Although Apple’s keynote earlier today had a heavy focus on the iPhone 5, let’s not forget that the iPod lineup also received a major revamp. Apple has created a fantastic advertisement for all their new iPods, as seen below.
Devies bounce all over the frame, as they somehow morph into each other at a fast pace. As is expected in all Apple advertisements, the background music fits the visuals perfectly, and the whole thing oozes quality.
Apple’s new iPod advertisement is awesome
September 13, 2012
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Posted by david ricketts
My Grandmother Uses Dropbox — Why can’t I?
August 14, 2012My first involvement with tech occurred in the early 80s. I recall the days of modems, time division multiplexors, acoustic couplers, and dipswitches. Most people don’t realize it, but cloud based file sharing existed in the 80s, but required an account with a major X.25 “cloud” service provider, such as Tymnet or Telenet.
At the risk of sounding nostalgic, back in the day, only people who had a keen interest in electronics (mainly, those of us under 30) were exposed to these esoteric products. Neither my grandmother nor my mother understood technology and, frankly, I never tried to explain it to them. It was a language that only a privileged few could understand. That has certainly changed.
Today, grandma owns an iPad, has a Twitter account, does her banking online, and knows what megapixels are. She texts, tweets, and takes pictures…lots of pictures. She happily uses the modern cloud to post pictures on Dropbox so her niece—who is going to school for archeology in the Middle East—can see the scarf grandma is knitting her for Christmas.
So, if grandma can use Dropbox, WHY…CAN’T…I?
That’s a question that business areas are asking IT professionals on a daily basis.
In order to answer the question, we need to examine why grandma is using Dropbox. Simply speaking – it’s easy to use. Grandma logs in with her username and password, drags and drops her scarf photo, and voila, her niece can download and view the picture almost instantly.
Unlike previous X.25 cloud services like Tymnet and Telnet, current cloud-based file sharing services, including Dropbox, have done a fantastic job adhering to the mantra – “Simplicity as a Design Goal.” Many other consumer-oriented services and products also have gained widespread adoption following the same blueprint – e.g., the iPod.
So, when the person who runs the HR Department comes to you and tells you that she’ll be using Dropbox to share employee information with a vendor (just as easily as she shares her family photos), what do you tell her? And, more importantly, what alternative can you provide her for sharing sensitive information with third parties?
Here’s a list of 5 tactics you can use:
1. Explain that consumer-oriented web sites don’t provide the same level of protection as modern enterprise IT systems.
2. Explain that while protecting pictures of a scarf with a username and password may be appropriate, protecting data which contains an employee’s social security number, home address, and medical information deserve more than password protection.
3. Explain that data breaches occur on a regular basis on cloud based services and losing data can cause irreparable harm to a corporation.
4. Explain that regulatory requirements force many companies to review entitlement on an ongoing basis, to verify access by auditing data use, and to encrypt certain types of data. Most cloud-based file sharing services do not allow for these types of controls.
5. Explain that there are alternatives! Specifically, there are products that can provide similar functionality, that are easy to use, that can be used to share both employee records and pictures of a scarf, without sacrificing security.
Related articles
Leave a Comment » | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Marketing | Tagged: Cloud computing, Dropbox, Filesharing, IPad, iPod, Middle East, Twitter, Tymnet | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
Connected kids
November 23, 2011At C24 we work a lot within education. We spotted this excert below that we thought really highlighted how connected todays kids are. It is
I pulled some data from a presentation from the K5 Learning Blog. Kids today are amazingly connected, but less involved in the physical world:
- More US kids aged 2-5 can play a computer game than ride a bike.
- 19% of kids aged 2-5 know how to play a smartphone app; 9% know how to tie their shoelaces.
- More kids aged 2-5 can open a browser than swim unaided.
- Kids aged 0-8 spend an average of 1 hour 44 minutes watching TV or video daily, 29 minutes reading, 29 minutes listening to music, 25 minutes playing computer or video games, and 5 minutes using new mobile devices.
- Kids aged 8-18 spend 7 hours 38 minutes using entertainment media daily: more than 53 hours per week. That’s an hour more than 2004 (6 hours 30 minutes). Because they multitask [non-rivalrous media] they pack 10 hours 45 minutes into those 7 hours and 38 minutes.
- 65% of kids aged 0-8 watch TV at least once per day. That’s 37% of kids aged 0-1, 73% of kids aged 2-4, and 72% of kids aged 5-8.
- Kids under 2 spend twice as much time watching TV and videos than being read to (1 hour 54 minutes versus 53 minutes per day).
- For kids aged 8-18, live TV consumption declined by 25 minutes from 2004 to 2009, but total TV consumption went up thanks to the Internet, cell phones, and iPods. 59% (2 hours 39 minutes) consisted of watching live TV, and 41% (1 hour 50 minutes) consisted of time-shifted TV, DVDs, online, or mobile.
- 53% of kids aged 2-4 have used a computer, 90% of kids aged 5-8 have.
- 25% of kids are going online daily by age 3, 50% by age 5.
- Cell ownership among kids 8-18 rose from 39% in 2004 to 65% in 2009.
- 7-12th graders spend an average 1 hour 35 minutes per day sending and receiving texts.
- 51% of kids aged 0-8 have played a console game, 81% of kids aged 5-8. 17% of kids aged 5-8 play console games at least once a day, 36% play then at least once per week.
- 27% of kids aged 2-5 screen time is used with new digital devices.
- 29% of parents have downloaded apps for their kids aged 2-5 to use.
- iPod ownership for kids aged 8-18 rose from 18% in 2004 to 76% in 2009.
- 23% of kids aged 0-8 watch educational TV shows, 8% use educational programs on the computer, 7% play education games on new mobile devices.
via stoweboyd:
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: American Academy of Pediatrics, Console game, DVD, iPod, Mobile device, Mobile phone, Television, Video game | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
Big Data in the cloud…the ability to make business decisions
September 27, 2011It’s no secret that while our devices may be shrinking, the amount of information we put on them is growing exponentially. In a study published in June 2011, IDC predicted that by the end of this year, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes, or 1.8 trillion gigabytes (this amount of data would fit onto about 28,125,000,000 iPods, each with 64 gigabytes of storage), and will grow by a factor of 9 in five years.
What is becoming more apparent is that big data is turning into big money, for enterprises and small businesses alike. So how can channel partners and cloud services providers (CSPs) help customers to manage navigate this trend?
With the development of big data trends and forecasts, a number of companies and groups have been formed to help manage, analyze and leverage it. According to an article by Stefan Groschupf, mining big data for business intelligence has led to the development of innovations like FlightCaster, a company that is able to predict flight delays by factoring in real-time conditions and using historical information on domestic flights.
In addition, many experts believe analyzing large datasets can be the precursor to more practical and cost-effective ways of doing business. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute, for example, estimates that retail firms that ‘maximize their use of big data’ could ‘increase operating margins by more than 60 percent…’.
The report mentions how Wal-Mart used electronic data to give suppliers a view of demand in its stores. With the collection of even more information on each store and buying habits of customers, retail chains like Wal-Mart can use the information they gather to tailor their business to the customer and improve operations.
And in a recent blog post on how companies are making money from the growth of data, Loraine Lawson noted that large tech security companies are crediting big data in part for boosting their company’s revenues.
Perspectives for Channel Partners
Executive Vice President at Asigra, Eran Farajun, says that cloud service providers are partly responsible for the explosion of data. With cloud computing and cloud services becoming more popular, the general public and small businesses are creating more and more data online, thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others, being solely based online requires all the information created on those sites to be stored online.
So while data is being made, monitored and mined, who’s worrying about what happens if and when that information is lost?
Although most small businesses might not be thinking about big data problems now, Asigra’s Senior Director of Strategic Alliances, Ashar Baig says that in five to 10 years, big data is going to be a problem. In addition, having more, highly valuable information increases the vulnerability of what happens when that data is destroyed in an accident, irrecoverable or hacked. In this sense, being able to protect, backup and recover information becomes akin to insuring your house and car.
The debate over whether or not the public cloud is the answer to big data storage problems continues to unfold. For end-users, security in the cloud is already a touchy subject, much less backup and recovery. But with big data issues coming to the forefront,security becomes even more divisive.
Standardizing encryption in the cloud backup and recovery field is a start to ensuring the cloud can meet the demand that huge datasets will put on cloud storage providers, as more and more businesses rely on the cloud to store big data.
Considering the issues outlined above, cloud storage providers need to ensure their data encryption standards are consistent with industry leaders, such as the National Institute of Science and Technology in the United States, to be prepared for the oncoming challenge of big data.
Thanks to the guys at Asigra for the post.
Related articles
- In the Pipeline: A Tidal Wave of Data (datacenterknowledge.com)
- How business taught scientists about big data (gigaom.com)
- Talk on the privacy bargain, big data, and human sensors versus human barcodes (boingboing.net)
Leave a Comment » | Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: Big data, Cloud computing, Facebook, FlightCaster, iPod, LinkedIn, McKinsey & Company, Wal-Mart | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
Cloud Backup Leader Asigra Introduces Latest Model
June 6, 2011Asigra, a leading cloud backup recovery and restore (BURR) software provider since 1986, is bringing a lot of firsts to the market with its latest offering. Today, the company introduced the Asigra Cloud Backup v11 with Cloud BURR industry firsts including: data protection of handheld devices, including tablets and smartphones; the first multi-tenanted client to reduce dramatically management resources; and the industry’s only automated cloud license server.
The new software also takes the title as the first enterprise-class cloud backup platform to protect the entire digital footprint, including storage, servers, desktops, and laptops; to provide data recovery and restore assurance (R2A) for consumers, and to establish new performance benchmarks.
“Our CEO back in 1986 lost his data and he was looking for a solution that would provide in his mind recovery assurance,” Ashar Baig, senior director of product marketing, told TMCnet in a recent interview about why Asigra’s new version was introduced. “Since then, we’ve used this term a lot called R2A which is recovery, restore, assurance, which means that the data is always going to be restored back to you.
” Asigra Cloud Backup v11 offers a variety of benefits including the fact that it will become an industry-first SMB and enterprise-wide cloud backup, recovery and restoration support for tablets and smart phones for end-to-end protection of the digital footprint.
This expanded support allows rollback to any point across any device to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO/RTO), according to company officials. The Apple App Store, Android (News – Alert) Market and Amazon Appstore now carry Asigra’s mobile backup app. In addition, the latest Asigra version guarantees that it will make good on its promise to return lost data, unlike other consumer backup solutions.
“Lots of consumer backup solutions out in the marketplace provide unlimited backup but they don’t provide recovery assurance that your data is going to be recoverable,” Baig said. “There’s no reason to back up the data if you are not going to be able to recover it so the one thing we do on the enterprise class is we offer R2A.
Our software does five things in the background to make sure that your data are recoverable.” Among those things are data integrity checks– data corruption checks and restore validation.
Other highlights of version 11 include an automated Asigra world-class cloud license server which provides the industry’s highest level of management automation of any cloud backup solution for service providers and end-users; a comprehensive and intuitive Web-based command center that provides complete visibility, control and management of the entire Asigra environment; up to 400 percent performance improvement; and support for 10 Gbps LAN interfaces on storage hardware, network switches and servers.
Moreover, the internal Asigra processes have been improved to handle much faster data read/writes. “How organizations protect their data is increasingly determined by user-driven trends, such as the integration of mobile devices in business environments,” David Farajun, CEO of Asigra, said in a statement. “The launch of version 11 reaffirms our commitment to overcoming the challenges of today’s evolving IT environment by providing the finest technology available to meet the needs of our customers. There simply isn’t a better end-to-end data protection solution in the world.”
Asigra Cloud Backup v11 provides a “simple, single, adaptable, and flexible” cloud BURR platform for end-to-end data protection – from handhelds to distributed data centers, according to company officials. The version offers data protection for Apple (News – Alert) iOS devices such as the iPad, iPod, and iPhone and Google Android–based tablets and smartphones.
“It will be important for IT professionals to deploy comprehensive backup and recovery strategies if they hope to reduce the staff requirements, capital expense and operational inefficiencies of managing multiple islands of data protection in the enterprise,” Dave Russell, research vice president for Gartner (News – Alert), said in a statement.
“Cloud backup, recovery and restore providers that deliver more holistic solutions will see their message resonate rapidly with the growing number of organizations plagued by backup challenges.” Added Baig, “We have 400,000 end customer sites that are protected by Asigra. We have been in business 25 years. But of all these end customer sites if anyone ever initiated a restore their data was always restored to them. That’s a very powerful statement to make in this day and age.”
Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication’s social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a bachelor’s degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Article source: http://it.tmcnet.com/channels/cloud-communications/articles/182569-cloud-backup-leader-asigra-introduces-latest-model.htm
Leave a Comment » | Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: Asigra, Backup, Hardware, Information technology, IOS (Apple), IPhone, iPod, Mobile device, Storage | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
