AWS names Dow Jones vet to drive its enterprise game plan

by Barb Darro

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photo: Amazon Web Services

SUMMARY:

Stephen Orban, a former CIO at Dow Jones and a Bloomberg veteran as well, brings an enterprise worldview with him to Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services has a new enterprise strategy chief in Stephen Orban, who, as a former CIO of Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and Barrons, probably knows something about the enterprise mindset. Before that he was at Bloomberg where he helped launch Bloomberg Sports, which was sold to STATS LLC, according to CIO Journal (registration required), which first reported the news. Orban disclosed his plans two weeks ago in a Medium post.

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IBM builds up its cloud with Netezza as a service and NoSQL as software

by Derrick Harris

photo: Clockready/Wikimedia Commons

SUMMARY:

IBM announced a new, promising collection of cloud data services on Monday, adding to an already-impressive collections services on its Bluemix platform. At this point, though, IBM’s biggest challenge isn’t selling enterprise users on the cloud, but convincing them it’s still the best choice.

IBM announced a bunch of new cloud data services on Monday, including an intelligent data-preparation tool, an in-memory analytic database and even a local version of a historically cloud-based database. It’s an impressive and in some cases even unique set of capabilities that complements the work IBM has been pushing with its Bluemix platform since February.

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Twitter Beats In Q3 With Revenue Of $361M, But Slowing User Growth Drags Its Shares Down 8%

by Alex Wilhelm (@alex)

Update: Twitter is now down around 10 percent in after-hours trading. Its CEO, in an interview with CNBC, said that his company is the “fastest growing business” in the big-dollar digital advertising space. 

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AWS Expands Its European Footprint With Frankfurt Data Center

 Provided by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)

Amazon today announced that it has opened the second data center for its AWS cloud computing service in Europe. The new Frankfurt region follows in the footsteps of the company’s operations in Ireland, which launched back in 2007.
The Frankfurt region sports two availability zones (compared to the three zones in Ireland) and offers access to almost all of Amazon’s cloud computing services, including EC2, S3 and DynamoDB. Missing, however, are tools like ElastiCache, SimpleDB and Amazon WorkSpaces.

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Android Wear Update Adds Offline Music, Bluetooth Headphone And GPS Support

Android Wear is getting its first big update, with features that make smartwatches using Google’s wearable operating system more standalone devices, including music syncing and GPS location support. That means if you leave your watch at home while you go out for a jog, you’ve still got access to sweet jams, and your watch can still tell you where you are, and how to get home.
The GPS features will work so long as an Android Wear device has the necessary hardware, which means no current shipping Android Wear watch can take advantage of them yet. The first Wear-powered smartwatch coming to market with GPS support is the Sony SmartWatch 3, which is up for pre-order starting today at Verizon’s website, and which lists a shipping date of October 30. Google says it’ll start selling the SmartWatch 3 via the Play Devices store soon, too.

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Hardware Battlefield Applications Close In A Week

Stop procrastinating and fill out your application for Hardware Battlefield. The show is set to be even better than last year with participating startups getting free exhibition space at the 2015 International CES and competing for $50,000 and the coveted Metal Man trophy.
For the first time, TechCrunch has partnered with the CEA to be an official media partner of the tradeshow. This means companies selected to participate in Hardware Battlefield will get even more attention from the press, investors and hardware distributors.

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Bitcasa nixes unlimited storage plan as it upgrades its infrastructure

By Jonathan Vanian

    

Summary: As part of the change, users will need to download new Bitcasa apps and then migrate their old data to the new platform by November 15 or face their data being erased.

photo: alexmillos/Shutterstock

Streaming storage startup Bitcasa has removed support for its “infinite drive” storage plan that allowed unlimited storage for $999. The company has also decreased its free storage plan from 20GB to 5GB. Bitcasa described the change in service as part of its storage infrastructure overhaul.

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