Cisco announced it has reached an agreement to buy Jasper Technologies, Inc., a leader especially for its Saas (software as a service) cloud platform for the Internet of Things. The price is $1.4 billion to be paid part in cash and part in equity awards, and additional retention incentives for Jasper employees who join Cisco. Jasper should keep on being almost independent as part of the new Cisco’s Internet of Things business unit.
IBM has confirmed that it has reached an agreement to acquire the provider of video streaming Ustream. No official figures about the acquisition were provided but the magazine Fortune leaked the news on Wednesday, providing a value of $130 million. For IBM the point of the deal is to add another service to its business cloud offers, one of the fast growing sectors and not just for IBM.
This Monday, Intel announced the acquisition of Ascending Technologies, also known simply as AscTec, a German company based in Krailing that produces autopiloted drones. The terms of the agreement not disclosed but in August 2015 Intel invested 60 million dollars in the Chinese aircraft company Yuneec International, which also produces drones. The acquisition of AscTec represents the culmination of a partnership between the two companies that began in 2015.
Last Monday, December 28, Ian Murdock, best known as the father of the Debian project, passed away. Born on April 28, 1973, in Konstanz, in the then West Germany, he launched the Debian project in the spirit of GNU project in 1993. The name is a combination of that of his then-girlfriend, Debra, and his. Debian is mainly a GNU/Linux distribution and, over time, has become one of the most important with the support of several architectures and a huge bouquet of software.
The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), the organization responsible for the final review of the Internet standards, has approved the new error 451 for the http protocol, the one used for websites. The purpose of the error 451 is to indicate contents not accessible for legal reasons. In essence, it’s a warning that a content has been censored. The code is inspired to the dystopian masterpiece “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury although in that case censorship concerned books.
