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  SAP Acquires KXEN to Extend Power of Predictive Analytics to 'Unlock Big Data'
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  Apple Shows Its Colors - New iPhone 5S, 5C Deliver Real Jazz, a Secret, and No Pop Entertainment Gimmicks
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  Big Data to Mean Big Spending by 2018
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  Net Neutrality Has Long-Term Implications for Innovation

Twitter is now ever-present. It is almost, without fail, the first place that breaks news of any kind - whether international, national, local or hyper local, it is Twitter that has the news first. Many tweets, in turn, evolve quickly into debates, trend instantly into the top 10 topics of any given day, and sometimes cause numerous other streams of media interest to develop.

Verizon's e-mail service has been crippled since early this morning. Here is what the company has to say about all of this on their website as of 3 p.m. EDT.

What exactly do you get from pay-TV providers for being a loyal customer? Nothing? No, less than that. Current customers get to stand by while your providers take the "sold-and-old approach" and spend their time pitching better offers and sales deals to non-customers.

We've been uncharacteristically rooting for Carl Icahn to pull Dell's shareholders into the realm of reality, but we've rooted to no avail. Michael Dell has now officially been able to take his company private, which effectively means he has been able to take the company back for himself at a ridiculous bargain price that his shoddy work as CEO over the last several years has driven Dell's share price to.

At the recently concluded ITEXPO show in Las Vegas, I moderated a panel discussion on whether traditional physical network providers, fixed-line and mobile, were going to be "dumb pipe" providers or had significant opportunities to be enablers and/or competitors of next generation Over-the-Top (OTT) services.

Back in June, Apple showed off the new iOS 7. And ever since June the endless leaks of both next generation iPhones have left absolutely nothing to the imagination. We’ve known what the new iOS 7 would bring and we knew what the iPhone 5S and 5C would at least look like, along with a variety of details and mostly accurate speculation. When viewed as either an operating system or pieces of essentially disjointed hardware, there isn’t much to give anyone a sense of innovation – a word that has recently taken on a very over-used sense of importance when speaking of Apple (we admit we’re as guilty on this front as anyone else).

But, when the two are finally married into the holistic entities that are now the complete and fully announced iPhone 5S flagship and the 5C, we begin to see innovation.

So here is a somewhat rhetorical question for you: How would you like to be able to relatively accurately predict the future? Is this wishful thinking, or can the focus today of using big data in combination with the emerging field of predictive analytics really narrow the odds?

When it comes to our personal lives, accurately predicting the future is likely to remain the in domain of psychics. However, for businesses, being able to get a reasonably good forward looking handle on customer buying proclivities is to put it mildly, serious business. Indeed, with the growth of interest in big data for finding insights that can be gained from cross-functional correlations of increasingly large customer profiles

Consultant Martin Geddes has for some time argued that telcos are in the trading platform business, not the “pipe” business.

Basically, Geddes argues for a future business model based on customized, on demand services and features that are not based on “speed” and “retail price,” but on how use of bandwidth supports the applications that now are what people will be buying.

As a U.S. District Court weighs a legal challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to promulgate network neutrality rules, European regulators are tussling with the same issues.

There are “near term” issues, to be sure, mostly centering on anti-competitive business behavior or creation of a “two tier” Internet.Proponents of network neutrality continue to worry about threats to the Internet caused by traffic management and quality of service features provided to end users or business partners.

If you follow my postings on all things malicious, which unfortunately have become a dominant subject in recent weeks, you are aware of my delight in gleaning new insights from subject matter experts. In perusing the now almost daily flow of information on bad guy activities—who they are attacking, the impact, user reactions, estimated cost of being out of service, tools of mayhem being employed, frequency and sophistication, recommended defenses, etc.—it got me to wondering if there were any days when certain entities and assets were most vulnerable to being attacked.

It is easy to understand attacks. This is especially true of pernicious denial of service attacks (DoS), of either the straight or the even more malevolent distributed (DDoS) kind, which are aimed to shutting down things like retailers

Big data has prompted a lot of consideration and care pretty much since it first showed up, and businesses have wondered how this new technology would fit into everyday operations for quite some time. The answers coming back, meanwhile, are sparking plenty of interest, and along with that interest comes plenty of spending. But it's just how high the spending will get—at least, if a recent study from ABI Research proves correct—that should really stagger the imagination.

According to the ABI Research study, spending on big data at the organization level will clear $31 billion by the end of 2013. That alone likely has some giving a low whistle of respect, but by 2018—just five years from now—the spending will make $31 billion look like a drop

NASA's Friday night launch of the LADEE lunar satellite from Wallops Island, Va., was seen from Maine all the way down to North Carolina, proving to be a social media boon to the agency and Orbital Sciences Corporation.

Launched at 11:27 p.m. ET on Sept. 6, the Orbital Sciences Corporation Minotaur V launch vehicle lit up the night with white fire as it left the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport 0B launch pad from Wallops Island. Quickly ascending into the dark night sky, LADEE crossed the 100 kilometer boundary into space in about two minutes and 20 seconds as the Minotaur rapidly burned through its first two solid fuel stages.

With only three days left before a planned vote of Dell shareholders regarding a deal posed by CEO Michael Dell's investment group, Carl Icahn has shut down his own fight for a leveraged buyout of the company. But from the look of things, the fighting may not be over just yet.

Icahn and his group put in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which read in part: “We have therefore come to the conclusion that we will not pursue additional efforts to defeat the Michael Dell/Silver Lake proposal, although we still oppose it and will move to seek appraisal rights.” This has pretty much cleared the way for a vote on the Michael Dell group's proposal, featuring a $13.75 offer per share

Wallops Island, Virginia – A decade or so ago, laser communication was one of the tools of the trade for establishing high-speed broadband connections between two points before fiber became plentiful. Now NASA has two projects in the works to demonstrate optical links across tens and hundreds of thousands of miles for satellite use, bringing a totally new meaning to “free space” communications.

NASA’s first demonstration will take place in a few weeks, as the LADEE satellite circles around the Moon. Onboard the 393 kilogram satellite is the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (LLCD).

It did not take long for my inbox to be flooded by those with encryption solutions to comment on the exhaustive front page story in the New York Times, "NSA Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web," that is burning up the Internet. As many noted in their comments, even leaker Edward Snowden says that better encryption technologies would help enterprises protect confidential information at rest and on the fly.

Though home management offerings trend toward complexity for the non tech-savvy consumer, Amazon has opened an online store full of products for those looking for a do-it-yourself alternative to cable and telco offerings, which provide professional installation and carry a monthly service fee.

Predictably, Amazon’s home automation store approach continues the e-commerce kingpin’s original strategy of selling products standalone or in groups provided by its merchant partners without value-added services. This will likely limit the company’s market opportunity in the more than plug-and-play home management arena.

The words “customer experience” have taken on a life of their own. They now are applied to virtually anything to do with how all of us feel about our engagement online with people, applications and processes. And, while we “experience” company capabilities typically through a Web browser, it is all the things that go on behind the curtain that make our interactions either compelling or not so much.

Putting aside interactions with call center agents, as we all know the engines that in many ways hold the keys to our online experiences are the data centers and servers that service providers employ to bring the virtual world to life. In short, it is their performance, or lack thereof

NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility (WFF) will be the site of two ambitious activities this month. Located about three hours drive from the nation's capital and an hour south of Ocean City, MD, the humble facility is scheduled to launch a satellite to the moon on September 6, followed two weeks later by a full-up demonstration of Orbital Sciences Corporation's commercial supply service for the International Space Station (ISS).

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is scheduled to be launched at 11:27 p.m. ET on Friday evening on board an Orbital Sciences Corporation Minotaur V rocket. The launch will be the first interplanetary launch from Wallops Island, Virginia.

One of the downsides about online video, such as it is, is that of discovery. There's so much raw video hitting the Web every day that finding something that matches what someone's looking for at the time is a bit of a challenge. Bing, however, wants to make this process simpler by bringing out a newly redesigned video search system that should make finding the right video online an easier task than it was.

The biggest changes in Bing are in the display of videos potentially available for viewing. The preview windows are now both larger and feature improved resolution so the content can be more quickly ascertained and determined whether or not it's relevant to needs at the time.

Almost lost in the wake of Microsoft buying Nokia, and Verizon (finally) buying up the rest of its wireless division from Vodafone, was Digium acquiring Vocalcloud. Atlanta-based Vocalcloud is the service provider delivering Switchvox as a cloud-based service for Digium.

It has taken Digium about a year to get to this point, according to Digium CEO Danny Windham, first with a Vocalcloud partnership and extensive testing before offering a Switchvox cloud service in March 2013.