Apple acquired PrimeSense - Israeli 3D sensing company

PrimeSense is best known for its advanced body-movement tracking technology originally used for the Xbox 360, a popular gaming device.


Apple has signed a $350 million acquisition deal with the Israeli company PrimeSense, the maker of a motion-tracking chip technology.
Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet confirmed the deal late Sunday, but would not elaborate on the details. 

The PrimeSense acquisition contributes to what is shaping up to be a banner year for merger-and-acquisition deals for Israeli startups. Google's $1 billion purchase of navigational application Waze has received the most media attention, but other big acquisitions include IBM’s $650 million purchase of cybercrime prevention company Trusteer and Facebook’s $120 million purchase of mobile utility app maker Onavo. Mobile protection company Asurion has also agreed to purchase Soluto, a cloud-based PC management service, for $130 million.

PrimeSense,the Israeli maker of motion-tracking chip technology is best known for licensing the hardware design and chip used in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360, which came out in 2010. More recently, the startup has been developing depth-sensing technology that would enable a three-dimensional camera inside a mobile phone to operate applications like indoor navigation tools or 3D shopping catalogs.

PrimeSense’s appeal is in its advanced body-movement tracking technology. Although Microsoft switched from the original PrimeSense system used in the original Kinect sensor for Xbox 360, to a homegrown alternative in the more recent version, that hasn’t stopped the company from further developing its system and targeting smaller implementations.

One such implementation is Capri, which significantly reduces the size of the sensor array while still allowing accurate motion-tracking of separate limbs and more.

Initially, Capri was seen as being the main point of appeal for PrimeSense to Apple, with suggestions that the new sensor could find its way into future iterations of iPhone and iPad. However, according to the Israeli report today, Apple’s actual intended goal for PrimeSense’s systems is its much-rumored television project.

That would suggest navigation of an on-demand, streaming smart TV system using gestures rather than a complex remote. Talk of a full TV with the Apple logo has persisted for some years now, fueled in part by comments by Steve Jobs in which he reportedly claimed to have “cracked” the problem of unintuitive interfaces.

At the time, it was assumed that Apple’s voice control system on iOS, Siri, would be the key to that system, but if the PrimeSense leaks are authentic, it now looks like motion-control could also play a part. That would certainly fit in with PrimeSense’s own development roadmap; the company said it was exploring TV integration all the way back in January 2011.
Another suggestion, though not one necessarily based on any more than speculation, is that the sensor system could be used in Apple’s smartwatch project, unofficially-dubbed the iWatch. It’s unclear whether even the reduced Capri sensor array could fit into a wrist-worn-scale device at this stage.

October Newsletter – Hybrid Cloud

Vega newsletter is published monthly by Vega BI, and distributed to our partners to facilitate pursuit of a common interest in top-notch technologies.

Cloud computing promises a new world of IT agility. Organizations often plan an elegant cloud environment that will be easy to maintain. But business needs often change that plan, and the reality is usually a complex and dynamic cloud environment that is unwieldy to manage.        Hybrid Cloud is our topic of the month, read an executive summary on the benefits and challenges of the hybrid cloud at page 2, and get an idea of some software solutions that can support such environment from different angles, at our glance on players section at page 3.

Hybrid Cloud Computing Overview & Benefits

As we witness high adoption rates for the public cloud and the private cloud, businesses are turning towards a hybrid cloud computing solution. Over the last few years security, operational challenges, performance, and data compliance issues have become a growing concern while using public cloud services. This is why businesses started shifting to the private cloud. While the private cloud offered more control and visibility over business processes, investments and infrastructure management still remained a concern.

With shrinking IT budgets and rising business demands, companies are looking for an intermediate model of cloud computing technology. The hybrid cloud computing solution rightly fits into this space. Certain applications require more control on data management solutions, while other applications do not demand such a high level of protection. By integrating the public cloud with the private cloud, businesses get the flexibility to isolate sensitive data while still benefiting from the many advantages offered by the public cloud.

What is hybrid cloud computing?

A hybrid cloud is the combination of public and private clouds that are customized to suit specific business requirements.  You can combine multiple private and public clouds to suit your needs. In short, a hybrid cloud computing solution strikes the right balance between scalability, agility, performance, security , operational flexibility as well as TCO.

Benefits of hybrid cloud computing

A hybrid cloud offers the following benefits by splitting business processes so that each process demand goes into the right cloud. Here are certain benefits offered by a hybrid cloud.

·         Flexible business operations

Every enterprise runs multiple business processes that are different in nature. While some processes work on critical data, some of them perform regular day-to-day activities. If a business function does not process critical data, you can use a public cloud. At the same time, mission critical functions can use a private cloud. By diversifying business needs, companies can leverage resources and overcome IT challenges.

·         Optimized costs

Depending on your business processes, you can configure your hybrid cloud using private and public clouds. As mission critical processes are comparatively fewer, while other less critical business process can benefits by the reduced cost and scalable solutions offered by the public cloud.

·         Enhanced security

One of the main concerns of a public cloud is data integrity and security. Hybrid clouds offer extra security to your data. By keeping your data out of the public cloud, companies can add extra security to business processes.

·         Improved performance

By optimizing available resources, businesses can gain a maximum output from business processes. With highly scalable networks offering the required agility, companies can improve SLA’s and minimize downtime.

The idea behind hybrid clouds is that businesses can combine the use of public and private clouds to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness offered by the public cloud computing environment without exposing mission-critical applications and data to the vulnerabilities associated with the public cloud option.

 For more ...... See Vega's October  Newsletter 

Hybrid Cloud/IT – IT Challenges

  

Enterprise & cloud computing

Cloud computing promises a new world of IT agility, with quick deployment of applications to support business needs. Organizations often plan an elegant cloud environment that will be easy to maintain. But business needs often change that plan, and the reality is usually a complex and dynamic cloud environment that is unwieldy to manage using the tools provided with each separate cloud.

·         The vision of enterprise cloud computing

Cloud computing offers a captivating vision of IT agility: this model promises to makes it possible for enterprise IT to deploy new applications in days or weeks rather than months or years, thus helping them make a substantive contribution to overall corporate performance, while reducing costs.  Of course, in seeking this improved agility, enterprise IT organizations must ensure that the enterprise cloud meets critical IT requirements, including:

o   Manageability— IT must be able to maintain control of the cloud environment and leverage existing IT policies and procedures without losing flexibility

o   Governance— Appropriate controls must remain in place to manage resource access by users.

o   Security— IT must be able to implement enterprise standards to prevent security breaches and protect data.

o   Cost tracking—The solution must enable assignment of computing costs to the organizational units responsible for individual applications.

With this combination of benefits and requirements in mind, many enterprise IT organizations have moved rapidly toward creating a cloud computing strategy and implementation plan. Most commonly, that strategy is based on implementing an internal cloud computing environment (a private cloud) and deploying applications in that environment.

·         The reality of enterprise cloud computing

The vision of enterprise cloud computing appears straight forward, but the reality is not quite so simple. Today, most enterprises find that they are no longer managing a single internal cloud. Rather, they have applications spread across mix cloud environment (public & private)in some cases  three, four, or even more cloud providers, both internal (private) and external (public). And for every cloud, there are multiple accounts to manage.

·         Business priorities that affect the enterprise cloud environment

Why so often this is the case?  To put it simply, many IT decisions today are driven by business priorities that conflict with IT’s cloud strategy:

o   Deployment decisions may came  by departments outside of IT— Because obtaining public cloud computing resources is easy and simple, departments  like sales or marketing have the ability to bypass central IT and deploy applications on their own public cloud environments

o   New cloud environments arrive through corporate initiatives—Changing business conditions, such as acquisitions, mergers and changes in decision. Disrupting IT’s plan to have a single “standard” cloud environment.

o   Application or operational requirements force selection of another cloud environment— This environment then becomes part of the cloud infrastructure that must be managed on an ongoing basis.

Therefore, despite IT’s natural inclination to define a simple solution that leverages a single cloud environment addressing all of a company’s cloud computing needs, the reality is that every company will use a variety of cloud solutions, including both private and public clouds, or “hybrid cloud/IT computing.”

The true reality of enterprise cloud computing, therefore, is a mix of cloud environments that must be managed on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, that mix will be dynamic, with new cloud environments regularly being added to the collection. This collection of cloud environments makes up the company’s hybrid infrastructure.

Brazil's "Internet Constitution"

Summary: The first set of internet governance rules in the country is surrounded by controversy and scares big organizations to death
By Angelica Mari, Brazil Tech

Brazil's "Internet Constitution" is due to be voted next week amid a war involving local politicians, some of the largest telecommunications firms and activists over citizens rights online.
The fate of the regulations, dubbed Marco Civil da Internet, was due to be decided earlier this week but disagreement from corporates and the political opposition over the original proposals meant the voting got postponed to next week.

The Marco Civil project is being led by Alessandro Molon of Dilma Rousseff's Workers Party and has already undergone a four-year consultation process.

What is the Marco Civil about?

The Marco Civil da Internet is the first set of internet governance rules in Brazil. Supporters of the Bill see the original text as a positive piece of legislation, which includes provisions across three key pillars: freedom of expression, net neutrality and privacy.
Freedom of expression online:

If voted in its original form, the regulations would guarantee the protection of freedom of expression and the right to privacy online. While there are fears that such measures could prompt a rise in piracy and publication of unlawful content in Brazil, the Marco Civil guarantees that users would only be identified with information on their communications disclosed at the request of a court order and limited to occasions where criminal investigations and prosecutions are taking place.
Large Brazilian media organizations such as Globo are understood to be strongly opposed to this.
Net neutrality:

The Marco Civil also determines that internet providers are required to treat all data that goes through their network in the same way. That in practice means operators would no longer be able to set higher or lower speeds according to individual internet usage patterns, load certain websites faster and also offer free access to certain content such as social networking tools while charging for others.
The Marco Civil also determines that the connection can not be suspended unless there is debt, and the company responsible for the connection is required to maintain the same quality of service on the same contract terms. The changes are clearly upsetting for the Brazilian telcos,who have been lobbying for years to ensure the current situation is maintained for fear of diminishing profits.
Privacy:

After the recent scandal involving the NSA monitoring of emails of millions of Brazilians including President Dilma Rousseff, the government requested the inclusion of another provision in the Marco Civil, stating that the data of internet users has to be stored in Brazil.
This is controversial amongst large and small companies that rely heavily on cloud services that may not necessarily be hosted locally. Additionally, it can be argued that the changes will do nothing to prevent against the possibility of intrusive surveillance.

What is happening now?

The president of the House of Representatives wants the Bill to be voted "when there is more agreement" between the various parties. Currently, there is still plenty of disagreement between the public representatives, the interests of the organizations some of them are influenced by, as well as the politicians that support the original text.
The Bill is now being processed as a matter of constitutional urgency and the fact it cannot be voted until next week prevents various other proposals from being voted too - such as the law that would allow anyone to publish biographies regardless of whether the subject allows it or not - so this process has to be out of the way soon.
Politicians and activists who have campaigned for provisions such as net neutrality wanted the Bill to be voted as soon as possible regardless of the agreement of the opposition and the telcos - however, ithe vote on the Marco Civil will only take place on November 5, when the leader of the initiative is due to present a final version of the Bill.
This weekend is set to be packed full of reports of secret dinners with politicians, media tycoons and telco bosses, petitions with several hundreds of thousands supporting the original proposal and protests against the interests of the large corporations. We just have to hope that on Tuesday, common sense will prevail and Brazil will not take yet another backwards step.