Amazon’s cloud, which, let’s face it, is still pretty much developer turf, broadened its push into the enterprise Wednesday with the introduction of AWS Storage Gateway, a beta virtual appliance nominally meant to automate enterprise data backup to S3 while creating a comfort level with the cloud among the leery. It’s the first time Amazon has proposed putting its own software on the ground inside a corporate data center. And the stuff’s targeted at large corporations. Amazon says some customers asked for such a solution. It also expects resellers to offer the service. It is of course proprietary and a competitive problem for other cloud storage and gateway suppliers. Come to think of it, Amazon as repository of corporate data is a problem for a lot of people.

read more

Intel last year bid billions trying to get the Nortel patents. Thursday RealNetworks said Intel was paying it $120 million cash for 190 “foundational media” patents, 170 patent applications and next-generation video codec software good for stuff like streaming. The IP is apparently supposed to brace Intel’s Ultrabook, smartphone, tablet and digital media interests. Intel’s also picking up Real’s video codec engineering team. Real retains “certain rights to continue to use the patents in current and future products.” RealNetworks and Intel signed an MOU to collaborate on future support and development of the next-generation video codec software and related products.

read more

Each week I conduct market research on HTML5 that includes news, quotes, market growth and developments around HTML5 and share the more interesting ones here with you. I hope you find it useful. A new survey from Evans Data shows that 43 percent of developers in North America and 58% in the Asia Pacific region are using HTML5. The trend is expected to grow even further in 2012. Read Original Content CEO of web framework and tool provider Sencha, Michael Mullany, states “Looking at the phenomenal rise of HTML5 as the next industry standard for Web development, it's clear that 2011 has been a transformational year for this powerful set of Web technologies.”

read more

A federal court in California has upheld the validity of a key RPost patent reinforcing the company’s claims to own the technology for registered, legally recognized, court-admissible evidence of e-mail content and delivery going back to 1995. RPost’s 35 patents, granted in 21 countries, broadly cover verifiable proof of e-mail delivery and value-added outbound e-mail processing. On December 27 the District Court for the Central District of California granted RPost a summary judgment finding its US patent 6,182,219 valid. The decision is a lead-up to RPost’s infringement suit against Trustifi Corporation but the 20-page ruling is expected to impact the suits RPost also has pending against Swiss Post, Canada Post, Adobe-Echosign, DocuSign, Zix Corporation, RightSignature, Farmers Insurance and Telarix, among others. They are all being sued for treading on ‘219 as well as other RPost patents.

read more

Microsoft staged a Private Cloud Day Tuesday to herald the coming of System Center 2012 sometime between now and the end of June. System Center 2012 will put Microsoft squarely in the private cloud business and put VMware’s teeth on edge because it’s cheaper and reportedly has the same bells and whistles as VMware’s widgetry. According to IDC VMware will have to start competing on price. Once Microsoft’s private cloudware is out there it’ll have the makings of a hybrid model – which is what most people say they want – governed by the same management tools and offering a consistent view of application performance and data in both environments. Microsoft, by the way, says it recognizes that users want to consume cloud capacity from a number of partners.

read more

After announcing support for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 8 and 9 in dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium we now also provide support for the latest versions in the dynaTrace AJAX Edition. The latest version of dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.4 therefore gives you full JavaScript, AJAX, Network and Rendering analysis support for Mozilla Firefox 8 and 9 as well as Internet Explorer 8 and 9. You can also check out the Release Notes for a more detailed description of the enhancements.

read more

EMC is going to raise the price of hard disk drives 5%-15% starting the first of the year. It said in an advisory to its channel that the price hikes will last for the duration of the crisis that has seen an estimated one-third of the world’s HDD supply effectively drown in the unforgiving Thai floods. That probably works out to something like 50 million-70 million drives. Senior VP of global channel sales Gregg Ambulos claimed that EMC had absorbed the cost increases produced by shortages in Q4 “to shield our partners and customers from the impact of higher drive pricing,” but now that supplies and stockpiles have shrunk further and capacity demand keeps escalating EMC’s going to have to pass the increases along “to offset the continued high drive prices we are seeing from our primary suppliers.”

read more

SmartBear Software has unveiled LoadComplete 2.0, the latest version of the company's load testing tool for Web applications. Featuring new support for rich Internet applications (RIAs), LoadComplete 2.0 now makes it easy to create and run realistic load tests, without scripting, for websites built using Adobe Flash and Flex, AJAX, and Microsoft Silverlight technologies. New data presentation and reporting options make it easier for users to control data parameters and interpret and diagnose results to improve the performance, reliability, and user experience of Web applications. Mathijs Groen, QA Engineer, Benelux, at Kewill B.V., said, "LoadComplete 2.0 is an economical and efficient tool for us to more easily test the performance of our rich Internet-based applications and compare performance statistics by running it on several types of application servers. This enables us to better assist customers by providing them with the most ‘smoothly running' framework."

read more

HTML5 is a draft specification for the next major iteration of HTML. It represents a break from its predecessors, HTML4 and XHTML. Some elements have been removed and it is no longer based on SGML, an older standard for document markup. HTML5 also has more allowances for incorrect syntax than were present in HTML4. It has rules for parsing to allow different browsers to display the same incorrectly formatted document in the same fashion. There are many notable additions to HTML, such as native drawing support and audiovisual elements. In this excerpt, we discuss the features added by HTML5 and the associated JavaScript APIs.

read more

Adobe said Tuesday that it’s going to restructure and let 750 people in North America and Europe go, 7% of its workforce, to focus on products that create digital content on multiple devices and platforms and digital marketing. In other words, its newfangled Creative Cloud, due out next year, and the Omniture-Demdex-Auditude side of the business. “Our mission is to produce the world’s content and maximize the impact of that content,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a statement. Adobe will cut its investment in enterprise software. It’s reportedly shutting down remote US development locations and getting ready to move more of the next release of Creative Suite (CS) development to India and China, suggesting that the sunset of Flash as we know it is commencing. Flash will be replaced by HTML 5 helped along by Adobe’s recent acquisition of HTML 5 house Nitobi Software. ZDNet says Adobe has quietly told developers that that development of its mobile Flash browser plug-in will stop. Current Android and RIM’s Playbook configurations will get critical bug fixes and security updates. Otherwise, Adobe “will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.” The company will focus instead on tools for creating mobile apps by packaging the code to run on Adobe AIR. Sounds like a win for the late lamented Steve Jobs. By Wednesday Adobe had blogged about its decision at http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html. It sayd Flash development for PC will continue. The move will reportedly take six months to play out. People are supposedly being told to finish and ship CS6, find another job in the company if they can, or get lost. Sounds like after CS6 ships, especially if the next two quarters aren’t exactly swell, Adobe might can more people. At the moment Adobe expects to take a restructuring charge of $87 million-$94 million, primarily for severance. And because of the charge it cut Q4 guidance from 41 cents-50 cents a share down to 30 cents-38 cents a share. As a result, its stock capitalized after-hours dropping 9% to $27.69. Immediate revenue guidance was unchanged at $1.07 billion-$1.12 billion but next year revenue could be 4%-5% lower. Wall Street expected 2012 revenues to be up 9%. With the changes, Adobe expects to drive “faster and more predicable growth in FY2013 and beyond.”

read more

China says it’s developed a Linux-running supercomputer using a natively developed 16-core 64-bit RISC chip called the ShenWei SW1600. It’s unclear if the Chinese started from scratch with a brand new architecture or based the processor on existing American designs. Reports suggest it could be a reverse engineered DEC Alpha 21164, others something beholden to Intel. It’s supposed to be capable of 140 Gflops at 1.1GHz. Last year China built what was for six months the world’s fastest supercomputer out of Intel and Nvidia parts. It was dethroned by a Fujitsu machine using Sparc chips.

read more

Nexenta, the OpenStorage shop, didn’t set out to get into the VDI business. It happened when it kept hearing the same complaints in engagements with VMware. That led to the new NexentaVDI provisioning and rapid deployment solution, which is supposed to make the world a happier place by getting rid of the nasty storage and systems management complexities in virtual desktop infrastructures with end-to-end automation. And it’s all done with a little plug-in for VMware View 5 that talks to a dashboard with real-time analytics and masters View’s tiered storage. Frankly it sounds uncommonly simple.

read more