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White House to Federal Agencies: Beware Social Media Ratings and Polls

cgseo — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:17:00 +0000

In a memo released yesterday , the White House made it significantly easier for federal agencies to use everything from social networks to online forums. But with the newfound freedom comes a surprising caveat: User ratings and rankings on those services, the new guidelines warn, "should not be used as the basis for policy or planning." In other words, a million Americans can Digg or retweet an important blog post, but government officials shouldn't use that popularity as an indicator of the post's value. Sponsor That's not always a bad thing considering that a dedicated group of like-minded people can game a casual voting system. But the voice of a social network corresponds to real people in the real world. A recent study , for instance, found that Twitter chatter accurately forecasts box-office revenues. As a whole, the new guidelines [ PDF ] were sorely needed. Social media and other online activities fell under a law that arduously dictates how agencies handle written materials. Under the new guidelines, online activities are now considered a "public meeting," which gives agencies much more freedom to blog, hold virtual meetings or even run contests. That freedom comes with a stipulation. The memo was written by the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator, Cass Sunstein. In it he explains that agencies should "exercise good judgment and caution when using rankings, ratings, or tagging" because they aren't "statistically generalizable." That's true, but it doesn't mean they're worthless. John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, told us last year that if you keep in mind that social networks don't necessarily represent the entire scope of the American people, then the data from them has "tremendous, tremendous value." At least 66% of all federal, state and local governments now use social media. It's still early in the current midterm election cycle, but candidates are already investing heavily in social media; Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the rule, not the exception. Those candidates will take their online communities with them to Washington when elected. Where else would they expect to get input on public policy than from that same community of voices? Photo by Dominik Gwarek . Discuss

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White House to Federal Agencies: Beware Social Media Ratings and Polls

Weekend Reading: Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh (Preview)

cgseo — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Okay, so you'll have to file this one under "future weekend reading" because this book isn't out yet, but I thought I would provide a bit of a heads-up post in anticipation of what should be a very interesting read. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose is written by Tony Hsieh (pronounced "Shay"), CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos , and lands in bookstores in early June. Hsieh helped to create one of the most successful online retailers which was well known for its stellar customer service and which eventually was acquired by Amazon . Sponsor Hsieh's methods at Zappos turned convential wisdom on its head and helped land the company on Fortune Magazine's list of the best companies to work for in 2009 just before its billion dollar acquisition. Before Zappos, Hsieh was responsible for co-founding LinkExchange which sold to Microsoft for $265 million, and now for his third venture, Hsieh is authoring a book to share his experiences and methodology. "I wanted to write a book to talk about the journey that I took in life in terms of what would bring myself long-term happiness, and what I accidentally discovered is that you can actually take concepts from happiness and apply it to businesses," says Hsieh in a video promo for his book. "Part of the goal of the book is letting people know that there is another way you can make yourself happy, make employees happy, make customers happy and still make money." Hsieh recently pimped his upcoming book at SXSW with a promotional bus and managed to run into Leo Laporte's live stream parade to chat about his book. He also snagged a few moments from the eternally busy Robert Scoble to talk about about personal and professional happiness. The tech world is buzzing about Hsieh's upcoming book, as Kevin Rose , Tim Ferriss and even Aston Kutcher have been looking over pre-release copies. For more information about the book and its author Tony Hsieh, check out the book's homepage and be sure to check back here for a review in June when the book goes on sale. Discuss

Earth Hour: Is it Time to Virtualize the Electrical Grid?

cgseo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:44:00 +0000

Another Earth Hour has passed by this weekend. Electrical systems across the globe were shut down to observe, for an hour, that energy is precious. In this moment, we also acknowledge that as humanity, we have the power to do better for ourselves. One great thing about Earth Hour is the photos. If you haven't yet, check out the brilliant photo essay at Boston.com on Earth Hour 2010 . If you haven't taken initiative to shut down your computer yet, read on to get a refresher on how better computing resource utilization creates a better world. Sponsor Earth Hour Translates to Megahertz The link to energy and efficiency is clearly evident in the data center. Where electricity is bundled in time units, processing is calculated in megahertz. We can see how important the work is at Intel and others (AMD, IBM, Apple) to get higher processing per energy consumption at the core. In the data center, applications and processes drive resources, as well as flows of traffic from users. In a way solving the challenge of energy efficient data centers is where information management and physics collide. Higher utilization is the promise of server virtualization. However, like in many things, scaling up is harder than scaling down. The tricky part is the linkages across the network, storage. These configurations are where further opportunity exists to abstract the workload, infrastructure, and energy to orchestrate a flow of resources that turn off and on when needed. In this way, we wonder, will find ways to connect energy consumption to workload - and cost. Is Energy Social? We see a time in the future where personal computing is a utility, and the plug knows who we are. With smart homes, mobile computing, and personal health records, it has to be so. One thing that struck a note with us about Earth Hour is how easy it is to do locally. All you do is turn off the switch. In California, there is a very lively discussion on automated, or "smart" meters from the default electrical company, PGE. See (some) of the dialog on PGE's smart meter site on Facebook. On one hand, having computerized meters gives the needed management to observe consumption in real-time and optimize the grid. On the other hand for many users, this type of oversight needs to be tied to consumer privacy and pricing. As shown with Earth Hour, there is an important social component and to giving back to the world, not just the shareholders. People question the intentions of a monopoly and as people we seem to get a better win with a simple, "Turn it Off" where we get a chance to contribute by ourselves. For us, Earth Hour represents people rallying for the future. Around the world, from Sidney to Singapore, Buenos Aires to Boston people are doing it because we are a people - not to support the systems. Here's to hoping that someday we can all check in to Earth Hour in a way that turns off our gear, lights, and grids - if only for a moment. Location Matters. Huddling Up to Where its Warm Oregon's has a lot of natural resources. From salmon, honey, and redwoods, to mobile technology, the state is blossoming like spring. One interesting trend are the massive data centers popping up out of the ground (like Facebook and Google ) that have been placed close to energy resources. In several small towns in Oregon, modern high-density computing environments are being deployed next to the oldest technology for generating power, the dam. These services show that tariff's and pricing do matter when it comes to energy and how it converts to the bottom line to the leaders in cloud computing. Computing Matters: A Few Green Guides Resources to Consider Intel : Seeing the Sensitivity of Server Refresh is an Intel internal review of ROI of pulling in newest versions of server technology and doing technology refreshes. Density does matter. VMware : This energy efficiency analysis walks us though the concepts of energy efficiency by pooling servers as virtual resources. The Gartner quote below us how serious energy is ties to computing costs. "Gartner estimates that over the next 5 years, most enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy (power and cooling) as they do on hardware infrastructure." Even if all of the technology was free, energy would still a very significant expense in running a data center operation. VMware also shows that energy saving can be viral , or can expand into other areas of the corporate environment. Earth Hour is a Question, Not an Answer One of the best aspects of Earth Hour is that we know it won't work for the real-time web. We aren't ready to shut down the Internet, or data center. Instead, as technology leaders, we may be able to design systems that react and become more efficient. With time, perhaps the Internet at large will "go dark" for an hour or so per year in celebration. For us, Earth hour was a trigger to consider the impacts of energy and look at it as a system, instead of a free resource. We compiled a few questions for enterprise managers considering how to tie global movement and questions into the day job: Earth Hour has a .9% difference in the electrical grid in some areas. We know virtualization offers more. What number are you using in your enterprise for virtualization energy savings? How long will it take for electrical grids and computing grids merge? Will it happen in our lifetime? Would your company be able to take down your network down for an hour with the flip of a switch? What part of the infrastructure would you be the most concerned about? How high of a priority is it for your organization to reduce it's energy footprint? Photo credits: demorganna & xshamx Discuss

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Earth Hour: Is it Time to Virtualize the Electrical Grid?

Enterprise Cloud Control: Q&A with Eucalyptus CTO Dr. Rich Wolski

cgseo — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:22:00 +0000

Eucalyptus a software layer that forms private clouds patterns in the enterprise. Private clouds are bringing together the best of Linux, Amazon, and VMware in a practical way. It could be argued that the cloud itself is a product of the open source spirit. So, with that in mind, we took a closer look at Eucalyptus and sat down with Dr. Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer of the Eucalyptus team to figure out what is the opportunity and why it is gathering the attention of successful open source entrepreneurs , investors, and partners. Sponsor A Cloud Forest. Where the Cloud and Servers Meet? We asked this abstract, but also practical question. Eucalyptus offers a solution for that models enterprise resources around Amazon's core cloud services. The result is resources in the enterprise having parity with instances in Amazon's cloud. By modeling the Enterprise Cloud after EC2 , EBS , and S3 and joining a cloud control center into the enterprise, the company introduces a control point for enterprise resources. The resources are bound together at the core model of compute and store, and build a network control point for surrounding services. Simple, but elegant. Dr. Wolski pointed us to a reference implementation that shows a cloud enabled data center with the cloud manager enabled, Intel® Cloud Builder Guide to Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel® Platforms , which features a scenario provided by the Ubuntu cloud . We found this scenario a great description of the powerful join happening around open source and Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services). The components of this model described here in the white paper give an idea of how this model includes the cloud controller as a map to the brains. It gets access to each of these core services on the network, and choreographs how they connect. Here is a little bit more about each, offered by the white paper. "•The Cloud Controller provides the primary interface point for interactng with the cloud. Commands to create or terminate virtual machines are initiated through the API interface at the Cloud Controller. • The Walrus Storage Service exposes the object store. The object store is used to hold the virtual machine images prior to instantiation and to hold user data. •The Storage Server hosts the actual bulk storage (a 1.4 TB JBOD in this case). Storage is exposed to the Block Storage Controllers and the Walrus Controller as a set of iSCSI volumes. • The Cluster Controllers manage a collection of Node Controllers and provide the traffic isolation. • The Block Storage Controllers (SCs) manage dynamic block devices (e.g., EBS) that VMs can use for persistent storage. •And, the Node Controllers (NCs) which are the servers in the pools that comprise the compute elements of the cloud. *It is noted that many of these pieces are interchangeable (e.g. Walrus) in this example with other components. Also noted: Eucalyptus supports numerous hypervisors in the market today. So, in this quick list of components we have a real-life definition of cloud computing, in the form of an enterprise service layer. Is the enterprise more complex in reality? You bet. Now, the fun begins. If a Tree Falls in the Forest, Does the Forest Know? Now your server distribution of Ubuntu, et al can one-click to cloud. That is interesting, but we know there is more. We found that cloud computing capability and cloud design are two different things and there are many pieces ripe for market upheaval. In a way, Dr. Wolski and team bring a new protagonist into the network, as he told us "A new abstraction to the toolkit". If Eucalyptus works, we'll see the company continue to grow as a piece of the fabric and bring this cloud object into the enterprise toolkit in a substantial way. IT leaders will start to plan around it, model it, and evolve it into core practices, disaster recovery, and the many scenarios around turning down and bursting resources. To do all of this, Eucalyptus creates a lens to distributed resources, a join of all the facets of the cloud that should move to keep in sync. This model is built on core compute fabric that is offered by Amazon to isolate the simplest go-to-market pattern for connecting enterprise and public resources. Here, we see a view of this model from the white paper. A Pristine Forest of Enterprise Cloud Servers We have a few questions left remaining, so we plan on keeping in touch with Eucalyptus. Will Eucyluptus gain enough mass in the private cloud while continuing a cozy relationship with Amazon? Will Eucalyptus bring forward competitors to AWS and/or commoditize Amazon's services by offering "in parity" providers? Is it possible to compete? What impacts might this have to VMware's core offerings, will this move VMware offering cloud computing closer to Amazon's AWS How does this impact software that is packaged for a data center and/or cloud? Will this model become critical mass for deploying Amazon? How does it trend with the deployments of Amazon's model of creating private data centers and cloud monitoring services? Also, a bigger question came to mind. Is this Eucalyptus further evidence that AWS was " the shot heard round the world "? Computing may never be the same, as freedom has rung now that the base computing solution is in the cloud? It really feels like competing has forever changed, and as a server, it just doesn't make sense to be a alone, when a forest is all around you. Open Source - Fastest Way to 10 million downloads Eucalyptus seems to have chose the path of least resistance, and brought open source into its corner. Becoming packaged at the core, in the Linux distribution and connected to other fabric it has the opportunity to grow quickly. And, since it's a private cloud, it can also grow for critical tasks. To that end, we see friends of open source, like Intel, Extreme, and Ubuntu ready to go the distance with Eucalyptus in their stacks. We asked about traction for the product. Dr. Wojiski chuckled a bit when he mentioned the large volume of downloads it has received with company partners. "It's rewarding being in open source model. It's in the core of our company and our motivations". Can you win by binding dominant platforms with open source? And, is that itself, open source? Photo credits: kubina & lgb06 Discuss

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Enterprise Cloud Control: Q&A with Eucalyptus CTO Dr. Rich Wolski

POLL: What’s the Best Way to Support Startups, Services or Cash?

cgseo — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:03:12 +0000

After wrapping up a panel with a gamut of pro- and anti-VC types at SXSW , I'm left wondering why there aren't more services-oriented startup firms. Let me explain: Most of the time, when a startup goes after venture capital, they're still in the process of building a product and bringing it to market. They need things like servers, developers, marketing tools and sometimes office space. Do they need money per se? Or is capital an increasingly arbitrary and unnecessary step in building a tech startup? Sponsor The fact is, almost every startup needs a little help. Maybe you get that help from the bank of Mom and Dad; maybe you get that help from your good friends at Mastercard. Often, you get that help from folks who want equity; you end up trading part of your assumed long-term success for resources you need in the short term. We are all familiar with the idea of trading equity for funds through angel financing and venture capital; we're also familiar with the TechStars and Y Combinator programs that help to incubate and accelerate startups through minuscule amounts of capital and significant amounts of mentorship. But most of us are less familiar with models such as Mike Trotzke's SproutBox or Marcus Whitney's Remarkable Wit . These firms provide services (and sometimes keeping-Ramen-on-the-table amounts of cash) to early-stage startups in exchange for equity. They provide development, marketing and other services that most tech startups need without delving into the complicated issues of valuation and funding rounds. These guys are focused on the absolute bottom line of technology, which has nothing to do with money: Making a great product and finding people to use it. So, we're interested to know from our friends in startups who aren't taking the bootstrapping route, given the choice between pure capital or business-building services, which would you choose? Take the poll, and let us know the reason behind your decision in the comments. We'll be following up soon based on the results. What would you rather have for your startup: Services or cash? polls Discuss

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POLL: What's the Best Way to Support Startups, Services or Cash?

Weekly Poll: What Companies Will Be at the Top of the Cloud in the Next 5 Years

cgseo — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:30:44 +0000

We take a look at the future of cloud computing services this week. We want to know: What companies do you think will be at the top of the cloud world in five years? This past week, we had 93 people respond to the question: 'Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?" The respondents were pretty much in full support of the open approach. Of the 93 people who responded, 83 said, yes, there is a place for open-source. But we wonder what it will take to get such a movement to a pace of note. We do have faith in the open-source way but how will this effort transfer to the data center? Sponsor The organizers have the right idea. Michael Manos of Loose Bolts writes: "If you think of the Linux movement, and all of those who actively participate in submitting enhancements, features, even pulling together specific build packages for distribution, one could even see such things emerging in the data center engineering realm. In fact with the myriad of emerging technologies assisting in more energy efficiency, greater densities, differences in approach to economization (air or water), use of containers or non use of containers, its easy to see the potential for this component based design." Let's move on to this week's question. It's certainly true that cloud computing is one of the most category filled markets you can find. Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service - the list goes on. What companies do you think will be at the top of the cloud world in five years? opinion We do see the same big name companies making their stake in the market, no matter what their category. It's evident that there will likely be a handful standing over the next several years. Who will they be? Discuss

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Weekly Poll: What Companies Will Be at the Top of the Cloud in the Next 5 Years

An Entrepreneur’s View On The Benefits of Coworking

cgseo — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:00:00 +0000

We've all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs. Sponsor Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay , an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs . In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources. "The thing about a startup is that you're always under resourced; you never have enough people," Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. "So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed." Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite , was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups. How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience? We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things. We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn't get over and we would just shout out, "Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?" and some guy would jump up and say, "Yeah, I've done that!" Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I'd say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool." What is the experience like now in Ventura? There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it's a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we're part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we'll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way - the kind of random things that happen when you're all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they've helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they're trying to jump-start this ecosystem. So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space? If possible, I would not do the "in your basement" or "in your garage by yourself". Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial. In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well. I s there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment? It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you're there, you know each other, you understand each other's pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company. What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business? There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That's the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you'll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you're colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. "Oh, you've got that problem? I've got that problem, and here's the solution." You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time. Discuss

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An Entrepreneur's View On The Benefits of Coworking