Alex Williams

Alex Williams is an editor for SiliconAngle and lives a charmed life in Portland, Or.

Latest from Alex Williams

5 Reasons Why the Google-Motorola Deal Has Big Business Written All Over It

One thing stands out in the posts I’ve read so far about Google buying Motorola Mobility. The $12.5 billion purchase has big business written all over it. Google is making a huge play for the enterprise and sees Android as the way to get in. Motorola gives Android that enterprise credibility that Google needs for ...

Radoop – It’s Like Yahoo Pipes for Hadoop

The idea of Hadoop always sounds so cool. Distributed computing, big data – it’s like this imaginary sweets shop with candy canes floating amid puffy clouds. Not really. But the dream of Hadoop is far more talked about than the reality of what it takes to actually deploy and manage. It’s complicated. Due to this, ...

A Fragmented Mobile OS Market Means More Bets on HTML 5

We are seeing developers make more bets on HTML 5. It’s in large part due to the features that can be built into apps with the programming language. But it is also about addressing a fragmented mobile OS market. Box is one of the most sophisticated in this approach. It topped the Forrester Wave report ...

Elevation Partners Roger McNamee 10 Hypotheses For Tech Investing

We got our hands on a presentation from Elevation Partners that we just had to share. The presentation by Elevation Co-Founder Roger McNamee goes through ten hypotheses for technology investing. I looked around a bit and it does appear that McNamee has been riffing on these themes as of late. Here are the ten in ...

Fred Wilson – With Due Respect, There Will Be Files in the Cloud

Fred Wilson published a blog post today with the premise that there will be no files in the cloud. With due respect I am going to have to object to his premise. He follows the logic of the Web, which is always a smart path to follow when thinking of how data flows. He argues ...

The @RiotCleanup Story: 2 Days, 86,000 Followers and 84,000 Mentions

The story about the @RiotCleanup Twitter account is one of the few shines of light coming out of the terrible riots in the United Kingdom. I started tracking the account today.  It has increased from about 30,000 followers this morning to about 86,300 people following it as of late this afternoon. The momentum picked up ...

Big Data and the London Riots – How an NPR Journalist Created a Telling Interactive Map

I’ve been searching around today for what the data is saying about the London Riots. My sources: Twitter, Google and The Guardian DataBlog. The Guardian blog used open data for its riot coverage. Its sources include The Metropolitam Police, the London Fire Brigade, the Association of Convenience Stores and the Twitter account: @Riotcleanup. Matt Stiles is ...

Lead Up to VMworld: Let’s Get Some Perspective, Here

The first few major user conferences I attended gave me agita.  I could cover the news well enough but it felt like there was this huge under swell that you could feel. It came down to the myriad of products, services, partners, user groups, channels – the list goes on. I felt it again last ...

The Real-Time Equivalent for Agile – A Tweetdeck of a Different Scope

What is the real-time equivalent for Agile – what would that look like? A different interface than Tweetedeck but the concept is the same.  A service on top that gives a view of different applications that are available real-time via a REST API. That’s the idea behind what Tasktop Technologies is developing these days. Their ...

Why Did Apple and Facebook Go With Fusion-io? It’s All About the Data

Fusion-io released its fourth quarter results yesterday and announced the acquisition of IO Turbine, a move that shows the never ending demand for better data performance. Here’s the problem. As Fusion-io sees it, virtualization is not seeing its potential. There’s a bottleneck. Why? Data is getting stopped up due to a lack of processing capability. ...