Infotrade

Oracle for years has seemed impervious to cloud computing. First Larry Ellison dismissed it. Then he sort of touted it, his version at least. But all along, Oracle was growing nicely. The industry chatter didn’t seem to matter. Big companies buy big software systems. Something changed this winter. Oracle’s software license sales limped up just 2% in December, and the company blamed customer budget cuts and fears over the European debt crisis. Sales to Europe, Africa and the Middle East make up a third of Oracle’s revenues. The stock took an instant 8% hit, but perhaps more tellingly is 22% off its May 2011 high. Investors appear to be signalling that Oracle ‘s recent woes are due to more than just stingy customers. Could it be true that big, hulking IT organizations are changing buying patterns? Patrick Walravens, a veteran software industry analyst at JMP Securities, believes so. He just lowered his ratings on Oracle to “market perform”. He blames the adoption o...

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who wrote the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” that defined such corporate conundrums, described them as arising when a disruptive technology—like a small disk drive or steel mill—becomes so big that it displaces an existing market, sending big, successful businesses to their doom. Of course, this happens in part because disruptive technologies are often difficult to recognize. This is especially true in the case of telecom, when the disruptive innovation isn’t any particular technology per se, but the rise of smart devices at the edge of carrier networks. Carriers have embraced this trend, believing that iPhones, iPads, Droids and other smart devices will eventually reduce customer churn and increase the amount of time they spend on the network. It’s a reasonable approach—but it is contributing to a dramatic shift in the balance of telecom power in the United States. This is particularly obvious in the wake of the holiday season....

Google may be getting ready to take augmented reality to the next level: According to a report, an Android-powered pair of glasses will go on sale by the end of 2012. If so, get ready for a new take on the concept of wearable computing. A number of smart gadgets that track your movements and assess your health havemade waves over the last year, but Google Glasses (just my suggested name) would be something unique: a network-connected pair of spectacles with a camera and a display that could record images and video of one’s surroundings and display information from elsewhere on a tiny screen, according to a report in The New York Times . If it sounds like a potential privacy minefield, that’s because it is. There are obviously all kinds of benign implications for such a device, such as tourism or spectator sports, but it’s already easy enough for people to walk around recording each other with smartphones . The first production of these glasses will probably make it pa...

One of the biggest challenges for classroom teachers is developing ways of ensuring students understand the material, especially the ones who feel self-conscious about asking questions or participating in class discussions. A new mobile app, GoSoapBox , hopes to become the go-to tool to help educators break down barriers and determine whether students are grasping what's going on in class. Using apps this way isn't new—some teachers are already using Twitter to engage shy students in classroom discussions. What sets GoSoapBox apart is that students aren't required to create an account, allowing them to remain anonymous. Students can use the service from a smartphone, tablet device, or laptop by typing in a code. They can ask questions, vote up questions posed by their classmates, participate in discussions, or tell the teacher they're confused—all without revealing their identities. Like for other new technologies, the principal hurdle to GoSo...

Another day, another threat to internet freedom. According to International Business Times, beloved Texas Representative Lamar Smith is the author of a new bill that includes extreme surveillance provisions, and a name that will make opponents sound like criminals: H.R. 1981 (bump that last digit up three times for a more fitting title), or the 'Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.' The new name has outraged many opponents of SOPA and other bills that could bring more government control to the internet, like PIPA and ACTA. It's hard to imagine the whole world turning out against a bill with the words 'protect' and 'children' in the title, regardless of the actual contents of the bill. In the words of Business Insider's David Seaman , it's “just a B.S. name so that politicians in the House and Senate are strong-armed into voting for it, even though it contains utterly insane 1984-style Big Brother surve...

New York City residents and visitors could be in for a major tech upgrade soon — the televisions in the back of taxi cabs might soon be replaced with embedded tablets. The NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission is considering a proposal from San Francisco-based mobile payment company Square to replace the televisions in 50 taxicabs with iPads or other similar tablet devices, according to a report in The New York Times . If implemented, the devices would allow riders to browse the Internet, play computer games, and swipe their credit card at any point during the trip. Square, which was created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is expected to present its proposal to the commission at its next meeting on March 1. The full cost of the program would be paid for by Square, according to reports. "Taxi drivers are among our most active and loyal users, with thousands of drivers around the country choosing Square as a more...

Anonymous , the loosely affiliated group of “hacktivists,” have had a wide array of targets: The Boston and Oakland Police Departments, the FBI, Scotland Yard and the Greek government, just to name a few. Targets are selected because of a perceived injustice: police brutality, Internet censorship or the rich oppressing the poor. Once perceived as a minor nuisance, Anonymous is getting some serious attention: According to the Wall Street Journal , the Director of the National Security Agency, or NSA, has cautioned that Anonymous could have the capability to knock out power in the U.S. through cyberattacks within the next one to two years. NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander issued his warning in private government meetings, and Anonymous hasn’t yet been added to any public “threat list.” However Alexander, and other government officials, have expressed growing concern about America’s vulnerability to cyberattack. President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget, for ex...

What do Eric Schmidt, Mark Zukerberg and the Chinese government have in common? They've all made failed attempts to remove anonymity from the social web. For different reasons. Last week, China announced the next phase of a censorship program that requires all social media profiles be registered with a valid phone number and state-issued ID number by March 16th. The government's stated intent is to create a better Internet society free of porn, spam and fraud, but we'd be stupid not to think that China isn't also trying to prevent social unrest, i.e. Egypt and Libya. Regardless of China's intent, some Internet experts I've talked to say the censorship move will destroy the world's fastest growing social web community. As proof, they point to a price decline in shares of Chinese micro-blogging companies, and a significant decrease in new user registrations, such as Sina's recent drop from 20 to 3 million per month; many...

Peak Games , a maker of social games in Turkey, is acquiring Saudi Arabia’s Kammelna Games to expand its presence in the fast-growing social game market in the Middle East. With more than 20 million monthly active users, Peak Games says it has become one of the top four social game companies in the world in the past 14 months, mainly on the strength of its games that are tailored for various countries and ethnic groups in the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey. Istanbul-based Peak Games wants to become the leader for online social games in the region, said Rina Onur, chief strategy officer of Peak Games, in an interview. “We have been expanding and hiring aggressively,” Onur said. “Kammelna is a great fit for us because they create culturally relevant games that are social and multiplayer in nature.” While other game makers often pay lip service to localizing their games for the Middle East, Peak Games goes far beyond simply translating ...

In many ways, everyone who is different from us is a bewildering, inexplicable enigma. They arbitrarily hate the things we like and like the things we hate, and behave in ways we can't predict. That makes us hate them a little. We end up concluding that these people (members of the opposite sex, opposing political party, owners of a rival video game system) are just one-dimensional stock characters placed as obstacles or foils in the movie that is our life. This has created a society that is almost sitcomlike in its huge, but simple, misunderstandings. It would be hilarious if the results weren't so tragic, and it's all due to the fact that we not only do not understand each other, but don't even try. That's because ... #4. We Think Trying to Understand Someone is the Same as Siding With Them Getty At some point after 9/11 when things had calmed down just a bit, some progressive guest on a news show was the first to say, "We need to understa...