Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone ... denied widespread rumors that its acquisition by Google Inc. is imminent. The rumors erupted late Thursday when tech blog site TechCrunch, citing two anonymous sources, reported that the companies were engaged in "late stage negotiations."...It can't be encouraging that Google decided to stop actively developing Jaiku, a Twitter competitor Google acquired in 2007. Instead, Google has decided ... to release the Jaiku engine as an open-source project under the Apache license ... Google also recently put mobile social-networking service Dodgeball out to pasture.Why would Google want to buy Twitter? They have yet to properly monetize Youtube ... Sure, Google has lots and lots of money to spend. But there isn't much to Twitter that Google couldn't recreate itself with its vast internal resources. So why spend a billion dollars on something so (relatively) simple?For one, Twitter is already running at full speed. Google can't recreate the buzz and the excitement in the rapidly growing Twitter community ... While I get a kick out of seeing what my friends are doing and like to update them with neat things that I observe, the real value for me in Twitter is the real-time search and trending ... If I am looking for information about a hot technology topic, Twitter is the best place to find up-to-the-second information.ButFor all those Twitterers madly typing 140 characters and caught up in the grand idea of Twoogle, we return you to your regularly scheduled tweeting ... In fact, Twitter and Google (GOOG) have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service....[But] what if, for example, Microsoft (MSFT) offered some huge cash payday for Twitter? In that case, I am certain Google would jump into the faceoff, backing up a giant Brinks trunk to the door of Twitter’s San Francisco offices.FurtherMicrosoft should resist the temptation to become a "me-too" bidder to try to buy the company out from Google. Twitter might offer Microsoft some badly needed "cool," but ... it makes no sense at all. True, Microsoft is generally seen as old and stodgy, but buying Twitter won't change that.As for helping Microsoft catch up to Google in search, Microsoft shouldn't even bother. It's not going to happen, and buying Twitter for hundreds of billions won't help. Microsoft should play to its strengths, notably bringing Office online, and continuing to build out its Live services. Buying Twitter would only be a distraction --- and a waste of cash.A Better Idea :A few weeks back, Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay wrote a provocative research piece asserting that Internet companies have a long and terrible track record of destroying shareholder cash by acquiring pre-business model start-ups ... in a follow-up piece today triggered by the Google/Twitter speculation, Lindsay declares that Internet companies in general, and Google in particular, should ... instead give back the cash to shareholders in a once-a-year dividend....Indeed, Lindsay comes close to calling the entire Web 2.0 company-creation mechanism something of a Ponzi scheme. (Though he doesn’t actually use the term.) ... Lindsay, in short, has issue a kind of manifesto calling for a new focus in the Internet industry on responsible stewardship of their investors’ money. What it all means..At present, Twitter is having a media honeymoon. Not a weekend passes when The New York Times doesn’t devote a considerable part of its expensive newsprint to Twitter. Jon Stewart jokes about it. Even Playboy models have Twitter accounts! In today’s dismal economic climate, thanks to its simplicity and its chameleon-like ability to be “many things to many people,” Twitter in many ways has come to represent the zeitgeist. No wonder some hip-hop moguls want to invest in the company.
Google Suggest is a Google Search feature that automatically completes a search query with suggested phrases as you type in the Google search text field. Suggestions are meant to be helpful--but they can sometimes be funny, bizarre, or downright creepy. We initially got lassoed into playing around with this Google feature when we noticed that select search queries were generating inexplicably odd auto-complete suggestions. The phrase “What would Jesus..." generated the suggestion "What would Jesus do for a Klondike bar?" First, though, a bit of background. Google says that its software makes suggestions based on complex popularity algorithms that are designed to predict the queries you are most likely to want to submit. Suggestions appear in a drop-down menu; and next to the suggested search phrases are green numbers approximating how many search results each particular query would return. Google Suggest works with current versions of the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Chrome Web browsers. If you find the service annoying, you can turn it off by visiting your Google Preferences page. We spent way too much time playing with this feature. We were hoping Google Suggest might shed some light on important questions such as “The meaning to life is...” But what we found instead was "The meaning to life is Christopher Walken." Who knew? What follows are funny and sometimes insightful answers to random questions. For more fun with Google services, check out: -- The Strangest Sights in Google Earth -- Strangest Sights in Google Street View -- Google's Top 17 Easter Eggs, Gags, and Hoaxes And as the search results pictured above suggest, when you've had your fill of fun with Google, you can turn your attention to "fun with goats."
In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.
Microsoft can't be happy, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also lose operating-system market share. Indeed, over the same two-year period, Microsoft Windows has lost five percentage points in market share while Apple's Mac OS X has gained more than three percentage points and Linux has more than doubled its share. The browser, quite simply, makes the operating system much less relevant to the computing experience. This is why Apple and Google continue to invest heavily in their respective browser initiatives: the browser is the key to operating-system disruption.
For this same reason, however, both would do better to invest in Firefox, the "Linux of browsers." In some ways, the browser efforts of Apple and Google are much like the Unix efforts of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems: they threaten to splinter the browser counterattack on Microsoft rather than solidify it. Common investment in Firefox, however, would leave the industry better off, just as common investment in Linux has. Firefox, for its part, is thriving on its own. IE lacks the community flair that makes Firefox so appealing. Just imagine what it could do with the resources of Apple and Google behind it. Microsoft probably has had, and still has, nightmares about that scenario.
Despite the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 two weeks ago, Microsoft continues to lose browser market share to Mozilla's Firefox.
According to the latest data from Net Applications, the global market share for all versions of Internet Explorer slipped from 67.44% in February to 66.82% in March.
Firefox's global market share meanwhile rose from 21.77% to 22.05% during the same period.
Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Chrome browser and Apple's Safari browser also showed small gains, the former rising from 1.15% to 1.23% and the latter rising from 8.02% to 8.23% from February through March.
While relatively small shifts in market share may be attributable to data collection errors, Net Application's March statistics continue a longstanding downward trend for Internet Explorer, one that Microsoft presumably hopes to reverse with IE8.
IE8 has been doing fairly well, having risen from a market share of 1.26% on March 2 to 3.07% on March 31.
Those figures are based on Net Applications' hourly tracking numbers for IE8. The company's monthly numbers show IE at 1.17% at the end of February and 1.83% at the end of March.
Perhaps just as significant as Internet Explorer's continuing slide is the inability of Google's Chrome browser to make significant gains. With IE8 already more widely used than Chrome, which has been available for about six months, it's clear that Google will have to engage in more aggressive promotion if it wants to build a significant user base for its browser.
Chrome may become more appealing once its plug-in architecture matures -- there are a lot of potential users for whom the inability to use AdBlock Plus with Chrome is a deal breaker.
Given that Microsoft can expect significant gains for IE8 when Windows 7 finally ships, Google may have to put a link to Chrome on its home page and leave it there for quite a while to match Microsoft's distribution advantage.
Google's street-level pictures are giving the cash-strapped the chance of a virtual holiday. Martin Hickes reports.
Fifty years ago, many Yorkshire folk thought themselves lucky to have a two-week summer break in Scarborough.
But following the "loadsamoney" 80s spending spree, the dot.com boom and latterly the rise of the low-cost airlines, the average traveller has been able to enjoy slightly more exotic climes at cut-down prices.
But given the worst credit crunch in living memory, those looking for a cheaper alternative are turning to the "virtual holiday".
Google Earth and Google Maps have been well known for years, but now users can take a stroll down just about any street in the world thanks to the search engine's innovative Street View technology. Except of course in Milton Keynes, where residents recently formed a human chain to prevent one of Google's camera cars taking photographs of the town's streets.
Elsewhere, there has been less resistance, and rather than just hovering above a city, the technology allows viewers to "drop" down into the heart of, say, San Francisco, walking its streets at eye level.
Google has been adding more street level photos to the web over the past two years, thanks to the use of special camera cars which have been trundling around major landmarks discreetly snapping the environs.
Many cities in Yorkshire were this month added to the list of potential virtual destinations, but there's also more exotic locations, such as St Tropez, Paris, the route of the Tour de France, and even the Vatican.
Yorkshire ex-pat Adrian Hill, now a New Zealand national, is one of the many looking forward to a virtual holiday back to his home town in 2009.
"I love Yorkshire and miss it on a daily basis," says Adrian, an electronics engineer, who emigrated in 2001. "The pound may be low at the moment but it still costs an awful lot of money – and time – to fly back to Britain and to my beloved Yorkshire.
"To be honest, I'd rather stay here and take a virtual walk round the old place. I can even revisit my father's house in Leeds
"In every sense of the word, you can almost be there now without having to fork out a huge amount of money. Of course I can't see or smell the loveliness of the Yorkshire Dales, but it's still a fantastic boon.
"I travel a great deal on business and am fortunate to have seen many beautiful places in the world – this virtual experience is a great means of identifying potential future destinations as well.
"Virtual or otherwise, Yorkshire is still the best place in the world though."
Extensive mapping of New Zealand went live at the end of last year, but as well as strolling the streets of the world's most famous cities, the site also includes tours of classic monuments. Ancient Rome 3D is one of the most extensive collections of three-dimensional buildings allowing virtual tourists to visit the Roman Forum, stand in the centre of the Coliseum, trace the footsteps of the gladiators in the Ludus Magnus and fly under The Arch of Constantine.
While many virtual holiday makers won't be able to indulge in the usual pleasures of overseas shopping and duty free, the presence of many stores online even opens up the strange possibility of virtual shopping while on virtual holiday.
Google has stated that its ultimate goal is to provide street views of the entire world, but its attempts may yet be thwarted after a formal complaint was lodged by watchdogs from Privacy International claiming it infringed basic rights.
"While 'virtual travelling' might have its light-hearted appeal, we are concerned that Street View itself dose pose a privacy problem generally and we have written to Google on a number of occasions to express these urgent views," says spokesman Gus Hosein. "More than 200 members of the public have contacted Privacy International to express concern about specific images on Street View. We believe it has caused numerous instances of embarrassment and distress and that the promised privacy safeguards do not provide adequate protection."
Having blurred faces and number plates, Google has insisted all sensible precautions have been taken.
"The Information Commissioner's Office has repeatedly made clear that it believes that in Street View the necessary safeguards are in place to protect people's privacy," said a spokeswoman for the search engine. "Overall, the product has proven to be very popular already, not just in the UK but also in other countries where it has been launched. Of course, if anyone has concerns about the product or its images they can contact us and we look forward to hearing from them."
So until anyone says otherwise, the virtual world, at least, remains our oyster.
Courtesy:YorkshirePost
A 15-year-old programming whiz from Iowa and his father have created the world's first YouTube music player, mining the site's extensive library of music videos free of charge.
David Nelson and his father, Mark, spent a year developing Muziic Player, a free downloadable player that allows users to organise, search, stream and create playlists from YouTube's catalogue of music clips. Since its worldwide launch last month, the player has been downloaded more than a million times, forcing them to add another server to handle the incoming requests for the player.
"My dad had the idea for creating a YouTube music site, but I said it should be done in a media player format," David said. "I imagined how great it would be to open up your desktop media player and have a library of millions of music videos."
After giving it some thought, David realised its implementation was a definite possibility. "YouTube has a massive collection of user-generated music content, and holds contracts with the world's largest record labels that are compensated for the playback of supported media. It has undeniably the most extensive media library on the Internet."
Muziic Player looks and works like iTunes, taking advantage of the content ID software built into YouTube to detect video submissions not supported by YouTube's contracts for removal. This also allows for compensation of artists and record labels that do hold contracts with YouTube. Unfortunately for UK users, YouTube's withdrawal of music videos from the UK site after a failure to reach a new licensing agreement with the Performing Right Society also applies to the Muziic Player, meaning users from the UK may be unable to view certain content with the player.
But David believes his software has the ability to redefine the problems facing digital music. "Muziic fills a demand by streamlining this process and making it a whole lot easier to discover new artists and songs by using YouTube. It reinforces the idea that when done right, free, ad-supported music sharing websites and applications can provide artists and labels with full compensation and prove to be a profitable business for those streaming the content as well."
But is the Muziic Player a profitable business? Although YouTube's API does not serve advertisements through the YouTube embeddable player used by Muziic, the player makes money through ads on the Muziic.com website.
Google's YouTube will soon show short videos from a major U.S. television group while testing new advertising arrangements in hopes of generating revenue online.
The sports network ESPN will launch a YouTube channel next month, with Disney/ABC Television Group launching several channels in May, including ABC Entertainment, ABC News, ABC Family and a soap opera channel, according to the companies. Content will include short clips of ABC shows such as "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy."
ABC, which is an indirect subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, owns 80 percent of ESPN, with the Hearst Corporation owning 20 percent.
The channels will only be available to Web surfers in the U.S. and will feature short-form content and not full programs. As part of the deal, Disney/ABC and ESPN will be able to test so-called pre-roll advertisements, which are shown before the featured content.
Disney/ABC and ESPN will be allowed to sell their own advertising inventory within their own channels. YouTube allows a few of its other partners to do this, such as CBS.
The channels will also use YouTube's InVideo overlays, which are animated ads that appear over a portion of the content. If clicked, the overlay will launch a video while pausing the featured content. If it isn't clicked, the overlay will disappear. Google has been experimenting with different ways to presents ads in a manner that doesn't annoy users but also allows it and its partners to generate ad revenue.
YouTube is hoping that its online analytical tools will give also media publishers new insight into how people are interacting with the videos.
The agreement comes as Google is still embroiled in a lawsuit with Viacom, which sued Google in March 2007 for US$1 billion. Viacom alleges more than 160,000 clips of content it controls were posted on the video-sharing site, violating its copyrights.
Since then Google has implemented a video and audio identification system that automatically scans content posted to YouTube. It lets copyright holders then decide if they want the content removed or leave it up and try to monetize it with advertisements.
The content ID system is part of Google's plan to ally with the entertainment industry to put premium-quality content on YouTube while also respecting copyright concerns.
YouTube remains the dominate player in online video. In December 2008, U.S. Web surfers viewed 14.3 billion online videos, with YouTube taking a 41 percent market share, according to comScore's Video Metrix service. More than 100 million viewers watched YouTube that month, according to comScore.
It is probably too late for the established news media, but somewhere in the cloud could be salvation.
If there is a tech buzzword in the blighted economy right now, it has to be “cloud.”
The cloud — a.k.a., cloud computing — is the rapidly growing suite of software applications accessible by the Internet and residing in massive data centers around the country.
The cloud offers the possibility of shifting much if not all of a business’s computing needs — from hardware to software, email to databases — away from bricks and mortar and IT departments onto the shoulders of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, IBM, and a dozen other big players.
Cloud cover growing
The trend is unmistakable. Vast and power-hungry data centers already slurp up 1.5 percent of the energy consumed in the US. Such is their growth that within two years the EPA predicts their power usage could double.
They are more and more popular because as companies struggle to shed costs in the midst of a devastating recession outsourcing business infrastructure is an appealing option.
IBM’s metamorphosis into a cloud computing company is perhaps the most interesting to watch right now. Remember that the “M” in IBM stands for “machines.” IBM made its bones in the last century by selling hardware. In recent years, it has de-emphasized metal and plastic and microchips for industrial strength software. And now it is shifting once more.
“What you are seeing are the beginnings of the whole IBM company moving toward cloud computing,” IBM vice president Sean Poulley said on Wednesday.
Clouds from both sides
Here’s another sign that the cloud is the next new thing: It’s April 1st and Amazon decided its hoax today would be about cloud computing, because “in today’s post-capitalist world” companies need “locational flexibility, the ability to literally instantiate a cloud where they need it, when they need it.”
Amazon’s tongue-in-cheek solution: cloud blimps.
OK, it’s not an April Fool’s belly laugh for everybody. But at least you can see that the cloud idea is a hot enough topic enough that it can become a joke for propeller-heads.
The cloud is the message
Now imagine you are the CEO of a struggling media company. The story line is well known: Secular disruption caused by the Internet compounded by the worst economy since the Great Depression equals more and more red ink.
Revenue is collapsing. Proposed solutions like micro-payments and premium content don’t yet seem substantial enough to make up for the loss of print advertising dollars.
What’s left is cost cutting. And that’s tough. Media companies already know how important it is to shed their industrial costs — ink, paper, presses, delivery. Another big cost is people. But people are the core asset of media companies: independent eyes and ears that watch the world and tell the stories.
The cloud could be the answer. It could allow media companies someday to avoid going down the path of making significant capital investments in online tools such as content management systems and video hosting.
Like most proposals for helping the struggling news business, the cloud’s potential for cost-shfiting probably won’t kick in until after much more pain is experienced, more bankruptcies are declared, and more newsrooms shrink.
But the potential is there. To quote Google on the subject: “We have teams of people working with hundreds of publishers to find new and creative ways to earn money from engaging online content. AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Earth, Google News and many other products are a part of our significant investments to innovate in this space.”
Who will be the first to build the newspaper on a cloud?
Internet in the coming years, it's instructive to consider the Google employee: most of his software and data--from pictures and videos, to presentations and e-mails--reside on the Web. This makes the digital stuff that's valuable to him equally accessible from his home computer, a public Internet café, or a Web-enabled phone. It also makes damage to a hard drive less important.
Recently, Sam Schillace, the engineering director in charge of collaborate Web applications at Google, needed to reformat a defunct hard drive from a computer that he used for at least six hours a day. Reformatting, which completely erases all the data from a hard drive, would cause most people to panic, but it didn't bother Schillace. "There was nothing on it I cared about" that wasn't accessible on the Web, he says. Schillace's digital life, for the most part, exists on the Internet; he practices what is considered by many technology experts to be cloud computing. Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But according to a Wall Street Journal story, the company is expected to do more than offer scattered puffs of cloud computing: it will launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online.
Google doesn't acknowledge the existence of such a service. In an official statement, the company says, "Storage is an important component of making Web apps fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives ... We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our Web applications, including storage options, but we don't have anything to announce right now." Even so, many people in the industry believe that Google will pull together its disparate cloud-computing offerings under a larger umbrella service, and people are eager to understand the consequences of such a project.
To be sure, Google isn't the only company invested in online storage and cloud computing. There are other services today that offer a significant amount of space and software in the cloud. Amazon's Simple Storage Service, for instance, offers unlimited and inexpensive online storage ($0.15 per gigabyte per month). AOL provides a service called Xdrive with a capacity of 50 gigabytes for $9.95 per month (the first five gigabytes are free). And Microsoft offers Windows Live SkyDrive, currently in beta, with a one-gigabyte free storage limit. But Google is better positioned than most to push cloud computing into the mainstream, says Thomas Vander Wal, founder of Infocloud Solutions, a cloud-computing consultancy. First, millions of people already use Google's online services and store data on its servers through its software.
Second, Vander Wal says that the culture at Google enables his team to more easily tie together the pieces of cloud computing that today might seem a little scattered. He notes that Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are also sitting atop huge stacks of people's personal information and a number of online applications, but there are barriers within each organization that could slow down the process of integrating these pieces. "It could be," says Vander Wal, "that Google pushes the edges again where everybody else has been stuck for a while."
One of the places where Google, in particular, could have a large impact is integrating cloud computing into mobile devices, says Vander Wal. The company recently announced Android, a platform that allows people to build software for a variety of mobile phones. The alliance could spur the creation of mobile applications geared toward cloud computing, he says. People want to seamlessly move their data between computers, the Web, and phones, Vander Wal adds. "If Google is starting to solve that piece of the problem, it could have an impact because that's something no one's been able to do yet."
"Cloud computing" promises myriad benefits -- including cost savings on technology infrastructure and faster software upgrades -- for users ranging from small startups to large corporations. That's an auspicious future considering that not everyone agrees on exactly what cloud computing is or what it can do. Despite the ethereal name, in its broadest terms, the concept of cloud computing is fairly simple.
Rather than running software on its own computers -- "on premises" as the terminology goes -- a company buys access to software on computers operated by a third party. Typically, the software is accessed over the Internet using only a web browser. As long as the software performs properly, it doesn't matter where the systems that run it are located. They are "out there somewhere" -- in "the cloud" of the Internet. Since companies tend to purchase access to this remote software on a subscription basis, cloud computing is also often termed "software as a service."
"Cloud computing refers to a number of trends related to pushing computing resources -- hardware, software, data -- further into the network," said Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton professor of operations and information management who moderated a panel discussion on cloud computing at the 2009 Wharton Business Technology Conference. These days, no computer user is an island.
A recent study determined that 80% of the data used by business comes from outside the company. Cloud computing "is the technical response to this reality," said panel participant Anthony Arott of anti-virus software company Trend Micro, based in Cupertino, Calif. A somewhat broader definition of cloud computing comes from another expert on that panel, Barry X. Lynn, CEO of "cloud platform" provider 3tera of Aliso Viejo, Calif. "A lot of people define the cloud as having the computers be someplace else. And that's not true," he said.
"People have run IT in data centers they didn't own for years. In the 1970s, we called that 'remote job entry.' In the 1990s, it was 'outsourced data centers.' It's not a new concept. Lynn suggested that true cloud computing isn't simply about adding physical distance between the user and the computer that's doing the grunt work. What's new is "when you abstract the computer from the physical resources." In other words, you no longer have specific machines -- no matter where they are located -- dedicated to specific functions or software applications. Instead, you have a piece of software running across a pool of machines, making optimal use of all the available hardware resources.
In between these explanations of cloud computing lies a variety of products and services, all of which claim to offer a number of advantages -- lowered investment in hardware, more efficient use of computing systems in existing data centers, easier scale-up of the applications and services. These approaches are now possible due to faster and more pervasive communications. As bandwidth has become cheap and readily available, and transmission speed is no longer an impediment, it's possible to store data and run software anywhere for users to access from wherever they want.
Backing (Up) Consumers According to Prasanna Krishnan, an associate at Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and also a panelist at the Wharton conference, the easiest examples for most people to grasp may be consumer web applications such as Microsoft's Hotmail, Google's Gmail and YouTube, and Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service. Consumers run only their browsers on local computers. The rest of the software -- along with users' email messages, photos or videos -- are on remote machines the user can't see and doesn't have to know anything about -- as if hidden in the clouds. Another conference panelist, Vance Checketts, general manager of Decho, based in Pleasant Grove, Utah, described his company's service, Mozy, as a "cloud" offering. Mozy lets users back up their home computer data online. "We have 18 petabytes [18 million gigabytes] backed up now across about a million users. It's cloud technology, but Mozy got started with just a bunch of cheap off-the-shelf disks." Google extended its successful webmail model by introducing Google Docs -- online versions of word processor and spreadsheet applications, software that traditionally runs on users' PCs. It is joined in that market by others, including Zoho, of Pleasanton, Calif., which offers a suite of online collaboration and business applications.
These convenient online tools have helped to fuel the market for netbooks -- lightweight portable computers which contain minimal data storage and computing capacity, and carry price tags usually under $400. By taking advantage of online applications and storage, users have the option to spend less money on hardware. Reducing -- or eliminating -- hardware and other operating costs naturally also appeals to corporate users, many of whom are moving toward subscription-based "software as a service" (abbreviated SaaS).
Online business applications offered by companies such as Salesforce.com (for customer relationship management) and Workday (for human resources and financial software) can not only replace expensive programs that would run on companies' premises, they can reduce the need for corporate computer servers and the related costs of maintaining them. With SaaS, companies pay subscription fees for usage rather than licensing costly enterprise software. SaaS is a growth industry: A new study by Forrester Research concludes that even in the current recession, software-as-a-service providers are seeing double-digit growth in their subscription revenue.
Ariba, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based procurement software-as-a-service company that had been left for dead after the Internet bubble burst, saw a 73% jump in its subscription revenue, from $18.8 million in the third quarter of 2007 to $32.6 million in the same period in 2008. Other companies have expanded into the cloud by offering data-center resources as more generic "computing as a service."
Google, which maintains vast warehouses of servers to run its own software applications, also offers a service called Google AppEngine that allows businesses to develop and run their own programs on Google's servers. Amazon has a similar offering called the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. These services offer companies a place to host applications and data under a pay-for-usage model -- called "utility computing" because it is ready on demand, just like turning on the lights or the water faucet. Customers pay by unit of consumption, whether it's storage space or computing time, and can scale usage up or down quickly. These computing services are particularly attractive when companies want to develop and test new applications without interfering with existing systems, and they can offer "hot," or ready-to-use, backups of the applications in use.
Back to the Future The notion that a company has a "private cloud" on its premises might seem contrary to the concept of cloud computing, but cloud-like features can also have advantages in corporate data centers. Lynn from 3tera gave a historical analysis of how computing architectures evolved. Decades ago, he said, "you had a giant mainframe, and everything ran on it. If you ran out of capacity, you would either make it bigger or get another giant mainframe." Then, client/server systems came along to distribute processing between central computers or servers and the PCs at users' desks. Still, however, every machine in the data center had to be dedicated to a specific software function or application. The newer technology of virtualization permits one piece of hardware to act as multiple "virtual machines" and be dedicated to multiple functions. This makes more efficient use of hardware, but each virtual machine still must be dedicated to a specific software function.
"What cloud computing really changes is [that] now you don't have specific machines, or virtual machines, dedicated to specific functions. You have a pool of machines. Anything can run anywhere" -- even in a company's private data center, Lynn said. Traditional corporate data centers can be inefficient. Businesses equipped for peak workloads may have servers that are underutilized much of the time. In a private cloud, a group of a company's existing computers can be brought together as a computing pool -- and an application "can just grab any available hardware and then give it back," said Lynn. "The term we use is 'disposable information technology infrastructure.'" The software from 3tera acts as a conductor, parceling out components of an application to different computers in a cloud like a taxi dispatcher. "There is no architectural reason why you can't have 20 different machine types" involved, Lynn noted, although performance is optimized if the machines are similar. For some corporate users, keeping the cloud in-house alleviates the security and privacy concerns that can come with running key applications and data outside the company. However, cloud providers insist that data is safer and less vulnerable with them.
Companies that provide storage and computing services maintain state-of-the-art facilities and implement security updates immediately. Lynn believes that eventually IT "will evolve to an almost completely external cloud," and he sees it as a natural progression. "If you're in the health care business, or financial services or manufacturing, why would you ultimately be spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on IT infrastructure? And the answer is, you've had no choice," he said. "If you woke up this morning and read in The Wall Street Journal that, say, Overstock.com has stopped using UPS and FedEx and the U.S. mail, and had bought fleets of trucks and started leasing airport hubs and delivering products themselves, you would say they were out of their minds. Why is that much more insane than a health care company spending $2 billion a year on information technology?" Panelists at the Wharton conference encouraged students in the audience to take advantage of cloud computing as entrepreneurs. Those thinking of offering innovative online services -- in the hopes of becoming the next Facebook or Twitter -- will need a way to ramp up their capacity quickly if all goes well.
With a cloud-based service, expansion capacity is as close as you can get to unlimited, panelists noted. Money is a factor, too, of course. A startup of any type can get the bulk of its computing resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, said Wharton's Hosanagar. "You don't have to worry about these big up-front fixed costs. I've had student startup companies on minuscule budgets." Added panelist Jonathan Appavoo, a research scientist at IBM: "Startups are the killer app for the cloud. As students with a good idea, this is a playground. You can be the driver of all this stuff. Computation now is so accessible, and we have an opportunity to dramatically change how things work."
Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen shares an interesting finding that goes against the wishes of content portals:
Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention..many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed. [source]
He cites couple of reasons for this -
The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment
Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.
Interesting stats
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then
drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
What does this mean?
Search engines rule the world. Content portals, no matter how hard they try will have a difficulty in retaining the users (and monetizing).
Success metrics need to be revisited - it should not be pageviews anymore (and am not talking about AJAX and PV issue). UUs and Returning frequency is what really matters. At the same time, content portals should rethink their push-approach (for e.g. rss feeds) and make that as part of the content strategy.
Jakob makes another interesting point - widgets are not adding value to sites, they actually are affecting the load time badly.
Google's rumored possible interest in acquiring Twitter has the online world buzzing, and such a deal would have advantages for both companies. One big question, however, is how a Google acquisition of Twitter would affect Google rivals Microsoft and Yahoo as they attempt to gain market share in the search and online advertising arenas.
The online world has been positively abuzz with news of a potential Google acquisition of Twitter. While the blog TechCrunch has quoted sources as saying such a deal is imminent, others, such as BoomTown, say such talk is the purest speculation.
At the same time, Google could potentially make use of AdSense on Twitter users' pages, exposing Twitter users to contextual ads multiple times per day. Twitter's monetization potential would expand, as the company could receive a substantial percentage of the revenue generated from such ad placements; recently, Twitter has been experimenting with sponsored sites and commercial accounts as ways to generate cash flow.
But what would such a merger do to Microsoft and Yahoo?
"I would certainly see it as a threat to Microsoft, which really needs to provide a boost to its search engine," John Byrne, an analyst at Technology Business Research, wrote in an e-mail. "Differentiating by offering superior search around user-generated content and specifically microblogging could be one way for Microsoft to differentiate its search engine and unlock Google's grip on search."
Were Twitter already bought, obviously, Microsoft would have to look for another company to fill that void; given Twitter's current momentum in the microblogging space, that task could present a substantial challenge.
Acquiring Twitter would also help Google's bottom line (and hurt its competitors) by adding "tremendous stickiness and traffic," according to Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC.
"Microblogging is becoming an accepted new channel of online communications in addition to e-mail and instant messaging, and it is here to stay," Weide said. "Does [a Twitter acquisition] make sense for Google? They don't really need more audience reach than they already have. But they might need to keep that audience reach out of others' hands. Microsoft and Yahoo come to mind."
Given the relatively low amount of revenue that Twitter generates at this point, however, Weide said he feels it would be prudent for Google to pay as little as it possibly can.
"I think an acquisition would make sense, and if they can get it for less than [$1 billion], the better it is," Weide said.
This contrasts with the view of a number of business pundits online, who have been urging Google to snatch up Twitter no matter the dollar amount required.
As for the potential success of AdSense placed on Twitter feeds, Weide pointed to the former's presence on MySpace, which generates substantial guaranteed revenues for the social networking site but hasn't been contributing mightily to Google's bottom line.
"I doubt [ads on Twitter] would do any better than on MySpace," Weide said.
In other words, although Yahoo and Microsoft could certainly use a microblogging aspect to gain a search advantage, acquiring Twitter might not be the coup de grace that Google needs in order to establish search engine dominance.
Microsoft's deal with ExecTweets, though, shows that Microsoft has an interest in engaging with microblogging as a tool in its online strategy. And should that interest allow Twitter to lever a few more dollars out of Google in any possible deal, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer probably wouldn't complain.
In either case, however, a big question presents itself: how an acquisition of Twitter by Google would affect Google's competitors in the search space and online advertising market, most notably Microsoft and Yahoo.
Twitter has been boosting its search capabilities, including transferring its search bar from search.twitter.com to its main Website and establishing a "Trends" menu to allow users to see in real time the most talked-about subjects on the site. Any deal between Twitter and Google would bring these capabilities under the search giant's roof.
