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With Oggl From Hipstamatic, Vyclone And More, Nokia Focuses On Camera Features (But Still No Instagram In Sight)
Nokia is going big on the camera features in its new 925 and 928 Lumia devices, continuing on in its PureView legacy first introduced back when it was still making Symbian devices. Within that it is adding a few key apps to the device — Oggl from Hipstamatic, the slick video sharing app Vyclone and Cinemagraph — but there is still no sign of popular picture-taking and picture-sharing app Instagram.
“We hear the voices on Instagram,” Matt Rothschild, head of sales for Nokia in the Americas, said in an interview, indicating that the company is still working on a deal: “For now, we see great technology complementing Instagram; we are continuing to work on that.”
In fact, TechCrunch understands that Nokia and Microsoft have been working hard on closing an agreement but still there have been no dice. Both CEOs have visited the company, we understand, and have even offered to put up investment reaching into the millions of dollars to create the app. Many (although not all) see Instagram as a deal-breaker, holding back some from making the switch to Windows Phone as their next startphone platform. (This point can be argued against, of course: Android has been growing like crazy, but it only got Instagram around a year ago.) In any case, given how much of a song and dance Nokia is making about its camera features — with its own Smart Camera software leading the pack — you can see why Nokia was so keen on securing the Instagram deal, which also included waging its own viral campaign.
In the meantime, we are getting other things, led by Oggl. Launched only three days ago for iOS, Nokia has secured a partnership with Hipstamatic to put its new app — itself an attempt at a comeback after free Instagram and other apps have stolen Hipstamatic’s paid app lunch — on to its Lumia devices. Because of the existing relationship between Hipstamatic and Instagram, from last March (before Instagram was bought by Facebook), users will now be able to post pictures that they take via Oggl on to Instagram.
Nokia plans to take its Smart Camera software, which offers best shot, action shot and motion focus, to other Lumia devices in Q3 later this year. But unlike Nokia’s mapping technology Here, which is coming to many other platforms — this will be staying only on Lumia’s devices.
Week in Review: Hadoop Summit, Value of Big Data, and more Ambari
And we are just about done with this week. But not quite – dig into the conversation from the past few days.
Hadoop Summit. We published the vast majority of sessions (70 so far) for the Hadoop Summit in San Jose, 26-27 June. The sessions stretch across 7 tracks from Architecture to Economics and we hope you can join us for THE Hadoop community event of the year. You can register here, and the schedule is here.
Big Data Defined Part Deux: Value Definition. Jim picked up from the last Big Data definition and talked about it here. Regardless of your views on volume, variety and velocity there is one V to rule them all: Value.
Enterprise Data Analytics with Hortonworks and Datameer. I’ve been having a ton of fun with Datameer visualizations this week. If you want to learn a little more about enterprise analytics and how to better unlock the insights in your own data (with cool graphics) then take a look here.
Get Started with Ambari. We published a fun tutorial on setting up Ambari to provision, manage and monitor your Hadoop cluster. Better automation of management and monitoring means more time in the garden.
Until next week – stay frosty.
The post Week in Review: Hadoop Summit, Value of Big Data, and more Ambari appeared first on Hortonworks.
Microsoft Says It Has Sold More Than 100M Windows 8 Licenses, 250M App Downloads In Last 6 Months, Blue Coming “Later This Year”
By most accounts, Windows 8 isn’t all that popular, but according to Microsoft’s latest numbers, the company has now sold more than 100 million copies of the latest version of its desktop operating system. In January, the last time Microsoft provided updated numbers for Windows 8, the company said that it had passed the 60 million mark. Windows 8 users are also getting used to using the Windows Store, it seems, as the total number of downloads for the first six months has now passed 250 million.
The number of apps in the store, Microsoft’s CFO and CMO Tami Reller said in a canned interview with Microsoft communications manager Brandon LeBlanc today, has increased 6x since launch and 90% of the apps are downloaded at least once every month. Given that the Store didn’t have all that many apps in it when Windows 8 launched, a 6x increase doesn’t sound all that big, but Reller argues that this means Windows 8 has “already passed what iOS had in store, in its first year of app development.” Earlier today, Microsoft also said that SkyDrive now has more than 250 million active customers.
Windows Blue: Coming “Later This Year”
While Microsoft has long acknowledged that the next version of Windows has the codename “Windows Blue” and various leaks have already revealed many of its features, the company has never announced a roadmap for Blue. In today’s “interview,” Keller said that Blue will be available “later this year, building on the bold vision set forward with Windows 8 to deliver the next generation of tablets and PCs.” Blue she said, “will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem.” Blue, she also noted, is an opportunity for Microsoft to respond to feedback from its customers (who all seem to be clamoring for the return of the Start menu).
With Microsoft Build at the end of June, chances are we will hear quite a bit more about Blue at that time, so it’s probably a fair guess that “later this year” refers to the late summer.
Week in Review: Hadoop Summit, Value of Big Data, and more Ambari
And we are just about done with this week. But not quite – dig into the conversation from the past few days.
Hadoop Summit. We published the vast majority of sessions (70 so far) for the Hadoop Summit in San Jose, 26-27 June. The sessions stretch across 7 tracks from Architecture to Economics and we hope you can join us for THE Hadoop community event of the year. You can register here, and the schedule is here.
Big Data Defined Part Deux: Value Definition. Jim picked up from the last Big Data definition and talked about it here. Regardless of your views on volume, variety and velocity there is one V to rule them all: Value.
Enterprise Data Analytics with Hortonworks and Datameer. I’ve been having a ton of fun with Datameer visualizations this week. If you want to learn a little more about enterprise analytics and how to better unlock the insights in your own data (with cool graphics) then take a look here.
Get Started with Ambari. We published a fun tutorial on setting up Ambari to provision, manage and monitor your Hadoop cluster. Better automation of management and monitoring means more time in the garden.
Until next week – stay frosty.
The post Week in Review: Hadoop Summit, Value of Big Data, and more Ambari appeared first on Hortonworks.
Microsoft Sued By CopyTele Over Alleged Skype Patent Infringements, Wants To Bring Cases Against 100 More Web Conferencing Services
CopyTele, a “patent enforcement entity” based in New York, has filed a patent infringement suit against Microsoft in connection with its Skype IP calling and messaging service, now used by 280 million people every month. The two patents in question come from Secure Web Conference Corporation, a subsidiary of publicly-traded CopyTele. They are 6,856,686 B2 (’686 Patent), and 6,856,687 B2 (’687 Patent), respectively covering “method and apparatus for securing e-mail attachments” and “portable telecommunication security device.” “The Patents-in-Suit, generally speaking, relate to secure web-based peer-to-peer communications,” CopyTele writes in its complaint.
If things go CopyTele’s way, this is just the beginning: Robert Berman, the CEO of CopyTele, tells TechCrunch that there are between 90 and 100 web conferencing companies that CopyTele believes are also violating the same patents. “This is a $ 4 billion industry,” he said. “This is the initiation of what will be a broader patent enforcement campaign.”
CopyTele will have to get in line for its Skype suit: as of last month, the Microsoft subsidiary is also being sued by VirnetX over patent infringement claims (for the second time; they’d already settled past claims). A case brought by a company called Via Vadis, both in Europe and the U.S. back in 2011, around the time that the deal between Microsoft and Skype was first announced, was thrown out in a German court in January.
Nor are these the first patent infringement suits that CopyTele has brought against the tech community. In January, it filed suits against E Ink and AU Optronics Corp, related to technology used in products like Amazon’s Kindle and the Nook from Barnes & Noble, among others.
CopyTele is also amassing other patent portfolios and plans suits against other entities. These include companies that offer loyalty programs. It’s also bought a Windows patent portfolio (for actual windows — not Microsoft Windows).
Companies like Google, BlackBerry and Earthlink have lobbied against patent trolls and what it calls “patent privateering,” when patent enforcement entities make deals with larger companies to take over their portfolios and bring cases against competitors. But Berman paints himself as something of a patent enforcement crusader and takes issue with the categorically negative picture painted around patent trolls.
“I think every patent case needs to be judged on their own merits,” he said. “Just as there are good and bad personal injury lawyers, there are good and bad patent assertion companies. I don’t think it’s fair to assess every company that doesn’t make products as a villain. We are not in the nuisance lawsuit business, particularly when large companies make money out of licensing. What gives large companies the right to do this and not small companies?”
As of today, Senator Charles Schumer is also wading into these waters with proposed legislation that will change how these kinds of cases are brought to court. He’s suggesting that each suit should be reviewed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office before it can proceed through the court system, so that it can vet the cases and decide whether they have any merit on patent grounds. In Schumer’s estimation this should ferret out illegitimate claims while letting genuine patent violations proceed along the costly route to court appearance, or settlement. In theory, if this legislation passes, if CopyTele (or any other company) believes that it has a legit case, it should have nothing to worry about.
We are reaching out to Microsoft for comment on this and will update as we learn more. Update: Microsoft has responded with a “no comment.”
Full complaint below.
Google Cloud Services: More Innovation, Less Hassle
Want to spend more time building innovative products and less time on infrastructure and maintenance? Google’s suite of cloud services includes infrastructur…
Tez – The race for secure low latency Hadoop picks up more speed
We had been expectingthis… honestly, yes. Hortonworks, a Yahoo spin-off for Hadoop, has made the
headlines again. So while Marissa Mayer was busy revealing a new version of
Yahoo.com home page in a purple Facebook avatar, the erudite guys at Hortonworks
revealed the open source Apache Hadoop immediate roadmap.
Hortonwoks, the Palo Alto
ecosystem. The key drivers of its strategy include:
ecosystem. The key drivers of its strategy include:
(1)
Accelerate
enterprise adoption of Hadoop
Accelerate
enterprise adoption of Hadoop
(2) Providing a low latency based SQL
type query interface for Hadoop
type query interface for Hadoop
(3) Making Hadoop cluster more secure
With these in mind, the
company revealed 3 components of its strategy:
company revealed 3 components of its strategy:
(1)
Stinger
initiative
Stinger
initiative
(2) Tez framework
(3) Knox Gateway
Stinger seems to be a
strategic move to keep Hive as the central interface for Hadoop querying. Just
this week, hadoopsphere.com published a post citing HCatalog could become partof Hive project. With Stinger, the company plans to make use of community
driven contributions to add more SQL like querying clause to HQL (Hive Query
language). Also, it claims to have achieved 90% reduction in Hive query
result time. Another significant addition is the introduction of ORCFile in direct
competition to Trevni and to tide over RC File format limitations. Tez
framework described in next paragraph also constitutes part of Stinger
initiative. Future additions include Buffer Caching, Vector Querying engine and
Query Planner.
strategic move to keep Hive as the central interface for Hadoop querying. Just
this week, hadoopsphere.com published a post citing HCatalog could become partof Hive project. With Stinger, the company plans to make use of community
driven contributions to add more SQL like querying clause to HQL (Hive Query
language). Also, it claims to have achieved 90% reduction in Hive query
result time. Another significant addition is the introduction of ORCFile in direct
competition to Trevni and to tide over RC File format limitations. Tez
framework described in next paragraph also constitutes part of Stinger
initiative. Future additions include Buffer Caching, Vector Querying engine and
Query Planner.
Tez is one of the most
exciting revelations of the day. It is a “general-purpose, highly
customizable framework that creates simplifies data-processing tasks across
both small scale (low-latency) and large-scale (high throughput) workloads in
Hadoop.”
exciting revelations of the day. It is a “general-purpose, highly
customizable framework that creates simplifies data-processing tasks across
both small scale (low-latency) and large-scale (high throughput) workloads in
Hadoop.”
(Tez in Hindi language
means fast speed)
means fast speed)
Tez apparently throws a challenge to Cloudera Impala. Currently, proposed as an
Apache incubator project with seed work already done, the project already has
22 committers which tells us something about the exciting race here. Tez aims
to optimize the latency by running the query in a single job rather than
multiple MapReduce jobs. Further it aims to leverage YARN to share data
processing primitives across Apache Pig, Apache Hive, Cascading and others.
Apache incubator project with seed work already done, the project already has
22 committers which tells us something about the exciting race here. Tez aims
to optimize the latency by running the query in a single job rather than
multiple MapReduce jobs. Further it aims to leverage YARN to share data
processing primitives across Apache Pig, Apache Hive, Cascading and others.
Knox is the other
significant project which has been proposed for Apache incubation. Since
security is one of the key focus areas, it “provides a single point of
authentication and access for Apache Hadoop services in a cluster”.
Earlier, hadoopsphere.com had proposed comprehensive security architecture forApache Hadoop cluster which could be implemented with custom built utilities or
custom off the shelf tools. Knox fills in the vital authentication layer of the
security architecture instead of just relying on Kerberos. However, it still
needs to do a bit of work on cloud integration and web interface for the Hadoop
cluster.
significant project which has been proposed for Apache incubation. Since
security is one of the key focus areas, it “provides a single point of
authentication and access for Apache Hadoop services in a cluster”.
Earlier, hadoopsphere.com had proposed comprehensive security architecture forApache Hadoop cluster which could be implemented with custom built utilities or
custom off the shelf tools. Knox fills in the vital authentication layer of the
security architecture instead of just relying on Kerberos. However, it still
needs to do a bit of work on cloud integration and web interface for the Hadoop
cluster.
Overall, Hortonworks has
shown its commitment to open source once again and driving upon the fact that
community based contributions can be innovative, exciting and ‘tez’ (fast).
shown its commitment to open source once again and driving upon the fact that
community based contributions can be innovative, exciting and ‘tez’ (fast).
ps: Arun Murthy/folks at
Hortonworks, please excuse the discretion of using Arun’s image in Speed movie look-alike
poster. And of course, kudos to many more heroes in the team.
Hortonworks, please excuse the discretion of using Arun’s image in Speed movie look-alike
poster. And of course, kudos to many more heroes in the team.
All other images in this
post taken from Hortonworks blog
post taken from Hortonworks blog
Bing Questions Study That Claimed It Delivers 5x More Malware Than Google, Says It Blocks 94% Of Clicks To Malicious Sites
Last week, a study by German antivirus testing company AV-Test claimed that Microsoft’s Bing delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company released a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing its searches directly on Bing.com. However, this methodology, Microsoft claims, bypassed Bing’s malware warning system.
Microsoft’s senior program manager for Bing David Felstead notes in his response that Bing “actually does prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.” Microsoft does not explicitly remove potentially malicious sites from its index, he writes, “because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked.” Instead, it pops up a warning when users click on these links.
The reason for this, Felstead says, is that when users search for a site – even if it’s a known malware vector – they do expect the site to appear in Bing’s index and would think Bing’s directory is incomplete if it didn’t show up on the search results page.
Overall, Bing says it shows results with malware warnings for about 0.04 percent of searches. Felstead also claims that Bing’s warning system blocks “94% of clicks to malicious sites.”
Despite the fact that the competition between Google and Bing has been somewhat heated lately, Felstead does note that detecting malware on websites is a very complex problem and that “no engine will be perfect 100% of the time.” But he also argues that Microsoft does show these malware warnings on its site instead of removing the links from its index in order to protect users who may otherwise go to Google and “then click on it (because Google may not have detected it as malware) their machine could be put at risk.”
Here are the original results from AV-Test: