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Yesterday, Hitachi took the wraps off their Unified Computing Platform by introducing its open data center platform. It is aimed at consolidating the enterprise functions of networking, storage, and compute into an orchestration layer. Virtualization is still guiding the evolution of the data center, in this case all the way to the physical form. If you like consolidating your systems into big iron with lots blinking lights, Hitachi has you covered. And if you like open systems that connect to your existing infrastructure, Hitachi believes that playing nice with others is in the domain of unified computing. Sponsor If you're interested in this idea, check out the video summary of the platform . The company shares us a deeper view of this product line and the problems it is intending to solve. Many of the opportunities targeted address budgets, for example, how to remove operating expense through the orchestration of resources. Orchestration is the Huddle on Third Down Orchestration merges network, system, and storage resources as a single unit to be managed and reported in. An analogy might be found in football. In the huddle, the quarterback might call "the slant 6" and all eleven members of the team interpret that play and perform their respective jobs. Orchestration, as Hitachi describes it behaves in a similar way. It will respond to plays like "scale up for product launch". All the members of the team (disk, server, and network) go to their respective places and do the jobs needed. And, if needed, adjust appropriately to the conditions on the field. Hitachi leverages a partnership with Microsoft's System Management tools to closely align the plan and reality to bring more intelligence into the equation. The Computing Stack is the Team This product is also about abstracting systems through software. The company is betting that the coordination of the tasks of operating systems, storage and networking within a single framework provides a lot of value to the business. Hitachi takes the point of view that it is best to harmonize existing assets though open standards and looks at computing as a utility to be shared in the organization. Some of the features the product contains make it easier for organizations to achieve scale across functions and environments. It is designed to support this modern data center principles: Multi-tenancy Charge back for resources Distributed physical data centers Public cloud resources through open APIs Hitachi Unified Compute Platform looks like an impressive physical device. It brings together resources normally held in separate racks and hosts them in a single location and reduces a lot of the work of wiring up data centers. As we unfold another chapter in computing, Hitachi is leveraging its strength in consolidation to meet the trend of massive growth of data. At a glance, there are a lot of reasons why IT managers might choose unified computing products: cost, ease, agility. Looking out a few years, it is easy to imagine growth in this category overall. Is Hitachi well positioned for aggregation of data center resources with its Unified Computing products? How will EMC, Cisco, IBM, and HP fare in the movement towards unified computing? Photo credit: idovermani Discuss
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Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform Goes for the Endzone
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North Carolina has asked online retailer Amazon.com to turn over the names and addresses of every customer who has made a purchase on the site since 2003 and what they bought. The N.C. Department of Revenue is making the request in an attempt to audit Amazon's compliance with state sales and tax laws, according to a Reuters report. Amazon says revealing this data violates customer privacy and has filed a lawsuit to prevent having to turn over the records which hold the transaction details on 50 million purchases over a 7-year time frame. Sponsor Government Wants Names, Addresses and Purchase History In a lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, Amazon states that North Carolina has no need for the personal details of its customers - details which include full names, addresses and information about exactly what they purchased and when. The Internet retailer had already given the state information on what has been sold to N.C. residents, but in the form of anonymized data, which should be sufficient. North Carolina, in turn, is now threatening the retailer with contempt proceedings if they don't hand over the requested records. The issue at hand, and likely the reason behind the request, has to do with N.C.'s sales tax laws. Amazon doesn't maintain any offices or warehouses in the state, so they are not required by law to collect sales tax on purchases. However, last year, the state passed a law that required retailers like Amazon to collect tax in the state if they ran marketing affiliate programs, which Amazon does. Amazon responded by shutting down Amazon.com Associates in N.C., the referral program that allows website owners to advertise Amazon products via links, banners, widgets and embeddable "mini-stores" on their web sites and blogs. Despite the program's shutdown, N.C. wants to find ways to collect back taxes on sales that took place before the law went into effect. Right to Privacy or Right to Tax? Amazon has already given the state order numbers, city, county, zip codes, transaction dates, prices and product codes for seven years worth of purchases - information routinely requested in audits like this. But asking for personally identifiable information goes too far, says the retailer. In the filing, Amazon says N.C.'s demands violate customers' First Amendment rights, Washington state law and federal law. Now it will be up to a federal judge in Seattle to rule as to whether or not this demand is, in fact, illegal. Beth Stevenson, the N.C. Department of Revenue's director of public affairs has not yet commented on the lawsuit Amazon filed saying the agency needed to review it first. Discuss
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Amazon Refuses North Carolina's Demands for Customers' Personal Data
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"My background is in Artificial Intelligence and my last business was building predictive data. Most of our customers were oil companies, and you can hold that against me if you like. But my pitch back then was 'just give me enough data, I'll figure out something.' And often enough I did figure out something." That's how Houston-based 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar describes his background. Tonight his web-crawling-as-a-service company will put up for sale tens of millions of data points extracted from public social networks and other websites. He says it's only a matter of time until everyone's doing it and he wants to be one of the good guys. "You can figure something out from just about anything," he says. That's the kind of geek Shion Deysarkar is. Sponsor Starting at $350 per month, 80Legs customers can now purchase 10 to 20 million monthly user profiles from LinkedIn, MySpace and some other social networks. Facebook and Twitter are not included, but there are a variety of other data sets from places like retail websites available as well. I've bet Deysarkar a beer that LinkedIn isn't going to put up with this, but he says 80Legs has been crawling them extensively for quite a while and would have stopped them if they wanted to. We'll see. 80Legs launched at DEMO last fall and has been on our radar since last Spring. Its core product is crawling the web for a small fee - to index whatever its customers want. As Sarah Perez wrote in September : What 80Legs does is no easy feat. It provides its users a service which offers up 50,000 computers which can crawl up to 2 billion web pages per day. Yes, it's like having your own little search engine that you can rent for a small fee. How small? 80Legs is about 50% less expensive than any other competitive service out there. Tonight it's putting up for sale some pre-configured crawls, in hopes to reach a new market of people for whom the core service is too complicated. Either way, Shion Deysarkar may be a man from the future. We're watching closely the slow opening of aggregate social network user data for bulk analaysis and innovation. It's a hotly contested area. Here's what Deysarkar thinks about four of the biggest questions in this area today. On The Slap-Down of Nice Facebook Data Harvesters Academic and innovation-minded researchers are harvesting large quantities of public Facebook user profile data, only to be threatened by Facebook's legal department. Pete Warden is the best known example and one that Deysarkar called "a shame." The people using that data are not doing anything that's shady or wrong. They are trying to make new value on top of that data. In ways that Facebook or whoever is not doing. Facebook is in the business of bringing people to their site, they aren't leveraging that data for other things, and there is many things they'll never use data for. No harm is being done to Facebook. What would help them would be to become a data standard. As long as people are adding value then it's good. On Users Approving of Data Aggregation Say "aggregate user data analysis" and most people freak out - presuming it's a screaming privacy violation. Might that ever change? Deysarkar thinks so, perhaps too optimistically. "Going forward, the end user will hopefully understand that people are creating services that will benefit them. If I take a couple of actions and I see it benefits me that's hopeful. The challenge is that people have to understand that it came from aggregation. The more people that are making a case and building things around it, the better. "If you look at social networking, quite often connections are made in unintuitive ways. Obviously market researchers can take advantage of that, but it can also help people connect with that we couldn't otherwise. "At the end of the day, it's going to happen. Sites are going to fight it, but that data is going to become available. Wherever there is value to be had, people are going to go for that value." On the Black Market for Social Networking Data One of our arguements has been that Facebook and other networks should open up access to their public user data for aggregate analysis because the bad guys who want to do bad things with it already are, through the black market . Meanwhile, positive uses of data analysis are prohibited. Deysarkar confirms again that the black market is real. "Companies should want to work with us because we're above board. The black market definitely exists. We have heard about it from some of our potential customers, who have asked about things we wouldn't do. They just say, 'we can get it through other ways.' Things like wanting a crawler to log-in and get private data. It's too bad that exists." On the Still Infant Market for Good User Data 80Legs is cool. It's a crawler-as-a-service. Pete Warden, one of our Big Data favorites, uses and endorses it. But it's also a little complicated, especially because it's like selling potential . It sells data that you then have to derive value from, it doesn't deliver value directly in ways people are familiar with. The Economist's Special Report on Big Data last month argued that data was a key new form of economic input, on par with land, labor and capital. Deysarkar says he agrees with that, "it is definitely a unit of value," but also admits that too few people get it yet. "We do have customers who are using 80legs the way we intended, we have a decent set of customers. But we know that there is a whole other set of customers who are intimidated because it is a bit technical now. These pre-configured crawls we're now selling still fit into the big picture, but the whole data market is not well defined. There isn't a rich enough ecosystem of companies using the data, that's the market we'd like to serve, but it's still being formed right now." What do you think? Is 80Legs just a little ahead of its time? A lot? Totally crazy and wrong? We would love for you to share your thoughts on these matters in comments below. Discuss
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Thoughts From the Man Who Would Sell The World, Nicely
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I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that thinks get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. Still, the absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss
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What Twitter Annotations Mean
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The Internet of Things is the idea of a web of data provided by things like real-world devices and sensors. It's something we've covered in great detail here at ReadWriteWeb because where there is data, there is a platform for services and mashups. When that data is intimately tied to our real lives off-line, that's exciting. The Internet of Things offers a whole new world of opportunities for improved decision making, innovative services and (unfortunately) social surveillance. It's loaded with implications to consider. Whether you've got 5 or 30 minutes to spare, check out the two following videos (one short, one long) that both do a great job of explaining where the Internet of Things is at and why it's so exciting. Sponsor Last week industry thought leader Tim O'Reilly, the man widely credited with popularizing the term Web 2.0, gave an opening keynote talk about the Internet of Things at his organization's MYSQL conference . Some readers here might assume that a MYSQL talk is too technical for them, but this was a speech that anyone could appreciate. We've embedded below two videos. The first is a great 5 minute explanation of the Internet of Things from IBM. The next is O'Reilly's 36 minute keynote. We highly recommend you check both out for a great picture of where the future is headed. Above, from IBM's Smarter Planet . Below, Tim O'Reilly at the O'Reilly MYSQL conference . Of course it's not all peachy keen. As O'Reilly explains at the 18 minute mark, there is a battle over control of all this data the web is being flooded with. "You see increasingly the giants of the internet are trading for their own account, they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that, we have to work for openess in that web." What do you think about the Internet of Things? Caption image from the Internet of Things 2010 Conference coming up in Tokyo this November. Discuss
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Tim O'Reilly Explains the Internet of Things
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