Spaceflight to launch network for communicating with tiny satellites

Gigaom

So, you built your shoebox-sized satellite. You found a spot on a rocket and got it to the International Space Station, where astronauts then released it into Earth’s orbit. Now you need to communicate with it. How?

The answer has been a headache for space startups, which, like any small company, don’t necessarily have the resources to build a huge amount of communications infrastructure from scratch. Some go ahead and do it. Others, like Southern Stars, find a partner with existing resources.

Spaceflight, which has been booking space for small satellites on rockets since early 2013, believes there is room for another option: a global network for communicating with satellites that anyone can buy time on, bringing down the cost for big and small satellite companies.

«Just as computers used to be mainframes and then it was the PC and now it’s tablets and smartphones with billions of different nodes…

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How CIOs can reform the IT organization

Gigaom

A radical redrawing of a firm’s technology road map can enable an IT department to be more focused on strategic applications and development and to work more closely with non-IT departments and business units.

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Internet of Thing !?

Lemonishka's Blog

Internet de las cosas? A que te suena? A cosas con Internet, pues sí… aunque eso solo es la punta del iceberg!!

El internet de las cosas en lo particular me parece un tema muy interesante y atrativo, por que no solo lo puedes abarcar desde el punto de la tecnología, sino de los negocios, de la sociedad, de industria, de la privacidad, de la inteligencia artificial, de la ciencia, de las personas, en fin… hay mucho que podríamos contar al respecto, pero la idea de este post es hacer la introducción del concepto para que tu interés y curiosidad despegue al respecto…

El Internet de las cosas es un concepto que si bien fue planteado hace más de una década (por Kevin Ashton en el Auto-ID Center del MIT) , relativamente se está usando apenas y esto es por que cada vez es más fácil entenderlo por la dinámica…

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10 tips on how to make slides that really communicate your idea

Google meets Detroit: Former Ford CEO Alan Mulally joins Google’s board

Gigaom

As Google’s (s goog) connected car and driverless vehicle ambitions increase, it needed to find a car guy to advise it on the rather arcane and insular ways of the automotive industry. Well, Google got its gearhead.

Former Ford Motor Company(s f) CEO and President Alan Mulally has joined Google board of directors and will serve on Google’s audit committee, Google revealed in its blog today. Google didn’t say specifically that Mulally would advise the company on automotive matters, but you have to figure that Mulally’s eight years at the helm of one the world’s most storied automakers — one which he managed to save from bankruptcy — has got to have something to do with the decision.

As I’ve pointed out before, Silicon Valley and Detroit have very different views about how and how fast the automotive industry needs to innovate. Mulally could help Google make sense of the…

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Shopify lets its merchants choose when it comes to bitcoin payments: Coinbase or BitPay?

Gigaom

Bitcoin merchant adoption is fast becoming a neck-and-neck race between Coinbase and BitPay, two companies who both offer similar services as a payment processor for merchants. Expedia and Dish Network both use Coinbase, while TigerDirect and Virgin Galactic are partners with BitPay. Shopify used to be squarely in BitPay’s corner, but today it announced that the more than 100,000 businesses on the ecommerce platform can now choose Coinbase to be their payment provider as well.

«We’re not supporting one provider over the other. We want to make sure merchants have the choice because each one has their features and benefits. And we’re just happy to offer that level of choice,» said Louis Kearns, director of payments at Shopify, in a phone interview.

Shopify was early to hop on the bitcoin bandwagon when it teamed up with BitPay in November 2013. Kearns said «thousands» of businesses use BitPay already and it…

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Elliptic takes $2M investment to help firms store and handle bitcoin

Gigaom

Europe’s top banking regulator may think banks should stay away from bitcoin and other virtual currencies, but that’s good news for at least one company — Elliptic, which has just scored $2 million in seed funding from Octopus Investments and several angels.

Elliptic offers a secure, insured bitcoin service called Elliptic Vault for retailers, hedge funds, bitcoin exchanges and other companies that are trying to dabble in this new world of so-called cryptocurrencies. According to CEO James Smith, the advice of the European Banking Regulator «opens up the playing field for people like us who can step into that void.»

Smith said the funding would be used to make Elliptic Vault easier to use:

«We want to make it very easy for companies to use. If they’re used to other types of financial products… a hedge fund is used to having everything with a custodian, normally a bank…

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Rethinking the enterprise data archive for big data analytics and regulatory compliance

Gigaom

If businesses are to extract value from years of history and corporate memory, they must store data in a fully accessible database or data store with access methods that are standards-based so they don’t need to maintain a different set of skills and tools.

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D-Wave Systems raises $30M to keep commercializing its quantum computer

Gigaom

D-Wave Systems, the controversial poster child of commercial quantum computing, has raised $30 million in venture capital from Fidelity Canada Fund, Goldman Sachs, Business Development Bank of Canada and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company, which is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, has now raised $160 million since it was founded in 1999.

Although debate over the quantum properties of D-Wave’s system remains an ongoing affair (see, for example, these two studies — here and here — published in the past few months), researchers do seem generally excited about the types of problems D-Wave’s computer might be able to solve given the right algorithms.

And regardless if it’s ultimately determined to be a true quantum computer, D-Wave is still an interesting company to watch. The company is already working with partners in the financial services and life sciences spaces to apply the D-Wave computer to their problems, and it’s promising to deliver its…

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Google’s top lawyer explains dilemma over EU’s «right to be forgotten» law

Gigaom

Google(s goog) is unsure how to apply «very vague and subjective tests» to the more than 70,000 removal requests that have landed on its doorstep in the wake of a recent court ruling, according to the company’s chief legal officer, David Drummond.

In a Guardian article titled «We need to talk about the right to be forgotten,» Drummond sheds new light on a controversial legal process that lets EU citizens order Google to remove search listings they dislike. Drummond described who is coming out of the woodwork to demand takedowns, and the dilemma Google faces:

former politicians wanting posts removed that criticise their policies in office; serious, violent criminals asking for articles about their crimes to be deleted; bad reviews for professionals like architects and teachers; comments that people have written themselves (and now regret). In each case someone wants the information hidden, while others might argue that it should be out in the open.

According to…

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