George C. Dimitriou

GSMA released research shows that the number of total connected devices is expected to increase from approximately 9 billion today to more than 24 billion in 2020, and within that, mobile connected devices will grow 100% from more than 6 billion today to 12 billion in 2020. This explosive growth will support an addressable revenue opportunity for mobile operators of nearly US$1.2 trillion by 2020, a sevenfold increase from expected revenues in 2011, and will also provide significant growth potential for the entire ecosystem.

The e-Atlas of Global Development is a free, online, interactive tool, which maps and graphs more than 175 indicators from the World Bank’s development database. Critical issues such as poverty, food production, population growth, climate change, international trade, and foreign direct investment are covered. It is a concise and up-to-date reference for journalists, teachers, students, and anyone interested in better understanding today’s critical development issues.

Visit and use the e-Atlas of Global Development at data.worldbank.org/atlas-global

25 years ago today that Microsoft released Windows 1.0. The world’s most popular operating system has gone through a number of versions since then, and the next iteration, Windows 8, is expected within 2 years.

At the time it launched, Windows actually wasn’t a full operating system. Rather, it was a graphical user interface (GUI) that ran on top of DOS. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said at launch that Windows 1.0, which carried a suggested retail price of $99 in 1985, was “unique software” that would provide “unprecedented power to users today and a foundation for hardware and software advancements of the next few years.” Windows has been the dominant operating system for the past two decades. Its future as such, however, is in doubt. Computing seems to be undergoing a fundamental shift away from the PC paradigm and toward mobile and tablet-based interfaces.

The graphic below, from ZDNet UK, illustrates the progression of Windows from November 20, 1985 to today.

Unveiled today at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing, Tianhe-1A is the world’s fastest supercomputer with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark.

Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)  in China, and it is already fully operational. To achieve the new performance record, Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. It cost $88 million; its 103 cabinets weigh 155 tons, and the entire system consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.

Tianhe-1A ousted the previous record holder, Cray XT5 Jaguar, which is used by the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. It is powered by 224,162 Opteron CPUs and achieves a performance record of 1.75 petaflops.

According to Nvidia, Tianhe-1A will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.

“Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization” is the first release from the Berkman Center’s Russian Internet research project.

For this paper, the authors analyzed Russian blogs to discover networks of discussion around politics and public affairs. Beginning with an initial set of over five million blogs, they used social network analysis to identify a highly active ‘Discussion Core’ of over 11,000. These were clustered according to long term patterns of citations within posts, and the resulting segmentation characterized through both automated and human content analysis. For a list of key findings, an image of the RuNet map, and access to the full paper, please visit: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Public_Discourse_Russian_Blogosphere

The 2010 Gartner  Hype Cycle Special Report 2010 evaluates the maturity of 1.800 technologies and trends in 75 areas. New this year is business use of social technology, sustainability and green IT, emerging energy technologies, enterprise architecture, Pattern-based Strategy and performance management.

Five years is eons in Internet time, and a lot has changed in the blogosphere since 2005. Sites have been born, sites have died, sites have grown up and others have faded away. Entirely new blogging formats have been created and business empires have been built on the foundations of humble blog beginnings.

The blogosphere of 2010 is powered in many ways by social media, something that barely existed five years ago, and was likely an afterthought to most hobbyist bloggers of the day.

How did we get from there to here?

Read the full story here.