Maria Deutscher
Latest from Maria Deutscher
Nest about to raise $150 million for smart thermostat
The era of the smart home is not yet upon us, but if Silicon Valley’s latest mega VC round is anything to go by, it’s right around the corner. The Palo Alto-based Nest Labs, known for its smart appliances, is reportedly about to secure a massive $150 million in funding to help take the connected ...
Weekly Big Data review: startups and reporting
Big Data startups are back in the limelight now that VideoIQ has been acquired by Canada’s Avigilon for $32 million. The deal is expected to close later this month. Spun off from GE Security in 2006, VideoIQ builds surveillance systems that utilize proprietary analytics technology to provide highly accurate live detection, event verification and instant ...
Weekly Cloud review: on-demand service gaining traction in government and beyond
Microsoft has agreed to buy a 202-acre plot land in Quincy, Washington for $11 million, one of the largest land deals in the town’s history. The software giant, which already operates a 75-acre data center in the region, plans to establish a new, larger facility that will run on ultra-cheap electricity from hydroelectric dams along ...
Internet of Things review: in-car Android plans surface as emerging platforms pick up steam
The war between Android and iOS is not just about mobile anymore. Insiders revealed this week that Google has partnered with Audi to develop an in-car entertainment and information system that uses its open source operating system. The platform, which is set to be announced at the upcoming CES 2013 conference in Las Vegas, is ...
Weekly security review: hackers take jab at top services, NSA cracks iOS
Skype has once again found itself on the front lines of cybersecurity this week after the notorious Syrian Electronic Army hacked into its social media profiles and published a tweet discouraging people from using Microsoft-owned services. The instant messaging giant quickly regained control of the accounts and released a statement saying that no other systems ...
Zerto unveils hardened disaster recovery platform for cloud providers
Virtualization has taken hold in the worldwide server market, but there’s still plenty of room for growth, which is what disaster recovery specialist Zerto is banking on. The five-year-old firm is rolling out a new edition of its flagship Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) platform that is simpler and more scalable to meet the requirements of ...
Sony reportedly considering making Windows Phone devices
Cornered by Samsung in the Android ecosystem, Sony may attempt to diversify its mobile lineup through a partnership with Microsoft, insiders told TheInformation this week. The tipsters said that the two rivals are in talks to launch a Windows Phone device as soon as mid-2014, a narrow time frame that indicates the prototype designs are ...
HP to fire 5,000 more workers in 2014
Unlike Michael Dell, who last year succeeded in wresting control of his namesake firm from shareholders, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman still has to perform the delicate balancing act between executing her long-term transformation strategy and satisfying Wall Street’s fixation on short-term results. And as always, the employees are caught right in the middle. Citing “market ...
Clearwater automates reporting for insurers
Big Data is proving to be a key asset across all vertical markets, with the financial sector in particular emerging as a hotbed of analytics growth. But as unstructured information piles up, practitioners come to realize that extracting meaningful patterns and relations is only one of the challenges to gaining a competitive advantage. The resulting ...
Avigilon shells out $32M for video analytics firm
Accounting for more than 50 percent of all internet traffic, video is among the main drivers behind the rapid growth of unstructured information. But while technologies for processing social media interactions and machine logs have garnered a tremendous amount of hype in the enterprise, video analytics is only now entering the mainstream. At present, this ...