C24 wins European Cloud Above and Beyond Award 2016

Birmingham based C24 Ltd announce their success in the European Cloud Above and Beyond Awards, held in Monaco.

C24 has been announced as the winners of the Cloud Above and Beyond Award at the Data Cloud Awards 2016, held in Monaco in June 2016.  In order to win the award, C24 had to demonstrate how they went above and beyond to deliver a cloud service that delivered tangible results for their customer.  The award was presented to C24 at an event in Monaco in June 2016.

C24’s entry was for a project delivered at the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership, one of the top academy consortiums in the country comprised of eight schools.  The Arthur Terry Learning Partnership (ATLP) has worked with C24 for many years and describe them as a true technology partner for their academy trust.

Following the award winning project, C24 created a case study from which Microsoft followed up with a video case study, filmed on site at ATLP.

The case study highlights staff opinion on their experiences with C24 and working together with Microsoft in order to deliver a better learning experience for students. C24 and the IT team at ATLP worked together to deliver a Microsoft Office 365 solution across the schools, which will provide them with collaboration capabilities in order to better communicate between different schools and enable improved learning experiences.

C24 believes that the ATLP and Microsoft project is a great example of a way in which technology partners can work together to add value to their customers, above and beyond delivering core tech services.  By bringing in the support of key partners such as Microsoft and HP, it enables C24 to offer more value and expertise to their customers.  This latest award is another example of their commitment to delivering exceptional technology experiences.

David Ricketts, Head of Sales and Marketing at C24 Ltd, a Six Degrees Company, said, “We are delighted to have been chosen for this award – and we are really pleased that it has highlighted the great work that the IT team at Arthur Terry are doing to improve the learning experiences of many children across the Birmingham area.”

Watch the Microsoft and C24 case study video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb2Vi_wNPUo

 

 

Filming with Microsoft – On set with the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership

C24 is pleased to announce that Microsoft has now released its case study about Microsoft and C24’s joint customer Arthur Terry Learning Partnership (ATLP).

We were fortunate to be onsite while Microsoft were filming the case study; interviewing Headteacher, Neil Warner, and Head of IT Delivery, Chris Butler (along with C24!) about their experience in working with Microsoft and C24 to deliver a better learning experience for their students.

Watch the full video here:

The Arthur Terry Learning Partnership (ATLP) has over 4,500 students and staff across a consortium of seven schools.  They are seen as a leading light in the education sector and now have a technology platform that can deliver for them over the long term.

C24, a Six Degrees Company, is a Microsoft Gold Hosting Partner and as such, we work closely alongside the Microsoft teams and were fortunate enough to be included in their video case study for the ATLP.

We originally engaged with the IT team at Arthur Terry Learning Partnership to help them with their project to migrate away from their current email solution which involved a number of the schools each having a different email platform – making it more difficult to communicate between the different sites.

Furthermore, in-house IT systems were ageing and required upgrading to cope with demand, whilst the primary schools’ hosted service was not able to deliver effective collaboration services.  This would result in an unsustainable model in the long term; creating obstacles for the schools to achieve their ongoing objectives.  Schools were unable to communicate with each other in a simple and cost-effective manner using existing systems, and flexible collaboration was not possible between different devices and locations.

C24 worked with the IT team at ATLP to work out the best solution for them, from an onsite solution to a fully hosted platform.  After much deliberation, Arthur Terry selected Office365 due to its collaboration capabilities to enable better communication between the different schools.

During the interview, Headteacher Neil Warner spoke about the benefits experienced by students since the new solution was implemented, particularly about being able to access school work from home, or mobile devices when on the move.

This has been an incredible benefit to the school, as students are now able to research information in real-time during classes, save documents to their OneDrive folder after the lesson and access the details at home.  And if they forget something important about homework, they can email their teacher from their school email account at any time.

On the day of filming, I also had the opportunity to share my views about working with partners like Microsoft to deliver joined up solutions to clients, with real outcomes, such as the collaboration element within the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership project.

This was a great opportunity for us to share our work with our clients to show how closely we are working with Microsoft, but also the opportunities we can bring to our clients, such as the video case study.

We think the ATLP and Microsoft project is a great example of our ability to add value to our customers through ongoing marketing activities, such as case studies or whitepapers.  When we work closely with our clients, we pull in lots of PR and marketing opportunities to not just promote our own achievements, but to show the exciting initiatives being undertaken by our clients.  We can also bring in the support of our key partners such as Microsoft and HP to deliver even more value.

C24 Ltd Achieves the Microsoft Gold Hosting Competency

Birmingham, West Midlands, United Kingdom — January, 30th, 2014

C24 Ltd, the hosting applications specialists today announced it has attained the Gold Hosting competency, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft Corp. customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment and distinguishing itself within the top 1 percent of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

To earn a Microsoft gold competency, partners must successfully complete exams (resulting in Microsoft Certified Professionals) to prove their level of technology expertise, and then designate these certified professionals uniquely to one Microsoft competency, ensuring a certain level of staffing capacity. They also must submit customer references that demonstrate successful projects (along with implementing a yearly customer satisfaction study), meet a revenue commitment (for most gold competencies), and pass technology and/or sales assessments.

C24 are specialists in the delivery of business critical applications from private ‘cloud’ infrastructures, all managed from two of the UKs most secure and private data centres. They pride themselves on “delivering simplicity from the controlled management of complexity” all by offering a client focused boutique business approach.

The business is UK centric however, due to their skill sets and client base they currently delivers business critical applications to over 107 countries across the globe. Access to this type of knowledge allows clients to benefit from a true managed service from a dynamic provider with both UK and internationally experience.

C24 operate a multi-line business operation that is built around the core application hosting/delivery and managed services functions. The solutions offered include: disaster recovery, online backup, DDoS mitigation, network installation and consultancy, data management and support and business intelligence. This multi-line approach enables C24 to offer best of breed solutions from leading industry vendors to address your businesses hosting and/or managed services requirements.

Paul Hemming, MD C24 Ltd stated “We are continually striving to be the best we can be and investments in people, clients and technology has seen C24 grow quickly but in a controlled way. The success of the business is underpinned by our ingrained expertise around the delivery and management of critical business applications at speed.”

Hemming continued “The Gold Hosting competency from Microsoft highlights our expertise in and commitment to today’s technology market and demonstrates our deep knowledge of Microsoft and its products.”

“By achieving a gold competency, partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the latest Microsoft technology,” said Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “These partners have a deep expertise that puts them in the top 1 percent of our partner ecosystem, and their proficiency will help customers drive innovative solutions on the latest Microsoft technology.”

 

Attaining the Hosting competency is exclusively for partners that specialize in hosting solutions and maintain their own datacenters or act as a reseller or agency of services hosted by Microsoft, providing agreed-upon service levels and customized hosted offerings and consulting for common customer scenarios. Equipped with exclusive training, the latest software and support, partners help customers offset the cost of maintaining critical business applications with scalable hosting solutions.

 

The Microsoft Partner Network helps partners strengthen their capabilities to showcase leadership in the marketplace on the latest technology, to better serve customers and, with 640,000 Microsoft partners in their ecosystem, to easily connect with one of the most active, diverse networks in the world.

 

About C24

C24 are one of the UK’s leading privately owned specialist hosting managed service providers. Working with some of the UK’s leading business we manage, secure and deliver critical business applications to over 100 countries globally. The solutions we offer vary but range from traditional email hosting through, secure back-up to the managed hosting of business critical ERP, business productivity applications and high availability disaster recovery.

 

Our investment in technology has seen us develop numerous private cloud based solution for UK, European and Global clients.

 

For more information, press only:

Name: David Ricketts

Email; dricketts@c24.co.uk

Tel: 0121 550 4569

Gartner Says It’s the Beginning of a New Era: The Digital Industrial Economy

Source: Gartner

Analysts Discuss How Digitalization is Unleashing New Capabilities, During Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013, October 6-10, in Orlando

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $3.8 trillion in 2014, a 3.6 percent increase from 2013, but it’s the opportunities of a digital world that have IT leaders excited, according to Gartner, Inc. Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research, explained today to an audience of more than 8,000 CIOs and IT leaders at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, that the digital world is here.

This results in every budget being an IT budget; every company being a technology company; every business is becoming a digital leader; and every person is becoming a technology company. This is resulting in the beginning of an era: the Digital Industrial Economy. 

“The Digital Industrial Economy will be built on the foundations of theNexus of Forces (which includes a confluence and integration of cloud, social collaboration, mobile and information) and the Internet of Everything by combining the physical world and the virtual,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research.

“Digitalization exposes every part of your business and its operations to these forces. It is how you reach customers and constituents; how you run your physical plant; and how you generate revenue or deliver services. Enterprises doing this today are setting themselves apart and will collectively lead the new Digital Industrial Economy,” Mr. Sondergaard said.

Economic Impact of the Internet of Things

In 2009, there were 2.5 billion connected devices with unique IP addresses to the Internet, most of these were devices people carry such as cell phones and PCs. In 2020, there will be up to 30 billion devices connected with unique IP addresses, most of which will be products.

This creates a new economy. In fact, Gartner predicts that the total economic value add for the Internet of Things will be $1.9 trillion dollars in 2020, benefiting a wide range of industries, such as , healthcare, retail, and transportation.

“Computing power will be cheap and covert. We won’t know it is there; it will be in our jewelry and in our clothing,” Mr. Sondergaard said.

“We will throw more computers into our laundry in a week than we’ve used in our lifetimes so far.”

“Digital changes the IT market in a big way through the Internet of Things,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “In the technology and telecom sectors, revenue associated with the Internet of Things will exceed $309 billion per year by 2020.”

Mobile smart devices have taken over the technology world. By 2017, new device categories: mobile phones, tablets, and ultra-mobile PCs will represent more than 80 percent of device spending. Gartner also forecasts that by 2017, nearly half of first-time computer purchases will be a tablet. Therefore, Mr. Sondergaard said mobile is the destination platform for all applications.

Future of IT Suppliers

The digital world runs faster for many traditional IT suppliers. In the past, the top technology companies reigned over the industry for long periods of time. However, now the leaders in areas such as cloud and mobile were not on many CIO’s radar five years ago. 

“What many traditional IT vendors sold you in the past is often not what you need for the digital future. Their channel strategy, sales force, partner ecosystem is challenged by different competitors, new buying centers, and changed customer business model,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “Digitalization creates an accelerated technology-driven start up environment across the globe. Many of the vendors who are on top today, such as Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft, may not be leaders in the Digital Industrial Economy.”

Big Data and Security

All of these “things” connected to the Internet generate data. People and their activities create data. Smart machines consumer and produce data, and mobile devices are the windows into data. Mr. Sondergaard said the effective digital enterprises harness that data to change their business.

With all of this valuable data within the IT organization, cyber security will be an ongoing concern, both inside and outside the enterprise. Mr. Sondergaard said IT leaders should anticipate events and headlines that continuously raise public awareness or create fear.

“The security of embedded technologies that your organization has right now may be the most important operational responsibility you will have in 2020,” Mr. Sondergaard said.

Digitalization will create new infrastructures and new vulnerabilities in our infrastructures. We recommend that you build a portfolio of security vendors because no single vendor addresses more than a fraction of your problem. Everyone will need to establish more agile security processes.”

New Internet Explorer Zero-Day Exploited in Watering Hole Attack Campaign

Attackers are targeting a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer in a campaign that has hit as many as 10 different websites, including the U.S. Department of Labor site.

Originally thought to be exploiting CVE-2012-4792, the attackers are now known to be targeting a previously unknown vulnerability in certain versions of IE. According to Microsoft, the vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 8, and IE 6, 7, 9 and 10 are not impacted.

“This is a remote code execution vulnerability,” Microsoft explained in an advisory. “The vulnerability exists in the way that Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated. The vulnerability may corrupt memory in a way that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user within Internet Explorer. An attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit this vulnerability through Internet Explorer and then convince a user to view the website.”

“On completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action to protect our customers, which may include providing a solution through our monthly security update release process, or an out-of-cycle security update, depending on customer needs,” according to the advisory.

According to AlienVault, the list of affected sites spans from the Department of Labor site to sites belonging to several non-profit groups and institutes as well as a European company involved in the aerospace, defense and security industries.

Researchers from CrowdStrike said the attack campaign may have begun in mid-March. Their analysis of logs from the malicious infrastructure used in this campaign showed the IP addresses of the visitors to the compromised sites belonged to 37 different countries.

“The legitimate sites compromised to deliver malicious code in this campaign give an indication into targets of interest,” blogged Matt Dahl, senior threat researcher at CrowdStrike. “The specific Department of Labor website that was compromised provides information on a compensation program for energy workers who were exposed to uranium. Likely targets of interest for this site include energy-related US government entities, energy companies, and possibly companies in the extractive sector.”

“Based on the other compromised sites other targeted entities are likely to include those interested in labor, international health and political issues, as well as entities in the defense sector,” he blogged.

Microsoft urged anyone worried about the attack to upgrade to the most current versions of the browser, which are not vulnerable to the attack.

“We also encourage folks to exercise caution when visiting websites and avoid clicking suspicious links, or opening email messages from unfamiliar senders,” blogged Dustin Childs, group manager for response communications for trustworthy computing at Microsoft.

TRUST, Can You Put a Price On It?

The Ponemon Institute recently published the first-ever research on the cost of losing control of trust—that is, losing control of the cryptographic keys and digital certificates that underlie trust for all transactions in our digital age. How intertwined are these encryption assets and trust? Consider two major exploits of this year alone: the Bit9 certificate theft and the DigiCert compromise. In both cases, hackers managed to obtain legitimate certificates to sign their malware. Their malware perfectly masqueraded as legitimate software because to users’ systems, which rely on certificates to determine whether to throw up system warnings or automatically install software, the malware was legitimate. The financial impact of such an exploit can hardly be exaggerated.

The cyber-criminals behind these exploits understand that each cryptographic key and certificate deployed in an organization is a valuable asset ripe for exploitation. Yet according to the findings, 51 percent of organizations don’t know the most fundamental facts about their own keys and certificates: they don’t know how many keys and certificates the organization has, where they are deployed, what they are protecting, or who has access to them.

It’s not that IT security professionals are simply falling down on the job. In many organizations, policies quite properly require the deployment of keys and certificates for just about every service. As a result, the average enterprise has more than 17,000 of them. No IT staff can manage such a large volume of keys and certificates manually without errors and oversights that completely undermine the supposed value of the mission-critical security and authentication instruments. Yet more than 60 percent of global 2000 organizations do manage their encryption assets manually; we’re talking about spreadsheets that list whatever keys and certificates application admins happen to report and not much more. IT security professionals know things can’t go on like this. Like coal miners listening to the timbers creak and watching the ceilings bulge, they know disaster looms, but their reports to the surface often go unheeded by management.

Too many business executives, locked in yesterday’s security constructs of armed guards, gates and cameras, think of this issue—if they think of it at all—as an annoying management problem for IT security teams to handle. They think the organization is simply losing track of assets that remain intrinsically valuable. They fail to understand that the assets’ value is trust. Lose track of the certificates and keys, and you can no longer trust them. Their value—and the trust that makes all other IT assets valuable—simply evaporates. Worse, compromised assets become liabilities, weapons to be used against the organization.

McAfee recently learned this lesson the hard way. One of their digital certificates was revoked, trust broke down, and Mac users could no longer determine when an application could be trusted or not–to the detriment of the McAfee brand.

The average organization can expect to learn the hard way too:

• The threats are likely—One in five organizations expects failures in key and certificate management to lead to exploits and infiltrations.

• The costs will be high—The average global 2000 organization can expect an estimated $U.S. 124 million in cost exposure from a server cryptographic theft incident. And such an incident is just one of the many that could occur.

• It’s already happening—In the last 24 months, organizations have experienced at least one of these trust exploits due to their key and certificate management failures:

• IT security will continue to fall behind, especially in the cloud—The risks of manual key and certificate management will only multiply as businesses continue to seek the benefits of cloud computing.

Most cloud systems, including Amazon’s and Microsoft’s solutions, rely on SSH to establish secure channels through untrusted networks. SSH provides managers with remote root access to a server and its shell services. It also provides servers with such access to each other. This level of access lets the cloud solution do powerful things, but the more power you give admins and computer systems, the more you must trust them.

Yet SSH has no equivalent to a CA to tell systems which SSH keys to trust. IT staff must manage these trust relationships on their own. To ensure the integrity of the system, the staff should rotate keys often; Amazon Web Services recommends a 90-day period.

Already overburdened IT staff must rotate thousands of keys every 90 days. Is that going to happen? Not manually.

Trust is the foundation of all relationships: trust between admins and servers, between servers and users, between servers and other servers—and between enterprises and the markets they serve. As our world becomes more connected and more dependent on cloud and mobile technologies, CEOs, CIOs, CISOs and IT security managers must make it their top priority to maintain control over trust by managing keys and certificates. When trust is compromised, business stops.

Our hope is that the Ponemon Institute Cost of Failed Trust Report validates the many IT security professionals who already suspect the risks of losing control of trust and that the report better quantifies the costs for them. We also hope that the report motivates business and IT executives to look beyond the problem toward solutions. You can take action to guarantee the hundreds of millions of dollars at risk: make sure your organization has control over trust by implementing a full key and certificate lifecycle management solution.

Via SecurityWeek

Related articles

• Cyber attacks on trust expose UK organizations to £247 million in losses reveals Ponemon and Venafi research (venafi.com)
• Attacks Against Online Gaming Companies Linked to Campaign Against Tibetans (news.softpedia.com)
• Microsoft Azure Outage Reveals Need to Automate Certificate Lifecycle Management (venafi.com)
• Time to Ditch Cryptographic Keys? (sys-con.com)

Data-as-a-Service (DaaS)

by Ravi Kalakota (thanks to practical analytics)

CIO request — “I want to build a data as a service offering for my data” to the rest of the organization.

Underutilization and the complexity of managing growing data sprawl have motivated several trends during the last several years. Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) represents an opportunity  improving IT efficiency and performance through centralization of resources. DaaS strategies have increased dramatically in the last few years with the maturation of technologies such as data virtualization, data integration, SOA, BPM  and Platform-as-a-service.

These questions are accelerating the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) trend:  How to deliver the right data to the right place at the right time? How to “virtualize” the data often trapped inside applications? How to support changing business requirements (analytics, reporting, and performance management) in spite of ever changing data volumes and complexity.

Enterprise DaaS strategy & Infrastructure is core focus area for business unit and enterprise CIOs.  

• Enterprise Datawarehouse (EDW) strategies are increasingly moving to cross enterprise Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) strategies.
• Structured and unstructured data growth force the evolution to DaaS
• As Data in app silos moves to a centralized corporate/enterprise asset – DaaS infrastructure becomes critical.
• To do any form of enterprise analytics you need DaaS in place first.

In the early years of this market, most DaaS was focused primarily on the financial services, telecom, and government sectors. However, in the past 24 months, we have seen a significant increase in adoption in the healthcare, insurance, retail, manufacturing, eCommerce, and media/entertainment sectors.

Data as a Service (DaaS) Use Cases

Data as a Service (DaaS) is based on the concept that the transaction, product, customer data can be provided on demand to the user regardless of geographic or organizational separation of provider and consumer. Additionally, the emergence of PaaS and service-oriented architecture (SOA) has rendered the actual platform on which the data resides also irrelevant.

Data as a Service (DaaS) has many use cases:

1. providing a single version of the truth;
2. enabling real-time business intelligence (BI),
3. high-performance scalable transaction processing;
4. exposing big-data analytics;
5. federating views across multiple domains;
6. improving security and access;
7. integrating with cloud and partner data and social media;
8. delivering information to mobile apps
9. enterprisewide search,

Organizations are looking to solve tough data and process integration challenges as they once again begin to invest in new business capabilities.

What is Data-as-a-Service (DaaS)?

Data as a Service (DaaS) brings the notion that data related services can happen in a centralized place – aggregation, quality, cleansing and enriching data and offering it to different systems, applications or mobile users, irrespective of where they were. As such, DaaS solutions provide the following advantages:

• Agility (and Time to Market) – Customers can move quickly due to the consolidation of data access and the fact that they don’t need extensive knowledge of the underlying data. If customers require a slightly different data structure or has location specific requirements, the implementation is easy because the changes are minimal.
• Cost-effectiveness – Providers can build the base with the data experts and outsource the presentation layer, which makes for very cost-effective report and dashboard user interfaces and makes change requests at the presentation layer much more feasible.
• Data quality – Access to the data is controlled via data services, which tends to improve data quality, as there is a single point for updates. Once those services are tested thoroughly, they only need to be regression tested, if they remain unchanged for the next deployment.
• Cloud like Efficiency,  High availability and Elastic capacity. These benefits derive from the virtualization foundation —one gets efficiency from the high utilization of sharing physical servers, availability from clustering across multiple physical servers, and elastic capacity from the ability to dynamically resize clusters and/or migrate live cluster nodes to different physical servers.

Agility (and Time to Market) is the important driver for DaaS probably more than cost and data quality is a metric needed to show value to the technology team.

Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Elements

Client need — “I want to build a data as a service offering for my data” to the rest of the organization.

Components to enable this are as follows:

1)      Data acquisition – can come from any source….datawarehouses, emails, portals, third party data sources

2)      Data stewardship and standardization — boil it down to a standard manually or automatically

3)      Data aggregate – Stick build data warehouse for acquisition.  This has a strong service and technology driven quality control mechanism.  Different than let’s write 100 etl programs.

4)      Data servicing:  via web services, extracts, reports etc…  Make it easy to consume for the end user either machine to machine or directly via reporting universe.  It’s probably a while before we move up market to reporting but machine to machine consumption is in our wheelhouse.

All these capabilities come together around the data logistics chain.  The last few decades have seen a dramatic shift  in how data is handled in companies.   Firms are shifting away from from a hierarchical, one-dimensional enterprise data warehouse (EDW) initiative (with fixed data sources) to a fragmented network in favor of strategic partnerships with external data sources. This phenomenon causes ripple effects throughout the old data logistics network.  Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) at its core is way to address this problem of fragmentation.

Summary

Domain Knowledge, Application Knowledge, People/talent, Processes, Technology Platforms are key requirements of DaaS strategy.

Obviously, the market leaders want to position ourselves to become the experts in knowing the underlying data so everyone else in the organization does not have to….domain expertise becomes really important here.

Notes

1) Platform as a Service (PaaS) is being applied to Enterprise Data

2) Data Virtualizaiton is a pre-cursor to DaaS. Vendors include: Composite Software, Denodo Technologies, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. Other vendors who fill pieces of the DaaS puzzle include Endeca Technologies, Gigaspaces, Ipedo, Memcached, Pentaho, Quest Software, Talend, and Terracotta.

3) A variety of technologies comprise the DaaS category including distributed data caching, search engines, elastic caches,  information lifecycle management (ILM) solutions, data replication, data quality, data transformation, content management, and data modeling.  

Connecting the world a Microsoft documentary

This video documentary by Microsoft explores how digital and specifically, Interaction Design, is and will change our lives in an ever connect world. It’s 18 minutes long but well worth a watch. I thought I’d paraphrase a few of the most thought provoking comments from the documentary below:

“‘Without humans there’s nothing interesting to talk about.”

“We are in the phase where we are a little confused about what’s important in life.”

“It’s about understanding that ecosystem where the human is at the centre.”

“It’s about getting more of the physical world connected with the digital world.”

“What we design as a man-made object is only complete when there are people using it”

RUSSIAN SEARCH ENGINE YANDEX TAKING THE LEAD OVER BING, GOOGLE STILL ON TOP

Yandex, the Russian search engine is emerging as a leading search engine taking the lead over its counterparts such as Bing. Comscore analysis of statistics recorded for the worldwide search engine queries between November and December 2012 reveal that Microsoft websites processed 4.477 billion queries, while Yandex processed 4.844 billion.

Google was still miles ahead with 114.73 billion search queries and 65.2 percent market share. Second place belonged to Chinese search engine Baidu with 14.5 billion and 8.2 percent market share while Yahoo took the third place with 8.63 billion and 4.9 percent.

Although industry giants Microsoft are equipped with all the resources but still Yandex, whose marketing budget is not even close to that of Bing, turning out to be on top for global search queries.

Source: Michael Bonfils, The Inquirer

Related articles

• Bing falls to 5th global search engine, surpassed by Yandex (news.cnet.com)
• Search engine rankings reveals Russia’s Yandex surpassing Bing (itproportal.com)

8 Insights About The Coming Era Of Interactive Design

Connecting is a short documentary by Bassett & Partners and Microsoft that explores how our lives (and our gadgets) have and will change in a more connected world. It’s 18 minutes long but very worth the time, as it features interviews with designers from Method, Twitter, Arduino, Frog, Stamen, Microsoft, and Nokia. What’s crazy, even with the magic of editing, is that so many of these talented perspectives tend to finish one another’s sentences.

As you watch, you’ll see a general consensus on a few really important points. They’d make a decent poster:

1. Our phones demand too much attention, detracting from our real experiences.
2. Analog metaphors are making less sense on digital devices.
3. We’re waiting for new paradigms in experiencing media like text on screens.
4. UX is a living, somewhat unpredictable thing. All experiences need to be fluid and flexible now.
5. You shouldn’t just try to understand a product. You should try to understand its connected network.
6. An “Internet of things”–countless connected sensors–is coming (and here).
7. All of our information feeds into something larger than ourselves, a “superorganism” or “colony” of digital information.
8. The hive mind got so big that greater Internet thought is now manifesting locally (think Egypt’s uprising or Occupy Wall Street).

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671611/8-insights-about-the-coming-era-of-interactive-design