Author Archives: Ajit Deshpande
More acquisitions by Yahoo!
Yahoo announced three acquisitions last week, to go with 14 earlier acquisitions made by the company since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO in the second half of 2012. Last week’s acquisitions were of inbox and address-book management startup Xobni for ~$48 million, iOS movie creation app Qwiki for ~$50 million, and one-person fantasy sports […]
Hunk, from Splunk
Hadoop has been a buzzword in technology circles for more than five years now. As unstructured and multi-structured data continues to explode, enterprises have increasingly resorted to storing this data in a distributed fashion using Hadoop clusters, with the expectation that this stored data might in the future have value for operations, competitive intelligence, compliance […]
GPU Licenses from Nvidia
Last week, leading GPU developer Nvidia announced that it planned to start licensing its Kepler GPU technology to other chip designers for use in tablets, smartphones and other new form-factors. The Kepler architecture is currently part of Nvidia’s GeForce 600 GPU, with plans for its incorporation into the company’s next-gen Tegra 5 ARM-based SoC which […]
Waze of the Start-up Nation!
GPS-based navigation app startup Waze was acquired last week by Google for a price just north of $1 billion. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Israel, Waze had previously raised approximately $67 million in venture capital from investors based in Israel and the Silicon Valley. The startup has almost 50 million users that contribute information […]
IBM backs MongoDB
Last week brought news of a partnership between IBM and 10gen, whereby the two companies would work together to achieve interoperability between IBM’s DB2 relational DBMS and 10gen’s MongoDB NoSQL database. As part of the partnership, IBM will push MongoDB as a core NoSQL database for enterprises building web and mobile apps. At present, DB2 […]
Smart Devices from Mozilla and Foxconn
When it comes to smartphones and tablets, the OS market is quite concentrated, with Android and iOS together owning a 92.3% market share for smartphones, and a 96.1% share for tablets. Well, Mozilla and Foxconn feel it is time to fragment it a little. As of June 3rd, the two companies announced that Foxconn will […]
Virtual Currency, from Amazon
Last week, e-Commerce giant Amazon introduced Amazon Coins, its own virtual currency for Kindle Fire owners to buy apps and games. During the introductory phase, Amazon plans to discount these Coins by up to 10% depending on the amount of the purchase; the company expects to dole out tens of millions of dollars in such […]
ESPN, Carriers, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Players in the internet ecosystem can broadly be bucketed into one of three categories – carriers (aka the infrastructure providers), Over-The-Top content providers (aka the ones that make the money), and end-consumers (the ones that pay). Over the years, one of the carriers’ approaches towards maintaining profitability has been tiered wireless data pricing (also being […]
In-store payments from PayPal and Discover
PayPal, the online payments and money transfer giant, last week announced a new milestone in its partnership with Discover. As of last week, Discover has deals with 50 merchant acquirers to offer PayPal’s service as a payment option at more than 2 million merchant checkout locations by end of 2013. The announcement represents significant progress […]
Pivotal and the Industrial Internet
First came SaaS, enabling application delivery through the cloud. Then came IaaS, providing the elastic infrastructure for enterprises to host their data and applications in the cloud. But the middle of the cloud-stack – the Platform as a Service, the layer that abstracts out the underlying infrastructure and enables enterprises to develop their own custom […]