* Other than royal palaces, there are no houses in London that are still owned by their 18th or 19th century families. (Courtesy: Clive Aslet/New Criterion)
* Sesame Street has a venture arm to fund and facilitate start ups.
* The recommended servicing amount of a pickle spear is less than a spear. (Courtesy: Personal experience)
On the one hand, there’s the public cloud, where a company’s data is stored and computing run by a third-party company at another site. On the other hand, there’s the private cloud, which is the new name for a company buying, running, and using its own data centers with its own staff.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid: Companies still do this, and they do it a lot. Analysts at JPMorgan & Chase (NYSE: JPM) estimate that only 5 percent of current data center spending is for the public cloud.
In the past, several cloud providers have tried to win the massive private cloud market by shoving their capabilities into other people’s data centers. This hasn’t worked too well, with Azure and Oracle’s Corp’s (NYSE: ORCL) now quietly hushed-away efforts being the most visible ones.
I also wrote an October update article for CTP‘s model portfolio that focused on recent tech M&A activity.
The internet of things involves the connection of a growing number of consumer products and capital equipment to the cloud for automation and data collection. You may be familiar with the connected home, where residents can monitor and control lights, thermostats, smoke detectors, security systems, locks and other features remotely, via their smartphones.
Discussions of this phenomenon often focus on sensors and the data they generate. But how systems learn from the information collected and communicate to the sensors is arguably more important. The internet of things doesn’t exist purely for monitoring functionality; these systems aim to identify subtle but meaningful patterns and respond with smart, automated actions.