CloudAve

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):

Especially 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.

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 affect

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

This response from Amazon was prompted by a post earlier by Searchcloudcomputing.com which claimed that Eli Lilly has backed out of AWS because they couldn't get Amazon to indemnify them against network outages, security breaches and other forms of risk inherent in the cloud to Amazon Web Services.

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.

As cloud computing gains considerable traction in both government and enterprise sectors, it is necessary for these organizations to employ professionals who can guide them towards secure cloud computing. There is a clear need for training and certification of professionals to assure that cloud computing

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.

In my opinion, there is a quite a bit of hype going on regarding the so called bungling by Google. Let me try to list out

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).

Bitnami studio is well suited for organizations that are keen to push their applications (whether popular

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%.

The other key findings include

• By 2012, nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; by 2014, about 65% of new products from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services
• SaaS-derived revenue will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market in 2014.
• Traditional packaged software and perpetual license revenue are in decline and IDC predicts that a software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7 billion decline in worldwide license