Davemichels

Less than a hundred miles from the rim of the Hoover Dam, just outside of Las Vegas at the edge of dusty San Bernardino County, sits a symbol of how the sun will some day provide copious amounts of electricity for entire cities. This is Ivanpah, the world’s largest operating solar farm, which uses 347,000 mirrors (173,500 heliostats) and three huge 450-foot towers to harness the sun’s heat to generate electricity.

As of the beginning of this year, it’s a mere symbol no longer. After more than seven years of development, over three years of construction, 2,700 workers, and $1.6 billion in U.S. government loan money, the massive solar farm is finally live and sending enough solar power into the grid to power 140,000 (average American) homes. Ivanpah was officially launched on Thursday with an event that featured U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, David Crane, the CEO of Ivanpah’s majority owner power company NRG Energy, and members of the band The Fray, which filmed a video at Ivanpah and titled their latest album Helios. Oh, and of course, a lot of media people, too.

To the workers, the companies (including Google and startup BrightSource) and the federal and state groups involved in supporting the 5-mile by one-mile long colossal clean power project, Ivanpah is the Hoover Dam for this generation. In fact, Bechtel, which helped build the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, also led the construction of Ivanpah.

More than anything, the facility marks a future of emerging clean power options that can begin to compete with large scale fossil fuel power, but without the associated carbon emissions. Ivanpah is an early example of how next-generation technology, innovation, entrepreneurialism and government support can come together to provide solutions to climate change in a substantial way.

In the beginning

Ivanpah originally began as an idea for the first commercial-scale project from a tiny startup based in Oakland, Calif., and Israel called BrightSource Energy. Founded in 2004 by the original developers of the Luz solar projects, which were built in the Mojave desert in the 1980s and 1990s (the company later went bankrupt), BrightSource emerged as one of the more promising startups out of the Silicon Valley cleantech bubble.

BrightSource was funded early on by the Valley’s VantagePoint Capital Partners, and one of VantagePoint’s team, John Woolard, joined BrightSource as the original CEO. Woolard spent years pushing BrightSource’s technology forward and wading through the regulatory process needed to get projects like Ivanpah (built on public land) permitted. He’s still the chairman, though he handed the CEO reigns to David Ramm in late 2013.

Ivanpah took years longer to get built than expected. It was one of the first projects to be developed on controversial Bureau of Land Management land, and the location ended up having more desert tortoises than originally thought. It’s been an object of much environmental scrutiny and at one point the site employed 160 biologists to try to make sure the handful of tortoises that live there weren’t disturbed.

BrightSource also ended up needing a lot of capital to get both its early demo plants and Ivanpah up and running. BrightSource raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors included DBL Investors, Morgan Stanley, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BP, Chevron, Alstom, Black River, and Statoil HydroVentures. BrightSource put up the first money into Ivanpah, but turned to partners to put up the rest.

As BrightSource made more progress with smaller demo solar plants like its one in partnership with Chevron in Coalinga, Calif., the company was able to secure some larger investors and partners behind Ivanpah. Bechtel came on to support Ivanpah in 2009 (as both an equity investor and builder), and NRG Energy took a majority share of the project with a $300 million investment in 2010.

Google even put in $168 million in 2011. Google is interested both in the financial return that a 25-year power contract can deliver, and also that it’s interested in backing clean power for its data centers both directly and indirectly.

Then of course, utilities PG&E and SCE have stepped in to become the customers for Ivanpah as they looked to meet aggressive state mandates that say utilities need to provide a certain amount of their electricity from clean sources. Without these California state mandates there would be no Ivanpah.

Finally there was the federal government and the Obama administration’s plan to use loan guarantees as a way to stimulate large job-creating projects. While the loan guarantee program was controversial because it gave money to companies like Solyndra and Fisker, it also gave $1.6 billion to Ivanpah. NRG Energy’s CEO David Crane said on Thursday that the project “unequivocally and without doubt” would not have been built without that loan.

Cleantech stories

But like so many cleantech stories, BrightSource struggled along the way. The company filed to go public in the spring of 2011, but a year later pulled that IPO after the public markets and the solar industry saw dark times. An IPO would have provided BrightSource’s investors an exit when it went public. Later VantagePoint Capital Partners was unable to raise its next fund due to lack of returns on the cleantech fund that backed BrightSource and many others.

BrightSource also shifted its strategy from building solar farms like Ivanpah to providing the technology for those solar farms, and having deep-pocketed power companies own and operate the farms. That strategy seems to be working now, and is a common transition for Silicon Valley-backed cleantech companies.

BrightSource is the latest example of a cleantech company that might not have made its venture capital backers money (at least not yet) but is now delivering disruptive and world-changing technology to the commercial markets. BrightSource has a pipeline of projects it wants to get built both in the Mojave and also internationally in South Africa, China and the Middle East.

Solar heat

Ivanpah is using markedly different solar technology than the type used by solar panels installed on rooftops. Solar panels directly convert light into electricity. Average panels convert about 10 percent to 12 percent of the light, while more high efficiency panels like those from SunPower convert about 20 percent.

Ivanpah uses solar thermal and tower power technology. That’s essentially a big field of mirrors that track the sun throughout the day and focus the sunlight up to the top of the boilers on top of the three towers throughout the field. It’s like if you’ve ever focused a magnifying glass on a leaf or an ant when you were a kid — power that up hundreds of thousands of times and you’ve got a pretty powerful energy source.

The boilers turn bright white as they reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and generate steam (as opposed to black when off). The steam operates a steam turbine which produces electricity. Unlike other solar thermal or fossil fuel power plants, Ivanpah uses dry cooling instead of water cooling to manage its heat. That’s important because as we’ve seen with the California drought, the future will be increasingly water-constrained.

Connectivity and computing is playing a role in Ivanpah as well. Each heliostat is connected by not only a power cable but also a data cable that controls each one ensuring they track the sun, or change position according to the facilities’ needs. When there are high winds the mirrors go into a safety flat position. When it rains they also go into that position to get a free mother nature washing. Data commands all aspects of the Ivanpah facility.

The future of solar thermal

Now that Ivanpah is fully built and constructed, the ironic part is that the technology is actually already dated. BrightSource’s CEO Ramm said during the media event on Thursday that future BrightSource projects will likely be 30 to 40 percent cheaper. That cost reduction will be because of efficiencies delivered in scaling up the technology, like moving from data cables to wireless data connections for the mirrors.

BrightSource will also focus future projects on moving from steam boilers to molten salt boilers, which can hold energy and store it during needed times like in the middle of the night. Storage will be increasingly important to make solar thermal a viable technology now that solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically.

Solar panels are actually the elephant in the room when it comes to a technology like Ivanpah’s. Over the seven years that it took Ivanpah to get permitted and built, solar panels are now at their cheapest time in history, and large solar panel projects are being built at scale, too. Solar thermal projects needed to provide something extra to compete at cost with both solar panel projects and fossil fuel power plants.

While Ivanpah might be the first of its kind, it represents the emergence of a solar power technology that can reach the kind of scale that a coal or natural gas plant can. Distributed solar panels on rooftops are disruptive to be sure, but in the near term utilities are looking for large power sources that can help them meet their mandates and that operate 24/7, like fossil fuel plants do.

While Ivanpah might not be perfect — it’s taken years and it’s more expensive than future projects — it’s also a symbol of how next-generation technology can deliver solutions to climate change at a scale that can compete with the incumbent technologies. It shows how Silicon Valley cleantech companies and entrepreneurs might not fit into the traditional venture capital model, but they’re continuing to bring disruptive technology to market that can change the energy game.

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At long last, Microsoft has given up force-feeding the Windows 8 Metro/Modern interface on users. Have they done it in time to keep their user-base?

Consider this my trip report for WebRTC Global Summit. It is written in sections to make it easier to glance over and get to whatever you see fit.

• The event was good. The right people were there, but it focused a lot more on the technology and the architecture and not enough on what to do with it – the use cases
• The Telecom industry sees WebRTC as a challenge and not an opportunity. It is a matter of mindset and not a technology barrier
• Most complaints were around IE and Safari support of WebRTC, along with the difference in behavior between Chrome and Firefox and in-between browser versions
• The Telco network vendors were missing: Ericsson, ALU and Huawei didn’t have booths or participate actively in the conference. Having seen them all in all previous WebRTC related events – this seemed a bit strange. Especially when both Amdocs and Oracle (the OSS/BSS players) were there with booths
• Some of the attendees in the conference never saw WebRTC in action. Many of the attendees in the conference never used it for real conversation – just saw what it does and moved along. How can we expect these people to plan what a Telco needs to do with WebRTC?

The companies that decided to demo and showcase their services came better prepared than those in previous demo sessions other conferences I attended. I actually enjoyed myself throughout the demos. They were quick, to the point and easy to understand.

The two runners up were Apidaze and Quobis. The winner was Viblast.

• I like Apidaze because they did a demo that showed exactly what their Widget4all offers – on a website, in a social network and embedded into an ad on a video site. Well done
• Quobis, who essentially do customization and system integration (my interpretation) work around WebRTC for Telcos, showed a demo that integrates a mobile number with a gmail identity. It showed immediate value for a Telco if you ask me
• Viblast does peer assisted video delivery. Their demo was just sleek and easy, and incorporated a mobile SDK as well

I just wish all future demo sessions would be this effective.

This time, I think I won’t be providing a review of each and every session. Instead, I’ll try just jotting down the main things that caught my attention.

• In some sessions, the speakers stated how surprised they were from the quality of VP8. They expected H.264 to be superior to it…
• Service providers that have already tested the waters (Bouygues and Telecom Italia comes to mind), had a good list of issues and challenges. They had the scars to show for their efforts. Enrico (Telecom Italia) even stated that they know what they are looking for, but that none of the vendors are able to provide it yet
• Service providers were usually in waiting mode at the conference, preferring to see how things play out or just waiting for all of the current barriers get solved before they commit to WebRTC (IE and Safari anyone?). This misses the point I think. A Telco will take a couple of years to get a service running, while WebRTC progresses far faster than that
• Douglas from Oracle had a good metaphor of a bridge – where Telecom and the Internet are supposed to meet somehow and come to terms. I can say that these two camps speak two different languages, and I think it is essential for Telecom to know how to speak Internet and not vice versa
• Telecom Italia started playing with WebRTC on a gender detection app, which has nothing to do with IMS or other telecom assets. Only later it started looking at telecom related use cases. I think that’s a smart thing to do
• Enrico (Telecom Italia) also stated that the challenges they expected were different than the actual problems they ended up with. Again – to do anything seriously with WebRTC requires dirtying your hands
• A lot of discussions about signaling. Some were in favor of SIP and IMS. Others couldn’t understand why anyone would want to use it when it can be avoided. Some didn’t care which
• There was a mistaken notion that “advanced telephony” features are necessary and are hard to do in WebRTC. Some questioned the idea of copying that model over to the web
• Manuel from Telefonica gave an overview of the history and future of the telephony paradigm; stressing the point that the networks and architectures of the past is what we are trying to use for our current needs
• There was still too much talk about IMS for my taste. I even saw RCS on one of the slides. Talking about relying on the past…
• Federico from Italtel used a great phrase – “Joyn: too little, too late, too expensive” (=RCS)
• During one of the panels, Andrzej Milkowski mentioned that WebRTC isn’t a competition – it builds an ecosystem that is about opening up communications
• Chang Feng from ooVoo represented the OTTs. His talk was about pushing for OTT and Telco partnerships. He indicated that for them, WebRTC support is requested by their partners and third party developers
• Serge from Google stated that their current focus is on mobile support. Their roadmap definitely shows that – expect a lot of progress there in 2014
• Serge also mentioned in a panel that WebRTC wasn’t really targeted at Telecom in any way. This means that Telecom will need to adapt to WebRTC and not the other way
• Ken Wieland has written a good summary of Serge’s keynote
• Chris Kranky did a great performance (not presentation. not session. performance), where he gave 5 suggestions of what Telco’s should do today with WebRTC

 

I had a successful pre-conference session in the first day of this summit. There were 20-something participants in a rather crowded room. This had the benefit of feeling nice and cozy, converting it more to a conversation instead of a frontal presentation.

Here are the slides from that session:

My other session was close to the end of the summit, and it was more of a hard-core technical topic on voice codecs in WebRTC. It was probably a bit too much at that point in time. The slides for that are here as well:

I noticed that some people in the conference didn’t know of the various “channels” I have for information. There are 4 main ways to “consume” my writing (and curation) at the moment:

1. The content on this blog, available in RSS or email
2. Weekly newsletter, which I operate together with Chris Kranky. It doesn’t hold the content on this blog, but rather the best weekly writing the both of us can find elsewhere
3. Monthly newsletter, which is my own. It has content unavailable on this blog, it short bits of information to make it easily consumable

Reports. Long form writing, that require payment – for those who need an in-depth view to specific aspects of WebRTC

The post WebRTC Global Summit: The Summary Version appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Here’s the good news about Greenpeace’s new report on the Internet and clean energy: a handful of web giants, like Google, Apple, and Facebook, have made impressive strides in recent years to find clean energy sources to run their web services. Here’s the bad news: Amazon Web Services, the hands down leader in public cloud computing, remains one of the dirtiest and least transparent internet infrastructure companies around.

For the report, Greenpeace looked at 19 of the largest information technology companies — from web giants to co-location providers — covering about 300 data centers. Greenpeace’s last clean cloud report was released about two years ago, and over that time many of the companies have made significant improvements.

Six high-profile Internet companies —  Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce.com — are now committed to powering their data centers with 100 percent clean power. This is actually a huge achievement, considering clean power can be more expensive and harder to access in many areas.

These moves have already had some very large real world impact. For example, following pressure from Apple, Google and Facebook, North Carolina’s local utility, Duke Energy, created a new program to provide clean power for their data centers in the area. The long-term impact of running the Internet off of clean power, is that as Internet access and Internet infrastructure invariably grows, the carbon emissions associated with the Internet will drop or remain steady. Already power associated with running data centers accounts for 2 percent of energy consumption in the U.S. (most of that is from fossil fuel-based energy).

Despite these green moves, Greenpeace calls out Amazon as being particularly resistant to committing to clean power, and to being transparent about its energy assets. Greenpeace says AWS is “far behind its major competitors,” when it comes to clean power. Twitter also lags, says Greenpeace, though AWS is particularly worrisome because so many companies run services off of AWS.

When it comes to energy, Amazon seems far more concerned with energy efficiency, which reduces its energy costs, than it is with the source of its energy. Amazon has said that it’s been building its own electric substations and even has firmware engineers rewrite the archaic code that normally runs on the switchgear designed to control the flow of power to electricity infrastructure.

Google has arguably done more than any company when it comes to all the various ways to back clean energy. The company has spent over a billion dollars on clean energy projects, and has numerous power purchase agreement contracts to buy clean power from utilities. Apple has been the most aggressive in terms of building its own clean power assets — it built massive solar farms in North Carolina and is doing the same in Reno, Nevada.

If you want to learn more about clean power and Internet companies check out some of these articles:

• Special report: Apple’s ground-breaking bet on its clean energy infrastructure
• Pushed by Internet companies, utility makes progress to sell clean power in North Carolina
• The ultimate geek road trip: North Carolina’s mega data center cluster
• Facebook’s data center in Iowa to be fully powered by wind
• A research report from our subscription service: Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

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Amazon officially announced a TV streaming box called Amazon Fire TV at its press event in New York Wednesday morning. The device is a set-top box with a dedicated remote control that is powered by a quad-core CPU and a dedicated GPU, which results in it being three times as powerful as competitors like Apple TV and Roku. Fire TV goes on sale immediately for $99.

The device comes with a dedicated remote control that enables voice input through a microphone button. The box itself is connected through 802.11 a/b/g/n dual-band Wi-Fi. There is also an Ethernet port, optical audio out, obviously HDMI and a single USB 2.0 port. Fire TV comes with 8 GB storage for apps as well as 2 GB memory.

The device will come with a number of featured third-party apps at launch, including Hulu Plus, Netflix, Quello, NBA GameTime, Plex, Vevo, TED amd MLB.tv. Netflix and Hulu Plus are featured right on the home screen, and content of these apps is available through content recommendations that take into account which serves a viewer subscribes to. FreeTime also doubles as a kind of parental control for the device: Parents can set time limits for video viewing, and kids won’t be able to exit the app and access other content without their parents’ approval.

Amazon Fire TV also integrates other Amazon services. Users who have the Amazon Cloud Drive app installed on their mobile devices can view photos on the TV right after they’re uploaded to the cloud. Subscribers can also access FreeTime, Amazon’s curated tier of content for kids, through the device.

Another key feature is gaming. Amazon wants to deliver thousands of gaming titles from publishers like Disney, Ubisoft and EA, but not directly go up against Xbox One and PS4, but rather target casual and mobile gamers. To do so, it will sell a dedicated game controller, dubbed the Fire Game Controller, for $40. For that price, consumers will also get 1,000 Amazon coins to spend on game titles. There will also be a multiplayer mode that will integrate tablets and phones. And yes, this is the game controller that leaked a few weeks ago.

The device goes up against competition from Apple, Roku and Google, whose devices all sell on Amazon.com as well. Kindle VP Peter Larsen took a direct stab at Roku Wednesday, demonstrating how hard it can be to find titles via search with a traditional remote control. He also quoted Amazon customer reviews of Apple TV, Roku and Vizio media streamers highlighting the same issue.

It had been clear for a long time that Amazon had been working on a TV streaming device. The company had hired a good chunk of the team that built Logitech’s Revue Google TV box, and reportedly was looking to launch in time for the 2013 holiday season, but decided to delay the release for unknown reasons.

(Cross-posted @ cloud computing)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

So Microsoft, what took so long?

On Monday, Microsoft cut prices on its Azure cloud services in response to the price reduction unveiled by Amazon Web Services last Wednesday. Last year, Microsoft pledged to meet all AWS price cuts and it’s been true to its word. All the changes to Microsoft Azure pricing are outlined in this MSDN post, but in general cuts ranged from 27 percent to 35 percent off compute instances and 44 percent to 65 percent on storage. The reductions cover both Linux and Windows instances. Don’t laugh; last week Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told reporters that 20 percent of all Azure workloads run on Linux.

Google kicked off this latest round of price axing last Tuesday at the Google Cloud Platform coming-out party in San Francisco, but God knows when this round robin will end (or who’ll be left standing when it does end.)

 

 

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Susan Law Cain / Shutterstock

Sprint told employees this week that it is shutting three customer care call centers and reducing operations at three others, resulting in more than 1,400 job cuts. It is also closing 55 stores across the country.

A Sprint representative confirmed the moves, which were announced internally on Tuesday. Sprint said they were part of planned workforce reductions the company had told employees were coming back in January.

“Those reductions come as the result of greater efficiencies that we’ve achieved through simpler pricing plans and improved customer service — which have resulted in fewer calls to customer service — as well as adjusting to changing marketplace dynamics,” a Sprint representative said in a statement to Re/code.

The company closed call centers in Elmsford, N.Y.; Overland Park, Kan.; and Sacramento, Calif., and reduced operations at call centers in Orlando, Fla.; Temple, Texas; and another Sacramento facility. The job cuts were reported earlier by the Kansas City Star.

As for the store closures, Sprint said that they are “designed to reinforce Sprint’s competitive position in the consumer market” and that 85 percent of workers at affected stores will keep their jobs.

The store closures were earlier reported by CNET.

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.—The communications and data services company CenturyLink is shutting down a major call center in Grand Junction.

Sprint announced Friday that Samsung’s Galaxy S5 smartphone will be available in stores and online beginning April 11, or you can pre-order it starting today. It’ll cost you $199.99 with a two-year contract, just like on AT&T and U.S. Cellular, or you can get it for $0 down (along with 24 monthly payments of $27.09) via Sprint Easy Pay. You can also buy the phone outright for $649.99. And for a limited time, customers that buy a GS5 on a Framily plan with Easy Pay will get a free Galaxy Tab 3, though you’ll have to pay for a data plan.

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Microsoft

Microsoft hopes to make Office a habit again, and bringing the suite to the iPad is just the beginning.

That’s the message from Qi Lu, the longtime head of Microsoft’s search and online services who now heads Office along with those online services.

Lu sat down with Re/code’s Ina Fried to talk about Office, Bing and where Microsoft is headed. He also touched on Office for Mac, the company’s search partnership with Yahoo and other topics. Here’s an edited transcript of that discussion.

Re/code: What are the top problems you are working to solve right now?

Qi Lu: My group’s charter is to build connected applications. Our fundamental focus and mission is to deliver experiences and scenarios that enable individual end users or organizations to get more done. Fundamentally, we see the world as driven by important tidal waves of cloud and mobile. We want to lean in, being cloud-first, being mobile-first.

Okay. That’s the business-y marketing answer. You are a technical guy. What are the big technical things to take Microsoft from where it was to delivering on that vision?

One is building what we consider modern endpoints. Endpoints can be a website. Endpoints can be an app. In particular, what you saw today is one type of endpoint, for touch-first devices. The endpoints can be tablets, can be phones, can be other types of devices.

On that front, the key is how do you take full advantage of what each platform affords you. Office is really known for a few important traits. One is high fidelity, second is rich in features, the third is information protection. It needs to be unmistakably Office.

We want Office to be a habit. Anytime you are a student thinking about writing something, think about using Office to author documents. Anytime you see a rich document, you think Office.

How do we carry that into a fundamentally different environment from where we grew up with mice and keyboards? I can tell you that’s definitely not easy. There are so many different ways you can go.

The second part is moving to the cloud. That’s also a massive undertaking.

You talked about Office being a habit. Is it fair to say there is a generation of workers where it is not yet a habit?

This world is changing. It’s driven by cloud and mobile devices, certainly a new generation coming to embrace those devices. They many not necessarily have been exposed [to Office].

If you look at industry numbers, within the next 12 months or so around the world, over two billion people will be using cloud-connected mobile devices, whether phones or tablets. Those people may not necessarily have used Office before. We view that as a really good opportunity for Microsoft.

Historically, Microsoft has had one team developing Office for the PC and then a smaller Mac team developing Office for Mac. Things have quietly changed behind the scenes. Talk about developing Office for all these different devices.

The new world is technologically more complex — ours, Mac and Android, then we have the Web. You have many platforms to deal with. For Windows alone, we have two, [traditional Windows and Windows 8].

Our philosophy is always, we want to take full advantage of what each platform provides to you and build experiences that are truly compelling.

At the same time we want to share as much code as we can. Without sharing code, the fundamental agility won’t be there. Anytime you want to add a feature you would have to go back to all these code bases.

Some of the Mac people have been working on Office for iPad. We haven’t seen a new version of Office for Mac in a while.

We are definitely working on a new version of Office for Mac.

Is that later this year?

We won’t be able to say anything specific. We are working on it.

We haven’t heard a lot about search in a while. We’ve heard that Yahoo hasn’t been very happy with the partnership. Is it critical to Bing’s future to have that Yahoo partnership?

We’re very happy with the Yahoo partnership. We are strongly committed to do what we can to deepen that partnership.

Scale is indeed a critical part of search for both end user experience and search economics. We are focused on getting more value, getting more scale through organic growth but also through partnerships.

You may know this, but Bing provides back-end services for Apple’s Siri. We’re serving billions of queries for iOS Apple users. Both sides, Apple and us, are very happy with this partnership. That brings more scale.

The other is our partnership with Amazon. On Kindle devices, Bing is also the search default, and we are getting more and more volume. That’s still early. We see a lot of opportunities to drive more partnerships.

You mention Amazon. You’ve said you are going to bring Office to Android. Would you bring Office to Amazon Kindle, too?

That’s a very, very interesting question. I won’t be able to say specifically, but our fundamental focus is if a platform enables us to build a very good experience and our customers are also using those platforms, if those conditions are there, certainly we will consider those platforms.

You bring up Amazon, which is an interesting flavor. A similar thing is happening in China. We view all of these as potential opportunities. There is more than an Office opportunity. There’s a services opportunity for Chinese devices that aren’t using Google services.

Have you guys been talking with the Chinese phone makers, the Xiaomis of the world?

I won’t be able to comment specifically.

But is it fair to say it is an interesting opportunity?

No question. We will look for those opportunities.

About a year ago, I wrote a post comparing cloud computing providers to fast-food chains. I called Amazon Web Services the McDonald’s of the cloud, Rackspacethe Wendy’s and Google — in a close third place — the Burger King. Since then, Google has been steadily creeping up on Rackspace and, on Tuesday, it blew the doors off with massive price cuts, progressive pricing models, and new features that firmly established Google as a visionary and AWS’s primary competition.

Google’s newfound cloud prowess was the major theme of our Structure Show podcast this week. Barb Darrow and I discussed reactions to the news and what it means for other top-tier cloud providers such as IBM Softlayer, Microsoft and Rackspace. Our guest, Ben Whaley of Anki (it makes an artificial intelligence-based toy racing system), said that although his startup is a happy AWS shop, Google looks a lot better now than it did a week ago.

If you listen to the whole thing (embedded below), you’ll probably get the sense the cloud market, at least in terms of who’ll have the most users, is really a two-horse race. It seems safe to assume Microsoft will find a niche (probably a big one) and be successful with the newly Windowless Azure. IBM Softlayer is doing some interesting things, especially around Watson as a service, and should be a strong revenue source for Big Blue.

Rackspace, well, it’s in a tough spot. Between “enterprise” clouds squeezing it on one end, and the more-innovative, always-price-slashing AWS and Google (AWS matched Google this week with cuts of its own) on the other end, it’s hard to see how it can continue with its current strategy. In this case, being in the middle is less a case of providing the best of both worlds, and more a case of being trapped in a nether region with no easy escape to either world.

However, the one thing we didn’t discuss in any great detail is what Google’s ascendence means for the smaller cloud providers out there — the Joyents and GoGrids, and the hot new startups such as Digital Ocean. These classes of providers are often specialists in one thing or another, and usually pretty innovative. Right now, they might even be less expensive than Google and AWS.

But the price and feature wars between those two giant companies are going to make life a lot harder for the small guys.

One could compare it to the client-server era, where large server makers dominated in terms of market share and revenue, but there’s a big, big difference in the cloud era. Rather than use their dominance to extract more money from users, Google and AWS are constantly cutting prices thanks to economies of scale and their efforts to minimize the cost of running their massive data centers. When they launch new features and services — which they do regularly — they’re either free or complementary, but never rolled into the price of the core services.

Cloud computing users must be pleased as punch to see all this competition at the high end — forcing AWS, Google, Microsoft, and IBM to race to the bottom on pricing and to the top on features — but other cloud providers must be sweating bullets. Maybe they have immutable advantages I’m ignoring, but nothing seems too defensible given the big guys’ deep pockets, top-tier technologists and willingness to accept low(ish) margins. What’s an advantage today is table stakes tomorrow, which means there’s really no time to rest.

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The typical workflow in the enterprise spans multiple applications. But in the age of mobile computing it’s not always as easy as it should be to craft a workflow that spans multiple applications. Moving to address that specific issue Good Technology today updated the Good Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform with a new activation code capability that creates an “activation delegate” for every application a user accesses on the platform.

John Herrema, senior vice president of corporate strategy for Good Technology, says that rather than forcing developers to compromise usability in the name of security these activation delegates manage security transparently to the end user. Every time a user opens a new application the identity of that user is validated against the activation delegate information stored on the Good Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform.

Herrema says this capability means that many organizations for the first time will be able to easily craft workflows that span multiple mobile computing applications without forcing end users to manually log into every application that constitutes a particular workflow inside that enterprise.

Coupled with Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) support in the Good Dynamics Platform, Herrema says end users can now also have single sign-on access to all Good-secured apps on the device and behind-the-firewall resources without having to constantly re-enter network credentials on the device.

In addition, the Good Dynamics Shared Services Framework can now publish common enterprise capabilities – such as business intelligence, expense handling, inventory management, payment processing, etc. – as server-based services, which developers can then use to add additional capabilities into their mobile applications.

Organizations, says Herrema, can also extend the Good Dynamics Shared Services Framework out to legacy enterprise applications in a way that makes them more accessible to developers, which Herrema says is critical because most organizations are not going to be able to invest the time and resources required to rewrite legacy applications.

Available both on premise and as a cloud service, Good Technology has been steadily building up an ecosystem of developers that encompasses more than 1,300 applications, By making it easier to securely access backend services, Good Technology clearly wants to extend the reach of its platform within enterprise IT environments that often struggle with how to replicate existing application workflows across mobile computing devices.

As such, it’s not just deploying and supporting mobile computing devices and the applications that run on them that is driving a lot of IT organizations to distraction; it’s figuring out how to integrate those systems within complex sets of business processes that in many cases have been in place for multiple decades.

A disgruntled customer is suing Nest, claiming that the company’s popular line of home thermostats are defective because they heat up and fail to measure a room’s actual temperature.

In a complaint filed this week in San Jose, Maryland man Justin Darisse said he bought the device on Amazon for $249.99 after seeing Nest promotional videos that suggested it would save him money, but that faulty temperature readings caused him to actually pay more for energy costs:

Nest’s base and faceplate heat up, which causes Nest’s temperature reading to be from two to ten degrees higher than the actual ambient temperature in the surrounding room. This defect prevents the thermostat from working properly. As a result, Nest users do not experience the advertised energy savings.

The lawsuit, which asks a court grant class action status, points to video images like the one below to claim Nest did not work as promised:

The complaint seeks more than $5 million on behalf of hundreds of thousands of other Nest buyers over alleged the company’s alleged violation warranty and consumer protection laws. Nest, which was acquired by Google in January, declined to comment.

Nest has won plaudits for its stylish design and use of smart sensors to improve home energy efficiency. If the lawsuit is successful, however, it could hurt its reputation among cost-conscious consumers like Darisse, who stated that “he would have continued to use his traditional Honeywell Thermostat that retails for around $30.00″ had he known about the alleged defect.

According to the complaint, many Nest customers have taken to online comment boards to complain about different temperature readings between Nest devices and other home thermostats. It also states an advertising body told Nest to stop making certain claims such as a promise that its device can “cut AC runtime up to 30 percent.”

You can read the complaint, which was spotted by Law360, for yourself here (I’ve marked up some of the relevant bits):

This story was updated at 3:44pm ET to say that the complaint seeks at least $5 million, not $500 million, from Nest.

Nest Class Action

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Colorado collected slightly more than $2 million in taxes on the sale of recreational marijuana in the month of January, according to new figures released by the state Monday.

Rolls-Royce is looking to join the likes of Amazon's drones in the sky and Google's driver-less cars on the roads by sailing the seas with remote-controlled cargo ships.

The firm’s Blue Ocean development team designed the unmanned ship prototypes after the European Union gave 3.5 million euros ($4.8 million) to a project called Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks (MUNIN). In developing unmanned ships, the project aims to solve some of the problems of crowded European waters and increasing environmental requirements.

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Medical marijuana has now joined the ranks of Chia Pets, the Clapper and the Flowbee with late-night direct-response TV ads.

New York Business Journal reports that Marijuana Doctors will begin running an ad (see above) in Comcast customers in New Jersey this month. The ad will soon reach the cable giant's customers in Chicago and Massachusetts as well

In the ad, a seedy-looking dealer in an alley tries to sell some sushi

"I got tuna, I got salmon, I got sweet shrimp," he beckons

"You wouldn't buy your sushi from this guy," the voiceover says. "So why would you buy marijuana from him?" The ad asks viewers to book their appointments "today." Read more...

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Struggling electronics retailer Radio Shack announced Tuesday it would shut down roughly 20% of its locations in the U.S.—roughly 1,100 stores—due to the company’s poor performance. The announcement comes as Radio Shack announced its dismal fourth quarter earnings, which the company blames on its poor mobile phone business, despite all attempts to update Radio Shack's outdated image (per the video below).

Radio Shack, which has experienced difficulty keeping up with online retailers like Amazon, did not specify which physical stores would close or how many jobs would be affected by the move, but the store closures will be based on financial performance, lease duration, location and area demographics.

Lead image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Boulder, Colorado Boulder County has more tech startups per capita than any U.S. metropolitan area, and it’s no wonder – the brightest minds flock to Boulder to work with companies that define innovation on a daily basis. And not only do startups thrive, seasoned technology companies and professionals find that being in this vibrant community is […]

When I see a post with the title “WebRTC And V.VoIP: Friends Or Enemies?” there are two things to do:

1. Ignore it as a blatant attempt at getting more page views and clicks
2. Write something of my own that has a catch-eye title, but way more value

Consider this that post.

-

I am going to present in two weeks’ time at Enterprise Connect a long session about the Fundamentals of WebRTC. A lot of the material for that session is new – created specifically for the session. The main reason for it is that I bore myself if I talk too much with the same slides.

I also decided to start and finish that presentation with the following slide:

Many people forget that minor detail…

But it isn’t enough. So here are 5 things that everyone should know about WebRTC – at least if he knows anything about VoIP or HTML5.

Here’s a table I like showing in my presentations about WebRTC:

It shows a comparison between WebRTC and SIP. There are 3 things that can be derived from this table, all important, and all point to the advantages WebRTC has over SIP.

1. SIP has a lot more options to it for virtually everything. I consider this a bad thing as more options mean more headaches in interoperability and more choices for the developers and operations people to screw things up
2. WebRTC has a specific, widely known API, which enables the creation of a developer ecosystem. SIP only has a network interface, along with proprietary APIs, specific to each vendor – which lends itself to interoperability and federation thinking – things that are a bit less important these days
3. WebRTC is targeted at web developers and not at VoIP and communications equipment vendors. This last one is critical. It indicates where disruption will come from, and how current day thinking about VoIP solution and their operability issues (scaling, security, high availability, etc.) just don’t fit anymore

I find it funny when people try to put WebRTC in the same scale of a SIP solution and look at security threats of the two. WebRTC lives in a world of web, where the issues are analyzed and dealt with slightly different. Same thing with scale – WebRTC works well with distributed systems and web scale technologies (think Big Data); places where SIP isn’t as flexible.

When trying to fit WebRTC into an enterprise setting, best to think of the problem statement in web related terms and not enterprise ones.

There are so many voice and video calling vendors, services and projects that use WebRTC that it is getting a bit crowded. It is also very boring. I think I’ve seen this past month every conceivable layout of talking heads imaginable.

But the thing is, WebRTC has a lot more to offer elsewhere. WebRTC is split into 3 main APIs:

1. Get User Media, which essentially provides access to the camera and the microphone of the machine you use
2. Peer Connection, which handles the communication part, including all things VoIP
3. Data Channel, which enables sending any arbitrary data direct between peers/browsers

Ignoring the Peer Connection for a second, there’s a lot that can be done with the rest of the APIs that WebRTC has to offer. There are many uses for the Data Channel already, but there’s also a lot to be achieved with Get User Media alone. Here are two:

1. MailChimp. They just use it to take your photo when you build your profile
2. FreeTuner. An online guitar tuner

None of these even deal with communications, but they were impossible to develop without WebRTC. It would be nice to see more uses of WebRTC beyond yet-another-way-to-make-a-video-call-and-kill-skype-or-webex.

There’s a huge fight about the video MTI codec. That’s the mandatory to implement codec in WebRTC. Is it going to be VP8 or H.264?

The thing is – not everyone cares. If I have a point-to-point video calling service, and that’s all I need from WebRTC:

• I don’t need to record anything
• I don’t need or want to connect to external video systems
• I don’t need to handle multipoint
• I am not trying to broadcast the session

Just a pure video call between two peers.

All I need is for the browsers to decide which one codec they all support. Be it H.264, VP8 or whatever else they decide to use.

If you ask me, this is going to be most of the use cases out there.

As long as there’s an agreement on at least one video codec that all browsers use, many of the vendors just don’t care about the exact selection.

We’ve been talking about WebRTC for two years now, but the truth of the matter is that the standard isn’t closed yet – there’s no specification – no RFC with a number – just a bunch of draft documents.

That said, there are around 350 different vendors and projects that I am now monitoring – all using WebRTC. For a non-standard, that’s quite a lot.

It means several things:

1. Don’t wait for it to stabilize. You’ll be left behind
2. Prepare for surprises. Your solution might break with the next browser version release (every 2-3 months). You will need to make changes in your code. Deal with different API naming and behaviors. Guess what? That’s how web developers have been working for years with new technologies. For them, WebRTC isn’t an exception
3. It will require organizational and procedural changes within your organization

You can treat this as a challenge, or you can look at it as an opportunity to improve. Your choice.

WebRTC isn’t perfect.

It isn’t implemented on IE or Safari.

It behaves differently between Chrome and Firefox.

It has no video codec decision yet.

It has this ugly thing called SDP that everyone loves to hate and use it anyway.

It doesn’t really work on mobile unless you make a real effort.

There’s no good server side solution from Google for all of us to use for free in our services.

All that is true.

But it is also the best solution out there by far if you want to start building things. Use it, and instead of complaining, go find your own solutions and sweat a little.

-

Want to learn more about WebRTC? I have just the report for you: WebRTC for Business People

The post 5 Things Everyone Should Know About WebRTC appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

NASA sure knows how to capture the endless beauty of real space. And on Sunday, the space agency decided to connect some of that epic reality with one of the films nominated for this year's Academy Awards

Hours before the ceremony, NASA tweeted out a couple of its #RealGravity images from life in space, as a way of helping the public connect its real work with the fictional images portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film, Gravity.

Tonight, #Gravity is up for awards at the #Oscars2014 & we're sharing #RealGravity images from real life in spacepic.twitter.com/4Dp6AlBB4s

— NASA (@NASA) March 2, 2014 Read more...

More about Space, Nasa, Film, Us, and Watercooler

The Second City will never forget one of its most accomplished alumni — Harold Ramis. The improv and sketch comedy theatre has release a moving tribute video to Ramis, who passed away Feb. 24th.

Ramis gained fame for writing and starring in some of the most recognizable comedies of the 1980s and 90s, including Ghostbusters, Caddyshack and Groundhog Day. Second City decided to remember Ramis in his early days, reflecting on his fondest memories of performing on stage with other comedy legends like John Belushi and Bill Murray

More about Video, Viral Videos, Film, Watercooler, and Videos

SaaS pioneer Salesforce.com posted a GAAP loss of $116.6 million or 19 cents a share for its fourth quarter ending January 31. That’s compared to a loss of $20.8 million or 4 cents a share this time last year. And Graham Smith, who has been CFO of the San Francisco–based company for six years, will resign in March, 2015.

Salesforce.com launched 15 years ago to focus on sales force automation and customer relationship management delivered from its servers, as opposed to running on customer premises. But in recent years the company has broadened its target market, spending billions of dollars to acquire companies like ExactTarget, Buddy Media, and others in marketing automation and social media analytics.

In those areas, Salesforce.com is locked in an arms race with Oracle, which has been on a buying binge of its own — acquiring Eloqua for $871 million in late 2012 and BlueKai just this week.

Profitability, in part because of its acquisitions, has proven elusive for Salesforce.com, which has posted a GAAP profit in only a few quarters of its existence.

But Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund (who rates the company a buy) sees a silver lining. In a research note about the earnings results, he wrote:

“Like most SaaS companies, Salesforce continues to invest aggressively in driving new business, but unlike some of the smaller companies is profitable on a non-GAAP basis and cash flow positive. Non-GAAP EPS of $0.07 per share was essentially in line with the Street at $0.06.”

He and other observers said the addition of former Oracle North America sales chief Keith Block will drive more and bigger enterprise deals to Salesforce.com.

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Google has finally taken steps to super-charge its Hangouts app with new features, catching up with many of the messaging apps out there that have added a ton of features including stickers.

A bunch of rich emoticon-like stickers have landed on Google Hangouts for iOS in a new update rolled out today. What’s more, Google has also introduced Vine-like short video messages which you can send to your friends in place of photos, for example. You get to record videos up to 10 seconds long and send them to your friends, after which they will play in a loop automatically within your chat.

The new version of Hangouts for iOS also features location sharing now, and is optimized for the iPad, thus including picture-in-picture video calling and a two-pane conversation view.

Google has already relaxed Android settings to enable users to replace the central SMS system with Hangouts, but its move to introduce new features — even on iOS — could appeal to more users.

We previously noted given the importance of messaging services in the mobile ecosystem now, considering the $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, Google could consider super-charging its Hangouts app. This could include tighter synergies between its mobile apps and Hangouts, or the addition of games, stickers and other services that are proving popular in Asia with the likes of Line and WeChat.

➤ Google Hangouts: iOS

Read – After missing out on WhatsApp, what does Google do next?

Headline image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Savant, a home automation company for the high end customer, has decided to come down-market a bit with a starter-package home hub and software combo that allows people to automate their living environment for $1,599. The new product revolves around a Linux-based home server that acts as a control for lights, sound system and whatever else you have as part of your Savant system. The hub and controller costs $799.00 and the attendant accessories adds to the overall price.

That’s pricey, although I’ve easily put that amount of money into my own hodgepodge of a setup. The buyer of the entry-level Savant systems gets a host, the Linux brain running the software; a controller with radios and ports for operating connected devices and a self-configuring Wi-Fi universal remote. The challenge is that you need one controller for each room you want to automate, so it can add up.

I’ve covered plenty of sensor and hub products that are hoping to let people automate their homes, but so far I’ve steered clear of the high-end of the market. Yet readers are clearly interested in Savant, judging by their feedback on some of my podcasts and stories. Plus on a podcast in December with Via, a company that installs technology into the homes of the “rich and famous,” my guest compared it to the Apple of home automation. Check out the home energy monitoring UI above or the Blu-Ray controls below.

He isn’t wrong. The high-end version of Savant’s products uses a Mac Mini that runs the Savant’s software. It’s integrated so that any Apple product also runs as the control for the system; the system boasts wall-mounted iPods and iPads as controllers. So in a way, Savant is Apple’s home automation play, just done without Apple’s involvement. But the new product is not an Apple-related product.

The Apple guts run the Savant Pro lineup while a Linux machine will lie at the heart of the new, lower-cost Smart Series. Both systems are available through a series of dealers as opposed to something you might buy at a mass market retailer or on Kickstarter. The dealers do all the hard programming I’m currently struggling with on my own DIY systems. Yet, even as Savant moves slightly down market, I expect the creators of other home hubs to get more aggressive about establishing relationships with integrators and head up.

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When Stephen Baldwin sued fellow actor Kevin Costner in 2012 over a business deal gone sour, lawyers demanded that Costner turn over his phone for a forensic exam. The phone sweep turned up old text messages that Baldwin’s lawyers put before a jury to claim that Costner knew more than he said he did.

The text messages failed to trip up Costner and the jury rejected Baldwin’s claims, but other defendants haven’t been as fortunate when it comes to mobile phone evidence. According to legal forensic experts, phones these days have replaced computers as the most important source of digital evidence — evidence that can nearly impossible to erase for good.

“The smoking gun is on the cell phone”

In the legal process known as discovery, people identify and turn over documents the other side thinks will help their case. This has normally meant turning over filing cabinets and bankers boxes, but today discovery is more likely to involve laptops, email servers and mobile phones.

Typically, lawyers will ask people to surrender their phones for a few hours to a firm that specializes in storing and scouring digital documents. Once the sweep is complete, the phones (and other electronic devices) are returned to the owners, leaving the lawyers to pick through the copied set of phone files in search of a bombshell. Sometimes they find one.

“A lot of the time, the smoking gun is on the cell phone because people are a lot more liberal when texting than on a corporate computer. They’re a lot more off-color when texting,” says Clint Shirley, a partner at New Orleans e-discovery firm Clarity Litigation. He says that at least half of the company’s work involves phones rather than computers.

According to Shirley, mobile phones are so significant not only because people are less discreet on their phones, but also because phones can store far more information than they could a few years ago. The result is that clues from phones, including texts and photos, can provide damning evidence in their own right, or else contribute to a story along with information gleaned from computers and offline sources.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not divorce cases where mobile phones are playing the biggest role. Instead, says Shirley, most of his forensic work comes from corporate litigation or from personal injury cases where information on a person’s phone reveals that they are lying about their condition.

Deleted but not gone

The prospect of lawyers coming to sweep your phone begs the question: Why not simply delete everything incriminating before they arrive? There are two reasons this could be a poor idea. First, it’s probably illegal because, under the discovery process, courts typically order both sides to preserve all relevant evidence.

“People have shredded documents since the dawn of time, but an erased cell phone is tampering evidence,” says Shirley, explaining that it’s become easier to detect attempts to evade discovery in the digital age.

The second reason is technical. Namely, deleting those damning texts or emails doesn’t mean the firms sweeping the phone won’t find them all the same.

“There have been cases where I’ve recovered 30,000 text messages and 50,000 emails on one phone,” says Lars Daniel, an examiner at Guardian Digital Forensics, who has testified as an expert witness in hundreds of court cases. He explained that simply deleting a text message or email doesn’t destroy it. Instead, other versions of the data remain stored within deeper layers of the phone. Recovering such data — along with things like a phone’s browser history or Dropbox links — often provides incriminating evidence.

There appears to be one way, however, that users can effectively destroy all data on their phone: Telling the device to perform a factory reset. Doing so wipes out the device’s existing encryption key, meaning that even if a file has survived, the phone will no longer be able to read it. Both Daniel and Shirley said that, in the case of iPhones, they have been unable to recover data purged by a factory reset (they did not refer to Android devices but the process would appear to be the same).

A factory reset will purge data but investigators still can, however, determine the date of the reset — a potentially incriminating piece of evidence in and of itself. And in many cases, the data still won’t be gone entirely — many mobile phone users will have synced the phone data to a computer or to a backup service like iCloud, where it can easily be retrieved.

Even “disappearing” apps don’t vanish

The popularity of vanishing message apps like Snapchat has soared in recent years. Snapchat, for instance, lets you send a text or a photo that disappears from the recipient’s phone a few seconds after they open it.

While the rise of vanishing messages may reflect a social desire for ephemeral communication, they can also serve a more pragmatic purpose: keeping a lid on things. The target market for a new app called Confide, for instance, is executives who want to discuss sensitive issues without leaving a paper (or digital) trail. Like Snapchat, messages from Confide disappear as soon as they’re read.

But while the idea of “disappearing” messages may appeal to those who want to keep their communications out of court, it turns out that these messages can also be retrieved.

According to Clint Shirley, Guardian Digital Forensics has routinely recovered Snapchat messages from a variety of digital devices, including iPads, and doing so isn’t difficult. (He was unfamiliar with the Confide app so it’s unclear if messages can also be retrieved from that or other disappearing message apps).

This reinforces the idea that nearly every communication on a mobile phone is permanent and that — short of resets or throwing it in the river — there is little a person can do to keep its contents out of court.

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The $249 Samsung Chromebook that’s been around since October 2012 is due for a refresh, and it looks as if it will come in the form of two new Chromebooks. OMG Chrome noticed that B&H Photo started taking pre-orders for the new devices this past weekend. They’re $299 and $399, depending on the model.

There’s little information to go on, but it appears that the $299 version will replace the current $249 model. The product listing mentions Exynos, which is the name for Samsung’s own ARM-based processor. Samsung uses an Exynos in its current Chromebook and the HP Chromebook 11 uses the same chip, which generally powers smartphones and a few Samsung tablets. The listing says “4-16 GB,” which I take to mean 4 GB of memory and 16 GB of internal storage. The former would be a nice boost over the more common 2 GB memory configuration found on many of today’s Chromebooks.

The second model doesn’t mention Exynos at all; I’d interpret that to mean it will use a Haswell-based Intel chip, just like the latest batch of Chromebooks. Again, the listing says 4 GB, which is likely the amount of memory. With that configuration, the device should perform admirably — likely twice as fast as the cheaper model. B&H’s website says this will be a 13.3-inch Chromebook, so it would likely compete with and compare best to Toshiba’s Chromebook, which is also a 13-inch device.

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Don’t look now but Google’s at it again.

The company has always wanted to index the world’s information and its latest effort, dubbed Project Tango, takes that mantra and applies it specifically to the world around you. Yes, you. And me. And everyone else in the world too if Project Tango expands beyond a startup project.

Google’ Advanced Technology & Projects group announced Project Tango on Thursday and says the goal “is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.” That can many so many things but at a high level, it essentially means adding more smarts to a phone so that it can “see” the world and understand how to move through and interact with objects around you. The initial device will be powered by the Movidius’ Myriad 1 vision processor platform.

Think of Project Tango like Microsoft’s Kinect being put inside a smartphone.

That’s pretty much what Google has done with its developer handset, which is limited to 200 units, runs Android and will be distributed to programmers by March 14. Unlike the Kinect, which is generally a non-mobile device — it does tilt and swivel, but senses user movements; not its own — Project Tango can measure how it moves around in your hand or pocket.

Confused? Perhaps this video explanation will help demonstrate the 3D senses found in Project Tango:

There’s definitely a VR or virtual reality aspect to Project Tango. Once a device knows everything about the space around it, you could, for example, superimpose other backgrounds or objects on top of others for a game. Or third parties and businesses could push virtual objects, ads or specials as you pass by a shop. Google smartly hasn’t defined a wide range of specific uses because quite honestly, that would simply limit the potential of Project Tango.

Instead, Google is providing the toolset and opening the door to opportunity:

“What if you never found yourself lost in a new building again?  What if directions to a new location didn’t stop at the street address? Imagine playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character. Imagine competing against a friend for control over physical space with your own miniature army.”

In fact, I see Tango as a better VR option than Google Glass. Glass excels at providing useful, contextual information outside your field of vision while Tango is likely better suited for your full attention. Or the attention of others; and by others, I mean robots.

The consumer robotics industry could see the biggest benefit from Tango than any other space if it the technology works and is cheap enough. After all, you can’t have robots with mobility if they can’t get around in a world they can’t see or understand.

I’ve said before that an internet connection paired with the right sensors from an Android device could be a powerful combination for robotics. Adding sense and meaningful awareness to surroundings would make that package even better.

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Microsoft

Imagine you’re Satya Nadella.

You’ve just taken the helm of the world’s largest software provider, but the company faces threats from almost every direction. What’s your biggest problem? What must you do, above all else?

Your first problem is not R&D. Microsoft’s R&D is in comparatively good shape — nothing like the starving, demoralized organization Meg Whitman faced when she took the reins at Hewlett-Packard, and has been fighting to reinvigorate since. Microsoft spends $10 billion annually in R&D, more even than Google.

Organic innovation isn’t dead, either, despite what many say. Take Microsoft’s announcement of a smart contact lens, which predated Google’s announcement of the same by a full two years.

What about “the cloud”? Surely this is it: When you’re a legacy enterprise vendor, the cloud is always the source of — and solution to — every problem. The trouble with the cloud, at least in its PaaS/IaaS embodiment, is that it’s driving otherwise sane companies to throw enormous capital into a fast-commoditizing business. This cloud is a race to the price bottom that Amazon has already won.

But if Microsoft’s chief need isn’t bigger R&D, or more drastic innovation, or a broader cloud, then what is it?

Developers.

That word doesn’t appear in Nadella’s introductory letter to the company, but it should. The largest threat facing Microsoft is its irrelevance to new generations of developers, particularly mobile developers. And the company’s first-order need is for a true, modern developer ecosystem.

The fact remains that it was the iPhone, much more than any cloud, that blew the Wintel world to smithereens. With their mobile devices and App Store, Apple has set the model for the modern developer ecosystem. Apple has paid out more than $10 billion to developers via the App Store — half of it within the last year alone.

Of course, the relationship has been more than mutually beneficial. Apple now boasts a huge, diverse ecosystem of developers, innovating at a pace that no R&D org can match, driving an ever-exploding array of new capabilities to the company’s flagship platform. Google was quick to catch on, encouraging its own rival ecosystem with an open source alternative, and by standing up Google Play.

But Microsoft …?

The irony is that behind initiatives like MSDN, Microsoft was one of the original creators of great developer ecosystems. It was the mutual embrace between Microsoft and devs that helped drive the company’s software onto so many machines, and then keep it there.

Unfortunately — predictably — that monopoly position turned Microsoft into a bully. The company began to view openness and playing well with others as traits for also-rans that couldn’t afford to do otherwise. This attitude was perfectly mirrored in Steve Ballmer, a domineering salesman who had grown up in the desktop world that Microsoft owned.

With the appointment of Nadella, the company seems finally to be acknowledging how dead and buried that old world is. This is the man who used a Mac — a Mac — onstage at Build. His aim? To show how Azure could be used to create iOS apps. (In the same appearance, he demonstrated how Google Chrome could be set as the default browser for websites built with Microsoft tools.)

It doesn’t hurt, either, that Nadella is an engineer, giving him the advantage of being “one of us.” Even if Ballmer had wanted to throw open the door to non-Microsoft talents, what independent developer would have trusted him?

Not that convincing devs will be easy for Nadella. In an Appcelerator survey of nearly 7,000 mobile developers, conducted jointly with IDC, we see that Microsoft has spent the last three years stuck in neutral for developer interest. And despite Nadella’s stewardship, even the plaudits for Azure’s ease of use come mainly from Microsoft-centric shops. If you’re a developer building apps in JavaScript, Java or Objective-C, Azure isn’t likely to be a destination for cloud services.

For Nadella to turn Microsoft’s fortunes, he’ll have to do what would have been unthinkable under Ballmer: Make non-Microsoft technology stacks and languages into first-class citizens, coequal with every Microsoft offering. In this, it may prove easier to change the technologies than the perceptions. But it’s here that Satya Nadella gives Microsoft its best chance.

Jeff Haynie is CEO of Appcelerator, the leading mobile enterprise platform company. Follow him on Twitter at @jhaynie.

IBM, in the midst of its massive transformation from a hardware-and-software-and-services company to a cloud-and-services company, is cutting jobs worldwide. The goal, besides remaking the 103-year-old tech giant into a modern IT leader that can take on Amazon Web Services and a flock of younger tech vendors, is to deliver on the promise to deliver $20 (non-GAAP) earnings per share by the end of 2015. Accomplishing that goal would be quite the feat, given the past few quarters of disappointing performance.

For IBM’s fourth quarter ending December 31, earnings — excluding some items — hit $6.13 per share, exceeding estimates of $6.00, according to Bloomberg. The trouble lay in revenue, which dipped for the seventh consecutive quarter — to $27.7 billion, missing estimates of $28.3 billion.

As for the job cuts, it’s not as if IBM didn’t warn us. On last month’s Q4 earnings call, CFO Martin Shroeter said IBM had reserved $1 billion to cover workforce reductions. Estimating that each person laid off costs IBM about $70,000, Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi told USA Today the company could cut 10,000 to 15,000 workers out of a total headcount of about 400,000.

Lee Conrad, a  former IBMer who is now the national coordinator of Alliance@IBM, a watchdog group affiliated with a union of IBM workers, said he is hearing of job cuts in several countries, the largest seemingly in India. “Reports from angry IBM India workers started flooding into the Alliance website 3 days ago,” he said via email on Thursday. “Hardest hit was the Systems Technology Group. Today we are hearing of job cuts in IBM India Software Group.”

The Alliance’s latest, admittedly incomplete list includes 1,500 jobs cut in Brazil, 600 in Argentina, 480 in France, 430 in Italy, 240 in the Netherlands and 105 in Belgium. Cuts in European countries must be negotiated, so the numbers could change, Conrad said.

Earlier this month, the company announced the sale of its X86 server business to Lenovo, and some of the latest job cuts in India and elsewhere relate to that move. The company is also reportedly looking to sell off its SDN and chip business.

“It’s important to look at what IBM is doing holistically. It’s jettisoning anything that’s not cloud or Internet of Things,”  said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. And yes, he acknowledged, the company needs to hit that magical $20 EPS number as well.

I’ve reached out to IBM for comment and will update this report as needed. An IBM spokesman reaffirmed what IBM said it in it’s earnings call — that

“IBM continues to rebalance its workforce to meet the changing requirements of its clients …. and positioning itself to lead in areas such as Cloud, Analytics and Cognitive Computing and investing in these priority areas.”

IBM’s former CEO Sam Palmisano delivered that $20-per-share pledge in May of 2010 and now it’s up to his successor, Ginni Rometty, to deliver on it. All I can say is: Poor Ginni.

Note: this story was updated at 7:25 a.m. and again at 8:22 a.m. PST February 14 with analyst comment and IBM comments.

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