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Alteva Expands SIP Trunking Portfolio
Alteva (NYSE MKT: ALTV), a premier provider of hosted Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), announces today the expansion of its Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking solution. Part of Alteva’s suite of Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solutions, Alteva’s SIP Trunking is designed to maintain the functionality of a traditional PBX while capitalizing on the additional features and functionality of the cloud. Eliminating costly PRIs and consolidating voice and data traffic onto one single platform provides cost reduction and new capabilities. It also facilitates greater flexibility and scalability in the workplace. Alteva SIP trunking connects PBX users with Alteva’s core base of hosted voice users, enabling free calling between all users across company locations even integrating home-based workers and road warriors allowing PBX users to utilize the features of the cloud such as disaster recovery, business continuity and other advanced services. What’s more, the solution paves the way for other modern “work from anywhere” solutions such as mobility, instant messaging, presence, collaboration and video.

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The Magic Of Seven – 7 Years Of VoipNow
From the dust of old centuries until today’s computer-driven and smartphone-glued society, seven has always been considered a magical number. Many believe in the power of seven, be they sorcerers or mathematicians, historians or, in the past decades, even psychologists. Seven days in the week, seven wonders of the world, seven primary colors, seven notes in the musical scale, seven ages of man, Miller’s law on human brain’s capacity of processing information, and the list can go on and on. So, what makes this number so special? Depending on interest or vocation, you’ll get a different answer every time you ask this question. I’m no scientist, so my answer is not that complicated, yet it does have its touch of magic. 4PSA was the first company in the world to introduce a communication platform that enabled service providers to offer affordable VoIP services, a state-of-the-art substitute for traditional PBX boxes.

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McAfee Simplifies Mobile Device Management And Data Security
McAfee today announced that McAfee Enterprise Mobility Management (McAfee® EMM™ software) is now fully integrated with McAfee® ePolicy Orchestrator® (McAfee ePO™) platform. With McAfee EMM software, comprehensive security, policy, and management capabilities are extended to mobile devices. McAfee ePO software enables enterprises to protect their data on company-issued and employee-owned devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers) through a single, unified infrastructure and console. According to a Gartner survey of 2,300 CIOs worldwide last year, CIOs ranked mobile security as their second highest technology priority.1 IT departments have largely deployed standalone management systems for mobile devices. Mobility no longer needs to be an additional strain on IT resources with the simplification and efficiency of managing end-user devices and servers in the same security infrastructure. “Businesses are leveraging mobile technologies to deliver a competitive edge yet many organizations manage these devices separately from their core infrastructure,” said Ari Jaaksi, senior vice president and general manager of Mobile Engineering Operations at McAfee.

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David Linthicum on accelerating business agility with PaaS
Business agility means the ability to change IT around emerging business opportunities. However, IT has been less than nimble in recent years; application backloads are at an all time high, and confidence in IT is at an all time low. DevOps principles and practices combined with PaaS characteristics will quicken IT solution development and delivery. DevOps focuses on improving continuous activity execution, such as continuous build, continuous integration, continuous test, and continuous delivery. These activities combine to create a ‘no wait’ environment that accelerates business agility. By incorporating automation into developer and operations processes, teams bypass time consuming manual tasks and gain faster phase execution. Both DevOps and PaaS promote simple, on-demand self-service environments that shield team members from complexity and reduce skill hurdles. By offering on-demand self-service access, rapid business innovation and experimentation is possible. By reducing complexity, team members are not required to obtain special training and skills before consuming IT services and infrastructure.

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BlueHornet Announces Kara Trivunovic as New Vice President of Strategic Services
BlueHornet Networks, Inc., the email solution from Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), announced the appointment of Kara Trivunovic as vice President of strategic services. Kara will play a leadership role in advising BlueHornet’s clients on strategic plans designed to increase the revenue and performance of their email marketing programs. Gerry Widmer, BlueHornet’s general manager, said, “The addition of Kara to our senior leadership is a testament to BlueHornet’s on-going investment in strategy and client services. Kara’s strategic approach is disciplined, thorough and highly relevant for marketers. With her support, we can offer our customers new opportunities for growth.” Prior to joining BlueHornet, Trivunovic served as the vice president of marketing services for StrongMail, a leading provider of cross-channel marketing solutions for enterprises. In addition, she was founder and principal of The Email Advisor, an email marketing consultancy focusing on email strategy and channel optimization, which was acquired by StrongMail in May 2009.

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The Top Mistake in Evaluating Big Data Initiatives
People starting a big data initiative feel like adventurers entering Terra Incognita. The mere fact of breaking into the big data space is often enough for them to lose ground because everything seems new and mysterious. To a certain extent, it is true. But just to an extent. The spirit of big data adventure distracts people from the fact that not all big data ideas are equal. The biggest mistake is failure to distinguish game-changing from business extension big data opportunities and treat them appropriately. If you are on the big data journey, approach game-changing ideas according to their potential for breakthroughs and evaluate business extension initiatives based on their predictable cost and benefits. I wrote about that in A Framework for Evaluating Big Data Initiatives. Game-changing initiatives implement radical and important new ideas that require more effort but give a greater return. Usually, these are new revenue opportunities, new markets or products, new business, or new ways of customer engagement — an example is a disruptive product that appeals to a new market segment with different needs than those of the enterprise’s current customers.

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UK School Opinions of Cloud Services and Student Privacy
SafeGov.org and Ponemon Institute Study Shows UK Schools Moving Rapidly to Adopt Cloud Computing, but Overwhelmingly Reject Business Models that Allow Cloud Providers to Mine Student Data for Profit. The study presents a mixed picture of cloud services in UK schools: while a majority of schools expect to adopt such services, school staff are deeply concerned by the threat to student privacy posed by data mining of student email and online documents for profit by cloud providers. SafeGov.org, in partnership with the Ponemon Institute, today released the results of a survey of UK schools designed to measure the views of school staff on the rapidly rising use of cloud services in the education sector and the potential risks to student privacy. The study focused on cloud versions of email and document collaboration tools. While a majority of schools expect to migrate to such services in the near future, 81% of respondents object strongly to the mining of student emails, web browsing and online behaviour for profit by cloud providers, while 84% say providers should never profile students.

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2013 Rails Google Summer of Code Projects
Google has announced the accepted projects for the Summer of Code 2013 and Rails has been granted five slots. Here’s what our students will be working on this summer: Genadi Samokovarov will be working on adding a web-based console for development, debugging and testing your Rails applications. He will be mentored by Rails Core Team member Guillermo Iguaran. Łukasz Strzałkowski will be working on seperating Action View from Action Pack and adding support for custom view classes. He will be mentored by Piotr Sarnacki, who was a Rails Summer of Code student in 2010 and has been a consistent contributor to Rails. Ujjwal Thaakar will be working on adding support to Rails for bulk/collection actions with RESTful resources. He will be mentored by Rails Core Team member Andrew White. Kasper Timm Hansen will be working on replacing the venerable html-scanner in the Rails HTML Sanitization API with Loofah and adding improvements to the API. He will be mentored by Rails Core Team member Rafael França.

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AppFirst Integrates with PagerDuty
AppFirst now integrates with PagerDuty! Below is a brief tutorial on how to integrate AppFirst’s robust system for collecting server information with PagerDuty’s sophisticated method of notifying a support team about alerts via SMS, push alerts, phone calls, on-call calendars, etc. Add a service on PagerDuty. Give it a name that is similar to the name you will give the alert on AppFirst (It does not need to be identical). Next, set the service type to “generic email.” A corresponding email address will be generated automatically. Note how the subdomain you specified in the previous step becomes part of the email address that gets generated. Now that the service has been created, you can configure how the incident report will be distributed by PagerDuty. Note the email address (you’ll want to copy it to your clipboard). Now, back on the AppFirst website, choose Administration | Users, and add a new user. Use the email address from the previous step. You can create multiple services on PagerDuty (so they can be assigned to different users). Each one will result in a new email address, therefore, a new user needs to be added on AppFirst for each one.

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The Legend of Updrage
Upgrades are fickle beasts. Sure, they’re great in concept, but if you’ve ever experienced an upgrade of any form, you would know that the process of pointing at something shinier and better than what you currently have and saying “that’s mine now” is never that simple. There’s costs associated with your upgrade, the stress of making that transition to something new, figuring out what to do with the old thing, finding the time to put together all the great things that make your upgrade worth the effort, telling everyone else about your upgrade, saying a few prayers to ensure that the upgrade works as expected, and eventually, after all the madness, you get to sit back, relax, and bask in the warming glow of all that work and time and say “oooh, that is shinier.” But within seconds you have to maintain that upgrade, learn that upgrade, upgrade that upgrade into something in the “Shinier 3000” lineup because technology is just a jerk like that (iPhone users will understand) and no matter what, someone, somewhere will look at all the culmination of all that invested energy, unimpressed and say, “it was just fine before, so why change it” with the kind of frustration and ferocity that leads to hilariously catchy spelling mistakes.

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Yumemi Launches Sprocket, a Badgeville-Powered Gamification Offering for Leading Japanese Brands
Yumemi, Japan’s market and technology leader in mobile commerce, today announced a partnership with Badgeville, the #1 gamification platform, to power Sprocket, its new engagement offering for marketers. Sprocket complements Yumemi’s suite of existing marketing solutions for web, mobile, and ecommerce, used by some of the top brands in Japan. Industry-leading brands using Sprocket to drive customer loyalty and engagement include Nestlé Japan, Nippon Television, and Dr.Ci:Labo. “Yumemi’s Sprocket, powered by Badgeville, is the clear gamification leader in Japan. Compared to other customer engagement offerings, Sprocket far exceeds in gamification features, widgets and program design,” said Rikako Ibi, Unit Manager, Digital Media Development Unit at Nestle Japan Ltd. “Sprocket was very easy to embed into our web and mobile sites. It is helping us achieve our business goals, incentivizing users to view more pages across our sites.” Sprocket uses Badgeville’s gamification foundation – including rewards, reputation, social context and behavior analytics – to drive customer loyalty and engagement, helping companies grow their bottom line and understand their audience. Sprocket is enabled by Badgeville Embed, a powerful management portal for software providers with multiple clients to easily design, deploy, and optimize thousands of client gamification deployments and embedded solutions.

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