Startup Opportunities on Vehicle History Checks

"The automotive industry is undoubtedly flaring up with some awesome tech innovations, but there is still one sector to tackle: vehicle history checks, a ghost sector that lies in the shadows of the automotive industry and hides from any overt advertisement. Worth over £500 million in the U.K. alone, these behemoths charge prospective car owners between £3 – £20 for you to check the history behind a vehicle. Information that should really be publicly accessible. Unfortunately our government has not yet given free public access to this data, instead deciding to charge £90,000 per year for access, adding a significant barrier to entry for most  startups." Read more on >>

Cloud Based Children Toys

Powered by IBM Watson system, new cloud based Children toys are being manufactured by a company called Elemental Path. The toys will be able to engage in real conversations with children and grow with them. The early prototypes of the CogniToys dinosaur has a big button that, when pressed, begins the interaction. Inside, the technology is lightweight. There’s only a speakerphone, microphone, battery pack, and a small piece of hardware that connects to the cloud. “As a connected device, we’re really doing all the processing in the cloud. The benefit of that is that we can launch a more affordable toy,” explains Coolidge co-founder of Elemental Path. The distinguishing feature of the toy is its ability to listen and respond to questions and return its answers very quickly due to its connected nature. As it is used it collects the information and remember the previously asked questions. As the system’s content is updated, the next child to ask the same question will now have an answer. Aimed at those ages four to seven, the toy can be customized to its owners. For the toy’s younger users, the system offers activities like jokes and storytelling, while older kids can ask it more specific questions, including questions about educational content, like math.  For further reading >>

Google' s New Tool for Measuring Cloud Performance

Google's announcements of its new performance tool in its cloud platform blog has not come as a surprise to anyone as there was a big market gap in this area for long time. For the programmers developing applications, performance is the number one issue, therefore evaluating cloud offerings has always been difficult.   Google has admitted that when they looked at how their own users could measure the relative performance of Google Cloud Platform, "it was clear they struggled with this exact problem." Google then started collecting feedback from several different sources including academia, cloud providers, and experts to further evaluate the situation and came up with a cloud performance benchmarking framework which they call PerfKitBenchmarker. Google claim with this tool  "You'll now have a way to easily benchmark across cloud platforms, while getting a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance, and overhead." Google also created a visualisation tool to help the customers interpret the results on dashboards. Releasing the source code under the ASLv2 license, tool is open for contributors to collaborate and maintain a balanced set of benchmarks.  Contributors can participate through github If they want something to be removed or added. Perfkit tool will be continuously updated with the technological advances and changes. Google says "we'll adapt PerfKit to keep it current. It already includes several well-known benchmarks, and covers common cloud workloads that can be executed across multiple cloud providers." Read more from googlecloudplatform >>

International Symposium on Big Data and Cloud Computing Challenges

International Symposium on Big Data and Cloud Computing Challenges is an annual event organized by the School of Computing Sciences, VIT University, Chennai Campus. The first version of the event will host oral and paper/poster session showcasing original contributions from students and professionals. Accepted Papers will be published in the conference proceeding as well as reputed SCOPUS indexed journals (as mentioned in Special Issues). The event also includes a programming contest for students with exciting prizes and certificate, and exciting opportunities from some of the technological giants. Be here as part of the symposium to know about your peers in technological advancement, and to learn the trade from veterans International Symposium on Big Data and Cloud Computing Challenges

Is Secret Cloud Computing Possible?

THESE days it's easy to access ultra-powerful computers: just borrow one from Amazon, Microsoft or other firms offering cloud computing services. But analysing data with someone else's hardware makes it hard to keep it secret. Now it seems a dash of quantumness might be the best way to stay safe in the cloud. In 2012, Stefanie Barz and her colleagues demonstrated ways of manipulating quantum states that can keep a server blind as it processes data. These kept cloud computing secure, but required a lot of back-and-forth traffic to eventually return the answer. So Barz, now at the University of Oxford, wondered if just a small amount of quantumness could provide a middle ground. Add a dash of quantum for secure cloud computing - 11 February 2015 - New Scientist

Glassbreakers - will SaaS product break the glass?

Computer programmer Lauren Mosenthal and her partner, Eileen Carey Newsweek writer NINA BURLEIGH published an article on JANUARY 28, 2015. WE ALL HOPE SaaS product Glassbreakers will break the glass. She says: "Viagra but No Abortions The Glassbreakers women are launching a product for women, designed to solve a problem women understand better than men, in an economic sector that has traditionally produced products shaped by the minds of young men for young men. It’s inarguable that white, upper-middle-class young men have applied the new technologies to make things that reflect their desires and culture and foisted them on the world. Women who complain about sexist video games get death threats from legions of boyfans conditioned by formative years on the Xbox controller to believe it’s their right to rescue—or maybe assault—wasp-waisted half-naked damsels in distress. And the anonymity of the Internet has proved relatively more menacing to women. None of these ill effects are deliberate, but they are built into designs and products created almost solely by one gender. As recently as 2011, for example, Apple made a Siri who could find prostitutes and Viagra but not abortion providers. Reviewing the movie The Social Network, the writer Zadie Smith wrote that everything about Facebook is “reduced to the size of its founder. Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to.” Ultimately, she wrote,The Social Network wasn’t “a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called ‘Mark Zuckerberg.’ It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.” Frustrated, women in Silicon Valley seem to be segregating themselves in women-only venture funds or starting gender-gated funds. Costello says that the sexual harassment lawsuits and the public talk about endless ugly events is a sign that things are changing. 'We are in a major time of shift. There is no other time when women have been better educated, earning a majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees and serving in equal numbers in nearly all professions. The control of personal wealth is about equal, as baby boomer men are dying earlier and women are inheriting money from their parents and husbands and have their own assets from working. If we can access 2 percent of that money controlled by women, we don’t need to be begging on Sand Hill Road.' " READ THE WHOLE STORY ON >>