The BP Gulf Oil spill has unleashed somewhere on the order 150 to 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Thankfully, much of this oil has been eaten by bacteria, reducing its damage. But much of it is hitting the Gulf coastlines, and scientists know that a disaster of that magnitude will have years of impact.
As if that wasn't enough, a new oil spill has occurred in Michigan. More than 800,000 gallons of oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River. The spill resulted from a ruptured pipe, and threatens Lake Michigan. The damage is already happening, as the New York Times reported:
On the river on Wednesday, Dan Backus arrived at his favorite fishing spot and found black water and oil-soaked plants. Looking out at the damage from the spill, he mourned the loss of fish and vegetation.
“It’s all destroyed,” said Mr. Backus,
We received so much positive feedback from our This Week in Venture Capital show walking through valuation calculations & term sheets that we decided to do a Q&A show this week to address topics that entrepreneurs want to learn about. We will continue to do more of this.
Click above to watch the show, and if you want a quick read – here’s a summary (oh, and if you’re wondering – Jon Stewart copied me – not the other way around):
I have been covering the European cloud computing market a little bit here at Cloud Ave. One of the reasons for the failure of public cloud providers in that market is the strict privacy laws that
requires
the cloud providers to keep the data within the borders. Even though AWS has support for EU region, there are no widespread adoption of AWS because different countries within the European Union have different regulations with respect to their data security and privacy.Almost all of the big cloud providers are facing difficulty in the European market due to the diverse regulatory requirements by different countries. Such requirements adversely affectEspecially in Europe, there are strict privacy laws which will ensure the presence of local cloud players or global players with infrastructure within the boundaries of Europe. Even within Europe, different countries have different requirements in terms of compliance and other regulations.
This morning I’ve been testing TweetDeck’s new super-fast version, based on the new Twitter User Streams API. TweetDeck provides fair warning:
This is a VERY experimental version of TweetDeck
I saw a few small glitches, but nothing major. Yet I am in trouble, and it’s not because of the product. It’s me. My brain…
Amazon has publicly debunked the story about Eli Lilly moving out of Amazon Web Services. In a
Twitter message
posted by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Amazon categorically state that Eli Lilly is still their customer.For those following this anonymous source story this morning: Eli Lilly is still very much a customer and has not dropped their use of AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) poster child Eli Lilly has walked away from the cloud computing service after failing to come to terms over legal indemnification issues.
Sources close to Eli Lilly say the pharmaceutical giant was at its wits end trying
The Technical Communicator community has many influential bloggers.
Yet for an industry known for its communication skills, we were
surprised by the lack of social media experience even among the elite.
Astonishing, given the nature of the industry. I suspect that will
change as Technical Communicators become more comfortable with today’s communication tools.
In compiling our ranking of the most influential Technical Communicator bloggers, we chose a variety of metrics to measure influence. Our Most Influential Blogger (MIB) formula consists of a weighted average across a range of metrics including Alexa, Klout Influence, Google Page Rank, Technorati Authority, and Twitter Followers.
The
Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) was formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing. Yesterday, at the Black Hat USA 2010 Conference, CSA announced industry's first certification program on secure cloud computing. CSA has been busy identifying top threats in cloud computing and developing best practices in the use of cloud computing. With this certification program, it will now certify that professionals with a responsibility related to cloud computing have a demonstrated awareness of the security threats and best practices for securing the cloud.
The noise surrounding Google App's City of LA deployment doesn't appear to be dying down anytime soon. Yesterday,
another article
highlighting Google's failure came up on the basis of a leaked email from the City of Los Angeles. The April 13 letter, addressed to L.A.'s information technology and government affairs committee from City Administrative Officer Miguel A. Santana, notes that during a pilot program testing the Google Apps system, which was deployed by Google implementation channel partner CSC, users voiced frustration over performance issues. The latter also notes that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) expressed concerned about the systems' level of security. The letter sheds an early light on some of the key reasons Google has missed the deadline to complete the project.
This is the Week of Leaks: first and foremost Wikileaks, and now the iPhone Leak. No, I’m not talking about the disappearing signal (aren’t we bored of the iPhone antenna stories yet?), this is leaking white light as reported by TheStreet.com:
Apparently, the back light from the iPhone display screen is leaking out around the edges of the glass and seeping through the back of the white phone, according to a person familiar with the manufacturing process.
So it appears Apple can’t make a white iPhone – for now...
When I wrote about Openstack last week, I talked about the disruptive potential of an Openstack.org and how it can make the market by empowering the smaller players.Many people who dismiss Openstack.org as a non-starter fail to understand that it is just a start. Openstack.org doesn't claim it has the miracle pill for all the ills in the cloud. It is a new initiative and it is just starting off. In fact, the compute code is not even ready. In my opinion, it is a start and any outright dismissal or claims of victory is not only premature but also amateurish. The only thing it offers is a potential to disrupt the cloud marketplace in the future. There are many factors in play before we can even see the results of this move. If they execute it right, it can stir up the marketplace. It may not destroy the
Last week when Twitter announced that they are building a datacenter I
wrote a post
wondering why companies move out of the cloud as they grow big. Even though I don't have many examples of startups building their own datacenters after growing big, many folks in the startup world told me that they wouldn't mind moving to their own DC if the situation demanded it. This justification can come from any company moving from the cloud to their own datacenter too. If every successful consumer focussed company is going to demand full control over network and system configuration and they want to be the person defining the SLAs, it is a big trouble for the public clouds. When consumer focussed companies are so obsessed with control and SLAs, there is no way enterprises are going to embrace public clouds anytime soon. Either we need a change in mindset of
Bitrock
, the company that provides tools and services to package, deploy and update software, has announced the release of
Bitnami Studio
, a self service GUI based platform to package and deploy applications to the clouds. It offers choice from the underlying operating systems to middleware/runtime to applications to the users so that they can easily assemble the stack they want and get it running on the cloud within minutes. I have already covered
rPath
several times in this blog and Bitrock claim that they offer more choice to the IT users than their competitors. Though I never got a chance to do a feature by feature comparison, I did notice that Bitnami studio offers more OS choices than rPath )rPath supports RHEL, SUSE, CentOS and Windows coming in Q3 of 2010).
The way we work has changed dramatically over the past few years. I’m relatively young…turning 27 in a few weeks – yet even I can recall working for previous employers where there was just no way of getting things done without being present in the same location as my team (probably because for my first serious job I was occasionally asked to get coffee, can’t do that virtually…). Today I think it’s safe to say that a majority of the tasks that an individual needs to complete can be done just as effectively sitting on a beach in Maui as they can sitting in a cubicle. Furthermore, the traditional work hours of 9-5 are becoming more and more irrelevant. One of the things that frustrated me the most when going into an office during a particular time was that just because someone told me that I needed to work from
Social Proof in Action …
Yesterday I wrote about the benefits of using social proof and authority in raising venture capital . If you didn’t read that yet it might be worth having a quick skim as a primer.
Social proof is defined as “looking for others to guide our decisions” and is also one of the most important techniques in acquiring customers in your company. Many of you have read or at least know the primary thesis of “Crossing the Chasm” the seminal book on marketing your products to mainstream consumers by Geoffrey Moore. It influenced a generation of tech marketers.
The book popularized the technology adoption lifecycle curve that originally came out of Iowa State University shown below. We all intuitively know this curve now but we don’t all market effectively to it. Chris Dixon alluded heavily to it in his brilliant post on “ Techies
Today morning I wrote
a post
that pointed to a Gartner report that said SaaS revenues from enterprise application market has increased 14.1 percent in 2010 compared to 2009. Now the market research firm IDC has come out with
a study
that forecasts the market to reach $40.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 25.3%.