The AWS team works non-stop to improve the security of our services. As you can see from the timeline below, many of our recent releases have made it easier for you to secure your cloud resources. The new AWS Security... | Continue »

According to new data from Experian, hybrid vehicles still make up only a small percentage of all cars on the road today, but they're gaining market share. The data company's study showed that hybrid car market share went from 2.2%... | Continue »

The Fiat 500L's optional portable espresso machine may not come to the states, but come May 1 those with coffee-on-the-go on the mind will have a new option from French espresso maker Handpresso. Like the Fiat's optional espresso machine developed... | Continue »

Occasionally, we get very clear signs that significant change is in the air. When large sums of money unexpectedly change hands, people take notice that something interesting and perhaps unexpected is happening. This morning, GE announced that they were investing $105m to take a significant stake in Pivotal, the new initiative jointly owned by EMC and VMware. On one hand, we have GE: perhaps one of the best examples of an exceedingly well-run global corporation with a market cap of over $220B. On the other hand, we have Pivotal: a nascent analytics platform company formed from EMC and VMware assets, with an exceptional leader at the helm: Paul Maritz. Why would a well-resourced and exceptional global corporation take a significant stake in what might appear to be a technology startup venture? And what might this signal going forward? Context Matters I need to start with a disclaimer: I have no "inside knowledge" whatsoever in regards to this. Consider what follows only informed speculation on my part. That being said, let's dive in ... The first big idea in play is the "internet of things", or what GE calls the "machine internet". The first wave of the internet was driven by... | Continue »

I had to put Wakame to down a little over a week ago. I still look for her when I go to our bedroom, or when I come home from work. I still have an urge to make sure her water bowl is clean and full, and my eyes automatically go to where her insulin and needles are for the daily routine I’ve been doing. She had been getting sicker over the past 6 months so I knew it was coming, and had even made arrangements to put her down twice before that were false alarms. When her brother Katsuo... | Continue »

A new beginning for me and my team: http://gopivotal.com/ | Continue »

A few months ago I had my rear bicycle wheel stolen leaving me stranded. A few months before that, the part of the front wheel that keeps it on the bike was stolen, also disabling the bike. I've seen friend's bikes completely stolen off the rack, often in the middle of the day in a heavily trafficked area. It always infuriates me and I dream of being able to catch someone in the act so I can stop them and, if I'm feeling particularly vengeful, punching them in the nose. Today I was walking though Yerba Buena park to get... | Continue »

2012, New York Auto Show, Honda, Odyssey, Minivan, Production | Continue »

The Golden Helicopter is a special award that is sporadically awarded to those who take a second to post reasoned responses in the face of weblog insanity. Alaina Browne received the first ever Golden Helicopter (in an off-line ceremony) for... | Continue »

According to BuzzFeed, Google Reader Still Drives Far More Traffic Than Google+: According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of... | Continue »

There's a bit of buzz going around about the "real-time web" lately. The real-time web is about information delivered to the user as soon as it is available. Real-time notifications are exciting because it allows web pages to be more dynamic and seem more alive. These techniques also allow developers to mimic desktop applications, with their immediate user feedback, on the web. With all the talk about "real-time" it's important to take a step back and evaluate the techniques we use to accomplish these browser feats. 1) Ajax (Wikipedia article) Ajax is the technique where a user action (via a... | Continue »

For many, Hadoop has become much more than just an interesting data management technology -- it's starting to be seen as the potential strategic successor to the familiar relational database world. It's the platform where the next generation of big data applications will be built. Along those lines, EMC's Greenplum division -- now part of the nascent Pivotal Initiative -- has announced a considerable suite of extensions and enhancements to the increasingly popular Hadoop environment. But please don't get lost in the product detail -- there are some very big and potentially controversial ideas in play here. The role that Hadoop is now playing in big data analytics is now unquestionable; the race is now on for who can provide the best enterprise platform and ecosystem. And, from where I sit, the new Pivotal group is doing a stellar job of earning that title. With this announcement, there's a new high-performance SQL layer to make more data available to more data workers. There are new capabilities to parallelize analytics processing. There's now a meaningful set of integrations with VMware and virtualized infrastructure. There are new consumption options for infrastructure and especially storage. And there's a new set of management tools... | Continue »

Every Tuesday, I take Aila with me when I take Tesla & Nora to school. Aila loves this. She tries the morning rajio taiso (morning calisthenics) with everyone (video). She is so happy to be part of Tesla's routine. Sometimes she joins on Friday when I volunteer in the morning, and she sits and waits, happy at a "desk." Here they are, Tesla guiding her little sister into school. By now, everyone knows Aila. Even the Principal enjoys her when she explores the hallway. | Continue »

Happy Valentine's Day! Super cute, right? It's not a totally original idea (here's a bike route one) but it was really fun to make. I've been running a lot lately and using the Nike+ Running iPhone app to track and map my runs. I've also been posting some of my longer or more interesting runs on Path. Here's how I planned the route - It was really easy to sketch out the map. I just took a screenshot of downtown San Francisco in Google maps and drew right on top of the image using Acorn. Then I used Runningmap.com to... | Continue »

We announced Amazon Redshift, our fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service, late last year (see my earlier blog post for more info). As we often do with complex new services, we started out by making a limited... | Continue »

I sat down with kbs+ Ventures late last year and they produced this interview which I think came out well. This video is part of a series on Creative Entrepreneurship that includes a book on the topic. The book is... | Continue »

We held the Grand Finale of the 2012 AWS Start-Up Challenge at the Dogpatch WineWorks in San Francisco. Each of the twelve finalists presented their AWS-powered start-up to a capacity crowd and then anxiously awaited word from the judges. AWS... | Continue »

Enterprise technology is cool again – and one of the coolest enterpreneurs in the enterprise space is Aaron Levie, the... | Continue »

Jeb Boniakowski dreams of "McWorld," a place in Times Square that would serve all the world's variations of the McDonald's menu: Everyone talks about how globalization "McDonalds-izes" the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is... | Continue »

Starts with a lot of "no, no, no...no, no no" : ) | Continue »