The telcos, including some big national carriers, have announced their backing of Mozilla’s Firefox OS, a smartphone platform that’s supposed to bring down the price of smartphones. That’s obviously what’s behind the deal in the first place; telcos have become weary of subsidizing handsets to promote coolness. They’ve encouraged Microsoft and now it appears that…
Author: Tom Nolle
Did Google Reinvent the Tablet, or Do Another Wave?
Google announced its tablet and some other things besides, and the question now is whether there’s some grand strategy at work here or just a bunch of geeks throwing products at a marketplace. I think there’s some thinking here, but whether it’s sound thinking remains to be seen. The Nexus 7 tablet is pretty much…
Making SDN’s REALLY Work
The challenges with coming to terms with technical concepts in our Age of Hype is embodied in a story about SDN that appears in Network World. The story lists five drivers of SDN transition, which include mobility, the cloud, consumerization of IT, traffic patterns in data centers, and agile service delivery. The challenge is that…
Operators Take Content into their Own Hands
Tablets, say the research, are becoming a more favored platform for video viewing, with one in ten tablet users viewing content at least daily. The key point in the data may not be the frequency, which likely surprises no one, but the demography. The largest tablet penetration is in the key 25-35 year-olds, the swing…
Microsoft’s Tentative Tablet and Telstra’s Breakout Move
Microsoft’s new tablet, the “Surface” was announced with much fanfare, but the product has been getting mixed reviews in no small part because it’s really not possible to review it at all. You can’t get one, even to play with, so far. No pun intended, but on the surface the device appears well-made and it…
Yammer and Political Yammering
It’s one of those days of a buffet of items that missed the cut during the week. There’s a theme though, which is the evolution of broadband and Internet. Microsoft announced it’s going to buy Yammer, a company who specializes in creating a kind of social workplace, a collaborative framework based not on evolved voice…
Cisco’s “Architectures” and Networking’s Future
Cisco’s annual event kicked off, and while all these events aren’t necessarily a window into the strategic future of Cisco, this one might well be. Cisco came out more strongly in favor of the notion of strategy and architecture than I’d ever heard them. It’s too early to say that this change is going to…
Some Random Tech Shots
It’s potpourri Monday, folks, and I’ve saved some items that didn’t make the topical cut last week for treatment. Don’t look for too much of a theme today, other than that I’m looking for “news” that’s not being treated comprehensively. If you think you’ve heard everything try this one out; the UN’s ITU is proposing…
SDNs Find their Niche?
Big Switch, one of the most active and interesting of the OpenFlow players, has announced a number of new things that may help the market better understand the value of OpenFlow. In particular, they help understand how OpenFlow might be used in conjunction with “normal” network protocols. To start with, it’s important to understand that…
Consumer Changes May Drive Networks in New Directions
Google’s augmented reality glasses have captivated people, but there are other aspects of blending of potentially live material with gaming and other experiences that may be realized faster. There are other changes in the consumer space that appear to have some potential to create broad impact, and that’s what I propose to talk about today….