Smyform Closes Strategic Investment From Second Century Ventures Deal Includes Financing and a Strategic Partnership from the Venture Capital Fund of the National Association of REALTORS® Seattle, Wash. – January 16, 2013 – Symform, a revolutionary, distributed cloud backup service, today welcomed Second Century Ventures (SCV), the venture capital fund of the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), as a strategic investor in the company. SCV joined Symform’s $11 million Series B round of funding from 2012, which included financing from Longworth Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, and WestRiver Capital. “Second Century Ventures is committed to identifying and helping develop technology
internet infrastructure
Cloud Services On The East Coast Clog In The Wake of Sandy In an age where the Internet infrastructure depends on the engineered redundancy of underwater cables, it is hardly possible that the effect of super storms like Sandy can go unnoticed. Hosting and colocution services went off tune after data facilities and websites on the East Coast went down in the wake of the super storm. Since the Internet is a real industry in the US, it is easy to imagine the level to which cloud providers have reached the blink trying to restore unstable networks. Like a herald,
Apple Vs. Google: The Great Cloud War You wouldn’t have expected it a few years ago, as Apple and Google were focusing on different sectors of the tech industry. In some cases, they actually created technologies that could benefit from each other. However, the two giants are just about ready to go toe-to-toe with each other nowadays. This has been prompted by Google’s Android OS being the only decent challenger to Apple’s iOS dominance. Additionally, Google and Apple have competing cloud computing platforms, which may serve the same purpose but are vastly different in their philosophical approach. Let’s take a closer look
SaaS Global Revenues to Grow 20% to $12 Billion in 2011, Gartner Report North American companies are estimated to account for nearly 64 percent of global software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue with their share slightly decreasing from 63.6 percent in 2011 to 60.8 percent in 2015, a report by Gartner, Inc. revealed. In 2011, global market for SaaS products would generate $12.1 billion, a growth of 20.7 percent year-over-year, the report said. The United States are still the most attractive marketplace for SaaS providers, being the most developed market for such services. Evidently, North America is the largest single regional market with
Environmental Challenges to Cloud Computing Cloud computing has been popularly considered to be environment-friendly. In fact, I had written an article along those lines, although I had expressed some skepticism on the extravagant claims being made on this issue (See: How Green Is Cloud Computing?). However, a recent report by environment watchdog Greenpeace does raise some questions the industry will have to answer. According to this report, provocatively titled “How dirty is your data? A Look at the Energy Choices That Power Cloud Computing”, the data centers that power cloud computing account for about 2% of global energy demand and
