Davemichels

The proceeds of Newegg's new T-shirt will go to fighting said patent trolls in court. The shirt warns victims not to settle in court -- that's how patent trolls get all of their money.

"We've been proudly kicking patent trolls' asses for eight years -- it's terrible what they're doing to small companies that can't defend themselves," Lee Cheng, Newegg's chief legal officer, told The Huffington Post. "It's the [patent] litigation that's kicking everyone's butt. The only thing we can do is fight the patent itself."

Oceans of digital ink have been spilled already about the demise of Google’s Reader service, with most of the coverage devoted to moaning about the loss of the tech blogosphere’s favorite RSS reader or talking about the pros and cons of various alternatives. But there is a deeper issue at stake that Instapaper founder Marco Arment put his finger on in a post about the Reader shutdown: namely, what Google’s behavior says about its shifting focus, and what that in turn says about the increasingly disconnected and impenetrable platform silos that now make up a majority of the web.

Arment starts with a question that has occurred to just about everyone who has thought about the decision, including Om: Why did the company bother to shut down a service that had a devoted user base (albeit a small one) and likely wasn’t using up much in the way of resources?

One theory is that Reader was just another victim of the kind of housecleaning that has killed off dozens of other Google services over the past year, as CEO Larry Page puts “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Google itself has said that it decided to close the service because usage had been declining — and there’s no question that RSS readers have always been something of a niche product.

Was RSS just too open?

Arment, however, thinks the closure is part of a much larger phenomenon — one that involves a move by Google away from open standards and towards its own closed and proprietary platform, and how that is just part of the closing down of the open web:

“Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started… the battle to own everything. While Google did technically ‘own’ Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.”

In many ways, as Arment points out, RSS is the antithesis of this platform-focused, walled garden approach. Developed by blogging pioneer and open-web advocate Dave Winer, it is about as wide open a technology as you could possibly imagine — and it has unquestionably done more to promote the “democratization of distribution” that Om has written about than just about any other product or service in recent memory.

Starving the open ecosystem

While RSS is not going away, every step that giants like Google take away from that standard makes it harder and harder to build a business or content strategy around it, and that in turn sucks the energy out of the entire ecosystem.

Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams discussed this phenomenon back in 2010 with Om during an interview about the evolution of the web, and talked about how building a business was increasingly about where to “rent” property rather than building a separate island of your own — in other words, piggy-backing on Apple’s iOS or on Facebook or on Google as a way of getting leverage. As he put it:

“Things get consolidated because it’s more economical and there are network effects in all these things. The idea of creating something from scratch, which is independent from the web… no one will ever create something that is wholly their own. There is some risk to the Internet becoming more closed — although it’s not really about closed. It’s that there are fewer players who own, sort of, the land. And that will have implications long term for everything.”

Who will fight for the open web now?

The cruel irony, as Arment notes in his post, is that Google and Facebook and even Apple wouldn’t be where they are today if it wasn’t for open standards and the open web. But now that they have used those standards to develop a dominant platform of some kind, “everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down… get it out of the way so they can get even bigger, and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.”

The Instapaper founder says he is having none of that, and that everyone who cares about the open web should keep building and supporting “new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence [and] interoperability.” And it’s worth noting that others are also concerned about the increasing closure of the web, and moving away from open standards — including the web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who has spoken passionately about the silo-ization of the web and what it means, and how we need to fight against it.

One of the depressing things about Google’s move away from RSS and from other open standards is that the search giant used to be one of the few large players on the web that seemed to be strongly in the open and interoperable camp — to the point where it fought a very public war with Facebook over the issue of giving users the ability to export their data. Now it seems there is more interest in duplicating a Facebook-style walled garden than in fighting for the open web.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jason Parks and Shutterstock / Luis Santos

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Microsoft is cutting off the well for low-cost software licenses via its TechNet Subscription services, which will be halted on August 31, 2013. The move, purportedly to stave off piracy and license violations, may also end up alienating developers and power users without deep pockets.

That day will mark the last day new subscriptions can be purchased on the site, and subscribers will have until September 30 to activate their purchased subscriptions. Existing subscribers can still use their Microsoft software until their subscription period runs out.

If you've never used a TechNet subscription, don't worry about it. But for the thousands of developers and system administrators who did have the relatively low-cost annual subscriptions, it's going to prove to be a pain in the butt.

TechNet subscribers were able to access a slew of Microsoft software, including licenses for Windows and Office, for the purposes of evaluation. The costs for the subscriptions were pretty low, too, with TechNet Standard rates beginning at $199 and renewing at $140 annually, and Professional costing $299 with a subsequent $249 renewal rate.

But while the intended purpose of the program was to provide evaluation copies for people interested in Microsoft technologies, what usually ended up happening was that TechNet subscribers would use their subscriptions to maintain machines with Microsoft software in production environments in perpetuity.

Such use would violate the terms of the TechNet agreement. TechNet license keys were also reportedly getting resold to other buyers. If that TechNet-licensed software was ever audited, the third-party buyer would be at serious risk. Not to mention that most subscription licenses would shut off after a year's time.

Microsoft's new tactic, is to simply give away free evaluation copies of their software, but with licenses that are much more time limited. These no-cost evaluations, available through the TechNet Evaluation Center, would be full versions, but would cut off after 90 or 120 days' time.

Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) participants will still be able to get license subscriptions through MSDN's own program, but the Operating Systems subscription, which is the lowest tier MSDN program, runs for $699 with a $499 annual renewal rate.

This is not the first time that Microsoft has changed it's TechNet program to stem the tide of pirated software coming from the relatively inexpensive TechNet program, but apparently it's just easier to kill off the whole program and let developers and admins buy their own licenses.

The timing of the revelation, one week after the Microsoft Build developer conference, is interesting … since such news would have surely caused some grumbles at the conference. While Microsoft is well within its rights to try to control pirated software, the fact is that the changes to TechNet will cause a higher barrier-of-entry for some developers who might actually need longer-term licenses for a low cost.

Trevor Pott, author of the Sysadmin blog over at The Register, summed up the problem best.

The message is crystal clear: if you want to test Microsoft software on anything excepting disposable short-term "free evals," then you will do it in the cloud and you'll pay for the privilege. Can't afford to subscribe to the cloud for a test lab? MSDN a little too pricy, or the restriction to development use too severe? Too bad.

Pott continues to make the observation that this is all part of Microsoft's attempt to disengage with low-margin consumer and small business customers that are increasingly shifting to mobile solutions and focus their efforts on high-end enterprise customers that still need "traditional" desktop solutions in volume.

Make no mistake: this isn't an arrogance born out of a belief that it retains a monopoly on the desktop, the Office productivity suite, or the server market. It is a wholesale shift in approach in recognition of its loss of monopoly.

If you have wondered how Microsoft would react to the continued decline of the PC desktop market, this may be one of the ways forward for Redmond. Too bad it could leave a lot of less-affluent technologists stranded.

Looks like BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet will not be upgraded to BlackBerry 10, after all.

Discussing the company’s lousy first-quarter earnings on a conference call with investors Friday, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said he had decided against bringing the company’s next-generation operating system to the PlayBook, despite his earlier pledge to do so.

“We spent a great deal of time and energy looking at solutions that could move the BlackBerry 10 experience to PlayBook,” Heins said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the level of performance and user experience. So I made the difficult decision to stop these efforts and focus on our core hardware portfolio. We will, however, support PlayBook on the existing software platforms and configurations.”

Hardly a surprising move. BlackBerry shipped a piddling 100,000 PlayBooks in its most recent quarter. And the device’s abysmal performance at market has clearly given the company grave second thoughts about its tablet strategy. Indeed, back in April, Heins went on record with some bearish comments about the tablet space in general.

“In five years, I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

Not for BlackBerry, anyway. Apple and Samsung seem to be enjoying a modicum of success with them, though.

It was a long long week. But a very interesting one.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

Hands down, WebRTC Conference & Expo is the largest event of our tiny industry. Tiny because it felt like a tight knit of people, and there lies the problem – it is still in the VoIP domain and not in the web domain.

Someone asked me at the end of the first day what was the best part of the conference – I assume he tried to get my view on the demos shown. My answer? It wasn’t anything specific – it was the people there. I had the opportunity to meet so many of you – people I’ve been interacting here in my blog and elsewhere on the internet – in person. Video calling, and WebRTC for that matter, may provide new means of communications but they will never really replace that magical time of hanging out with someone. Of sitting around a table for dinner with people and enjoying yourself.

I assume you want some highlights from the show, so here are mine:

• Around 700 attendees, which means we’re in an exponential growth of people and interests around WebRTC
• Around 35 demos – most polished and ready for use by anyone – next time someone tells you WebRTC isn’t ready for primetime, you can say to him he is clueless
• There were real products with real end customers using it already, which to me is a validation of the need
• No interesting gaming companies. Yet
• Very little innovative use of the data channel. I hope to start seeing it in one of the next events
• Some booth vendors had only Powerpoint to show (these were the incumbents), which was sad, considering a lot of startup companies came out with running services that have paying customers on them already
• There are some super smart people working in this domain, and it was a joy to work to them

If you are looking for more, then the WebRTC World website has that coverage. To top it off, Andy Abramson has done a great job of aggregating the news around the show on a daily basis (Tuesday A, Tuesday B, Wednesday, Thursday).

And if you are looking for the session I had with Ken Workun from Genband about WebRTC Disruption, then here’s the slide deck:

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Have a great weekend, and a safe travel back home for those who were in Atlanta.

The post The Week That Was: WebRTC Conference & Expo 2013 appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Samsung introduced many new devices running on different platforms this week at a London press event. New Windows laptops complemented new Android cameras but perhaps the most intriguing is a notebook that combines both operating systems with an exclusive Dual OS feature. And if that weren’t unique enough, the new Ativ Q has a swiveling hinge that allows it to be used in four different modes.

Windows 8 looks sharp on the Ativ Q’s 13.3-inch touchscreen with whopping 3200 x 1800 resolution and so too does Android. Users can switch to Google’s operating system with one tap of the display, which brings up the familiar Android 4.2 home screen. From what I can tell, Android is actually running in a virtualization mode, meaning it’s running simultaneously with (and technically within) Windows 8. That’s good because you can switch between the two operating systems at will; there’s no need to reboot and switch.

Upon first glance at the Ativ Q, I wondered if having Android available on a Windows 8 device would be valuable. My initial reaction was: No, not really. But then I realized that Android offers a much wider range of touch-friendly apps compared to Windows 8. And access to these apps is just a button tap away. I’m not expecting Samsung to sell massive quantities of the Ativ Q — mainly because of the unique features — but the device became a bit more appealing to me when thought about using Android to offset the “app gap”.

So the Ativ Q might be nice for running Android games, but a dedicated handheld console would do the trick as well. Enter Nvidia’s Shield which looks like an Xbox 360 controller with a 5-inch display grafted on to it. Nvidia introduced the Android-powered Shield at January’s Consumer Electronics Show and recently announced a $349 price tag. Some found that too steep and apparently, Nvidia took notice.

This week, the company reduced the price by $50. Those who pre-ordered Shield will also get the newly discounted price. This is a good move by Nvidia; at least from a PR standpoint. I don’t know how much profit the company had built in to Shield which runs on Nvidia’s latest Tegra 4 chip. Previously, Nvidia said that it would not sell the device at a loss, so presumably, there was some room to move on the final price. Shield arrives in gamers hand this coming week, starting on June 27.

It’s not often that an app makes my weekly Android roundup, but I’m making an exception this time. Google introduced its Cloud Print app for Android, making it easier to print directly from an Android phone.

I’m looking forward to a better printing experience, even though I don’t print documents too often. When I do, I typically email them to my printer’s Cloud Print email address. With the new app, however, it should be a much more seamless process. Google Cloud Print is available for free in the Play Store for devices running Android 2.3.3 and up.

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The first trailer for “Jobs,” the highly anticipated Steve Jobs biopic, has finally hit the Web ahead of the film’s release later this summer.

Directed by Joshua Michael Stern, the film stars Ashton Kutcher as the Apple co-founder, and Josh Gad as his partner, Steve “The Woz” Wozniak, and promises to show Jobs’s evolution from college dropout to tech icon, chronicling the rise, fall and rise of Apple in the process.

The film has received early mixed reviews, including one from Apple co-founder Wozniak himself, who dismissed the film as “awful and atrocious” after reading an early version of its script.

“I’m not even sure what it’s getting at,” Wozniak said in a Gizmodo comment. “The personalities are very wrong although mine is closer … don’t forget that my purpose was inspired by the values of the Homebrew Computer Club along with the ideas of the value of such machines and Steve J. wasn’t around and didn’t attend the club so he was the one learning about such impact of the future.”

“Jobs” debuts in theaters on Aug. 16.

Zagat fans received an email this week saying the restaurant rating site will pull the plug on user reviews — unless, that is, they sign up for a Google+ account.

I received a copy of the email by way of a disgruntled friend who harrumphed about the search giant finding another way of “forcing” users onto its unloved social network. Here’s what the email said (emphasis in original):

Thank you for being a valuable member of the Zagat community and for contributing your reviews of local businesses. We are making some changes to zagat.com and want you to be aware of how the changes will affect you.

On July 10, 2013, Zagat editorial ratings and reviews will be made available to all zagat.com users; you will no longer need to sign in with an account to view them. At this time, we will also be removing the user account system on zagat.com. You will still be able to participate in future Zagat surveys, either anonymously or with a Google+ account. However, all ratings and reviews you have added on zagat.com (as well as any lists and photos) will no longer be available.

The text is a little confusing: on one hand, it says that ratings and reviews will be open to “all zagat.com” users but, on other hand, warns in bold letters that “all ratings and reviews you have added .. will no longer be available.”

So which is it? Is Google giving us all the reviews or taking them away? I looked into it and here’s what’s going on: the good news is that, as of July 10, everyone will be able to see all the category scores and Zagat’s curated editors’ reviews (both these features now require registration). The flip side is that, if you want to see other diners’ reviews, or leave one of your own, you better get on Google+. Here’s what you see if you’re a Zagat later-comer and try to register now:

It’s not obvious why Google can’t just leave the user reviews as they are. Google declined to comment for the record but the likely answer, as it always is with Google, is data: the company will now be able to combine your restaurant preferences with your Google map information — which will in turn be a boon for mobile advertising.

Google watchers may also take note that Zagat was not one of the products included in the company’s mass consolidation of privacy policies that swept email, YouTube and more under the same data umbrella.

As for Google+, it’s become increasingly clear that that it is not just a social network but also a back door for the company to obtain social data all the same.

(Image by Everett Collection via Shutterstock)

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With the launch of Windows 8, we’ve seen the emergence of convertible devices — machines that twist, fold or detach so you can use them as a laptop or a tablet. Now Samsung is giving new meaning to the term “convertible.”

At an event in London today, Samsung introduced the ATIV Q, a hybrid device that can run Windows 8 and Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2. The company said it designed the ATIV Q after its customers expressed a desire to access Android apps on a Windows PC. Now, users can switch between the two operating systems seamlessly.

You can even pin Android apps to the Windows 8 start screen, and transfer and share files between Windows 8 and Android. (Asus also introduced a Windows-Android hybrid, the Transformer Book Trio, at Computex earlier this month.)

But that’s not where the covertible-ness of the device stops. The laptop also features a hinge design that lets you use the machine in four different modes. You can use it as a regular laptop; you can lay the display flat over the keyboard to use as a tablet, or flip it over to watch videos. Finally, you can pull the display away from the hinge and position it at different angles — sort of like an all-in-one PC.

Sound familiar? That’s because Acer offers a similar design with its Aspire R7 laptop, though the ATIV Q has a smaller form factor. It measures 0.5-inch thick, and weighs 2.8 pounds; the Aspire R7 comes in at 0.7-inch thick and 3.3 pounds. While thinner and lighter is better, these types of convertible devices often come with trade-offs.

Samsung boasted that the ATIV Q’s 3,200 by 1,800 pixel touchscreen offers 2.8 times the pixel density of full HD displays, can be viewed in bright sunlight, and has a 178-degree viewing angle. The ATIV Q is powered by Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell processor, and promises up to nine hours of battery life.

In addition to the ATIV Q, the company also introduced the ATIV Tab 3. Dubbing it the world’s thinnest (stop me if you’ve heard this before) Windows 8 tablet, the ATIV Tab 3 measures just 0.3-inch thick and weighs 1.2 pounds. It’s targeted at those looking for a portable tablet to use on the go.

It comes preloaded with Microsoft Office Home & Student and, like the Galaxy Note series, the tablet includes a stylus (called the S Pen), so users can take notes, make annotations and sketch doodles right on the device. The ATIV Q also supports the S Pen.

Samsung did not announce pricing or availability for either devices at this time. Also unveiled today was the Android-based Galaxy NX camera.

WebRTC isn’t just disrupting UC. It has a lot more to it that wasn’t apparent in the beginning.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

A confession.

When I started out looking at WebRTC, it was from my own narrow worldview – that of video conferencing. The premise of my whole way of thinking was around how WebRTC can be used to bring video conferencing to the browser and removing the necessity of an application installation. It seemed like achieving the impossible back then. I even had a larger notion. One of replacing the whole concept of what a room system is.

Today? I cringe when the only business model presented by a company is to connect a web browser to today’s video conferencing systems.

Having the opportunity to talk to companes, listen to their pitch, understanding their service and business model and interviewing them; gives me a different perspective of things. It always amazes me of the things people achieve with WebRTC.

The latest Google demo of ponging with a bear?

Quaint. Interesting. Gaming with video calling. Nothing really new. Maybe besides showing off that this thing can actually be done in a browser.

Here is the current list of different ways in which companies are using WebRTC today:

1. Gaining access to the microphone and camera

Yap. There’s this. Most will say “this isn’t communication”, but I think people have been showing off some darn good stuff with it.

Be it a photo booth, speech to text or different kinds of video recognition capabilities – this thing has merit on its own.

2. Web voice and video calling

This one is easy. Most WebRTC startup companies can be found here – each with its own set of use cases to deal with. Dating, gaming, experts market, telemedicine – the list goes on.

3. Legacy web channel

Legacy is where the boring stuff is. It is IMS, VoIP and UC companies with products, where for them WebRTC is just another channel into their legacy system. I don’t have faith in this approach, as in the long run, my guess is that the web companies will eat their legacy counterparts alive.

4. P2P streaming / CDN’ing

This is where the whoa happens. That things about data connection and the ability to send whatever you want from one browser to another? There are companies exploiting it, and I am planning on having an interview with such a company in the near future.

The most comment use in this case is file sharing, P2P streaming or as an “add-on” to a CDN type of capability.

5. Plundering

That’s the classic one. WebRTC has a pretty permissive open source license, and it has good quality. So there are companies that plunder it for their own needs – take its echo canceler, the whole shebang, the codec – whatever they need, port it and plug it into their own solutions.

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There’s more than one way to use WebRTC. And UC? A blip in the radar of WebRTC – nothing more.

The post 5 Different Ways of Using WebRTC appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Ford Motor Co. is going back to buttons and knobs.

Punished by third-party quality reports because of the difficulty of using its touch-screen multimedia system, called MyFord Touch, the auto maker will reprise tuning and volume knobs for the radio as it redesigns existing models, a top Ford executive said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Internet companies have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to lift secrecy restrictions on 702 orders so they can clear their name, in part by disclosing how many records they have turned over in response to legal process. Google sent an open letter to Holder yesterday, and Facebook and Microsoft have also asked the Justice Department for permission to divulge summary statistics. Holder has not responded.

By contrast, AT&T never asked for permission to disclose NSA surveillance. Instead, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Carl Nichols said during a 2006 court hearing in San Francisco that a discussion of all the "facts" about NSA surveillance could only happen in a classified setting. The Bush administration asked that the case be tossed out on "state secrets" grounds.

Neither did Verizon, which has secretly turned over daily logs of all customers' phone calls to the NSA, according to a court order that the Guardian published last week. When USA Today disclosed in 2006 that NSA was vacuuming up phone logs, Verizon didn't deny it. Instead, a spokesman told the newspaper only that "we do not comment on national security matters."

Image copyright isak55

What Does “Software Defined” Mean?
In the infrastructure space, there is a growing trend of companies calling themselves “software defined (x).” Often, it’s a vendor that is re-positioning a decades old product. On occasion, though, it’s smart, nimble startups and wise incumbents seeing a new way of delivering infrastructure. Either way, the term “software defined” is with us to stay, and there is real meaning and value behind it if you look past the hype.

There are three software defined terms that seem to be bandied around quite often: software defined networking, software defined storage, and the software defined data center. I suspect new terms will soon follow, like software defined security and software defined management. What all these “software-defined” concepts really boil down to is: virtualization of the underlying component and accessibility through some documented API to provision, operate, and manage the low level component.

This trend started once Amazon Web Services came onto the scene and convinced the world that the data center could be abstracted into much smaller units and could be treated as disposable pieces of technology, which in turn could be priced as a utility. Vendors watched Amazon closely and saw how this could apply to the data center of the future.

Since compute was already virtualized by VMware and Xen, projects such as Eucalyptus were launched with the intention to be a “cloud controller” that would manage the virtualized servers and provision virtual machines (VMs). Virtualized storage (aka software defined storage) was a core part of the offering and projects like OpenStack Swift and Ceph showed the world that storage could be virtualized and accessed programmatically. Today, software defined networking is the new hotness and companies like Midokura, VMware/Nicira, Big Switch, and Plexxi are changing the way networks are designed and automated.

The Software Defined Data Center
The software defined data center encompasses all the concepts of software defined networking, software defined storage, cloud computing, automation, management, and security. Every low-level infrastructure component in a data center can be provisioned, operated, and managed through an API. Not only are there tenant-facing APIs, but operator-facing APIs which help the operator automate tasks which were previously manual.

An infrastructure superhero might think, “With great accessibility comes great power.” The data center of the future will be the software defined data center where every component can be accessed and manipulated through an API. The proliferation of APIs will change the way people work. Programmers who have never formatted a hard drive will now be able to provision terabytes of data. A web application developer will be able to set up complex load balancing rules without ever logging into a router. IT organizations will start automating the most mundane tasks. Eventually, beautiful applications will be created that mimic the organization’s process and workflow and will automate infrastructure management.

IT Organizations Will Respond and Adapt Accordingly
Of course, this means the IT organization will have to adapt. The new base level of knowledge in IT will eventually include some sort of programming knowledge. Scripted languages like Ruby and Python will soar even higher in popularity. The network administrators will become programmers. The system administrators will become programmers. During this time, DevOps (development + operations) will make serious inroads in the enterprise and silos will be refactored, restructured, or flat-out broken down.

Configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet will be the glue for the software defined data center. If done properly, the costs around delivering IT services will be lowered. “Ghosts in the system” will watch all the components (compute, storage, networking, security, etc.) and adapt to changes in real-time to increase utilization, performance, security, and quality of service. Monitoring and analytics will be key to realizing this software defined future.

Big Changes In Markets Happen With Very Simple Beginnings
All this amazing innovation comes from two very simple concepts — virtualizing the underlying components and making it accessible through an API.

The IT world might look at the software defined data center and say this is nothing new. We’ve been doing this since the 80s. I disagree. What’s changed is our universal thinking about accessibility. Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have blinked if a networking product came out without an API. Today, an API is part of what we consider a 1.0 release. This thinking is pervasive throughout the data center today with every component. It’s web 2.0 thinking that shaped cloud computing and now cloud computing is bleeding into enterprise thinking. We’re no longer constrained by the need to have deep specialized knowledge in the low-level components to get basic access to this technology.

With well documented APIs, we have now turned the entire data center into many instruments that can be played by the IT staff (musicians). I imagine the software defined data center to be a Fantasia-like world where Mickey is the IT staff and the brooms are networking, storage, compute, and security. The magic is in the coordination, cadence, and rhythm of how all the pieces work together. Amazing symphonies of IT will occur in the near future and this is the reason the software defined data center is not a trend to overlook. Maybe Whoopi should take a look at this market instead.

Ben Cherian is a serial entrepreneur who loves playing in the intersection of business and technology. He’s currently the Chief Strategy Officer at Midokura, a network virtualization company. Prior to Midokura, he was the GM of Emerging Technologies at DreamHost, where he ran the cloud business unit. Prior to that, Ben ran a cloud-focused managed services company.

Yahoo has made yet another acquisition after the company picked up free conference calling service Rondee on undisclosed terms. Users of the six-year-old service are advised to start looking for alternatives, since it will close down within the next month, as TechCrunch reports.

Rondee is joining Yahoo’s small business team, as a note on its website explains, but new users can sign up to the service and calls can be scheduled up until July 12. The firm says data from past calls will remain accessible to Rondee users until August 12 of this year.

The company explains that it will transition users over to rival Instant Conference as part of the closure:

We’ve appreciated your support. To minimize the inconvenience to you, we have arranged for your Login ID and Rondee On Demand PINs to work with Instant Conference, a highly reputable conference calling service. Be sure to check your email for details.

This is an interesting acquisition since no immediate synergies spring to mind for Yahoo here. The company may well just be beefing up its SME offering, or perhaps there is something more audacious (new voice call features) being planned for its oft-forgotten Yahoo Messenger product?

Earlier in the day (Wednesday), Yahoo picked up photo app maker GhostBird in yet another undisclosed deal that will result in the retiring of its iOS app. The deal might be aimed at improving Flickr but, with Yahoo keeping details quiet, it is not entirely clear at this point.

Lest you forget the biggest deal of the lot, thus far: Done deal: Yahoo acquires Tumblr for “approximately $1.1 billion”, promises “not to screw it up”.

Sadly there was no Tumblr-inspired animated GIF announcement for either the GhostBird or Rondee deals. Given the frequency of Yahoo’s recent deal pipe, it probably doesn’t have the time, sadly.

Headline image via Thinkstock

Yahoo’s acqui-hiring spree shows no signs of letting up. Over the last day, the company has bought and effectively killed two startups in wildly different spaces: in the photo app corner we have GhostBird Software, the maker of the KitCam and PhotoForge2 iOS applications, and as of a few hours ago we also have the 6-year-old conference calling service Rondee.

No prizes for guessing where the Toronto-based GhostBird folks are heading – as they wrote in a blog post on Wednesday, they’re off to help the revitalized Flickr team make new iOS and Android apps. KitCam and PhotoForge 2 won’t see any further updates, and you won’t be able to download them from the App Store anymore.

As for Rondee, well, this one is a bit more puzzling. It’s a San Diego, CA.-based free conference calling service that obviously caters to the enterprise market – or at least, it will be until July 12. The company’s website recommends that customers should flee to rival service Instant Conference.

Meanwhile, the Rondee team will join Yahoo’s Small Business unit. At the moment, there is no Yahoo conference call service for small businesses – that division only deals with web hosting, domain registration, ecommerce and marketing services and business email. That may change.

Neither the Rondee nor GhostBird takeovers came with disclosed terms, but I think it’s fair to say we’re not in Tumblr territory here.

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Security software company Symantec may lay off as many as 1,700 employees as early as today, sources familiar with the company’s plans tell AllThingsD.

The cuts are part of a wider company-wide reorganization first announced in January as part of a turnaround plan instituted by Steve Bennett, Symantec’s new CEO, who joined the company 11 months ago.

Bennett, a former CEO at Intuit and a veteran of General Electric, told Reuters in a January interview that the company has too many management layers and would be streamlined into 10 business units.

Ellen Hayes, a Symantech spokeswoman just sent the following statement:

“Symantec is in the midst of a company-wide transformation. As part of this effort, we are engaged in a company-wide reorganization. As a result, some positions are being eliminated. This action is a reflection of our new strategy and organizational simplification initiative announced by Symantec’s executives on Jan. 23rd, 2013. One of the goals of Symantec’s reorganizational effort is to make the company’s employee reporting structure more efficient and support the company strategy moving forward. There are several stages to the reorganization process, as we define executive and management layers down to all levels of employees. Some notifications are happening this month, as part of this the process. We are communicating with employees directly and do not have more information to share at this time.”

The company said in its 10-K annual report, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 17, that it plans to take charges related to its reorganization plans amounting to between $220 million and $250 million. Those cuts are to be completed by the end of the company’s 2014 fiscal year, which began March 30. But, as of the end of March, it had taken only $10 million worth of those charges, meaning the biggest reduction in force is yet to come.

People familiar with the company’s operations say job cuts have been under way for several months, but only a relatively small number of people have have been let go so far. One source close to the company said the next round of cuts was to be “the biggest yet.” Some employees had already been told their positions were being eliminated this week.

The cuts are to be carried out in two phases. About 1,000 positions would be eliminated this month, and some affected employees had already been notified as early as Wednesday. Another 700 positions are to be eliminated in July. The combined cuts would amount to about eight percent of Symantec’s 21,500 employees worldwide.

Earlier this year, Bennett complained that most Symantec managers had on average only five people reporting to them. As such, the job cuts are expected to hit the company’s middle-management ranks especially hard.

Symantec reported $6.9 billion in sales for the fiscal year ended in March. Its biggest line of business is its storage and server management segment, which accounted for $2.5 billion, or about 36 percent of sales. It is best known for its consumer-facing security software business, which accounted for $2.1 billion in sales. Sales for fiscal 2013 rose by less than three percent year on year and profits while net income rose four percent. Its shares have risen by more than 18 percent this year.

Microsoft is expanding its retail footprint — deep into Best Buy.

The two companies on Thursday announced a strategic partnership that will see Microsoft creating Windows Stores inside more than 600 Best Buy locations in North America.

These stores-within-a-store will occupy between 1,500 square feet and 2,200 square feet of floor space inside the Best Buy locations in which they’re built, and will showcase a broad range of Microsoft products — software like Windows and Office, and hardware like Surface, Xbox, and the Windows Phone portfolio. Essentially, these Windows Stores are replacing the retailer’s existing PC departments. To support them, Best Buy is staffing some 1,200 Microsoft-trained sales associates, and it’s adding an online version of the Windows store-within-a-store to its website.

Microsoft is touting these new Windows Stores as massive “department-level takeovers,” and says they’re key to its retail efforts.

“We’ve heard a lot from customers over the last year,” Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela explained. “They’re buying tablets and other devices to complement their PCs. They’re using technology both at work and at play, and it’s blurring how they think of using tech in their lives. At the same time, they’ve asked us to showcase touch-first devices in a compelling retail environment. We’ve listened, and the story of the Windows Store is that we’ve delivered what customers want: More touch, more hands-on experiences and more opportunities to see Microsoft technologies and how they work together.”

The new stores will begin opening this summer.

Promo video below:

Yahoo bought its second company in one day, purchasing enterprise conference call service Rondee after it announced the acquisition of GhostBird Software, an Apple iOS photo app creator, for its Flickr team earlier today. Rondee’s staff will join Yahoo’s Small Business unit, which the company had once considered shutting down. (Every Yahoo division, please line up for your gift of a tiny startup from CEO Marissa Mayer!) According to a post on Rondee’s Web site, it will start the shut down of the service by the end of July and the transfer of its clients to InstantConference. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Rondee was founded in 2006. (For anyone who gets this one — perhaps we in the media are not smart enough, as Yahoo execs are fond of saying these days — please send me a note.)

Tech giants Hewlett-Packard and Google just announced a plan in which they will join forces under the banner of Google Apps.

HP has become a Google Apps reseller and will package management tools with its PCs, printers and other IT gear. One extra thing that HP brings to the table is some management software that will simplify setup.

It’s the latest move on the chessboard by HP to get a little closer to Google, and it is interesting in light of the fact that Microsoft has both been building its own hardware — the Surface — and also cozying up to HP rival Dell with a $2 billion loan to help finance its $24.4 billion leveraged buyout. The move is also taking place against the backdrop of HP’s further embrace of Android and Chrome-based hardware. It just added a second Chromebook to its line of notebooks, and also offers an Android-based tablet.

But of course it’s not really about that if you ask HP execs, which I just did. “It’s about giving our customers what they want,” HP’s Ron Coughlin, senior VP for consumer PCs and solutions, said in a brief interview a short while ago. “Actually we’ve been looking at our entire portfolio and asking how we can deliver a holistic solution to small and medium businesses.” It will start rolling out in July.

Google is getting something pretty attractive out the deal, too: HP’s considerable relationships in the channel — the network of third-party resellers that offer customized packages of products to businesses. “You might say there was some excitement on Google’s part at the prospect of Apps being offered in our channel,” Coughlin said.

Google Apps, in case you’ve forgotten, is the Internet giant’s suite of cloud-based office applications that include word processor Google Docs and file storage service Google Drive, among others. Google said more than five million small businesses use it. And indeed it has created a sufficient competitive threat to Office that Microsoft launched its own cloud-based variant called Office 365.

Coughlin wouldn’t drill down on this in our conversation, but it doesn’t take much to imagine more HP hardware — servers and networking gear, for example — being added to this combined package to make the deployment and management of Google Apps a lot easier in the small-business environment. “All I can say is, watch this space,” he said.

The announcement was made on the same day that HP CEO Meg Whitman was due to deliver a big keynote address at the company’s Discover conference in Las Vegas.