The pact with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan’s largest telecommunications provider, allows the proposed Software and Services Excellence Centre to develop cloud computing products and services for small and medium-sized companies.

Microsoft also plans to establish cloud computing partnerships with financial institutions and hardware companies.

Related posts:

1. HP, Intel, and Yahoo Get Into Cloud Computing
2. Obama Administration to launch cloud computing initiative….at NASA
3. New Microsoft, new cloud friendly Windows. Courageous and likable

Microsoft has announced that most if not all of the data lost last week in the Sidekick debacle is being recovered.

While the news comes as a relief to panicky customers, some who filed lawsuits after the data loss, it appears that confidence in the device may not be recoverable. Since the incident, angry T-Mobile Sidekick users have ranted angrily on the web, feeling rightfully less assured that their data is safe and reporting lack of cooperation on T-Mobile’s part in facilitating device changes.

Microsoft blamed “a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up” and explained that components need to be painstakingly rebuilt piece by piece to keep data intact. While the efforts are no doubt appreciated, it’s difficult to forgive an error that could have been avoided with adequate preparation. Keeping customers through contract is one strategy, but working from a place of “we’ll make the trouble worth your while” is always a better strategy than “after a protracted period of making you worry, we’ll eventually do what you paid us to do all along.”

Microsoft’s statement on the incident and resolution:

Dear T-Mobile Sidekick customers,

On behalf of Microsoft, I want to apologize for the recent problems with the Sidekick service and give you an update on the steps we have taken to resolve these problems.

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users. If your Sidekick account was among those affected, please continue to log into the T-Mobile Sidekick forum at http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick for the latest updates about when data restoration will begin, and any steps you may need to take. We will work with T-Mobile to post the next update on data restoration timing no later than Saturday.

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.

We will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible. We are eager to deliver the level of reliable service that our incredibly loyal customers have become accustomed to, and we are taking immediate steps to help ensure this does not happen again. Specifically, we have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained.

Once again, we apologize for this situation and the inconvenience that it has created. Please know that we are working all-out to resolve this situation and restore the reliability of the service.

Sincerely,

Roz Ho
Corporate Vice President
Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft Corporation

[Image: GadgetCrave]

Related posts:

1. Sidekick users see data in the cloud evaporate
2. T-Mobile Resumes Sidekick Sales, Reduces Pricing After Resolving Data Issues
3. T-Mobile U.S. Data And Calling Networks Falter Nationwide

Sayeth T-Mobile: DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power if you haven’t already.

I had Sidekick II back in the day and it was so cash. I saw one for the first time in years yesterday and I remember being surprised they still existed. Apparently, people are still using them, and some of them got a bit of an unhappy surprise this weekend with an untold amount of customer data being “almost certainly lost.” Microsoft subsidiary Danger had a server outage, and lacking the foresight of a 3rd grader writing a book report on Captain Underpants, they didn’t back your shit up.

T-mobile gets bonus points for their candor here, releasing a statement on Saturday that details the outage and the fact that data is unlikely to be recovered and your friends with iPhones are almost certainly going to be smug and snarky about the whole thing. Full text of the statement, below:

Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:

T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption.

We appreciate your patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability, and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers.

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips in our Sidekick Contacts FAQ. We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.

In addition, we plan to communicate with you on Monday (Oct. 12) the status of the remaining issues caused by the service disruption, including the data recovery efforts and the Download Catalog restoration which we are continuing to resolve. We also will communicate any additional tips or suggestions that may help in restoring your content.

We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers’ personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.

We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.

Once again, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger regret any and all inconvenience this matter has caused.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft to Sidekick users: We totally found your data!
2. T-Mobile Resumes Sidekick Sales, Reduces Pricing After Resolving Data Issues
3. T-Mobile U.S. Data And Calling Networks Falter Nationwide

According to a release from NASA today, Vivek Kundra, White House federal chief information officer will “outline his vision for a new federal government cloud computing initiative” at a press conference at NASA’s NASA’s Ames Research Center Tuesday September 15.

Details on what the announcement will be aren’t available at this stage, but NASA promises that in addition to NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, “top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend the news conference.”

For those who love cloud computing, the conference takes place at 10am Tuesday, with the event being simulcast on NASA TV.

(Img: new snap from the Hubble Telescope c/- NASA)

Related posts:

1. Microsoft in Cloud Computing Deal With Taiwan Gov’t. Firm
2. HP, Intel, and Yahoo Get Into Cloud Computing
3. NASA Scrubs Launch Of Ares I-X

CloudContacts announced another level of functionality for their popular business card scanning service today.

While the internet has changed networking rapidly and permanently, even the techiest among us actually meet people in person from time to time. And inevitably, if work comes up, the age-old tradition of the business card swap occurs. With the best of intentions, we collect this information and plan to put it to some good use. And then inevitably, it ends up loose in the bottom of a cavernous laptop slash purse, acting as a number collection surrogate, or forgotten only to surface later with a vague recollection of who that guy was and what exactly transpired between you.

If you don’t make many in person contacts, a business card scanner can be of use. But that information is stored locally, which may not be as handy if you’re not tied to an office or fixed workstation. As someone who has spent countless hours sifting through vendor cards looking for a specific one when all the names are ABC Corp, DEF partners- searchability alone would have been worth it if this service existed in those distant, early 2000s days.

So I was geekily intrigued by the email that arrived in our tips box linking to a blog post about CloudContacts and the bookmark export feature. Again, having to manually search the rolodex of hundreds of cards and find a vendor or supplier while hand-typing in every address, while manually interfacing my forehead with a glass desktop, I can really appreciate this service. Separating and sharing the addresses on the cards you collect is a really cool extra level of functionality.

And while you can upload your cards yourself (even allowing a cell phone pic) or mail them in, they got me with the local NYC pickup service. Nothing’s more frustrating than a company you know is in walking distance (and everything in NYC is in walking distance) that refuses to allow you to forgo next-day ground and won’t take advantage of being all local. Holla!

Related posts:

1. Sending your business cards to the cloud
2. One very cool business card
3. Microsoft Releasing Social Bookmark Program

Today Amazon basically told every single Kindle owner that they don’t really own anything that they buy through the company. As far as Amazon is concerned they have complete say on whether or not you can keep a book you thought you paid for.

Think not?

Well think again because as any Kindle owner who had paid good money for an electronic copy of George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm found out this morning this isn’t the case. This happened because the publisher of the two books decided that they didn’t want to make electronic versions of the books available after all and applied pressure on Amazon to fix the problem.

The fix of course was to delete all downloaded versions of the books from people’s Kindles. Granted their accounts were credited with what the books had cost but that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve just been told we don’t really own anything we buy in digital form – especially when the seller has a direct way to delete that product.

As David Pogue wrote in a post today

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

It is this kind of thing that leads me to believe that the more we move into the cloud the less we will actually ever own anything anymore.

Related posts:

1. Book ownership a story to tell our grandkids
2. Amazon Kindle 2: What’s New, When’s it Available, and Everything Else
3. Universities Taking Kindly To Kindle

These days, tech pundits and futurists can’t go a week without pontificating on the future of computing, wondering (and arguing) whether the computer will be merely a tool to access “the cloud” or as an application set.  Even the most inconsequential software release (or failure) sparks this argument – the most recent example is the release of the Opera browser’s repackaging of a personal webserver.

Companies and individuals alike have been heralding the death of the computer as we know if for years, claiming all applications, data, and other innovations will live in a decentralized fashion across distributed networks -  Google’s office suite offerings are an example of this.  Everything from instant messaging clients to word processors, video editors to photograph storage, and email to computer programming tools can be found as browser-based applications.  But just because they exist doesn’t mean they should, as not everything needs to be achieved inside the browser.

Some activities, such as photo or video editing, are best left to desktop tools that aren’t reliant on crude Javascript or Flash plugins, and still others have no reason to exist  “in the cloud”.  The essential test is this:  does existing in the cloud add value to the tool, allowing easier multi-computer interaction?  Or maybe it’s a service that allows users to connect and interact with each other?

If it doesn’t pass these tests, the application/tool doesn’t need to be cloud-oriented.  It is precisely for this reason that the computer will never be just a gateway to the ‘net – besides the obvious hardware and software complications with “the browser is the future operating system” arguments.  With the ridiculously marketed release of Opera’s twenty-year-old technology, a claim of “the desktop isn’t dead, and we’re the real future!” rung out through some circles… this isn’t the answer either.

These arguments are irrelevant, useless, and ultimately nothing more than a well marketed fist-fight.  Computing’s future is likely a combination of desktop and cloud, making intelligent choices between the two based on the needs and value of any given application.  The real issue is going to be the interoperability and real-world use/abilities of the cloud – a highly relevant and critical issue only just achieving any semblance of discussion.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction.  He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. 3D desktop in the future for Macheads?
2. Amazon and Oracle team for cloud deal
3. Central Desktop Gets Social Integration

Business cards are a handy little item that have been a round for a very long time. They have been the basis of things like the Rolodex or over stuffed wallets. The problem is that at some point you need the contact information that is on one of those hundreds of business cards you have collected but be damned if you can find it – until of course you no longer need it.

Dealing with all these business cards was the driving impetuous behind Allen Stern’s site called CloudContacts but until today it usually meant mailing in all those cards to CloudContacts and have them added manually into your account with the service. Well as usual technology has caught up and you can now add those cards as you get them to your CloudContacts account with a simple snap of your mobile phone camera.

Once you have taken the snapshot you email the image to your private CloudContacts mailbox and the little gremlins working behind the scenes quickly convert that information into its electronic form. Now all your contact information is available from anywhere in the world. There’s no application to download and install either – it’s all a matter of snap a shot of the card and email it away. Down and dirty simple which is always a sign of a great idea. Not to mention the fact that all that contact information is easily imported into all the standard email clients, and apparently many of the social media services out there.

For more information about the new service from CloudContacts as well and an ordering form just head over to this page and get yourself started. As well here is a quick video put together by Allen to help explain how it all works a littler better

Related posts:

1. CloudContacts adds more functionality with bookmark export feature
2. Going green with your business card, and I do mean green
3. One very cool business card

For me, this is nothing short of Microsoft 3.0 – from a PC company, to a server company to a cloud company.

While the usual crew of tech pundits are make a big show of yawning there are others who might agree that this week could be marked down on the calendar as the re-emergence of Microsoft as a platform powerhouse with a good solid direction that they are going in. In a later post last night Steve pointed anyone who might be interested in just what this Software + Services (S+S) is about to the Software Plus Services page where there five videos available to give people a bit of idea of what is coming down the pipe.

The main video; Overnight Success, was one I watched twice because I, well .. it was damn cool. Look for the next generation WinMo based mobile phone near the end which is being built not on a Vista base as was assumed but rather on Win7. The iPhone doesn’t have the market on sexy cornered anymore if what I saw is any indication. The other videos are just as intriguing to watch as one of them shows both a Mac laptop and iPod connecting and sharing via Live Mesh. Just make sure to save the one of Ray Ozzie’s keynote speech for the last as it is longer than the others, but it is still well worth watching as in it he lays out pretty well the future of Microsoft.

As much of what happened during the Monday PDC event was starting to break into the blogs Mark ‘rizzn’ Hopkins and myself ended up have a long conversation on IM as we tried to wrap our heads around the implications of what Microsoft was planning to bring to the next generation of the company’s services and product. The fact is that I believe given what I have seen so far and knowing the reputations of the people who are now the driving force behind Microsoft’s push to the web that Google and the rest of the cloud companies could have a very serious fight on their hands.

Like I said last night to Mark while Google may have the street smarts and has been more comsumer facing than Microsoft they haven’t yet been able to seriously crack into the corporate enterprise marketplace. Much of my argument as to why this is can be found in my post yesterday here on The Inquisitr where I was asking who owns the keys to cloud. My point in relation to Google was that it had centered its move into the cloud by basing everything around the browser and this just isn’t good enough for the enterprise market. With Azure, Mesh and Live Services however Microsoft is going right for the corporate boardroom and given they have almost 20+ years of playing in that field they are way ahead of Google – they just needed the the platform and developer tools the cinch the deal. Now they have it.

One of the examples I used when talking with Mark was IBM and the idea that imagine them being able to deploy an installation of Office that regardless of whether it is operating out of a browser or as an installable app it allows their employees to work realtime with the same data in live collaberation regardless of where they are in the world. It won’t matter if they are using a desktop, a laptop, a netbook or a mobile phone that data will be available to everyone to work on. IBM would almost be able to ROI immediately plus they can have it all within their own cloud data center or available throughout the Microsoft cloud system. That’s a pretty powerful argument for an enterprise business.

Mark did point out that Google possibly had the edge on Microsoft on the mobile platform which I agreed at this point they did. But stop and think for a second if all the employees at IBM are already using Mesh and Live Services on their laptops and other handheld devices to do their work and keep their data why would they suddenly switch to another cloud system just because they are nolonger at work. By being able to provide enterprises with the right mix of tools and applications that make sense for them to go the cloud Microsoft opens the door wide to the consumer marketplace for their more consumer oriented cloud services.

On top of that by releasing advance Community Technical Previews (CTPs) of the platform along with the next version of developer tools; that will let developers get in on the ground floor, Microsoft follows a tradition set back with Windows 95 and developers having had time to develop against it. I have made fun of Ballmer before (and I probably will again) for his “Developer, developer, developer” war chant but this has proven to work for them in the past and I don’t see why it won’t work this time either.

Whether I am right or wrong about my thoughts on this new Microsoft remains to be seen but regardless there are going to be some interesting times ahead now that Microsoft has started the climb up to the clouds.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft and the Business of the Social Media Web
2. Microsoft Changes Direction On Search
3. Microsoft in Cloud Computing Deal With Taiwan Gov’t. Firm

There is too much money invested and continuing to be invested for us to turn back now. Amazon and Google have been there already in differing ways and with the announcement today at Microsoft’s PDC of the Windows Azure Platform the company has made it quite plain that it plans on being a dominant player in the cloud marketplace.

This announcement follows on the heels of a week or so of interesting discussions about cloud computing that was started out by Tim O’Reilly’s post on October 26th called Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing which dragged in such luminaries as Nicholas Carr, Mathew Ingram and Alan Patrick.

While the discussion was centered around the economics of cloud computing and whether or not such things as network effect would have any impact on the adoption and proliferation of cloud computing one really needs to go back to the starting point of this whole discussion. It started back on August 1st with an excellent post by Hugh Macleod titled The Cloud’s Best Secret (which I wrote my thoughts about on my personal blog) in which he suggested that there could be the possibility of a single company dominating this new cloud infrastructure

But nobody seems to be talking about Power Laws. Nobody’s saying that one day a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft came to dominate Software.

Monopoly issues aside, could you imagine such a company? We wouldn’t be talking about a multi-billion dollar business like today’s Microsoft or Google. We’re talking about something that could feasibly dwarf them. We’re potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.

It is this idea that has sparked the current conversation but I believe some more basic points are being missed in the conversation. While all these smart folks were getting all worked up over whether or not the cloud was even a serious marketplace for the enterprise through to whether the Web 2.0 philosophy would be the power behind the clouds they were for the most part sidestepping a key part of the marketplace.

As fun as it might be to get into a tussle of semantics over what network effects might or might not mean this does nothing to address the impact that moving to the cloud will have on us, the users, and even more broadly on our society. Are we even ready for the huge impact it will have? Are we ready and willing to hand over the entirety of our lives; work and personal, to the various gatekeepers for them to control?

Let me clarify right from this point on I do believe that we are headed to the cloud and in one sense I am excited by the potential it holds. However there is also a part of me that believes that we need to step very carefully as we move onto this new terrain. We need to truly understand what we could be giving up in exchange for this globalization of our identities, our lives. We also need to be aware that once we make the move there will be going no back. We will be locking ourselves into a global walled garden with only one way in and one way out. We need to understand who controls the keys to this new world we are being shown.

At this point I believe the keys being held by others breaks down to the four sections below with the first being

Platform and Application Access and Usage by the User

While Microsoft is proposing a blend of access through its Software Plus Services (S+S) the majority of cloud computing is using Software as a Service (SaaS). Microsoft’s idea is that you can use the software as normal on your computer but the data would be kept on the cloud but totally accessible by you using any compatible device that can connect to the web. This would be done primarily through their Live Services and Live Mesh platforms. Regardless of where you are as long as your device; whether it be a desktop, laptop or mobile device, you can sign in and access your data. This allows you to leverage the power of your device and installed software to work with your data on the cloud.

The other concept; SaaS, is the one being used by the majority of cloud application and service providers at this point. This method only requires that you have a device that can connect to the web and have an installed browser. All your work is done via the browser and for me this is a drawback as you are limited to whatever handled by a browser. For the majority of people who are use to things like Gmail or Google Docs this isn’t really a problem but once you start raising the stakes of an applications capabilities and what they are being asked to do this limitation does become a problem.

As Ted Dziuba pointed out once, try pushing out an enterprise size database table on any of the current web based database applications and you quickly discover how pointless that exercise is. The problem is two fold when comes to trying to do everything through a browser. First you are stuck in a single thread process which means that if you are doing this from a desktop; or even most laptops now, you are woefully under utilizing your machine. The other problem is that most of the wizardry being done with web based applications are based around javascript and I’m sorry it doesn’t even compare to trying to do the same thing with an application coded in C, C++, Cocoa for the Mac or even .NET for Windows.

This is why we have been seeing more and more web apps that are just good enough because they are limited by what ever can be delivered through an HTTP stream which again is a single process. They don’t have the robustness that even an iPhone App that is compiled to run on the iPhone platform and they definitely don’t have  the depth of capabilities that you find on installable desktop or laptop applications.

In effect we are being trapped into a level of applications that will never utilize the full capabilities of the desktop, laptop and given the increasing power of mobile devices web apps won’t keep up either.

Platform and Application Obligations by the Providers

Cloud computing is a rather nebulous term and really for a good breakdown of what it is Tim O’Reilly’s post does a good job of it; but it basically comes down to three different types

1. Utility Computing – people like Amazon, Sun
2. Platform as a Service – people like Google and Microsoft
3. Cloud-based end-user applications – Google, Facebook, Twitter and most of the social media services

Last up was Alan Williamson. summarised eloquently here:

“His main message was that with cloud infrastructures problems don’t magically go away, they just shift. You don’t have scalability or storage problems any more, but you need to constantly monitor the cloud and your application in it. Alan pointed out examples when Amazon’s cloud failed and their applications got cut off from the Internet. As a solution, he proposed deploying the application on more than one cloud so that you have resilience. This requires writing the application in a way that can be easily ported to different providers, which in itself might be a challenge. One idea that was really striking was their analysis of getting off the cloud to a dedicated infrastructure again — apparently it would take them about three weeks of full-bandwidth transfer to download the data that they have in the cloud, making it virtually impossible to go back.”

Nice- so much for “freedom to leave“. The service might support it, but with massive data sets, portability ain’t so easy… Mi compadri Stephen O’Grady recently posted some good thoughts on Cloud Standards but its also worth considering the physical limits of data portability (we might be talking about flowing a terabyte of data, not justan email address). To often we assume everything on the web is instantaneous. We’re talking about the Physics, rather than the Economics of Data Portability. Data volumes will certainly be a key challenge for data portability, which is one reason my money is on the Synchronised Web.

Along with that we have to wonder what happens if we piss off a cloud provider. what happens to our application if we are a company and as a result what happens to our customers data. What are supplier agreements; SLAs, worth which is a point James Grovernor raises in another post

 … but here Neil, pointing to a review of cloud computing services, focuses on the issue of supplier agreements, SLAs, or their lack in cloud computing. Its a really important point.

In a cloud computing environment, the vendor holds the strings. If at any time the vendor decides that a customer is in violation of the terms of its service, that customer’s application can go dark now, immediately, and completely unilaterally — SLA be damned.

Paul Downey likes to say The Web is Agreement, but perhaps more importantly for businesses The Web Is Contract.

So really what happens to our data, to our lives if a supplier suddenly goes dark or disaster strikes – where are we left then?

The Social Impact of Living on the Cloud

There is no denying the fact that as we progress faster and faster towards ubiquitous connection to the web and the cloud of data upon which it sits our live – our society is going to change. The question is whether or not we are ready for that change because it will become all encompassing. Where do borders start and where do they end when your life – that data that make it up – is spread all around the globe. Who’s laws govern our data and in turn can have an effect on us. We all know the reports of Google searches being used to convict people of crimes. What happens if they have your esoteric thoughts, your saved images or any part of your life really to search through? What rights do we have at that point?

One of the best post I have read yet on the social implications of living on the cloud has to be Cloud Culture written by Kevin Kelly and in my opinion it should be required reading for anyone interested in cloud computing. While the post covers many of the possibly social implications of living on the cloud two of his points stand out

The Extended Self. Where is my stuff? If I google my own mail to find out what I said, or rely on the cloud for my memory, where do “I” end and it starts? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of interest, and all my notes, and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes — if all this is sitting somewhere — but nowhere in particular — it changes how I think of myself. What happens if it were to go away? A very distributed aspect of me would go away. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves — a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye — than the cloud is our extended soul.  Or, if you prefer, our extended self.

[...]

SharePrivacy. Privacy is over. Or more precisely, privacy as we imagined it is over. The extended self requires a different finesse for grappling with the levels of intimacy humans need. The binary functions of public/private, or even friend/not friend have to yield to more nuanced, more complex ways to describe our relationships. The Chinese have a unique name for every type of cousin (younger than you, older than you, your mom’s brother, your dad’s sister’s son, etc.); the cloud will breed distinct ways of relating to agents we know, agents we once knew, agents we know we don’t know, and so on. Sharing is the foundational action on the cloud. Some types of sharing will come to resemble what we used to call privacy.  It is impossible to share the same cloud to do everything and not evolve our notions and powers of sharing.

Are we really ready as a society for this kind of momentous shift?

Ability to Access the Web and the Cloud

We are a class based society. Whether we like to admit it or not we are. We make distinctions everyday between rich and poor, worker or disabled, productive or just a lazy slob. There is another class distinction that is growing everyday and may overwhelm all others and that is the technological division that is happening in our society. It is helping the rich get richer and the poorer slide further down the social scale.

If we live is a society that requires this always connected lifestyle in order to be a productive member of society what happens to those that can’t afford the connectivity cost? While we might like to believe that being connected is something every person should have the fact is that the telecoms control those keys to the cloud and there is no gray area of their control. With them access is either on or it is off – you pay the bill or you don’t have access.

This center of control to me is the most dangerous because it doesn’t matter how sound your platform maybe or how reliable you service is if those people that control the very access to the web and the cloud decide to hold it ransom we’re screwed. I know some folks have suggested that by that time we will have either made access a state right or it will be subsidized in some way or another. I have grave doubts about that as we are talking about mega corporations that have been around for a very long time and have become powers in their own right and that power isn’t something you will be able to take away without a fight.

In the end unless someway is found around this potential hijacking of our access to our lives we will see the biggest class separation we have ever seen in the history on mankind.

Wrapping up

The cloud holds a lot of potential for us as a human race and while I don’t know if as a society we are really ready for the cost to reach that potential it is something we can hope for. There are a lot of roadblocks in the way but then our growth has never been an easy road – this time is no different.

Oh and one last thought – there is a school of thought within the artificial intelligence community  championed by Raymond Kurzweil and his followers that if you combine enough computers together there is always the chance that artifical intelligence may form on its own.

And interesting prospect given our road  to the cloud.

Related posts:

1. Is That Cloud Turning Into A Minefield?
2. Microsoft 3.0
3. Vetrazzo Builds and Deploys Custom ERP Apps on Force.com 5x Faster and at 1/3 the Cost than with J2EE or .NET

So what is the newest and hottest headline to hit the tech blogosphere lately? Well if Gartner is any indication cloud computing is what will be getting bloggers salivating over trying to come up with the best headlines for some time to come. After all we already have Robert Scoble suggesting a Cloud Computing Price War to come and Steve Clayton going with Huge Clouds Ahead. This is all very well and good but this is beginning to look more and more like once more of putting the cart before the horse.

Gartner; as being reported by Jason Hiner on the ZDNet blogs, is suggesting that cloud computing is #2 of the top ten technologies to watch for the next ten years. Ten years – wow  - like nothing will radically change in even five years that could make cloud computing seem minuscule. But anyway back to the point on hand – the idea that cloud computing is going to be the next big battlefield. Already we have it being staked out by the big boys like Amazon, Microsoft, Sun along with newcomers like Dell and other computer companies trying to extend their lifelines.

Robert points to the fact that even companies like Rackspace who were considered to be a hosting company have made moves into the cloud computing arena by buying up companies likes Jungle Disk and Slice Host. All this as an effort to take on companies like Amazon.

The problem as I see it is that other than those few people working in the cloud space it is just another nonsensical word to the average computer user. I would bet that you could ask a 1,000 people on the street what cloud computing was and they would say it has something to do with controlling the weather. Cloud computing is in reality just a new coat of paint on old ideas but even with its new look we are still in the beginning days of what this new territory is all about.

The fact that we are already declaring price wars on an idea that isn’t even full fleshed out is ridiculous. As it is we already have three or four of the major players with different ideas as to what cloud computing is. Is it the all in one method like Google and Google Docs, is it just the vanilla service from Amazon which let’s you build the fronted services or will it be the S+S service from Microsoft?

In the end the only ones who will be confused are the end users as they find themselves in the middle of some made up battleground in the sky. The idea that at this early point in trying to bring a new technology to the marketplace means that we have battle it out even before we know what the fight is about is nothing short of pointless.

Related posts:

1. Obama Administration to launch cloud computing initiative….at NASA
2. Hey Scoble – startups aren’t the cat’s ass you think they are
3. Amazon’s new Pony Express service

As much as we might all want to be enveloped in that warm glow of kombaya that is being exuded by the church of the cloud everyone is missing one of the most basic laws of mankind – everything has a price. Just because we surround this cloud computing with an acronym alphabet soup of different licences it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that even with the ever decreasing costs of storage and acquisition it doesn’t change the fact that nothing in this world is ever done for free. At some point there are shareholders, there are CEOs with their overblown pay packages and then there are the people who keep the cloud afloat to begin with. They all need to get paid.

So how is this done?

How do people get paid; overblown pay packages or not?

Well the most tried and true method; and the one that landed Microsoft in so much hot water both legally and with consumer backlash, is by locking in your customers to specific vendors. This is the question that both Tim Bray and Dare Obasanjo raised in separate posts today on their individual blogs. Tim started it of with a simple question about what he considers the big issue of cloud computing

Big Issue · I mean a really big issue: if cloud computing is going to take off, it absolutely, totally, must be lockin-free. What that means if that I’m deploying my app on Vendor X’s platform, there have to be other vendors Y and Z such that I can pull my app and its data off X and it’ll all run with minimal tweaks on either Y or Z.

In a day and age where we are all looking to reduce our computing costs this idea of free software that makes our data available from anywhere in the world that has a high speed connection and a laptop with a browser is deeply enticing. Whether it be on a personal level for those living a digital nomad lifestyle right through to corporations looking to reduce their massive IT budgets this cloud computing appears to be an answer made in heaven.

As enticing as the ease of entry might appear one has to wonder how far down the road the bean counters are looking. What happens if for whatever reason at some point in the future you; or your company, wants to change cloud computing vendors? Just how far have the tendrils of your current provider weaved themselves into your corporate infrastructure? Just how badly locked in are you to that once seemingly benign cloud service that promised you the moon and stars?

This is the question that Dare asked in his post as well today

So let’s say your organization wants to move from a cloud based office suite like Google Apps for Business to Zoho. The first question you have to ask yourself is whether it is possible to extract all of your organization’s data from one service and import itwithout data loss into another. For business documents this should be straightforward thanks to standards like ODF and OOXML. However there are points to consider such as whether there is an automated way to perform such bulk imports and exports or whether individuals have to manually export and/or import their online documents to these standard formats. Thus the second question is how expensive it is for your organization to move the data. The cost includes everything from the potential organizational downtime to account for switching services to the actual IT department cost of moving all the data. At this point, you then have to weigh the impact of all the links and references to your organization’s data that will be broken by your switch. I don’t just mean links to documents returning 404 because you have switched from being hosted at google.com to zoho.com but more insidious problems like the broken experience of anyone who is using the calendar or document sharing feature of the service to give specific people access to their data. Also you have to ensure that email that is sent to your organization after the switch goes to the right place. Making this aspect of the transition smooth will likely be the most difficult part of the migration since it requires more control over application resources than application service providers typically give their customers. Finally, you will have to evaluate which features you will lose by switching applications and ensure that none of them is mission critical to your business.

In other words you have just entered into the minefield sewn throughout the cloud computing stratosphere but as easy as this one might be to overcome there is an even bigger minefield waiting just around the corner.

It is the fact that as much as we have heralded things like APIs as being the greatest thing since sliced bread when it comes to cloud computing they suck. They suck because there is absolutely no standardization between the various cloud computing services already in business; and it is bound to get worse as more companies try to join this newest gravy train. Not only that but there is no commonality between the various platforms these services may use. Some use Ruby on Rails, some use Django which in turn may use totally divergent database base formats like SQL Server, MySQL or PostgreSQL.

In his post Dare points to a comment that Dewitt Clinton of Google left on Tim Bray’s post where Dewitt said

… the way Amazon and Google (and everyone else in this space) seem to be trying to compete is by offering the best value, in terms of reliability (uptime, replication) and performance (data locality, latency, etc) and monitoring and management tools. Which is as it should be.

Dare’s reply to this was

 

Although Dewitt is correct that Google and Amazon are not explicitly trying to lock-in customers to their platform, the fact is that today if a customer has heavily invested in either platform then there isn’t a straightforward way for customers to extricate themselves from the platform and switch to another vendor. In addition there is not a competitive marketplace of vendors providing standard/interoperable platforms as there are with email hosting or Web hosting providers.

As long as these conditions remain the same, it may be that lock-in is too strong a word describe the situation but it is clear that the options facing adopters of cloud computing platforms aren’t great when it comes to vendor choice.

 

Either way we look at this we are heading into a minefield and while it might not blow up in our faces today it will eventually if we don’t watch where we are putting our feet as we move forward.

Related posts:

1. Appirio Builds Cloud Leadership with Key Executive Appointments
2. Obama Administration to launch cloud computing initiative….at NASA
3. Sidekick users see data in the cloud evaporate

Two stories have gone completely viral in the blogosphere this month; one I played a part in, and one I didn’t. The first was the story of Dell’s application to trademark the term cloud computing, a trademark that was all but a done deal until the blogosphere errupted in a righteous fury over a company taking advantage. From the first post on Google Groups to its coverage on Elastic Vapor and onward, the story spread like wildfire, finally culminating in a preliminary denial of the trademark that Dell may or may not appeal. If I were to guess, I’d assume Dell would drop the application, not wanting to incite the anger of the tech community, nor let its competitors gain press for what’s certain to be an almost instantaneous protest of an appeal.

In the case of Dell, the outcome seems clear: Dell lost, the tech industry won, and the blogs and forums that pushed the story along certainly played a part. But what happens with a viral story that has no real winners?

The Bigfoot story may be that story. Since it’s first coverage (some of it here on The Inquisitr), it’s another story that spread at lightning speed, with one site after another either claiming the “find” was real, or expressing cynicism. By now, we all know that the story was a hoax, but there seems to be no winner. One of the individuals involved has lost his job as a Clayton County police officer due to his involvement. All three individuals are now known worldwide as liars. There seems to be no good that came out of the story.

Odds are that those involved in the Bigfoot hoax really had no idea how fast a story can spread. What seemed like a simple press release that might have gained a bit of local coverage snowballed, and the perpetrators of the hoax may simply have lost control of it. The idea of “going viral” is the dream of every entrepreneur, PR person, and blogger. It just may not have a good outcome.

Guest author Cyndy Aleo-Carreira is a contributing editor at The Industry Standard. She also writes about tech and start-up issues as well as freelance writing at Shakespeare I Ain’t, and does a weekly podcast with The Inquisitr’s own Duncan Riley at Things You Can’t Say About the Internet on Talkshoe.

Related posts:

1. 2008’s Best Viral Videos and Worst Tech Embarrassments
2. Bacon Salt: How two tech guys created a viral food sensation
3. Taylor Momsen, Nike Viral Campaign

The three companies announced the news this morning. They’re working with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, along with research centers in Singapore and Germany, to create six “centers of excellence.” In non-marketing speak, that means six places with cloud infrastructures using HP hardware, Intel processors, and open source software developed under Yahoo’s watch. The programs include Apache Hadoop and Pig, a parallel programming language Yahoo Research helped head up.

The goal of the whole thing is to let educators and researchers experiment on an Internet-wide level. Want to read more? A full seven pages await you in the company’s official release.

Related posts:

1. Intel & Yahoo Team Up for “TV Widget” System
2. Obama Administration to launch cloud computing initiative….at NASA
3. CBS Signs Deal With Yahoo