According to a press release announcing its formation, the Forum "provides a unique framework for industry stakeholders to collectively develop solutions that address technical challenges such as VLAN scaling, layer 2 performance and resilience across very large domains and consolidating storage network technologies onto ethernet."

{loadposition stuart}Founding members are Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Equinix, HP, Juniper Networks, PCCW Global, Spirent Communications, Tata Communications and Verizon, but many more organisations are expected to join, including providers of cloud services.

The new body is associated with the Metro Ethernet Forum. James Walker vice president of managed network services for Tata Communications has been appointed president.

Walker said: "This is in response to urgent requirements from customers … We are already seeing performance degradation today from customers who have difficulty distributing their resources around the world … I started talking to colleagues and peers in December and now we are launching it. It brings together many stakeholders from many different parts of the industry … It addresses two areas: ethernet and its behaviour in a large environment and how it interacts with the cloud orchestration layer that sits above that… They have a very tight interaction with each other."

To demonstrate this tight integration, Walker said: "Cloud orchestration platforms use multicast to discover resources, so if you had taken multicast out of ethernet on the WAN you would have broken cloud orchestration platforms. So it is very important to have the interaction between those two layers."

He added: "There are also requirements from a privacy and regulatory point of view. In some countries there are certain types of data that you cannot take offshore so controlling where storage sits and how it is accessed becomes very important."

He said the goal of the forum was to enable separate data centres connected over a wide area network to behave as if they were on the same local area network.

CONTINUED

---

"For customer with a data centre and Singapore and one in Hong Kong that wants to move a virtual machine from one to the other, that is a big exercise, but if they are on one LAN it behaves as one data centre. So we are talking about data centre virtualisation. That is extremely attractive to customers."

The new body is closely aligned with the Metro Ethernet Forum. Walker said: "We are sharing back office resources. They have an intellectual property structure and it allows us to get up to speed very quickly."

{loadposition stuart}MEF president Nan Chen said: “Solutions from the CloudEthernet Forum will increase demand for carrier ethernet services – aligning it closely with the MEF’s objectives and mission to accelerate the adoption of carrier-class ethernet globally."

The new body expects to have its first deliverables in about six months. These will be a set of best practices, "things you can do today with existing technologies," Walker said. He added: "If we have to generate new standards it will be a 12-18 month job. If we decide that the ethernet framework has to be redesigned and the IEEE has to go away and think about it, it will take longer."

He expects membership to grow quickly. "Over the next few weeks you will see further announcements. There are 30-40 companies that have expressed interest in the Forum. We want to bring in large-scale cloud and SaaS providers. We have had discussions with several of them and they have expressed an interest."

 

Look to the west-northwestern evening sky and you’ll see Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus gathering together in the evening sky.

The best time to see them, during this May 25 to May 28 time period, is about 30 to 45 minutes after the Sun sets in the western sky.

On May 26th, for instance, the three planets will be very close together, the closest you will see them during this event.

On May 27th, just one night later, Jupiter and Venus will be positioned side-by-side with respect to our viewpoint on Earth.

{loadposition william08}After that day, Jupiter will begin to move lower into the sky, until it disappears from view in early June.

Even though the three planets appear to be very close together, this is only a mirage -- something that only appears to be so due to our viewing position here on Earth.

According to the May 21, 2013 Space.com article 3 Planets Performing Rare Night Sky Show: How to See It, “While the three planets appear tightly grouped in our night sky, in reality they're very far away from each other.”

And, “During the last week of May, Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will be about 105 million miles (169 million kilometers), 150 million miles (241 million km) and 565 million miles (909 million km) away from Earth, respectively, Sky & Telescope officials said.”

The YouTube video “Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury Meet in Western Twilight May 25-28, 2013”, as shown above, states, “Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury, shine together in the western twilight about half an hour after sunset in late May, according to the editors of StarDate magazine.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daOTyBnUdzc)

The search giant plans to make these images available on Google Maps later this year, along with images from previous expeditions including to Everest.

This means the Galaagos Islands will now be 'Street Viewable', with users able to enjoy a tropical getaway without leaving their computer chairs.

For this particular expedition the company worked together with the Charles Darwin Foundation, the Galapagos National Parks Directorate and, for the underwater survey, the Catlin Seaview Survey.

Google said its team spent a total of 10 days in the Galapagos to capture imagery from 10 locations that were selected by its partners.

{loadposition dswan}Google Maps project lead Raleigh Seamster said the team “walked past giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, navigated through steep trails and lava fields, and picked our way down the crater of an active volcano called Sierra Negra.”

Google most recently hiked around the Grand Canyon to take enough images for over 9,500 panoramas there and handed it over to a local hiker to get imagery of Canada’s Arctic territory.

The Galapagos expedition, Seamster noted in today’s announcement, marks the first time the team has captured imagery from both land and sea at the same time.

In its latest report on the supply chain market worldwide, Gartner’s lists its top 25 companies as it tries to raise awareness of the supply chain discipline and how it impacts business results.

"At the heart of the Supply Chain Top 25 is the notion of demand-driven leadership," said Debra Hofman, Managing Vice President at Gartner.

"We've been researching and writing about demand-driven practices since 2003, highlighting the journey companies are taking, from the old 'push' model of supply chain to one that integrates demand, supply and product into a value network that orchestrates a profitable response to ever-shifting changes in demand."

{loadposition peter}Hofman points to newcomers to the top five this year –  Intel and Unilever – along with Ford, Lenovo and Qualcomm joining the top 25 companies for the first time.

Hofman says that Apple continues to “outpace everyone else by a wide margin on all five measures used, and was again ranked number one by the peer voters, capturing 75 percent of the highest possible points a company can get across the voting pool.

While McDonald’s and Amazon swapped second and third rankings, Hofman says this was not reflected in the peer voters' opinion. “Amazon ranked a very close second behind Apple in the peer vote, almost completely closing the opinion gap from previous years and fast gaining on Apple's voting position.”

Hofman says that many companies are working on building out the foundational components of an end-to-end supply chain across disparate businesses, focusing on improving core supply chain functions, and creating more common processes and systems across them.

“More-advanced companies describe a wide range of initiatives that build on the foundation, including end-to-end supply chain segmentation, simplification, cost-to-serve analytics, multitier visibility and supply network optimization, Hofman said.

"What differentiates the top companies is where they are in the life cycle of these innovations," said Stan Aronow, research director at Gartner.

"The leaders have gone beyond the theory and are now deploying the capabilities that others are just starting to consider. In doing so, they are finding new and creative ways to use these capabilities, exploring synergies and opportunities they hadn't necessarily anticipated in advance.  

“Leaders are discovering that the combination of capabilities they are now implementing brings them to a new frontier of performance, and affords them an entirely new toolbox with which they can orchestrate the optimization of their business and leap ahead of the competition," Aronow concludes.

According to Hofman, against a backdrop of slow growth, many companies might have been expected to retrench and slip back to focusing their supply chains “solely and exclusively on delivering cost reductions and efficiency gains to corporate bottom lines.”

Instead, Hofman says, in 2013 leaders are embracing a new imperative for growth, “realising they have to get smarter about how they do it.”  

"At leading companies in diverse industries, the supply chain organisation is no longer narrowly focused on driving efficiencies and cost cutting; it sees itself, and is seen by its CEO, as a growth enabler.

"Part of 'getting smarter' about growth is partnership across the business. Leading high-tech and consumer product companies, for instance, are approaching new markets with cross-functional teams that include sales, marketing, operations and IT to holistically design a synchronised entry strategy, starting with the customer and designing the right product, pricing, margin targets, service levels, and supply chain network design and tradeoffs that will all work together to achieve the goal."

Aronow says that acquiring, developing and retaining supply chain talent continues to be a major focus area for companies, and that Gartner continues to publish extensive research in this area.

He says that companies are investing time and resources in expanded university relationships, rotational programs, enhanced career progression planning specific to supply chain, multichannel learning options, supply chain certification programs, supply chain leadership development, and others.  

"Leading supply chain organisations are going beyond specific talent initiatives to look at the fundamentals of motivation in their supply chain teams.

“For them it's about engaging hearts, not just minds. It's about igniting passion and excitement for the work, not just compliance.”

 

	Table 1:  The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2013
	Rank	Company	Peer Opinion (1) (172 voters) (25%)		Gartner Opinion (1) (33 voters) (25%)	3-year weighted ROA (2) (25%)		Inventory Turns (3) (15%)		3-year weighted Revenue Growth (4) (10%)		Composite Score (5)
	1	Apple	3203		470	22.3%		82.7		52.5%		9.51
	2	McDonald's	1197		353	15.8%		147.5		5.9%		5.87
	3	Amazon.com	3115		475	1.9%		9.3		33.6%		5.86
	4	Unilever	1469		522	10.5%		6.5		9.0%		5.04
	5	Intel	756		515	15.6%		4.2		11.4%		4.97
	6	P&G	1901		493	8.6%		5.8		3.6%		4.91
	7	Cisco Systems	1167		517	8.5%		11.2		7.8%		4.67
	8	Samsung Electronics	1264		298	11.6%		18.5		15.7%		4.35
	9	Coca Cola Company	1779		278	11.7%		5.5		14.0%		4.33
	10	Colgate-Palmolive	794		324	18.9%		5.2		3.6%		4.27
	11	Dell	1409		342	6.2%		30.7		-0.6%		4.05
	12	Inditex	745		221	18.0%		4.2		13.4%		3.85
	13	Wal-Mart Stores	1629		282	8.8%		8.1		4.9%		3.79
	14	Nike	955		236	14.1%		4.2		10.6%		3.62
	15	Starbucks	808		159	16.5%		4.8		11.5%		3.41
	16	PepsiCo	810		314	8.6%		7.8		10.5%		3.41
	17	H&M	399		41	28.2%		3.7		6.7%		3.22
	18	Caterpillar	714		247	5.8%		2.8		23.4%		2.91
	19	3M	999		105	13.3%		4.2		6.9%		2.87
	20	Lenovo Group	397		211	2.5%		22.2		29.8%		2.75
	21	Nestlé	679		112	13.3%		5.1		-0.6%		2.51
	22	Ford Motor	552		231	5.7%		15.1		3.1%		2.51
	23	Cummins	74		139	13.3%		5.3		13.5%		2.48
	24	Qualcomm	122		45	12.7%		8.5		25.9%		2.37
	25	Johnson & Johnson	730		144	9.6%		2.9		3.3%		2.35
	Notes
	1	Gartner Opinion and Peer Opinion based on each panel's forced-rank ordering against the definition of "DDVN Orchestrator"
	2	ROA:  ((2012 net income/2012 total assets)*50%) +  ((2011 net income/2011 total assets)*30%) +  ((2010 net income /2010 total assets)*20%)
	3	Inventory Turns:  2012 cost of goods sold /2012 quarterly average inventory
	4	Revenue Growth:  ((change in revenue 2012-2011) *50%) +  ((change in revenue 2011-2010) *30%) + ((change in revenue 2010-2009) *20%)
	5	Composite Score:  (Peer Opinion*25%) + (Gartner Research Opinion*25%) + (ROA*25%) + (Inventory Turns*15%) + (Revenue Growth*10%)
	2012 data used where available. Where unavailable, latest available full-year data used. All raw data normalized to a 10-point scale prior to composite calculation.  "Ranks" for tied composite scores are determined using next decimal point comparison. Source Gartner (May 2013)

The new dongle is available exclusively on Telstra prepaid 4G plans, and provides a 4G connection to the user's computer, while acting as a Wi-Fi hotspot being powered through the connected computer.

The dongle can also be charged using an included AC adapter or another USB-compatible power source, like those that come with smartphones.

The dongle costs $119 and includes 5GB of data to use in Australia over 30 day, while prepaid rates range from $20 to $180.

{loadposition dswan}Telstra is aiming the device at “people who work out of the office and have multiple devices that need Internet access such as phones, tablets and laptops,” Telstra general manager of emerging mobile devices Graeme McLindin said in a statement.

Meanwhile Telstra has turned on its 1500th 4G base station “as part of a billion dollar, nationwide program to extend 4G mobile coverage to two thirds of the Australian population by the end of next month.”

Telstra’s Networks Executive Director Mike Wright said the Telstra 1500 4G base station milestone meant “superfast download and upload speeds would be available for millions of Australians on Telstra’s 4G network.”

The Google Glass Face Recognition API from Lambda Labs will be available to developers within a week, TechCrunch reported, quoting company co-founder Stephen Balaban.

The news comes amid some tough questions to Google from US Congress about privacy concerns pertaining to Google Glass, includng 'how does the company plan to prevent its product from collecting data without user/non-user consent?' and 'Is any information off-limits?'

Lambda Labs first released its  open-source Face API last year, and it's already in use by over 1,000 developers who are hard at work creating apps for various devices.

{loadposition dswan}The Glass app would lould let users recognize faces in a crowd as well as remember faces by storing data from personal encounters, and could perform functions like "networking event interest matching."

"This is the first face-recognition toolkit for Glass, so we're just not sure how Google, or the privacy caucus, will react," Balaban said.

But a Google Glass PR rep has poured cold water on the idea, telling CNet that Google would not allow facial-recognition apps in its app store, meaning the startup will potentially have to find a way to circumvent the app store, possibly through rooting or jailbreaking the Glass device.

Steve Lee, Glass director of product management, was quoted as saying by The New York Times, "We've consistently said that we won't add new face-recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place."

Meanwhile a parody video has emerged showing a somewhat accurate vision of the future, in which amateur photographers are going to get even less tolerable with access to Google Glass. Check it out below.

The new flagship smartphone, launched globally on April 27, is estimated to have sold at a rate of four units per second, according to the company, and has sold at twice the rate its rival, the HTC One.

Its predecessor the S3 reached the 10 million mark 50 days after its launch in 2012, while the S2 took five months and the original Galaxy S seven months to reach the milestone, Samsung said today.

The device is now available in over 110 countries and will gradually be rolled out to a total of 155 countries in tandem with partners, according to the Korean tech giant.

{loadposition dswan}"On behalf of Samsung, I would like to thank the millions of customers around the world who have chosen the Samsung GALAXY S4," said J.K. Shin, chief executive and president of IT and mobile communications at Samsung.

"At Samsung we'll continue to pursue innovation inspired by and for people."

The device has been widely praised for its impressive screen, and innovative features like S Health.

All eyes are now on Apple for its iOS7 launch, expected at the company's WWDC in mid-June. Its iPhone is still the best-selling handset worldwide, accounting for 21% of all smartphone sales worldwide last year.

In March 2011 Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, the University of Melbourne, and the Victorian Government launched CEET (Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications), the world’s first research centre exclusively dedicated to energy-efficient telecommunications technologies. Its research efforts cover a broad range of telecommunications network infrastructures and how those elements can increase their energy efficiency.

CEET has now developed a Universal Router Energy Model, which takes a global approach to energy measurement on networks. The model measures the data flowing through routers in order to calculate the overall energy consumption across the network.

The technique was demonstrated this week at the Australian Broadband Applications Laboratory at CEET, when the research team showed how the model can be used to measure energy consumption across two different data paths.

“The ability to model data paths will provide services providers an opportunity to choose the most energy efficient path for data in the future,” said CEET director Professor Rod Tucker. “It also increases our understanding about energy consumption.

“The model is a breakthrough in increasing the sustainability of telecommunications networks. Accurate measurement and modelling will provide the data that the industry needs to deliver efficient solutions in the face of growing demand.”

{loadposition graeme}

CEET was a founding member of GreenTouch, an industry consortium devoted to ‘delivering the architecture, specifications and roadmap to increase network energy efficiency by a factor of 1000 compared to 2010 levels.’

Dr Thierry Klein, Head of Green Research at Bell Labs and Chairman of the GreenTouch Technical Committee was in Australia this week to visit CEET and observe the testing of the model.

“CEET is a true global leader and visionary in the drive for energy-efficient and sustainable computing and networking,” he said. “The work demonstrated today is an essential building block of GreenTouch's agenda to increasing the energy efficiency of global comms networks, and the researchers in CEET are critical to the success of GreenTouch.”

The model was developed through the collaboration between CEET and GreenTouch. The work demonstrated by CEET forms the basis of emerging international standards to reduce the carbon footprint of telecommunications industries.

During his visit Klein held a press briefing to explain the dynamics of network energy usage and the efforts of GreenTouch to reduce it.

“ICT networks are growing rapidly, and scaling those networks is becoming more difficult. Mobile data and Internet traffic is growing much more quickly than energy efficiency (see diagram). We need to bring more focus to energy efficiency.

“Fortunately there are several promising research directions, such as the work being done by CEET. GreenTouch’s role is to help ICT and research communities organise to address these challenges, and to encourage standards and research into technologies that will give us the dramatic, holistic change we need to reduce energy consumption.

“It needs more than evolution, it needs revolution.”

No this is not an article about search engine optimisation (SEO) – that’s so last year and we all should be doing that anyway. It is about ORM (online reputation management).

ORM is about either good or nefarious companies that make a living out of influencing search result by flooding the twittersphere, facebook, blogs or the web with stories and information (or misinformation) that has a tangible result on whether your company or name comes up in the vital first few lines of a search.

ORM is about framing the on-line conversation and moving it to a place someone wants to go.

It is commonly used to clean up (or sully) the first few pages of the search – it is all about putting positive or negative information ahead of the official company site.

{loadposition ray}

It is now being used by celebrities, professional people – even prospective employees to move damaging content further down the search. Unfortunately negative things stick but few searchers ever delve deeper than the first few pages.

It is being used to counter wars of words, or false paid endorsements, or whatever.

Campaigns need to be carefully staged and results can take from a few days to several months but you have to ask what would happen if you did not undertake ORM.

For example bad or venomous listings can’t be easily removed from Google (ever tried fighting City Hall?). But a flood of good, positive reviews and blogs using the same key words can move the bad stuff further down the list. All of a sudden the web is awash with positive comments about your products, about your staff (stories on them are all good fodder), customer experiences and though leadership. It may take 50 postings or it may take 500 and companies exist just to do just that.

But the catch 22 with ORM Is that once you start the opposition can also become stronger and more resolute to destroy your reputation so it has to be handled objectively. Fortunately most casual ‘knockers’ are not persistent and the issue dies a natural death.

What we are seeing is a raft of offshore companies now contacting Australian companies offering ongoing ORM services – and if you were sceptical you would ask if these companies are not creating the very issues they purport to solve. I don’t have hard evidence but it appears the next big thing is for unscrupulous offshore, churn and burn, companies to generate bad reviews or rumours and then contact the target with a solution costing from a few hundred dollars a month to many, many thousands – so don’t fall for this new scam.

 

The tools used by ORM (good and bad) include

• Registration of similarly spelt or sounding domain names
• Registration of similar facebook, linkedin, twitter hashtagsf or other social media names and sites
• Digital monitoring of the web using key word triggers to map conversation trends
• Engaging sometimes dozens or hundreds of “users” to post ORM favourable content regularly (this is most important as it obscures the source)
• Letter to the editor campaigns
• Setting up events or public campaigns to leverage off
• Setting up blogs either supporting or lambasting the target
• Review campaigns involving provision of product to legitimate journalists

And so much more.

Opinion:

ORM is a tool enabled by social media and the web. It can be used for good or evil and all I can suggest is that if you need it then start with a registered consultancy group member of the Public Relations Institute of Australia before you fall for some snake oil pedalled by so called ORM experts.

And I declare that I am a proud Fellow of the Public Relations Institute of Australia.

Clipp  is the brainchild of co-founders Greg Taylor (of the eCoffeeCard fame) and Stuart Hunter (who is also CTO). You can read Stephen Withers iTWire article here for a good overview – what it means to a user.

What I wanted to do is look at the app payment world and whether this has the potential to be a game changer – let me say that I think it does.

We all hate leaving a credit card at the bar – partially out of paranoia that it may be copied and lead to huge bills (and while most pubs, clubs, restaurants etc., are reputable sometimes the honour of an employee is less so) but partly because of an ingrained fear that “after a few” you will walk out and forget it was there.

Clipp solves that and adds a level of spending control, a level of responsibility (you can view a detailed list of drinks consumed at any time) and because it uses photo ID identification it could just save your card from being improperly used. And you can walk out without waiting at the bar to pay – convenient.

{loadposition ray}

Stuart would be happy if every pub in the country adopted Clipp and frankly it is so easy to do that I suspect he will have to employ a few more sales people to cope.

Clipp is now integrated with five of the most commonly used pub Point of Sale (POS) software platforms – H&L Australia, Idealpos, Finchcorp, BePoz, Vectron and Jensen data Systems.

For a pub to use Clipp it just requires pain free activation of the feature and some back of house payment gateway changes (that Clipp do). It is funded mainly by Clipp being the credit card gateway and the money ends up in the pub’s bank exactly as it does anyway. Stuart is convinced that as Clipp grows its gateway rates will be less than any standalone pub could negotiate – aggregation is good.

Clipp also satisfies the new PCI (Payment Card Industry) security standards that technically make it illegal to hold a credit card behind the bar (more bureaucracy) as well as gaining pre-approval for the level of spend (no more rejected cards) and importantly establishing the legitimacy of the person using the card. Having been involved in PCI DSS issues before I can tell you that any solution to help comply is a blessing.

Clipp also has a loyalty program (that they fund – not the pub) that encourages users to use Clipp joints…

The future of this system should be ubiquitous – clubs, hotels, restaurants, anywhere you run a tab.

In the meantime Clipp are also working hard to make it so with the app being ported to BlackBerry (who hosted drinks to show the efficacy of this app – Thanks BB), iOS, Android and Windows Phone so they have it pretty well covered.