Negative Approach

Khronos updates OpenGL high-performance graphics

The nonprofit Khronos Group standards organization announced a new specification this week for OpenGL 4.2, which brings new graphics functionality to the what's considered to be the most widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API.

OpenGL 4.2 includes specs for enhancing pixel rendering, geometry and efficiency in memory storage and bandwidth, as well as a lot of other very technical specs. In short, OpenGL 4.2 makes graphics looks better across multiple platforms and gives developers a consistent set of APIs to work with.

Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content for Nvidia, said there were … Read more

North Korea's army of online game hackers

From the "I guess this makes sense" files, the New York Times reports that North Korea has unleashed a squad of hackers to infiltrate South Korean gaming sites. The two countries have technically been at war for almost 60 years, and cyber-attacks are the modern-day equivalent to a slap in the face.

The police in Seoul said Thursday that four South Koreans and a Korean-Chinese had been arrested on charges of drawing on that army to organize a hacking squad of 30 young video gaming experts.

Working from Northern China, the police said, the squad created software that … Read more

BMC's vision for the cloud

For a company with an $8 billion market cap, we really don't hear too much about BMC. And yet, when I met CTO Kia Behnia this week, I couldn't help but be very impressed by the company's focus on the cloud and its vision for where much of enterprise IT is likely to be heading.

According to Behnia, BMC currently has more than 85 customers for its cloud services products, primarily large companies looking into both public and private clouds as ways to enhance their environments.

From Behnia's perspective, the primary opportunity for the private cloud … Read more

Totango set to enhance SaaS sales tools

As enterprise users grew tired of installing massive suites of on-premise customer relation management software and Internet-oriented businesses began to rise, Salesforce.com came along and turned hosted applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), into a multi-billion dollar market.

Following in Salesforce's wake came lead-nurturing tools like Constant Contact, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Marketo that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and have ostensibly added value to their customers' relationship.

This week we see the launch of Totango (pronounced like "to tango"), which bills itself as a "real-time customer usage analysis platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) … Read more

VC funding in second quarter continues 2011 uptick

Private company research firm CB Insights today released a new report on the state of venture capital financing for the second quarter of 2011. With $7.6 billion invested in 768 deals in the second quarter, we are on track to see $29 billion to $30 billion invested through all of 2011.

California, Massachusetts, and New York combined to take nearly 75 percent of U.S. venture capital funding in the second quarter of this year, the highest concentration in five quarters. California remained on top with deals in the state up 27 percent and dollars up 19 percent. California'… Read more

Snaplogic CEO on integration in the cloud (Q&A)

The rapid rise of cloud computing and near-ubiquity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) has breathed new life into the integration space, or so says Gaurav Dhillon, chairman and CEO of SnapLogic.

SnapLogic is a cloud integration company making a name for itself with technology that can "containerize" data, making it easier to move in and around disparate cloud and on-premise applications and data sources.

I caught up with Dhillon--perhaps best known as CEO and co-founder of publicly traded data integration pioneer Informatica in the early 1990s--after his cameo at Structure 2011 in San Francisco last month. I wanted to get … Read more

CA focuses on virtualization-to-cloud continuum

Over the last several years CA Technologies has made a number of cloud-related acquisitions--3Tera, Oblicore, Nimsoft--companies focused on the management and associated necessities of cloud infrastructure, if not direct components or providers of clouds themselves.

At this week's Structure conference in San Francisco, I spoke with Jay Fry, vice president of marketing for cloud computing, about what the company is doing to address the burgeoning cloud marketplace. (The company changed its name last year from CA, and before that it was Computer Associates.)

According to Fry, this year is about figuring out what customers really want--not just from … Read more

A field guide to the cloud

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

The Web is taking too long (infographic)

New Relic last week released the results of a study it conducted on 1 billion Web pages across the globe this month--and the data suggest Web page success can come down to a matter of seconds.

Using its new end-user technology, the application performance management company monitored actual page loads on Web sites across a variety of browsers and operating systems, including mobile, for the span of one week.

It takes an average of six seconds for a Web page to fully load, according to the research. That might not seem like a long time to the untrained observer, but … Read more