data

Microsoft to acquire mobile-data company

Microsoft announced Thursday it has made plans to acquire MobiComp, a mobile-data company founded in 2000

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. MobiComp, which is based in Braga, Portugal, will become part of Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business division.

The acquisition will be used to bolster a number of services on the Windows Mobile smartphone platform as well as the Windows Live Web services division.

MobiComp has developed an array of products: MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities, and Active mTicker. They're used by companies to back up data stored on mobile phones, submit content from … Read more

Maxtor Black Armor: The Fort Knox of external hard drives

We first caught a glimpse of the Maxtor Black Armor back in January at CES 2008. Since then, we've been excited to get it into our labs for testing to see if it measures up to the rest of the market. After a few months of waiting, we finally got it and...not so much.

The Black Armor's No. 1 concern is data security. Like a little digital lockbox, everything inside the hard drive is protected by 128-bit government grade encryption that's built into the hardware itself, rendering the drive useless in the wrong hands. The owner … Read more

New technology could reduce power in data centers by 80 percent

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Power Assure was started a year ago by Donnie Foster and Clemens Pfeiffer, former Hewlett-Packard executives. For the last ten years, Pfeiffer--the CTO and brain behind Power Assure's patent pending Holistic Power Management technology--ran his own company, International SoftDevices, developing software for monitoring and restarting servers after they had failed.

"We realized one could use this to automate the switching on and off of servers, and we saw a business opportunity," recalled Pfeiffer, who is CTO of the start-up based here.

Power Assure's Holistic Power Management collects power usage data every minute … Read more

Data Loss Prevention needs a new name--and acronym

We are an industry of Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs). Everyone tries to categorize what they do with them.

Some like ERP stick around for years, while others like Enterprise Optical Networking (EON) come and go without much fanfare. On occasion, however, the industry creates a TLA to define an industry trend, but as the market and technology develop the TLA no longer fits.

This explanation aptly describes the situation with Data Loss Prevention (DLP). A few years ago, DLP vendors like Vericept and Vontu made hay by providing a network-based gateway appliance that would scan IP packets looking for confidential … Read more

Interesting factoids: Data sells, fuel costs

Two fascinating factoids from Paul Kedrosky and the Wall Street Journal today, neither of which relates to open source, but both of which gave me pause:

Paul notes that exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange are making more money from selling data than from revenue from equities trading. Sometimes the business you're in isn't the business you should be in....I'm guessing we'll see more of this in open source, as people learn that there's more money in the data and services around the code than in the code itself...? The Journal reports that more than half of today's airline ticket prices are consumed by fuel costs. … Read more

Red Hat settles patent suit with Firestar, DataTern

Red Hat announced on Wednesday that it has reached a settlement with Firestar Software and DataTern over a patent infringement lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed two years ago in a U.S. District Court in Texas, centered on Firestar's patent for linking object-oriented software with relational databases.

Firestar, in its lawsuit, had alleged that JBoss, which Red Hat had acquired, violated its patent with the JBoss Hibernate 3.0 object-relational mapping tool for Java. Hibernate 3.0 had an open license.

Under the settlement, whose financial terms were not disclosed, all software distributed under Red Hat's brands and predecessor … Read more

Video: Erase personal data from the iPhone

Before tossing out your first-generation iPhone for the iPhone 3G we're all anticipating on July 11, you'll need to wipe off personal data, including your passwords and user IDs. CNET's Tom Merritt shows off three paths to iPhone data-cleanliness using iTunes for Mac and Windows. The first method is simple, but will likely leave a swatch of information behind. The second method is for the ultraparanoid with a lot of time on their hands, and the third method averages techniques to get the data coffers mostly spotless. Check it out.

Update: No special monetization plan for Facebook Connect, exec clarifies.

This post was updated at 1:21 p.m. PDT with comment from Tim Kendall.

NEW YORK--It would've been cool: Facebook director of monetization Tim Kendall hinted Monday that the company would offer "a product" to help third-party companies "accelerate" participation in its developer platform when asked whether the company had any plans to start directly monetizing the technology.

Since no further detail was provided, and Kendall had said that this would deal with "whether an application is within Facebook or outside of Facebook," this reporter inferred that he'd meant something involving … Read more

Google spotlights data center inner workings

SAN FRANCISCO--The inner workings of Google just became a little less secret.

The search colossus has shed only occasional light on its data center operations, but on Wednesday, Google fellow Jeff Dean turned a spotlight on some parts of the operation. Speaking to an overflowing crowd at the Google I/O conference here on Wednesday, Dean managed simultaneously to demystify Google a little while also showing just how exotic the company's infrastructure really is.

On the one hand, Google uses more-or-less ordinary servers. Processors, hard drives, memory--you know the drill.

On the other hand, Dean seemingly thinks clusters of … Read more