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Software patents are broken and patent trolls are seriously hurting innovation. Companies are spending more money on buying patents to launch offensive strikes against other companies instead of competing by building great products. There are numerous patent horror stories I could outline where they are being used for all purposes except to innovate. In fact the software patent system as it stands today has nothing to do with innovation at all. This is the sad side of the Silicon Valley. While most people are whining about how software patent trolls are killing innovation some are trying to find creative ways to fix the problems. This is why it was refreshing to see Twitter announcing their policy on patents , Innovator's Patent Agreement, informally called IPA. As per IPA, patents can only be used in an offensive litigation if the employees who were granted the patents consent to it. I have no legal expertise to comment on how well IPA itself might hold up in a patent litigation ...

This is the second and the last part of this two-post series blog post on Big Data myths. If you haven't read the first part, check it out here . Myth # 2: Big Data is an old wine in new bottle I hear people say, "Oh, that Big Data, we used to call it BI." One of the main challenges with legacy BI has been that you pretty much have to know what you're looking for based on a limited set of data sources that are available to you. The so called "intelligence" is people going around gathering, cleaning, staging, and analyzing data to create pre-canned "reports and dashboards" to answer a few very specific narrow questions. By the time the question is answered its value has been diluted. These restrictions manifested from the fact that the computational power was still scarce and the industry lacked sophisticated frameworks and algorithms to actually make sense out of data. Traditional BI introduced redundancies at many levels such as staging, cubes etc...

Vienna, Va., April 4, 2012 — NJVC®, one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense, and Gravitant®, a provider of cloud brokerage and management solutions for IT enterprises, announce a new strategic alliance. Under the terms of the partnership, the two companies will launch a cobranded cloud portal later this spring designed specifically to support the federal government’s planning, provisioning and management of cloud services across multiple providers. “The consulting and business development expertise of NJVC and the software product line of Gravitant have great synergy,” said Kevin Jackson, NJVC vice president and general manager, cloud services. “NJVC government customers will now have one centralized place for all their cloud needs, and can rest assured that the underlying tools of the soon-to-be-announced portal will constantly optimize the cloud in their favor.” The cobranded cloud portal will provide government customer...