Month: October 2013

• How Jeff Bezos crushed Diaper.com so Amazon could buy it (link)
• The Cloudera Model – Mike Olson (link)
• Counter point to above post: Build to Last – MapR’s business model (link)
• Does Open Source raise spell end of traditional SW (link)
• GE’s Jeff Immelt – Analytics Lessons Learned (link)
• Big Data to help you get in shape (link)
• Company of the week: DWave Systems – pioneer in quantum computing (link). Fascinating read about their technology here.
  • One day in future we  all will be benefitting from quantum computers in one form or other. Good to learn about the advancements being made in this field. Though there are “research” projects in the works, DWave is the first commercial attempt (that I know of) to bring quantum computing to the market. Take note Intel!.

Early Week Reading – Oct 6th, 2013

• Multi-Region DynamoDB (link)
• Software design defect cripples Health care website (link)
• Twitter does make money in data business – no news here! but interesting read(link)
• Interesting bio: Tracy Hall, who invented Synthetic Diamond (link). He was awarded $10 US savings bond by his employer GE, and GE went on to make billions using the materials created by this invention.
• Instant classic football – Broncos vs Cowboys (link)
  • Great game of football. Was a treat to watch, points raining down from both sides in the intense battle to win. Final 100 seconds literally changed the game.
• Alternative use for social media – Gangwars fueled by Social Media (link)
• Dark Valley of Hadoop or rather generally Big Data – good read (link)
• Innovation is not just about new products (link)

Amazon is going to release set-top-box for the holidays (link).

One more set top box from yet another vendor? Don’t we have enough already with Roku, AppleTV, Google ChromeCast and various devices from small players? I would like to see someone release a full-fledged TV DVR plus streaming device like SageTV(other than Tivo). I’ve been using SageTV and its Media Extender STP-HD300 for the last three years with no issues and loving it. I’ve spent zero dollar with Comcast or Dish since then.

SageTV uses desktop PC as the media server to control HD HomeRun, over-the-air TV tuner, using regular ethernet cables and streams live/recorded TV to the HD300 box sitting next to the TV/Home theater system. I don’t see a good alternative to this powerful system right now, and I’m worried if something happens to my computer or to the little wonder box HD300 (already 3 years old) I would end up either loosing access to TV altogether or cut my pride and subscribe to Dish/Comcast.

When Google acquired SageTV last year, the hope was that they’ll make it better by integrating more services, kill the Google TV  and replace it with “Google powered” SageTV. Whatever happened to that hope and to SageTV!!! Can someone take up the SageTV flag and help those occasional TV watchers save some dough? I don’t see any other option, short of Tivo that charges $15/m just for the service and TVGuide?  Give me choice folks!