Smart Cities are here to stay, but for their promise to be delivered, the data they produce must not be put in new siloes.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mathias Herberts, Co-founder and CTO of Cityzen Data, discussed the best practices that will ensure a successful smart city journey.
Archivo mensual: diciembre 2016
Alibaba Enters Japan
Alibaba’s growing aspirations to be the one-stop tech shop for all consumer and business products in Asia, became one inch closer to reality with its entry into the Japanese market. On Thursday, the company announced a couple of partnerships that are likely to give a big boost to its two growing business arms – content delivery and cloud storage.
One of the partnership is with the Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corporation. Already, SoftBank is one of Alibaba’s largest investors, and with this agreement, it has entered into a joint venture to run a local cloud center hosted by SB Cloud Corporation. With this partnership, Alibaba has officially entered the Japanese market, and it will offer cloud computing services to local clients. The other agreement is with Oriental DreamWorks, through which it plans to bring animated movies to its Chinese customers on its online streaming platforms – Tudou.com and Youku.com.
This entry into Japan is significant in many ways. Alibaba has been strategizing to have a global footprint with a stronghold in Asia. Already, it’s cloud product called Aliyun, has a presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, and with this data center, the total number of global data centers has increased to 14. Outside of Asia, it has a big presence in the US, and a growing one in Australia.
Currently, Alibaba is one of the largest conglomerates in the world, and owns the following companies:
- Aliyun – Cloud computing platform
- Tmall – Largest platform for businesses and retailers for B2B and B2C transactions in China.
- Taobao – Largest online shopping platform in China
- AliExpress – A global retail market platform
- 1688 – Leading wholesale marketplace in China
- Alimama – Largest online marketing platform in China
- Youku.com and Tudou.com – China’s largest online video streaming platforms
- Cainiao – Platform for logistics and operation management.
- Alitalk – Instant messenger for merchants and businesses
With such an impressive portfolio of companies, it’s no surprise that Alibaba is looking beyond the Chinese shores. If you look closely, Alibaba and Amazon have a lot in common. Both companies started out as e-commerce retailers and branched into public cloud computing line of business. Also, these two companies are leaders in their respective geographical areas, though Amazon is much larger and has a wider global footprint when compared to Alibaba. This partly explains why Alibaba is trying to mirror Amazon, and even compete with it on the global market.
It is significant to note that Amazon opened its new cloud data center in London last week to meet the growing demands of its British clients, and also to prepare for the possible consequences of Brexit. Likewise, Alibaba also entered the Australian market a few weeks ago to cater to the growing needs of its Australian customers. In this sense, both the companies have been aggressively pursuing different markets, and it’ll be interesting to see how the competition plays out in the Asian market, especially considering that Gartner predicts the Asia Pacific and Japan cloud market to be worth $11.5 billion by 2018.
The post Alibaba Enters Japan appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
How the Cloud Is Transforming the PoS Industry | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #BigData
A number of retailers, especially small businesses, are moving away from these expensive systems to cheaper, yet a lot more sophisticated cloud alternatives. A typical cloud PoS system should cost retailers between $50 to $200 a month.
Point of Sale (Pos) systems typically haven’t required an internet connection. These devices come with a cash register, a barcode scanner and a card reading machine that connects to the bank via a fixed line connection. In addition to this, the higher end PoS systems come with inventory tracking and management tools as well. All of this does not come cheap and the hardware for these devices can cost anywhere between $2000 to $4000. This is not including the monthly support fee of between $25 to $100 that PoS providers charge businesses.
[slides] @Citrix’ #IoT and #DigitalTransformation | @ThingsExpo #BigData #ML
Businesses are struggling to manage the information flow and interactions between all of these new devices and things jumping on their network, and the apps and IT systems they control. The data businesses gather is only helpful if they can do something with it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, discussed how different the impact of IoT will be for large businesses, expanding how IoT will allow large organizations to make their legacy applications and systems more useful by leveraging an increasingly disparate ecosystem of technologies, users and devices to create actionable business intelligence.
[video] Smart Video with @Roundeeio | @ThingsExpo #RTC #UCaaS #WebRTC
«LinearHub provides smart video conferencing, which is the Roundee service, and we archive all the video conferences and we also provide the transcript,» stated Sunghyuk Kim, CEO of LinearHub, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
[slides] @Symantec’s #MachineLearning & Security | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #DL
Most of us already know that adopting new cloud applications can boost a business’s productivity by enabling organizations to be more agile and ready to change course in our fast-moving and connected digital world. But the rapid adoption of cloud apps and services also brings with it profound security threats, including visibility and control challenges that aren’t present in traditional on-premises environments. At the same time, the cloud – because of its interconnected, flexible and adaptable nature – can also provide new possibilities for addressing cloud security problems. By leveraging the power of the cloud with a data science and machine learning cloud-based solution, security and risk professionals can solve many of the traditional security challenges found in popular apps like Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce and Box.
[slides] Introduction to #VPaaS | @ThingsExpo #IoT #RTC #UCaaS #WebRTC
Video experiences should be unique and exciting! But that doesn’t mean you need to patch all the pieces yourself.
Users demand rich and engaging experiences and new ways to connect with you. But creating robust video applications at scale can be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Zohar Babin, Vice President of Platform, Ecosystem and Community at Kaltura, discussed how VPaaS enables you to move fast, creating scalable video experiences that reach your audience anywhere, in an enterprise grade secured environment, low-level video ingestion, processing, management, distribution, and playback. And experience microservices, the Big Data analytics to answer all your end-user consumption and behavior questions.
[video] MathFreeOn with @CISLuser | @CloudExpo #SaaS #IoT #AI #ML #DL
«MathFreeOn.com is a line coding platform for engineers and scientists. When they want to solve an engineering problem and they have to use software – they have to pay a lot of money for licenses – but with MathFreeOn you don’t have to pay a lot of money. Just go to our site and write the code and you can check the result right away,» explained Simon Lee, CMO of MathFreeOn, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
[slides] #IoT and Immobile Data | @ThingsExpo @CalSci #DigitalTransformation
Providing secure, mobile access to sensitive data sets is a critical element in realizing the full potential of cloud computing. However, large data caches remain inaccessible to edge devices for reasons of security, size, format or limited viewing capabilities. Medical imaging, computer aided design and seismic interpretation are just a few examples of industries facing this challenge. Rather than fighting for incremental gains by pulling these datasets to edge devices, we need to embrace the immobile, heavy nature of this data by providing new opportunities for high-performance access and real-time collaboration.
[slides] #IoT in Action | @CloudExpo @OracleIoT #BigData #M2M #AI #ML #DL
What are the new priorities for the connected business? First: businesses need to think differently about the types of connections they will need to make – these span well beyond the traditional app to app into more modern forms of integration including SaaS integrations, mobile integrations, APIs, device integration and Big Data integration. It’s important these are unified together vs. doing them all piecemeal. Second, these types of connections need to be simple to design, adapt and configure. Plus, with the proliferation of IoT, there is an explosion in the number of devices requiring interconnection – both in terms of asset monitoring and spatial analytics.