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Saturday, 29 June 2013
La NASA inaugura la exposición del Atlantis
Desde hoy se puede visitar el nuevo pabellón dedicado al transbordador espacial Atlantis en el Complejo de Visitantes del Centro Espacial Kennedy, en el que se le puede ver como si estuviera en órbita, con las puertas de la bodega de carga abiertas y el brazo robot extendido.
Las dos primeras fotos vía Zero-G news; la tercera vía RyInSpace
Con la inauguración de este pabellón ya se pueden visitar los tres transbordadores que le quedan a la NASA que viajaron al espacio, aunque cada uno casi en una esquina distinta de los Estados Unidos: el Discovery en el Centro Steven F. Udvar-Hazy del Smithsoniano en Washington, el Endeavour en el Centro de Ciencias de California en Los Ángeles, y el Atlantis en el KSC.
También son dignos de ser visitados en Enterprise, que se usó para pruebas aerodinámicas, pero que nunca salió al espacio, en el Museo del Intrepid en Nueva York, y el Pathfinder en Huntsville y el Explorer el Houston junto con el NASA 905.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/la-nasa-inaugura-la-exposicion-del-atlantis.html
Alt-week 6.29.13: DARPA's robot finalists, the IRIS solar mission and empathetic computers
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Vídeo: un curioso efecto al dejar caer una cadena de bolitas metálicas
Steve Mould explica y demuestra en este vídeo a cámara lenta un efecto de física muy curioso conocido como el collar de Newton. En él una cadena de bolitas metálicas va cayendo libremente de forma un tanto sorprendente respecto a lo que nos diría la intuición.
El efecto se produce, por explicarlo de forma simple, porque esa trayectoria tan extraña que siguen las bolitas (ascendente y luego descendente) es el camino que les ofrece menos resistencia – debido principalmente a la flexibilidad y naturaleza de la cadena.
(Vía Geeks Are Sexy.)
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/efecto-cadena-bolitas-metalicas.html
Otra prueba de que la Tierra es redonda
Por si a alguien le quedaba alguna duda, la Tierra en toda su redondez vista a través de las ventanas de la Cúpula de la Estación Espacial Internacional, por cortesía de @astro_luca .
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/otra-prueba-de-que-la-tierra-es-redonda.html
PSA: Google Play Music All Access $8 promotion ends soon
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A Year After Launch (And With 300K Sites Created), ‘Social Front Page' RebelMouse Mulls Ad Strategy
It’s been a little more than a year since former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry first launched RebelMouse, a service allowing users to pull their content together from across social networks. To mark the occasion, Berry stopped by the TechCrunch office to look back at the past year and hint at his plans for the future.
Overall, Berry said that the service’s growth has backed up his initial vision.
“We haven’t done any pivots — we’ve just been following the core path,” he said. “A year ago, I had all these hypotheticals of how people could use the product. Now there’s an insane amount of anecdotal evidence.”
As shared in a company post, RebelMouse is now reaching 5 million unique monthly visitors, and its users have created 300,000 sites. Publishers like the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch- and Huffington Post-owner AOL, and Time have used the technology, as have brands like GE, Patagonia, and Sprout Organic Foods.
One thing you might notice about all of those links is that they don’t go to RebelMouse site itself, but instead to the websites of the publishers in question. Berry said that’s as it should be: “We want to be very clear to everyone that it’s not as important to us to be the destination as it is to help the open web.” That goes back to the original vision, where Berry realized that it’s “too hard” for many people to build and update a website using a traditional content management systems. With RebelMouse, you can take advantage of all the content that you’re already posting on other sites to create a unified, up-to-date presence, whether the “you” in question is a person or a company.
And if you want to pay RebelMouse for the privilege, even better. The company is already making money through a subscription program where users pay $9.99 a month to host their RebelMouse site at their own domain. The next step in Berry’s monetization plan is advertising, specifically the term that everyone is embracing nowadays, native ads.
Berry acknowledged that native “is a highly abused term” (in his view, native advertising means that the ad has to match the look and the content of the site), but he argued that RebelMouse can deliver sponsored content in a real-time way that’s sensitive to the user’s context: “We can give publishers native advertising at scale.”
Other future plans include the launch of smartphone apps (although Berry noted that mobile already accounts for a significant part of RebelMouse’s traffic.)
And of course, as RebelMouse evolves, so does the social media context in which it’s operating. The past year has seen the new social apps explode in popularity, and Berry predicted that the process will continue.
“It’s surprising, but social graphs, instead of gaining value over time, well, there’s an aspect that’s true, but there’s the opposite, where they lose value over time — people enjoy new networks,” he said. “That’s why RebelMouse’s goal is to remain the Switzerland of all of this.”
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Topographic maps illustrate where Twitter's bird flies highest
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Twitter website adds language translation, promptly proves its worth
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Why Oracle And Salesforce, Once Bitter Rivals, Are Now On Cloud Nine
Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison, the CEOs of two of the more powerful enterprise companies in the world — Salesforce.com and Oracle — are not known to be the chummiest of pals. Before this week’s sudden peaceful truce, which will see the two companies integrate their cloud services, the only clouds that connected the two were dark and frowny ones. For years, the two have pitted themselves and their companies against each other in brinkmanship-style competition, while chasing similar acquisitions and similar strategies just to stay within sight of each other.
It was popcorn-munching fodder, as their sparring often took on a decidedly personal, catfight-style spin. To wit: Just two years ago, Oracle cancelled Benioff’s high-priced keynote talk at its OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco at the last minute, precipitating a back and forth between the two CEOs. Benioff wasn’t invited back in 2012.
While the personality-led public spats often seemed more like desperate grabs for publicity and attention than anything else, the Oracle-Salesforce fued can be boiled down to a much more interesting (and fundamental) conflict: Which company or model (if either) represents the “true cloud” — present and future. In reality, that comes down to not only who has been able to win over enterprises with their respective service suite in the sky in the past — but who’s got the best shot at doing that tomorrow … or in 2025?
False clouds and true love
Leading up to this denouement, Benioff rarely missed an opportunity to criticize Oracle’s philosophy, focusing on its Exadata system, which the Salesforce CEO called “the false cloud” (a term he used consistently over the years). His opinion: Oracle’s direction failed to show a critical understanding of what enterprise customers really want (and need) in the modern world of cloud computing. Benioff has long been outspoken about the fact that IT companies must embrace consumerization and the “social revolution” if they hope to survive. That manifested, in part, in Salesforce’s integration with Facebook, and acquisitions of a number of social marketing and social productivity services, like Buddy Media, Radian6 and Rypple, among others.
In turn, Ellison has said that Salesforce.com, in fact, “isn’t a real cloud company,” because it was “applications-only, rather than apps backed by that all-important cloud infrastructure,” as we wrote at the time. Of course, Oracle has worked hard to become much more than a partial cloud, with the virtualization tech and an end-to-end stack that one traditionally associates with a “true” cloud computing company. Salesforce, in reality, Ellison had said, was actually just an “itty bitty application” running on Oracle’s infrastructure.
Sure, Ellison and Benioff sparring over “whose cloud is bigger” doesn’t quite have the same pugilistic feel of a real war, but the two companies have long been referred to as enemies for good reason. That’s why the news this week that Oracle and Salesforce are putting aside their differences to embrace in a nine-year partnership, covering applications, platform and infrastructure over the next nine years, came as somewhat of a shock.
Besties or frenemies?
First of all, the truth is that Benioff and Ellison have known each other for a long time. Larry Ellison was Marc Benioff’s mentor when he was an eager executive at Oracle — for 13 years, mind you, in which he became Oracle’s youngest VP — before he took off to found Salesforce. Back in the day, InformationWeek described Benioff’s presence onstage at an Oracle conference a decade ago as Ellison-esque.
In fact, the Oracle CEO went on to help get Salesforce.com off the ground as an early investor, and Salesforce has been a big customer of Oracle’s over the years.
When did it go wrong? Some have said that the feud that broke out officially in 2011 could be attributed to Benioff’s drive to be taken seriously by his former boss, mentor and investor — he, in short, had something to prove.
While sensitive, city-sized egos have no doubt been partly to blame; on the other hand, as Arik Hesseldahl pointed out last year, again, the real issue at hand has been the very definition of cloud computing. On this issue, the two CEOs routinely went their separate ways.
For Benioff, the cloud has been something that can’t be owned or packaged, because it is a fundamental part of the Web itself, which consumers never really interact with or touch on a daily basis. Salesforce.com was designed to bring massive data centers and cloud computing to users through the familiar window of their browser — they just need an Internet connection or a web-connected device to use it. Benioff’s “cloud” is defined by services like Facebook, or AWS, or Google Apps, where customers have a wide range of tools at their fingertips without having to worry about what’s going on behind the scenes. They don’t have to install anything, manage a ton of moving parts, worry about upgrades (and so on), and they pay for what they use.
For the Oracle CEO, on the other hand, the cloud has been more of a hybrid, one that caters in part to Enterprise organizations that don’t want third-parties handling their data or operations or physical asseets. Really, it’s the old world of enterprise software, with a mess of modern tech — a world where Oracle, traditionally, has hardly been alone.
Of course, Benioff has been a broken record on this point, believing that this kind of cloud is going the way of the dinosaur, that Oracle-style hardware will be replaced by the distributed, omniscient Internet-powered cloud.
So why the change of heart? It seems that at least part of it has to do with growing up: the two companies share a long list of mutual customers. “Salesforce is a big company now,” Ellison said proudly in front of his former pupil and new-bestie. “Companies expect us to work together professionally toward their mutual benefit.”
And Ellison noted on a conference call around the news, “We don’t want each and every one of those customers having to hire a third-party or having to spend a lot of money to wire up the Salesforce applications to the Oracle applications.”
Benioff added that it was “an easy commitment” for both companies to make and that there was “no company” he’d rather “partner with to be the heart of Salesforce’s database infrastructure.” Not only that, but he gushed that the potential opportunities that could result from the partnership were “endless,” and that they would be hosting more joint conference calls in the future.
Rivals waiting in the wings
The reality of it, however, is that on some level the two companies need each other. While Salesforce has nailed the idea of cloud services, its bread and butter remain as their name says — focused on sales teams and mobilizing them. On top of that Salesforce’s cloud mantra, even if it is the way everything seems to be moving, is still far from ubiquitous, particularly for large enterprises. Oracle, on the other hand, has the larger remit with the verticals it targets, and it also has the credibility for premise-based software solutions, but perhaps has not managed to pin down that cloud element in quite as strong a way as Salesforce has.
That speaks to symbiosis of a sort: Salesforce will become an official internal user of Oracle’s financial and HR apps; Oracle will begin integrating Salesforce into its infrastructure, using its newly acquired companies using Salesforce to help it find the best ways to integrate. Down the road, the idea is to allow customers to just flip a switch to enable usage of either company’s apps. And as Read Write alluded yesterday, together this alliance will also help Oracle crack further into big data technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL, which may compete, but more likely complement the relational databases upon which Oracle’s business is built.
This also points to another way that a partnership between these two giants makes sense: if it’s the new wave of enterprise startups that are providing the most disruptive effects in the industry, with large enterprises increasingly opting for hybrid solutions from a selection of these emerging companies, Ellison and Benioff coming together to present an even more formidable OracleForce will make it difficult for would be rivals to compete.
To that end, it will be interesting to see if this does indeed usher in a “third wave of computing” as Benioff terms in it, in which big companies and rivals like Oracle and Salesforce (and Microsoft, who had Oracle news of its own this week) are forced to come together if they hope to produce the kind of value and flexibility of choice that customers have begun to demand out of their infrastructure — the kind of value that smaller competitors may be more agile and able to achieve. This argument is made most persuasively by Aaron Levie, co-founder of Box (yes, one of those nipping at the big guys’ toes), who writes about the rise of the cloud stack.
Incumbents get disrupted because the very moats a company builds up to be successful in one era become a liability in the next.
—
Aaron Levie (@levie) June 27, 2013 And herein also lies the challenge for the two: whether they can really get their big arses in sync to work together to meet those new enterprise demands.
Some are very cynical that this latest move demonstrates that they can. Carter Lusher, chief IT analyst at Ovum, believes that “nothing in the announcement amounted to a significant change in either company’s strategy.”
“This is a very minor announcement, just above ‘press releaseware’ because of the lack of detail provided,” he writes in a research note, citing the lack of detail on how and when platform migrations will take place, or what companies will get displaced in the process, or when they will hit the market with these new solutions. “It is Ovum’s opinion that this announcement neither shifts the dynamics of the IT industry nor should it change any IT organization’s IT strategy or procurement plans,” he concludes.
Still, there’s time to see how the practicalities play out. In the interim, let’s see whether regulators have anything to say on this deal.
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Cox flareWatch beta brings IPTV with 60 HD channels, cloud DVR for $35 monthly
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Verizon starts selling 32GB Samsung Galaxy S 4 online for $299
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Bell cleared to buy Astral Media, creates a Canadian TV powerhouse
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Songza introduces paid ad-free service that costs $0.99 a week
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