BobGourley

Bob Gourley is Crucial Point LLC’s founder and editor of CTOvision.com. Bob has received industry recognition including Infoworld top CTO award, AFCEA’s meritorious service award, and recognition as one of the top 100 “Tech Titans” in DC by Washingtonian magazine. He was named one of the “Top 25 Most Fascinating Communicators in Government IT.”

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors: The flying robot video you absolutely must watch

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As you watch the video below you can form your own conclusions about this natural evolution of robotics.  But I'll give you some of my opinions below the video: http://youtu.be/YQIMGV5vtd4 Now some context: As a technologist I would like to remind you all that every future use case for incredibly capable systems like this will involve IT with moving parts, and all IT with moving parts requires IT guys to fix them when they break. So guess … [Read more...]

President’s Daily Brief- There’s an app for that: iPad Used to Deliver President’s Daily Briefing

President Obama receives Presidential Daily Briefing via iPad

The White House photo of the day for 31 Jan 2012 is one to remember.  It shows proof positive that the megatrend towards a consumerization of IT is not only unstoppable, but is changing enterprises everywhere in very positive ways. The photo, shown below, shows two iPad's in use, one each for the President and for Robert Cardillo, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration. Cardillo is reviewing several key items from the … [Read more...]

Anup Ghosh on Cybersecurity in 2012: Let’s break the security insanity cycle

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Editor's note: the post below by Anup Ghosh first appeared on the Invincea blog and is republished here with the author's permission. bg Prediction 2012: Hackers Will Find New Fertile Ground to Pharm Posted by Anup Ghosh on November 29, 2011 Invincea is on record that the year 2011 will go down as the year the fundamental underpinnings of Internet security fell. In fact, it is the bloodiest year on record for Internet security. Not only did we … [Read more...]

Hadoop Quickstart: Use Whirr to automate standup of your distributed cluster on Rackspace

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We have previously provided a Quickstart guide to standing up Rackspace cloud servers (and have one for Amazon servers as well). These are very low cost ways of building reliable, production ready capabilities for enterprise use (commercial and government).  And Bryan Halfpap has provided a Quickstart guide which shows you how to build a Hadoop Cluster (leveraging Cloudera's CDH3).  Using Bryan's guide you can have a Hadoop Cluster up and running in … [Read more...]

President Mentions Cyber-Threats in State of the Union Address

cyberThreat

Cyber practitioners have long wondered when this would happen. Now it has. The President of the United States has finally realized that the threat from malicious actors in cyberspace has grown so significant that it bears mentioning in the State of the Union Address. In his January 24, 2012 State of the Union Address President Obama, while talking about America's military strength, said: "To stay one step ahead of our adversaries, I have already sent … [Read more...]

Fixmo Announces Advisory Board, Adds to Board of Directors

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We have previously written about the Mobile Risk Management leader Fixmo and their relevance to enterprise missions and I have shared my excitement to be on the advisory board of this very virtuous firm (see, for example, Fixmo And Mobile Risk Management For Enterprise and Government Agencies). Fixmo has just announced the full membership of their advisory board plus some additions to their board of directors. Other advisers include: Mr. Wilson … [Read more...]

A CTO Perspective: Consider The Message The Elders of the Internet Have A Message for the U.S. Congress

the internet is a series of tubes

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) was founded in 1990 as a donor funded non-profit with a focus on fighting for internet freedoms. They frequently bring those fights to the courts by bringing lawsuits against large corporations and the government. They also work to provide information to inform legislators and the public at large. The EFF is cool, but of course you don't have to agree with every position they have ever taken. That said, all in … [Read more...]

Cloudera and Carahsoft Webinar: Big Data Success in Government 19 Jan 2012

Cloudera and Carahsoft explore Big Data success stories in the Federal Government

Thursday January 19, 2012 Carahsoft and Cloudera are presenting a webinar on Big Data in the federal space. The following is from their announcement site: Join us as we describe big data technologies including Apache Hadoop and how government organizations have been successfully deploying these technologies. We will discuss the fundamentals of Hadoop and how it fits into government initiatives. In this live webcast, Bob Gourley, Editor of … [Read more...]

Consume CTOVision on your Apple iPhone or iPad or Android Phone or Tablet with Google Currents

currents

Ryan Kamauff introduced Google Currents to our readers, calling it "one of the best designed apps I have ever seen."  I have to agree, they have done a good job with this, producing something that works on Android and iOS and works well for both those communities. Currents also works well for producers of content. Producers can easily configure the backend of the app to distribute content in ways that are easy for readers to find what interests … [Read more...]

Quickstart Guide: Stand up your cloud-based servers with Rackspace

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Rackspace is a growing cloud computing capability provider that differentiates themselves by what they call "Fanatical Support."  We try not to dwell too long on the marketing slogans of firms but have first-hand experience with Rackspace and can tell you their support is really really different. It must be the culture, but every support experience has left me convinced they are a great company to do business with. We host several sites at … [Read more...]