Today’s topics include more speculation about the latest iPhone 6c smartphones, indictments from the U.S. Department of Justice involving massive insider trading linked to hacks of embargoed financial news releases, the availability of Google’s Cloud Dataflow and new big data analytics efforts from HP.
As Apple prepares to unveil its upcoming latest flagship iPhone smartphones on Sept. 9 at a launch event, rumors are circulating that a new iPhone 6c basic model could be part of the new product lineup.
The iPhone 6c rumor was reported in an Aug. 12 story by NDTV Gadgets, based on a relatively vague Twitter post by frequent tipster Evan Blass, who posts under the name “@evleaks.”
It appears “the iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, and 6c will all arrive concurrently,” wrote Blass in his Twitter post. No other information or attribution was provided in the post. Rumors also had circulated earlier this year, when reports said that iPhone 6c devices were expected in the second half of 2015.
In a pair of indictments, issued on Aug. 11 by the U.S. Department of Justice, nine individuals were identified as participating in a massive five-year scheme to prematurely access embargoed press releases that generated $100 million in illegal profits.
The indictments were unsealed in Brooklyn, N.Y., and in Newark, N.J., federal courts and alleged that the nine defendants were able to pilfer approximately 150,000 press releases from the servers of Marketwired, PR Newswire and Business Wire.
After four months in beta, Google’s Cloud Dataflow services are now generally available to enterprise users, making it easier for them to create big data applications using simple programming languages and simple software developer kits.
The Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Pub/Sub products are part of the company’s wide-ranging Google Cloud Platform, which provides the infrastructure for customers to use to build applications that can scale as a business grows, while reducing data processing latency.
Michael Stonebraker, co-founder and CTO of Tamr, a startup developing a platform designed to help businesses use all of their data, was a guest speaker Aug. 11 at Hewlett-Packard’s third annual Big Data Conference.
There, executives talked about the company’s broad, expansive approach to the issue of big data that includes everything from how to work with open-source communities—including Hadoop and OpenStack—to courting developers.
They also announced new big data initiatives, including the latest release of its Vertica analytics platform, expanded work in the open-source community and a program designed to give startups greater access to HP’s big data software.