Blog

  • Goodbye Servers, Hello Devices.

    It’s been a wild ride for the most time of the past 9 years. The Internet came a long way and the time I spent at Akamai Technologies since 2007 were an amazing and exciting experience. Before I came there, I was working for a security consultancy, planning deployments of hundreds of Firewalls and Intrusion-Detection Systems. Having to deal with thousands of servers was absolutely the right choice at that time and the decision didn’t turn out wrong.

    During my time at the company, I worked for close to 100 brands, from all kinds of vertical like automotive, air-travel, industry, logistics, high-tech, e-commerce, media & entertainment. Mostly global corporations, all of which were well-known brands, even outside the Internet industry.

    Having held 4 different roles, I helped customers on 2 continents to get their digital strategy in place, visited uncounted customers and prospects, places and offices in 10 different countries, collecting 80+ stamps and visa on my 3 new passports, while I reported to 9 different managers. Akamai likely gained 160.000 servers in the same timeframe, coming to more than 200.000 at the time of this writing.

    And during the same time, Internet evolved further. When my time at Akamai began, the iPhone was about 3 months old, and became available in Germany only after I started. Since mobile Internet is broadly available,  technology and after all society really changed. This shift towards general acceptance of internet made the time with the company a wild ride.

    While the normal smart phone user takes Internet availability for granted today, technology doesn’t stand still. The broad availability of connectivity  came to a point where new opportunities are starting to emerge. Having stepped up the game from hundreds of firewalls in 2003 to hundreds of thousands of servers in 2007, today house hold appliances start to become available with a “connected” options, making them more smart at the promise to make life more efficient and convenient.

    The Internet of Things opens the opportunity to work with millions of Internet connected things going forward. And this forthcoming development will lead to another wild ride that I wanted to take part in right from the beginning. Therefor, I decided to join Osram’s Lightify department, starting tomorrow! I’m excited!

  • Cyber Tea

    Just not my cup of tea.

    https://www.facebook.com/MuseumOfInternet/posts/853013608177777:0
  • Revolv Smart Home Service being shut down

    Remember the Revolv home automation hub? Probably not. The device was released in late 2013, and while fantastic, it largely flew under the radar before Google’s Nest division bought the company,…

    Well, neither do I remember the Revolv devices, and they’re apparently out of sale since they were acquired by Nest/Google. Now that their cloud service is being shut down, they make a good point for open standards though. Without the possibility to operate them further and their manufacturer out of business, the hardware will only be good as a doorstop starting May this year.

    via: TechCrunch

  • DIY Killer Drone

    Chainsaw Copter:

    Only in Finland.

  • Microsoft's event-triggered serverless Azure

    After Amazon Web Services launched their Lambda offering in 2014, they apparently had some success. Just a few weeks after Google announced their serverless offering, today Microsoft also announced they’d be offering a technology to execute code event-driven, on demand.

    Microsoft announced it was previewing a new service today at its annual Build Developer conference that lets programmers create event-driven triggers without deploying any underlying…

    via: TechCrunch

  • Linux at 25: Why It Flourished While Others Fizzled

    Linux, the open source operating system that virtually powers all of webservers, billions of Android phones as it’s kernel just as well as the majority of home routers and IoT devices, turns 25 years this year. IEEE Spectrum runs an article on the history and why the open kernel became so successful.

    Timing, cost, and the right license made all the difference.

    Also, Linus Torvalds has an approach that would be called agile these days. Bringing a feature in place is more important than having the 100% solution, and Linus explains this approach in the accompanying Q&A session:

    I’d rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long.

    via: Linux at 25: Why It Flourished While Others Fizzled – IEEE Spectrum

  • Business jargon we got used to

    Everybody hates management-speak and corporate jargon, but here are some terms that people used to think of as horrible jargon that we all got used to. Maybe one day we’ll all be leveraging deliverables without a secon

    via: Business jargon we got used to

  • Zigbee for #IoT

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    Dresden Electronic Raspbee

    Zigbee is a wireless protocol for applications not requiring lots of bandwidth, e.g. home automation, lighting or sensor networks. The idea is to create so called Personal Area Networks. The specification is standardized as IEEE 802.15.4.

    Dresden Electronic offers the Rasbee (Picture to the left) to get started with low budget Raspberry Pi Hardware.

  • John Oliver talks about Encryption

    John Olivers ‘Last Week Tonight’ on encryption in general and the the case Apple vs. FBI in particular.