Globaldata Share Discussion Threads

[littleredrooster] 30/1/2017 11:21

now in a state of de facto hostilities with Washington

Well, it's not so long ago that Mexico conspired with Germany to invade the US.



Mexico unites in anger over President Trump's plan for sanctions

29 January 2017 • 9:11pm

"President Donald Trump’s escalating threats against Mexico have led to calls for a guerrilla struggle of national resistance from across the political spectrum, uniting the Mexican people as almost never before in modern times.

A string of elder statesmen warn that the country faces grievous injury and is now in a state of de facto hostilities with Washington, forcing Mexicans to fight back on every front and whatever the cost.

“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” said former president Vicente Fox. “Trade is important, jobs are important, but they are not as important as dignity. We must not be cowed or it will paralyse us,” he said."

[littleredrooster] 28/1/2017 11:41

hxxp://www.geekwire.com/2017/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-azure-will-fend-off-amazon-web-services-enterprise/

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: How Azure will fend off Amazon Web Services in the enterprise

by Dan Richman on January 27, 2017 at 3:20 pm

"Microsoft believes that its unique combination of cloud offerings will hold off market-leading public-cloud service Amazon Web Services in Microsoft’s traditional stronghold of the enterprise, CEO Satya Nadella said in phone call with press and analysts after the release of quarterly earnings Thursday. Microsoft is the number-two public-cloud company, competing energetically with AWS in an ongoing battle of pricing and features.

Cloud computing has always appealed to startups, freeing them from the financial burden of buying, housing and maintaining computing and networking hardware. Instant expandability (and contraction, if necessary) of both compute and storage, plus the availability of APIs into esoteric and otherwise-out of reach services such as machine learning and voice recognition, make the cloud an easy choice for new companies."

[littleredrooster] 28/1/2017 11:40

hxxp://www.eweek.com/cloud/microsoft-azure-cloud-services-nearly-double-during-past-year.html

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services Nearly Double in Size During Past Year

By Pedro Hernandez | Posted 2017-01-27

"Microsoft reported strong second quarter fiscal year 2017 (2QFY17) earnings on Jan. 26, laying to rest any doubts that the software giant could transition to a cloud computing company.

Azure revenues climbed a whopping 93 percent, or 95 percent using constant currency calculations that account for exchange rate fluctuations. "These results show continued strength in the cloud and especially Azure business," Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst at Forrester, told eWEEK.

"While Microsoft does not break out Azure from the broader Intelligent Cloud category (which also includes some server products, cloud services, and enterprise services), the Azure business nearly doubled year-over-year (as it did last quarter), and usage continues to double year-over-year," continued Bartoletti. "Basically, Azure is more than twice the size it was at this time last year, and the growth trajectory is consistent.""

hxxp://www.geekwire.com/2017/microsofts-commercial-cloud-run-rate-tops-14b-first-time-driven-azure-office-365/

[littleredrooster] 26/1/2017 10:46

Worth more than £15m?

FBT is starting to talk about the possibility of profits in 2018.



01 December 2016

"The Company operates in the large and growing cloud video market. With its platform of cloud video applications and its relationships, including those with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Forbidden is well positioned in this market. The Company's focus is on helping customers unlock the value of their content by reducing the time to market from camera to screen, and increasing the ease and efficiency of using content in multiple ways."

"It is against this growth momentum that the Company is raising additional funds to ensure that the Company has adequate capital to finance further sales, sales support, sales implementation and product development support where necessary. Management is committed to ensuring that the Company's growth continues, and is optimised, whilst also targeting profitability in 2018."

[littleredrooster] 20/1/2017 10:09

hxxp://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/17/oracle_to_launch_london_cloud_region_with_three_new_data_centres/

Oracle crashes AWS and Azure UK cloud data centre party

London base in global expansion

17 Jan 2017 at 15:25, Alexander J Martin

Oracle will open a cloud region in the UK that's based in London and plans to have three data centres serving the region by mid-2017.

The region will accompany others in Virginia and Turkey in a plan Oracle stated will double "the regional presence of its cloud platform in the last 24 months, with 29 regions available globally".

Each region will consist of three high-bandwidth, low-latency sites, named Availability Domains, which will be based within several miles of each other and operate fault-independently. It's unclear whether Oracle will build or lease the facilites required to float the UK portion of its cloud.

In a statement, Oracle said the approach would provide "[t]he highest levels of failure protection and availability to Oracle customers' most demanding cloud applications. Availability Domains are deeply integrated into the Oracle Cloud Platform, easing use and eliminating complex architectural decision-making around availability."

Additional regions are planned to launch in APAC, North America and the Middle East next year.

Oracle claims to be a "global large scale cloud platform" but much of its cloud revenue has come from Software-as-a-Service rather than platform.

The database giant is late to the cloud platform business, lagging Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure. Since 2016, AWS and Azure have offered the UK as a region using locally based data centres in different parts of the country.

Local hosting potentially addresses customers' need to comply with data protection needs and requirements for low-levels of latency.

16 Comments

hxxps://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2017/01/17/oracle_to_launch_london_cloud_region_with_three_new_data_centres/

[littleredrooster] 18/1/2017 10:43

The bankers may have the money but the citizens have the votes.



US banking chiefs to talk with May over hard Brexit

US-based banks and asset managers are to hold talks with prime minister over their fears for thousands of City jobs.

by William Robins on Jan 18, 2017 at 09:51

"US-based banks and asset managers are to hold talks with Prime Minister Theresa May over her ‘hard’ Brexit plans the firms fear will see thousands of jobs cut from UK financial services.

The chief executives of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley as well as the chief executive of Blackrock have been invited to meet May for private talks on Thursday, according to Sky News.

The meeting will reportedly take place in Davos, where the World Economic Forum is currently being held.

On Tuesday May confirmed the UK will leave the European single market in a speech to the nation intended to create clarity over the UK’s goals in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations with the EU.

Goldmans and JP Morgan were both major donors to a group campaigning to keep Britain in the EU, Britain Stronger in Europe, shelling out £500,000 each while, while Morgan Stanley donated 250,000 donation.

Sky News said its sources suggested Jes Staley, the American chief executive of Barclays, and Steve Schwarzman, chairman of private equity group Blackstone, may also have been invited to the meeting."

[littleredrooster] 17/1/2017 13:36

Worth more than £15m?



Forscene in Sports - every second counts

Published on 17 Jan 2017

Be the first to own, distribute and monetise sports video content, capturing the attention of more sports fans. Forscene enables you to rapidly deliver professionally edited video that combines real time sports action with your existing digital assets.

[littleredrooster] 16/1/2017 14:35

building deltatre into a market leading sports technology provider



16 January 2017

"Forbidden Technologies plc (AIM: FBT), announces that it has signed a three year revenue earning deal with deltatre, a leading supplier of digital and broadcast services in the Sports market, for the use of its Forscene cloud video platform.

The three-year deal is for the use of Forscene for one of deltatre's long term clients."

[littleredrooster] 16/1/2017 14:34

wiped out $11 trillion of American household wealth

Would Donald Trump now become president if the financial crisis hadn't happened?



Moody’s Reaches $864 Million Subprime Ratings Settlement

by Matt Scully

January 13, 2017, 6:58 PM EST

"Moody’s Corp. agreed to pay almost $864 million to resolve a multiyear U.S. investigation into credit ratings on subprime mortgage securities, helping to clear the way for the firm to move beyond its crisis-era litigation.

Moody’s reached the agreement with the U.S. Justice Department and 21 states, which accused the company of inflating ratings on mortgage securities that were at the center of the 2008 financial crisis, the Justice Department said Friday in a statement. That penalty is about a third of the $2.5 billion that Moody’s earned in the four years leading up to the crisis. Standard and Poor’s, after fighting the U.S. in court for two years, settled similar claims with the U.S. for $1.5 billion last year."

"Since the financial crisis, the bulk of government settlements have been shouldered by the biggest banks, which have paid more than $162 billion in fines and penalties. The Obama administration has been criticized for years for failing to hold individuals accountable for misconduct leading to the crisis.

Still, the settlement over ratings by Moody’s Investors Service helps the administration move closer to wrapping up investigations of Wall Street firms for their actions leading up to the 2008 mortgage meltdown, a catastrophe that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission said wiped out $11 trillion of American household wealth. The credit ratings industry has been the target of these investigations into Wall Street for years."

"Both Moody’s Investors Service, a unit of Moody’s Corp., and S&P played key roles in Wall Street’s making of toxic, subprime mortgage bonds. While subprime home loans typically go to borrowers with the weakest credit, bonds backed by those mortgages received top-flight, AAA credit ratings. The bonds began coming apart in 2007 as the housing market collapsed, contributing to more than $1.9 trillion in losses at financial firms worldwide during a crisis that almost collapsed the global banking system."

[littleredrooster] 04/1/2017 15:47

all of the claims it made .. were false

Friends of the Earth exposed as liars. No surprise there.



Friends of the Earth must not repeat misleading fracking claims

4 January 2017

"A spokesman for the ASA said the advert "must not appear again in its current form" and the FOE must "not make claims about the likely effects of fracking on the health of local populations, drinking water, or property prices in the absence of adequate evidence".

Cuadrilla's chief executive Francis Egan described FOE as "the unacceptable face of the charity sector", which had been "scaremongering" in order to "frighten the public into giving it money".

"[T]he charity's admission that all of the claims it made, that we complained about, were false should hopefully put a stop to it misleading the UK public on fracking.""

[littleredrooster] 24/12/2016 00:35

This 'cloud storage' thing is going to get seriously big in 2017

Microsoft embiggens cloudy BLOBs from 195GB to 4.77 TB, blocks from 4MB to 100MB

23 Dec 2016 at 05:58, Simon Sharwood

The waistline of Azure's storage service continues to expand, with Microsoft upping the size of the Binary Large Objects it can define.

Redmond's cloud can now support BLOBs of 4.77 terabytes, up from the previous 195 gigabytes. Block sizes are also up, from four megabytes to 100. And you can commit 50,000 blocks to a single Blob.

Microsoft says the changes will help users handle “storing and processing 4K and 8K videos to cancer researchers sequencing DNA.”

Whatever they're used for, Microsoft wouldn't be doing this if it didn't see demand for cloud use at this scale. And why wouldn't it see that demand? Building rigs to handle workloads like those described above costs plenty. The cloud's a natural for this kind of stuff.

For those of you wondering just how long it would take to get 195GB into Azure, never mind 4.77TB, Microsoft has news on that front too as it has tweaked its data import/export service. It's now available in Azure's Canada, US Gov and China regions, and has added the ability to handle 2.5” Internal SATA drives and internal SSD drives.

2.5” drives can't yet match the scale of the 12TB and 14TB behemoths the disk industry offers in the 3.5” form factor, but the addition of SSDs should at least speed up the transfer of data in and out of Redmond's cloud.

[littleredrooster] 21/12/2016 14:35

Worth more than £15m?

Crikey! My post seems to have brought FBT to life. Five articles published today. Something must be happening?

[littleredrooster] 18/12/2016 16:49

the product that really got me excited .. was Captevate

"I honestly don’t think I’ve seen an editing solution so easy to learn"

So everyone becomes a 'professional' editor? That should speed up the production process and lower costs.

Worth more than £15m? We shall see.

[littleredrooster] 17/12/2016 13:44

the product that really got me excited .. was Captevate

FBT's market cap is presently under £15m.



Why I joined Forbidden Technologies

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my career in sports production and sports technology, from the long nights as producer of a British institution, Match of The Day, to building deltatre into a market leading sports technology provider.

It was a difficult decision to leave the talented team at deltatre but my desire to enter the world of entrepreneurialism was too great. The truth is I have a skill: building businesses with ideas and concepts that people want and that make them money. My latest venture, FanView, will be a business designed to bring sports fans closer to the action. As we began business planning, a requirement appeared to quickly, easily, get content to market, and of course I chose Forscene. I say “of course” because there really is no tool like it in the market. So when the team approached me to interview for a non-executive director role, I was incredibly excited.

The first meeting I had with Aziz and Jason cemented my excitement. I already knew the power of Forscene and had played with eva so could easily see the huge potential of that platform. But the product that really got me excited and I saw the most potential in was Captevate – online video editor. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen an editing solution so easy to learn in my entire career. The team walked me through the growth model, but actually my mind went instantly to specific use cases. Since that first meeting we’ve already created professional sports proposals with Captevate as the centrepiece.

The future for Forbidden Technologies is incredibly exciting. The new team are extremely talented and focused (or ‘relentlessly focused’ as Aziz keeps telling us!) on growing the commerciality of the business. And that’s why I’m here. I’m here to help build revenues. I’m here to help build a commercial culture. I’m here to help get Forbidden’s products into people’s homes and offices around the world. I love sport and I love to win. And so above all, I’m here to win with Forbidden Technologies.

Author.
Jim Irving
Current founder of Fanview, with previous roles as Commercial Director for deltatre Media and Executive Producer at BBC Sport. Jim has worked on a variety of major sporting events including World Cups and Olympic Games.

Published.
02/11/2015

[littleredrooster] 07/12/2016 14:32

Foreign firms spend £100bn buying British businesses so far in 2016

6 December 2016 • 3:45pm

"Foreign companies spent more than £100bn acquiring firms in the UK in the first nine months of the year, according to official figures - the highest level on record.

In the same period of 2015, overseas investors spent £24.2bn on UK acquisitions, meaning the value is four times as large as a year ago.

Some major transactions have dominated the figures, with huge investments such as Japanese company Softbank’s £24.3bn takeover of UK technology darling Arm Holdings.

But the number of individual transactions is also up sharply, as more small deals take place too.

A total of 167 deals worth £1m or more apiece have taken place this year, compared with 96 in the first nine months of 2015, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Those working in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market said the figures are an indication of the UK’s attractiveness as an investment destination."

[littleredrooster] 17/11/2016 12:49

short form video is now the primary source of news for the under 24s



5 key trends for short form video success

November 17, 2016

"AOL has released results of new research study exploring UK consumer viewing attitudes for short form digital video, finding that it has now become the primary news source for younger audiences. More than half (52%) of 18-24 year olds said that they prefer getting their news from short form videos than reading it.

The research found that the key for viewers to successful short form video above all else is quality, as over half (58%) said they lose patience if the production quality of video is not good enough. Additional quality indicators relevant to video advertising included brand fit, uniqueness of the content, and appropriate length.

Continuing on advertising around short form video, viewers revealed that they are more likely (54%) to watch an advert if it’s related to the destination content. Four in 10 consumers (41%) also said they would prefer brands to be featured in the video they are trying to watch rather than putting ads before it, challenging marketers to deliver innovative new video ad experiences and thoughtful brand integration.

Mark Melling, Senior Director of AOL Video, Europe, commented on the results: “That short form video is now the primary source of news for the under 24s shows just how important the medium has become. Consumers have also made it clear to advertisers; yes they are willing to be engaged with video, but the challenge is to make sure that the experiences being created are of a suitable quality and are aligned to the destination content they are trying to view.”"