News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
The Open Source software movement has the momentum of a force of nature. Great contributions to enterprise IT are being made by open source today. It is important to keep a full spectrum view in mind, the great innovations of proprietary shops are critical to success, but the strengths of open source are something we should all leverage.
Android is a great mobile computing platform. It’s extensible, fairly easy-to-use (considering its plethora of features), has a great application store with hundreds of thousands of applications, and connects back with everything in Google so that all of Google’s information and services are at the users fingertip. For developers, it’s a very extendable platform which is able to integrate code from a variety of languages, run C programs, and deploy … [Read more...]
Do you have a program or project that is evaluating "big data" approaches to the solution. You are not alone. With the explosion of data hitting almost every facet of IT, project leaders and program managers everywhere are downloading and evaluating the open source Apache Hadoop. Since the word Hadoop is so frequently used to refer to the entire suite of open source tools around the core capability, one thing to keep in mind is that you will also need … [Read more...]
Say you're a Crip gangbanger and want to declare a "Crip Holiday" for you and your homies. You put it out on Twitter, bring a 9mm pistol along with you, and congregate at a local park at 7:30. You get there only to find out that the police are waiting for you. Sounds stupid? Well, it actually happened. Quoth Mashable's Radhika Marya: The New York Daily News reports that police learned the alleged Crips members were using Twitter to call for a … [Read more...]
As Katherine Maher pointed out on Twitter, no one gets credit when contingency plans work. And it is truly amazing how much government-citizen information collaboration has evolved--not to mention the growth of data journalism even in the most traditional news outlets. The average citizen had a wealth of accurate (and useful) hurricane information to choose from. There was also plenty of data to be used for those seeking to tinker, and very useful … [Read more...]
With this post we provide some info on a capability we believe most of our readers will want to know more about, the Plug and Play Tech Center. For an overview see the video clip below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkse7I5k44E&feature=player_embedded The Plug and Play Tech Center is a Silicon Valley facility with a very apropos name. If you have a business idea or a hot technology and you want to accelerate it into the world, you want to go … [Read more...]
Do you have a need to index and search pictures and video? If you are working for any of the intelligence agencies, a police department, or any other security force that involves video and photo, you may. You may even have a need for this outside of the intelligence/security realm. How do you do it now? Does a human need to look at each video and picture and index what objects are visible in the video? That could take ages if so, and may be nearly … [Read more...]
Last week the White House and the Federal CIO announced that the source code of the cost-saving IT Dashboard has been made available to the public and other government agencies. This first open source release will serve as a starting point for communities of interest to adapt the code to their own needs and develop unique versions of the Dashboard. This development is the latest in a growing movement to cut government IT spending by sharing … [Read more...]
Doug Cutting is the creator of Lucene, Nutch and Hadoop. Doug and these projects are increasingly being mentioned in enterprise environments. So with this post I'll provide a bit more of context on each. Doug Cutting has earned a reputation as an innovative, community-supporting developer. He is on the board of directors of the Apache Software Foundation and is now its Chairman. He is the Architect at Cloudera, the firm famous for delivering an end to … [Read more...]