Facebook is planning to build a second data center in Europe, and it has just announced the eventual site: Clonee, Meath County, Ireland. This will be the social network’s first ever data center in Ireland; the company’s current and only European data center is in Sweden. Alongside the news comes a render of what the planned data center will look like once it is constructed.
Verizon has introduced a new sponsored data program called FreeBee Data. Under this, companies are able to sponsor subscriber mobile data under one of four different categories, including things like covering the data used by watching a 30-second video or streaming 30 minutes worth of audio. Verizon will offer both per-gigabyte and pay-per-click options.
Yahoo has introduced its new “Yahoo News Recommendation” dataset, something it says is the biggest ever machine learning dataset released publicly. Says Yahoo, this dataset has been released for the academic research community, giving researchers who are normally unable to access such large-scale datasets the opportunity to conduct research using the mass of information.
A leaky database has been discovered that contains information on more than 191 million U.S. voters. The discovery was made by researcher Chris Vickery, who found his own personal information among millions of others’ in the misconfigured database. Despite efforts, the source of the database hasn’t yet been discovered and law enforcement, at least at this time, doesn’t appear too interested in taking down the list.
Google has announced that Project Fi, its mobile service, will cover more than just your Nexus smartphone. With this new update, Project Fi adds support for data-only devices like your tablet; you’ll need to pick up one of its data-only SIMs to get it (availability is rolling out gradually). Google is going with a simple pricing structure, a flat rate of $10 for every gigabyte.
The social network makes Offline Mode a reality with apps' ability to make Facebook comments and see cached content at all times. This is part of the plan. Part of the plan Facebook has to get as much Facebook delivered to you as it can, all the time. They suggest that these updates are to tend to people around the world connecting with 2G mobile data in developing countries - we know it's for the cat pics.
Li-Fi stands for Light Fidelity, and it's being presented at this time as an eventual replacement for Wi-Fi-transmitted internet. While the term Li-Fi actually does stem from the term Light Fidelity, the word Wi-Fi stems from Hi-Fi, or High Fidelity, from the audio term for home audio, high-quality sound production. The people presenting Li-Fi have taken the concept of the Signal Lamp (aka the Aldis Lamp), sending morse code between ships at sea, instead sending data to your phone. Li-Fi is also known as visible light communications (VLC) technology.
Black Friday is nearly upon us, and if you're one of the brave souls planning to venture out into the madness, some data Google has laid out might be of interest to you. The company recently published some infographics for retailers with the goal of helping them make more effective business decisions, but the data could be useful to the lowly shopper, too. For example, Google’s data suggests heading out between 4AM and 6AM is optimal for avoiding the crowd.
As T-Mobile continues to drive home its "un-carrier" mantra with new features and plans, the company has just announced a new "Un-Carrier Unwrapped" promotion that should make subscribers very happy this holiday season. The promo is said to release a new "gift" each week for the next month, with the first being announced today: all existing Simple Choice customers will get 3 months of unlimited LTE data.
T-Mobile, in its latest Uncarrier event, announced that video will now stream “free” from certain video services, with “free” meaning it won’t cut into a subscriber’s existing high-speed data allotment. The initial change will include a total of 24 video services, but the carrier teases that additional video services will be encompassed by the free streaming change in due time. Counted among the initial included services are Hulu, Netflix, and Sling TV.
Our use of the Internet has increased considerably in the past years, partly thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices. But the bandwidth consume and the price we pay for them aren't exactly getting considerably cheaper. Opera, who previously made a leaving out of compressing web pages, is now making a living out of compressing data that passes through mobile apps. And now it is making sure everyone gets the message by partnering with 14 OEMs to pre-install its Opera Max into as many smartphones as possible.
The spread of the Internet and prevalence of mobile devices have put data front and center today more than any age in the past. But with volumes of data comes the need to make sense of that data. Called big-data analysis, the process has mostly relied on human intuition. As any artificial intelligence scientist will tell you, intuition is one of the hardest parts of the human thinking process to replicate. Researchers from MIT, however, might be on the verge of a breakthrough, with a Data Science Machine capable of performing just as well or even better than humans.
