaintance’s name, or help him make new professional contacts in the same area of research.

Dong Xuan, associate professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State University, said: “Today, online social networking has advanced dramatically, but our ability to meet people face-to-face hasn’t gotten any easier.”

Called eShadow, the software uses nearby wireless networks and smartphones’ wireless communication technologies to alert users that a friend who also uses the software is in the area and gives directions to that friend’s location, according to a Ohio statement.

“We want eShadow to close social gaps and connect people in meaningful ways while keeping the technology non-intrusive and protecting privacy,” said Xuan, who led the project.

As to users’ safety, Xuan feels that, at least for some situations, meeting someone in person is safer than meeting them online.

“Online, people can steal others’ identity, or lie easily without detection. It’s much harder to pull off a masquerade in person,” he said.

The name eShadow comes from the idea that users input their interests into the software, and their smartphone broadcasts those interests to certain other users of the software – but only within 50 yards of the phone. So as users move, the broadcast follows them around like a shadow.

In outdoor tests, they measured how fast the software could detect users who were 20, 30, and 50 yards apart. They tested different numbers of users, from two to seven.

In all cases, the software was able to connect people within about half a minute – an average of 25 seconds for two users, and 35 seconds for seven.

Xuan noted that eShadow’s algorithms could be useful beyond socialising. Soldiers could use something akin to eShadow to locate each other on the battlefield.

These findings were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) in Minneapolis.

Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/computing/Smartphone-app-to-help-locate-friend-in-crowd/articleshow/8977008.cms

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Tags: Crowd Smartphone

Infosys sees big opportunities in cloud computing

June 24th, 2011

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Country’s second largest software exporter Infosys is eyeing big opportunities in cloud computing but advocates that there is need to put in place a policy framework for the same.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO and managing director of Infosys said that Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is preparing a draft on the policy and would submit the same to the Government next month.

Cloud computing facilitates sharing of technological resources, software and digital information. It operates on a pay-per-use model, helping companies to cut costs as they do not have to invest heavily in infrastructure.

“CII is putting together a draft paper on the opportunities in cloud computing and what should be the policy frame work on this. The opportunities are huge for country like India in providing citizen services. And if we have the right regulatory frame work then we can accelerate,” he told reporters on the sidelines of an event here.

He said cloud services currently form about 3% of Infosys’ overall income and more than 10% if cloud products are also included. Replying to a question on the company’s focus, he said Infosys would concentrate on core issues in cloud like transitioning companies towards cloud, running cloud services and new solutions offering.

He, however, said that some of the issues like data privacy and security should be addressed properly and it is possible with a proper regulatory frame work in place.
“Regulatory frame work would give confidence that the service providers will provide the service securely and reliably. We need a regulatory frame work in place also to ensure data privacy. But the data centre should be located in
India,” Kris said.

He opined that creation of infrastructure for cloud computing requires huge investment. A senior official of the company said Infosys has already appointed 2000 experts to work on the technology.

Source:http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/infosys-sees-big-opportunitiescloud-computing_560104.html

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Tags: Computing Infosys

IBM expands social software portfolio with Connections

June 24th, 2011

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IBM has announced the expansion of its software portfolio to help organisations embrace the power of social business. IBM is delivering IBM Connections, the industry’s first social networking platform with real-time compliance capabilities.

The new IBM Connections software allows organizations to track and trace data on the fly throughout their organizations. This information can be analyzed and is discoverable in real-time using the IBM Connections active compliance service versus waiting until day end for analysis.

The adoption of social software is on the rise and rapidly becoming a vital business tool, enabling organizations to transform virtually every part of their business operations from marketing, customer service and sales, to product development and human resources. The market opportunity for social platforms is expected to grow by a factor of nearly two billion worldwide by 2014, according to IDC.

Organisations, both in regulated industries and those beginning to experiment with social technology, inevitably have questions about security and compliance. A growing challenge for global organisations is the ability to manage risk while harnessing insights from a wide variety of social communities and remaining compliant with their own governance policies, including practices dictated by their regulatory requirements.

Gartner recently said that “by the end of 2013, half of all companies will be forced to produce material from social media websites for e-discovery so enterprises need an overall governance strategy for all applications and information.”

The new IBM Connections 3.01 software uses microblogs, wikis, communities and activities to collaborate with clients, partners and employees.

The social networking platform delivers enterprise-quality compliance capabilities providing the ability to monitor, track and quickly pull out relevant data around conversations, posts and file uploads in real-time. This electronic trail of online interactions helps organizations meet their policy needs while working at the speed of social networking.

IBM plans to provide these industry agnostic compliance capabilities for clients through collaboration with Actiance, a leader in compliance capabilities. In the third quarter. IBM is expected to introduce Actiance Vantage for IBM Connections, which archives and logs social content to help enterprises remain compliant with corporate and government regulations.

The new features within IBM Connections also help foster greater participation in communities through moderation allowing managers and editors of online content to review materials before they are published.

To help organisations take advantage of the social business opportunity, IBM Connections also features social analytics to help users find experts and the ability to comment or vote on ideas in a community. The Connections Ideation Blog is designed to allow crowdsourcing of ideas across teams and customers.

Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/services-apps/IBM-expands-social-software-portfolio-with-Connections/articleshow/8963531.cms

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Tags: IBM Software

Missoula looks to spend $800K on software upgrade to improve permitting process

June 24th, 2011

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The city of Missoula is on the brink of an $800,000 software upgrade – and the pending purchase is giving at least one City Council member “sticker shock.”

“It is a lot of money, and I can’t help feeling like we’re just over this barrel,” Councilman Bob Jaffe said Thursday.

But Jaffe also said the new system will mean “a substantial bump up in the quality of service” for people who need permits. Instead of driving a dump truck to City Hall for a permit, an excavation contractor will be able to get a permit on his phone from the job site.

The deal comes Monday before the Missoula City Council, and chief administrative officer Bruce Bender said an upgrade has been a long time coming. He said the purchase presents an opportunity for the city and is a better bargain than it looks.

“Even though it doesn’t appear that way, we did receive a cost reduction,” Bender said.

The city was able to piggyback on a state contract, and Bender said officials from Accela Automation have said delays only mean the cost will go up. The city will make payments over 10 years.

The new system will be linked to the state of Montana so a contractor can get all required permits in a jurisdiction online, Bender said. The program will manage engineering permits, building inspection, business licensing and also wastewater treatment records.

“It’s pretty complicated, and you know, we look at it as a 10-year investment,” Bender said.

Missoula County is paying for an estimated $86,000. Bender said the city of Missoula is splitting the rest of the cost among the building, engineering and wastewater departments.

He said the bulk of the cost – some $500,000 – is for “configuration.” That means paying people from Accela Automation to come to Missoula, write a permit system that’s specific to local permits and ordinances, convert old data and train staff on the new program.

Councilman Jaffe said the ongoing licensing costs stay the same. And he said despite the high cost, the state appears to have done due diligence in its request for proposals and ensuing reviews.

A report released earlier this year criticized the city of Missoula in part for being slow and inefficient in permitting. The report suggested the processes needed upgrading, automating and consolidating.

It’s the “Cadillac deal,” said Jaffe, but the Accela product should pay off in the long run.

“It’s a large investment in Missoula being business friendly and helping the building industry,” Jaffe said.

Source:http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_0406c5b8-9e15-11e0-99fc-001cc4c03286.html

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Tags: Software

Business software to hit $46b this year: Ovum

June 24th, 2011

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Market leader Microsoft falling behind in Asia-Pacific.

The Asia-Pacific business software market is on target to reach $46 billion this year, a report by analyst group Ovum has found.

It said the sector rebounded strongly from last year’s flat sales to grow at about 8.4 percent a year.

Although Ovum recognised Microsoft as the market leader with 15 percent of sales in the region, analysts warned innovation at the software maker was lagging and would likely see rivals IBM, Oracle and SAP nipping closer at its heels in the coming years.

Over the next four years, the Asia-Pacific business software market was expected to grow by a compound annual rate of 8.9 percent, which would equate to a $65 billion market by 2015.

Ovum said enormous repositories of data horded by organisations, the exodus to mobility in the enterprise and a shift to cloud computing drove the growth.

Emerging markets in China and India were key drivers of growth, although more established markets including Japan, South Korea and Australia were expected to contribute strong, single-digit growth.

Ovum said information management would likely be the best-performing area based on projected growth of 11 percent over the next four years as companies spend on managing and making sense of their bulging repositories of business and customer data.

“As the global economy continues its recovery, the emphasis of IT investment is moving on from the traditional area of back-office automation and transaction processing, towards the exploitation of information to add value to the business,” Ovum analyst Tim Jennings said.

“The volume of information within enterprises continues to grow at an astonishing rate and investment is needed to manage this information and to turn it into actionable intelligence, through technologies such as business intelligence and analytics.”

Ovum also ranked the top software vendors in the region with Microsoft at No.1 with $6.6 billion (15 percent). IBM, Oracle and SAP were ranked second, third and fourth, respectively.

But how long they would stay in Microsoft’s shadow was to be seen: “It is doing just enough to stay in the game, but is not a star performer”, said Ovum principal analyst Richard Edwards.

For instance, the area of information management, identified by Ovum as the fastest growing segment of the Asia-Pacific software market, was not Microsoft’s strong suit while rival IBM was a leader, the analyst said.

Ovum projected strong growth across the board with security software expected to grow by compound rate of 10 percent to 2015, with applications software growing at 9.7 percent over the same period.

Organisations’ enthusiasm for mobilising their workforces would drive demand for software enabling the transition while the inexorable move towards the cloud would see more sales of software-as-a-service, Ovum added.

Source:http://www.crn.com.au/News/261665,business-software-to-hit-46b-this-year-ovum.aspx

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Tags: Business Software

Who Will IBM Buy Next?

June 23rd, 2011

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As IBM turned 100 years old this month, the company received a lot of fanfare and attention. Amazingly, the company has managed to stay relevant in the fast-paced world of technology for a century. Many analysts reflected on the past achievements and milestones while others talked about their current innovations.I’m a fan of the retrospective approach, but I often find it more interesting to think about where a company is headed rather than where it’s been.

In the spirit of forward looking analysis, I decided to dig into IBM’s merger and acquisition strategy. The name of Big Blue is never far away when the topic of tech mergers and acquisitions is brought up so I thought it’d be an interesting angle to take given the company’s 100 year history. Naturally, I had to dig into IBM’s history a bit to understand their future. I took a look at the last 10 years of IBM’s merger and acquisition strategy.

As I took a look at IBM’s history, it was fairly obvious that they love to purchase in services and analytics. They purchased 14 services companies in the last decade alone. They also dropped a pretty penny in business analytics, which is marked by their massive purchase of Cognos which they got for a cool $5 billion. These were obvious areas of continued focus but IBM never stays in one place too long – take a look at their portfolio and you’ll see what I mean.

As I thought about their strategy, one thing came to mind: cloud. IBM has made it no secret that they plan to mine the cloud market for all it’s worth. According to their estimations, they expect it to be a $7 billion a year business by 2015.

That’s all well and good, but the cloud is really more of a marketing concept than it is an actually thing. You can’t simply buy a chunk of the cloud market, you need to buy the things that make the cloud run. From an IBM perspective, I see three major areas of focus in the cloud market: cloud infrastructure management, cloud application performance management, and cloud services. In each of these sections, I came up with a couple of companies that I can see them purchasing in each of these areas. Here’s what I came up with.

Cloud Infrastructure Management
IBM has always made it a point to manage infrastructure. It’s part of their strategy to remain largely brand agnostic in their dealings with large enterprises. They have made a killing off this market with their Tivoli systems management unit in the on-premise world, why shouldn’t they be able to do this in the age of the cloud as well?

In looking at the market for companies of this nature, two companies stand out in my mind: Eucalyptus and RightScale. Eucalyptus is a great purchase on the private side of the cloud for enterprises that want to keep it all at home. RightScale is where it’s at in terms of the public cloud. They work with nearly ever major cloud provider, Amazon EC2 etc, and they have experience deploying roughly 2 million servers. These are both still relatively small company, but with a nudge from Big Blue they could become a force to be reckoned with.

Cloud Application Performance Management
This just seems like a natural fit for IBM to take over in this place. It’s an application that runs deep in the technology stack and is built for IT professionals. It jives with the IBM style. It’s another area of cloud management that IBM could focus on.

The two vendors that come to mind here are AppDynamics and New Relic. Of course there is plenty of competition in this space but these companies are young and making waves in application performance management. AppDynamics already has a customer base of 30K and supports companies like Taleo. They’re making things happen. New Relic is also a great vendor in this space. They are a lot like AppDynamics but they support even more programming languages. They’ve also got a strong base in the world of SMBs.

Cloud Services
As IBM looks to the cloud, it just seems logical that services will be a part of their strategy. Professional services make up a huge portion of IBM’s revenue so there’s no reason that they’d turn their back on this segment now. There are a lot of firms out there that have some cloud capabilities, but there are relatively few that focus purely on working in the cloud. If IBM were to snap one of these guys up, they’d bring a dynamic offering to their already powerful services market.

One of the cloud services companies that is shining brighter than many of the rest is Appirio. They’ve been around for a while but they recently shifted their focus to the cloud. In addition to their professional services, they’ve also got a lot of their own custom code they can use to help a business in need. Additionally, they’ve started to focus a lot on mobility which is a hot item in the enterprise these days.

Alternatively, they may consider a smaller Milwaukee-based firm called Xorbix Technologies. They aren’t crushing it quite as hard as Appirio in this space but they are doing some good work. Even as a small firm, they’re working among some big names helping out some of Salesforce.com and Google’s biggest customers. Either would play nicely with IBM’s professional services.

Well, there you have a few of my ideas of where IBM might goin the cloud. As such a vast company, their M&A strategy is difficult to discern but I think these are reasonable areas for IBM to shop around in. Of course, these aren’t the only places that I think they may look to buy. After all, they recently stated that they’re willing to let go of $20 billion in the next 5 years. I’ve listed more of my ideas on my blog at Software Advice.

Think you know where Big Blue is headed? Drop by Software Advice, a company that reviews wholesale distribution software, and leave your thoughts. Don’t forget to vote in our poll. You can see the full article and vote in the poll at IBM Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Next?

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Sensor-software device could help farmers to protect crops

June 23rd, 2011

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Farmers are trialling a new sensor and software technology that will allow them to better protect their crops with pesticide before pathogens can infect.
The system comprises a piece of online software that gathers real-time geographical data on weather conditions and logged incidences of infection.
It then uses mathematical models to predict how likely a certain pathogen is to be present in the vicinity of a particular farmer’s field.

The farmer then uses a simple test kit that can provide confirmation of whether the pathogen is indeed present and can apply pesticide as required.
Prof Roy Kennedy, director of the National Pollen and Aerobiology Research Unit (NPARU) based at Worcester University, led the development of the technology, which was funded by the Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

‘The device is very similar to a pregnancy test but it’s set up to detect important plant pathogens. It’s semi-quantitative in that you can put the test device into a digital reader and look at the reading in relation to a calibration curve, which tells you how many propagules [active spores] are in the air.’
Kennedy added that early warning of infection means that farmers no longer have to waste time and money spraying crops when there is no disease in the air — resulting in more targeted protection with potentially greater yields.

‘We have several of these devices each set up for different pathogens that affect different crops in the UK — and we’re looking to detect these in the air before they infect the crop.’

The system is being tested out by several agriculture consultancies, including the Allium and Brassica Centre (ABC) in Lincolnshire, and Alphagrow in Lancashire.

Source:http://www.theengineer.co.uk/sensor-software-device-could-help-farmers-to-protect-crops/1009133.article