5 Minute Drill: Turbo Touches An iPad

I spent about 10 minutes in an Apple store earlier this week checking out the new iPad, and thought I’d spend nearly five minutes telling you all about it via the video below.

New IBM Smart Analytics Systems

IBM today announced new systems highly-tuned and optimized to help clients more quickly draw insights from vast amounts of data to anticipate emerging business trends, capture new opportunities and avoid risks.

These new optimized systems support all environments in a data center, enabling clients to handle higher volumes of transactions and analyze data where it resides.

As part of today’s news, IBM is announcing IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology and Smart Analytics Systems for x86 and mainframe environments.

Each is integrated at every level — from microprocessors to hardware and software, highly-tuned for analyzing enormous amounts of data and in real-time handling data intensive transactions.

Analyzing data where it resides in the data center is very important as clients seek to shorten the cycle time between processing and results, and want to avoid the costs of migrating data from one system to another.

Wall Street firms, for example, are paying hefty rental fees to exchanges to allow their hardware to be located next to the servers that house market and trading data, mainly to shave critical milliseconds from the time it takes them to order and execute a trade.

With IBM’s new analytics systems, clients can now more effectively manage analytics and transactional workloads and extract data insight up to twenty times faster compared to competitive piece parts, for improved business outcomes.

These systems can also reduce storage space for structured and unstructured data by up to eighty percent with deep compression capabilities that shrink the data on disk, translating into significant energy-related cost savings for clients.

According to recent analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated at 650 percent. Eighty percent of this data will be unstructured, generated from a variety of sources such as blogs, web content, email, etc.

In fact, seventy percent of this unstructured data is stale after ninety days.

With this ongoing shift in the market, companies and governments need to be able to analyze and extract intelligence from information, irrespective of where data resides, in real time — without being bound by a particular system or platform.

IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology
The new IBM pureScale Application System combines POWER7-based servers with WebSphere Application Server and DB2 pureScale software  to handle  heavy transactional workloads, such as smart utility grids.

As the amount of data continues to grow, organizations in all industry segments are poised to take advantage of IBM’s economical and efficient approach to scaling capacity — without forcing clients to overspend on excess hardware and software.

For utility companies, a smart electrical grid requires up-to-the-minute data to deliver electricity in real-time, where it is needed most. It helps customers monitor their energy consumption to avoid or reduce usage during the most expensive peak times.

To handle the volume of data and transactions generated by this workload, companies require an application system that ensures continuous availability and virtually unlimited computing power required to meet changing business demands.

IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x
The new IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x, join the Power Systems based 7600 with attractively-priced integrated server, storage, software and services.

These analytics workload optimized systems include pre-tuned components to speed deployment of  powerful business analytics solutions in days.

Integrated Cognos and InfoSphere Warehouse software capabilities include reporting, analysis and dashboarding; ability to analyze multiple business variables to uncover unseen relationships; and ability to mine both structured data and unstructured information such as email, websites and blogs, to uncover hidden opportunities or provide customer behavioral analysis.

You can read about a number of IBM clients already adopting these new technologies in the full press release.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5600 (with System x) is immediately available.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 (with System z) and the IBM pureScale Application System will be available later this quarter

Where Am I?

Whoa there, Nelly!

Rumor mill has it Yahoo is considering a purchase of location-based marketing darling Foursquare for a mere $100M buckaroonis.

That’s certainly one way for Foursquare to lose its way in the digital wilderness.

Let’s be real: Yahoo doesn’t exactly have a glowing record of effective acquisition integration.

Of course, that raises Texas-based location service competitor Gowalla’s stock in trade.

Then again, both Gowalla and Foursquare should probably get theirs while the gettin’s good.

One major move by Facebook in the mobile location arena and you can watch that oxygen leave the bubble faster than Tiger Woods flees a post-Masters press conference this week in Augusta.

(Sterling performance yesterday, BTW, Tig..now, get out on the golf course and show us you can actually still play golf.)

Me, I’m still not telling anybody where I am in the world using these services.  While I’m sure they’re good for something, I have enough trouble keeping up with my location without advertising it to the world.

And quite honestly, I see too many opportunities for social etiquette snafus, never mind all the privacy issues I’ve raised previously.

“Oh, no, you mean, we were BOTH at the SAME bar at the same time and we COMPLETELY missed one another?? How could technology POSSIBLY have failed us so?!”

John Battelle writes it’s a “demo” thing (as in “demography”).

May be.

But I still maintain the only person in the world who needs to know where I am is me.  And I don’t need an Internet service to tell me that.

At least not yet.