Month: August 2011

@WalmartLabs — “Social + Mobile + Retail”. Or how the technologies drives retail

@WalmartLabs is redefining Commerce for the largest retailer worldwide, through the innovative fusion of retail, social and mobile. “Walmart wants to tap into social data and entice mobile phone toting customers to its stores”.

We’ve posted on Twitter several updates about Walmart has acquired social media startup Kosmix, about plans to change the way of retailing, etc. Now the time when we can look to Walmart’s tech plans in details. Are they really able to redefine commerce…?

@walmartlabs logo

Today ReadWriteWeb has posted an article “@WalmartLabs: How a Scrappy Search 2.0 Startup Became The Future of Walmart” with the main focus on acquiration of Kosmix, social media startup which had built a Semantic Web platform to organize social media data.

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.NET Micro Framework review. Waiting for NETMF 4.2

The .NET Micro Framework is .NET for small and resource constrained devices. It offers a complete and innovative development and execution environment that brings the productivity of modern computing tools to this class of devices.

SoftElegance as a company with specialization in custom software development for industrial automation attended in new releases which should be 4.2. As Colin Miller said on his blogpost “NETMF 4.2 Contributor and a Cool Product” release 4.2 will have new contributor. Today we would like to look deeply to the current state of the NETMF and what we’ll have in the future in .NET Micro Framework

.net micro framework

For current .NET developers, this means that they can now create applications that run on a range of devices from targeted devices like remote controls to PCs and Servers and on to the cloud – all with the same programming model and tools.

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The look into the future: Windows 8 Server with Hyper-V Replica

Microsoft’s Windows 8 server shows big Hyper-V improvements for scalability and replication. Windows 8 Server edition has about 100 new features, but the main focus was on Hyper-V and a new feature called Hyper-V Replica that provides “asynchronous, application-consistent virtual machine replication.”

At the moment the main information about the Windows 8 and Windows 8 Server comes from official Building Windows 8 blog. SoftElegance keeps follow the blog to stay in touch about the new features comes with new MS’s OS.

building windows 8 blog

At Windows 8’s recent partial unveiling, Microsoft demonstrated a mission-critical SQL VM being replicated from a private cloud to the offsite data center with a few clicks. Also it was showen Hyper-V supporting 16 virtual processors per VM, up from the 4 supported today.

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Automation World indicates that nearly 80% of automation engineers will own a tablet PC by mid 2012

Apps are springing up for all kinds of automation uses, ranging from remote monitoring to test and measurement. Are iPads and other tablet PCs destined to become part of the automation engineer’s toolbox?

Looks like it’s new growing market for software developers to start developing new products and apps especially designed for tablet PC’s and automation needs. Yes, it’s not new, looking to billions of apps on Apple store or Android Market, but automation engineers definitely waiting for the tablet’s software their needs.

automation world logo

Automation World conducted research earlier this year to find out what its subscribers thought about the application of tablet PCs in industry. The results shed a great deal of light on how fast the tablet PC adoption trend is accelerating.

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Project Daytona — a set of tools for working with Big Data, from Microsoft Research

Microsoft has developed an iterative MapReduce runtime for Windows Azure, code-named “Daytona”. Project Daytona is designed to support a wide class of data analytics and machine learning algorithms. It can scale out to hundreds of server cores for analysis of distributed data.

SoftElegance has started to explore this new data analysis and processing framework under the SoftElegance Research Lab initiative which officially will be started next month.

Project Daytona was developed as part of the eXtreme Computing Group’s Cloud Research Engagement Initiative. The project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure was developed for the organizations who have large and growing data collections and need tools to find signals in data and uncover insights.

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