AT&T Inc. announced the launch of the first super Internet Data Centre (IDC) in Asia, located in Singapore.
The super IDC, an expansion of AT&T's existing facilities, would act as a regional gateway to the Internet and the AT&T network to deliver AT&T Synaptic HostingSM, its next-generation utility computing services.
This launch is part of AT&T's $1 billion planned global network investment in 2008 to increase global data centre hosting capacity throughout the 38 data centres in AT&T's global Internet protocol (IP) network.
Other super IDCs are located in Piscataway, New Jersey; San Diego, California; Annapolis, Maryland and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which will form the regional hubs in the US and Europe.
Bernard Yee, vice president, AT&T Asia Pacific, said: "AT&T continues to invest in growing its business to support customers and to meet the demands of multinational corporations for next-generation services and solutions. To help customers in this challenging economic environment, the first super IDC in Asia, combined with our Synaptic Hosting platform, will offer them much greater flexibility to scale their information technology resources up or down to meet their business requirements."
"The super IDC will enable us to offer information technology and infrastructure service as turn-key managed infrastructure solutions on demand," Yee added.
"In addition, AT&T is going to offer managed application services within the sectors of enterprise resource planning software, eCommerce, web services, messaging and unified communications services to enhance our value proposition and managed services proposition for our customers in Asia and globally."
"Our goal is to allow them to focus on running their businesses while achieving greater flexibility, improved performance and further cost-savings," Yee said.
The AT&T IDCs allow AT&T to deliver consistent, highly scalable, enterprise-class information technology (IT) services around the globe. In addition to the hosting services available in all other centres, the super IDC supports large-scale computing and application infrastructure on demand that can be combined with other AT&T hosting services, such as managed networking, virtualised security, application acceleration and storage.
Companies can deliver end-user applications infrastructure whenever and wherever they are needed on a pay-for-use model. The new services can be accessed from anywhere in the world and combines technology acquired by AT&T from application service provider US inter-networking.
Friday, November 21, 2008
AT&T launches first super Internet Data Centre in Singapore
An online challenge to Google library
According to the media reports, the project would use the latest technologies to allow users anywhere access to films, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and documents as well as books kept in European libraries.
The source mentioned that the prototype that was launched today and would contain around two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain, as the most recent items are plagued by problems linked to copyright.
Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy.
Originally known as the European digital library network – EDLnet – it is a partnership of 90 representatives of heritage and knowledge organizations and IT experts from throughout Europe.
By 2010, the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational, the aim is to have 10 million works available, though this is very negligible compared to the 2.5 billion books in Europe's more common libraries.
Around one percent of the books in the EU's national libraries are now available in digital form, with that figure expected to grow to four percent in 2012.
And even when they are digitalized, they still have to be put online. Google, one of the pioneers in this domain, claims to have seven million books available for its 'Google Book Search' project, which had gone online in 2004.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Are mobile phones really hot?
Christmas being just round the corner, as always mobile phones are a popular gift choice. Reevoo.com gives you the low-down on mobiles; examining what's hot, what's not, what people are actually buying and which phones are the best value for money.
What's hot? The iPhone 3G of course! But it's not highly ratedDespite being one of the most talked about phones of the year, the iPhone 3G has failed to beat its 2007 predecessor.
The original iPhone is rated 8.3/10, just pipping this year's 3G offering to the post, (the iPhone 3G scores 8.2/10). According to owners, the major issues with the 3G model are its battery life and application crashes, meaning that other phones have been able to storm ahead of the iPhone. So, what really is the hottest mobile phone this season?
Revoo recommendations: Top five Christmas mobile phones
Top five most popular in last 30 days:
1. Nokia N96
2. Samsung F480 Tocco
3. Blackberry Storm
4. Sony Ericsson C902
5. Samsung Omnia
Top five highest rated phones of 2008:
1. BlackBerry Bold 9000
2. Sony Ericsson W980i
3. Apple iPhone 3G 8/16GB
4. Samsung F480 Tocco
5. Sony Ericsson K660i
Reevoo reviewers pick the BlackBerry Bold 9000 as the best phone released in 2008.
Reviews on Reevoo for the BlackBerry Bold 9000 include:
Positive+
+ Great keyboard for e-mailing and texting. Cracking screen which is nice and bright and videos look lovely on it. The sound from the internal speaker is really good. Just a great phone overall.
+ The Bold is undoubtedly the most impressive Blackberry yet. One of its greatest advantages is that in spite of many new features, it feels very familiar. Web browsing is almost broadband speed.
Negative
– Out of the box battery life is bad but gets better with regular charges
- The hyped-up phones usually get all the attention but it's interesting to see how the most popular phones differ from the most highly rated:
The Nokia N96, whilst being the most popular phone on the market, gets marked down by reviewers for poor battery life and software problems. At around £500 for Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) customers, it's no surprise that it also gets rated below average for value for money.
However, it does impress with its design and features. One reviewer writes "great picture and video quality, very easy to find your way around, fantastic features...looks good".
So who wins the race?
When it comes to value for money, the stylish Samsung F480 Tocco is a great buy. It scores highly for design and features and gets much higher scores for battery life than the Nokia N96, both iPhones and the BlackBerry Bold 9000. It's around £150 PAYG or free on some contracts.
Here are some of the reviews from owners of the Samsung F480 Tocco:
Positive:
+ Easy to use, good haptic technology feedback from the touch screen, excellent camera, fair battery life, smart, compact, stylish.
+ It's easy to use and has a very good memory and has good features that I would have expected.
Negative
- No Wi-Fi capability.
- Should come with a ball point touch screen pen, can be hard to press the right keys sometimes.
Indian techie accused in $1-bn Intel data theft
Intel has filed a criminal complaint against Biswamohan Pani, former design engineer for chipmaker Intel, in the US district court in Boston. The case is that Pani made off with information valued by Intel at more than $1 billion. He is due to appear in Boston federal court today.
Intel filed the complaint formally, after the FBI sleuths searched his house in Worcester in July, which recovered some top-secret files with details of future Intel chip designs, said a report.
Pani had resigned from Intel in May but he said the company that he could continue to work at Intel till June 11. But he started working with AMD on June 2 while he still continued with Intel.
During this period he allegedly remote-accessed the secret files with an intention to pass it on to AMD. But FBI has ruled out AMD's involvement in Pani's conduct.
On the other hand, Pani pleaded innocence in the incident and said that the design files were meant to help his wife who still works with Intel and were not intended for sale. Networking major Cisco in its recent report on data leakage had pointed to the 'insider threat' to corporate information.
How do you evaluate this kind of 'insider threat' as far as maintaining the security of data is concerned? Do you think the corporates are making serious efforts to ensure the security of their data in a highly networked environment?
Women power in IT on the rise
Moreover, NASSCOM conducted a survey of 50 companies and found that 11% of leaders in the industry were women. These roles were in senior management mostly for decision-making. Also two year’s back, three or four companies formally followed gender diversity programmes, but now there are about 80 companies that have some initiative to handle issues for women and take care of gender diversity and inclusiveness.
Techies turn to social media to reach consumers
Companies ranging from PC maker Dell Inc to storage equipment maker NetApp are increasingly turning to outside blogs, viral videos and websites such as FaceBook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Digg — and their tens of millions of users — to reach consumers.
These social networking sites harness the age-old power of the word-of-mouth recommendation and can be potent marketing tools. If nothing else, they demand a higher level of consumer engagement than conventional ads.
“This is 180 degrees from that sort of advertising,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. “Having a conversation with them (consumers) is a very new skill.”For tech companies with big marketing budgets, the shift to social media is an implicit acknowledgment that television and print are not necessarily the most effective ways to reach buyers, particularly younger ones.
In addition, with a recession looming, corporate budgets are being slashed. UBS has forecast global ad spending will fall 3.9 per cent in 2009. In such an environment, social media could prove to be a cost-effective way to sell to consumers.
But the strategy is not without some risk. While every company wants to generate buzz, online backlash can be brutal.
Consumer healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson learned that the hard way with a recent Web video ad for its Motrin painkiller. While apparently trying to be irreverent about the pain of wearing a baby in a sling, the ad offended many mothers who savaged it on Twitter, the wildly popular “micro-blogging’’ site where users communicate with short “tweets’’ of 140 characters or less. J&J was forced to apologize on Monday.
Brian Keeler, a vice president at media consultancy VShift, said the key to social media is credibility and enlisting consumers in the act of marketing itself. But if you upset your audience, it can mean trouble. “With the online media, things can go viral and spin out of control really fast,’’ he said.
Dell has a dedicated team of around 40 people that interacts with consumers through its blogs, community forums and third-party sites. The company began its social media push last year as it moved to repair its public image.
“There’s been a realization over the last several years that your customers are going to talk about you online and you have a choice to join that conversation,’’ spokeswoman Caroline Dietz said.
Own a personal supercomputer!
Computers built with innovative NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) are capable of handling calculations typically relegated to expensive supercomputing “clusters”, a technology breakthrough the company says could soon bring lightning speeds to the next generation of computers aimed at the consumer market.
NVIDIA’s Tesla Personal Supercomputers deliver approximately 250 times the processing power of current computer workstations for similar prices, according to the California-based company. “This changes everything. This supercomputing power is being brought to the workstation,” Tesla computing products general manager Andy Keane said.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities and research facilities are already using GPU-based personal supercomputers. “GPU-based systems enable us to run life science codes in minutes rather than the hours it took earlier,” said Jack Collins of the Advanced Biomedical Computing Centre in the US state of Maryland. “This exceptional speedup has the ability to accelerate the discovery of potentially life-saving anti-cancer drugs.”
NVIDIA, founded in 1993, became renowned for GPUs that drive sophisticated computer game and video hardware. While CPUs typically handle tasks in a linear style, zipping from start to finish in series, GPUs work on tasks simultaneously in order to do things such as get colour pixels together on screens to present moving images. Sets of NVIDIA chips built for speed, power, and superior graphics production are built into upgraded Macintosh notebook computers recently rolled out by Apple.
GPUs that could do parallel computing mathematics at lightning speed were engineered by NVIDIA to make Tesla chips that put desktop workstations on par with supercomputers at one 100th of the price. “You can’t ignore the GPU; you can’t say it is just a game chip,” Keane said.