Michael Hugos has published an article at CIO Blogs addressing just this question: how can we look at massively multiplayer online (MMO) games as models for business collaboration?

His example game is actually quite brilliant. EVE Online is one of the best-known sandbox MMO games ever produced, run by CCP Games headquartered in Iceland, this MMO has been at the center of a great deal of controversy because it broke the mold for a game played by and for players. In its science fiction environment, players are given all the tools they need to build a career from a multitude of actions that affect other players from resource gathering, hauling, trading, playing with the internal stock market, or even fighting wars as a mercenary.

The high fidelity model of social interaction with a corporate and resource model, however, isn’t what makes EVE Online perfect for looking at how MMOs could be an excellent model for business collaboration. It’s how the game allows players to communicate and pay attention the current status of what they’re working on in relation to everyone that they’re collaborating with. In many ways, the heads-up-display (HUD) and user interface of EVE Online generates a sort of near-technological telepathy between players working together in a corporation to get things done.

Essentially, EVE Online—sometimes chided as being “spreadsheets in space”—envelops a gamified approach to logistics and resource management.

Hugos presents this in  his article and I’d like to expand on it,

Business intelligence and analytics software has something to learn from games and from MMOs in particular. MMOs use well designed heads-up displays that combine data analysis with group collaboration capabilities. This is illustrated below in screenshots showing two of the heads-up displays used by players flying spaceships in a battle. Note how they use moving 3D displays to present information from real-time data feeds provided by the game.

In addition to the moving 3D displays in the center of the screens, notice the other information shown around the edges of the screens. There are dials and readouts with relevant data, and thumbnail displays showing their status and the actions of other players they are collaborating with. To supplement these visual displays, players also communicate with each other moment to moment using text messages via chat features and Internet-based voice messages that can be directed to individual players or the entire group through headphones and microphones.

What makes MMO games engaging and interesting to players often can be boiled down to entanglement and immersion. If what a player does has an impact on the world that they’re playing in, and they can see the fruits of their labor (and that labor is not intense) they feel rewarded by the experience. What I’ve just described may even be seen as the benefits of working for a real-world company, making an impact on that company’s outcome, and providing some sort of tangible labor.

With the advent of the mobile phone and apps that allow for close collaboration we’ve moved closer to having on-demand communication with colleagues through the day. With the introduction of gesture-detection we’ll even be able to bring intense amounts of data into an immersive format with 3D displays (the peripheral relevant data that Hugos refers to.) Video games even present a way to collect vast amounts of behavioral and active big data and democratize massive small-actions by a multitude of people into organized work—directed by a person with an interface that could allow them to direct that work it would become the next-gen of human resources.

While games like EVE Online may feel like “spreadsheets in space” and to some may become a second job (being CEO of a corporation in a video game can be quite stressful) these sorts of social and technological interaction provide keen insights into how we can engage workers, management, and executives in the businesses of the future.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games as a Model for Business Collaboration is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EverQuest 2 Player Base Swells 300% Since Switching to Free-to-Play
• Free-to-play MMO Spending Up 24 Percent in the US; DC Universe Online Revenue Leaps 700 Percent After Going F2P
• World of Warcraft Turns 7: Players Blow out Candles, Eat Cake
• Blizzard to Experiment with Real-Money for Gold Scheme in WoW via Tradable In-Game Pet
• Blizzard Planning Diablo III Cash Auction House: Items Will be Bought, Sold for Real Money
• Bitcoins for World of Warcraft Virtual Gold? Just Look to Bitmit.net

EMC ironically pioneered flash in the data center when it added flash front-ends to its high-end Symetrix fibre channel disk arrays in 2008. The problem that flash is intended to address, as EMC President and COO Pat Gelsinger says in an interview with Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante, is the growing gap between the amount of data that the server CPU, which doubles in power every 18 months, can consume and the slow IO speed of spinning disk, which has not changed over two decades.

This put flash below the IO software stack. Since then several startups have moved flash into the server, putting it on the server PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) bus, providing fast, random access read/writes combined with persistent memory to protect the data in case of a server crash or power failure. This left EMC behind as the figures show. While Gelsinger bragged that EMC sold 25 Pbytes of flash in 2011, Fusion-io CEO Dave Flynn responded that his company sold 50 Pbytes. And that was only one of several startups in the market.

VFCache is EMC’s bid to get into this market, and it is in large part a defensive move. Gelsinger inadvertently admitted as much when he said, “Our customers are saying that the combination is really fabulous, so I won’t go with Exadata or someone else.” (emphasis added)

But VFCache differs in important ways from the competition. First, while the startup flash vendors are providing full read/write functionality on the server, VFCache is a read-only cache. New data is written through the cache to the EMC storage array, which slows writes. FVCache is designed to work with the traditional storage stack, while Fusion-io’s vision (and that of the other flash statups) is of single tier storage with all data residing in flash on the server. EMC believes that this will be prohibitively expensive for much of enterprise data, and Gelsinger talks of “hot”, “warm”, and “cold” data and envisions a three-tier system.

“It’s not unusal to see 80% of the IOPS on 20% of the data,” says EMC CTO of Flash Products Dan Cobb. “So what about the other 80% of data.” Putting that on flash will be a cost-prohibitive choice.

Wikibon’s View

Wikibon tends to agree with EMC in this. Vellante in his recorded analysis says, “Flash will become the predominant medium for IO-intensive applications.” The relevant measure for these applications will not be the traditional cost-per-Gbyte but rather cost-per-IO. By this measure, flash is already less expensive for these applications and will “enable a new breed of applications that were once too expensive to justify based on the IO economics of spinning disk.”

But for a variety of reasons including compliance, companies need to maintain very large amounts of data that are not constantly active. Despite the continuing fall of flash prices, it is unlikely to drop below the cost-per-Gbyte price of disk, much less tape, in the foreseeable future.

Dennis Martin, president of Demartek, which conducted an independent evaluation of VFCache, said “The cost-effective approach is to use a small quantity of flash compared to total storage with automated tiering or caching solution….The cache fills up with hot data, making the access times significantly reduced.”

Datamark’s evaluation of VFCache running against a typical Oracle application found that populating the cache fully from the storage array took about an hour but resulted in a 2.6X to 3.3X increase in transactions-per-minute and also increased write speed to the underlying disk array, which was relieved of much of the read load by the VFCache. Martin suggests that this architecture is most valuable when used with read-intensive workloads with small IO block sizes of up to 64K, random IO workloads, and/or multiple IO streams. It would be less effective with write-intensive applications such as those capturing large amounts of transaction data for near-real-time analysis.

This, however, presumes an effective intelligent data management layer to move the most active data to the VFCache and then replace it as that data cools and newer data becomes more active. EMC does have that technology in the form of FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and Flash Cache, which, says EMC SVP of Flash Products Mark Sorenson, (http://siliconangle.tv/video/emc-launches-vfcache-pcie-flash-solution) it plans to extend to VFCache this year. EMC also promises high-performance deduplication for its flash product. Once this is available, EMC will offer unified multitier data storage from the server to the archiving layer with automated tiering. At present, however, FVCache is an immature product.

What is EMC’s VFCache Good For? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• Gamesmanship: Fusion-io Sold Twice as Much Flash Last Year as EMC – An Interview with CEO Dave Flynn
• EMC Lands UK Government Contract
• VMworld 2011: Red Carpet Roll Out for Cloud and Virtualization
• Top 10 Executives from VMworld
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• Frugal IT in a Down Market Could Gravely Affect Cisco’s Earnings Call Today

This article, built on his seminal paper on “Designing Systems and Infrastructure in the Big Data IO Centric Era,” he finds that DRAM has several disadvantages that will keep its costs much higher than flash, including that it is unlikely to attract wide-scale consumer market applications to drive its base price down; its power protection systems are bulky and add expense and complexity; and it is byte addressable which makes it expensive to scale. Flash, by comparison, is experiencing steady price decreases driven by its heavy use in consumer mobile devices, does not require power backup, and is block oriented, which makes it much easier to scale.

The one disadvantage of flash versus DRAM is IO speed. However, Floyer says, flash is fast enough to meet the needs of near real-time big data analysis applications, and the large extra cost of using DRAM, and the complexity of maintaining its battery backup, make it an impractical alternative.

However, Floyer does not expect flash to invade DRAM’s established transactional systems market. Some applications, particularly in the financial industry, demand the absolute speed advantage of DRAM, despite its higher cost. He suggests that some real-time systems may evolve into hybrid DRAM-flash environments.

DRAM will Remain Too Expensive to Compete with Flash is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Top Storage Industry Expert David Floyer Publishes Major Report on Industry Trends
• Big Money Data: What’s A Trillion Dollars Look Like?
• Oracle Delivers R Enterprise, Data Mining Inside Exadata 11g
• What is EMC’s VFCache Good For?
• SAP Continues HANA Migration to SMB Application
• How Cloudant Became an Accidental Enterprise Success

Interviewed by SiliconAngle.com founder and CEO John Furrier on SiliconAngle.tv from last week’s NODE.js summit, Floyer presented a vision of the future of IT based on the disruptive technologies just entering the enterprise.

“We’ve gone through server and storage consolidation with virtualization,” Floyer said. “Now we’re going to see application consolidation, database consolidation which will simplify the way businesses are run, reduce the cost of running those businesses and allow them to do things they couldn’t even dream about before. So this is a very exciting time.”

At the front end, he says, companies will need tools like NODE.js that empower fast development of ad hoc applications to research the new kinds of questions that are being asked in big data environments.

“A lot of young, extremely talented programmers are tackling the problems of mobile computing involving the problems of vast amounts of IMs going between people, from machine to machine, using NODE.js, he said. “They’re providing a framework for very high-speed transport of these messages where speed is more important than absolute certainty of delivery.”

That, however, presents problems in the business world, where absolute guarantees of delivery are important. The only way to ensure that no data is lost is to write it to some form of persistent storage as quickly as possible. Traditionally that has meant disk, but that is a very slow, narrow bandwidth solution that places major constraints on applications, particularly in the new big data environment.

The answer, he says, is a new IT architecture combining servers with flash memory cards built-in, allowing data capture at near memory speeds on a persistent medium that can survive unplanned outages (see image).  This, in his vision, is connected to an active management second layer that moves the data to layer three, consisting of hybrid flash/disk systems. Here the flash provides a persistent cache that can take in large amounts of data quickly and feed that onto large capacity disk for permanent storage. This in turn is connected through another active management layer to an archiving layer of SATA storage using advanced methodology to facilitate fast retrieval of archived information when needed.

All the major pieces for this architecture are available, he says. One important key part was supplied by the recent demonstration by HP and Fusion-IO of a one billion IOPs system using cards installed directly in HP Proliant servers to act as persistent memory for very large amounts of incoming data. Although the demonstration was limited in some respects, its implications were tremendous, as Floyer showed in his analysis published here on Wikibon.org.  This demonstration of the system that becomes layer 1 of the new architecture solves the problem of capturing very large volumes of data in a persistent medium to minimize risk of data loss. The key here is that the built-in acts as a kind of memory, avoiding the traditional IO stack to support atomic writes at very high speed.

Today HP and Fusion-io are leading the development of this critical, tightly coupled server/ front-end system. However, Fusion-io has competition including SolidFire and Virident, which provide equivalent or even higher speed data capture. That opens the possibility for other partnerships with HP competitors in the server space.

Obviously this layer by itself will always have limited storage capacity. The HP demonstration purposely used 64-byte files specifically because of this limitation. Therefore this top layer needs to be connected through an active management layer to layer three, where large amounts of active data can be stored. This layer needs to combine the IO capabilities of flash with the high capacity/low cost of disk. While this layer could be entirely , EMC’s Project Lightning “is very interesting”, Floyer says. “They are putting cards into servers and have FAST, which is part of the active management of data. They can introduce cache coherence across the servers and layer 3.”

This is still a fairly expensive storage technology, however. Once the data is no longer needed for active analysis, the architecture should have another active management layer that will recognize that and move it down to a less expensive all disk archiving layer using SATA disks. Floyer says DataDirect Networks has an interesting product in Web Object Systems (WOS) that provides a high-speed object-based storage mechanism that can play a base role in that management scheme. And Cleversafe’s use of erasure coding for distributing data across a network provides guaranteed retrieval of files after a hardware failure at a lower cost than RAID, which again can save the enterprise money while preserving that guarantee of data preservation that enterprises need.

Node.js, Flash Technology Opens Door to Undreamed of Applications is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Big Money Data: What’s A Trillion Dollars Look Like?
• Oracle Delivers R Enterprise, Data Mining Inside Exadata 11g
• SAP Continues HANA Migration to SMB Application
• How Cloudant Became an Accidental Enterprise Success
• DRAM will Remain Too Expensive to Compete with Flash
• Sumo Logic Emerges From Stealth To Take On Splunk, Log Data Analytics

I recently watched an amazing TEDx talk by Luis von Ahn about massive-scale online collaboration through systems such as how reCAPTCHA uses a common Internet method of determining humanity to digitize books. This sort of crowdsourcing has elements of expectation that could be brought to bear in every sphere where a multitude of humans are already coming together to do a simple task—such as video games—and possibly even harnessed.

The Internet and the cloud are powerful democratizing forces—the Internet, as a resource, gathers millions of voices and eyes from around the world and directs them to each other. We’ve already seen surprising innovations in using the Internet’s crowdsourcing effect to do surprising amounts of work with the reCAPTCHA project: Google uses it to properly scan old books into digital form by using millions of eyes to read English in a way computers do a poor job.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking again with Amr Awadallah, the CTO of Cloudera, who has spoken to John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCube before about the power of big data technologies and he reflected about how companies who run video game services such as those that allow players from across the world to engage in Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 use big data technology to assess customer retention and usage.

However, he mentions that there’s a great deal of data being generated here and there’s a lot of people playing these games for entertainment. Hours upon hours a multitude of people spend playing video games and all of that could be put to use somehow if only we found the angle.

Looking at the power of the reCAPTCHA project to OCR books using what is otherwise a waste of time for most people (filling out CAPTCHAs to prove that they’re human) the project with Google has managed to harness what people do every day on the Internet to do a staggering amount of work.

In what I think is a brilliant idea, Awadallah mentioned Star Gate: Universe. A science fiction show in which one of the characters is catapulted out of his Earthbound life of playing video games into exploring space because he solved an unsolvable problem in a video game. A problem put there by Star Gate Command to see if they could entice gamers to attempt to solve it (it involved some special math problem that would solve an issue that would allow said space exploration.)

If we were able to inject something like that into highly played massively-multiplayer online video games like World of Warcraft or DC Universe Online we might even see everyday people solving difficult modeling problems in science. It doesn’t even need to be an impossible-to-solve problem; it could be a small part of a much larger problem.

We’re Already Doing This; It’s Just Not “Interesting Enough Yet”

We’ve already seen some “social games” begin to deliver similar crowdsourced problem-solving outside of video games such as Foldit—a web portal and a game seeking teams of people to attempt to determine how particular proteins are folded. Through gamification, a social status system, and a reward system, the researchers who run Foldit have managed to solve a number of interesting, complex protein models.

If it were possible to break down large problems into small tasks that could be executed by video game players as either part of a larger game or part of a minigame we could harness the power of their time in these games. Perhaps it could be something as simple as identifying similarities between two models or some other simple task. Put together, a hundred people doing the same simple task can expand into a complex integration of behaviors.

Right now, most games like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 don’t really have the mechanics necessary to invoke these sorts of crowdsourced microwork the way that reCAPTCHA does.

Humans are very good at intuitive pattern-based problem solving and many video games are based on just this and video gamers are virtually trained to do this well. So it makes sense that this is where we’d want to try out experiments in this first.

The Internet and Video Gamers Could Unlock the Next Breakthrough in Science is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Following the implosion of Cirtas in April of last year, cloud gateway vendors have basically positioned themselves as “on ramps” from a customer data center to the actual cloud providers like Amazon, Azure, Nirvanix and Rackspace. With Amazon now offering its own cloud gateway, this calls into question the need for the middlemen who have been pushing their wares as a means of getting access to the Amazon cloud.

By cutting out the middlemen, Amazon could single handedly accelerate the demise of the standalone cloud gateway market. Sure, today the standalone vendors will cry out in protest that they offer “advanced” features that Amazon doesn’t have yet and that Amazon is still in beta mode—but the looming threat is irreversible: Amazon now has a platform that it can build additional functionality on to—and it will—rapidly

While they may have snapshots, encryption and cached volumes today, look for Amazon to add incremental functionality like data deduplication, file locking, and multi-site file sharing in the coming months.

For cloud gateway startups that have made broad public claims about their products’ ability to give customers superior access to AWS, today’s news doesn’t exactly fortify their business strategies. After all, Amazon can make their gateway work better with their own cloud than anyone else can—they do own it from soup to nuts, you know.

What does this mean for startups like Ctera, Nasuni, Panzura, TwinStrata, StorSimple and Riverbed’s Whitewater group?

VCs who invested in standalone cloud gateway vendors should definitely be concerned right about now.

Amazon Cuts Out the Middleman: Launches its Own Cloud Storage Gateway is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Floyer focused on the demonstration earlier this month by HP and Fusion-io of a system that reached 1 billion IOPS using eight servers and 64 flash PCIe cards. His analysis shows that this configuration, in which huge volumes of individually small chunks of real-time data are written straight onto persistent flash storage cards treated as an extension of memory in a non-locking system, reduces the cost of the total system by an order of magnitude – from $34 million using a traditional IO software stack with PCIe flash to $3 million. For comparison he also priced theoretical equivalent systems using disk and SSDs at $220 million and disk only at $2,276 million. Obviously while technically possible using these older systems, this has been made practical for large numbers of applications for the first time with the HP/Fusion-io architecture, which eliminates both disk and the traditional IO software stack to boost write ioDrive performance from 1 million to more than 15 million IOs a second.

This makes real-time analysis of a whole new class of applications possible, Floyer says. Real-world applications include:

1. The capture and analysis of real-time performance data from large populations smart machines such as refrigerators, washing machines, driers, etc., to identify developing problems early, allowing service providers to intervene before the unit fails.
2. Real-time monitoring of tens of thousands patients with smart implantable medical devices such as heart defibrillators to identify early signs of heart or other medical emergencies and literally save people’s lives.
3. Monitoring of large transportation system such as railroads to identify problems ranging from “hot boxes” (locked air brakes on a freight car) to incipient failures of a track joint to head off derailments.
4. Analysis of credit card use over large populations to identify fraud.

All of these and others are already in use in small scale experiments but need the kind of very large scale, near real-time, atomic write data capture that persistent flash memory provides in this configuration for the first time. The implications, Floyer argues, are staggering.

This is the Start of the Big Data IO Era is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• How Did 2011 Stack Up to Last Year’s Predictions?
• Big Money Data: What’s A Trillion Dollars Look Like?
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• SAP Continues HANA Migration to SMB Application
• EMC’s Project Lightning Provokes Fusion-io Reaction
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As long as it doesn’t interrupt the attention of the driver this would be more like television-in-car and music systems for children in the back seat—just on the window next to them. I wonder how the passenger (or child in my case) getting stuck on the middle hump seat will feel about this.

Researchers and students from FUTURE LAB at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Israel took up the challenge from General Motors Research and Development to develop an augmented-reality window.

“Traditionally, the use of interactive displays in cars has been limited to the driver and front passenger, but we see an opportunity to provide a technology interface designed specifically for rear seat passengers,” said Tom Seder, GM R&D lab group manager for human-machine interface. “Advanced windows that are capable of responding to vehicle speed and location could augment real world views with interactive enhancements to provide entertainment and educational value.”

GM has no current plans to put this into production vehicles, so we get to see researchers and students let their imagination soar. Dubbed Project WOO—Windows of Opportunity—the interactive backseat windows would allow a sort of interactivity and outside-awareness that riders have never had before including the possibility of writing messages to other cars. (Remember learning that you had to write what you wanted to say backwards in breath-fog so that people in other cars could read it?)

Current apps include:

• Otto, an animated character projected over passing scenery that responds to real-time car performance, weather and landscape. With Otto, passengers can learn about their environment in fun, playful ways.
• Foofu, an app that allows passengers to create, explore and discover through finger drawing on window steam.
• Spindow, an app that provides its users a peek into other users’ windows around the globe in real time.
• Pond, an app that allows passengers to stream and share music with other cars on the road, downloads favorite tracks, and share messages with other passengers on the road.

Perhaps this innovation will just lead to a new form of griefing and flamewars between passengers in highway bound vehicles—or it might lead to strange ad hoc gaming during traffic jams. With apps like Pond, people will be able to share their music with other cards nearby on the road, now there’s a use for an ad hoc network that I can get behind. Although the concept of Spindow feels a little bit too voyeuristic for my tastes (I wonder if it faces outwards or inwards) although being able to see what someone stuck in a traffic jam in Tokyo sees in real time while sharing my traffic jam experience in Phoenix would be enjoyable.

These apps use an innovative technique of “smart glass” that will be capable of acting as a multitouch surface and change its transparency/opacity and translucency in order to reflect projected images. To create the multitouch and gesture sensitive surface itself, the students used a motion tracking technology called EyeClick.

A gesture-based technology might also be useful for drivers (although with limited functionality) to allow them to hands-free controls in the car such as turning on and off internal lights, turning up and down music, and et cetera. So the technology being forwarded into these backseat panes might give insights into how drivers can be interacted with without distracting them from the road.

Fundamentally, GM wants to change the experience of a journey in one of their vehicles to be one of discovery as much as conveyance. Of course, doing something the other guy doesn’t won’t hurt their bottom line when it comes to buying decisions—now we’ll just have to see what Top Gear thinks of it when it appears on the product line.

GM Innovates Augmented Reality “Smart Glass” Technology for Back Seat Drivers is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Massively Multiplayer Online Games as a Model for Business Collaboration
• Solar Powered Electric Cars? Ford’s Got ‘Em
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• IBM Leads the GreenList 500
• Why Is Google Testing Self-Driving Cars?
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In their joint statement, Symantec and LiveOffice reveal how useful it is for a business to go with a single vendor for their communication and teamwork solutions. This is also the point where the cloud can be extremely useful for a multitude of business models because it allows them to offload e-mail servers and other infrastructure into the cloud which also removes the need for the overhead of in-house servers.

Another issue discovered by many businesses and e-mail is the need for archives. A multitude of different countries have specific requirements for business communications and regulate how long they’re stored, how they’re stored, and asks that they remain accessible for external agencies to audit the business. For example corporations and businesses may need to comply with regulations from FINRA, SEC and SRO. As a result, businesses are asked to keep expensive systems to archive their e-mail communications in order to remain in business.

LiveOffice keeps this covered with their hybrid cloud-service by not just archiving e-mail and past communications for a company using their service, but they do so in a manner that takes into account the regulatory necessity when archiving.

The other side of archived material isn’t just about staying on the right side of the law, but also keeping track of the evolution of projects inside the company. Many companies archive their e-mail and communications just out of necessity so that they don’t lose a great deal of useful documentation if they cannot find it in their files. A cloud-based outfit like LiveOffice vended through Symantec would essentially make short work of this by archiving-as-you-go during communication.

With cloud-based services, archiving is made easy and backups are literally instantaneous (as well as sorting and etc.) as they can be designed to both save locally and into the cloud as they’re sent out. This means that if the local backups are burned in a catastrophe, they’re still available offsite. This also means that remote and mobile users connected to the same vendor do not have far to go in order to get access to a timeline.

Being able to pull up all of the communication for a particular project, link it to assets of that project, and view them remotely (without having to pull them all across the network) could speed up offsite individuals and remote collaboration.

Plugging Into Pre-Existing Services

Looking at the Symantec solution, one interesting thing is that it hooks up with pre-existing cloud-based services such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Dropbox. Since these are all extremely popular services and people have already used them, this means that they won’t need to suddenly shift to a new interface or service just because the company switched to LiveOffice.

By acting as man-in-the-middle, LiveOffice can be used to plug into already existing usage of these services and back up information sent to them. It’s also been mentioned—back to the regulatory archiving—that if enterprise users send documents out to these services, via LiveOffice, that those documents can be retained in the format they’re sent out for later use in legal or regulatory matters.

All of this without disrupting the collaboration and communication capabilities of the users.

It looks like LiveOffice is managing to position themselves well by getting acquired and Symantec is positioning themselves as a cloud-enabled enterprise vendor for communication software that will enable businesses to keep doing what they’re doing but stop worrying as much about being able to access backups and or what they need to do in order to stay complaint with data regulations.

All of these things greatly reduce disruption on the workforce while also enabling the power of storage-as-a-service in the enterprise sector.

Symantec Acquisition of LiveOffice Gives Business a Cloud Booster-Shot is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• Symantec Enhances Archiving and eDiscovery Offerings, Acquires LiveOffice
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Today, Reuters is reporting on the partnership between the educational entertainment studio and Microsoft for Xbox LIVE and Kinect.

In a novel approach, Sesame Street characters will appear on screen in the normal fashion of programming but ask children watching to interact with them and become part of their own education and entertainment. This is already a type of programming glibly called “edutainment,” this could dramatically change how parents and educators view both television programming and the video game experience.

“Children participate while watching television but they can’t interact because their actions have no impact on show programming. It continues to go on,” says Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Workshop, Research and Education VP. “With Kinect Sesame Street TV it’s a totally different experience because if you’re not going to interact, the character is going to prompt you to interact so there are going to be two tracks where the child will truly be interacting and getting feedback. So if they’re asked to identify the letter D and they pick the letter e they will be corrected.”

In our culture, children already spend hours a day watching television.

So-called the “boob tube” by an older generation due to its mesmerizing effect and how non-interactive it is, this has been a long-standing criticism for the type of content that television delivers. Even educatainment programs such as Sesame Street have never been able to escape from the one-sided delivery that television provides; but the digital revolution, DVRs, and especially Internet TV has been changing all that.

Time for video games and natural human interaction devices to enter center stage and Kinect is an excellent product for doing exactly that.

Unlike the Wiimote or the PlayStation Move, the Kinect does not require the child to remember where the interactive object is in the room. All they have to do is activate the programming and go. Furthermore, with prompting from characters on the screen, they’ll be able to interact with them in a similar fashion as they would with another person.

Microsoft and Sesame Street are dubbing this a project about “playful learning.”

No doubt, it will help shape the future of how the Xbox, Internet TV, and Kinect will affect the lives of a new generation.

Microsoft Brings “Edutainment” to the Next Level with Sesame Street, Kinect Partnership is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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