NETBOOK

Atlassian has revamped the Jira bug tracking tool with a new user interface, which the company said will offer faster navigation and a simplified workflow.

"We really tried hard to create a whole new, more efficient Jira," said Dan Chuparkoff, Atlassian group manager for Jira marketing. "It should be easier to use and easier to learn."

Jira 6, released Tuesday, also comes with performance improvements and the first interface designed specifically for mobile clients.

First released in 2002, Jira was originally created to provide a way to track bugs during the software development process, allowing a development team to identify issues in the code base they were working on, and then track how these problems are being remedied.

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It appears Canada’s anti-money laundering regulator will leave Bitcoin exchanges in the country alone for now.

LibertyBit, which exchanges the virtual currency Bitcoin for U.S. and Canadian dollars, has been told it does not have to register with Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), said CEO Paul Szczesny, via email on Tuesday.

FINTRAC, which was created in 2000, is responsible for investigating and preventing money-laundering and activities used to fund terrorism.

But concerns have been raised in some quarters that the high degree of anonymity of Bitcoin transactions makes them attractive for criminal purposes such as tax evasion.

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Mobile operators collect huge amounts of data about how their subscribers use mobile data, and that information is starting to go on sale as targeted intelligence that enterprises can use to better reach consumers.

SAP will introduce a cloud-based service at this week’s CTIA Wireless trade show that will collect information from carriers about what mobile sites and apps their customers use, and even where they are when they use them. Using its own HANA in-memory computing technology, SAP will crunch the big data in near real time and sell it for marketing use. Carriers are already talking to SAP about the service, called SAP Consumer Insight 365, and enterprises may begin using the data within about three months, said John Sims, president of SAP mobile services.

The data won’t tell SAP what specific user did what and where, but the company will be able to break down the information by demographic measures such as country, neighborhood, gender and age group, plus time measures down to the time of day, Sims said. As for location data, it will be up the carriers how specific it gets.

With HANA, SAP’s data centers can work through billions of rows of data per second, Sims said. That’s important because an average medium-sized operator may generate one terabyte per day of information about subscribers’ mobile activity, he said. The most current data will reside in HANA, while the rest will move to a more persistent environment such as a Hadoop cluster or SAP’s SybaseIQ database.

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Toshiba said it will soon begin mass producing a new type of 64Gbit NAND flash that is the smallest and fastest in its class, though it still lags rival Samsung Electronics in the development of an even denser flash technology.

Toshiba said Tuesday that it will begin mass production this month of a 64Gbit chip with an area of 94 square millimeters that can write data at 25MB per second. The new chips, made using a 19-nanometer process, are the fastest and smallest to use 2-bit-per-cell technology, Toshiba said.

Main rival Samsung is already a step ahead. The South Korean company said last month that it began mass-producing a 128Gbit NAND chip with 3-bit-per-cell technology, also using a process smaller than 20 nanometers.

Toshiba said it is also working on 3-bit-per-cell technology, and aims to begin mass production by September. The company said it would first focus on smartphones and tablet memory with the chips, then expand to notebook PCs.

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Amazon Web Services has finally received certification under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which the company said will lower the cost of implementing its cloud services among government organizations and agencies in the U.S.

FedRAMP is a mandatory government-wide program that standardizes security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services. As part of the program, Amazon has been granted two so-called Agency Authorities to Operate (ATOs) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it said.

One ATO covers the GovCloud “region” of AWS infrastructure, and the other the U.S. East/West regions of its cloud infrastructure. Within those boundaries, agencies can use Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). They can also use its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which allows IT staff to create an isolated section of Amazon’s cloud where they can launch resources in a virtual network defined by themselves, including public subnets, private subnets, and hardware VPN access.

In a recent interview, Stephen Schmidt, chief information security officer at Amazon Web Services, talked about how he looked forward