Tag Archives: Cyber Monday

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Rackspace Broadens Hybrid Cloud Ecommerce Vision Through Magento Partner Program

Leave a comment

By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Rackspace Broadens Hybrid Cloud Ecommerce Vision Through Magento Partner Program

Leading Open Cloud and Ecommerce Providers Team Up to Provide High Performance Solutions for Online Retail Businesses

SAN ANTONIO, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Today, Rackspace® Hosting (NYS: RAX) , the open cloud company, announced it has entered into the Magento Hosting Partner program as a platinum level partner. Rackspace and Magento, a division of X.commerce, an eBay Inc. company, will work collaboratively to serve both dedicated and open hybrid cloud customers with one of the fastest growing ecommerce platforms on the market.

For companies aiming to expand their global footprint, the collaboration between Rackspace and Magento will provide a low cost entry into new markets around the world without the cost of establishing a physical presence. Through a broad product portfolio that includes dedicated hosting, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud, Rackspace is giving customers the flexibility to choose the right solution for their unique business needs.

Rackspace’s hybrid cloud in particular provides a differentiated and compelling customer experience, as it offers a dedicated infrastructure for managing day-to-day traffic, along with powerful open cloud solutions for sporadic spikes during peak times such as Cyber Monday, Black Friday and free shipping Thursday. In addition, Rackspace helps online retailers achieve PCI compliance by delivering a variety of products for its dedicated and cloud customers.

“Within three months of launching the new site built on the Magento platform, Gant’s online orders went up 340 percent. We also saw a 290 percent increase in conversion rates and 35 percent reduction in page load time,” said Anna Carlqvist, a global eCommerce manager at GANT Clothing in UK. “Thanks to the infinite scalability of the Rackspace Open Cloud, Gant can scale servers up and down to meet customer needs while only paying for what we actually use. This has lead to a 50 percent reduction in hosting costs.”

Rackspace is gaining traction within the ecommerce market; according to a study from ecommerce publishing authority Internet Retailer, Rackspace is currently ranked the number one hosting provider for the Internet Retailer Top 1,000 websites. Rackspace now hosts a greater percentage of the world’s Magento deployments than any other hosting provider.[1]

“Over the past five years, Rackspace and Magento have developed a strong, lasting relationship with the shared goal of providing an optimal, end-to-end ecommerce solution,” said Suaad Sait, chief marketing officer at Rackspace. “The ecommerce space …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Can Apple Survive a $99 Kindle Fire Tablet?

Leave a comment

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

The hills were alive yesterday with the sounds of $99 Kindle Fire HD tablets.

TechCrunch’s report that Amazon.com is producing a high-def tablet that will hit the market later this year at a $99 price point turned heads. An Amazon rep denied the report, but it’s not as if it would come as a major surprise if it did actually happen.

The original Kindle e-reader hit the market at $399 six years ago, and now the latest generation is available for as little as $69.

The original non-HD Kindle Fire hit the market at $199 less than two years ago, and it’s already at $159 — with a Cyber Monday sale this past holiday season that temporarily marked down the device to $129.

Technology gets cheaper over time, especially as a company aims for the mainstream market. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see a somewhat scaled-down Amazon tablet break below the $100 barrier. There are actually a few 7-inch Android tablets selling for less than $80 on Amazon.com itself right now. Google‘s Android is an open source platform, so it’s really just a matter of working with suppliers to get the components that are cheap enough to work. If the obscure Zeepad, Coby, and Chromo can pull off sub-$80 gadgetry, why not Amazon with the vibrant ecosystem of digital media to sell after the initial sale?

If anyone could subsidize a $99 tablet, it would have to be Amazon — but what would this mean for Apple‘s iconic iPad?

Passing the torch
Android became the top dog in smartphone mobile operating systems a couple of years ago, but it’s taken longer for Android to overtake iOS when it comes to tablets.

Apple was strong out of the gate. The $499 price point was aggressive enough that the first wave of similarly sized tablets merely matched the tech giant’s price point. By the time the world realized that there was a legitimate market for tablets, the iPad had a seemingly insurmountable lead.

Schools went iPad. Restaurants went iPad. Gadget blog Electronista is reporting this week that the Department of Defense has a pending purchase order for Apple hardware including 220,000 iPads that will kick in at the end of the sequester.

The iPad has become to tablet operating systems what Microsoft‘s Windows is to the PC market — Apple’s platform is the safe and popular choice. Why risk straying from iOS?

However, Windows never had a rival gobbling up market share the way that Android has been noshing in the “good enough” computing niches of tablets and smartphones.

The threat is real, and Apple needs to pay attention.

Industry trackers see Android overtaking iOS in tablets this year, and a price war will only bloody up the players on the way down.

Apple fights back
Apple’s response late last year was to roll out the $329 iPad mini in time for the holiday shopping season. Shaving down the size, specs, and price …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Computers

4 ways to prepare for and fend off DDoS attacks

Leave a comment

Cyber attacks of all kinds are on the rise. It is a trend you ignore at your own peril. National Security Agency and U.S. cyber-command chief Keith Alexander said in July that Internet attacks of all sorts surged 44 percent in 2011 and are responsible for what he terms the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

In a world where you can rent an already-hacked botnet for about $20to start your attack, and in a world where a criminal enterprise industry has developed to support amplifying attacks in progress, it is important to understand that these types of attacks are simply not going away. Are you ready for them? Are you considering the right points? Here are four strategies to help your organization prepare for and defend against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) events in the future.

1. Consider over-provisioning a service in advance

Most of us develop systems on strict budgets. There is a general resistance among financial types as well as information executives to not pay for unused capacity. This makes good sense in and of itself—why waste your dollars on capacity, either bandwidth or compute, that you are not using? Many companies scale their systems to match a predictable but legitimate peak, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or another annual peak load.

In a DDoS attack, however, your site or resource can experience loads many times greater than even your highest peak activity—on the order of 10 or 20 times, if not more. Mind you, I’m not suggesting you budget capacity to pay hackers to blast your network with packets. While you are specing bandwidth and compute resources, though, it makes sense to give yourself a healthy margin of error, even on top of your peak.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld