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Les slides et les vidéos de cette présentation donnée le 16 Mars, où comment les lois de Moore et de Metcalfe combinées ont fait sortir la puissance de calcul des coeurs de réseaux pour la concentrer dans les interfaces utilisateurs des terminaux.
Eesha Khare is the mind behind a super-powerful and tiny gizmo that packs more energy into a small space, delivers a charge more quickly, and holds that charge longer than the typical battery. Khare showed off her so-called super-capacitor last week at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Ariz. In her demonstration, she showed it powering a light-emitting diode, or LED light, but the itty-bitty device could fit inside cell phone batteries, delivering a full charge in 20-30 seconds. It takes several hours for the average cell phone to fully charge. Khare also pointed out that the super-capacitor “can last for 10,000 charge cycles compared to batteries which are good for only 1,000 cycles.”
If Google is allowed to go after specific neighborhoods and homes in Austin, Texas, AT&T says it should be able to snag the same terms and conditions for its own fiber-optic deployment. "I think you are going to see that begin to manifest itself around the United States, and in not just AT&T and Google. You will see others doing this because the demand for really high-speed broadband via gigabit-type fiber-based solutions on a targeted basis is going to be very, very high," Stephenson said.
Apple's iTunes business exceeded $4 billion revenue last quarter. Horace Dediu broke down where all the sales are coming from on his site, Asymco. As you can see, it's mostly a mix of content and app sales.
Editor's note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable, where he heads Customer Development. Previously, he worked in venture capital in Europe. ...
Via Alain Rodermann
Two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and company turned the hardware world on its head when they launched the Open Compute Project, an effort to improve every aspect of the modern data center and share the results with the world at large. They began by “open sourcing” fresh designs for computer servers and power systems and cooling equipment. Then they did the same with hardware that stores massive amounts of digital data. Then they remade the racks that hold all these machines. And now it’s time for the networking gear.
The idea is to design a networking switch that anyone can load with their own operating system — just as you can load your own OS on a computer server. Typically, networking switches are sold by hardware giants such as Cisco and HP and Dell, and they ship with software specific to the company that designed them. But Facebook aims to separate the hardware from the software.
The walls around Barnes & Noble‘s Nook walled garden are tumbling down. The company’s Nook HD and Nook HD+ are credible content-consumption tablets — remarkably credible, actually, considering that they come from a 127-year-old bookseller. But they sold so poorly over the holiday season that it raised questions about whether B&N would end up being forced to de-emphasize its hardware business in favor of selling content on other platforms. The Nooks use Barnes & Noble’s own custom version of Android and provide its own stores for books, magazines, newspapers and apps. And therein lies an oft-raised argument against buying a Nook: the Barnes & Noble application store has had only 10,000 pieces of software — mostly for-pay ones — vs. the hundreds of thousands of choices in Google’s Google Play.
So with one fell swoop, in the form of a software update being rolled out today, B&N is eliminating that downside. It’s giving both Nooks the Google Play stores for apps, music, movies and books, plus key Google apps which the tablets have lacked until now: Chrome, Gmail and YouTube. (Google’s policies for its apps are an all-or-nothing proposition for device makers — if they want Google Play, they also have to pre-install Google’s apps.) New Nooks sold at Barnes & Noble’s bookstores and elsewhere will also carry the updated software.
"The computer is responsive in a manner that I've never experienced before."
Apple said it removed AppGratis for violating a clause in the iOS developer guidelines that prohibits apps from mimicking the official App Store. But there's a disconnect between AppGratis's official statements about how it promotes apps and how it attracts developers for such promotion. Specifically, AppGratis gives developers an estimate of where in Apple's App Store rankings an App can land based on how much the developer is willing to pay, according to a document from the company's pitch that a source in the developer community sent us. For example, this document shows AppGratis estimates a ~$300,000 buy will land an app in the top five slot in the US version of the App Store.
Mobile browsing got significantly faster over the last 12 months, according to a new report from Google, and the average page load times on mobile are now comparable to desktop page load times. On mobile, Web pages now load about 30% faster than a year ago, but when it comes to desktops, Google only found some very minor speed-ups. That, however, is actually quite impressive, given that the size of the average Web page increased by over 56% in the last 12 months.
Verizon and NEC said they have successfully sent the highest-capacity transmissions for regional and long-haul distances over field fiber. The two companies said tests showed that by expanding from one band to two bands, the C-band and the L-band, the two firms were able to transmit 40.5 terabits per second for a long-haul distance of more than 1,800 kilometers (1,118 miles) and 54.2 Tb/s over a regional distance of more than 630 kilometers (391 miles), using Verizon’s fiber loop outside Dallas. The achievement was accomplished by tightly packing optical channels in the two bands of the optical fiber spectrum, the two firms added.
The city started the traffic system in preparation for the 1984 Olympics at a handful of intersections surrounding the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where crowds flocked to watch Carl Lewis and Evelyn Ashford. Other cities have chased to keep up, adopting centralized control of at least some traffic signals. But Los Angeles has remained at the forefront, with a system that is not only more widespread, but also faster and more autonomous than most others. Now, the magnetic sensors in the road at every intersection send real-time updates about the traffic flow through fiber-optic cables to a bunker beneath downtown Los Angeles, where Edward Yu runs the network. The computer system, which runs software the city itself developed, analyzes the data and automatically makes second-by-second adjustments, adapting to changing conditions and using a trove of past data to predict where traffic could snarl, all without human involvement.
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The report published by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations detailing Apple's strategies is a great read on its own. The report gives an inside look on Apple's absolutely genius tax avoidance strategies. Apple uses a variety of offshore structures and arrangements to shift billions of dollars from the United States to Ireland. The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, while Apple said it has negotiated a special corporate tax rate in Ireland of less than 2%*. (The 2% rate statement has proven controversial, see below for details) Apple has found the secret to not paying taxes. You just avoid taxes by not declaring a tax residency for the company that oversees the entirety of your international income.
Apple is going to integrate IAC's video site Vimeo and Yahoo's photo sharing site Flickr into the next version of iOS, the software that runs iPhones and iPads, Mark Gurman of 9 to 5 Mac reports. Gurman says iOS users will be able to upload video straight to Vimeo from their iPhones and iPads, just like they can currently upload straight to YouTube. The same will be true of Flickr. iOS users will be able to quickly upload their photos to Flickr straight from their devices. This is going to be really good for Apple, Yahoo, and iOS users. Yesterday, Yahoo announced a redesign for Flickr, and an increase in storage to 1 terabyte of data. This means that you can pretty much store all of your photos in Flickr.
According to Philip Rosedale : "I think the magic of Silicon Valley (and, most visibly, San Francisco) is not in fostering risk-taking, but instead in making it safe to work on risky things. The phenomena is larger than the people: having traveled a lot, I would argue that the entrepreneurs and engineers in San Francisco are pretty much the same sorts of people as the ones you'd find anywhere. But there are two things happening in Silicon Valley that are qualitatively different from New York or London (or pretty much anywhere else): First, the sheer density of tech entrepreneurs per capita is 10 times greater than the norm for other cities, and second, there is a far greater level of information sharing between entrepreneurs here. Putting a sharper point on that second one: In New York City they ask you to sign NDA's, and in San Francisco we don't. And what may feel a bit risky for the one turns out to have a big positive benefit for the many."
In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company’s revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth. As everyone knows, venture investors look for companies that show hockey stick graphs, and according to co-founder Joe Gebbia, his company had a horizontal drumstick graph. The team was forced to max out their credit cards...
Waze and Facebook partnered in October 2012 when Waze released its updated version that allows users to share their drive with their Facebook friends.
This would be Facebook's third acquisition in Israel. It bought Snaptu in 2011 for $70 million and Face.com in 2012 for $60 million.
In the last year, Waze tripled its user base to 45 million and in March alone, 1.5 million users downloaded the free mobile navigation app, Calcalist said.
Loic Le Meur's keynote on the Sharing Economy as he studied the theme for his upcoming conference LeWeb London on June 5-6
Latest research suggests half of employers will, in just four years time, require employees to bring their own devices to work. Should BYOD be a requirement over a personal, optional decision? Some interesting tidbits from the research: 38 percent of companies expect to stop providing workplace devices to staff by 2016. (PCs, such as desktops and laptops, are included in the definition of BYOD.)BYOD is most prevalent in midsize and larger enterprises, often generating between $500m-$5bn in revenue per year, with 2,500-5,000 employees on the roster.BRIC nations, such as India, China, and Brazil, will most likely already be using a personal device — typically a "standard mobile phone" — at work.Meanwhile, companies in the U.S. are more likely to allow BYOD than those in Europe (likely due to stronger data protection rules, see below).Around half of all BYOD programs provide a partial reimbursement, while full reimbursement costs "will become rare."Gartner vice president David Willis says companies should "subsidize only the service plan on a smartphone."
If you walk into the lobby of the data center Facebook operates in the high desert in Prineville, Oregon, you’ll find a flatscreen display on the wall where you can check the pulse of this massive computing facility. The display tracks the efficiency of the operation, which spans 333,400-square feet and tens of thousands of computer servers. Facebook built this data center in an effort to significantly reduce the power and dollars needed to serve up the world’s most popular social network, and — driven by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s deep-seeded belief in the free exchange of ideas — the company aims to push the computing world in a similar direction. The display — which shows much the same information Facebook engineers use to monitor the facility — is an advertisement for the Facebook way. Now, the company is taking this idea a step further. On Thursday, Facebook uncloaked a pair of web services that let anyone in the world track the efficiency of the Prineville data center and its sister facilityin Forest City, North Carolina. “We’re pulling back the curtain to share some of the same information that our data center technicians view every day,” Facebook’s Lyrica McTiernan said in a blog post. “We think it’s important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like.”
Netflix is looking to ditch its Silverlight-based video player for an HTML5 version that would work pretty much anywhere, but HTML5 isn’t quite up to the task just yet, according to the company. Microsoft has already put Silverlight — once Microsoft’s much-hyped alternative to Adobe’s Flash Player —out to pasture. While Microsoft will continue to support Silverlight for some time, it will be retired come 2021. That gives Netflix and others eight years to come up with an alternative. For its part Netflix wants to use HTML5, but HTML thus far lacks some key components Netflix needs, namely a way to generate media streams for playback, a cryptography protocol and, most controversially, DRM for streaming media.
The value of Bitcoins – the peer-to-peer currency – has been soaring so much of late that you have certainly heard about it. It is also likely that you still don’t fully understand how this decentralized payment mechanism works in practice as it is hard to build a bridge between the overly general and the overly complicated descriptions of the system. Here is our (imperfect) take at it based on what we have read so far. The monetary economics of it is fairly straightforward and uninteresting, but the mechanics of making payments over a communications channel without a trusted party is really interesting.
"Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. “Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” writes one outside observer. But I don’t think so. To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in. More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align."
Via Alain Rodermann
It's ugly out there for the traditional PC makers. IDC says PC sales fell 14 percent in the first quarter on a year-over-year basis. That's worse than its forecast of a 7.7 percent drop.
This is the worst quarter for PC industry since 1994 when IDC started tracking sales. So, that pretty much makes it the worst quarter in history.
IDC blames Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system for alienating consumers. The new tile-based interface is too weird for consumers, says IDC.
Instead of buying new laptops or desktops, people are buying tablets and smartphones which serve as good-enough alternatives.
Between 34 percent and 42 percent of large enterprises will be seriously considering procuring various unified communications (UC) applications as a premise-based, but managed, service, by 2015, according to the findings of the Dimension Data 2013 Global UCC Study conducted by research firm Ovum. .../... Results also suggest U.S. businesses have taken a reasonable and careful approach to bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives, with more than 60 percent of firms supporting employee owned smartphones and tablets, and almost 20 percent indicating support for those which have arrived in the organization without official vetting.
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