Autor: HCFG

Longtime Pandora (S P) CTO and SVP of Product Tom Conrad is leaving: Conrad announced with a blog post Tuesday that he will be “transitioning to an adviser role” in three months, which is corporate speak for leaving, but on good terms. Former Pandora VP of Engineering Chris Martin has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer, and the company has started to look for a Chief Product Officer. Conrad can be credited for shaping Pandora’s technology strategy, which involved an early focus on mobile, and more recently, an embrace of open standards for connected TV and whole-home audio platforms.

Level 3 Communications, one of the companies that provides middle mile broadband transit between content providers and last-mile ISPs, has weighed in on the peering fight that occurred last month between Comcast and Netflix (without actually mentioning the deal). As you might expect, Level 3, which will now deliver fewer of Netflix’s bits to Comcast, is not a fan of how much power ISPs have in paid peering negotiations.

But in a blog posted Tuesday, Level 3 took what was a coherent argument detailing the problems associated with some paid peering deals, and poisoned it by conflating paid peering with network neutrality. After explaining paid peering and detailing how ISPs are trying to charge content providers for direct peering as a means get money for capacity upgrades, it delves into the problems associated with these arrangements:

So what if content providers refuse to pay? Some ISPs agree…

This quote from a Gartner press release highlights perfectly what we’re going to be discussing in June at our Structure 2014 show in San Francisco. The release also pegs the market value of the internet of things at $300 billion by 2020 derived mostly from services. But the big picture is that to meet the demand for real-time data processing from billions of connected devices (Gartner thinks there will be 26 billion), the data center will have to change. We agree.

The Russian web giant Yandex has bought an Israeli geolocation firm called KitLocate for its energy-saving location technology.

While services like mapping and navigation require a mobile device to constantly check in with GPS satellites, location-based recommendation services for example do not. KitLocate provides a software development kit full of location capabilities for apps – geo-fencing, motion detection and “social location” – that request the user’s coordinates less frequently, saving on power consumption.

Yandex will use these capabilities, which apparently use less than 1 percent of the device’s battery per hour when active, in its own location-based mobile search app and other services, a company spokesman told me. It will also offer the SDK to other developers.

The deal, worth “several million euros”, also gives Yandex an office in Israel’s “Silicon Wadi”, specifically Tel Aviv. The spokesman told me KitLocate comes with 8 staffers, and Yandex will hire more engineers…