Open-Sourced H.264 Removes Barriers to WebRTC

The industry has been divided on the choice of a common video codec for some time, namely because the industry standard–H.264–requires royalty payments to MPEG LA. Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco is making a bold move to take concerns about these payments off the table.

We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.

via Open-Sourced H.264 Removes Barriers to WebRTC.

HP Calls Out Cisco With Data-Center Switches

The star of HP’s show, or at least the product with the biggest number, is the FlexFabric 12900 core switch, which can fit 768 10Gbit/s ports or 256 40Gbit/s ports. Cisco’s 18-slot Nexus 7018 claims to have the same 10Gbit/s density but only has cards to support 96 40Gbit/s ports.

via Light Reading – HP Calls Out Cisco With Data-Center Switches.

Shopping or browsing on Main St? India’s Big Data firms know

The business of storing, decoding and analyzing unstructured data – think video, Facebook updates, Tweets, Internet searches and public cameras – along with mountains of facts and figures can help companies increase profits, cut costs and improve service, and is now one of the world’s hottest industries.

It’s called Big Data, and although much of the work is done in the United States, India is getting an increasing slice of the action, re-energizing an IT sector whose growth has begun to falter.

via Shopping or browsing on Main St? India’s Big Data firms know – chicagotribune.com.

Google Changes Tack on Android

Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter. That is a shift from Google’s previous practice, when it joined with with only one hardware maker at a time to produce “lead devices,” before releasing the software to other device makers. …

via Google Changes Tack on Android – WSJ.com.