Monthly Archives: March 2010

March 31, 2010 Posted in Analysis Leave a comment

RIPing The Traditional Web: Not So Fast

By Krishnan Subramanian

Recently, Rob Mills wrote a post on Think Vitamin proclaiming death to traditional web. He was pointing out the widespread use of mobile devices and the next wave of iPad like devices and argued that this will make traditional web secondary to mobile sites and apps.

The web is dead. OK, it isn’t but it might be dying a slow painful death when it comes to how users access online tools and the platforms they use to carry out certain tasks.

He, then, argues why he thinks mobile sites will take over the traditional web

There are huge advantages to iPhone, iPod Touch’s and the mobile web but it does mean that designers and developers now have new parameters in which to be creative, a world where attention to detail prevails, or at least it should. Will it be that the traditional web will be secondary to mobile/iPhone/iPad sites?

I think he is plain wrong. Let me explain why he is wrong and the web as we know is not going out anywhere.

First, and foremost, he has completely misunderstood the very nature of web itself. For some odd reasons, he thinks various websites and applications that are part of the web itself as the web. For me, it is a very simplistic view. Rather, I see web as a platform on top of which we build these many different websites and applications. A simple design problem doesn’t mean a death to the very platform itself.
Unlike many other platforms, web is a continuously evolving platform. It started as a collection of documents and evolved into a platform on top of which applications can be built. Then, we added a social layer on top of the platform to do wonderful things. Next, it is evolving into a web of data, making the platform much more robust. The next evolution is going to help us develop more intelligent applications. The web as a platform will continuously evolve offering us newer ways to build applications on top of it. Such evolving platforms rarely die a fast death. Sorry my friend, the design issue you are quoting will not kill the web.
Plus, the author seems to be completely ignoring what will happen when HTML5 takes further foothold in the web. We cannot dismiss HTML5 as inconsequential. Who would have thought till few months back that Flash could face a potential danger of losing the dominance in the video marketplace. If anyone had talked about death to flash sometime last year, we would have strongly recommended a visit to his/her Psychiatrist. Apple’s refusal to allow flash on iPad has made talk about potential death to flash plausible. We should not underestimate what HTML5 can do to web in the coming years.

I think I have offered solid arguments against the post on Think Vitamin. I would love to hear from the readers of Cloud Ave about what they think about the issue. Feel free to jump in.

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March 30, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Nice Marketing Blackbox Republic – But Maybe I Was Right to be Skeptical

By Ben Kepes

Nearly a year ago the blogosphere went wild about Blackbox Republic, a social media site that “focused on reinventing the online relationship market” or whatever that means. It’s a social network for “sex positive” individuals or people who are “open enough about sexuality that it’s not an issue” – yeah

March 30, 2010 Posted in General Leave a comment

An Interesting Agenda Shapes Up At Gluecon

By Krishnan Subramanian

Gluecon, a great conference organized by Eric Norlin at Denver each year, is shaping up very well this year with more emphasis on the technical side. I attended the event last year and I posted my thoughts about the event here and here. Towards the end of the event last year, I casually mentioned to Eric that there should be more technical discussions in the event. It appears more people have shown interest in having a more technical content in the conference and the net result is this impressive agenda with a great array of speakers.

Starting the day one with a keynote by the UC Berkeley Professor and creator of CAP Theorem, Prof. Eric Brewer, and another one by the creator of Ingres, Mike Stonebraker, there are wide array of topics being discussed including one focussed on Web and cloud architectures, another focussed on various cloud platforms and a track on NoSQL. The day ends with two big bang talks by the security gurus, Michael Barrett and Chris Hoff.

The second day is also shaping up equally well. It starts with a keynote by Doug Crockford, creator of JSON, and a discussion about Twitter API between Ryan Sarver and Chris Shipley. The day is filled with interesting sessions on various topics including Cloud Models, Protocols and Open Standards, APIs, Cloud Storage, etc..

Just looking at the agenda makes the geek in me pumped up about the event. I honestly enjoyed the event last year and I am hoping I will be able to attend it this year too. If you are impressed by the agenda Eric has put up and want to attend, please note that the early bird pricing ends this friday. So go ahead and register immediately to avail this pricing. Since Cloud Ave is a media partner to the event, Eric has given a discount code for Cloud Ave readers. If you use “cloudave1″ (without the quotes), you will get 10% off the early bird price and your ticket price drops to $472.50. It is a great price for the content in this year’s agenda.

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March 30, 2010 Posted in Just for fun 1 Comment

Xero Now Hosted by MYOB

By Ben Kepes

It’s not Friday, but it’s time for a Friday funny…

A couple of years ago, Xero got hold of the URL relating to MYOB’s new (at that time) SaaS product Business Basics Online. I posted about it at the time saying:

But in the craziest turn of the story, check out this link –www.businessbasicsonline.co.nz. Yes indeed, the URL links straight to Xero.

Someone at MYOB corporate HQ is going to be really, really uptight about this one.

So far Xero 1, MYOB 0, and if this start is anything to go by, it could just prove the SaaS debacle of the year.

I think the score has just been leveled – have a look at the screenshot below froma Xero listing on a certain accounting software’s site:

Take a close look at the URL:

I’m umpire and I’ve just called a tie break…. (oh and as it says in my disclosure statement – I’ve worked for ‘em both)

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March 30, 2010 Posted in General Leave a comment

Under The Radar – Brokering The Clouds

By Krishnan Subramanian

Image by thekenyeung via Flickr

Under The Radar, a series of conferences organized by Dealmaker Media, is a platform for startups to launch themselves in front of some of the top minds in industry is organizing their cloud event on April 16th, 2010 with a focus on Commercializing the Cloud, highlighting the fact that Cloud Computing has moved from the hype phase to increasing enterprise adoption. Cloud Ave is a media partner for the event and Zoli has already written about it. We even have a special deal for Cloud Ave readers and they can get $100 off the ticket price by using this link. (Previous Cloud Ave coverage of Under The Radar event can be found here).

In a series of posts, I am going to talk about some of the companies participating in the event. I am hoping that this will serve as a warm-up for the event happening in two weeks. You can see the full schedule of the event here. What I am trying to do in this series is to pick some of the participating companies, categorize them based on what I feel is their role in the cloud marketplace and give a brief introduction about their product(s).

In the first part of this series, I am going to talk about Cloud Brokers. Cloud Brokers are services acting as an intermediary between the end user and cloud providers. They add more value to end users beyond what is offered by the cloud vendors and, also, play a role in brokering interoperability between different clouds. In 2009, Gartner highlighted the role of Cloud Brokers in their special report. From the list of companies presenting in the event, I have selected four companies to be categorized as Cloud Brokers. Some of them may not exactly fit the description of Cloud Service Brokers but I have them categorized under this term to keep the number of categories (and, hence, the number of posts) small. Feel free to pick me apart if you don’t like my characterization.

CloudSwitch: CloudSwitch came under my radar when they won the launchpad event at the recently concluded CloudConnect Event. CloudSwitch offers an easy point and click way to move the multi-tiered applications at the enterprise datacenters to various clouds. Using what they call as Cloud Isolation Technology™, they move the applications and data to public cloud with a few clicks while keeping the control in the hands of the enterprise. This helps the enterprises to maintain a better leverage on the security. CloudSwitch also helps enterprises extend the policies of their datacenter and keep the applications running on the cloud to be tightly integrated with their existing datacenter tools. The ease with which the applications and data can be moved between the datacenter and different cloud providers helps enterprises prevent the potential vendor lock-in problems. They have a free version called CloudSwitch Explorer and an enterprise version called CloudSwitch Enterprise.
Makara: Makara came under my radar when they spoke at the San Francisco Cloud Computing Club (SFCC) meeting recently. Their platform could very well turn out to be the developers dream. Their platform helps developers deploy, manage, scale, monitor their applications on the cloud seamlessly without even knowing about what it means. Unlike some of the application management platforms that requires an installation of an agent at the application layer, Makara leverages the virtualization layer and makes it easy for developers without any need for agents. Similarly, there is no need for setting up management servers/appliances too. Makara platform makes it super easy to get the applications to the cloud without any code changes in minutes. Using the words of their CTO Tobias Kunze Briseno, the developers could instantly turn on the applications in the cloud.
Layerboom: Layerboom, based in the beautiful city of Vancouver, Canada, could turn out to be the hosting companies’ dream come true. As we move further into the cloud, questions are raised about the fate of hosting companies. I have been talking about an open federated cloud ecosystem and arguing that some of the existing hosting companies can transform themselves into cloud providers by tapping into solutions like the one offered by VMOps. Layerboom is trying to solve this same problem by offering a platform where hosting companies could easily create and manage virtual cloud servers easily. Their BoomBox appliance can help any company transform their existing infrastructure into a cloud computing platform. Soon, they are going to offer Layerboom Live Image, which is a hosted dashboard to manage the cloud servers.
Reductive Labs: Reductive Labs (now called as Puppet Labs) has been under my radar for a long time, ever since I was doing system admin stuff and evangelizing open source. I have used cfengine briefly for my professional needs. Since then, I am keeping tabs on various developments in that field, from cfengine to puppet to chef. I know very well how Puppet dramatically makes it easy to completely automate an entire datacenter with its configuration management platform and I am well aware of how deeply it has penetrated the enterprise market. Like Chef (and its parent company Opscode), Puppet is well positioned to play a major role in the cloud infrastructure space. I had a brief chat with their CEO, Luke Kanies, couple of weeks back at a bar in SFO after the OSBC event but he didn’t give any hints about their Cloud plans. I, myself, is keen to see what they are going to offer during the event.

We have an interesting mix of companies in the cloud brokerage space presenting in the event. In my next post, I will talk about some companies presenting in the UTR event and who are in the Cloud Monitoring space. In the mean time, if you have any take on the above companies or if you want to add some insight about their product/service, feel free to jump in and add your comments. However, if you have absolutely no idea about them and want to learn more about them, take advantage of the $100 discount offered to Cloud Ave readers and register for the event.

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March 29, 2010 Posted in Design 3 Comments

Crowdsourcing for the Stars

By Ben Kepes

I posted late last year about how Zendesk (more on them here) had crowdsourced the translation of their application into different languages. At the time CEO Mikkel Svane commented that;

Within just a few weeks of releasing the Zendesk internationalization tool we had support for more than 25 languages, and hundreds of customers had already enabled the new languages on their support portals. We see this as a trend that clearly shows companies are amenable to living with minor inaccuracies in favor of agility and speed

Well the other day I was having a noodle around inside my box.net account and I discovered that it’s not only bootstrapping startups who find crowdsourcing attractive. Yes, down the bottom of my account page in box was this text:

As I mentioned in my post about Zendesk – their translation cost them the paltry sum of a Zendesk T shirt per translator. Box too have some cool shirts – I wonder if their rate for translation services is the same as Zendesk’s. Care to comment Aaron?

On another, but somewhat related – note, I have a couple of gift cards for a one year, 5GB box.net accoutn that are left over from a conference schwag bag – first two people to either leave a comment here or otherwise contact me get the gift card. Nice.

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March 29, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Xero Personal – Is That It?

By Ben Kepes

Six months ago Xero (see disclosure statement) announced that they’d be building a personal finance application to go with their business one. I was pleased at the time, in part because I believe the personal/business divide is an artificial one (see post here). This morning Xero flicked the switch on

Tagged Business, Credit card, Finance, mint, Personal finance, Pocketsmith, Software as a Service, Xero |

March 27, 2010 Posted in General 1 Comment

Cloud Computing – Scrap the Term?

By Ben Kepes

OK – So this is going to be contentious… ah well, I’ve never shied away from that. I wonder if it isn’t in fact time to ease off on the whole “Cloud Computing” term. While this might sound a little heretical, bear with me here…

I’ve been running a bunch of CloudCamps around the place – and a common issue I’ve come up against is being part of sessions where half the crowd are talking high stack level stuff, while the other half is talking infrastructure. It’s easy to see how this occurs – the term “Cloud Computing” covers a huge variety of things – from customer applications, down to the millions of Amazon servers spinning away – along with everything in-between. It’s not surprising there’s sometimes a disconnect between people involved in the cloud.

In the early days of the cloud (hey – a whole few years ago) we needed a term we could hang our hats on – something that was all encompassing and, to a certain extent, something that let us find some commonality in the fight for legitimacy against the legacy vendors and their well articulated, and well funded FUD.

But we’re in a different world now – everyone does cloud, from the most traditional vendor to the smallest startup. Cloud is, to a greater or lesser extent, the default and because of that the term becomes problematic.

This sounds a little funny coming from someone who edits on of the preeminent Cloud blogs, runs Cloud events and attends pretty much every cloud focused event – while I think the term cloud still has legs, I believe its days are numbered. When we’re all doing cloud, and there’s simply nothing else, the term will fade into our collective memories. As Ric Telford from IBM said in his Cloud Connect keynote in San Jose:

in five years time, cloud will be the new normal

Admittedly that was pretty much the only thing that Ric said that wasn’t tainted with what was a recurrent problem at Cloud Connect, CloudWash. It seemed that every traditional vendor was calling their product cloud this or cloud that, whether or not there was anything ever remotely cloud-like about it. As I remarked during one of the ~~vendor pitches~~ sessions:

and:

And don’t believe for a moment it was only IBM that was talking this way – a number of other vendors were taking a similar line: Oracle, HP and Dell to name just a few.

Of course dropping the cloud moniker won’t result in marketing departments all across the globe jumping on the latest theme du jour, but perhaps it’ll lessen the hype. After all the cloud is really to good to be wasted…

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March 26, 2010 Posted in Just for fun Leave a comment

T Shirt Friday #36 – Appirio #2

By Ben Kepes

Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

Second in the series of Appirio t shirts is this one, resplendent in the (quite attractive actually) Appirio logo on the back and with a *humorous* quote on the front – well maybe humorous to the frat boys, to those of us past 18 it’s just a little low brow (but maybe that’s just me being a snob).

Hot

Hmmm – it was free (to be honest I gave it away at a CloudCamp)

Not

Country of origin “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”
Black – it sucs as a t shirt color IMHO
The childish quote on the front

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March 25, 2010 Posted in Design 1 Comment

Without Standards, the World Falls Down

By Ben Kepes

This was meant to be a happy post. Unfortunately OggSync gets to bear the brunt of my frustrations over standards and portability. But first some background:

I run a pretty busy schedule – to give you an idea of what that means in real terms I have 12 separate calendars – my manufacturing business alone has half a dozen calendars I need to keep an eye on (marketing, production, board stuff and operations). Add in my personal calendar and that of my wife, the calendar feeds from both myself and my wife generated by my favorite little web app of all time, TripIt, school term dates and the like and you see that my calendar feed gets kind of busy.

Add to this the fact that I’m travelling more and more (half a dozen international trips before May) and have to work mobile and you have a recipe for disaster. Until now I’ve made do with the single calendar sync that Google provides for in its Google cal to win mobile sync. That’s fine… until I need to check on the time for a flight that is trapped within TripIt.

Roll up my lifesaver, OggSync. OggSync provides a lovely little synchronization service that allows users of the pro version to sync multiple calendars with multiple clients, both desktop and mobile. It’s a full, two-way synchronization and backup application that also performs these tasks on contact data.

Or so I thought….

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Sydney, looking at eight or so Google calendars that have become almost completely useless. You see it happened like this…

I installed OggSync and set it up and was stoked to see all the events from my different calendars appear on my Windows Mobile device. So far so good… Yesterday however I flew to Sydney which is in a different timezone from home. I turned my device on at the airport and saw that Windows Mobile, as it’s designed to do, picked up the new timezone from the mobile carrier I was roaming on.

OggSync sprang into life and synchronized all my events… but… Unfortunately OggSync doesn’t know that Windows Mobile changed my timezones – so every single event in every single calendar I synch now appears two hours early – great if you’re anally retentive, terrible if you’re busy.

OggSync were really supportive, I need to point out this isn’t a failing of theirs per se, they told me it was a new issue with the latest version of WinMob and that they’d help me restore from backup once I got back to my home timezone – but this isn’t really the issue. Fundamentally this is an example of why using a third party to integrate different applications is a dangerous and fraught thing. Roll on open standards and open data…

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Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.