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Google Octane benchmark tests JavaScript in the real world, scales to mobile sizes

Google's Octane benchmark tests JavaScript in the real world, scales to mobile sizes

We're all too familiar with JavaScript tests like Sunspider -- we use them all the time to gauge browser speeds on phones and tablets. Most of these have little direct correlation to the sites we're visiting on our devices, however, and seldom acknowledge that we're testing with anything but a desktop. Google wants to drag the experience into this decade with its new Octane benchmark. The collection of tests uses real-life examples of JavaScript code -- who knew web-based Game Boy emulators were so popular? -- to generate results for a simple, more-is-better scoring system. Its interface also scales dynamically and should fit just about any screen size. While we can't guarantee that Octane will find a place within our own battery of tests, both the benchmark itself and the source code are available for anyone to investigate. Feel free to post and compare your results in the comments.

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Google Octane benchmark tests JavaScript in the real world, scales to mobile sizes originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Aug 2012 09:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/22/googles-octane-benchmark-tests-javascript-...

Amazon sets sights on cloud cost sprawl

Amazon is making it easier for companies to track and price out the cloud services they’re deploying with a new cost allocation process.

The fact that Amazon Web Services are so inexpensive and easy to spin up is both a blessing and a curse for companies. A blessing because internal developers can try out new stuff fast and cheap; bad because it leads to cloud cost sprawl where companies find it difficult to track and monitor cloud usage and the costs of which — let’s face it — add up. Even cheap services cost money. A post on the Amazon Web Services blog outlines how corporate users can tag those services to make billing less of an, um, adventure.

It does still require some manual input. The Amazon resources you use have to be tagged  as one of the following:

  • S3 buckets
  • EC2 Instances
  • EBS volumes
  • Reserved Instances
  • Spot Instance requests
  • VPN connections
  • Amazon RDS DB Instances
  • AWS CloudFormation Stacks

The tags — 10 of which can be applied for each resource used — are then entered via the AWS Management Console, the service APIs, the command line or Auto Scaling.

For many big AWS users, this is a good thing. Because there are so many services offered by the hour, it is easy to leave something running unnecessarily. “For us, the underlying mechanism is very valuable because it means we can do a ‘one-stop-shopping’ for our clients and re-bill them for a combination of the AWS charges plus our support and engineering charges,” said Bob Shear, president of Greystone Solutions, a Boston company that sets up ecommerce sites for customers.

A variety of third parties including Rightscale, Cloudability, CloudynNewvem and UptimeCloud already offer services to help customers better track their cloud spending. And Rightscale just announced its ShopforCloud service for forecasting purposes.

Amazon clearly sees a need to offer a better cost tracking service of its own.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Will Merydith


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/cloud/amazon-sets-sights-on-cloud-cost-sprawl/?utm_source=f...

C-SPAN’s Online Hub Provides Raw Convention Coverage


The Republican and Democratic national conventions are just around the corner, but primetime television coverage will be scant. What are political aficiandos who want gavel-to-gavel convention coverage to do?

C-SPAN, which has a public mission to "provide access to the political process," thinks it has the answer: The network on Thursday is launching "Convention Hubs" for both the RNC and DNC. The hubs will livestream the conventions and provide more than 100 hours of video coverage for anybody to watch and share on their social networks, as well as myriad of bonus features designed to engage C-SPAN's online audience.

"We want to give our viewers a single source of information on t…
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More About: 2012 presidential campaign, Politics, US, Video, cspan, trending

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/23/cspan-convention-hub/?utm_source=feedburner&ut...

Hulu Has a New Look, and It’s Beautiful


new-hulu-640

Hulu just launched a new design for its site, incorporating much larger cover art and more personalized content for its users. The new site will roll out to all visitors over the next several days, Hulu says.

The company's vice president of product, Rob Wong, wrote in a blog post that the thrust of new Hulu is to make it easier for users to find the "best TV moments" available while unearthing "hidden gems" such as classic sketches from Saturday Night Live. Hulu Plus appears to be unaffected.

"We’ve always wanted to do a better job of highlighting these moments, whether it’s a funny bit from last night’s Jimmy Fallon, the week’s best TV episodes, a fresh import from the U.K…
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More About: Video, hulu, trending, videos

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/22/new-hulu/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=fee...

Creating a Data Driven Culture

Data Driven CompanySmall companies have lots of advantages over their bigger competition. With less bureaucracy, less politics and fewer obligations to existing customers, they are more nimble.

In short, small companies can make faster decisions. But there’s more to being successful as a small company than just this. If you can combine your ability to make fast decisions with making better decisions, then you’re on a path to success. And making smarter decisions comes down to making decisions based on data and quantitative analysis instead of your gut or internal politics.

The key becomes answering the question “How do you create a data driven culture at your company?”

But how does one create a truly analytical culture at his or her own company? Here are three initial steps you can take as a leader.

1. Universal Data Access

If you want sound, quantitative decision making, the first thing you need to do is make the data available and accessible to all employees. Too often, analytics tools are too intimidating, too difficult and reserved for use by the chosen few ‘trained’ administrators. Or the data needed for making decisions is locked up in a system without widespread access to all of your employees.

There’s no reason for any of that.

If you want your employees making data-based decisions, they need access to as much data as possible. The data should be available, flowing freely to all.  At my previous company, we accomplished this by shoving as much data as possible into a single reporting system from as many sources as possible. Not only did we have sales data from our CRM, but marketing data, consulting data, customer service data and product usage data; all readily accessible to all employees and centralized. If anyone had a hypothesis they wanted to test out, they were free to go in and figure out the answer.

There was no reporting guru. You have a question? Go figure it out yourself.

2. Ask Everyone for Quantitative Proof

Small companies are full of good ideas. There is never a shortage. But which ideas are the right ones that provide the big wins?

I recently asked Mark Roberge, VP of Sales and an early employee at HubSpot, how HubSpot created a highly analytical culture. He had a simple response: “There was always demands for numbers”.

Having a good sounding idea isn’t enough. To create a data driven culture, you need to expect quantitative analysis to back up every assertion. Every early employee responded to each new idea or hypothesis with the question “What is the data that backs your idea up?” and it’s up to everyone, not just management, to demand those numbers.

If you don’t have it, go generate it. Run a test. Run an experiment. Generate the data needed to make the decision.

3. Transparency and Honesty

Lastly, practicing and abiding by a policy of absolute transparency creates an expectation of honest and frank dialog around your decisions. This is in part inspired by SEOmoz’s (a Seattle based startup) TAGFEE tenets.

Take a counter example: a highly political company. Such a political environment is one in which pre-held conceptions are clung to by employees independent of real data. Instead, data is selectively used to back up preconceptions. Once you go down this path, the power of your data-driven decision making is corrupted. People do what they want to do with the data they choose to use or not use.

Transparency and honesty in your dialogs roots out misuse of data. Sunshine become the best disinfectant.

Summary

To summarize:

  1. Provide widespread data access
  2. Expect numbers to justify your ideas
  3. Be open and honest in your use of the data

How have you created a data driven culture?

 

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/creating-a-data-driven-culture/

7 Tips on Negotiating Venture Capital Financing From Breaking Bad

Editorial Note: This article was made possible through the input and advice from three great entrepreneurs in the D.C. startup community, Manpreet and Gurpreet of Seva Call, and Navroop of Gryphn

One of the most treacherous areas to launching your business and startup is negotiating the venture capital financing details in your term sheet. If you ask any founder who has ever had to deal with the minefield of speaking with investors, lawyers, and other co-founders, you’ll find that agreeing upon a final term sheet can be a taxing process that comes with a slew of pitfalls you can find yourself getting caught in.

Interestingly enough, many of these pitfalls are similar to those of my favorite show, Breaking Bad. For those unfamiliar with this Emmy Award-winning show, it’s essentially a drama that chronicles the life of a desperate chemistry teacher (Walter White) that turns to cooking meth to pay for his cancer treatments and from his forays into the criminal world, finds himself becoming one of the most sought after meth cookers in the country. Launching a meth empire has similar tasks and duties to that of launching a small business or startup: you have to make sure you’ve covered all of your bases, do your research, and of course, ensure your math is right (in Walt’s case, his chemistry).

With that said, I’ve put together seven tips on negotiating venture capital financing inspired from quotes and moments from Breaking Bad. Hopefully they’ll help with any aspiring entrepreneurs out there trying to figure out how to best negotiate their term sheet, and at the very least, it’s a great way to combine my two favorite things: Breaking Bad and Startups.

Enjoy.

 

 

[images via AMC]

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/08/23/7-tips-on-negotiating-venture-capital-financin...

VMware's new "pro" Fusion safely deploys business apps to Macs

Run any Windows OS from XP to 8 on a Mac with VMware Fusion.
VMware

VMware's Fusion for Mac is among the company's most successful consumer products, used by millions of Mac owners to run Windows and Linux virtual machines. But VMware is now reaching into its expertise in IT to pitch Fusion to businesses, with a new professional version designed to provision (mostly Windows) applications to employees or contractors who use Macs.

The Fusion professional edition is one of several upgrades announced on Thursday for VMware's desktop virtual machine products for OS X and Windows. Fusion 5, as expected, adds optimizations for OS X Mountain Lion and Windows 8 (although Fusion 4 will work with those operating systems just fine if you prefer not to upgrade). Workstation 9 for Windows and Linux adds optimizations for Windows 8, allowing Microsoft's touch interface for Windows 8 to be manipulated inside a virtual machine, just as if you were using a "real" Windows 8 touchscreen computer.

Both Fusion and Workstation have "millions" of users. While VMware wouldn't tell us exact user counts, it did say that Fusion is more popular—perhaps not surprising as it's a consumer product. Fusion 5 is the first to also come as a professional edition. It has the same features as the consumer software, plus the ability to create "restricted virtual machines" in which IT shops can provision Windows apps to users while imposing restrictions designed to prevent data leakage. It works with any Windows operating system from XP to 8.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/vmwares-new-pro-fusion-safely-deploys-bu...