An anonymous reader writes “Simply put, the US government has failed in its role as the ‘caretaker’ of the internet. Although this was never an official designation, America controls much of the infrastructure, and many of the most popular services online are provided by a handful of American companies. The world is starting to sober up to the fact that much of what they’ve done online in the last decade is now cataloged in a top-secret facility somewhere in the United States. The goal has been to promote internet freedom around the world, but we may have also potentially created a blueprint for how authoritarian governments can store, track, and mine their citizens’ digital lives.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you thought smartphones were ubiquitous now — and in certain places they pretty much are — prepare for a whole lot more people to be coming online on their phones in the next 5 years. Ericsson has published its latest mobility report, based on traffic measurements of live networks, which projects global smartphone subs will rise from 1.2BN in 2012 to 4.5BN by the end of 2018 — a CAGR of 25%.
Digital dating is nothing to scoff at; it’s a big business, and it’s changed a lot of lives — mostly for the better. Yet, while dating has seen enormous progress during the Digital Era, there’s still a lot garbage out there, and the space is still mostly dominated by a handful of old names. A gaggle of dating sites and apps have appeared over the past five years, but few have had real staying power, and many have gone the way of the dinosaur.
There’s something about Soccer (and as a Brit, by that I mean Football, pulease…) that seems to have captured investors’ imagination of late. A case in point: 
IDC is the 
Rackspace is banking on service providers such as telcos for its global expansion, leveraging OpenStack to build out cloud infrastructures that partners will then charge customers for cloud offerings. Rackspace will provide an end-to-end program that will include the hardware and the OpenStack cloud operating system software for the build out. The company will provide continuous automated testing and delivery of updates from the Rackspace engineering teams. Rackspace will also manage infrastructure operations such as patching, tuning and monitoring. Rackspace CTO John Engates said in an email interview that if a large telco or service provider wants to become a public cloud provider, they have lots of options for the parts, but none of the sum: Until now, there has been no way for them to get all the pieces they need. They could go to a hardware company who will pull a tractor trailer full of hardware up to the loading dock, call a software company to buy licenses, an integrator to come put it all together, some business consultants to help figure out the go to market pieces, and maybe two years later get to market with something that they hope works. Then they have to figure out how to operate it long term, and build the engineering teams to continuously innovate the platform. What makes this different is that we’re giving them everything. The expansion in many respects is a blueprint for what could be an antidote to Amazon Web Service (AWS) considerable growth. Rackspace goal is to form a partner network that could act as one federated cloud that allows for the build out across multiple regions with OpenStack as the common operating system. “We want to spread as fast as possible,” said Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for Rackspace Open Cloud (OpenStack) at Rackspace Hosting in a phone interview last week. “This gets us into markets that are underserved.” In contrast, AWS has built out its own proprietary data centers around the world, treating them as one giant, programmable system. The contrasts show how AWS pushes a direct strategy while Rackpace is planning to go direct and work with service providers as channels to reach the end market. Marten Mickos is CEO at Eucalyptus Systems. His company competes with Rackspace and companies, such as VMware. His comments, also in an email interview, reflect a market still forming. It’s a difficult choice for customers. VMware is
Japan’s Midokura, a startup with offices in SF, Tokyo, Lausanne and Barcelona, today announced a $ 17.3 million Series A funding round, led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, along with NTT Group’s DOCOMO Innovations, Inc., and Innovative Ventures Fund Investment, the investment arm of NEC Group. The funding will be used to hire and grow the team in preparation for future deployment and expansion of Midokura’s MidoNet network virtualization services.
![cobone2[702]](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/cobone2702.png?w=100&h=70&crop=1)
After months of speculation that its backer Jabbar Internet Group were shopping around for a sale, the leading Middle Eastern daily deals site 
The Internet makes it easy to collaborate across borders. But despite the rise of remote work and virtual teams, founders still need to travel for business sometimes. For some, travel practically becomes the job. And while data and capital now flow virtually unrestricted across borders, physical border crossing have gotten no easier. That’s causing headaches for global startups.
Amazon’s onslaught in disrupting enterprise IT services continues. The company today announced that it would be making Redshift — its cloud-based data warehousing service — widely available, after first launching the product on a limited release at the end of November. The product, part of Amazon Web Services, is aimed both at startups who are looking for cost-effective ways of storing data for their new services, as well as larger or more established enterprises that want to cut operational costs, and possibly capex as well. Amazon also announced a number of third parties — including SAP, Cognizant, IBM, Informatica, Tableau, Attunity, Actuate, Pentaho, Talend, Birst, Roambi and Pervasive — are also linking up with Redshift to help integrate the product into companies’ wider IT services, by also offering analytics and other services on top of it. It will be interesting to see whether Amazon itself eventually begins to move further into this service layer itself, going beyond more basic storage solutions. MicroStrategy and Jaspersoft were the two early partners Amazon announced for IT integration. Amazon is offering the service at a sliding scale depending on usage. Amazon says that pricing for an on-demand, XL Node, 2 terabyte storage starting at $ 0.85 per hour per Node, and a reserved instance, one-year contract for the same service at $ 0.215. The second class of service, the 8XL Node, 16TB storage, is priced between $ 0.912 for a three-year, reserved instance deal and $ 6.80 per Node for the on-demand option. That works out, it says to a terabyte of data coming in at less than $ 1,000. That represents a massive discount for those who have traditionally used physical data warehouses for this service. When Redshift was first announced in November 2012, Andy Jassy, the SVP and president of AWS, said that the typical cost of an equivalent data warehousing solution was $ 19,000-$ 25,000 per terabyte. Amazon is no stranger to offering is cloud-based enterprise services at competition-beating prices. At the end of January, the company also launched an elastic video transcoding service that helps reformat videos for multiple devices, which also represented a huge discount on existing products like Zencoder. Amazon today didn’t reveal too much about how well the product is doing in terms of actual sales — which is not unusual practice for a company that to this day still hasn’t broken out publicly its own sales figures for its Kindle readers and tablets — but it did note that “hundreds” of companies
As Rovio plans its entry into the 
Canalys 
International cable company Liberty Global has struck a deal to acquire U.K. cable, broadband and mobile telephony company Virgin Media. Liberty’s approach was confirmed yesterday by Virgin Media but the pair have now put out a joint release confirming the acquisition and its terms. The stock and cash merger puts an approximate value of $ 23.3 billion on the deal.
Nokia’s slide down the mobile rankings continues: StatCounter figures for January 2013 show Apple dislodged the Finnish mobile maker for the first time as the most popular mobile vendor in terms of global internet usage. Meanwhile Samsung took second place. The figures come from StatCounter GlobalStats web traffic analytics research.
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