Google Earth 7 adds more 3D imagery to desktop app

Google has updated the desktop version of Google Earth with 3D imagery that was previously only available to mobile users of the mapping program. A new tour guide feature--also included in the Google Earth update--allows you to fly over given areas where Google has prepared guided tours.

Google Earth 7 now has 3D imagery of Boulder, Boston, Charlotte, Denver, Lawrence, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Tampa, Tucson, Rome and the San Francisco Bay Area (including the Peninsula and East Bay). The application also provides 3D coverage of metropolitan regions in Avignon, France; Austin, Texas; Munich, Germany; Phoenix, Arizona; and Mannheim, Germany.

These are the same areas with 3D imagery on Google Earth for iOS and Android. "The experience of flying through these areas and seeing the buildings, terrain and even the trees rendered in 3D is now consistent across both mobile and desktop devices," Peter Birch, Google Earth Product Manager, wrote in a Wednesday blog post. When zooming in, the viewing angle in the desktop version of Google Earth now tilts at a higher elevation in order to showcase 3D imagery.

The other new feature in Google Earth 7 is tour guide. Instead of searching for tours, thumbnails highlighting pre-created tours for any area you're viewing in Google Earth appear at the bottom of the screen. When you go on a tour, you get a flyover of historical and cultural sites nearby, whether it's Rome, the Great Wall of China, or Stonehenge. There are more than 11,000 of such guided tours, including for all the cities with 3D imagery. Guided tours also include factoid popovers pulled from Wikipedia.

Google Earth 7 is a free download for both Windows and Mac users.

Ellison hawks Oracle's cloud stack, calls out Salesforce.com

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made a vigorous sales pitch on Tuesday for his company's next-generation Fusion Applications and underlying technology platform, saying they constitute a more modern approach to cloud-based software than offerings from rivals like Salesforce.com.

While Ellison didn't provide much news during his talk at OpenWorld in San Francisco, his remarks served to crystallize Oracle's market message for SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service).

Ellison began with a boastful claim to Oracle's place in industry.

"Oracle has more SaaS applications than any other vendor," covering sales, human resources, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and more, he said. "Everything you need, top to bottom, to run your enterprise in the cloud."

He noted that "every time you acquire a SaaS application you also acquire the underlying technology."

He went on to describe Oracle's platform, which includes Oracle's database, application server, OS, servers and storage. "It all comes together. It all has to be there for the cloud to work."

Ellison gave an update on the progress of Fusion Applications, which became generally available last year. Some 400 customers are licensing the software, with about 100 having gone live.

Out of those, about 40 percent are using Fusion CRM (customer relationship management) and another roughly 40 percent are running HCM (human capital management), according to a slide shown during Ellison's presentation. The rest are running Fusion ERP modules.

Two-thirds overall are deploying Fusion in Oracle's cloud, Ellison added.

Many customers who now prefer to run applications either on-premises or via dedicated hosting are going to adopt Oracle's Private Cloud, another offering announced this week that essentially duplicates Oracle's public cloud behind a customer's firewall.

But in any event, "you can make one decision and change your mind" since Fusion Applications can be moved between deployment models without changes, Ellison said.

"We're the only one who gives you a choice of deployment," Ellison said, noting that Salesforce.com customers don't have the option to move its cloud applications into their own data center.

Customers could do initial testing on the Oracle public cloud and then do a production deployment on a private cloud, he added.

While some may see Oracle's full-stack approach to the cloud as the ultimate vendor lock-in, Ellison said all of Oracle's technology is based on open standards such as Java and Linux.

"Standards are still important," he said. "Just because we're in the cloud we don't forget everything we've learned over the past 20 years of computing."

He also sought to dispel any notion that cloud services amount to magic for customers.

"Just because the application is in the cloud doesn't mean you don't have to do any work," he said. "You're still going to have to interconnect these applications. Therefore we provide a platform to do it."

While Fusion Applications' SOA (service-oriented architecture) makes it easier for customers to make these connections, there's more to it than flipping a switch, he said. "Otherwise Deloitte wouldn't have a big cloud practice. Accenture wouldn't have a big cloud practice. They must be doing something."

Ellison repeated statements he made earlier in the week regarding a new multitenancy feature in Oracle's upcoming 12c database. The feature will allow a number of "pluggable" databases to reside in a container.

This approach is superior to the form of multitenancy used by most SaaS vendors, according to Ellison.

"We think you should not commingle two customers' data in the same database," he said. "You can still share hardware, have shared resources and operate efficiently. We just don't think you should write an application with multitenancy at the application layer."

NetSuite and Salesforce.com pioneered cloud software, being formed in the late 1990s, but "that was a while ago," Ellison said. "They built multitenacy into the application layer because they had no choice."

Fusion, in contrast, is "extremely modern," Ellison said.

Ellison wrapped up his speech with a discussion of Oracle's Social Relationship Management product family.

"There's a lot more data out there than there used to be, and all that data properly processed will give you business insights about your customers, business insights about your products," he said.

Ellison described how Oracle's social technologies could detect customer discontent or confusion on a social network and then help companies quickly respond to specific customers. To improve its hand in this area, Oracle has made a number of acquisitions, including Collective Intellect and Involver.

In a demonstration, Ellison showed how a marketing manager for Lexus could use a group of Oracle technologies to plow through nearly 5 billion Twitter messages and determine which Olympic athlete would be the best person to represent the automaker in a campaign, based on audience interest.

OpenWorld continues through Thursday in San Francisco.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

DefensePro: All-in-One Attack Protection with IPS, NBA, DoS Protection and Reputation Services

Radware's award-winning DefensePro^® is a real-time network attack prevention device that protects your application infrastructure against network & application downtime, application vulnerability exploitation, malware spread, network anomalies, information theft and other emerging network attacks.

• DefensePro includes the set of security modules – Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Network Behavioral Analysis (NBA), Denial-of-Service (DoS) Protection and Reputation Engine - to fully protect networks against known and emerging network security threats. It is based on standard signature detection technology to prevent the known application vulnerabilities. The core of DefensePro is patent protected behavioral based real-time signatures technology that detects and mitigates emerging network attacks in real time such as zero-minute attacks, DoS/DDoS attacks and application misuse attacks. All without the need for human intervention and without blocking legitimate user traffic.
  
  
   
• DefensePro uses a dedicated hardware platform based on Radware's OnDemand Switch supporting network throughputs up to 12Gbps. It embeds two unique and dedicated hardware components: a DoS Mitigation Engine (DME) to prevent high volume DoS/DDoS flood attacks - without impacting legitimate traffic– and a StringMatch Engine (SME) to accelerate signature detection.
  
  
   
• APSolute Vision™ offers a centralized attack management, monitoring and reporting solution across multiple DefensePro devices and locations. It provides the user real-time identification, prioritization and response to policy breaches, cyber attacks and insider threats.

Cutting Edge Network Security Technologies

DefensePro uses multiple technologies to provide APSolute Attack Prevention for data centers and networks:

Intrusion Prevention System

• The Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) module is based on stateful static signature detection technology with periodic signature updates and emergency updates in case of a newly discovered high risk attacks.
   

Network Behavioral Analysis

• The Network Behavioral Analysis (NBA) module employs patented behavioral-based real-time signature technology. It creates baselines of normal network, application and user behavior. When an anomalous behavior is detected as an attack the NBA module creates a real-time signature on- the-fly that uses the attack characteristics and start blocking the attack immediately. In case of DDoS attacks it injects the real-time signature into the DME hardware offloading the main CPUs from the excessive unwanted traffic.

Denial-of Service Protection

• The Denial-of Service (DoS) Protection module is based on several technologies: signature detection, behavioral based real-time signatures and SYN cookies mechanism that challenge new connections prior to establishing a new session with the servers.

Reputation Services Engine

• The reputation engine offers real-time Anti-Trojan and Anti-Phishing service , targeted to fight against financial fraud, information theft and malware spread.

Business value

Maintain business Continuity of Operations (COOP) even when the network is under attack

• Full protection of data center applications against emerging network threats
• Maintain network performance even when under high volume network attacks
• Maintain excellent user response time even under attack

Best security solution for data centers in a single box

• Combining intrusion prevention system (IPS), network behavioral analysis (NBA), denial-of-service (DoS) protection and Anti Trojan & Anti Phishing

Most accurate attack detection and prevention

• Blocks attacks without blocking legitimate user traffic

Best in class unified monitoring and reporting solution

• Per user customization of real-time dashboards and historical reports
• Helps achieve compliance with pre-defined report sets for PCI, HIPAA, SOX etc.

Reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) of security management

• Multitude of security tools in a single box
• Single management application to manage multiple DefensePro units cross multiple data centers
• Full investment protection and extending platform life time thanks to the pay-as-you-grow license upgrade scalability delivering best ROI and CAPEX investment protection