January 16, 2012
Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1
The Secret Behind All Those Shiny CES Gadgets? Cloud Computing
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Barb Darrow
As usual, a big chunk of the news out of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year revolves around bright-and-shiny devices. But this time out, those devices are acting as the Trojan horses for the hardware makers' cloud vision.
Backend cloud services are now pretty much required as hardware companies struggle to build more intimate relationships with PC or tablet buyers to keep them coming back for more. With the exception of Apple Macs, most desktop and laptop PCs are seen as pretty much interchangeable: People buy what's cheapest.
At CES, Acer showed off a new slim Ultrabook measuring 15 mm thick at its fattest point and weighing less than three pounds. But, more importantly, the company also launched AcerCloud, which will let PC users store and retrieve their files any time. Cloud access will come with all new Acer consumer PCs. The effort was promptly slammed as a blatant knock-off of Apple's iCloud.
In that same vein, Lenovo announced Lenovo Personal Cloud along with its new hardware. Lenovo's own verbiage shows what these hardware companies are trying to do. Lenovo's "personal cloud vision" marks the transformation of the company from a "personal computer" manufacturer to a "personal cloud solution" provider that integrates hardware, software, and cloud computing together
The wrinkle here is that these PC makers - Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Toshiba, Dell et al - are competing not only against each other but against nimbler new-age companies that offer cloud-based storage, compute, and application services without being tied down to a hardware albatross. That means Acer and Lenovo are also competing with the likes of Dropbox, Box.net and others as well as Amazon which is using its Kindle franchise as the storefront to its massive online store.
The beauty of the cloud computing model, which conceals so much complexity from the user as reported here, is that it can deliver very easy-to-obtain-and-consume services without requiring much technical savvy on the part of that user. Hardware makers now know they have to be in this game to make their endpoints desirable in this increasingly connected world. In short, they're offering more cloud services to keep themselves - and their hardware - relevant.
Oppose SOPA in Congress This Wednesday
The DCIA urges DCINFO readers personally to attend the US House of Representatives Hearing on the misguided, ill-conceived, and potentially harmful Stop Online piracy Act (SOPA) this Wednesday January 18th.
Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is providing this opportunity for technology sector representatives to express rational views about how damaging SOPA would be to the continuing operation of the Internet and to suggest alternatives.
The DCIA supports the OPEN Act, a much more reasonable option, co-sponsored by Congressman Issa and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).
Hearing panelists are expected to include Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace Hosting; Alexis Ohaninian, Co-Founder, Reddit; and Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures.
We also encourage you to contact Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, with your views on the Protect-IP Act (or PIPA), SOPA's equally bad companion piece in the Senate.
Chairman Leahy has recently indicated a willingness to revise this measure, which currently provides for court orders banning ad networks and payment processors from doing business with web-based companies merely accused of copyright infringement, banning search engines from returning results to their sites, and banning Internet service providers (ISPs) from putting traffic through to their URLs.
This will not only result in closing down legitimate sites that are wrongfully identified as infringing, but also as a result of its interference with the domain name system (DNS), put the entire web architecture at risk.
And it won't work as intended because infringers will simply enter numeric IP addresses to reach sites offering unauthorized content.
Leahy's revising of DNS blocking provisions would be a positive, as would be the same action promised late in the week by SOPA backers in the House, but these bills will still be unacceptable unless their authors also remove the grant of grossly excessive enforcement powers to private parties and address the absence of penalties to such entities for abusing them. The definitions in these bills are still far too sweeping as well.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Congratulations to Gary Shapiro and everyone at the Consumer Electronics Association on attracting record-setting attendance to the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV.
Highlights in the advancement of innovative technologies at the show are too numerous to list, but those most relevant to the distributed computing industry will be featured in this and upcoming editions of DCINFO.
The 2012 International CES was the largest in the event's 44 year history, with a record number of more than 3,100 exhibitors across the largest show floor in CES history - 1.861 million net square feet of exhibit space - and drawing a record of more than 153,000 attendees, including more than 34,000 international attendees.
More than 20,000 new products were launched at the 2012 CES. Executive delegations from thousands of global companies, from Apple to Zeo, attended the 2012 CES to meet with current and future customers.
We are especially grateful to everyone who participated in our standing-room-only (SRO) second annual CONTENT IN THE CLOUD Conference within CES.
DCINFO readers who were unable to attend can now access the Conference Brochure online, which includes our Conference Agenda, Biographies of Keynote Speakers, Panelist and Moderator Bios, DCIA Member Company benefits, and our DCIA 2011 Annual Report. Please click here for photos from the conference.
Mike West, Founder & CTO, GenosTV set the stage for the entire conference program with his opening keynote A Vision for Content in the Cloud.
Mike postulated that a vision may be the framework for a series of predictions based on: understanding of what may be possible, experience of futures past, personal biases founded on hope, or assumptions of future behaviors. It could be an opinion, a guess, or series of guesses; and if so, hopefully educated, insightful, directed, and useful. Or it could be a glimpse into the future - that may be with us soon.
He noted that our keynote presentations and panels with leading professionals from across the industry would explore many different aspects of content in the cloud: benefits, drawbacks, impacts, and issues; and the details provided by them would ultimately shape the overall vision that delegates could take away from the conference.
Starting with the perspective of consumers, Mike noted that most computer-equipped consumers already use "the cloud," although they don't know it by that name and simply call it "going online" (or a similar expression).
To consumers, in relationship to their consumption of content, the cloud could eventually mean delivery on the promise of "Anything, Anywhere, Anytime," a seamless, aggregated experience, without forcing change in their lives and behaviors, and without limits.
The high-volume content right now is video, which in its digital forms is relatively easy to manipulate, reformat, store, and distribute. Today, however, the majority of video content consumption is still on televisions: linear TV - viewed when it is telecast. Despite being digital, the current TV system still resembles in many ways the old analog system of the 1950s.
Meanwhile, the consumer is a social animal seeking shared experiences and the sharing of experiences. Merging entertainment with Internet functionality needs to be simple for even the most technophobic consumer and needs to be a seamless, beneficial, and useful aggregation.
A key will be to make it simpler and better for consumers -- making it easy to find what they want when they want it: enhanced search and recommendation capabilities, getting rid of channel numbers, and instead implementing visual channel selection with advance EPGs.
Linear TV integrated with DVR and VoD/FoD functions with more channels and more entertainment options able to serve the interests of smaller, broader audience-sets with simplified time-shifting, without the need for special equipment, and without storage capacity limitations - these will all be readily achievable with cloud-based distribution.
Combine the social elements of shared viewing, shared playlists, communities, integrated chat, e-mail, and social media with integrated video telephony, instant messaging, etc. as options.
A current issue that needs to be overcome is bandwidth availability. Broadband infrastructure is barely ready to support large-scale video-in-the-cloud deployments, particularly "the last mile" in many places.
Business models are another major challenge. Established providers are grappling with the effects of new technologies. The old models worked well for years and it's hard to change. Key questions include: How to ensure that revenues continue and increase? How to provide for assured content security and ownership protection, particularly combating and reducing infringement?
The fact is that content is actually safer in the cloud than out in the wild, but this area nevertheless needs constant attention. Handling consumer access rights to and ownership of online content in digital lockers, and managing interoperability among them, require improved content management systems.
Some consumers still want something tangible (like a disc). Our vision of content in the cloud has to result in happier consumers with more choice, getting what they want, when they want, where they want including this aspect.
The bottom line is a very large opportunity to open new avenues for content from a wider range of content providers to wider audiences than ever before. There is an unprecedented chance to serve under-served interests and demographics, expatriate communities, multiple languages, minority groups, etc.
Content in the cloud is synonymous with more access, more content, more variety, new media outlets, and greater revenue potential for content rights-holders. There are opportunities to create new business models and to revamp, revive, and reinvigorate old business models. Ubiquitous connectivity and new technology simply act as catalysts.
Expanded markets for content providers, broadband network operators, and CE manufacturers should all be the result of fully exploiting content in the cloud.
Our first panel explored "The Impact on Consumers of Implementing Cloud Computing for Media Storage." Panelists included Sean Barger, CEO, Equilibrium; Jim Cady, CEO, Slacker; Ian Donahue, Co-Founder, RedThorne Media; Ed Haslam, SVP, Marketing, YuMe; Gigi Johnson, Executive Director, Maremel Institute; Jostein Svendsen, CEO, WeVideo; and Dave Toole, CEO, MEDIAmobz. As a follow-up to this panel, DCINFO readers are invited to read Gigi's white-paper Opening Pandora's Digital Box - Shifting Metaphors and Media to the Cloud.
Our second keynote was Consumer Benefits of Cloud-Delivered Content by Shahi Ghanem, EVP, Strategy, BitTorrent.
Our third keynote was Consumer Drawbacks of Cloud-Delivered Content: Privacy, Reliability, Security Issues by Jim Burger, Member, Dow Lohnes.
Our next panel discussed "The Impact on Telecommunications Industries of Cloud Computing." Tom Mulally, Principal Analyst, Numagic Consulting, moderated panelists Sean Jennings, VP, Solutions Architecture, Virtustream; Wayne Josel, Counsel, Media & Entertainment, Hughes Hubbard & Reed; Bill Kallman, President & CEO, Scayl; Monica Ricci, Director of Product Marketing, CSG Systems; Nick Strauss, Director of Sales, Verizon Digital Media Services; and Mark Taylor, VP, Media and IP Services, Level 3.
Our fourth keynote was Telecommunications Industry Benefits and Drawbacks of Cloud-Delivered Content: New Opportunities vs. Infrastructure Challenges by Joe Porus, VP, and John Schiela, President, Converged Technology & Media, Phoenix Marketing International.
Our next panel explored "The Impact on Entertainment Industries of Cloud Computing." Panelists included Kris Alexander, Chief Strategist, Connected Devices & Gaming, Akamai; Saul Berman, Partner & VP, IBM Global Business Services; Peter Csathy, CEO, Sorenson Media; Mark Friedlander, National Director, New Media, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) ; Jonathan King, SVP, Business Development, Joyent; Ty Roberts, SVP & CTO, Gracenote; Ajay Malhotra, EVP, North America, Prime Focus Technologies; and Robert Stevenson, EVP, Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, Gaikai. As a follow-up to this panel, DCINFO readers are invited to purchase Saul's book Not for Free - Revenue Strategies for a New World.
Our fifth keynote was Entertainment Industry Benefits and Drawbacks of Cloud-Delivered Content: Innovation and Flexibility vs. Disruption and Accountability Issues by Scott Brown, US GM & VP Strategy Partnerships, Octoshape.
Our final keynote was Benefits & Drawbacks of Cloud-Delivered Content - A Consumer Electronics User Experience Perspective by Lucia Gradinariu, Chief Market Strategist, Huawei.
Our closing panel addressed "The Impact on CE Manufacturers of Cloud Computing Deployment." Robert Scoble, Startup Liaison Officer, Rackspace, will moderate panelists Stefan Bewley, Director, Altman Vilandrie & Company; Shane Dyer, President, Arrayent; David Frerichs, Strategic Consultant, Pioneer Corporation; Kshitij Kumar, SVP, Mobile Video, Concurrent; AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media; Michael Papish, Solutions Architecture Director, Rovi Corporation; Jordan Rohan, Managing Director, Stifel Nicolaus; and Chuck Stormon, CEO, Attend.
Please plan now to join us for the CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the NAB Show. Share wisely, and take care.
CES 2012: Wyden, Issa Against Pending Web Bills
Excerpted from TWICE Report by Doug Olenick
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) joined with Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) President/CEO Gary Shapiro calling for the defeat of the current anti-piracy legislation now before both houses of Congress.
Wyden and Issa gave an overview to a press gathering of their fight against PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is working its way through the House.
Wyden has introduced the OPEN Act in the Senate, and Issa plans to do so in the House in the near future.
Wyden said the fight is nearing a critical point as lawmakers head back to Washington in the coming weeks to take up the issue. Issa will hold a hearing on January 18th that will include venture capitalists and companies that could potentially be negatively impacted by the proposed legislation.
Issa hopes the hearing will help educate those lawmakers supporting the current legislation and convince them to instead back Issa and Wyden's Online Protection & ENforcement of Digital Trade Act (the OPEN Act).
Issa said the OPEN Act will protect content providers and enable quick enforcement through the International Trade Commission (ITC), whereas PIPA and SOPA would use various federal judges to render such decisions.
Issa claimed these judges are not well-suited for dealing with high-tech issues like online copyright infringement whereas the ITC handles similar cases as a matter of course.
"Our bill gives the ITC the ability to follow the money. It will allow them to go to Master Card, PayPal, etc. to stop the money," Issa said.
He compared this to the type of enforcement that was used to stop the online gambling industry, where the government attacked the banks and credit card companies that were doing business with offshore-based gambling operations.
Wyden, who chairs the Senate trade subcommittee, has promised to filibuster if needed to stop PIPA from being voted on in the Senate when it comes before that body on January 23rd.
"I do not believe you can go out and damage the architecture of the Internet in the name of anti-piracy," Wyden said.
Issa said the OPEN Act would also give the ITC the ability to quickly go after the most offending copyright infringement sites. He said about 20 sites worldwide are responsible for 80 percent of the infringing activity taking place.
Level 3 and Akamai Focus on Latest Cloud Computing Opportunities
Technology companies focused on content delivery and high speed streaming have seen demand for their services skyrocket in recent years. Many content delivery companies have begun to focus on cloud computing to boost customer appeal, as cloud services require more bandwidth due to high quality media.
The Paragon Report examines the outlook for companies in the technology sector and provides research reports on Level 3 Communications and Akamai Technologies.
Akamai Technologies provides services for accelerating and improving the delivery of content and applications over the Internet in the United States and internationally. Last month, Akamai agreed to buy its smaller rival, Israel's Contendo for $268 million. Contendo offers web and mobile acceleration services that extensively utilizes cloud technology.
"Cotendo's technology, partnerships and people are a strong complement to Akamai. Together, we believe there is tremendous opportunity for our combined technologies as enterprises embrace the move to the cloud and seek solutions for an increasingly mobile world," said Paul Sagan, President and CEO of Akamai.
The Paragon Report provides investors with an excellent first step in their due diligence by providing daily trading ideas, and consolidating the public information available about them.
Level 3 Communications offers network and Internet services, including transport services, high speed Internet protocol services, dedicated Internet access, virtual private network services, and dark fiber services. The company recently revealed that Level 3's advanced IP network will serve as an important component in the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure project, a $66.6 million total cost project that is being partly funded with $46.6 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
The Paragon Report has not been compensated by the above-mentioned publicly traded companies and generates its revenue from other third-party organizations for advertising services.
A New Peer Sphere: BitTorrent Baked into Devices
Excerpted from Variety Report by Marc Graser
BitTorrent used CES to unveil a line of software that enables its service to transfer files through live streams, and apps on Android and Apple's iOS devices.
"Peer-based computing is the fastest way to send these huge files over the Internet," Shahi Ghanem, Chief Strategy Officer at BitTorrent said. "This dovetails with the expanded abilities of smart-phones, HD camcorders, and DSLR (cameras) to record high-quality files that easily can clear multiple gigabytes of space, either individually or taken as a group."
More than 150 million people used BitTorrent and uTorrent in December, with 132 million people using uTorrent and more than 20 million people using BitTorrent.
The San Francisco-based peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing company has also inked hardware deals to integrate BitTorrent's file-sharing software in new devices that will enable users to exchange movies, photos, and lawfully-owned entertainment files.
BBK Electronics, popular in Russia, will integrate BitTorrent in its TVs, Blu-ray, and DVD players.
"Our customers would like to easily playback hi-def content on their TVs and share it with friends," said BBK representative Evgeny Zemskov.
Others are AirTies, makers of set-top boxes (STBs) and routers in Europe, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey; Dune HD, which makes media players and Europe and Asia; and Antik, which makes web-enabled TVs in Slovakia.
LG and Gaikai to Bring Cloud Gaming to 3D Televisions in 2012
Excerpted from GamesBeat Report by Stefanie Fogel
LG Electronics and Gaikai are teaming up to bring an integrated cloud gaming service to LG Cinema 3D TVs in 2012.
Gaikai says it has spent three years building the fastest interactive cloud network in the world, instantly capable of delivering cutting-edge games without the need for any extra custom hardware.
The company's cloud platform will be a part of LG's game portal service within the Smart TV ecosystem and will allow consumers to use their Smart TV log-ins to seamlessly play a broad range of games, including some of the latest award-winning releases.
"We care passionately about delivering the best content and most premium experiences possible for our valued customers," said Taeg Il Cho, VP of TV Product Planning Group at LG Electronics. "The ability to have award winning games that run on much more powerful hardware in the cloud than today's PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 made this a must-have feature for our televisions and future devices."
Gaikai has recently scored some big deals with other retailers and game publishers - including Best Buy, Capcom, Ubisoft, Walmart, and Electronic Arts - by offering the ability to stream games directly to Internet users. By adding a small amount of code to a website, a retailer or publisher can offer streaming game demos to interested consumers, who can then purchase the game on the same page.
A prototype version of the LG Smart TV gaming service was demoed live on the CES 2012 show floor in Las Vegas, NV.
How P2P and Big Data Could Save the Set-Top Box
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Derrick Harris
Netflix dominates the business of streaming Hollywood movies and television into consumers' homes, but a new business model developed by big data firm Opera Solutions could help give cable companies the inside track. They've been under fire from services, such as Netflix, Roku, and Hulu that stream content to existing devices such as gaming consoles, or straight to users' computers, but cable companies' set-top boxes (STBs) could end up as their saviors.
Thanks to a combination of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking and big data algorithms, cable or satellite providers could significantly reduce the costs of serving content while also improving the accuracy of personalized recommendation - and this solution relies on the omnipresence of STBs.
Opera employees working under the team name "Media Moguls" developed the model as part of the company's annual Opera Open challenge, in which employees compete to create the best product that utilizes the company's analytics technology. Media Moguls won the competition.
According to team member Carmine Mangione, Chief Software Architect at Opera, the problem facing most providers of streaming video is one of choice vs. costs. While they might want to provide the largest libraries possible, that's a very expensive proposition. In order to provide an effective streaming experience and provide features such as rewinding, Mangione explained, content needs to be served from memory rather than on slower, but cheaper, hard disks. On average, a single server could effectively serve about 100 people watching the same movie at the same time.
That's not too bad a ratio if a provider is hosting a small library, but Mangione said it gets exponentially more expensive as providers try to address the long tail of subscriber interest. More content doesn't just mean adding more servers, but it means adding enough servers to maintain performance levels even in the case of unexpected traffic, thus drastically reducing the number of viewers each server actually supports.
In an e-mail, Andrew Grant, Akamai's Senior Manager for Entertainment Industry Marketing, described the problem in this manner:
"For VoD content, as content libraries get larger - i.e., as more and more of the 'long-tail' of video content is made available for consumers to enjoy - the system must be architected to support a projected average amount of streaming per title, and then over-provisioned to support the unpredictable traffic associated with an outlying event. Think when Michael Jackson died and suddenly traffic for old concert footage suddenly spiked. Building a system to support this level of 'flash crowd' traffic would require leaving a large amount of server capacity under-utilized a large part of the time."
By Mangione's math, a 100,000-movie library would cost about $1.4 billion a year to operate, as opposed to about $10,000 for a 10,000-movie library. Akamai's Grant noted that his company's CDN (which is one of several that serve Netflix's streaming service) is built in part to adjust to such spikes by adding capacity as needed. Akamai's services, of course, aren't free either.
Mangione realized that cable providers could actually save themselves infrastructure costs and add more content by leveraging the CPU and memory present in their STBs. By creating a P2P network of subscribers' boxes, providers wouldn't have to build as much infrastructure because their servers would get hit a lot less. Once subscribers downloaded movies, their STBs and Internet connections would handle most of the subsequent downloads from other subscribers.
But there's a problem with such a simple approach: Movie files are large, and P2P networks can be slow because traffic might have to traverse multiple network hops. Even if they offer fewer titles, streaming services such as Netflix might look more appealing because their use of CDNs allows them to deliver content so much faster.
The solution to this problem, Mangione decided, is to determine subscribers' particular interests and then create geographically logical clusters of subscribers who share the same interests. The benefits to this approach are twofold: 1) It decreases the chances of having to hit a provider's central server because the chances are higher that someone (or multiple people) in a user's cluster has that title. And 2) it improves the accuracy of recommendations because the system primarily analyzes what people with the same interests are viewing and doesn't have to filter through as much noise from the overall subscriber base.
Such private networks scale to about 10,000 users, Mangione said.
Aside from classifying users into groups based on what they watch, Media Moguls captain and Opera Principal Scientist Frank Elliott noted the system also could determine the genre of movies more accurately based on who's watching them. Ideally, the algorithms would maximize P2P traffic and minimize server load by accurately pointing subscribers to new content they want but don't have, and that's on other STBs in their clusters.
Opera does have some clout when it comes to talking about recommendation algorithms: A team that included several Opera employees came in second place in the Netflix Prize competition in 2009, although it and the winning team finished in a statistical tie.
It is, of course, up to cable or satellite providers to determine the viability of Opera's model and implement it, but the signs point to that happening. For one, Opera CEO Arnab Gupta said his company's plan is to commercialize the technology through a media-industry partner that already has the data, infrastructure, and distribution plans in place. Ideally, that would be a cable or satellite provider (Dish Network is ramping up its streaming service), but conceivably could be an Internet-only device that has adequate hardware specs.
And although STBs might be relics of the past as new boxless viewing methods come into existence, mainstream ubiquity could be a way off. Adopting the Opera method would let providers leverage their existing networks of STBs in the meantime, and its relevancy might well carry into future viewing methods. Whether customers are streaming content from other devices (e.g., game consoles, Roku, etc.) or straight through their TVs, providers still have to worry about the backend costs of storing and delivering all that content.
In any case, licensing content is also a hurdle, but all the hubbub about SOPA and PIPA might end up proving to be a blessing in disguise. If the public outcry against these bills is enough to kill them in the House and Senate, it might well serve as a signal to content owners to focus on new, legal distribution channels rather than on lawsuits. Something like this, done through existing cable or satellite partners, could be one good option.
Clouds, Ultrabooks, and the Evolution of Storage
Excerpted from Forbes Report by Tom Coughlin
The use of cloud resources, including services and storage, to serve consumer needs was one of the major topics at both the 2012 Storage Visions Conference as well as the 2012 CES. This article will provide observations on what the development of the cloud will mean to the balance of local vs. remote storage.
Increased storage efficiencies and storage capacities at data centers combined with higher bandwidth access and the use of flash memory based content delivery systems enable services such as YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, iCloud, and various other multi-stream social networks, content access and remote storage services. Some people claim that the rise of cloud based resources will lead to less local storage, but there are reasons that the opposite consequence may occur.
Although the amount of raw bandwidth available worldwide is large, the availability and cost of access at any given point in time can vary significantly, particularly for a mobile individual. For that reason even thin client products with smaller screens (such as smart phones and tablets) accessing compressed content often benefit from prior content downloads when connections are good as well as caching and buffering of content to ensure good performance. Thus the storage capacity either directly inside these devices or readily available to them will generally increase with time. Intel and Micron's recent announcement of 20 mm flash memory chips with 128 gigabit capacity will probably lead to a wave of tablets with up to 128 GB capacity within the next year-and I expect that the general storage capacity in these products will rise over the next year.
An interesting ecosystem of "personal cloud" devices such as the Seagate GoFlex Satellite or the Kingston Wi-Drive may provide additional WiFi accessible local storage for these thin client products-a feature that may be useful for a number of users. These personal cloud devices may be further augmented by a second (or even third) generation of home and small business NAS storage devices from companies such as Buffalo, Hitachi GST, Iomega, Seagate, and Western Digital that offer remote access from their internal storage and sometimes coupled with additional storage through a cloud provider. These examples of small "private clouds" can be part of a hybrid cloud architecture.
The number of cloud services and devices in these consumer hybrid clouds will probably require protocols for how these services and systems can work together on an ad hoc basis. This leads us to project the rise of loose cloud federations that can share content and services to the consumer as available and as needed. Content from one type of cloud may be cached or buffered into one of the others for greater accessibility as well as better performance. Likewise remote storage will be used to provide disaster recovery of the most valuable consumer content while more transient or personal data is kept on the closer components in the cloud federation.
Ultrabooks were much discussed at CES this year with good reason. These thin lightweight devices provide greater creative capabilities than thin client tablets usually provide and they have more powerful processors and memory. Although originally projected to be primarily flash memory based devices it is likely that the majority of the more popular models will probably contain a hard disk drive to keep the price at a point where these products will appeal to a majority of users.
At the same time, flash memory will likely be used in these devices to provide faster performance using either a dual drive configuration where frequently read content (such as applications software) is kept on a solid state drive (SSD) while user data is kept on a hard drive, or as a cache memory. The cache memory approach uses flash memory as a non-volatile enhancement of faster DRAM memory. Frequently used content is captured in the flash cache and read back instead of going to the slower hard drive to retrieve this content. This increases the performance of the overall computer system. Ultrabooks might even contain flash cache as well as flash dual storage combined with a hard disk drive in order to allow the drive to stay in a lower power state and giving some additional battery life.
So, although the cloud will provide enormous improvements in services and less expensive options for disaster recovery storage for consumers and other users, it may not replace most local storage. Universal connectivity with good quality high speed connections cannot be counted on and some content may not be put on a truly remote storage system due to privacy and sensitivity concerns.
Thus the future seems to be one where we will see the growth of remote cloud storage and services enabled by developments in storage technology as well as the rise of more personal clouds to serve the needs of individual consumers and other users. At the same time the growth in the amount and richness of content may lead to the growth of more cache and buffer storage in computers and consumer products as well as new types of storage tiering. In this way the growth of content in the cloud(s) may contribute to further storage capacity on the ground.
@ CES: Cisco's Videoscape TV Platform Reaches for the Cloud
Excerpted from CED Report by Mike Robuck
After making its debut last year at the Consumer Electronics Show, Cisco's blended Videoscape TV platform is set to offer "video in the cloud" services via a host of new product offerings.
"Cisco offers the most comprehensive networked video solutions available to service providers," said Jesper Andersen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Service Provider Video Technology Group at Cisco. "We have spent the last year refining and advancing our Videoscape platform with new capabilities that will support our customers' biggest challenges.
Only Videoscape offers the combined power of the network, cloud, and client to help service providers accelerate time to market with new multi-screen video services. With our new cloud components in play, we are confident we can help our customers open new programming distribution channels and advertising possibilities to drive new revenue."
Also since last year, Cisco's Videoscape has racked up customer wins with Rogers Communications, Israel-based Yes, and France's Numericable. Last month, Rogers launched a beta version of its live streaming service for iPads, and it plans on offering it across Android devices later this year. At the time, Rogers' David Purdy, Vice President of Video Products, hinted that bigger things were in the offing when it came to pushing video services across the company's quad play of services, and Videoscape looks like it will play a key role.
Customers are clamoring for multi-screen video content, and by pushing content into a cloud service, providers using Videoscape will be able to offer live and VoD content to PCs and Macs, as well as iPads, iPhones, and Android devices.
In addition to blending Internet, linear, and VoD video for "any screen" consumption, Videoscape also puts service providers on the pathway to IP video services.
On the video cloud services front, Cisco has rolled out a new gateway, the Cisco 9800 series, that features six tuners, which allows viewers to watch and record six video streams simultaneously. The gateway delivers live, recorded, and on-demand content - including standard and high-definition and 3D TV - to multiple screens within the home via traditional QAM-based set-tops and pure IP set-tops.
Cisco uses its Videoscape Voyager Vantage software to connect the set-top boxes to a cloud. It also allows a service provider to deploy richer user interfaces (UIs) and electronic programming guides (EPGs); provide extensive VoD catalogs; and integrate new applications for social media, Internet video, and content sharing.
Cisco was demonstrating a prototype of how some of these new Videoscape components work in Las Vegas in conjunction with Coincident TV. Using Cisco's Conductor and an iPad, viewers are able to get more information about a TV show they're watching, including actor bios and telescoping opportunities to buy the same clothes an actor or actress is wearing, as well as gather more information on Wikipedia and chat about a show in real time after it has aired.
With VoD content stored in the cloud, Videoscape also allows viewers to jump around to different parts of an episode or view summaries of episodes.
The UI is HTML5-based, and APIs can be used by third parties to develop additional apps. Using XMPP and Coincident TV, the iPad is able to communicate in real time with the cloud to pull videos into a home.
The iPad works in conjunction with the content on a TV without disrupting the show in progress. The end result is a viewing experience that complements or augments the content that is on a big-screen TV.
In short, the demonstration contained a lot of the elements of interactive TV that cable has been trying to deploy for years through EBIF, tru2way, and other technologies - but devices such as the iPad have changed the interactive TV landscape.
Amazon Transformed Into Hot Media Company
Excerpted from Business Insider Report by Marc Rosoff
How did an aging e-commerce giant like Amazon become one of the hottest company's in Silicon Valley? Along with a brand new cutting-edge campus, and a strong track record of employee loyalty and sound business practices, Amazon has become much bigger than books.
In addition to Web Services - which is now estimated to be a billion-dollar business powering back-end operations for some high-profile start-ups - the company has established itself as a leading mobile and media powerhouse.
"It's not like being in Hollywood for movies or New York for publishing, but Amazon is increasingly looking more like a big media company," writes Business Insider's Marc Rosoff. "For instance, Amazon Prime has morphed from a discounted shipping deal to an online video streaming service with thousands of movies."
The company also boasts a thriving online music store and related music locker service, as well as a publishing house that plans to put out more than 100 books this quarter.
Meanwhile, "Amazon has rolled out mobile apps for all major mobile platforms" BI adds. Along with the success of its Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire, Amazon is rumored to be designing a mobile phone for a 2012 debut.
Mobile Cloud Computing Will Soar in 2012
Excerpted from Data Center Knowledge Report by Olafur Ingthorsson
It's no surprise that many cloud experts predict that mobile cloud computing will become increasingly important in 2012. Given the numbers of smart-phones, tablets, and other mobile devices shipped every day, more and more users are relying on the cloud as the main driver for satisfying their computing needs, whether it is data storage, applications, or infrastructure.
A simple Google search for smart-phone sales in 2012 quickly reveals booming sales expectations, not least in growing markets like India and China. One of the main reasons for the growth is the availability of affordable devices across all platforms including Windows, Android and Bada.
Secondly, the application of smart-phones in industry and corporate settings is supporting increased sales. Previously, the Blackberry was virtually the only accepted corporate smart-phone platform. This is changing fast, as both iPhones and Android (and presumably Windows Phone) are being adopted in corporate settings.
Although security issues are still creating many concerns, perhaps especially for the Android, this trend shows no signs of slowing down. This is especially interesting as Android has already captured half of the global smart-phone market share, according to Gartner. Whether this is a bomb waiting to explode is hard to determine, but it is clear that malware is growing at an exponential rate, although most users are still unaffected.
According to a Maravedis prediction, Android will continue to be the leading smart-phone OS in 2012, accounting for approximately 50% of worldwide market share, followed by iPhone with 18%, Windows with 13%, and Blackberry with 12%. Symbian will be largely discontinued by the end of the year.
Tablet sales display a similar picture. Sales are expected to surge in 2012. Although Apple iPad is still the market leader, it is closely being followed up by several Android designs - most notably from Samsung and Acer and increasingly the budget-friendly Amazon Android Kindle Fire.
These factors contribute heavily to the increasing mobile cloud emphasis. It is, however, due not only to increasing availability of smart-phones and tablets, but also to standards and cloud services that support remote data access, storage, and apps. Prominent examples include Apple iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, and DropBox, to name a few. Users are getting used to upload and access their data from the cloud - and increasingly from a mobile device.
In fact, "Visiongain" expects mobile cloud services to reach $45 billion in 2016. The greatest revenue contributions will come from mobile cloud apps, driven by increasing smart-phone penetration, growth of 3G network coverage across the globe, and deployment of 4G/LTE services. Furthermore, technology enhancements such as BONDI, OneAPI, and HTML5 will further enhance the development of cloud based mobile applications.
From the predictions above, it certainly seems that mobile cloud computing has a bright future ahead. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are likely to enter the domain with carrier-cloud services that are poised to compete with some of the public cloud offerings through service differentiation and network quality levels. This will further help to advance the mobile cloud in industry and corporate settings whereby customers can receive improved service levels and service guarantee.
Cloud Computing Will Be a Boon for SMB Providers
Excerpted from eWeek Report by Nathan Eddy
Many service providers offer data centers and hosting capabilities to SMBs looking to store infrastructure externally.
As cloud computing continues to gain acceptance in emerging markets, service providers - such as telcos, multiple system operators (MSOs), and hosters - are well-positioned to gain mindshare and become an important route to market (RTM) for small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) acquiring cloud solutions, according to a report from IT research firm AMI-Partners.
The company's recently released 2011 Route-to-Market Opportunity Model shows that in emerging markets, such as China, India, Brazil and Russia, SMB cloud services spending and investments through service providers will increase nearly sixfold from $111 million in 2011 to $615 million by 2015. This represents a four-year annual growth rate of 54 percent-the largest among all RTMs tracked by AMI and far outpacing the growth in total software-as-a-service (SaaS) spending over the same period.
"Service providers in emerging markets will gain considerable market share in the cloud services space, due to several key factors," said Rohan Bose, Associate for AMI's Channels Practice. "The first is due to mergers and acquisition activity within the channel landscape. Larger telcos and service providers are in the process of acquiring smaller VARs and local channel partners/resellers." Bose said the acquisition of these partners allows service providers to diversify their product portfolios and enter the cloud market by providing basic SaaS solutions (such as accounting, business intelligence/analytics, e-mail, and CRM).
"This is an important step for many telcos and MSOs, as they believe that their traditional offerings such as voice, data, and video services will begin to enter a phase of modest growth over the next couple of years," he said. "Cloud services allow service providers the ability to meet the growing SMB demand and differentiate themselves from other competitors."
The second factor for the expected increase in service providers' share is their ability to bundle SaaS solutions with broadband and high-speed Internet connectivity. Other cloud providers such as channel partners can bundle multiple SaaS applications together, but cost-conscious SMBs are more likely to purchase bundles containing broadband. Bose explained that as the demand for cloud services continues to rise, SMBs in emerging markets will require access to high-speed Internet to increase business efficiency, and it is the service providers who are uniquely positioned to offer such packages.
Finally, many of these service providers offer data centers and hosting capabilities to SMBs looking to store infrastructure externally. Similarly, they can offer data center hosting to traditional channel partners such as VARs for the same reason. Other channel partners who require space to host their own apps often turn to service providers to meet their needs. AMI studies have shown strong interest by channel partners to partner with service providers for hosting needs, but it is up to the service providers to foster and grow the relationship.
"Given the gradual shift in SMB preference, IT vendors would be wise to take advantage of this lucrative opportunity," the report concluded. "Since many smaller service providers do not yet have the necessary business applications to offer SMBs SaaS. and other cloud vendors can utilize them as a viable option to go-to-market. By entering into strategic and symbiotic relationships, vendors can help service providers add further value to their services."
Pushing the Limitations of Distributed Computing in the Cloud
Excerpted from IT Business Edge Report by Michael Vizard
IT and compliance executives are not on the same page when it comes to cloud security.
Enterprise IT continues to get more complex. It's already difficult to manage distributed computing environments that now have as many, if not more, virtual servers than physical ones. And now IT organizations are wrestling with the prospect of having to manage all those servers across hybrid cloud computing environments.
IT vendors such as IBM in the case of the zEnterprise mainframe or Cisco in the form of the Unified Computing System (UCS) X86 server are responding to these concerns with homogeneous platforms that allow IT organizations to consolidate the management of servers, storage ,and networking under a common management platform.
But those approaches require millions of dollars to actually implement. As a result, it might take years for IT organizations to centralize all their servers. In the meantime, the problem of managing widely distributed physical and virtual servers is only going to get more pronounced.
Convirture CEO Arsalan Farooq says that unless the IT industry as a whole finds some way to rise to this management challenge, the whole shift to cloud computing may be in jeopardy. IT organizations moving to the cloud will find that the management headaches associated with cloud computing are exponentially higher and many of them might simply declare cloud computing to be a failed experiment.
Convirture provides an open source framework for managing Xen and KVM virtual machine environments. Farooq says that one of the challenges that IT organizations are going to have to come to terms with is that not only is IT becoming more complex to manage, but the diversity of the virtual machine environment is increasing as rival platforms continue to gain share on VMware.
Potentially worse yet, Farooq notes that application workloads will need to be managed across increasingly fragmented enterprise IT environments. In an ideal world, Farooq says application workloads would be dynamically routed to the optimal platform available to process them. But he says IT system management vendors are still years away from making that happen across heterogeneous environments.
What all this means, says Farooq, is that the next two years may be a make-or-break time for a distributed computing model that is already pushing up against its own cloud computing limitations.
Coming Events of Interest
State of the Net Conference - January 17th-18th in Washington, DC. Unparalleled opportunities to network and engage on key policy issues at the largest information technology (IT) policy conference in the US and the only tech policy conference routinely recognized for its balanced blend of academics, consumer groups, industry, and government.
Social Media Insider Summit - January 22nd-25th in Key Largo, FL. Attendees will hear case studies from leading brands who have been able to turn social media campaigns into results.
Cloud Connect - February 13th-16th in Santa Clara, CA. The premier technology event for cloud computing, features the latest technologies, platforms, strategies, and innovations within cloud computing.
Cloud Computing Imperative 2012 - March 12th-13th in Dubai, UAE. Strategies to implement IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and XaaS. Plan the shift of IT responsibilities, get fresh perspective on managing project budgets, build a strong ROI for cloud computing, understand the shift from managed services to the cloud, master the cloud infrastructure and see cloud security from a hacker's perspective.
Cloud Computing Summit - March 23rd in London, England. This conference provides you the chance to meet and share views with some of the IT and cloud computing industry's biggest and most innovative organizations. From global software, platform, and infrastructure providers to leading security, application, and virtualization deliverers, this forum will put you on the shop floor with the people that matter in cloud computing.
2012 NAB Show - April 14th-19th in Las Vegas, NV. From Broadcasting to Broader-casting, the NAB Show has evolved over the last eight decades to continually lead this ever-changing industry. From creation to consumption, the NAB Show has proudly served as the incubator for excellence - helping to breathe life into content everywhere.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at NAB - April 16th in Las Vegas, NV. Don't miss this full-day conference focusing on the impact of cloud computing solutions on all aspects of production, storage, and delivery of television programming and video.
|
