The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently identified four keys areas in which to focus for the next 15 years: Health, Farming, Banking, and Education. Bill himself holds forth on a regular basis about the challenges facing many billions of people in the world, particularly in Africa, as well as the opportunities to save lives and change lives.

He does not seem naïve about the enormity of the challenges, and does not offer technology as a simple panacea to what ails the world. He also seems committed to respecting national sovereignty in implementing programs, difficult as that may be sometimes. And he seems to understand very clearly that even the vast wealth of his and his wife’s foundation and its allies cannot hope to achieve signficant results on its own.

I would add Energy, Transportation, and Government to Bill’s and Melinda’s list–aware that the Foundation supports these areas and many others as well. In our efforts at the Tau Institute, we then focus on how the Internet of Things will play a role in these areas as well as societal improvement and transformation overall. We’ve also chosen a 25-year timeframe, an thus use the term IoT 2040 to describe our activities.

Our program includes research, events, consulting, and technical education. We have four overriding goals:

1. To spur beneficial economic development in all corners of the world
2. To reduce poverty & disease
3. To curtail violence as a way of settling disputes
4. To produce political and societal leaders who will maintain progress

We think a good way to measure progress is through the research we’ve been conducting for the past few years, which creates relative,”pound-for-pound” rankings that show how well nations are doing with respect to their available resources.

Our rankings reflect a lot of time spent, by me and by our associates and advisors, living in the various corners of the world. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

The most dynamic countries should correlate well over time with those most quickly growing their economies in an equitable way.

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“People are a lot more knowledgeable about APIs now. There are two types of people who work with APIs – IT people who want to use APIs for something internal and the product managers who want to do something outside APIs for people to connect to them,” explained Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Big Data, AI, Machine Learning, Hadoop, Predictive Analytics — we hear these terms every day from companies such as Cloudera, Trifacta and Dato (formerly GraphLab) that are securing many millions in financing. I believe that 2015 will be the year when the conversation moves from Big Data to the Dataware stack. Over the past twelve months we have seen a lot of companies across the big data spectrum emerge and while the language can be the same, there are clear product categories that have emerged which describe the market opportunity and future growth.

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No, it’s not an endless loop waiting to happen, the plan here is to use Logstash to parse Elasticsearch logs and send them to another Elasticsearch cluster or to a log analytics service like Logsene (which conveniently exposes the Elasticsearch API, so you can use it without having to run and manage your own Elasticsearch cluster).
If you’re looking for some ELK stack intro and you think you’re in the wrong place, try our 5-minute Logstash tutorial. Still, if you have non-trivial amounts of data, you might end up here again. Because you’ll probably need to centralize Elasticsearch logs for the same reasons you centralize other logs.

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Remote work in ops is divisive. The perks of working from home, your local coffee shop, wherever, can be quite obvious to engineers and contributors. But some team leaders and company execs aren’t buying it. One faction sees it as a way to do better quality work. Another has watched deadlines and motivation fall by the wayside because of unresponsive remote workers.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of remote work? What should you consider before you take the plunge into flexible hours and asynchronous communication?

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Many years ago Gartner introduced their technology Hype Cycle, which maps visibility against maturity for new technology. The Hype Cycle in essence states that many new technologies get a large amount of visibility early in their maturity cycle. The visibility and enthusiasm drops significantly when reality sets in: technologies early in their maturity cycle will have low adoption rates. The vast majority of customers of technology are conservative in their choices, especially if this new technology is not (yet) fundamental to this customer’s business.

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If you’re part of the decision making process in how to get started with Big Data then you’ve probably already discovered that open source Apache Hadoop has a big lead. You also know that unless you’ve got a particularly deep NoSQL team or want to write your own proprietary code that the free open source version of Hadoop is not for the great majority of businesses. You want the benefits of open source but with some support and some capabilities that tie the open source components together in an enterprise quality database system. You want a Hadoop Distribution.

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“For over 25 years we have been working with a lot of enterprise customers and we have seen how companies create applications. And now that we have moved to cloud computing, mobile, social and the Internet of Things, we see that the market needs a new way of creating applications,” stated Jesse Shiah, CEO, President and Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Some of the network gear vendors cast a wary look at network management vendors, particularly those who do continual, automatic discovery of the network inventory and connectivity. Why?

We know what’s actually out there, and what’s actually being used.
We had one customer in the insurance industry who was due to renew their maintenance agreement with a large, well-known network gear vendor. The typical scenario was to be handed a spreadsheet by the salesperson, listing the serial numbers of the network devices they had purchased, together with a summary of maintenance charges.

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Code Halos – aka “digital fingerprints” – are the key organizing principle to understand a) how dumb things become smart and b) how to monetize this dynamic.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Robert Brown, AVP, Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant Technology Solutions, outlined research, analysis and recommendations from his recently published book on this phenomena on the way leading edge organizations like GE and Disney are unlocking the Internet of Things opportunity and what steps your organization should be taking to position itself for the next platform of digital competition.

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