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Weekly#105

  • Algorithmia Launches With More Than 800 Algorithms On Its Marketplace (Techcrunch)
  • Curiosity Is as Important as Intelligence (HBR)
  • Smartphones are about to become network hubs (NetworkWorld)
  • Apple Event in 90 Seconds (TechCrunch)
  • Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay Expands to the Pacific Northwest (Yahoo)
  • Three European countries have already hit their 2020 renewable energy goals (QZ)
    • In 2010, the European Union set a goal of producing 20% of its total energy from renewable sources by 2020. The latest figures show that the union as a whole reached the 15% mark in 2013. But the combined figure includes some countries already exceeding thier targets, while others lag far behind.
      Three out of the 28 EU member states have surpassed their 2020 goals. Sweden had one of the most ambitious goals, planning to produce 49% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. It’s already gone further than that, with 52.1% from renewable sources in 2013. Bulgaria and Estonia also are producing more than they had been targeting, five years ahead of schedule
  • 4G around the globe: Spain has the fastest LTE speeds, the U.S. has among the slowest (VentureBeat)
  • WhatsApp hits 1 billion installs on Android, the second non-Google app to do so (VentureBeat)
  • Who Coined ‘Cloud Computing’? (Technology Review)
    Part of the debate is who should get credit for inventing the idea. The notion of network-based computing dates to the 1960s, but many believe the first use of “cloud computing” in its modern context occurred on August 9, 2006, when then Google CEO Eric Schmidt introduced the term to an industry conference. “What’s interesting [now] is that there is an emergent new model,” Schmidt said, “I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing—they should be in a “cloud” somewhere.”

    The term began to see wider use the following year, after companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM started to tout cloud-computing efforts as well. That was also when it first appeared in newspaper articles, such as a New York Times report from November 15, 2007, that carried the headline “I.B.M. to Push ‘Cloud Computing,’ Using Data From Afar.” It described vague plans for “Internet-based supercomputing.”

    Sam Johnston, director of cloud and IT services at Equinix, says cloud computing took hold among techies because it described something important. “We now had a common handle for a number of trends that we had been observing, such as the consumerization and commoditization of IT,” he wrote in an e-mail.

    Johnston says it’s never been clear who coined the term. As an editor of the Wikipedia entry for cloud computing, Johnston keeps a close eye on any attempts at misappropriation. He was first to raise alarms about Dell’s trademark application and this summer he removed a citation from Wikipedia saying a professor at Emory had coined the phrase in the late 1990s. There have been “many attempts to coopt the term, as well as various claims of invention,” says Johnston. (Source)

 

 

 

 

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