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Cloud Startup Makara Hopes To Make Deploying Apps Easy and Fast

John Furrier — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:34:09 +0000

One of the biggest issues for developers is moving their apps to the cloud. Many companies like RackSpace (@rackcloud) and Amazon are trying to figure out ways to on-board developers to the cloud.

Today, Makara, a cloud startup, is coming out of stealth mode to target developers to provide a way to seemlessly move thier apps to the cloud and iterate fast with support for Makara provides easy on-boarding and management to the cloud. Makara hopes to leverages virtualization to simplify cloud application management. Makara’s Cloud Application Platform (now available as a developer release) helps developers easily deploy, scale and monitor mission-critical applications in the cloud

Makara allows developers to deploy new or existing web applications to a public or private cloud with no code changes. Makara has integrations built in for all of the components of a web application stack, and developers can choose the versions they need from a catalog. Once the application is deployed, developers have deep introspection to the application runtime and cluster-wide visibility into end user response times end-to-end through the entire stack.

Makara’s Cloud Application Platform supports Java, Flex, PHP, JBoss and Tomcat applications. It runs on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Terremark vCloud Express, VMware ESX, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox and Xen.

New Network and Developer Model – Fast Deployment and Iteration
Iteration is the new way for developers to push out updates in real time based upon user/customer needs. Cloud computing is a very disruptive way to introduce new innovative apps fast. With the “new network” model of fast iteration one of the biggest headaches is management and configuration of deployed apps. Makara hopes to solve this problem.

Makara’s Cloud Application Platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product is freely available today as a developer release at www.Makara.com.

Makara’s CTO Tobias Kunze Briseno writes about his companies new platform:

I am very excited to report that, after months of under-the-radar development, today we are launching the Makara Cloud Application Platform, Developer Beta today. This software enables developers to take their existing Tomcat, JBoss or PHP applications and get them running in minutes on a long list of supported cloud environments: public or private, external or internal.

Best of all, hairy details such as clustering, management, and monitoring are already built-in. Developers today want to deploy, scale and manage their applications without being held up by provisioning and deployment. They want to turn their applications «on», instantly.

Consider deploying a new version of an application to a cluster: instead of messing around with transferring files to a server and then tweaking them to match another environment, developers simply export the application from their working machine and import it in the target environment in the cloud, be it testing, staging, or production.

Think about everything you would normally have to do: set up machines, configure a load balancer, tweak the code to match the environment, deploy across the cluster, and so forth. Do you really want to tweak ant and maven scripts (and that’s if you’re lucky; if you’re unlucky you’re tweaking bash scripts) every time? Did you really want to set those up in the first place? Don’t you wish you could just tell the computer: «deploy my copy to staging and replicate it out to the cluster»? And then have those management and monitoring goodies built-in, with all their juicy details and a nice display?

When I am developing web applications, this is the platform I would want to work with. In my previous life as an operations director, one of the things we struggled with constantly was rolling out new versions of our application. We’d put together a release, roll it into our staging environment, run tests, then deploy it into production. Each time we moved from environment to environment would take 6 hours…

Debugging things was a very punishing process of diving through 60 servers worth of log files. Of course I could think of architectural ways to make things more stable, of isolating changes in the code, etc, but the problem is when you’re trying to release 50 times a month and there’s constantly pressure to roll out new versions of the application, you just don’t have time to solve these issues from the inside.

There is yet more undifferentiated heavy lifting lurking in the application stack. There is an operating system to install, maintain, and secure, applications and web servers to configure, logs need to be rotated and consolidated, the machine health needs to be monitored, and so forth. All just in order to run an application. Sure you can start with a template, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Our application platform makes this go away. It does all remaining heavy lifting for you.

The face of the Makara Cloud Application Platform is a console that lets you on-board your application, unmodified. And capacity adjustments are incredibly simple – you can scale your cluster by adding nodes or right-size it by dropping running nodes. To see how the application is doing, you’ll then pull up the dashboard and see a number of views of the transactions being served by the cluster now or in the past. You can compare timeframes for easy baselining. The dashboard gives you 360º visibility into the application’s performance and resource usage, including network time to download pages. And when that change request comes in, updating the code and re-deploying the application across the cluster is just a few simple clicks. Holy smokes: All these views are even interconnected, so you’ll see on the dashboard when a change was made to an app, an app was restarted, or a machine added to the cluster.

This is just the first glimpse of our vision of how we see applications to really take off in the cloud, but it’s already a big step, both for us and for the developer, so I’d like to encourage you to give it a try:http://www.makara.com/TryIt. And let us know what you think! Do you want to be part of the game-changing revolution in how applications are deployed and run that is currently happening in the IT landscape? Then you should sign up for the Open Source project we are about to launch. But this is something I’ll talk about another day…

Here is the company’s video that describes the issues for developers that want to move to the cloud.

Cloud Startup Makara Hopes To Make Deploying Apps Easy and Fast is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Apple iPad = iTunes New Money Making Machine

Anthony Farrior — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:15:08 +0000

Apple Launches iPad.

You know it’s bad when the salesman has to visualize his product for you. He sat on a couch and demonstrated right? Wow, so let’s recap:

iPad runs almost all of the over 140,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®.

The iTunes® Store gives you access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 11 million songs, over 50,000 TV episodes and over 8,000 films including over 2,000 in stunning high definition video.

Apple also announced the new iBooks app for iPad, which includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile device. The iBookstore will feature books from major and independent publishers.

It’s the specially made CPU processor worries me. Having a incredible deadline and momentous pressure to do what no one else has done spells consumer disaster, imho. Don’t get me wrong, 1 GHZ speed has become the standard for low power mobile devices and the iPad falls right in place with that. Bigger than a netbook but smaller than a laptop. I get it Steve, I really do.

But (… wait for it) can I squeeze it into my non-consumer life? I don’t pay for much and the iPad is made for purchasing things. Applications, games, music, videos and now ebooks/papers. Everything I need is free but not available for this new fangled device: Youtube.com? Nope, no flash support. Hulu.com? Nope, no flash support! My son’s visits to cartoon network? No! No Flash support!!!

How about my girls’ visits to Disney‘s Tinkerbell site … Oh I get it.

If I have to buy an app to substitute for what I can do freely on the internet, I don’t want it. Who would? Do I like capacitive Multi-Touch screens? Of Course! But what’s the use if I’m broke and can’t afford the software I can get at no charge if open sourced or ad supported? Can I jailbreak the iPad?

I would have to be an idiot to buy a computer that only does one thing at a time. This is 2010 right? Windows 3.1 handled that nearly 20 years ago. Why would I want to purchase a device that doesn’t multitask? No wonder the battery can last almost ten hours, it either surfs the net or plays music, not both.

As if that were not enough of a punch to the gut, we have to deal with AT&T, again?

What do we have to do to get away from these blind mice leading us into dark holes of bad reception? One person asked me why can they use their 3Gs iPhone underground at train stations but not in their home or where they need to make a call? Guess they aren’t getting this device because if they prepped all of their work on this device only for it to fizzle come presentation.

…ouch.

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In the same vein:

What You’re Not Hearing (Yet) About the #iPad

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:50:48 +0000

Apple iPad hands-on demonstration.

“iPad is pretty amazing — there, I said it.” – Ryan Block

The magic hour has passed, and those that have had a chance to play with the Apple Tablet have played with it and those who have their opinions out about it have started to trickle in. I’ve been in press briefings since the moment I woke up this morning, so I haven’t had a chance to jot down my (already) quite well formed thoughts on the product.

Still, I figured it’s worth pointing to those that have already said their piece, as a few of them were pretty interesting.

The iPad Was Disappointing

“Steve, Imma let you finish, but Moses had the greatest tablet announcement of all time.” – @Stwo

Robert Scoble points to the upcoming feature war between Google and Apple:

Apple’s new iPad didn’t meet expectations, either mine, or the folks who I’ve been talking with on Twitter.

If my friends who work with or for Apple and in the press hadn’t built it up as mind blowing it wouldn’t have been disappointing, but this was a case where expectations got too big and what showed up didn’t meet them. Come on, no radically new way to interact? No Flash? No full OS? No Camera? No Verizon?

I was expecting a 10.0 and an 8.7 showed up.

So, we’ve seen how Steve Jobs is setting the trends for the industry. I can’t wait to see how Google puts together its machine to compete.

One hint? There was no talk of wireless synching between iPhone and iPad. Why not? Compare to when I got my Google Nexus One phone. I entered in my email address and all my apps magically appeared. THAT gives you a hint of how Google is going to hit at Apple.

Oh, and one other weakness Apple has? Apple is clueless about social software. Google isn’t all that great either, but it is a world ahead of Apple. So, look at Google to make some major social networking moves this year to make its ecosystem a lot more interesting to the Facebook generation.

Lead blogger Adam Frucci over at DVice was not impressed:

The iPad was supposed to be Apple’s revolutionary new product, the one that would make tablets palatable to the masses. Instead, it’s a product that falls into all the old tablet pitfalls while adding some new ones into the mix.

The iPad Will Kill the Kindle (Or Not)

"Don’t make us explain how it works." Too true.

“Definitely not enough girls working at Apple. Don’t they know the word ‘pad’ makes ice run in our veins?” – Maggie Alderson

Mashable’s Josh Catone rode the fence (“4 Reasons the Kindle is Dead, 4 Reasons It’s Not”):

“Uh-oh,” is the reaction we can imagine Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had when watching today’s unveiling of the eagerly awaited Apple iPad tablet. The new Apple device looks, at least upon first glance, like it will completely eat Amazon’s lunch. In fact, Steve Jobs even eulogized the Kindle in his unveiling.

“Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further,” he said while unveiling the iPad’s iBook e-reader software. But is the Kindle really dead? Amazon proudly proclaimed the Kindle as the number one selling product on Amazon.com, with a huge banner on their home page today. Can it really be all over so fast?

He put together four reasons for both sides:

It Will Kill the Kindle Because:

1. iPad Starts at $499 (and the Kindle ends at $489)
2. The Kindle Just Reads Books (the iPad does a little more)
3. iBooks Looks “Sweet” (my emphasis added).
4. Kindle Lacks Color and Video

It Won’t Kill the Kindle Because:

1. E-Ink Display is Gorgeous (which is misrepresenting things – e-Ink reduces eye strain over active matrix displays).
2. Free 3G (on the Kindle, of course. Apple? Free? In any sense of the word? You must be shrooming).
3. Huge Book Selection (yeup.).
4. Crazy Battery Life (while the iPad is an “impressive” 10 hours. We’ll see).

And Then Some People Really Hated It…

“It works pretty well and does what you expect it to. It just feels really good.” –Leo Laporte

According to Ars Technica, actual protestors showed up today to demonstrate against the iPad:

Members of the Free Software Foundation staged a small protest outside today’s Apple event in San Francisco, making the case against Apple’s use of DRM. The group’s four-foot signs were headed with the message "Entering Apple Restriction Zone" and laid out the tablet’s detriments.

If the iPad turned out to be more "laptop-like" than "phone-like," the FSF would have an even stronger objection to Apple’s tight connection between device and Apple-controlled stores (for music and apps). Such a device would extend the iPhone model beyond phones and into laptop territory—and computers in particular should remain open devices in ways that are perhaps less important on phones.

There was also the charge of hypocrisy; if Steve Jobs truly hates DRM so much and wanted it gone from iTunes Store music, why does he continue to lather it onto all video content from Apple, and why did he voluntarily add it to iPhone apps?

As the event got underway, I asked Sullivan what his protest crew was going to do next. "We might take a trip down to the Apple Store," he said, to keep spreading the word… all in the hopes of turning this golden calf into a free-range gnu.

Particularly interesting. Most of my objections to the device were from a usability standpoint, but the FSF does raise a number of interesting points. On a meta-level, it is interesting that what we once jokingly referred to as a cult-like religious movement of Mac-heads is actually developing the trappings of actual religious movements, complete with non-ironic protestors.

What Does “Unlocked” Mean to You?

“Can’t wait to hear all the bitching from people who live in San Fran on how the 3G coverage from ATT sucks with iPad.” – @Jeffr0

When I heard Steve Jobs say that the iPad was by default unlocked, I thought that meant something. According to Rosa Golijin at Gizmodo, not so much:

We’re excited that the iPad‘s data plans won’t lock you down in a 2-year contract and that the device’s 3G modem isn’t carrier-locked. But you still won’t get 3G speeds on an iPad if you decide to use T-Mobile.

Why? The iPad‘s 3G modem supports UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz) and GSM/EDGE (850, 900,1800, 1900 MHz). T-Mobile’s 3G runs on 1700 Mhz. See the trouble? You could of course still get EDGE data service using T-Mobile, but that’s just not as great as the theoretically blazing 3G speeds, is it?

Some of you are remarking that T-Mobile also runs on 2100 MHz, but here’s what our friend and wise man Richard Baguley says:

UMTS2100 is the european version, not the US one. I don’t think they are compatible. So, the iPad would just not see the T-Mobile 3G on either frequency

Nice. Real nice.

At any rate, that’s the bulk of what I found interesting about the iPad discussion today. Expect a lot more perspectives to surface here at SiliconANGLE this evening and over the tnext day or two.

What You’re Not Hearing (Yet) About the #iPad is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Three Words You Wouldn’t Hear 10 Years Ago: Homebrew Render Farm

Douglas Gourlay — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:46:58 +0000

It all started when I wanted some new network icons.

Somehow all the ones I used in the past were made by an art department I strangely do not have access to anymore, and I really don’t want to have to pay an agency to make them for me. I could probably outsource somewhere, but don’t want to have to explain what I want, so sometimes it is just easier to do it yourself (and learn a few new things while you are at it).

Plus it was a fun way to spend an evening.

So off I went, using a 3d design program known as Rhinocerous.

Incidentally, Rhinocerous is an insanely cool name. I wish I could name my products things like that. A new switch is the Raven 98000, and over here we have the Magpie 5600 connected to the Corpus Corax 11000. You catch my drift; cooler names should be used in networking products, instead of the secret-decoder-ring-needing acronyms and SKUs limited to 17 characters (who who picked 17, again?). I don’t expect this to change anywhere anytime soon, so I’ll get off my soapbox.

So we have Rhino running, doing a bit of drawing, getting the shape right and such. Then we couple that with a ray-trace rendering app, in this case VRAY, for Rhino.

You get a lot of choices about textures, lighting, and such that frankly are too plentiful for a neophyte, but in the hands of an expert is clearly a pretty powerful program. This is where it gets fun though: there is an option in VRAY for ‘distributed rendering’.

Nerd alerts went off throughout my office as I madly scrambled around loading a VM with the VRay distributed rendering client onto every machine I could get my hands on. Old Mac laptops, an 8-Core MacPro, a 4-Core MacPro, even a 2-Core MacMini fell victim to loading this intimidating piece of software. I then realized that I had some network issues, and quickly patched through a few more Cat6 ports from the office to the wiring closet, locked the ports down at 1000-FULL and moved my IP Phone to a PoE port while I was at it.

After it was all said and done and running like a champ, the coolest part was watching the MacPro spawn multiple execution threads which you cold see rendering in real time. Render times were cut down by about 70% from using just one machine.

Lessons Learned

It wasn’t all roses. A few things I learned and a few things I think the SW developers should focus on in future versions.

1) VRay and Rhinocerous both do not have native Mac versions yet. This is frustrating but you can work around it with VMware Fusion 3. They both worked pretty well through a VM on Windows XP. I am still not up to Windows 7 being happy to have skipped Vista.

2) Since you are running it in a VM note this: On the station with Rhinocerous be sure to tweak your setting to as many CPU cores as you can. I set it up for 4 cores and 3-4Gb of DRAM on the VM. I need more RAM for this machine, it could easily be happy with 16Gb on the VM. I am looking forward to the native version.

3) On the distributed render farms you don’t need a whole lot of memory as it seems mostly CPU intensive, at least for the way I was using it. I set mine at 512Mb of Dram and let the other machines continue their happy servitude streaming iTunes, serving photos, keeping myDrobo happy, and generally performing well. Even the Tweetdeck machine. On these and the master you will have to move the Network Interface Card settings from NAT (default) to Bridged. You will probably have to at least go to the console and do a ‘ipconfig /release, ipconfig /renew’ to ensure the adapter comes up and yvou are ont eh same LANs egment as teh physical hosts. I was not able to get it working with NAT. Also be sure to let the sockets through any host-stack firewalls, McAfee goofed me for a bit on this.

4) Room for improvement: a native MacOS client for Rhinocerous and for VRay would really help. But the way the developers have you add distributed render nodes is archaic. First on the node themselves it spawns a text window and doesn’t provide any diagnostics, just a scrolling log when it gets a job.

b) VRay requires you put the IP address, hard coded, into the master machine of each client. Don’t you think this would work much better integrated with Bonjour or something that enables auto-discovery of potential render-nodes?

c) Even smarter would be have the render nodes run as a reduced priority process in the taskbar. Then each machine in a studio could be helping any rendering via processor reclamation when not being dominated by the user.

d) I like the real-time display of the ray tracing going on, but put a report in their showing what system did what percentage of the work. This way I would now which ones to upgrade, find the bottlenecks, etc. A little diagnostics would go a long way here.

e) Also when showing the list of the servers, check server availability and let me know BEFORE I start a render job. Novel, yes?

In the end, it was fun, I will continue to use them, but there is some room to improve that would be really useful for someone like me and I imagine the IT staff at any design studio. Here’s some shots of the finished products…

Three Words You Wouldn’t Hear 10 Years Ago: Homebrew Render Farm is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Booth Babes Revisited: Just Plain Stupid or Universally Appealing? [#CES2010 Leftovers]

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:07:21 +0000

We’ve seen a number of interesting videos come out of #CES, including the video that our friends Robert Scoble, Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick put together as a part of their Spark Series as well as Art Fewell’s tireless efforts to bring us a mountain of video from the show.

I was recently going over the mess of articles and videos I accumulated post #CES2010 and one in particular by Gizmodo that I had previously missed caught my eye: “Booth Babe Confessions.”

I was immediately reminded of a post Stephen Foskett put out just after #VMWorld2009, “(Don’t) Make Your Startup Look Stupid With Booth Babes And Chotchkies!”

It was a post that generated some of the most controversy and discussion of anything we’ve ever posted here (conversation that, unfortunately, has been lost to the whims of the web after one of our comment synchronizations failed). The idea that actual benefits befall conference vendors by employing either scantily clad or suggestively dressed women to staff their booth is an idea that’s antiquated and insulting to both the women involved and the attendees being pitched.

From Stephen’s old post:

As a speaker on cloud computing and enterprise data storage, I attend dozens of trade shows every year. Yet I am still amazed by the lack of consideration for the consequences of these cheap tricks. It boils down to a simple question: What does a sexy babe, a magician, and a flashing pen tell the world about your company?

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, and makes any company look stupid. Moreover, it demonstrates you’re out of ideas, have little regard for your customer, and don’t think anyone cares.

Still, watching the video, it’s hard to deny that for the crowds typically attending high-profile events like these that they don’t work – watch the video and keep an eye out for how every single head turns around these women.

It’s also intriguing, and the point of the video, that every woman interviewed had some sort of story about how they’ve been sexually harassed in some way, shape or manner in their (sometimes very short) career as a booth babe. Are we really that crass as a species of Internet dwellers (or do I really need to ask when we sub-species like YouTube commentors, Digg community members and 4chan)?

From Gizmodo:

Some slip these girls their hotel keys, pressuring them for a visit later in the day. Others mistake professional flirting for actual flirting and try pick-up lines. "Do you know what the speed of light inside a vacuum is? I do."

It’s hard to deny that booth babes work – sex is a universal marketing tool. It’s also hard to deny that it’s both demeaning and insulting to everyone involved.

Stephen offered some interesting alternatives to relying on junk and babes to be effective vendors at a trade show:

Replace the spokesmodels with informed techies – Rely on your recognizable and respected bloggers, speakers, and authors – you do have those, don’t you? Your solutions engineers and technical executives are another great pool to draw on. Staff with a 50-50 balance between sales and product expertise.

Replace the chotchkies with something that reflects your product – Use some creativity and think of a truly useful giveaway or socially-redeeming contest. Give away a worthwhile chunk of your product or service if possible, or represent the value of the product with a thoughtful giveaway. If you sell on efficiency and green IT, a flashing plastic pen or smooshy foam cloud sends the wrong message.

A hands-on lab beats a taped demo – Let your customers-to-be try your product out in person, both on the show floor and at a better-equipped lab. Offer a free training class with a certificate of completion so they can demonstrate their success back at work.

Get on the agenda and off the show floor – Your best leads and most-informed customers come from speaking engagements and social marketing, not badge-grabbed passers-buy. Arrange a customer roundtable or birds-of-a-feather session to locate and engage real sales leads.

It’s been some time since the original post aired here. I know that our audience here at SiliconANGLE is rife with both vendors as well as serial conference attendees. I have two questions, in light of that:

1) Does the status quo work? If you’re a vendor, do you use booth babes and chotchkies to get attention, and does that strategy work for you? If you’re an attendee, do you find yourself falling victim to these methods and checking out products that you’d otherwise likely ignore?

2) Stephens suggestions have been out there for a while now: have you tried Stephen’s tips and have they outperformed the sex appeal approach? Again, if you’re a vendor, let us know your experience. For the serial attendees out there, do you find yourself being attracted to Stephen’s more highbrow strategies in practice, or do you still follow the eye-candy?

Looking forward to hearing feedback.

[Editor’s Note: All photos, courtesy of Gizmodo’s #CES2010 Booth Babe coverage. –mrh]

Booth Babes Revisited: Just Plain Stupid or Universally Appealing? [#CES2010 Leftovers] is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Metcalfe’s Law Opportunity Gap: Analysis of the Melting Pot

Hutch Carpenter — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:30:47 +0000

A general observation of collaborative work is this:

The larger and more diverse are your personal network of contacts,
the higher the quality of your ideas and project work.

In the enterprise market, the opportunity being seized by companies is to better connect employees. The sheer size of these firms makes it obvious that they are not optimizing collaborative activities. Social software plays an important role in helping that. SunGard’s CEO has a great take on this issue in the New York Times.

But what about small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)? Do they have issues with maintaining connections? We’ll tackle that issue in a second. First, however…

WE by Spigit: Innovation Management for SMBs

Spigit is introducing its SaaS application for SMBs, called WE. WE leverages the enterprise functionality of enterprise Spigit, but streamlines the features to account for a self-service process and cost in tune with an SMB’s budget. The critical things firms need for innovation are there: easy idea entry, community feedback, workflow stages, analytics, individual reputation scores, multiple ways to filter for ideas, social profiles, connections, activity streams, etc.

It also reflects a slick new user interface, with multiple themes to choose from.

You can see more about WE innovation management for SMBs on the Spigit website. And readeWeek’s coverage of the release here.

The Challenge of Growth: Traditional Collaboration Modes Don’t Scale

When a small company starts out, it’s rather easy to stay on top of what colleagues are doing. There just aren’t too many of them. You easily banter, bounce ideas off one another and contribute your part to projects.

It’s natural human interactions.

The problem is that small businesses continue to rely exclusively on the tried-and-true methods of collaborative work as they grow. Keep on with the emails, the desk meetings, the lunches. Sure, it’s fun to keep with those who sit essentially in your visual perimeter. But it means you’re missing out on a lot of valuable ideas and insight from colleagues.

The graphic below shows the challenge of scale in collaborative work:

The easy interactions of old are now replaced by the departmental exchanges, and the daily work inherent in those micro environments.The small firm mentality that employees enjoyed with fewer employees is no longer applicable as the company expands.

Yet as research has shown, employees who are able to break out of departmental silos and leverage a diversity of connections perform better in terms of innovation.

So how does this fit SMBs?

Metcalfe’s Law Hits Dunbar’s Number

Metcalfe’s Law. Initially addressing fax machines, it speaks to the value of networks. Specifically:

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected participants.

For those who study the value of information networks, this law makes sense. You increase your number of information sources. And all things being equal, the person with greater information has a decided advantage in term of:

Awareness of key issues
Long tail knowledge of different issues
Access to information that will solidify an idea
Identification of colleagues who can help advance an idea or a project
Different points of view and information that make up for the knowledge limitations we all have

Every new connection inside a company increases these information advantages, for all members of the network. The problem occurs when employees are only using traditional methods for making and accessing these connections: email, desk conversations, departmental meetings.

They run into Dunbar’s Number. I use Dunbar’s Number here as a heuristic, describing the mental limit we each have to stay in top of what others are working on. With traditional means of engaging in collaborative work, the Metcalfe’s Law advantages of information diversity are limited by our Dunbar’s Number ability to keep up with the new connections.

This graph describes the issue, and SMBs’ opportunity:

Up to a certain point, employees can stay on top of what their colleagues are working on, and interact relatively easily. Is this up to 150 employees? Maybe. As Danah Boyd noted about Dunbar’s Number:

He found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn’t mean that people don’t have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point.

150 is a maximum number. Meaning for many of us it’s less. And I’d argue, in a work context, where we’re busy delivering on the daily tasks that define our jobs, it’s an even lower theoretical maximum.

Which means at some point, small businesses begin to lose out on those information advantages when they rely only on traditional collaborative work modes. In the graph above, that’s the part of the graph where Dunbar’s Number crosses over Metcalfe’s Law.

Call it the Metcalfe’s Law Opportunity Gap.

At that point, companies need to look at systems that allow employees to share and filter information, and to interact with others outside their daily sphere of contacts. To access non-redundant information and points of view.

This is a problem well-known to large organizations. It also applies to SMBs as well. It’s why they need social software at a certain point in their growth trajectory.

This is an important issue for innovation. So many of these employees will have front line customer and supplier experience, and ideas for the business. But visibility on these ideas will get harder and harder as the firm grows.

If this area interests you, check out WE by Spigit. Social software for SMBs.

Metcalfe’s Law Opportunity Gap: Analysis of the Melting Pot is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Why The Internet Tablet Still Counts

Anthony Farrior — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:53:00 +0000

Even with CES 2010 displaying tons of new Internet Tablets, many feel there is no real slot for it at home. Some think this is just a novelty product created on top of everyone not wanting to get left out of the tech party. I’m not sure about any of that but I do think I can use it.

For years I tried to have one main PC for the entertainment/living room, one for my office and one for my wife. Due to bad quality though, my wife’s laptop constantly overheated. Due to the young age of my kids, I spent more time with them than my PC in my "office". Ultimately we would all flop down in the living room and fight over the one LCD TV connected to the cable, DVD player and PC.

What to do? Well I’ve tried the "Netbook" route and it worked for awhile until i got tired of squinting my eyes and squishing my hands together to fit the tiny screen and keyboard. My wife wouldn’t look twice at the thing and by the time I gave it to my son, it fell down the stairs one too many times. The mobile phone solution was

a bust because of the screen(again) was too small and it was only good for occasional video/audio blogging. The Blackberry WordPress app has made it a little easier for me but without bookmarklets and multiple tabs I’m dead in the water.

How about the JooJoo? 12.1 inches in diameter is huge! Usb support for a keyboard is a go! Wifi for home use only is enough for me! 2gigs of space for any custom pics I want to upload to my blog is adequate. I don’t see the exact speed but it’s said to play HD video found on the internet very well. Did I mention a capacitive screen that pinches? I don’t need extra bells and whistles, I just need a good blogging tool for me or a comfortable device for my wife.

Now don’t forget folks, the first rule to any tech device is "Don’t buy the first model!" I can live without a tablet PC for now since I don’t have time to put all of my marbles on a device in litigation. I’ll probably wait for the third company to make one since they will see the other two mistakes and build one better at a lower price. So come on Company "X", let’s see you one up Fusion garage/Techcrunch and Apple by the fall of 2010, pleeeeease?

Why The Internet Tablet Still Counts is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Pete Cashmore Almost Denies an Aol Buyout

Art Lindsey III — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:07:41 +0000

Hello, boys and girls. Welcome to day two of “As the Overrated Blog Turns”.

Just a little while ago, Pete Cashmore took some time off between mirror visits to bang out a response on Mashable’s Tumblr blog. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? I know when I’m looking for news on a company; a Tumblr is the first place I go. Nice job, Pete! Incidentally, the biggest thing on Tumblr is a picture of Pete looking all pouty and dressed in one of his trademark “Prettyboys of Scotland” suits, but I digress.

Anyway, the Satin Highlander says:

“While commenting on speculation isn’t something I’ve done in the past, I think it would be nice to keep our community in the loop as much as we can on recent Mashable-related rumors. And with our writers on the ground at CES this week, I think it’s especially important to keep our focus on the real news.

We’re very open to partnerships and always talk with those that get in touch. We’ve certainly spoken to lots of potential partners, some of those conversations more significant than others. But I don’t feel that any of those conversations reached a point at which Mashable is likely to cease being independent.”

Yes, that’s right. He’s focusing on the real news. He’s gotta send a whole mess of people to Vegas so they can document the “100 Greatest Bar Meetup Tweets at CES.”

Okay, Okay, enough of that, let’s parse some words on this non-denial.

Look at the second paragraph of the response there. What a load of crap that is. Of course Mashable is open to ‘collaborations.’ Most businesses are. Give me a break, this response is straight out of an employee orientation video.

Sitting around saying “I’m not saying I’m selling the farm, but I’m not not saying it either.” is a huge cry for attention. If they weren’t working on something, or even still, didn’t want to talk about it, Pete could just nip it in the bud and say “This isn’t true; we’re not changing a thing.” It’s not like he has any stockholders he has to be honest with.

But he’s not doing that, is he? Why would he when he can coyly milk this for all its worth and every SocNet blogger on the planet will banter about it incessantly? More than one person at SiliconANGLE reached out to Pete and the staff, where any number of responses on or off the record could have shut down this rumor mill. Pete may say he doesn’t want to comment, but you can bet while he has everybody looking at him, he will. This is so simple, I can’t believe I even have to write it down. I feel so dirty right now.

For the record, we stand by our three conjectures, as his post doesn’t deny any of them. In order of likelihood:

1) A content sharing agreement with Aol’s Seed initiative.

2) The contract with FM is up exactly 60 days from Wednesday, and Mashable is considering switching to Platform-A.

3) It was floated at some meeting somewhere the prospect of Mashable being acquired. We’d put the deal at between $15-25 million, not the $45 million that has been suggested to us by anonymous tipsters.

Don’t be fooled, kids. I’m not.

Pete Cashmore Almost Denies an Aol Buyout is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Google Phone Nexus One – A Pawn In The Mobile Chess Game

John Furrier — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:02:43 +0000

Google is introducing the Google gPhone or as the official names goes – The Google Nexus One. Engadget has the definitive review while others are chiming in here, here, and here.

Google is playing the open card by forcing fast innovation in a developer focused way – similar to what made Microsoft successful in the 80s and 90s – creating a future benefit incentive or rising tide floats all boats. Apple in dark contrast is taking a completely different approach stay controlled and lead with economic incentives – money – their tide has risen.

And This Means What?

Google Nexus and Android goes beyond a me-too device. Google having its’ own phone is strategic. It’s just one piece of the user environment (aka the edge software) that Google needs to own to have a fully functional Android operating system. It also allows them to better negotiate with handset makers and carriers as they say it gives Google BATNA (Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement).

By making Android open source Google sends a message to the army of software developers that the Google platform is worthy to develop ontop of. Also, Google garners the support from a growing and rabid community of developers while deflect any policy and antitrust discussions. Bottom line: the best move Google can play as a new player facing a dominant competitor – Apple. Will Apple blink? Don’t think so.

From a platform perspective Android (now Google Nexus One) as an open source development project increases the range of devices that the software can be ported to. Google Nexus One is a pawn in the Android operating system mission on both desktop, mobile, and soon to be set-top.

Initial Reactions

Google seeded the phone with so called influencers – this is called the “puppy dog close” – give a puppy to a kid and they fall in love with it – give a blogger early access and they write great things about it. Smooth move of the month for Google – again the opposite of what Apple does.

Most people who have had units are very much very positive on the new Google phone.

[Editor’s Note: I have a complaint into the Google PR department lodging my official complaint on not getting one. Update: Google was very kind to say that I have a Nexus One gPhone eval unit waiting for me so I drove down the freeway 2 exits and picked it up at the Googleplex - THANKS Google-mrh]

Engadget Review

Here are some highlights from the Engadget review of the Google Nexus One smartphone.

Never mind the Nexus One itself for a moment — there’s a bigger picture here, and it might spell a fundamental change for the direction of Android as a platform. In a word, Google is plunging head-first into the dangerous game Microsoft has adamantly sought to avoid all these years on WinMo: competing head-to-head with its valued (well, supposedly valued) partners. Whether Android risks losing support over manufacturers and carriers being treated like pieces of meat remains to be seen, but realistically, Motorola (which has very publicly gone all-in with Mountain View over the past year) and others are likely to grin and bear it as long as the platform pays the bills — no matter how awkward competing with the company that writes your kernel and huge swaths of your shell might be.

It’s not in any way the Earth-shattering, paradigm-skewing device the media and community cheerleaders have built it up to be. It’s a good Android phone, but not the last word — in fact, if we had to choose between this phone or the Droid right now, we would lean towards the latter.

The device, a Snapdragon-powered, HTC-built phone looks — on paper, at least — like the ultimate Android handset, combining a newly tweaked and tightened user interface with killer industrial design. A sleek, streamlined phone that can easily go toe-to-toe with the iPhone 3GSs, Pres, and Droids of the world, powered by the latest version of Android (2.1 “Flan,” if you’re counting), and hand-retooled by Google.

The Nexus One is nothing if not handsome. From its ultra-thin body to sleek, curved edges, the phone is absolutely lustworthy.

It’s clear that Google and HTC made strides to bring an Android handset into the same realm of base desirability that Apple’s halo device occupies. For the most part, they’ve succeeded. The phone shape finds itself somewhere between the iPhone and Palm Pre — taking the Pre’s curved, stone-like shape and stretching it into something resembling a more standard touchscreen device

The shape and size of the phone is absolutely fantastic; even though the surface of the device houses a 3.7-inch display, the handset generally feels trimmer and more svelte than an iPhone, Hero, and certainly the Droid.

HTC has managed to get the thickness of the phone down to just 11.5mm, and it measures just 59.8mm and 119mm across and up and down — kind of a feat when you consider the guts of this thing. In the hand it’s a bit lighter than you expect — though it’s not straight-up light — and the curved edges and slightly tapered top and bottom make for a truly comfortable phone to hold.

Unlike the Droid, the Nexus One has a trackball just below those buttons that should feel very familiar to Hero users — the placement feels a bit awkward here, and there’s literally nothing in the OS that requires it.

The 3.7-inch display should be stunning — and is for the most part — but we did have some issues with it.

In terms of touch sensitivity, the display is as good or better than any Android phone we’ve used.The Nexus One is a nightmare to see with any kind of bright light around, and snapping photos with it on a sunny day was like taking shots with your eyes closed.

One place where the Nexus One seems to be improving things is in the camera department. Not only has Google bumped up the speed of the camera app , but the 5 megapixel lens and flash took sharp, detailed images with none of the HTC-related issues we’ve seen on other models.

Well the real story is that Android 2.1 is in no way dramatically different than the iteration of the OS which is currently running on the Motorola Droid (2.0.1). In fact, there is so little that’s different in the software here, we were actually surprised.

By all appearances, the company will have a new phone portal where buyers can pick between an unsubsidized, unlocked Nexus One for $529.99, or sign up for a two-year agreement with T-Mobile and purchase the phone for $179.99.

Update: here are two credible review from Walt Mossberg and Gizmodo
Walt Mossberg of AllThingsD Review
Gizmodo Review

Here is a video of the announcement at Google

Google Phone Nexus One – A Pawn In The Mobile Chess Game is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Two Months On With the MiFi…

Mike Coop — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:30:11 +0000

I’d committed to keep y’all up to date on my ongoing experience with my MiFi. After a couple of months of use, I’m still enamored.

Verizon’s network delivers as promised, with only a few occasions where I’ve had little or no signal; ironically, in each of those situations I’ve been able to fail back to my previous connectivity method of Bluetooth tethering to my 2G T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve, so I have yet to encounter a situation where I’m totally off the air, although I realize that it’s just a matter of time until I do.

The power characteristics of the device are interesting (he says euphemistically). From a full charge, I’ve been pretty consistently getting four hours or so of use when on EVDO Rev. A. At least, I think I have—the mechanisms to determine power remaining pretty much suck. The on-screen display on the web-based management screen offers a battery icon with four levels, meaning that when you’re at two levels remaining, you’re probably in the neighborhood of 50%. Maybe—I’ve seen the device come off of full charge and show me only three levels, so it’s an inexact science, as is the device status option, giving you a number from zero to four in terms of charge remaining.

That said, I can’t fault Novatel for not offering a more concrete, hours-and-minutes-remaining option. EVDO Rev. A connectivity is not just fast, but is also the most power- efficient; when the MiFi drops back into 1xRTT mode, the battery drains faster—and the device superheats, so much so that it becomes uncomfortable to carry in a shirt pocket. Since I’ve ended up in many situations where I’ve been bouncing back and forth between Rev. A and 1x, the device would spend too many cycles trying to figure out an hours-and-minutes-remaining calculation, so I understand the reason for just having a simple battery icon.

Speaking of heat, the heat the device puts off is a minor nit. Yes, it runs hot, but it’s only an issue if the unit is pressing against your skin; even in a pants pocket, it’s not a big deal.

A bigger nit is the input juice required to actually charge the device. I carry a USB charging block, which is a compact wall-wart with fold-out plug blades and two USB ports. Sadly, the block won’t charge the MiFi, even when using the USB charging cable included with the MiFi. Numerous bloggers have written about this issue, so I won’t go into it here. Just know that you really only have two options to charge your MiFi—plug it into the wall using the included AC adapter, or plug it into your wall-powered computer using the included USB-to-microUSB cable. Note that I say “wall-powered computer”. I can’t speak to the battery-based charging capabilities of non-Macs, but I can speak to my own experience.

Here’s an example. Last month, I needed to participate in a two hour GoToMeeting while driving from Falls Church, VA to Linthicum, MD. (Don’t try this at home…I’m a professional.) I plugged a half-charged (according to the battery icon, at least) MiFi into my fully charged MacBook using the MiFi’s USB-to-microUSB cable, and hit the road. The only application running on my Mac at the time was GoToMeeting; all radios were off, since I was USB-tethered to the MiFi. While I’m fortunate that the drive ended up taking well less than two hours, by the time I ended the call at the 120^th minute, I’d just about run out of battery on both the MiFi and my MacBook.

This MacBook celebrates its second birthday next week; while the battery is nowhere near factory fresh, I typically get about four hours of use when in travel mode (radios off, a couple of applications running in lightweight form). Thus, I was very surprised to find that not only did my Mac bite the dust much faster than I would’ve expected, but the MiFi being plugged in provided no charging benefit whatsoever—and in fact may’ve been detrimental to the Mac’s battery charge. I haven’t performed any scientific testing on this topic, but you should consider it in your own use—be aware that if you’re not wall-powered, you may derive no charging benefit from being physically tethered.

Finally, I haven’t bumped up against the five gigabyte per month data transfer cap yet. My MiFi use tends to be very bursty—if I’m on the road in a hotel that expects me to pay for Wi-Fi, the MiFi becomes my lifeline. But, if I’m in a location where I have ready access to a network, the MiFi remains off (yet fully charged). That said, it’s invaluable at certain times. Earlier today, about five minutes before my flight pushed off the gate, I needed to do something on the Internet that was going to be a pain from my BlackBerry.

I turned on the MiFi for the first time in more than two weeks; as it roared to life, I popped my Mac open (again giving thanks for the fact that the Mac’s OS/hardware pairing enables me to resume from sleep in moments, rather than the minutes typical on “other” computing platforms), hopped on the ‘net, took care of business, and was back offline in about three minutes. The absolute immediacy of being able to do so via Wi-Fi made the process seamless—no USB stick to plug in, no connection manager software to launch to connect. Just a button press on the MiFi, the opening of my Mac’s lid, and VOOM.

While I eagerly await the forthcoming 3G/4G MiFi Novatel’s developing for the Sprint network, I’ve found the investment in my Verizon MiFi to be absolutely worth it—my best purchase of 2009.

Two Months On With the MiFi… is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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