Davemichels

You can’t say you didn’t see this one coming, but the American Civil Liberties Union has just sued James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, arguing that the recently disclosed surveillance programs tracking the phone and Internet use of American citizens violate the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The suit, filed in a federal court in New York, also names Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency. (Here’s a PDF copy of the original complaint.)

“The practice is akin to snatching every American’s address book — with annotations detailing whom we spoke to, when we talked, for how long, and from where,” the opening section of the complaint reads. “It gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations.”

The ACLU points out that, in a case last year, a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court supported the idea that collecting troves of seemingly innocuous information on people — in this case, data collected from GPS trackers planted by police — amounts to a pretty clear violation of someone’s rights under the Fourth Amendment. In that case, the court found that a GPS tracker placed on someone’s car by police and used to track his movements for a month, qualifies as an unreasonable search. The programs disclosed in recent days are “precisely that kind of unreasonable incursion into Americans’ private lives,” the ACLU said in a statement.

Google’s Chrome browser can already access local media files and soon that will include your iTunes library. Google’s François Beaufort, who keeps an eye on the Chromium project, noted the change on Monday. The support would allow browser-based access to local iTunes music and possibly spur some Chrome browser extensions for music playback.

Chrome currently accesses local media, which includes video, music and still images, through its mediaGalleries API. By sifting through the latest Chromium code, Beaufort caught mention of iTunes being added to the default destinations that the API has access to.

In addition to the Chrome browser, Chrome apps could take advantage of the app, so a standalone music player for an iTunes library can be built. That won’t help on Chrome OS devices as iTunes can’t be installed on them but Windows and Mac owners that have Chrome installed could take advantage of the new feature.

Not everyone likes to keep their music files in iTunes, however, even if the songs are purchased from Apple’s store. I routinely make duplicate copies of my music files, for example, using both Google Music and Amazon’s MP3 service. Not only do I then have backup copies, but I can listen to the music on a wide variety of smartphones and tablets, regardless of platform. It would be great to see a developer take the new Chrome mediaGalleries API one step further and create a browser based service to move the files through the cloud. Currently, uploading music to Google or Amazon requires a software installation.

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When you enjoy a first-mover advantage in a new market, as Amazon has for the last seven years in public cloud, you get to dictate the terms of the initial conversation — think of Henry Ford: “You can have any color, so long as it’s black.” And instead of challenging Amazon to stick to the fundamentals of flexibility that supposedly necessitated the public cloud in the first place, companies like Joyent are following along. That doesn’t mean we all have to keep listening, though.

Why cloud in the first place, anyway? Remember this?

This is the diagram that justified public cloud, showing how in a classic on-premise solution you were forced into capital expense based on future capacity predictions. With cloud, we were told, you don’t have to make predictions that are ultimately doomed to failure, causing either an overcapacity spending nightmare or an under-capacity business-limiting situation. It’s supposed to be about flexibility.

At least, until it’s inconvenient for Amazon to be flexible.

The deal you really make with Amazon

When you sign up for AWS, the deal you’re really making is that you’ll agree the following:

• I’ll let you dictate to me what sizes my virtual machines (VMs) can be. Instead of letting me pick how many CPU cores and how much RAM I need for my workload, I’ll choose from among the 18 sizes you pick for me, and pay for resources I don’t need. After all, those cookie-cutter sizes make the multi-tenancy density easier and more profitable for you — so I’ll do my part by paying for things I won’t use.
• I can’t possibly expect consistent performance from my VMs. Is that fair to you, really? Instead of holding you accountable for any quality, I’ll design around it with a deployment strategy that launches five VMs, runs performance benchmarks on each, and keeps the one good one.
• If I need to scale, I’ll do so horizontally. Why even consider a vertical scaling option? All my apps were designed with an on-premise solution in mind where we could add memory whenever we wanted to. I’m sure that running something intended for a single machine will run on multiple VMs just fine as my demand grows. What could possibly go wrong?
• To get the best pricing, I’ll predict how much resource I expect to need and pay you a large upfront fee. I don’t even have to recoup all of it if my predictions were wrong. I’d just like to reserve that price for resources I might not use.

Wait a minute, what about that last one? Isn’t cloud supposed to be flexible resources on-demand instead of making a prediction on capacity need that will ultimately be incorrect? So, how come the best AWS pricing comes with that exact same model?

Don’t ask Joyent; it just did the same exact thing.

A hypnotized market

The conversation around public cloud is starting to resemble “Amazing Alexander,” that old Jon Lovitz “SNL” skit about the hypnotist with a Broadway show — where too many people keep repeating the same lines Amazon feeds them over and over again. Amazon’s business model is to buy commodity hardware at insane volume direct from manufacturers, and then sell a notion of flexibility that isn’t what it could be. It’s better than the old on-premise world, but when you overhear someone at a trade show debating the merits of an m1.xlarge versus a m2.xlarge versus m2.2xlarge, instead of just how many CPU cores and how much RAM they actually need, there’s room for improvement.

So when Joyent announced support for reserved pricing in a model very similar to what Amazon is doing, it not only started chasing a competitor whose economies of scale it probably can’t match, it sent a dangerous signal to the marketplace that the status quo is just fine.

It isn’t.

Worldwide IT spend is estimated to be around $4 trillion, and public cloud spend only $4 billion. What are the 99.9 percent waiting for? Something better.

Price/Performance > Price

There’s growing sentiment that price/performance should be a part of the purchase decision. Value with anything, including public cloud, is derived from a combination of factors, and getting started with a performance characterization of public cloud providers has never been easier. Third-party cloud benchmarking and performance reports, like those available from Cloud Spectator, can provide a guide for narrowing choices among IaaS vendors before running your own application-specific tests. Only then, and when considering flexibility factors, can you truly judge the total cost of ownership for a cloud solution.

The bottom line is that Amazon got to define the way the market things about public cloud functionality by going first — but that doesn’t mean it gets to own the definition in perpetuity. As Rackspace CEO Lew Moorman recently said, “When public cloud came out and you could suddenly provision a server in a minute when it used to take three months, those were intoxicating advances … you get drunk on them, but when things settle in there are tradeoffs.” As a consumer, you owe it to yourself to explore what those trade-offs are and exactly which choices Amazon is not providing.

After a 19-year career with HP that included a six-year stint running Enterprise Architecture for HP.com, as well as being a founding member of HP’s public cloud efforts, Pete Johnson joined ProfitBricks in February 2013 as Senior Director of Cloud Platform Evangelism. @nerdguru on Twitter, Pete is active in social media, trade shows, and meetups to raise awareness of Cloud Computing 2.0.

Comcast has a clever new scheme to dramatically expand the coverage of public Wi-Fi Internet access. So far so good.

The controversial part? Comcast's plan - announced on Monday - leverages its customers' home Wi-Fi routers to make the connections available.

A Good Idea On Paper

On paper, Comcast's Neighborhood Hotspots sound like a pretty good idea: The new Wi-Fi network, which will broadcast with the "xfinitywifi" network ID (SSID), piggybacks a separate Wi-Fi signal on the Xfinity customers' home routers to - keeping things separate from the Wi-Fi and wired network that belongs to the customer.

Existing Xfinity customers can log into the public network with their Xfinity account information. Non-Xfinity users will be able to log into the network as a guest, receiving two free one-hour Wi-Fi sessions per month. Or they can choose from one of three options to pay by the hour, day or week.

In densly populated areas, this bifucated system would effectively create a huge Wi-Fi cloud through which logged-in users could get net access using Wi-Fi rather than cellular signals. Obviously, coverage would be spotty in sparsely settled areas, or in markets where Comcast does have a large presence as an Internet provider.

(By the way, some think that Google plans a very similar public Wi-Fi network via Google Fiber.)

But even then, at least visitors to an Xfinity user's home would be able to use the public Wi-Fi network instead of having to request the Wi-Fi passcode. Sharing passcodes can lead to awkward situations, with guests able to download or pirate content with which the account holder might not want to be associated. (Well-intentioned guests might even try to download "anti-virus" spyware to protect your Linux servers... true story.)

Who Is Responsible?

There is no monetary cost of the service to Xfinity customers, but it would seem to place some additional burdens on customers.

First, there's the bandwidth question of bandwidth. While the dual signals should not interfere with each other from device to router and home users won't have to pay for bandwidth that visitors use, what will happen to your streaming episodes of Burn Notice if someone happens to be standing outside watching a Game of Thrones bootleg on their phone?

That should not be an issue, says Charlie Douglas, Senior Director of Corporate Communications at Comcast. "Typically, there should be minimal impact to the customer’s private home Wi-Fi network’s speed or experience due to the neighborhood Wi-Fi hotspot in the home," Douglas explained in an email. And, if there is a problem, home users can always opt out and disable the public Wi-Fi feature.

That, in turn, brings up liability - if tracking for illicit downloads is done via IP address, then at some point Comcast would have to step into the process and report on exactly which user was using which network at any given access point.

According to Douglas, that kind of granularity is actually a feature. "Account holders are only responsible for the content that flows over their own Wi-Fi hotspot, not the neighborhood hotspot," he explained. "Having two Wi-Fi signals is actually safer for customers because they won't have to share their private network or passwords."

Comcast is the nation’s largest Internet service provider, with nearly 20 million customers. It has been testing the neighborhood hotspot concept since last year in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Northern Virginia and the Washington, D.C. area. 

The implementation of this new neighborhood Wi-Fi system seems to have a number of potential benefits. Still, home users might be less than thrilled to have people parked outside their houses just to suck up Wi-Fi, no matter who is paying for it.

 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Signaling? Stardandizing it? For what purpose exactly?

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

I used to work in the signaling business. Developing protocol stacks, marketing them – explaining their value to customers. That need to follow a certain spec. To implement a well-known set of features. To follow industry use cases.

Those days are long gone.

You can look at 2013 as the year signaling died.

It was a slow death, so there’s no exact date, but I think we’re there.

The notions of interconnectivity, federation and interoperability were used to be important. They were laws of nature. Things you just had to have in a VoIP product. And now? They are tools to be used when needed, and they are either needed by the architects, to tap a specific ecosystems of products and developers or by business people, deciding how to wield them in the battlefield.

The decision not to add signaling to WebRTC might have been an innocent one – I can envision engineers sitting around a table in a Google facility some two years ago, having an interesting conversation:

“Guys, let’s add SIP to what we’re doing with WebRTC”

“But we don’t have anything we developed. We will need to use some of that open source stuff”

“And besides – why not pack XMPP with it? Our own GTalk uses XMPP”

“Go for it. Let’s do XMPP. We’ve got that libjingle lying around here somewhere”

“Never did like it, and there are other XMPP libraries floating around – you remember the one we used for that project back in the day? It is way better than libjingle”

“Hmm… thinking about it, it doesn’t seem like we’re ready for signaling. And besides, what we’re trying to do is open source a media engine for the web – we already have JavaScript XMPP – no need to package it now – it will just slow us down”

And here we are, sometime later, debating why did they not include signaling – it can be as simple as realities of meeting a deadline, a decision not to decide, or not to fight another religious battle about which protocol to use – or it could have been a guided decision.

It was one of many similar decisions that have been taking place lately.

A few other notable decisions that are killing signaling?

• Apple, selecting SIP for FaceTime; and then including their own proprietary push notifications, not standardizing it, and locking the service down
• The rise of WhatsApp, Line, iMessage and a slew of other IM apps – all with no notion of what exact signaling protocol they use (the fact that I don’t know or care…)
• Tango? Viber? Do they use a proprietary solution or a standardized one? Would that make a real business difference to them?
• Skype… which is now got its connectivity to Lync. Skype – proprietary. Lync – “SIP”ish in nature
• And last, but not least, Google dropping XMPP support from their Hangouts service

Notice a pattern?

Signaling is now a commodity. Something you use as needed. It also means that islands are now the norm for communication services, and openness on the protocol level is the exception.

The post The Death of Signaling as we Know it appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Misplaced luggage is one of the most headache-inducing problems that can befall a weary traveler. Thanks to Airbus, however, tracking down your lost suitcases is about to get a whole lot easier.

European aircraft manufacturer Airbus recently unvealed the "Bag2Go," a so-called "smart bag" complete with GPS, RFID and 2G mobile data capabilities. The Bag2Go can even sync up with your iPhone, letting you track your bag's progress as it's loaded onto your flight.

The best part? Should your Bag2Go get somehow misplaced, the tracking tech makes it easy for it to be located. Read more...

More about Travel, Lifestyle, and Travel Leisure

It was almost five years ago when I sat down with Jeff Lawson to talk about his vision for Twilio, and how he wanted to offer a way for all app developers to embed voice into their applications. His pitch at the time was simple and barebones, but his ambition wasn’t. Hard work and fortuitous timing turned that simple little pitch into a company that is becoming a core part of the post-broadband communication network.

It is one of the reasons why the company raised a whopping $70 million in new funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures, who co-led the most recent round of financing. The company has so far raised a total of $102.7 million in funding in three rounds. Its early backers include Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Founders Fund, Manu Kumar, and Union Square Ventures. That is quite something for a company that got turned down by twenty odd investors before the first dollars rolled into the bank account.

My sources tell me the company — while still unprofitable — is growing at break-neck speed and is on track to do $50 million in 2013 revenues.  While it doesn’t have profit margins that are as rich as classic software-as-a-service companies, it still has a gross margin in excess of 45 percent. This scorching growth is one of the reasons why the company is now valued at close to $500 million.

An initial public offering is a distinct possibility, although I also wonder if Amazon will bring Jeff (who in a past life was chief technology officer of StubHub) back home by buying this company. In a nutshell, Twilio is a cloud-based communications platform that allows app developers to add voice and texting capabilities to their applications by including a few lines of code.

We, in Silicon Valley, collectively celebrate the fast and the furious, the pretty and the sexy, the nouveau. Somehow we have lost appreciation for the simple fact that it takes (what seems like a lifetime of) agony, sacrifice and ingenuity to build something of lasting value. And that is the reason I wanted to tell the story of Jeff is because he has done what very few founders get to achieve — to build what it seems is a business that has stayed true to its roots and succeeded by helping others succeed.

The Telecom Disruptor

I was introduced to Lawson by McClure, who had been helping me in the early days of GigaOM and started jumping up and down, insisting I meet Jeff. So, I did. And as Jeff sat next to me in my favorite Starbucks, giving me the pitch, I couldn’t help but think to myself: Twilio looks like a dozen odd startups, that were providing voice APIs and betting on telecom minutes arbitrage.

As someone who had been following voice-over-the-internet and telecom for over a decade, I knew it was a sucker’s game and it would take a lot more than just founder-bluster to build a real business. I guess that skepticism is a natural byproduct of watching an industry chase pennies.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone: Lawson met a total of twenty angels and VCs and they all were not keen on his company. He didn’t care and just launched the product right after the 2008 financial crisis had hit. Of course, what I had missed was that this was a non-telecom guy who was  fed up with the telecom industry’s practices.

In his previous life, he had wanted to find a simple way to add communications into his businesses’ work flow much like he would add code to his software. Instead he was left dealing with expensive contracts and massive gear, which he didn’t need. He and his two co-founders (Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis), essentially set-out to replace that archaic architecture. They saw what Amazon was doing with its cloud platform, and they wanted to do the same for communication. ”The company started to meet our own needs,” said Lawson, a 35-year-old quirky and charming engineer from Michigan.

Hackathons Rule

Despite strong competition from more entrenched companies, Twilio kept plugging along. They stayed hyper-focused on developers. Quite a few of my friends were playing around with Twilio and built very basic apps on it. Others hacked together personal messaging systems. Some wanted to make voice-to-blog plugins. Twilio, it seemed, had found its people. We stayed in touch and we often wrote about this tiny company that kept beating the odds.

Our stories dovetailed again when they moved into the first GigaOM office on Pier 38, just after we moved out. That office had a lot of good karma (if not enough heat). It wasn’t until they offered an easy way to integrate SMS into their apps that their star zoomed.

Jeff jokes that while Amazon didn’t really have to work at finding their customers, Twilio had to seek out its potential customers. Enter, Hackathons!  ”The art of creating software and building new things was starting to get celebrated at these hackathons,” Lawson said. Twilio embraced the hackathons with gusto and became an active participant — where there was a hackathon, there was Twilio. I remember seeing Danielle Morrill, one of the early Twilio employees pretty much at every hackathon I attended — carrying the proverbial company flag.

My colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote a prescient piece and observed:

…future isn’t voice, but apps that provide the context for the best means for communication. It may be voice, it may be video or it may be text, but Lawson (while not committing to anything beyond expressing interest in video) expects Twilio to be there on the back end enabling developers to offer communication with a minimum of fuss.

Over a period of time, Twilio turned their voice-inside-apps service into a platform and the apps based on that platform started to grow big, some almost overnight. One of them, GroupMe was acquired by Skype for $85 million. Another similar app, Beluga was snapped up by Facebook. Just as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was making it dead simple for startups to get started, Twilio was making it easy to add communications capabilities.

The success of GroupMe was the aspirational story that helped cement Twilio’s story into the app ecosystem. I guess, when you look back, the rise of iPhone app economy was the best thing that happened to Twilio, which saw a big boom in the number of developers using its messaging and voice platform. ”I see API replacing the dial tone,” says Lawson, who is convinced that the future of communications is through application interfaces.

In a blog post announcing the funding, one of Twilio’s new investors, Scott Raney, wrote:

Twilio is also a part of a broader trend towards services and APIs catering directly to developers.  More and more, developers are making critical decisions regarding the nature of the products they are building. Like Redpoint’s earlier investments in Heroku and Stripe, Twilio is at the forefront of this movement.

Since the heady days of Beluga and GroupMe, others have embraced Twilio and started to build their businesses based on Twilio’s services. I recently came across a company called SendHub, that has built a brian-dead simple phone and messaging system that marries two crucial trends — “bring your own device” and “distributed workforces.”

The premise behind this Silicon Valley company is pretty simple: if there are no desk-phones and employees are spread across the country, how can a PBX system invented for monolithic mid-20th century organizations be useful, regardless of the fact it uses voice-over-the-internet for transporting technologies? How can we think just about voice as a communication tool, when we are texting more, sharing files, doing conference and constantly tapping into the CRM systems. It reminded me of Google Voice, except reinvented for today’s needs.

In the past a similar company would have spent its entire first few years trying to build the network underpinning its business (think Google Voice & RingCentral), but these guys signed up for Twilio (and Amazon) and focused all there resources on building the new communication experience. It has allowed the company to start bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales.

Culture Defines Customer Experience

When I asked Lawson what has made his company work, he pointed to his company’s nine core values and how they add up to creating the best experience – whether it is for customers or for the employees. “Experience is how something makes you feel,” he said. “When you see a U2 concert, that is an experience and has a lasting impression.”Lawson is pretty convinced that Twilio’s model of customer acquisition and keeping them around works, mostly because they are hell bent on creating an awesome experience.

“Telecom services are worse than enterprise software,” he said. The industry wants to conduct a transaction before you as a customer taste any success. “We want you to succeed and then willingly conduct a transaction,” he added. “A transaction before success is stupid.” It is one of the reasons why they only have four-percent annual churn in their customer base.

“This is what creates the long term customer and that is what makes our model work.” In order to create that experience, Twilio has done a few unusual things. For instance, the company expects every employee (even non-technical ones) to create an app based on Twilio and also handle customer service for a few days. “It is because we want everyone to have empathy with our customers’ problems,” Lawson said.

The Evolution of the CEO

A company’s culture is set by its leader and that is why I find Jeff quite fascinating. A brilliant engineer, he has found a way to overcome the challenges of being an engineer-founder. When I asked him what has made him work, Lawson said his attitude has been: to adapt and reinvent. “I think you learn that what worked for past nine months when you were only 10 people doesn’t work when you are 30 people, so you adapt and learn [a] new way,” he said.

To illustrate the point I want to tell the story of the company’s mascot – an Owl. During its early days, the company fell in love with a Reddit meme about drawing an Owl. You draw a circle and figure rest of it out! That is how Lawson sees the company — there are no instructions. Just start, figure the rest of it out, learn and improve. And that is how he sees his job as the CEO.

Today Twilio is 160 people. By the end of the year it will be 200 people, but by then, Lawson said that he will have changed once again as a CEO and have learned to do things differently. “There is a new playbook every 6-to-9 months,” he said. “You just need to know what are non-negotiable values.”

“We are not telecom people and we don’t want to be those guys,” Lawson said. “We are hackers and [are] for the hackers.” That’s non-negotiable.

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Google was supposed to be different. Unlike Microsoft and Apple, which built their empires on proprietary software and associated lock-in, Google has long been all about peace, love and open standards. Recently, however, that has begun to change. Google, long a champion of open standards and "one click away" competition, has started dumping open standards, ostensibly to force fealty to Google products.

New monopoly, same as the old monopoly?

Google's March Away From Open Standards

Google's deviations from open standards have been picking up pace lately. Each of Google's individual steps away from open standards are backed by good reasons, like Google's apparent desire not to defend in court its V8 open video codec and subsequent about-face on H.264. Or Google's shift away from Blink principles with Pepper and PNaCl.

But they represent a troubling trend.

For example, Google recently announced that it was deprecating its support for CalDav, an open standard, in favor of the Google Calendar API because "Most developers’ use cases are handled well by Google Calendar API." All your calendars are belong to us.

Perhaps more troubling, Google also cut its support for XMPP, the open messaging protocol, in an attempt to unify its messaging services. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Parker Higgins writes, such open standards support is critical for ensuring competition on user-facing functionality, rather than lock-in:

Google's earlier full support for XMPP meant that users could chat with people on other instant message services, or even who host their own chat servers. This kind of decentralization is a good thing: it decreases lock-in to any particular service, which in turn lets the services compete on important factors like quality, uptime, or respect for user privacy.

Ironically, Google calls out the importance of such open standards support in its own documentation for the now-deprecated Talk platform, as Higgins highlights: "[Service choice] allows you to choose your service provider based on other more important factors, such as features, quality of service, and price, while still being able to talk to anyone you want."

Of course, there are very good reasons for what Google is doing. As The Verge writes on Google's move away from XMPP, Google's messaging strategy was a mess of different protocols. It needed to simplify things and decided it was cleaner to craft a new standard rather than try to improve an old one. And as Neal Gompa points out, improving the old standard might still annoy users because it would likely create new incompatibilities.

Even so, Bryan Appleyard suggests that Google displays "a sinister impatience with government," generally. In the case of its move away from some key open standards, I suspect it's less a matter of any overt willingness to "be evil" and more with a desire to rid itself of the messiness of committees and consensus that open standards require.

Android All Over Again?

Not that this is particularly new. Google has taken plenty of heat for making Android's code open source without making its development process permeable to outside developers. Doing so, after all, would keep Google from being able to build what it wants, on its terms and schedule.

Stung by the criticism, particularly from Apple's Steve Jobs, then-Android chief Andy Rubin tweeted that availability of the source code was the true definition of open:

the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) October 19, 2010

Developer luminary Joe Hewitt ripped into Rubin's defense, but it ultimately it didn't seem to matter. Android kept chugging away, open or no, with device manufacturers happy to crank out low-cost competitors to Android's iPhone and consumers happy to buy them.

Does Anyone Care?

Consumers don't seem to mind, clicking on an ever-increasing number of Google ads, served up against closed services. Convenience, unfortunately, often trumps all other considerations. 

Like Apple before it, Google clearly wants to create an optimal user experience, even at the expense of proprietary protocols. The problem, just like with Microsoft and Apple before it, is that by embracing closed standards Google threatens to throttle innovation, limiting consumers' upgrade path to the same vendor, year after year. Hopefully we'll be wiser this time, and demand open standards from the company that has generally been so committed to them.

Wishful thinking?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

With Windows 8.1, Microsoft is trying to address some key criticisms of the major overhaul it undertook with Windows 8.

The company has been dribbling out news of its new features, including more personalization, deeply integrated Bing search, and the option to boot straight to a traditional Windows desktop.

Speaking at Computex overnight, Microsoft showed off some of these features, and posted a YouTube video showing the forthcoming operating system in action. It has also said it will release a preview version on June 26 at its Build conference in San Francisco.

The final version will be a free update from Windows 8, and is due out later this year.

Here’s the video:

Carrier clouds should be killing Amazon. They own the networks. They own the billing relationship with business customers. Yet they're struggling to make the slightest dent against the Amazon Web Services behemoth, which Morgan Stanley just pegged to impact 3% to 17% of all IT spending in the next few years.

Is there any reason to expect this to change?

More Than Just Dumb Pipes

For years telcos have looked for ways to maximize the value of their networks, getting away from the characterization that they're merely "dumb pipes." In theory, cloud computing is an ideal way to do this and plays to the carriers strengths: existing billing relationships with businesses that need cloud computing resources and ownership of the networks so as to ensure quality of service. As Alcatel-Lucent has been telling the world since at least 2011, most cloud providers can't promise high service-level guarantees because they rely on others' networks and commodity, failure-prone hardware.

More recently, carriers like AT&T have been talking up the capability to "expose [a carrier's] network and billing capabilities as APIs, letting business customers seamlessly integrate AT&T's capabilities into their own internal apps without extra logins." In order to compete, telecom operators like AT&T have spent $17 billion to build out their cloud technology portfolios, according to IDC, including Verizon's $1.4 billion acquisition of Terremark in 2011 to give it a lead in cloud computing know-how.

The technology is there. The will is there. What seems to be missing for the carriers is a focus on the right customer. 

Overlooking The Developer

At the most basic level, carriers have proved to be terrible marketeers of cloud services. In large part this revolves around the person to whom the carriers market their services: businesses.

After all, the carriers largely ignore the developer, and that's a huge mistake in a market that is driven by developers. As much as carrier clouds may make sense for a business with an existing billing relationship with Verizon or another carrier, it's almost certainly the case that the person actually writing applications for the cloud isn't privy to that billing relationship. Instead, she's the developer down the hall who signs up for AWS because she just wants to get work done as conveniently as possible.

AT&T's Laura Merling gets this, and has been nudging the carrier toward open APIs in a bid to attract developers. It's a good start, but has it come too late?

The Google In The Room

After all, Amazon isn't the only company with developer cred. Google, for example, groks developers. Google I/O was one big geek fest, with the opening keynote lasting hours and bursting with developer love.

Nor is Google's developer outreach merely a matter of marketing. According to one ex-AWS engineer, Google also threatens Amazon because it arguably bests Amazon in compute performance. And while Amazon makes developers happy with consistent price decreases, Google has gone one step further and offered minutely, rather than hourly, rates, which saves developers on downtime. 

Google, then, is a legitimate threat to Amazon. The carriers? Not so much. Not until they stop trying to sell top-down to businesses and instead recognize that the cloud is very much a bottom-up phenomenon, driven by and for developers.

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

TV set-top box maker TiVo Inc. said it will receive a lump-sum payment of $490 million from Google Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. to settle patent litigation with both companies.

However, TiVo shares fell Friday as the settlement amount looks to be well below market expectations.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Twilio, an API maker that bridges the telecom and the developer worlds, has closed a $70 million Series D round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and new investor Redpoint Ventures. Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated.

The company has already racked up some pretty hefty investment rounds, and its most likely next step is an IPO — if it doesn’t get scooped up in acquisition. A Twilio spokesman said that Twilio is weighing all its options, but an IPO seems like the most likely path.

Though it’s a hot company, few people actually get what Twilio does due to the arcane telecom world it travels in. It has basically teased out carrier voice and messaging interfaces all over the world and offered them up to developers as simple APIs.

A few lines of code in an app, and developers can send out text messages and voice calls just like the pros. What’s more, they don’t have to strike individual deals with the hundreds of carriers around the world or integrate separately with each of their communications APIs. It’s a model that global carriers have tried to pursue on their own, but so far they’ve failed miserably.

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WASHINGTON — The Obama administration called government review of complete phone records of U.S. customers a “critical tool” in protecting the public from terrorists.

The information “allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” a senior Obama administration official said Thursday. The official stopped short of confirming the practice.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The National Security Agency might not have the names of Verizon’s wireless customers, but the agency probably can figure out what they’re up to if it’s so inclined. The metadata Verizon has provided the NSA — phone numbers, numbers called, duration of calls, location — is a veritable treasure trove to an organization with the right analytic skills and the right tools. The NSA has both.

There are numerous methods the NSA could use to extract some insights from what must be a mind-blowing number of phone calls and text messages, but graph analysis is likely the king. As we’ve explained numerous times over the past few months, graph analysis is ideal for identifying connections among pieces of data. It’s what powers social graphs, product recommendations and even some fairly complex medical research.

But now it has really come to the fore as a tool for fighting crime (or intruding on civil liberties, however you want to look at it). The NSA is storing all those Verizon (and, presumably, other carrier records) in a massive database system called Accumulo, which it built itself (on top of Hadoop) a few years ago because there weren’t any other options suitable for its scale and requirements around stability or security. The NSA is currently storing tens of petabytes of data in Accumulo.

In graph parlance, vertices are the individual data points (e.g., phone numbers or social network users) and edges are the connections among them. In late May, the NSA released a slide presentation detailing how fast fast Accumulo is able to process a 4.4-trillion-node, 70-trillion-edge graph. By way of comparison, the graph behind Facebook’s Graph Search feature contains billions of nodes and trillions of edges. (In the low trillions, from what I understand.)

So, yes, the NSA is able to easily analyze the call and text-message records of hundreds of million of mobile subscribers. It’s also building out some massive data center real estate to support all the data it’s collecting.

How might a graph analysis work within the NSA? The easy answer, which the government has acknowledged, is to figure out who else is in contact with suspected terrorists. If there’s a strong connection between you and Public Enemy No. 1, the NSA will find out and get to work figuring out who you are. That could be via a search warrant or wiretap authorization, or it could conceivably figure out who someone likely is by using location data.

Having such a big database of call records also provides the NSA with an easy way to go back and find out information about someone should their number pop up in a future investigation. Assuming the number is somewhere in their index, agents can track it down and get to work figuring out who it’s related to and from where it has been making calls.

Presumably, agents could begin with location data, too. If a bomb went off at Location X, bringing up all the numbers making calls from towers in that area might be a good starting point for investigation. Tracking someone’s movement from location data could be helpful, too.

If this all sounds a little creepy, maybe it should. After all, the world’s biggest, baddest intelligence agency can pretty much figure out who you are, who you know and where you go. And unlike web and retail companies that collect and analyze so much data about us, the government can put you in jail.

It might be even creepier when you consider how much other data law enforcement agencies can collect about you without a warrant.

However, someone familiar with NSA policy told me, the good news is that the vast majority of people are still anonymous even in this sea of data: There’s just too much data to care until someone pops up in the bad guys’ networks or gets on the agency’s radar.

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Leaked documents from the National Security Agency and the FBI have revealed a secret government program, code-named PRISM, that is "extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time," according to the Washington Post.

The data was pulled from the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Dropbox, the Post reported, is supposedly "coming soon."

The NSA does not monitor every piece of data, the story reports, only that belonging to targeted individuals. But the capability to monitor the target within all of the companies' data is there, according to the slides obtained by the Post.

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

In the two weeks since Microsoft unveiled the  Xbox One, gamers have raised some questions about its latest-generation console: will the Xbox One remain “always” connected to the internet? Will the console work with used games? And how much information can the console glean on any one user at any given time?

Those concerns turned into anxiety, as Microsoft continued to be vague about its policies.It said these questions would be clarified “at a later time.”

Yesterday, the company set up a landing page to address the most important concerns gamers have with the console. But Microsoft’s announcement has only further incited gamers. One meme on Reddit likened the Xbox One to the maniacal AI Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The biggest blow many gamers believe Microsoft has dealt is with game ownership. Right now, you can bring your copy of a game to any buddy’s house, load it up and play on his console — and even bring along your game if you have it on a transportable memory card — with no extra interference. When you’re done, you can hand it off to him to play or trade it in at an outlet like GameStop.

Not so with the Xbox One, which will continue to sell discs in stores but, according to Microsoft, “after signing in and installing, you can play any of your games from any Xbox One because a digital copy of your game is stored on your console and in the cloud.”

In effect, Microsoft plans to use the cloud as a licensing system for games, verifying ownership via an internet connection every 24 hours of gameplay (or every hour on a friend’s console). Users can “share” their games with up to 10 people via Xbox Live, but the same game cannot be played simultaneously. Loaning and renting games will not be possible at launch, and game publishers get to decide if you can resell that license or even give it away to a friend.

While practically confirming gamers’ fears about Xbox One’s DRM system, Microsoft also laid bare the privacy limits of the system. Users will have a strict opt-in when the Kinect has the ability to read and store certain data — including automatic facial recognition and more abstract concepts like recognizing a player’s heart rate — but would withhold some gameplay features if they don’t opt in.

In short, it’s a small win for privacy in a major loss for ownership. Gamers are angry at Microsoft’s decision, which isn’t going to help the console’s image right before E3.

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A well-placed government source leaked ReadWrite this draft memorandum from the White House.*

Announcing Citizenship 2.0—The Same Civil Rights You Love, But Better!

We're super excited to announce Citizenship 2.0—now enhanced with extra monitoring for your safety and security!

We know that many people have enjoyed the old version of American citizenship. But as with any product, times change and require adaptation and upgrades to stay current.

Your old freedoms were delivered in conventional ways. Now you can get just the freedom you need, when you need it. It's freedom as a service. It's Citizenship 2.0.

New And Improved!

In recent years, this administration has learned a lot from Silicon Valley—and we're not just talking about the communications we've been intercepting for years from some of the biggest Internet companies. We've been very interested in how innovative business models can be applied to government.

In particular, the freemium style of product has proven very compelling, where most users get a basic service for free and others pay to get an enhanced version.

Of course, as taxpayers, you're already paying the government to provide services. But our expert governance innovators—"governovators," we call them—have figured out a way to apply this model to the rights you enjoy as a citizen.

Get excited, people—freedom is no longer free. It's freemium!

Big Government, Big Data, Big Changes!

You may ask, what's enabling this move? You may have read something about PRISM.

PRISM doesn't exist, of course. But let's say we had a secret program to monitor all Internet communications with the tacit cooperation or nonresistance of major tech companies. For argument's sake. If something like that existed, that would merely be a back-end foundation for the front-end interface improvements to your government that really matter. That's Citizenship 2.0.

Here's what you're going to get:

• Unlimited storage for all your communications. You won't have access to them—but we will. And that's what matters. If you or your parents come from a foreign country, or you just have a funny-sounding name, or you ever Googled the name of a political organization, you also get extra backups—for free!
• In-app purchases. Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." First of all, that was, like, soooo three centuries ago. Second, what's with the crazy capitalization? Anyway, we have all this new technology that's a complete game-changer. With Citizenship 2.0, you don't have to surrender your essential liberty up front. You can trade little bits of it as you go, for all the temporary safety you want!
• Access to your leaders. We're all about transparency—at least when it comes to what you're doing online. Thanks to Citizenship 2.0, what you do online might end up in a report that the president himself reads! Isn't that cool? 

Note: If you prefer the old version of citizenship, you can opt out of these changes and stick to the original version guaranteed by the Bill of Rights by marching, protesting, or writing your Congressman. But let's get real—no one's going to bother to do that.

*We're kidding. We hope.

Siri is good at predicting the weather on your iPhone. And Google Now can tell you a few interesting things.

But within two years, virtual assistants will be able to do a wide range of tasks from handling all types of media to making reservations to offering full control of devices. More importantly, they will work across tablets, televisions and phones.

“I think we will see virtual assistants within two years that are quite robust,” Nuance CEO Paul Ricci said, speaking at D11. “I also believe that within two years we will see that virtual assistants will work across platforms.”

Nuance, a leader in speech recognition, has been involved with Siri since before it was acquired by Apple. While it doesn’t power Google’s stock Android speech recognition, it is behind Samsung’s S Voice and virtual assistant technology on HTC devices. It also works with Amazon and, Ricci confirmed, Nuance still works with Apple.

“We’re a fundamental provider for Apple,” Ricci said.

As for why Nuance bought Swype, Ricci said: “We thought over time there are some common technologies in language and prediction technologies.”

So, has that paid off?

“It’s worked out some,” Ricci said.

Nuance is also working a lot on speech recognition for in-car systems, an area Walt Mossberg points out has yet to be truly great.

“The car does need work but the problem must be solved,” Ricci said. Ricci notes that things will improve as the car gets connected and can harness the power of the cloud.

Full D11 Conference Coverage

No one’s quite sure what it is but more people are convinced that something big is happening at the highest levels of Microsoft ( msft). On Monday, AllThingsD reported that a “significant restructuring” of the software giant is in the works, citing unnamed sources close to the situation.

The report references CEO Steve Ballmer’s annual shareholder letter, which re-characterized Microsoft as a ”devices and services company.” That is quite a shift from a company built on shipping shrink-wrapped boxes of diskettes or bundling the operating system on PCs and servers made by hardware partners IBM, HP, Dell et al. Update: Microsoft had no comment on this report.

This report comes a week after noted Microsoft watcher Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund posited “big changes” to come, driven by a set of shareholders increasingly annoyed at Microsoft’s stagnant stock price. Sherlund put forth some pretty interesting options including the offloading of Bing search to Facebookor Yahoo in exchange for traffic acquisition costs or an outright sale of the Xbox franchise — a big “device” success — to another player, perhaps Samsung.

AllThingsD sources expect bigger roles to come for key Microsoft execs including Satya Nadella, president of the key Server and Tools unit — who will speak at GigaOM’s Structure later this month; Tony Bates, president of the Skype communications division; and Don Mattrick, president of Interactive Entertainment division. These are all respected executives but pressure is also building for Microsoft to bring in new blood — perhaps even at the tippy top. There have been repeated calls for Microsoft to dump Ballmer, over the years, for example.

In what could be related news, Microsoft CIO Tony Scott quietly left the company last week, news first reported by Geekwire and subsequently confirmed by Microsoft.

Microsoft is known for big, massive changes — like in the mid-1990s when it missed the internet for example. Still, these latest rumblings come at a critical time for Microsoft, which is at TechEd this week flogging Windows Azure as a key enterprise alternative to Amazon Web Services. And in a few weeks at its Build Conference, it will continue to tout Azure as well as the upcoming Windows 8.1 as a key OS for mobile devices where Microsoft is trying to make up for lost time

MSFT data by YCharts

This story was updated at 9 a.m. PDT with Microsoft’s non-comment.

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Dell grew its server share in the first quarter of 2013, but that good news isn’t good enough, apparently. The company is now rallying around a new strategy to get its server and PC businesses booming again — by making fewer products, bringing efficiencies to its supply chain and lowering prices — according to a Monday article from AllThingsD.

Dell increased its server revenue and shipments in the first quarter, according to new Gartner and IDC figures, while archrival Hewlett-Packard’s server share declined. Gartner said Dell boosted server revenue by 14.4 percent year over year, and IDC put revenue growth at 10.1 percent. The problem is, lesser known server vendors edged out Dell in both categories.

After all, while its market share in shipments, at 22.2 percent, has gone up slightly since 2006, when it was at 21.7 percent, the other guys have jumped forward in a big way, from 27.6 percent to 37.5 percent. Going private, which is still in the works, could let Dell change up its operations without having to deal with shareholder scrutiny on profitability and other matters.

If Dell can execute on the plan quickly, it could gain advantage as other legacy vendors such as Fujitsu and IBM scramble to catch up and lower prices to stay competitive with Quanta, Wistron and other “no-name” vendors that have seen their market share rise. But those “other” vendors are shrewd and have sold boatloads of gear by building custom servers for a new wave of webscale customers. Quanta and their kind have figured out ways to keep costs low at scale — their shipments are more impressive than their revenue.

That’s why Dell might gain ground with this initiative against name-brand server makers, but it will have to try harder to fend off the little guys.

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I'm not sure who to blame. His mother, perhaps, or the public school system. But it turns out that my son - days away from graduating from High School- does not know how to send mail through the U.S. Postal Service. 

I am not making this up.

The boy has a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop, does some basic coding, is pretty good at CAD and gets excellent grades. He can bang out what appears to be 60 words per minute using only his thumbs. But a letter? Forget about it - he doesn't even know how to properly address an envelope. 

The Mysteries Of Snail Mail

The only reason I discovered this is because his mother and I told him it was appropriate - and highly profitable - to send graduation announcements to his grandparents, aunts and uncles.

I witnessed the entire confounding process.

First, he wrote the mailing address on the top right of the envelope - and only the address, no name. I corrected him, fatherly like, handing him a fresh envelope: "The mailing address goes in the center. It has to be personalized."

Success! I then handed him a stamp. This clearly baffled him. The notion of a physical stamp seemed like witchcraft. "A stamp is required," I continued. 

He placed it, carefully, in the top left corner of the envelope.

"That's not where it goes! Don't you know how to mail a letter." I was beginning to lose patience.

We started again- though I told him he owed me $.50 for the ruined stamp. This time, he printed - though his penmanship is atrocious - the name and address, correctly, in the center of the envelope. Next, he carefully placed the stamp, level straight, on the top right, as I instructed.

So far so good: "Now put the return address on the top right." I said." Print clearly, please."

He stared back at me. "What's a return address?"

He's almost ready to register with the Selective Service and he doesn't knowwhat a return address is!

I breathed in, deeply. "A return address is your address. Our address."

"They're not sending this envelope back to me, are they?" he asked.

"It's required by the Post Office!" I barked.

He rolled his eyes with an obscene level of teenage skepticism, though was wise enough to comply.

I took the completed letter from him, deciding it best that I personally take it to the post office. 

What's Happening Here?

How is it possible that the world's most connected, most tech-savvy generation ever does not know how to mail a letter? What else don't they know?

I stopped at the doorway, inspired. "Get your computer. Go to USPS.gov (turns out it's really USPS.com)." If he saw for himself - on the screen - how to properly mail a letter, maybe he'd get it, I thought. 

Unfortunately, the Postal Service doesn't know it has a problem here. We couldn't find any instructions at all on how to mail a letter. Not from the USPS home page, nor from its"Quick Tools" section, nor the SEND MAIL tab, nor even from the FAQs - including the "common questions" section. 

"Google it. Google 'how to address a letter'."

The results came back instantly. The very first entry was from the Walter L. Parsley Elementary School. There, with text and pictures, were simple instructions for addressing a letter. 

 

Perhaps it's too late for letter writing, though. If my son could get this far without knowing how to mail a letter, I fear the writing is already on the wall. If not on the envelope. 

 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Morgan Freeman set the Internet atwitter this week when he briefly fell asleep during a live TV interview alongside Michael Caine in support of their new film Now You See Me.

But, as it turns out, there's a perfectly logical — and awesome — explanation for Freeman's doze-off. Here's what the actor had to say in a Facebook post late Thursday night:

Regarding my recent interview, I wasn't actually sleeping. I'm a beta tester for Google Eyelids and I was merely taking the opportunity to update my Facebook page.

Now it all makes sense. And if you missed it, here below is the original video clip from Freeman and Caine's interview with Tacoma Fox affiliate Q13. Watch as he drifts off then quickly regains consciousness and tries to feign interest in Caine's rambling story about magic tricks: Read more...

More about Film, Watercooler, Videos, and Morgan Freeman

If you haven't heard, we're in the midst of a rampant and sometimes violent iPhone crime wave. In San Francisco, smartphone theft accounts for nearly half of all robberies in the city. Most of these are iPhones. In New York City, there were more than 11,000 thefts of Apple products - mostly iPhones - in just the first eight months of last year. This represented a 40% rise over 2011, far higher than the rise in other crimes. 

Blow Up Your iPhone

Fortunately, I have a modest proposal for a simple and definitive solution to this problem: iPhones rigged to burst into flames or even explode. You steal my iPhone, it catches fire or blows up in your hand. 

So go on, punk. Steal my iPhone. Let's see how many fingers you have come morning. Once word gets around, this problem will self correct in very short order. What better iPhone theft deterrent could there be than a city filled with petty criminals - all with stumps where a hand used to be? 

Reasonably Priced Protection

The cost would be quite reasonable. Lithium ion batteries are already prone to radical overheating. If a flaming iphone that melts the thief's fingers isn't a strong enough deterrent, gunpowder is cheap, and could easily be engineered into the iPhone 6. Meanwhile, exploding cases could be built to retrofit older models. Look at it this way, what's another $50 or so for the privilege of having a true remote wipe feature?

True, the theft victim is still out an iPhone, but that was a foregone conclusion anyway. Within moments the thief had likely placed an "almost new" iPhone listing on eBay. But the former owner can focus instead on the joy of knowing that the criminal paid an even higher price for that no longer-working iPhone. 

Help From Carriers And Smartphone Vendors?

Besides, as noted, once flaming iPhones become the standard, thefts will likely taper off very quickly. In the meantime, perhaps the mobile carriers would be willing to thank us for our help in stopping crime. No, they probably won't let you out of your contract - they're not crazy - but they might offer heroic vigilantes (nee victims) a free replacement device. 

I wouldn't look to Apple for help, though. Despite the iPhone crime wave, the company has done precious little to protect the products so far, and that's not likely to change. After all, Apple actually benefits every time an iPhone is stolen - mostly likely the vic buys a replacement device at the full, non-subsidized price. What? Is Apple supposed to not sell you another iPhone?

My proposal has wider benefits as well. No doubt there would also be a radical drop in pickpocketing and other two-handed crimes. And wouldn't it be useful to have immediate, obvious evidence of who the thieves are? The police could quickly shift their focus to fighting more important crimes.

Countering Objections

Now, some of you may object that flaming iPhones are dangerous. That the punishment doesn't fit the crime. That innocent people could get hurt.

Sure, fires are hard to control. But isn't that the point here?

And sure, losing a few fingers may seem harsh (it'll be hard to use a touch screen even on a legitimately purchased device), but anyone who's ever had an iPhone stolen probably wished for even worse things to happen to the thief. 

Finally, if bystanders don't want to get hurt, they can just avoid standing by iPhone thieves. And just like gun owners are encouraged to lock up their firearms so kids don't get their hands on them, a little care should keep most of the little ones from using Mommy's iPhone to play games without telling her about it. If not, they'll figure it out when little Johnny down the street has to learn to bat left-handed at stickball.

In the end, what's a little collateral damage compared to making sure my iPhone is safe? Heck, if this takes off, you can bet that Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and the rest won't be far behind. Pretty soon the entire smartphone market will be exploding. That's a good thing, right?

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

Smartphones never cease to amaze me. I’m still impressed by how productive I’m able to be on my Android device no matter where I am (often to the chagrin of my wife), and I’m still surprised every time I see someone pull out a Square when it comes time to pay (like happened last night at Fat Choy in Las Vegas, a way-off-strip place you should totally check out if you’re in town). But neither of those situations really compare with busting out a phone in order to detect the levels of toxins in the air.

Yet that’s exactly what a group of researchers at the University of Illinois have created — a cradle that wraps around an iPhone and turns it into a biosensor that can detect, according to a university press release, “toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.” Inside that cradle are about $200 worth of mirrors, lenses and a photonic crystal that the researchers claim can identify these substances as accurately as a $50,000 spectrophotometer in the lab.

The cradle is essentially there for support, though, while the phone’s camera and processor do the real work. With everything firmly aligned in front of the camera, a scientist would simply snaps a photo and the CPU processes the result. What it’s processing is the difference in wavelength that the photonic crystal, primed to react to a specific molecule, reflects. The team demonstrates the device and app in the video embedded below.

And if you’re into this type of mobile data collection, another group of University of Illinois researchers actually created a smartphone-powered water-pollution device called MoboSens

Like all things mobile or sensor, though — from SkinScan (now SkinVision) to health care apps like Ginger.io — the biggest value might come from data that has nothing to do with what the app is primarily measuring. Rather, when data about a certain condition, air quality or what have you is tagged with time and geodata, for example, it becomes the basis for mapping how situations are spreading or where there might be safe haven.

Imagine a team of scientists with iPhones dispersed throughout a city after a disaster, painting a real-time picture of what areas are most affected by a particular toxin (or maybe radiation). Taking a longer term approach, researchers could track how situations are evolving over time. Throw in even more data that smartphones are capable of detecting — temperature, ambient noise, vibration, etc. — and we might unlock entirely new ways to think about how diseases spread through the air or what conditions tend to favor the spread of foodborne bacteria.

In some ways, though, this is more than another cool thing you can do with a smartphone. It’s the furtherance of something we’ll discussing in depth at our Structure conference next month, which is how we rethink IT when computation and data are no longer bound within a single server or even the corporate network somewhere. The biological data this app will collect isn’t much use locked inside the phone; it needs a way to reliably and securely connect with other datasets and other services, likely distributed across the country or even the world. That’s where the real opportunity lies.

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You probably already knew this, but a new report from Forrester wants to emphasize this seemingly obvious point: Tablets are not simply larger touchscreen smartphones. There are significant difference in where people use them, how they use them and for how long - all of which have big implications for app developers, marketers, tablet makers and a lot of other folks.

As the table market continues its white-hot growth - nearly 50 million tablets were sold last quarter alone - these differences will force  both innovation and disruption in publishing, advertising, retail, gaming and work, as people optimize apps, media and services specifically for tablet use.

Tablet Usage: The Little Differences 

The majority of tablet users use their gadgets primarily in the living room and bedroom of their homes. This is true even for tablets with cellular connectivity, not just Wi-Fi. 

Even outside the home, Forrester's data reveal that tablet usage is concentrated in "fixed" locations. These include coffee shops, airports and hotels.

Whereas smartphones are highly personal devices, used mostly "on-the-go" and in short "snackable" sessions, tablets are more likely to be shared with others inside the home. Tablets are also used for longer stretches of time. 

Forrester's data also show that tablet users are wealthier and better educated than typical smartphone users. In addition, tablet users are more likely to discuss their opinions of products on social media and other online services.

Forrester's research also reveals the versatility of these devices. Reading, email, watching video, playing games and taking pictures are all common activities. Across their 15 primary activity categories, browsing the web was most common - undertaken by 68% of individuals polled in Forrester's survey - and note-taking was least common, though still undertaken by a respectable 26% of respondents. At present, there is no one specific task driving people to purchase a tablet.

Though the market is relatively new, the report also suggests that users will embrace tablets for controlling numerous home-based technologies - such as entertainment systems, energy monitoring and more. 

Tablets As Second Screens

Tablets are preferred over smartphones as the "second screen" - i.e., as something else to look at while the TV is on. And it turns out that people also use tablets and smartphones differently as second screens. 

According to Forrester's data, web browsing, product research and watching videos online are all more likely to be tablet-based second-screen activities. Social networking and chatting while watching television, however, are the province of the smartphone.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Tablets might actually have a big impact television advertising. As a second screen, tablets offer advertisers new possibilities for integrating their marketing efforts across seemingly disparate media. Some app makers are already jumping on this bandwagon.

For instance, Shazam just updated its "what's that song" app to tag and identify live TV events by "listening" to them. On one hand, that lets the app provide more information about the show or sports game you're watching, including links to related information. On the other, though, the app will also tag the commercials, potentially opening up a new way for advertisers to reach you through the tablet as well as the big screen.

It's not all about play, either. The Forrester study found the people actually report using tablets for "work" surprisingly often. A full 58% of surveyed users report spending an average of 2.5 hours per day on their tablets for work from home. There is, of course, a possibility of responder bias; some people might be inclined to say they're working on their tablets even if they're not.

Assuming those numbers are solid, though, that finding could provide an opening for makers of apps and even tablet hardware focused on personal productivity. Wait, did someone just say... Microsoft?

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) polices are increasingly popular as a way for companies to let workers use the hardware they like best and are most productive with. But according to a new study from Cisco, that not be the best way to think about BYOD.

Implement a strong BYOD policy, Cisco says, and your organization could save $1,300 per year per mobile user. Users meanwhile, report that they are happier and more productive - even though they may end up paying more out of their own pockets!

(See also Worried Workers: BYOD Or You're SOL [Infographic])

Happier, More Productive, But Poorer?

The survey, released Wednesday by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) consulting unit, polled 2,415 users in six countries to determine the effects of letting employees bring their own devices into the office. The results indicate that employees around the world were very interested in BYOD, and they were even willing to pay for it: On average, workers said they would spend $965 out of pocket for their own devices and another $734 annually for the data plans to go with them.

Here's why: Workers with their own devices said they were happier and (more objectively) reported significant productivity gains. In the U.S., BYOD participants saved 81 minutes of time per week - just over 70 hours a year.

Not every country noted such productivity increases, and use of employee devices also had negative effects, such as increased administration, downtime and distractions that dragged the overall efficiency down, explained Jeff Loucks, senior manager at IBSG. 

Most of the devices in question were phones: 81% of device bringers reported they uses smartphones, 56% brought tablets and 37% brought their own laptops. On average, each of the estimated 198 million BYOD users around the world had 1.7 devices, said Loucks.

BYOD Keeps Growing

The number of BYOD users is expected to swell to 406 million by 2016. Even though the U.S. leads in BYOD use right now, by 2016, China alone is expected to have 166 million alone, compared to the 106 million in the U.S. and 76 million in India.

Companies fared best, Cisco discovered, when they implemented a strategic BYOD plan, rather than stick than just trying to keep up with devices coming into the organization. Such reactive policies tend to make users figure everything out for themselves, often working with an IT department that only grudgingly allows such devices into the organization.

Want to realize those promised cost benefits? Get ahead of users with a proactive BYOD policy that enables employees to quickly access corporate tools and data, perhaps featuring a self-service help system. Such policies also help organizations keep better security on corporate data.

(See also ReadWrite Survey Results: What A Typical BYOD Program Really Looks Like.)

Be Careful What You Wish For - BYOD Edition

As much as workers seem willing to pay their own way to get the devices they want without their employers' interference (only 30% said they would be willing to work with corporate-provisioned devices - often called Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled, or COPE), it's hard to shake the feeling that even though employees are more satisfied and productive, there's something unsettling if they end up footing the bill for this innovation. 

(See also Forget Bring Your Own Device - Try Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled.)

It's not an idle question: A recent Gartner survey of CIOs found that 38% said their companies planned stop providing employees with devices by 2016. Gartner also expects that nearly 50% of employers will demand employees provide their own devices for work purposes - out of pocket - by 2017.

Companies are increasingly willing to explore BYOD policies - but it seems that the reasons may not be entirely altruistic. Letting employees use the tools they prefer is clearly a good idea, but making them pay for the privilege doesn't seem right. 

 

A lot of folks believe that the Microsoft empire is doomed, and that the rise of touchscreen computing and mobile devices will lead it its inevitable downfall.

This may very well be true; it certainly is true that to date, Microsoft’s attempts to enter the touch and mobile markets have been poorly received.

Yet much of the time, the smart folks have it wrong.

In the 1980s, Apple’s Macintosh product introduced the graphical user interface (GUI).  It was light years ahead of Microsoft’s DOS, and Apple’s brilliant founder, Steve Jobs, openly sneered at Microsoft’s crappy software.

Microsoft tried to catch up by introducing Windows.  It was a failure.

Microsoft brought out a second version of Windows.  It was also a failure.

Finally, Microsoft brought out Windows 3.1.  It was still a crappy knockoff of the MacOS, but it was executed well enough to be a major upgrade over DOS.

The rest is history.

In the 1990s, Netscape’s Navigator introduced the commercial Web browser.  Everyone agreed that the Web would change everything, and doom desktop software.

Microsoft tried to catch up by releasing Internet Explorer.  It was a failure.

Microsoft brought out a second version of IE.  It was also a failure.

Finally, Microsoft brought out IE3.  It was still a crappy knockoff of Netscape, but it was executed well enough so that people didn’t really care.

The rest is history.

My point is that it’s very easy to write off Microsoft.  It’s never been a cool company.  Here in Silicon Valley, it’s the closest thing we ever had to an Evil Empire.

But Microsoft has vast resources, and armies of smart people.  Even today, when it is supposedly in its death throes, it has double the staff, revenues, and profits of Google.

And it has a history of bumbling its way to “good enough” when tackling new markets.  Bill Gates may yet have the last laugh.

Related articles

• Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time? (fool.com)
• Gartner: Microsoft is dead, Windows has expired, Office has ceased to be (plus.google.com)
• Microsoft, the Walking Dead (cloudave.com)

(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ll see the signs of a significant disruption in computing. No, I’m not talking about mobile: That disruption already happened and we’re in the midst of it playing out now as PC sales have become stagnant at best. Instead, it’s within the browser: Google Chrome is the harbinger of change and through it, Google has huge potential to change computing once again.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say, within a year, many of you will be using a Chromebook. Before you roll your eyes, let me add one caveat: That Chromebook won’t be Google designed hardware; instead it will be on the Mac, Windows or Linux machine you have at that time. So it won’t be a Google build device like my Chromebook Pixel is.

Let’s step back and I’ll explain.

Chrome is widely installed and growing

When Google launched the Chrome browser in late 2008 for Windows, the idea behind it was to speed up your web experience. It took until May of 2010 for all three major operating systems to have a stable version of the browser. Since then, usage has grown tremendously. Looking at market share summaries from five sources (consolidated at Wikipedia), four of them show Chrome as the biggest market share in March, 2013. (Note: April’s numbers are missing one source, which is why I’ve pointed to March figures.)

If you follow browser share statistics — hey, we all need a hobby — this won’t surprise you. Chrome has continued to slowly grow its worldwide user base with rather steady progress. And there’s little reason to assume that trend will change any time soon. So what does that mean?

For many Chrome is just a browser. For others who use a Chromebox or Chromebook, like myself, it’s my full-time operating system. The general consensus is that Chrome OS, the platform used on these devices, can only browse the web and run either extensions and web apps; something any browser can do. Simply put, the general consensus is wrong and the signs are everywhere.

Let’s talk about Chrome apps

First, much time was spent at Google I/O on two key topics we featured on last week’s GigaOM Chrome Show podcast: Packaged Apps and Native Client apps. You can listen to the show for a full description by Google’s own Joe Marini, but I’ll summarize the concept here.

Packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, just like a traditional website or web app. There’s one subtle difference though. These apps are “packaged” in a way that allows them to run outside of the Chrome browser on any device that has Chrome installed. And they can run when the user is offline. Google Keep is a perfect example of this. I use it as a to-do list outside of my browser, both online and offline. When I don’t have a connection, my data is saved locally and when I later connect to the web, Google Keep automatically syncs my data to the cloud.

Here’s an image from my Chromebook showing Google Keep outside of the browser. Note too, the notification message at the bottom right; Google has added these in the developer channel of Chrome, bringing even more desktop features to the environment.

Native client apps are similar in that they’re also packaged and they support offline access. There’s a key difference however: These apps are coded in their native programming languages — C or C++ for example — compiled and then embedded in HTML where they behave like standalone native apps. Google says there’s about a 5 percent overhead performance hit, so they’re not quite as fast as their native app counterparts.

A good example of a native client app is a game I played on my Chromebook Pixel recently called Cracking Sands Racing The app, a port of a game for iOS and Android, was a 533 MB download to my Pixel and I played it outside of the browser. Even better, the support for a gamepad worked just fine as I used an Xbox 360 controller to play the game. Controls and graphics were responsive; no different overall that if I was playing a version of the game on a Mac or PC.

I know what you’re thinking. “That’s good for you since you have a Chromebook. What do I care?”

Chrome is a back door to the new app economy

Here’s the thing: Both Packaged Apps and Native Client apps work on any computer that has the Chrome browser installed. You remember: the browser that has the biggest market share. Even better, Google is working on Portable Native Client, which extends the native client app support to mobiles. Meanwhile, at Google I/O, the company said these apps can work on mobiles through Apache Cordova, a set of cross-platform APIs that support iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and more.

You can see where I’m going with this but lets take it a step further. Have you noticed that Google recently added the Chrome App Launcher to Microsoft Windows? It’s the same app launcher that’s native to Chrome OS. And Google is working on it for the Mac platform; it’s already in the developer channel for Chromium. And it’s sure to follow for Linux.

Essentially, once you can run web, Packaged and Native Client apps on any device with the Chrome framework, you need an easy way to manage and launch them. Think of Chrome as a platform environment atop a platform. On my Pixel, Chrome runs over Linux. For you, Chrome may run on top of Windows or OS X. Both of those have their own program launchers but as developers expand the number of Chrome apps, you’ll use the Chrome App Launcher to access them.

By the way, in the launcher picture above, did you notice that CIRC doesn’t have the same little arrow as the other icons? That means it’s an app, not a web shortcut.

Wait, won’t the big platform players block this?

Along with the disruption of mobile devices, the physical media market has undergone changes too. We typically don’t buy apps on a disk to install them any longer. Instead, platforms are providing centralized applications stores that they maintain control over. The Mac App Store is a perfect example. Note that you can install apps from outside of the App Store, provided you allow for such actions in your security settings. Since these stores are controlled by the platform makers, won’t Apple, Microsoft and others try to keep Chrome apps from spreading to the desktop?

They can try but I don’t think they’ll succeed, except maybe on mobiles. If people find the apps compelling enough, they’ll be in an uproar for starters. But there’s another possible reason and I think it’s brilliant on Google’s part.

I noticed that when I downloaded Cracking Sands Racing, the video game I was able to play offline on my Pixel, the file had a .crx file extension. That may not look familiar to you, but I recognize it. It’s the same file extension Chrome uses for browser extensions. If that naming convention holds true, any company blocking Chrome app installations would also block Chrome extensions. How would the Chrome using community react to that? Not well.

What does your desktop look like a year from now?

As I alluded to at the beginning of this post, if you’re a Chrome user today, you’ll be more immersed in the Chrome ecosystem a year from now, even if you don’t have an “official” Chromebook. This all depends on how well Google pulls off its strategy to upend the desktop computing world, but so far, it seems to be on track.

Bear in mind the apps in this vision will be truly cross-platform as they’ll run on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer with Chrome installed. If it can get developers on board — and those I spoke with at Google I/O are ready to embrace the effort — Google will have a thriving desktop platform built on top of the platforms created by others. But it will be a desktop that’s far more agile, with new features added within days or weeks, not months or years.

Welcome to Chrome, my desktop today and your desktop of the future.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• What Google Must Do to Make Chrome OS a Success With Netbooks
• Life After Chrome: What’s Next for Android

As far as social networks go, recent popular opinion suggests Facebook, for all its reach and power, just ain’t cool anymore.

Most of those claims have been anecdotal. The most prevalent voice came from Josh Miller — co-founder of competing social startup Branch — whose argument hinged mostly around the behavioral habits of his teenage sister. Despite a lack of hard evidence, this somehow reinforced just how passe Facebook supposedly is.

Alas, as of Tuesday, we now have a study to bolster the claims. Teens are expressing “waning enthusiasm” for Facebook, according to a recent study from the Pew Research Center. Teens, according to the study, are tired of all the “drama,” the stress of managing their online reputation on the network, and are “annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details.”

Contrast that waning enthusiasm with an increase in teen Twitter signups over the past two years. Nearly a quarter of online teens use the microblogging service, according to the study. Fascinating, considering the “inane details” Facebook complaint; it wasn’t so long ago that many dismissed Twitter as “the service for letting people know what you had for breakfast.”

As the report states, teens took some time to warm up to Twitter, a service that was first colonized by adults. Today, however, “teens are now migrating to Twitter in growing numbers, often as a supplement to their Facebook use.”

It’s worth noting that while Twitter may be increasing in popularity with the kids, it’s not necessarily at the expense of Facebook in terms of user activity (at least, not yet).

Indeed, the teens queried in the study aren’t leaving Facebook. Rather, they feel burdened by it, a necessity of existing online in the 21st century. “While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives,” the report stated, “it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own.”

Perhaps that’s why Facebook Home — the fully Facebook-ed version of an Android phone — doesn’t seem to be taking off. Or maybe that’s why Poke — Facebook’s Snapchat clone aimed squarely at the teen audience– was dead in the water just weeks after launch. Perhaps, at least with teens, Facebook isn’t desirable as every part of our connected experience, but rather as relegated to one part of it: Our identity.

Which, admittedly, isn’t the end of the world for the social giant. Facebook wants to be an online directory of people, making it possible to look up profiles as you would thumb through a phone book of yesteryear. And with Facebook Connect, you can take that online identity across the Web to sign in to any number of commenting systems, applications and partner sites.

Still, losing mindshare and desirability from the young audience today isn’t good for the long term. Today’s kids will be tomorrow’s adults, folks with jobs and a willingness to buy the things they see in the Facebook ads served to them.

Teen or not, Facebook wants you to be delighted to visit its site, not obligated. Perhaps the company can spur that feeling in teens again someday — drama not included.

Image courtesy of Flickr/Ei Katsumata