I recently wrote about Twitter's business model as ultimately enveloping ever greater parts of its developer community. [Twitter Is The Black Hole Of The Twitterverse...] After all, why leave money on the table? Why not produce the best desktop client, or mobile client? Why let others build lucrative businesses out of your community? That seemed to be the way things were moving for Twitter after one of its engineers Tweeted: "If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)" Khris Loux, co-founder of JS-Kit Echo, a commenting service, writes that Twitter has a choice of being a tyrant, or a benevolent king. How Twitter Can Become A New Bre

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="160" caption="Data Center Madness"][/caption] It’s been an interesting first quarter. Cisco and HP dumping on each other last month, 3PAR turns up the heat in automated storage tiering and then HP’s two-day analyst event in March, followed up by EMC’s grand vision for federated storage and then LSI’s analyst event in NYC. Next week is Iron Mountain in Boston where we’ll hear about the Mimosa acquisition. Then it’s SNW in April which will bring a ton of announcements. It looks like 2010 is shaping up as a good rebound year. Earnings reports in December were optimistic and the year-on-year comparisons with Q1 2009 should be excellent because Q1 2009 was so miserable. Tech companies are

I’ve been lucky enough to meet with a swath of companies this year, almost all of which excite me on various levels. One of the more interesting infrastructure conversations I’ve had is with a company called Bandwidth.com, who this year in Austin launched a new service over at Phonebooth.com. The service, like much in the telephony business, isn’t immediately exciting (due mostly to the utilitarian nature of telecom), but is really quite interesting at first brush, and looks to have the signs of a service offering with staying power once you delve beneath the service. Bandwidth is a company that’s been around for ten years, involved (unsurprisingly) in the bandwidth business. Starting out as a reseller, they’ve long since transi

Last week I wrote a post that covered many of the observation I made on my recent trip to mainland China. Given my background in IT, a natural area of interest for me was the build out of IT in China businesses that are not directly aligned with U.S. or European counterparts… in other words, what are the independent businesses doing when left on their own. I don’t believe it is surprising to assert that growth in China to date has come independent of any investments in technology made by the government or business. Cheap labor has made possible productivity gains that would require substantial technology investment in developed countries, but as a I pointed out in my last post, wage inflation is no longer a hypothetical, it is happe

As the CloudConnect event finishes up today after a great four days of presentations and gathering of some of the top people in the Cloud Computing sector, infrastructure and service provider Opsource has two major announcements today, both around their cloud computing efforts. First, Opsource is announcing that their cloud offering is exiting its public beta phase and is now available to all to purchase their computing services by the hour.  Although this represents a nice milestone for the organization, the bigger news is around the second announcement around the Service Level Agreement's (SLA's) that OpsourceCloud customers will enjoy. These SLA's that Opsource is delivering set the bar mighty high for the standard cloud realted

According to Forbes online, Cisco is announcing specifics on their Borderless Network vision with specifics on new switches. These specifics come one week after Cisco's overblown router announcement that was supposed to change the Internet forever. We at SiliconAngle were reporting that Cisco was going to provide more 'edge' products as part of that big announcement which they never did. We stand by that original report and are sure those things will materialize eventually. With that in mind today's announcement shows clearly that Cisco is pushing the value at the edge of the network both in mobile and other devices. In today's announcement Cisco revamped their Ethernet switches, added new services, and enhanced routers for it's recentl

In the corporate world, we still use Internet Explorer 6. Yes, I know how shocking and lame that is, not to mention how slow GMail is on it but in a software environment, IE6 has been the most stable. I'm not saying it's the best, just that it plays nice with the multitude of web apps used in a work ecosystem. While it’s true many of the users complain about not having the latest and greatest, once they do upgrade to IE7 or IE8 (without permission typically), trouble ensues. I like IE6 when trouble shooting because I can right click on it and run as an admin inside a user's profile. IE7 doesn't do that. IE8 is bust because trying to tweak some of it's ActiveX settings leaves that nasty banner chasing you back to the settings they want

Cyber-anthropology. What? That was just about my reaction as well.  I met Diana Martin in the SxSWi Bloggers Lounge early Saturday morning, who is a UX (user-experience) specialist at The Planet (a large web host local to Dallas).  As we at that particular table were sipping our wake-up juice and making our introductions and card exchanges, she initially introduced herself not as a Planet employee, even though it was pretty clear from the large block lettering on her t-shirt that she was, but as a cyber-anthropologist. Naturally, that’s a pretty decent cue that you’re about to hear a pretty interesting introduction. Obviously, the etymology of the word indicates that the use of the study of anthropology is somehow involve

Like many of you, I woke up yesterday to a bitter post on Jolie O’Dell’s personal blog entitled “Why SxSW Sucks,” which has acted as some sort of magnet for many of the non-attendees of SxSW to unload their sour grapes sentiments about being unable to attend the festival. I had initially planned to respond in print yesterday when I read the post originally (and I did address some of her points directly in the closing statements of the SiliconANGLE SxSW live broadcast with Michael Sean Wright), but the more I thought about it, I didn’t get less calm, only more irritated. I woke up this morning fairly well rested after a grueling week of interviews and running around and didn’t feel less irritated, but more so. Let me preface an

The convergence story is playing out on the main stage with the moves in the Fibre Channel market as reported by Network World this morning. EMC does deal with QLogic adding them to the list of approved EMC vetted solutions (thanks @stu from EMC for the clarification).  EMC's sales force will now be able to sell QLogic as well as Cisco and Brocade.  However, QLogic is the only 8Gb FC stackable switching option at EMC. What's Happening Here - Blow to Brocade This announcement is really a blow to Brocade because this is now two Tier One OEMs carrying the full portfolio of QLogic switches--two customers where Brocade had no competition from QLogic in the past. I got a tip from an source close to the deal who emailed me that th