Startups Compete To Win The Mobile App CRM Battle

Intuit Buys Elastic Intelligence, Will Use Connection Cloud To Help SMEs Build Apps

Server Density adds management to cloud monitoring tool

Gigaom

Server Density, the London-based startup that hopes to give RightScale a run for its money, just added some cloud management capabilities to its existing monitoring features.

Version 2.0 of Server Density adds a graphical way to view a customers’s  infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services or Rackspace infrastructure. Using data from the cloud providers themselves as well as from Server Density’s existing customers which include Intel(s intc), EA Mobile, DuckDuckGo and Trend Micro, Version 2 offers a new Firefighter mockup — a map of all their cloud data centers and their status.

Now, when something goes awry in a cloud deployment, customers typically face a flood of e-mail. “That adds to the confusion at 3 a.m. when you’re still waking up. What you need is a way to visualize what’s going on quickly. We do that well designed graphical interfaces,” said CEO and founder David Mytton who announced the new…

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When your mother-in-law is endorsing you on LinkedIn, it’s time to question endorsements

Gigaom

Last week I logged into LinkedIn(s lnkd) and saw that one of my relatives had endorsed me for blogging. I like my relative a lot. But he’s not a tech blogger, and he’s not a colleague of mine at GigaOM either. In fact, we’ve never even worked together. I assumed he endorsed me because he’d read some of my articles, or he just wanted to be nice. But really, I had no idea why I got the endorsement.

So I was curious to hear from LinkedIn: What is the point of endorsing someone on the social network? Is there any benefit to me if I get endorsement from a kind-of-random person who doesn’t know me in the endorsed capacity? Will it make my experience on the site any better, or should I remove endorsements from off-target people?

The answer from LinkedIn was: An off-target endorsement isn’t a huge deal, as…

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How to think positive

One way to think and act positive is not to say NO to something before having thought what a YES could look like.

So next time you have an urge to say no, pause and think a YES scenario. Life could turn out very different than what it is.

Netflix builds a tool for jumping between Amazon clouds

Gigaom

Netflix (s nflx) clearly has learned from its Christmas Eve outage, which involved the failure of Amazon (s amzn) Web Services’ Elastic Load Balancing service, and has created a tool called Isthmus to solve the problem.

In a Friday blog post, Netflix’s Ruslan Meshenberg explained that Isthmus manages Elastic Load Balancing services in multiple regions in order to keep latency low for users in the event that ELB goes down in one region. On Christmas Eve, the issue was that state data got deleted, causing issues for the control plane tasked with managing load-balancer configuration and bringing some down some ELB load balancers. Now that sort of error could be less likely to affect Netflix service.

Isthmus builds on the newly open-sourced Zuul tool for managing the Netflix API and Elastic Load Balancer services that my colleague Barb Darrow wrote about earlier this week. “Zuul is at the…

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Tweet from swaminathan (@hearfromswami)

Delhi IGI airport voted world’s 2nd beat airport.

Ex-Yahoo CTO launches Altiscale, hardcore Hadoop as a service

Gigaom

Raymie Stata knows a lot about Hadoop. It was Stata who helped bring Hadoop creator Doug Cutting to Yahoo in 2006, and as during a seven-year stint as chief architect and then CTO at Yahoo, Stata was instrumental in helping position Hadoop as the technology famously “behind every click” at the web portal. Now, Stata is trying his hand at the Hadoop startup game, launching a new startup called Altiscale that recently closed a $12 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners, as well as Accel Partners, Jerry Yang’s AME Ventures and a few individual investors.

Altiscale is in some ways a manifestation of Stata’s seven years of experience helping turn Hadoop from a cute little project into a production system running across 42,000 nodes. It might not be not pretty, but it gets the job done. And, thanks to the handful of former senior Yahoo, Google…

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Caller ID outfit Truecaller doubles user base to 20M in under 5 months

Gigaom

The Swedish caller ID and blocking service Truecaller, which has proven particularly big in India, has been around since 2009. However, the company’s growth has been particularly impressive of late.

Back in January we reported that Truecaller had amassed 10 million users. On Wednesday, the firm said it had hit 20 million – that’s twice as many users in just under 5 months.

Truecaller is effectively a huge, international reverse-lookup phone directory. Its data is derived from official phonebook services and also from users’ personal phonebooks, and is generally used to combat spam callers and telemarketers.

Last month, the firm opened up an API to let third-party developers tap into this resource, which was 600 million numbers strong at the time. “We’ve received more than a couple of thousands of requests, and we have some really cool cases that we are looking forward to closing soon,” a company…

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Can free Red Hat on AWS make it the de facto Linux for the cloud, too?

Will be interesting to watch.

Gigaom

Currently, the bulk of Amazon(s amzn) EC2 instances run on Ubuntu Linux. Now, just in time for the the Red Hat Summit, it appears Red Hat(s rhat) would like change that and is partnering with Amazon to offer a free tier of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Web Services.

There has been a free tier of the AWS service for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Amazon Linux or other “unpaid” versions of Linux for some time, but SUSE and Red Hat did not fall into that category. Now Red Hat Linux, which has become the Linux standard for most corporations, is part of the free tier. Users can get 750 hours of free Red Hat usage, but here’s some fine print: 

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. You will not be…

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