Showing posts with label Cloud computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud computing. Show all posts

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Personal Cloud Search

I remember Google once brought this thing that allowed you to search through your Desktop. I quite liked it. It was a nice toy. But I mostly remembered where my stuff were. But, hey, search!

A Simple Way to Search Your Share of the Cloud
A company called ClipCard will let you search all your cloud-based stuff at once, even if it’s stored in several places.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Dropbox Mobility

Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
Google's lament with Facebook was it stands behind a wall, we can't search. Then Steve Jobs brought along iPhone apps that were even further behind the wall. An app was not like a website. You couldn't search. And the data the app collected mostly stayed not among apps, but inside that app itself.

Looks like Dropbox wants to shake that thing. Dropbox is a cloud inside the cloud.



Dropbox Offers a Way to Free Data from Mobile Apps
setting out to build “a fabric that ties together all devices, services, and apps … the Internet’s file system” .... the Sync API, allows mobile apps to save data to a user’s Dropbox account so that the app can be synched across multiple devices .... The Sync API could also erode some of the restrictions imposed by the competing mobile “ecosystems” of Apple and Google by making it easier to switch between them without leaving any data behind. For example, someone who had been using an image editing app for Apple’s iPad could install the same app on an Android tablet and find the edited photos on the new device. ..... “The Sync API allows iOS and Android developers to focus on the core aspects of their app and leave the complexities of working across platforms to us” ..... Dropbox’s leaders are carefully planning how to compete with Apple. ..... Apple and Dropbox are the two cloud services most used by U.S. consumers, with 27 percent and 17 percent
Will Dropbox Add a Music Player to its File Store?
Dropbox: Founder Drew Houston Simplifies the Cloud
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Sunday, August 05, 2012

Facebook In 2022

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
If Facebook is the next Google it will still be around, it will still be doing cutting edge work. It will still be innovating. But right now is not the best of times for Facebook. They got to wait it out.

Facebook could emerge the identity provider of choice. Facebook could host the credit history and score for the global population. As in, Facebook could do what many governments have not done.

Data mining is going to be big for them. Or can be.

Frankly I don't know what Facebook will be like in 2022. That is kind of far. 12 years back I had not seen a Facebook coming.

What will Facebook look like in 2022?
Like Google, Yahoo, and even Amazon, Facebook will have to recast itself as the internet landscape changes. Google started as a better search engine. As the internet grew and exploded in use, Google shifted to providing a bevy of cloud services, trying to be the provider of your core internet experience through apps such as Google Documents, Gmail, and Google Maps. Now Google is shifting gears again by moving offline with Google Glasses, Street View, and Driverless Car. ..... Today Amazon is plotting a network of urban warehouses that can ensure same-day delivery, and has even turned itself into the preeminent cloud computing provider with Amazon Web Services. .... The next 10 years of Facebook will be defined by solving the mobile problem. .... What if Twitter starts building out a more thorough profile? What if Instagram remained independent and built a robust web platform? ..... Rather than a desktop-focused social network, Facebook will be the universal sign-in solution for the social web, a collection of various mobile applications, and a powerful external ad network that overcame Google’s publisher network. ..... Watch over the next few years as Facebook builds a large publisher network based on the promise of true demographic targeting.... The Facebook of 2022 will look a lot more like a data warehouse .... Facebook in 2022 will look much more utilitarian

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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Padmasree Warrior: Top Of The List

This Huffington Post article has been making the rounds today.

Readers Pick: 27 Women In Tech You Need To Follow On Twitter


It is no surprise Padmasree Warrior - what a last name - tops the list. I have an Indian friend whose last name is Engineer.

We Indians are the most successful ethnic group in America. No, it's not white people. An average Indian American family makes twice as much as your average white family. And no, it's not the Jewish people. It's not the Chinese, so no, it's not an Asian thing. It's us. It's Indians.

I once got a tweet from Padmasree.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

The Cloud Outage

O'Reilly Community: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment: if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model....... two dueling architectural models of cloud computing applications: "design for failure" and traditional. ..... The Amazon model is the "design for failure" model. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of your software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage. ...... The advantage of the "design for failure" model is that the application developer has total control of their availability with only their data model and volume imposing geographical limitations. The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front. ...... Physical redundancy encompasses all traditional "n+1" concepts: redundant hardware, data center redundancy, the ability to do vMotion or equivalents, and the ability to replicate an entire network topology in the face of massive infrastructural failure. ...... If you had redundancy across availability zones, you would have survived every outage suffered to date in the Amazon cloud. ...... If you had regional redundancy in place, you would have come through the recent outage without any problems except maybe an increased workload for your surviving virtual resources. ...... Cloud redundancy enables you to survive the complete loss of a cloud provider. ....... Being home to the world’s reserve currency confers great advantages on the U.S. economy. Because of it, our government, companies and households can borrow money more easily and cheaply. And because all that demand for dollars artificially raises its value, we can import goods at a cheaper price than other countries. ...... Applications built with "design for failure" in mind ..... will achieve uptimes you can't dream of with other architectures and survive extreme failures in the cloud infrastructure. ...... no humans, no 2am calls, and no outage! ..... Netflix, an AWS customer that kept on going because they had proper "design for failure" .. ? Try doing that in your private IT infrastructure with the complete loss of a data center.
I should have, but I did not expect this to happen. Servers are known to go down. Heck, PCs crash. The browser freezes. The cloud went down. In a big way. What's next? Datacenters? I think it did happen once. One Google datacenter went down. Correct me if I am not remembering it right. What if Facebook's datacenter in Oregon went down for an hour?

So the cloud went down. And there has been much talk. The Amazon Web Services is pretty much the cloud that most of us are privy to. And you thought Jeff Bezos was in the business of selling books.

The cloud should not go down. The cloud can not go down. It is like when there is a power cut the generator turns on on its own immediately, and so although there was a power cut, you did not feel it. The cloud needs that mechanism. Otherwise it is not a proper cloud. The cloud is not like the rest of us. The cloud is not supposed to go down.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Google Earth Builder


Official Google Enterprise Blog: Bringing 100% web to the world of Google Earth and Google Maps: At Google we’re committed to opening up our cloud infrastructure so that others can benefit from our enormous computational power. Today I’m going to share some exciting details on our plans to make our cloud technology available for processing and serving geospatial data...... Google Earth and Google Maps have given people the ability to easily view rich geographic information from desktop or mobile devices. Google Earth helps us understand the effects of climate change on our ecosystem, Street View provides a panorama of our neighborhoods ...... Constant Innovation: just refresh the browser for the latest features ..... shapefiles of demographic data, spreadsheets of worldwide customer locations and files of your recently acquired imagery for a new development ..... Google Earth has more than 700 million downloads. We hope that more people can use Google Earth Builder to make better location-related decisions within business and government
The day Google Earth first came out, I downloaded it and had an amazing, amazing day roaming the Himalayas and vast expanses of Russia. It was a mind blowing experience. I was like wow.

Google Earth: A House Is A House Is A House

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

To Natural User Interface

3d Fantasy Yellow House made with 3D Studio MaxImage via Wikipedia
Technology Review: Microsoft's 3-D Strategy: Microsoft has joined the wave of companies betting that 3-D is the next big thing for computing. .... treating the device as a natural extension of how they interact with the world around them. ..... have people shopping and searching in 3-D as well. .... move computing from today's graphical user interfaces to the "natural user interface" ..... gesture and voice .... a natural interface frees up attention and concentration so that they can focus better on the task at hand .... processing high-definition, 3-D video in real time would strain the capabilities of most home computers today .... the average person views 3-D technology as something used on special occasions, not as a day-to-day technology
The graphical user interface itself was a huge jump. Before that you had to enter exotic commands into your machine. The natural user interface - or 3D computing - promises to be a similar big jump, comparatively a bigger jump.

Just like a big chunk of humanity never bothered with landlines and went straight to mobile phones, I can see the same thing happening with the natural user interface. The natural user interface could end up the majority of humanity's first introduction to the full fledged computing experience.

A computer is not a tool. Computing is an environment.
eMarketer: Email Still Tops Facebook for Keeping in Touch: 86% of survey respondents said they used email to share content, while just 49% said they used Facebook ..... ages 18 to 24, reverses the trend, with 76% sharing via Facebook, compared with 70% via email. .... Rather than focusing on sharing content they thought the recipients would find helpful or relevant (58%), most respondents cared more about what they thought was interesting or amusing (72%).

Technology Review: Craig Mundie's Cloud Vision: cloud computing--the trend shifting computer processing and storage away from desktop computers and onto distributed computers across the Internet. .... Traditional procedural programming languages tend to mask or in fact squeeze out the inherent parallelism in many problems just as a byproduct of the structure of the languages. How you get programs to be correct at larger and larger scales across this distributed concurrent environment is another problem. ...... "Look, I just expect to be able to listen to my music no matter what device I happen to pick up." .... what I call this composite platform, where you've got a balanced set of roles between what you expect the cloud to provide and what you expect the clients to provide themselves.

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Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Amazon's Amazing Cloud

Larry Elllison on stage.Image via Wikipedia
GigaOm: How Big is Amazon’s Cloud Computing Business? Find Out in 2010, AWS will generated about $500 million in revenues and will grow this to $750 million by 2011. By 2014, it would bring in close to $2.54 billion in revenues. ..... the total market for AWS type services .. will eventually grow to $15-to-$20 billion in 2014 ...... the total global cloud market in 2010 will be $22 billion and $55 billion in 2014..... Amazon was smart to bet early and bet big on the cloud computing opportunity

Larry Ellison on the Charlie Rose show in the late 1990s in an aside derided Amazon as being in the business of "selling books." But Amazon through its amazing cloud service has gone on to revolutionize computing in ways Jeff Bezos never imagined when he started out. He started out wanting to sell books. Amazon built its infrastructures for its own use, but upon building realized it had too much excess capacity. What to do? Necessity is the mother of invention, like the cliche goes.

There are so many big, wonderful dot coms in existence today that owe their existence to Amazon. Jeff Bezos took the electricity out of the equation. You don't need to have your own personal generator. You simply plug in.

Software as utility, hardware as utility: these were once revolutionary concepts.

We need some major revolutions in the ISP business so all humanity can come online. That is very important to the future of computing.

You Can Create An Android App Too, Anyone Can
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Friday, October 02, 2009

Larry And The Cloud

Larry Ellison Still Hates “Cloud Computing Nonsense” (Video) TechCrunch








Hilarious.

Larry has been doing cloud computing all along. He is not hostile to the concept, he has been one of its pioneers. What he is hostile to is the terminology, as if it has been something invented last year while Larry was asleep at the wheel.



In The News

China at 60: The Road to Prosperity Time Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power without significant external support — theirs was largely a homegrown revolution. ...... to regain China's fu qiang (wealth and power), dignity, international respect and territorial integrity. ...... Mao's social engineeringpolitical campaigns. ....... China is the world's most populous and industrious nation, is the world's third largest economy and trading nation, has become a global innovator in science and technology, and is building a world-class university system. ...... It is at peace with continually convulsed China in unrelenting
Territories currently administered by two stat...
its neighbors and all major powers. Its hybrid model of quasi-state capitalism and semidemocratic authoritarianism — sometimes dubbed the "Beijing Consensus" — has attracted attention across the developing world. ...... China is the first major economy to recover from the global recession and, indeed, is leading the world out of it. ........ begun to experiment with very limited political reforms .... recently surpassed Germany as the largest exporting nation. Its GNP is on course to overtake Japan's by 2010 and perhaps that of the U.S. by 2020. ........ China is beginning to move up the technological ladder and is becoming more innovative in certain sectors such as electronics and biotechnology. .......... producing two-thirds of all photocopiers, microwaves and shoes; 60% of cell phones; 55% of DVDs; over half of all digital cameras; 30% of personal computers; and 75% of children's toys  ...........  a staggering $2 trillion in foreign exchange — the largest reserves in the world — and is beginning to invest significant amounts abroad  ....... 450 out of the FORTUNE 500 American companies have production lines and a business presence in China  .... the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment .......... Chinese state and society have also reconnected with the past, emphasizing Confucian and Buddhist values. ........ Basic literacy is almost universal in China today, while it was roughly 20% in 1949. ........  The blogosphere and Internet are alive with unbridled discussion — unless and until it crosses the state censor's invisible hand........ Income disparities (as measured by the Gini coefficient) are now approaching the highest in the world. ......... one must really be a party member to get ahead professionally ....... 76 million party members ...... Instead of being a totalitarian party dominated by a single leader, the CCP today is an
People's Liberation Army in dress uniform. Thi...Image via Wikipedia
authoritarian party with a collective leadership. ....... is becoming a hybrid party with elements of East Asian neo-authoritarianism, Latin American corporatism and European social democracy all grafted to Confucianist-Leninist roots. .......... It now has both interests and a presence in parts of the world completely new to China — such as Latin America and the Middle East — and enjoys rising international prestige. ........ China now has over 2,100 peacekeeping personnel deployed in about a dozen nations worldwide — more than any other member of the U.N. Security Council. This is one tangible expression of China's strong commitment to the U.N. Today, indeed, the PRC may be the greatest advocate of the U.N. among the major powers. ........... China's military is the best in Asia and in some sectors is approaching NATO standards. ...... Public opinion polls in Europe and the U.S. regularly reflect a negative image of China
Ahmadinejad: Iran's Man of Mystery

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Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Competing For the Web 3.0 Definition


There are those who say the semantic web is the Web 3.0. I intend to argue that semantic web just adds to the dynamism of Web 2.0, and so that semantic web is Web 2.1, not Web 3.0.

Conceptually Diligent: Web 5.0 Is Repackaging Hello

There was Windows 95, and Windows 98, and Windows 2000, Windows X, Windows Vista, now they are talking up Windows 7. Those who are pushing the semantic web as the Web 3.0 are Windows slaves who don't seem to realize that Windows was about computing processes, but the Web is about people.

The central premise of my classification system is that the web is about people. Hence the top ranking goes to face time.

Web 5.0: Face Time

The web is not just about the software powering the websites. The web is also the hardware, the web is also, I dare say primarily about connectivity. AOL was an early stage Web 3.0 comany. Cisco has been a 3.0 company. Clearwire is a bold 3.0 company. AOL also was a Web 2.0 company. It popularized email and instant messaging in the US during the early years. It is very possible for one company to inhabit a few different spaces, clearly. Where would you put Intel? Where would you put the sizzling mobile space?

A Web 3.0 Manifesto

I give you that the alternate definition of Web 3.0 seems to be the more mainstream one, but I intend to compete. Those people are making the mistake of thinking the web is only about technology, worse, only about the software behind the websites.



Every additional computer that connects to the internet changes the internet itself. That is even more true about people. Every additional human being that comes online changes the internet itself.

There is no agreement on the definition of Web 3.0 like there is on Web 2.0, and so I intend to compete. There is general, tentative agreement that Web 3.0 is the next thing, beyond that there is no agreement. This is a fluid situation, and I intend to shape it.

Defining Web 4.0

My classification with its five broad elements is comprehensive, but it is early stage. It is earth, fire, water, air, spirit, it is not exactly the Periodic Chart Of Elements yet. But when you talk of the semantic web as Web 2.1, that is the first step towards a Periodic Chart Of Elements. So the semantic web has its place, I am not discounting it. I just intend to show it its proper place in the scheme of things.




On The Web

Web 3.0 - Wikipedia technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realized the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the Internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.



A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0
HowStuffWorks "How Web 3.0 Will Work"
Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center a third wave—one that we are calling Web 3.0—and it may prove to be the most significant and disruptive yet to the traditional software industry. ........ not defined by distinct periods of time, but are best seen as overlapping waves of adoption. ....... Web 2.0 is about the next generation of applications on the Internet, featuring user-generated content, collaboration, and community. ...... Participation changes our idea of content itself: content isn’t fixed at the point of publication—it comes alive. Google’s AdSense became an instant business model in particular for bloggers, and video-sharing sites have rewritten the rules of popular culture and viral content. ........ For companies entering the emerging software as a service industry, the massive time and capital requirements remain a substantial barrier to entry. ........ The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish. ......... For developers, Web 3.0 means that all they need to create their dream app is an idea, a browser, some Red Bull, and a few Hot Pockets. Because every developer around the world can access the same powerful cloud infrastructures, Web 3.0 is a force for global economic empowerment. ....... the move from mainframes to client server was painful for IBM and DEC and created massive wealth for a broad generation of new companies like Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP. Web 3.0 threatens Microsoft’s .net, BEA, and WebSphere. And while I expect companies such as Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, and salesforce.com to do well, I think that even more wealth and further innovation will be created by a new, more broadly distributed class of companies and entrepreneurs that leverage the power of Web 3.0. ...... the stuff of revolution.
Web 2.0 is so over. Welcome to Web 3.0 - Jan. 8, 2009 Twitter has no business model. .... Almost no new game-changing companies have emerged since Twitter burst on the scene in 2007 ....... Yahoo's news site, for example, can charge more than 30 times as much as Facebook for a banner ad. ....... Accel just announced two new funds, totaling a billion dollars, dedicated to investing in early-stage social-media companies. ..... New companies are cropping up to expand the utility of the web, creating location-based services and financial payment systems that can be bolted onto existing sites. Often bootstrapped, they are frequently profitable and may get acquired quickly. Even in today's tough environment, these upstarts are the ones raising money and trying to score a life- or business-altering hit. Welcome to Web 3.0.
Web 3.0 - Features by PC Magazine
Web 3.0, the “official” definition. « The Jason Calacanis Weblog Web 2.0 services like digg and YouTube evolve into Web 3.0 services with an additional layer of individual excellence and focus. ...... Wikipedia, considered a Web 1.5 service, is experiencing the start of the Web 3.0 movement by locking pages down as they reach completion, and (at least in their German version) requiring edits to flow through trusted experts.
Web 3.0 | Facebook
» What to expect from Web 3.0 | Software as Services | ZDNet.com version 2.0 of any product tends to be a shortlived staging post on the way to 3.0, which is where it finally hits the mark. Windows was a classic example. 1.0 was so buggy it was hardly worth using. 2.0 fixed some serious problems but still had a lot of shortcomings. 3.0, launched in May 1990, was an instant success ...... After all, everyone will want to know what role Microsoft might play in Web 3.0.



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