Month: September 2013

Just how connected do you want to be?

Gigaom

If all the connectivity efforts of today did in fact become successful, a decade from now, we are looking at connected traffic lights, sensor-laden parking lots and roads, connected everything at home, locks that can be locked and unlocked digitally, pills with digestible silicon, smart tattoos and washable sensors in fabrics. Many of these are commercial or nearly commercial today and will likely attain reasonable to massive scale over the next decade. Of course, there are several impediments to truly seamless connected everything. But, given the level of interest and efforts, we will get closer and closer to this utopian connected world for sure.

A lot of good things will come out of it – automation at home making things easier for us, personalization that will allow our devices to be so much more proactive and useful, global energy savings, better healthcare, etc. But, as…

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Apple iPhone 5s vs. iPhone 5c: Which phone should you buy?

Gigaom

Now that Apple(s aapl) has officially announced the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c, a new question has probably come to mind for anyone in the market for a new phone: Which one should you buy? The iPhone 5s is Apple’s high-end, luxury smartphone, with the aluminum build, fingerprint sensor, and 64-bit architecture to prove it. The iPhone 5c meanwhile, comes clad in five fun plastic colors, and starts at $100 less than the iPhone 5s.

Pre-orders for both phones start on Friday, so you’ve got a little bit of time to figure out which one you want. I’ve compared some of the specs and features for each phone to help you decide which one should end up in your shopping cart.

iphone 5c vs iphone 5s

Siblings, or at least cousins

Let’s start with the similarities, as there are quite a few. The iPhone 5c basically contains the same guts as the iPhone…

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When “effortless” is anything but: Today’s cloud washing is all about hybrid

Gigaom

For the past few years cloud washing was a practice IT vendors used to paint their not-necessarily-cloudy products as cloudy. It was widespread and obnoxious. It would be nice to say that the trend dissipated, but that is not the case. It has just morphed into hybrid cloud washing.

Hybrid is everywhere. As companies weigh decisions about what workloads to move to the cloud, vendors are using the descriptor to persuade potential customers that their workloads will move “seamlessly” or “effortlessly” between their private cloud and some public cloud. If only saying it made it so.

The fact is it takes a lot of effort to make something effortless, according to Margaret Dawson, VP of product marketing and cloud evangelist for HP Cloud Services(s hpq). In reality, hybrid cloud is a goal.

“If you look at the auto industry, hybrid means the combination of a traditional engine and carburetor…

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