I recently saw an article on Google testing Internet connectivity via balloons in the stratosphere. Project Loon is taking the concept of low earth orbit satellites and moving them even closer, taking out latency.

Last week, Google (more specifically Google X – their research arm) launched 30 high-altitude balloons above the Canterbury area of New Zealand as part of a pilot. I heard that there will be some interesting pictures coming up in a future issue of Wired as well.

There are still many parts of the earth where it can be impossible to get high speed Internet connection. Since Google wants to increase the access and use of the Internet (increasing their revenue) it makes sense that they would invest in something like this that governments find a bit too remote and expensive. Any business that has sites in remote locations like mines, ranches… will likely see benefits if the project takes root.

I’ve mentioned Coursera (and the need for continuing education on this blog before) as a way to take (or at least sit in on) college level coursework from the comfort of your home - e-learning. Now Stanford is placing their online coursework (starting this summer) on a new site, OpenEdX -- the university has announced. It is built on the open-source platform edX that was released earlier this year. This platform is available for use by other universities and educational providers. More on EdX courses are available here. 

I’ve been participated in a number of Coursera courses over the past couple of years and hope these will stand up as well. I'm going to try and take another starting this month on Software defined Networks.

It is all part of a shift in the way education is being performed and will likely effect how businesses train for the future.

I don’t do posts about HP product announcements, but since this the week of HP Discover, why not. There definitly are some changes in the wind for storage.

One of the first things out of the shoot today at HP Discover was a whole new set of capability in the area of software defined storage. With all the options in storage today (SSD, low end, backup…) the complexity of managing the environment is reducing the flexibility of organizations. Storage solutions are becoming complex, inefficient and rigid.

The family of converged storage solutions announced today should help address many of these issues by providing a single architecture enabling a flexible and extensible approach that embraces block, object and file storage of devices ranging from HDDs to SSD/flash, providing:

• Performance acceleration – eliminating system bottlenecks
• Efficiency optimization – extending the life and utilization of existing media
• System resiliency – providing constant information/application access
• Data mobility – federating across systems and sites

With a range of HP 3PAR StoreServ solutions ranging from the low end 7200 to high performance (StoreServ 7450) or high scaling 10800 – all running from a single architecture and interface.

The 7450 that was announced today is:

• Accelerated:  Over 500,000 IOPS and less than 0.6 ms latency proving a massively parallelized architecture, flash-optimized cache algorithms and QoS
• Efficient:  Reduce capacity requirements up to 50% and extend flash lifespan delivering a multi-layered and fine-grained virtualization with hardware-accelerated data compaction
• Bulletproof:  Eliminate downtime for performance-critical applications with a Quad-controller design with persistent cache and ports, peer failover, and multi-site replication
• Futureproof:  Allowing organizations to move data seamlessly to balance performance and cost enabling a simple solution across Tier 1, midrange, and flash with federated data mobility

Also announced was HP StoreOnce VSA, a software defined approach to information protection enabling a more agile and efficient approach to remote information protection.

The breadth of these announcements should enable greater flexibility for organizations that maintain their own infrastructure.

Today (right before HP Discover) the availability of the retail sleeve for the ElitePad was announced. By adding this hardware extension, a tablet that runs the full version of Windows 8 now can have additional features specifically designed for use in a retail setting, allowing them to connect to existing store systems and improve customer service.

The extensible nature of the ElitePad is an example the flexibility that needs to be designed into solutions to increase value and the business environment today and in the future. Last month the personal system group within HP announced a whole series of new machines (like the Rove).

The new HP Pro and HP Elite series desktop PCs were also announced, including space-saving commercial all-in-ones (AiOs) with rich multimedia and optional touch screens, act as the hub of enterprise productivity. You can see more about these in the press release.

This week there should be a number of interest announcements… if you're there have fun it should be a great opportunity to answer questions and learn. I couldn't make it this year.

Recently readwrite.com had an article on Why Programming is the Core Skill for the 21st Century. The focus of the article is that there are far more programming jobs than there are people who can fill them, therefore alternative techniques are being applied - everywhere. I find that interesting, since there are numerous experienced programmers that are out of work, but maybe they have not kept up as the needs of the marketplace have changed.

“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 913,000 computer programmer jobs in 2010. That number is expected to jump 30% from 2010 to 2020. Meanwhile, the average growth of all other U.S. jobs is predicted to be just 14%.“

With the increased analytic capabilities and computing in general more and more jobs are going to be augmented with automation. Knowing how this works will be important. It makes me wonder if the IT organization of the future will be focused more on supporting the business organization with their own automation efforts, rather than being seen as the go-to business process automation resource pool, or will entities like codeacademy take on that role? Before you ask – yes I have actually reviewed a few courses on codeacademy.