Most people don’t realize that when they post Tweets on Twitter that the social network has a license to own those communications. Last week, DataSift introduced “Historics” in limited release. This is a service that allows companies to analyze public Tweets dating back to January 2010. DataSift is one of two companies in the world with a license to make Twitter data commercially available for non-display purposes. DataSift’s new social data platform creates insights from social data and aggregates public social data, enriching it, filtering and delivering it into social media monitoring, business intelligence and CRM applications. DataSift enriches every Tweet with details including sentiment, topics, web-links, location and social media influence — giving anyone who can afford it the capability to filter social data, extract meaning and create insights. Demand is so strong for the service that almost a thousand companies — including 100 of the Fortune 500 companies — are on the waitlist for Historics. The service becomes generally available in April.
 

Speaking ahead of his address at Defence IQ’s Tactical Communications 2012 event in London this April, Michael McCarthy, director of operations for the US Army’s Brigade Modernization Command, Mission Command Complex (MCC) revealed that there are immediate plans to deliver Android smartphones and tablets to frontline troops. In recent months, the US Army has been incorporating smart technology into the wider battlefield network, under what has been called “an accelerated approval process.” As standard-issue equipment, the phones and tablets should allow units to share live video, GPS coordinates, voice communication and ultimately build an accurate integrated picture of the battlefield. The US Army is also continuing to invest and develop its own App Store, which includes special apps for soldiers, such as foreign language translation and equipment location services. Open-source Google Android software has reportedly been considered the preferred foundation for the apps. Tablet devices are also expected to become certified components of several global future soldier programs, including India’s F-INSAS and France’s FÉLIN, and have been incorporated successfully into the British Artillery training program.
 

Scientists at IBM Research have achieved major advances in quantum computing device performance that may accelerate the realization of a practical, full-scale quantum computer. For specific applications, quantum computing, which exploits the underlying quantum mechanical behavior of matter, has the potential to deliver computational power that is unrivaled by any supercomputer today. Using a variety of techniques, IBM scientists have established three new records for reducing errors in elementary computations and retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits (qubits) – the basic units that carry information within quantum computing. The most basic piece of information that a typical computer understands is a bit. Much like a light that can be switched on or off, a bit can have only one of two values: “1” or “0.” For qubits, they can hold a value of “1” or “0” as well as both values at the same time. Described as superposition, this is what allows quantum computers to perform millions of calculations at once. For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe. Quantum computers will have widespread implications foremost for the field of data encryption where quantum computers could factor very large numbers like those used to decode and encode sensitive information.
 

According to the “Second Middle East Business Continuity Survey,” sponsored by eHosting DataFort, organizations in the Middle East are increasingly looking to improve their disaster recovery capabilities. The survey was conducted across nine Middle East countries including Saudi Arabia and covered various industry verticals such as financial services, telecom and government. Nearly 25 percent of the respondents plan to use an external data center service provider for both production and disaster recovery, while 57 percent aim to implement a disaster recovery solution between the production site and the disaster recovery site. In the survey, 16 percent of the respondents reported at least one significant business disruption during the last year, citing hardware/software failures, power failure, application infrastructure failure and site outages as the top four reasons for a crisis. Only one-third of the respondents outside the financial services sector felt that they have high levels of IT disaster recovery readiness as compared to 72 percent of the respondents within the financial services sector.