Startups - Infoworld

Obama attacks offshoring, seeks visa reform

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:49:49 +0000

In his State of the Union Speech, President Barack Obama Tuesday night attacked offshoring, urged businesses to bring jobs back to the U.S., and renewed his appeal for visa reforms to keep foreign students from returning home after earning advanced degrees.

Obama Tuesday made many references to tech, to business startups and to innovation in the speech.

9 hot technology startups to watch in 2012

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:20:17 +0000

While there are sure to be a lot of new networking and IT companies that emerge in 2012, these nine stood out for their potential to deliver game-changing innovations in a wide array of fields, including cloud computing, enterprise search, and mobile application development.

Interview: Gaurav Dhillon, cloud entrepreneur

Eric Knorr — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Back in the early 1990s, with a $75,000 grant from the National Institute of Health, Gaurav Dhillon literally started Informatica in his garage. During his 12-year tenure as CEO, he built Informatica into a public company that stands as one of the leading EAI (enterprise application integration) software vendors.

Sotheby's sells Apple founding contract for $1.6M

admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:24:13 +0000

The contract that founded Apple was purchased Tuesday for nearly $1.6 million, far above the estimate of $100,000 to $150,000 put on the 35-year-old document by Sotheby's.

The auctioneer sold the contract, part of a larger sale of rare books and manuscripts, Tuesday morning for a total of $1,594,500, which included the 12 percent buyer's premium, or the commission taken by the auction house.

Beware the mobile tech jobs bubble

Bill Snyder — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:00:00 +0000

We all knew that the end of the dot-com bubble resulted in widespread failure of companies and the loss of many IT-related jobs. But until recently, there were few hard statistics to flesh out that assumption. Now there are -- at least for Silicon Valley, the heart of the bubble. They indicate that high tech is not necessarily the source of long-term jobs and suggest that the brewing mobile apps bubble could bust fairly quickly if startup funding continues to decline.

Big Switch Networks lures away VMware virtual networking veteran

David Marshall — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:46:23 +0000

Back in April, Big Switch Networks dropped out of stealth mode to announce a $13.75 million round of financing, led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

WikiLeaks meets WiccaLeaks: Which is witch?

Robert X. Cringely — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:02:23 +0000

It's all WikiLeaks all the time here in Cringeville this morning. And for sheer entertainment value, the wiki saga lands somewhere between the clown circus over at AOL/TechCrunch and today's Netflix/Qwikster mishegas.

7 cloud companies on the rise

admin — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:00:00 +0000

By now we're all familiar with the big names in the cloud computing industry, such as Amazon, Rackspace, and VMware. But there are also a whole host of cloud startups that are coming online to help you manage your cloud services provided by the big players.

Altaro readies Hyper-V backup tool for small businesses

David Marshall — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:53:28 +0000

It's nothing new to say that virtualization is booming due to the flexibility, efficiency, and savings it provides. It remains a growing market even with a down economy, and the more it grows, the more companies will be looking for solutions to help protect and manage their virtual environments.

Facebook shouldn't be afraid to rewrite its code, and neither should you

Neil McAllister — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:00:00 +0000

In most fields, there's a special kind of shame associated with having to start a project over from scratch. As an architect, for example, the last thing you want to hear is that one of your buildings will be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up because it can no longer support the weight of its tenants.

According to computer scientist and entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, however, that's more or less the situation confronting Facebook right now. Only in Facebook's case, the "building" is a Web application, and the problem isn't concrete or steel girders; it's MySQL.

Startup launches new SaaS cloud monitoring solution, RevealCloud

David Marshall — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:59:20 +0000

In the IT world, we're always looking for the next big thing, and for the last year or two, one of those next big things has been cloud computing. Unfortunately, numerous questions around the cloud have been holding it back. There has been general confusion as to what exactly is the cloud, how is it defined, what is it made up of, and why do we need it.

Startup aims to secure application clouds and virtual desktops

David Marshall — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:01:50 +0000

Last week at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco, Simon Crosby, the former CTO of Citrix Systems' data center and cloud division, announced the eyebrow-lifting news of his departure from Citrix, along with Ian Pratt, chairman of Xen.org and co-founder of XenSource. The two have decided to leave Citrix in order to form a new stealth company called Bromium.

Silicon Valley's road to recovery

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Things are bubbling in Silicon Valley, according to the latest quarterly Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index [PDF], released Thurs

AOL's continuing war on Web journalism, the TechCrunch edition

Robert X. Cringely — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:42:01 +0000

Sadly, today's blog post is not about the royal wedding, but it is about a royal pain in the ass known as Michael Arrington. It's also more generally about what's happened to the profession that I have called my own for the past 397 years.

Stop acting like a startup, Google

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:29:08 +0000

If Google were a literary character, it would be Lenny from John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men." Lenny is a mountain of a man and a tireless, impressive worker with a heart of gold. He's always intent on doing the right thing (that is, "doing no evil").

2011's IPOs show the future is in consumer tech

Bill Snyder — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000

It's not exactly raining money in Silicon Valley these days, but the market for technology IPOs is finally coming back to life. A look at new offerings in the first quarter of 2011 showed that seven tech companies went public, compared to just three in the same period in 2010, according to a survey by PwC (previously named PricewaterhouseCoopers).

AOL vs. Web journalism, part 3: Engadget strikes back

Robert X. Cringely — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:58:59 +0000

AOL promised to be a source of endless drama in 2011 (or amusement, depending on your point of view), and so far it has not disappointed.

It seems the company was furiously working on an ego-compression algorithm that would allow both Michael Arrington and Arianna Huffington to be in the same building at the same time when an explosion occurred and eight Engadget staffers were blown clear. Hey, I read it on the InterWebs, so it must be true.

Big Data runs afoul of big lawyers

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:00:00 +0000

If you've read anything about the phenomenon of Big Data, then you probably picture armies of servers chugging some form of the the ReadWriteWeb blog says. It's also coming from the people you'd least expect: 4chan.

In search of: A Delete key for email

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:34:13 +0000

If lawyers or hackers got hold of your company's email messages, what sort of picture would emerge?