Small Biz > More stories
Microsoft beefs up cloud login security in PhoneFactor gobble
Microsoft has bought PhoneFactor, the maker of software that allows punters to securely identify themselves to computer systems using their mobiles. Terms of the deal, announced yesterday, were undisclosed.
The snapped-up biz offers phone-based authentication as an alternative to physical security tokens that can, for instance, …
Skype touts FREE* Wi-Fi across the UK
For a tenner a month Skype will let a business share its Wi-Fi network with Skype customers, but the biz will get window stickers and porn filtering too, so what's not to love?
Online voice-chat outfit Skype and partner Wicoms will provide a free Wi-Fi access point to plug into a broadband connection, and a website to monitor …
Scottish PhDs hoist kilt to reveal storage array killer
Imagine a shared storage resource that needs no storage array hardware at all, has no central controller like a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), protects your data, and involves little or no system management.
It's a product being developed by three graduates of Scotland's University of St Andrews, and if it takes off it might …
IBM takes on Amazon, wades into medium size biz clouds
IBM is about to start extolling the wonder of its cloud to medium-sized companies instead of sticking with its usual larger customers. Big Blue will the harness the power of a network of managed service providers in an effort to start a presence in a market dominated by companies like Amazon and Salesforce.
Beancounters at …
Larry couldn't, but we can: Upstart Waratek touts cloudy Java love
A startup has pledged to deliver for Java what the brains of Larry Ellison’s mighty Oracle and the entire Java community cannot: cloud scalability - now.
It also hopes to spread the love to Java-hating sysadmins.
Waratek is planning the general release of its Cloud VM for Java at JavaOne next week. The Cloud VM product is a …
Winklevoss twins stuff $1m into social network for the FILTHY RICH
Wanna know what the world's been lacking? A social network for hedge-fund bods, of course. And who better to be at the helm of such a brave Web2.0 venture than square-jawed Olympic rowing twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss - who rose from the ashes of their legal spat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to plunge some of their …
VCs snaffle £200m of UK taxpayer gold ... to bet on high-risk biz
The UK government has showered venture capitalists with £200m of taxpayers' money for high-risk investments, the science and universities minister David Willetts told MPs today.
Willetts said £50m of this cash has already been set aside as an angel investment pot. “For the first time, we’ve said we’ll co-invest,” he said. …
Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth
Blighty's Business Secretary Vince Cable pulled back the curtains on his new biz investment bank this morning.
While outlining plans for the state-backed pile 'o public cash, which would provide capital to companies, the Liberal Democrat minister efforts so far to kickstart the economy were laissez-faire - and said his bank …
Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart
Billionaire Linux kingpin Mark Shuttleworth has injected $1m into storage startup Inktank to bring the team's distributed file system Ceph to cloud computing.
Shuttleworth invested the cash as a convertible note to grow the four-month-old biz and fund the development of the open-source fault-tolerant storage system Ceph. Inktank …
Arqiva swallows IPTV-on-Freeview upstart
Not content with a virtual monopoly on broadcast, UK giant Arqiva has bought Connect TV, the outfit that has been slipping IPTV channels into the Freeview Electronic Programme Guide for the last year.
Neither company will say how much the UK broadcasting services firm paid for Connect TV, but reps from the company did admit to a …
Famous SAS man trousers £1m as e-publishing startup sold to Tesco
Famous ex-SAS man "Andy McNab" will pocket almost £1m as Mobcast, an e-book publishing operation he co-founded, is sold to Tesco.
Mobcast has 130,000 titles available to read on tablets, phones or computers and is not tied to any specific device. The service was founded in 2007 by McNab and the firm's head, Tony Lynch.
"As an …
Iomega: SOHO punters will pay hard cash for our cheap boxes
Networked storage is not just for enterprise buyers. The wee consumer arm of storage-and-networking giant EMC says that small office and home office (SOHO) and small and medium business customers have bought more than a million of its StorCenter networked storage boxes.
Iomega is an EMC business unit focused on selling external …
Ofcom begged to protect minicab, other small-biz's radio spectrum
The Federation of Communication Services, trade body to the UK's private radio operators, is calling for Ofcom to step away from the free market when it comes to spectrum regulation.
The Federation, representing more than 300 UK companies with interests in private radio, has published a 14-point advisory for Ofcom's …
'G-Cloud is nothing more than a suppliers' website'
Quotw This was the week when the US patent trial between Apple and Samsung was still happening and the pair of them were as snide as ever.
Documents released in court revealed various tidbits about the companies and their ongoing tiff, including that the fruity firm offered Samsung a licensing deal at one point, though not a very good …
$1bn for Instagram? Knock yourself out, Facebook - UK watchdog
The UK's merger and acquisitions regulator has cleared Facebook to snaffle up photo filter Instagram. Imagine the sighs of relief at the social network when the watchdog ruled that the $1bn acquisition won't affect competition.
The Office of Fair Trading said there was no need to refer the proposed deal to the Competition …
Wee biz sector risks wrath of UK data leak watchdog
Businesses that fail to keep private data secure could be in trouble as the Information Commissioner's Office extends its beady eye beyond breaches in the public sector.
Bean counters at Syscap pointed out that with the ICO issuing more warning notices and ramping up its fines, small businesses in particular could be at risk as …
Upstart DEY touts Facebook-style storage for all and sundry
Data juggling upstart DEY Storage claims it can bring Amazon, Facebook and Google-style storage to businesses with a silky software coating.
Why bother paying any attention to it? Well, DEY has just raised $3m in seed funding from the great and the good including Seagate boss Steve Luczo and Virtual Instruments CEO and ex- …
Rampant fake Facebook ad clicks riddle hits dead end
Analysis After a startup claimed that 80 per cent of clicks on its ads in Facebook were bogus, sales of pitchforks and burning torches went through the roof as pundits circled in search of a scandal. However, the figures in the case lead to an unexpected dead end rather than to a smoking gun of unimaginable fraud.
Facebook charges …
London CGI firm scores DON'T-HIT-the-PEDESTRIAN test contract
The Driving Standards Agency (DSA) has awarded animation firm Jelly a contract for CGI technology.
DSA said it met with the SME last October to identify new technologies that could be used to refresh its hazard perception test. The agency started a formal procurement process in January and two early examples of CGI clips were …
ARM knees semi groins with 2 billion chip feat
Two billion processors designed by ARM shipped in the first quarter of 2012, banking the UK chip biz forecast-busting profits for Q2.
While the rest of the semiconductor industry apparently suffered a 4 per cent slump year-on-year in shipments, the Cambridge-based company said it enjoyed a 9 per cent rise - marking the highest …
O2 attempts to muscle in on voucher biz with SME freebie scheme
O2 is opening its Priority Moments service to any business with an O2 phone, letting one-man-bands offer vouchers to O2 customers just like the big boys can.
Small businesses, who've not yet ventured into Groupon or Vouchercloud or who just fancy broadening their options, can now use O2's Priority Moments for some free …
Google plucks Gmail app maker Sparrow from the sky
Google has bought email application maker Sparrow for an undisclosed sum.
The Paris-based startup confirmed on Friday that it had been acquired by the advertising and search giant.
Sparrow said in a statement announcing the buyout:
We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most …
Scottish cloud abacus gobbled by control freak RightScale
If you think keeping track of the technical differences between cloud systems is hard, try figuring out what compute, storage, and network capacity on various platforms can cost. It's enough to give you migraine, which is why cloud control freak RightScale, which spans multiple public and private systems, has acquired small …
WD sees red, flogs NAS niche drives to SOHO punters
Updated WD has spotted a NAS niche in the SOHO (small office/home office) market and introduced its Red drive specifically for such customers, simultaneously bringing colour-code branding to the fore, ahead of its Caviar and Scorpio brands.
The Red hard drives are 1, 2 and 3TB 3.5-inch drives with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and they are …
Misery ending? UK reseller insolvencies may have bottomed out
Insolvency rates in the UK channel were back to pre-recession levels in Q2, according to official stats from credit reference agency Graydon UK.
The picture is remarkably different to a year ago when reseller failures reached a nine-year high with 99 firms hitting the wall, a pattern that continued until the end of Q1 2012 when …
Cabinet Office pilots sales website for small IT suppliers
The Cabinet Office is piloting a website intended to be an "interactive forum" to help small businesses communicate with government and find out about ways to sell to the public sector.
Known as Solutions Exchange, the website has been divided into two sections. The first, 'challenges', focuses on emerging opportunities to work …
Realising the benefits of cloud for mobile workers
Vid Even today, many enterprise users are unsure about cloud computing. They don't understand what it means, and they think that it's mere hype. And yet mobile devices primed for the cloud are making their way into the enterprise, whether IT departments like it or not.
Understanding how the cloud works, and what it can offer mobile …
Gov mulls ban on wallet-draining charges for card payments
The government is to consult on plans to ban companies levying surcharges on consumers when they use payment cards later this summer, the Consumer Affairs minister has said.
Some companies currently charge consumers a fee for buying goods or services using credit or debit cards or via other payment methods. Under government …
Office 365 in moving pictures
Site news Check this out, a short whiteboard-style animation by our art guy Andy, for an Office 365 campaign we are running with Microsoft.
Of course, all you IT pros know the cloud drill, and are wedded to text. But the next time your business manager asks you what this Software-as-a-Service malarkey is all about, you can show them this …
Google to axe Meebo apps on 11 July
Google acquired Meebo for $100m last month and has already started to shut down the advertising service's products.
Ten years ago Meebo would clearly have been labelled as a nefarious data-slurping and spyware operation and would have probably spawned a web-wide boycott. How times have changed.
Meebo's clients are mega- …
Silicon Valley Bank lures Brit startups with sacks of cash
US tech-loving bank Silicon Valley has opened its first branch in the UK to offer cash and services to Britain’s IT startups.
Silicon Valley Bank has $20bn in assets and will be targeting the tech, life science, private equity and venture capital industries in the UK.
Chancellor George Osborne reckoned the bank’s move was “yet …
HULK DDoS-from-one-computer is easily thwarted, say security pros
Security experts are downplaying the significance of a new denial-of-service (DoS) attack tool.
The HTTP Unbearable Load King (HULK) program was developed by a white-hat network security researcher, who shared it on his blog as a proof-of-concept demonstration of how to effortlessly knock over web servers. Nonetheless there is …
MoneySavingExpert.com founder flogs website for £87m
MoneySavingExpert.com - the advice website for people seeking decent insurance, credit cards and other money deals - is being sold for £87m to MoneySupermarket.com.
Personal finance journalist Martin Lewis founded the site in 2003.
The proposed deal awaits clearance from shareholders and regulators including the Office of Fair …
Telefonica chooses stable of young ones to make it money in London
Telefonica's desks-for-shareholding deal, Wayra, has picked the lucky sixteen startups who'll benefit from central London office space, logistics support and business development, in exchange for percentage holding in the resulting business.
In exchange for ten per cent of the company the selected sixteen get get an average …
Al Gore pumps $12m into cheapo TLC flash upstart
GreenBytes announced a good but unexceptional Solidarity all-flash array in February. It has now morphed it into what we believe may be the first enterprise TLC flash array on the market. And it has an astounding price/performance: a single VM instance costs $12.
Investors have been so impressed by the specs that Generation …
Amazon shops for mobile ad slinger to gobble – report
Amazon is apparently scoping out mobile ad companies with a view to boosting the ad revenue from its Kindle Fire as well as pushing adverts into its web properties.
The news comes from Ad Age, which has been talking to the ever-present "people familiar with the talks" and reports that although Amazon hasn't fixed on Jumptap, it …
Sheer weight of Brits' interest knackers new tax tool
Hundreds of thousands of Brits were so keen to check what the government does with their tax that they crashed a new online expenditure calculator.
The service was launched on Monday by HMRC, and promptly fell down again after getting 400,000 visitors before midday - although the service is now limping back to functionality. …
Moshi Monsters pushed onto pint-sized kiddies' mobes
Monstro city, the social network frequented by all the coolest kids in the playground, is going mobile and has signed a deal with Gree to deploy at least two games on that platform.
UK-based Moshi Monsters is school-yard flavour of the month right now, boasting collectable figurines and a social gaming network which makes money …
Cable to stimulate stiff growth in entrepreneurs' trousers
Under-fire UK business secretary Vince Cable has launched the government's new £200m "GrowthAccelerator" programme to help small businesses with the potential to do well to actually do well.
Meanwhile, Cable was branded a "socialist" by Tory donor and Downing Street advisor Adrian Beecroft on Wednesday, in his report on business …
Shoreditch a hub of 'exciting innovation', says science minister
Big Tent Science minister David Willetts told a gathering at Google's Big Tent event this morning that future scientific research will rely heavily on the mining, slicing and dicing of data from the public sector.
His comments come as the government's Open Data Institute was launched, having been plonked on the London's Silicon …
Open Data Institute pours golden £10m shower on upstarts
The Open Data Institute has launched with a taxpayer-funded £10m pot to turn the government’s public information dumps into something tangible. Or that's the promise.
Based at Silicon Roundabout in London’s Shoreditch, the group is headed by web daddy Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence professor Nigel Shadbolt.
The …
New UK MVNO offers white list calling for kiddies' mobes
The UK has a new virtual operator, one specifically targeting parents who believe their children need a mobile phone before they're old enough to cope with the pressure of having one.
For three quid a month (plus call/text charges), Bemilo lets parents vet potential contacts, read every SMS and lock down the phone at night to …
