Disruption Tour --- Run To Survive

TechnologyReview.com

Terabyte Storage for Cell Phones

A nanotech-enabled device could replace the flash memory used in portable electronics.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/19643/?nlid=638 

You Can’t Push a Rope

by Eric Eggertson

 commonsensepr.com

It may be the wrong time. It may be the wrong company. You may not have the clout or persuasion to get management over its inertia.

Your job is to gauge the best course of action and provide advice. If you have laid out the pros and the cons, and the consequences of not following the course of action you propose, you have to let things take their course.

People will not be led if they don’t want to be. If you can find a way to document the impact of inaction, they may be ready to change course six months from now. Maybe never. Maybe a slightly different approach will get the nod.

Tricking management into doing something it doesn’t want to do may work sometimes, but that approach is more likely to poison relationships. Unless you have leeway to do some skunkworks trials, you may have to just drop your smart idea.

If you can’t live with that, you’re either too thin-skinned, or you’re working at (or consulting for) the wrong place. Decide if you want to do something about that, and do what’s right for you. Just don’t complain when no one will follow your advice.

Amazon Dynamo: The Next Generation Of Virtual Distributed Storage

marketingpilgrim.com

Readwriteweb.com

A few weeks ago, Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, published a long technical paper on his blog about Amazon's highly available storage system called Dynamo. The paper itself is quite complex and technical and includes a description of the architecture, algorithms and tests that Amazon has been doing with the system.

Yet, even from a casual glance, it is clear that Amazon's work is very important. Since early last year, the e-commerce giant has been making forays into becoming a Web OS company. Amazon has been methodically exposing pieces of its own infrastructure as commodity web services, and in the process confusing Wall Street analysts and making thousands of startups quite happy.

Dr. Vogels has been both the architect and the evangelist of this effort. In his speech at last year's ETech conference he explained that by leveraging the Amazon Web Services Stack, web developers are finally able to focus on the core business logic of their apps and services. Hiding the enormous complexity of building a scalable web business behind a simple API, Amazon is paving the way toward a whole new web ballgame.

Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook

From NYTimes.com click here for more...

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 30 — Google and some of the Web’s leading social networks are teaming up to take on the new kid on the block — Facebook.

On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a “news feed” that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

Stop being tracked...

from mashable.com

Privacy advocates are in the midst ofproposing the creation of a do-not-track list akin to the Do Not Call Registry, and are expected to announce this proposal at a news conference tomorrow, according to AdAge.

There are very real privacy concerns with regards to user data, especially with recent developments in advertising relationships with Facebook and Microsoft, not to mention the ever advancing juggernaut of the Google data acquisition machine.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, and the Consumer Federation of America as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are among the privacy advocates proposing for the do-not-track list. The groups are suggesting that there be a requirement that advertisers, as a part of their online ads, give those that they advertise to the details of what they intend to track about them.

Not to downplay the privacy concerns of these organizations (or even my own privacy concerns), but my reaction is about like the Caveman’s reaction on that Geico commercial: “Yeah. What!?” I can agree with many of the assertions of these organizations: most consumers don’t understand how data collected on them is being used, privacy policies are often a farce, and private data is often not safeguarded enough.

But it’s as if no one thought about the feasibility of enforcing restrictions on advertising companies, or how, for instance, you’d initiate an agreement to share demographic information with a user downloading an advertising supported podcast. In a world where these privacy advocates have their way, am I going to be inundated with privacy policy pop-ups every time I navigate to a new domain?

It’s simply not feasible for something like this to be executed, and even if it were, would we want the government in charge of enforcing compliance?

Maybe those APML guys are right - if we start volunteering information about our attention in a way that everyone can understand, perhaps it’ll keep these privacy advocates from lobbying Congress to get even more involved in bureaucratizing our lives and surfing habits.

Myxer Mobilzes Content for 3 Million; I’ll Tell You Where to Put It

from mashable.com

Myxer, the tool that lets you mobilize web content, has reached 3 million users. After launching in April, and presenting at DEMOfall, the mobile content delivery service has seen some significant growth this year.

What struck me with Myxer’s tools is th ease with which you can send content to your mobile phones. There are multiple ways in which this can be done, starting with perusing the site for content. Enter in the phone number you’d like to send it to, and it’s on its way.

Another tool is for publishers who would like to enable mobile delivery of their content, with a share button that can be added to media on their website. This is helpful because it lets publishers allow for mobile sharing for site visitors, who can send it to their friends, or to themselves.

This second option sounds a whole lot like Clearspring’s latest initiative, which lets publishers widgetize their content in a very similar manner. With Clearspring’s new tool, a publisher can add a share button to their web content, and site visitors can create a widget for that particular multimedia item.

We’re finding more and more ways to break up the web, and direct pieces of it to other places on the web, or to other devices (mobile) and spaces (desktop). For most of this type of content, there are some pre-determined areas in which this can be sent: your personal start page, your social networking profile, your desktop, etc.

But with more personal and individualized tools where site visitors are picking the content (not the publisher), now you’re introducing a new reason for sharing content. Most current widgets are for personal use, in order to keep up with your favorite blog, etc. But with Myxer and Clearspring’s options for breaking down web content even further, your better enabling people to clip and collect their own items.

So what to do with all this aggregated media? Widgets and mobile phones are great, but how else could it be used? Of course I’m speaking very abstractly here, but I’ve come up with a few basic ways in which the media could be collected and further shared.

A plug-in:

Could enable the collected media to be sent to existing networks that specialize in the collection and automatic organization of digital data, like EachDay, Twine or Rememble. This would give users a more direct option for organizing all the media they’ve collected through tools like Myxer and Clearspring.

A community:

Could be built for the automatic organization of data, and then personalized for albums, or other sharing options amongst friends or for personal use. Create one album for Halloween images, which could be offered up to friends for desktop or mobile backgrounds. You get the idea. Similar to clipmarks and other bookmarking tools, this community could be made searchable, and a recommendation engine could be included as well. To Myxer’s benefit, it’s already begun several initiatives on the community front.

Book it.

The media could be collected and organized into a book, which could be printed for yourself or for someone else. This would be used in conjunction with tools like Blurb or SharedBook. With initiatives from companies like HP for more self-printing options getting more web 2.0, this could be a viable interest.

Did I miss any? Let me know in comments. And be a troll about it.

Facebook China Coming?

from mashable.com

Is Facebook headed to China next? That’s the speculation following the news that the hyped social network has registered the domain Facebook.cn this week. Facebook.com.cn, meanwhile, is registered to someone at a Chinese ISP, and currently redirects to Facebook.com. 100,000 of the English site’s existing users are already in China, says Reuters.

So is Zuckerberg headed into the massive Chinese market, despite allowing blatant Facebook clone Xiaonei.com to run away with the lion’s share of the market and get itself acquired? And will a copy of each news feed be forwarded to the Chinese government?

Not so fast: while a Chinese launch may eventually be on the cards (remember that MySpace is putting its focus on International expansion, including the debut of MySpace China earlier this year), Facebook recently had trouble with the Facebook.fr domain, which now appears to redirect to Facebook. So it’s perfectly possible that Facebook is snapping up those domains it doesn’t yet own. Either that, or Zuckerberg will be making a trip to China in the coming months.

SOCIAL NETWORKING GOD: 350+ Social Networking Sites

mashable.com

One of the main topics here at Mashable has always been social networking. In the past several years, some networks have thrived, some vanished, while hundreds of new ones appeared. It has become a huge area to follow, and this article illustrates this well: a collection of over 350 social networking sites, all of which were covered in one way or another here at Mashable. We hope to have created an extensive and useful resource for anyone interested in social networking. Enjoy. (more…)

Why Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) Strategy is a Winner

Readwriteweb.com

We all know the term 'Software as a Service (SaaS). The term SaaS was coined in a conference in 2005 and then popularized by Salesforce with its "No Software" motto. Today Google is one of the strongest backers of this approach, with such products as Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs. And ever since Bill Gates' famous Internet services memo in November 2005, Microsoft has been promoting the concept too.

But today we can coin a new, similar term: HaaS, for 'Hardware as a Service'. Hardware has always been available as a service through dedicated hosting providers, but it was never so well abstracted until Amazon introduced S3 and EC2. With dedicated hosting, you still had to deal with dirty hardware issues like scalability; but Amazon makes it a totally painless experience. In other words, the relationship between EC2-S3 and dedicated/virtual hosting is similar to the one between SaaS and ASP (Application Service Providers) - EC2-S3 is an evolved version of dedicated or virtual hosting services.

How big is HaaS?

First of all, if you still don't know about S3 and EC2, I recommend you take a look at some past RWW articles on the topic; Alex Iskold wrote a very good introductory article about it. See also Alex's ETech report of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' speech. Also, there are great articles on Amazon's official web site.

So what is Haas? A good comparison can be made with Google Adsense. In early 2000, Google enabled web publishers to generate revenue from their content. Google introduced a fair pricing model that worked for everyone, from personal publishers to big media companies. As a consequence, some earned pennies with Google AdSense, while others earned millions of dollars per month.

In other words, Google fragmentized the Revenue side of web business and made it available to everyone. But the Costs side of the web business remained the same for a very long time. There was an ongoing inefficiency and nobody did much about it. Virtualization, which was made commercially available first by VMware, changed things a little and lowered the prices of hardware. But things were still pretty much the same; publishers still had to pay for resources they didn't use and deal with the hassles of maintenance.

Now what Amazon is doing with EC2 and S3 is to fragmentize the Costs part of Web business. Publishesr no longer need to deal with scalability - they pay exactly for what they use. In other words, resources are allocated more efficiently than ever - which was what happened with Google AdSense too, as the below diagram shows.

Can Amazon Follow Google's Example, on the Hardware Side?

Another way to ask how big is HaaS: "Will Publishers follow the same pattern as with Google Adsense and pick more fragmentized and efficient hardware options?" If the advantages are obvious, there is no reason for them not to embrace Amazon's offerings. However, there are a few differences that may slow down or even inhibit this process:

• Amazon S3 & EC2 is less viral than Google AdSense. Google Ads were spread all over the Internet - everywhere you go, you see Google Ads and you want to give it a try yourself. Amazon's offerings work in the background and they're not visible to users, hence they're not especially viral. However, Amazon could try things to make their product more viral - e.g. offer discount prices for web sites that promote that they're powered by Amazon EC2.
• It is tough to switch your existing infrastructure to Amazon S3 & EC2.  On the other hand, you can start using Google AdSense using a simple copy-paste.
• The fact that the EC2 pricing is linear may make it not so attractive for big publishers. Even so, Amazon should cut deals with the top web sites, to try and influence other sites.

It's also worth pointing out that VMware, the first virtualization software company listed on NASDAQ, performs very well and shows the potential of HaaS. Amazon EC2 is not a direct substitute of virtualization, but it shows the potential of offering super-efficient hardware services over the Internet.

Conclusion

It's intriguing to watch Amazon, the old favorite dot com era e-commerce site, transform itself into a technology company with their new and innovative HaaS unit. Amazon is leveraging its deep scalability know-how and expertise, and it's making web publishing even easier and cheaper. As a result, it should eventually bring great value to Amazon.

Some may be wondering why Amazon is de-focusing and entering into something that is far from its DNA as an e-commerce service. To respond to that question, take a look at the table below, which compares some financial data of Internet bigcos:

Company	Net Profit Margin (%)	2006 Annual Revenue ($M)	Market Capitalization ($B)
Google	29.02	10,604.92	210
eBay	18.86	5,969.74	50
Yahoo	9.96	6,425.68	45
Amazon	1.77	10,711.00	37

In terms of 2006 annual revenue, Amazon is even stronger than Google and well ahead of the others. However, in terms of market capitalization, it is ranked only 4th. That's because of Amazon's more traditional, less technology intensive business model - which pushes their net profit margin down with high inventory costs.

That's why, in order to remain strong, Amazon is investing more and more in technology - which will increase its net profit margin.

We will see how HaaS complements SaaS; and how many SaaS startups will shift their infrastructure to Amazon's server farms. And let's not forget that Google and Microsoft are both increasing their HaaS efforts - the Google Dalles server farms for example. Nonetheless, HaaS gives Amazon hope for increased profit margins and stock price in the long term.

Search to Soar, News to Nosedive in 2010

Revenues for the worldwide information industry will reach $448 billion by 2010, with search topping growth and news companies in the last position, according to...

Search to Soar, News to Nosedive in 2010