June 11, 2012
Volume XXXIX, Issue 10
Call for ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY Speakers at CCW:2012
The DCIA and CCA this week announced a call for speakers at ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, one of three co-located conferences taking place at the CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) summit November 8th-9th in Santa Monica, CA.
Major topics will range from latest trends in cloud solutions for high-value content production and distribution to pitfalls to avoid in adopting cloud solutions for content development/delivery, along with analyses of newest cloud offerings for entertainment and industry direction, and problem areas affecting cloud adoption in the entertainment sector.
In addition, special sessions will explore in-depth cloud collaboration, dailies, editing, metadata, and pilots.
And finally, ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY panels will examine cloud transcoding, storage, delivery, data, and analytics.
Registration enables delegates to also participate in any session at the two additional conferences being presented at CCW:2012 on NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD, as well as ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY.
CCW:2012 features one common exhibit hall. and all networking functions (e.g., luncheon, refreshment breaks, evening cocktail reception, etc.) are open to all attendees at no additional cost.
World IPv6 Launch Day (WILD)
Excerpted from Slashdot Report
"So how did the World IPv6 Launch Day (WILD) go on June 6th? Surprisingly well, according to participants at the event.
Google said it has seen 150% growth in IPv6 traffic, Facebook now has 27 million IPv6 users and Akamai is serving 100x more IPv6 traffic.
But it's still a “broccoli” technology. “I've said in the past that IPv6 is a 'broccoli' technology,” Leslie Daigle, CTO of the Internet Society said. “I still think it is a tech everybody knows it would be good if we ate more of it but nobody wants to eat it without the cheese sauce.”
Reader SmartAboutThings adds a few data points: "According to Google statistics, Romania leads the way with a 6.55% adoption rate, followed by France with 4.67%. Japan is on the third place so far with 1.57% but it seems here 'users still experience significant reliability or latency issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.”
“In the US and China the users have noticed infrequent issues connecting to the new protocol, but still the adoption rate is 0.93% and 0.58%, respectively."
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Wednesday June 6th was World IPv6 Launch Day (WILD), a historic day when the Internet and cloud computing companies gained significant growing room.
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf called WILD the start of the 21st century Internet because of the vast implications of advancing to a new system for assigning Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
IP addresses, which identify computers and other connected devices on the global network, are essential to the Internet’s operation, and the IPv6 protocol is coming not a moment too soon.
Its predecessor, IPv4 could handle 4.3 billion possible IP addresses. While that may seem like a lot, the last unreleased block was assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) last year, and IPv5 was an experimental streaming protocol that never took off.
By contrast, IPv6 spans 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 unique addresses – which means it’s virtually unlimited.
It’s not only more IP addresses that makes IPv6 better than IPv4. There’s also streamlining in how addresses are assigned and connectivity recovered when networks change, along with standardization in how MAC address identifiers are handled. IPsec is also baked in, one of several improvements in overall network security.
If you use Android or the iPhone, or a version of Windows or Mac OS that was released in the past five years, it probably supports IPv6 as well as IPv4. The big problem has been that websites, household routers, and consumer Internet service providers (ISPs) have not supported it.
And for IPv6 to work Internet-wide, everybody needs to get on board — PCs, networks, routers, and websites, too.
A year ago, some companies switched on IPv6 temporarily, just to test it out. But this week to ensure that the Internet can continue to grow and connect billions of more people and devices around the world, thousands of companies and literally millions of websites permanently enabled IPv6 for their products and services as part of WILD.
Participants in WILD included many DCIA Member companies and other web-based businesses in more than 100 countries.
By making IPv6 the new norm, these companies enabled millions of end-users to enjoy its benefits without having to do anything. There’s more on IPv6 at Wikipedia.
WILD was organized by the Internet Society as part of its mission to ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible for everyone – including the five billion people not yet connected to the web.
“The support of IPv6 from these organizations delivers a critical message to the world: IPv6 is not just a ‘nice to have;’ it is ready for business today and will very soon be a ‘must have,’” said Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer, Internet Society.
“We believe that the commitment of these companies to deploy IPv6 will ensure that they remain industry leaders. Any company wishing to be effective in the new Internet should do the same.”
At some point, the entire Internet infrastructure has to move to using the newer address space, since the differences in the protocols mean that computers with IPv4 addresses cannot communicate with machines with IPv6 addresses.
“IPv6 is critical to the future of the Internet’s underlying architecture, and to supporting the billions of devices that will connect to the Internet over the coming years,” said Tom Leighton, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, Akamai.
“Having expanded our global IPv6 footprint to over 50 countries, Akamai enables websites to reach a growing audience over IPv6 with the performance and reliability that they have come to expect and demand from IPv4.”
Cisco SVP Engineering and General Manager Service Provider Business, Pankaj Patel, added, “The Internet has fueled remarkable economic growth and innovation that would have never happened without a network.”
“Today, we face an explosion of connected devices moving data and content, especially video, and of applications and services coming from the Cloud. IPv6 enables the network — the platform on which innovation is built — to scale and make more growth more possible, today and into the future.”
John Schanz, Chief Network Officer, Comcast, concluded, “We at Comcast take great pride in being an innovator and technical leader. As a result of our team’s hard work, enabling IPv6 in over a third of our network, I am happy to report that by today we have exceeded our goal of 1% of our customer base being enabled with IPv6 for WILD!”
“Thank you to the Internet Society and others for organizing and participating in this important event!”
The World IPv6 Day in June 2011 was a 24-hour “stress test” that focused on websites. It also served as a wake-up call that it was time to upgrade the World Wide Web.
At NANOG 52, the Internet Society’s Phil Roberts provided an introduction to World IPv6 Day and moderated a panel of key participants. Panelists from Akamai, Cisco, and Comcast presented their companies' results including how they prepared for the event, issues that arose, lessons learned, and the current status of IPv6 in their networks.
World IPv6 Day Observations at the Technical Plenary at IETF81 further outlined the overwhelming industry response and several additional reports were delivered by participants in the IPv6 Operations Group at IETF81.
World IPv6 Day Operators Review described the traffic growth Hurricane Electric saw on World IPv6 Day, including significantly higher IPv6 traffic. In Comcast Experience with IPv6 Deployment, John Brzozowski presented results from Comcast's trials including increased traffic on Teredo, 6to4, 6rd, and native IPv6 access. He noted that 50% continued to publish AAAA records after World IPv6 Day.
In Investigating IPv6 Traffic: What happened at the World IPv6 Day, authors compared IPv6 activity before, during, and after World IPv6 Day. They examined traffic traces recorded at a large European Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and on the campus of a major US university; analyzing volume, application mix, and the use of tunneling protocols for transporting IPv6 packets.
Comparing IPv6 and IPv4 Performance shared the results of a comparison of performance measurement between IPv4 and IPv6 among their vantage points in the network and 46 of the websites who turned up IPv6 on that day.
And finally, in World IPv6 Day, Phil Roberts summarized the rationale for the 2011 event.
The June 6th, 2012 WILD was a permanent commitment across the distributed computing industry, laying the foundation to accelerate the deployment of IPv6 across the global Internet.
Major Internet companies and ISPs permanently enabled IPv6 on their websites and across a significant portion of their current and all new residential wireline subscribers. Home networking equipment manufacturers enabled IPv6 by default through their router products, and additional commitments to IPv6 by companies beyond websites demonstrated broad support of the new Internet Protocol.
This move was imperative as the last of 4.3 billion IP addresses enabled by the current protocol IPv4 were assigned to the Regional Internet Registries in February 2011.
Already there is no remaining IPv4 address space to be distributed in the Asia Pacific region, and very soon the rest of the globe will follow. IPv4 address space is expected to run out in Europe this year, in the US next year, and in Latin America and Africa in 2014.
IPv6 provides an essentially unlimited number, which will help connect the billions of people that are not connected today, allow a wide range of new devices to connect directly with one another, and help ensure that the Internet can continue its current growth rate indefinitely.
For more information about WILD and the participating companies, as well as links to useful information for users and how other companies can participate in the continued deployment of IPv6, please click here. Share wisely, and take care.
Oracle Unveils Suite of Cloud Computing Services
Excerpted from OneNewsNow Report by Michael Liedtke
Business software maker Oracle is finally adapting to a shift in computing that is threatening to turn the company into relic.
The 35-year-old company hailed its technological transition Wednesday at its Redwood Shores, CA headquarters, where hyperbolic CEO Larry Ellison announced plans to distribute more than 100 business software applications over the Internet instead of selling them as products that have to be installed on individual office computers.
The concept of leasing software applications reachable on any Internet-connected device is known as "cloud computing." It's an idea that Ellison has frequently mocked as a passing fancy, but his comments Wednesday made it clear that he realized some time ago that the trend had become a serious business.
Ellison said it took thousands of Oracle engineers the past seven years to develop the company's suite of cloud computing services. The work was code-named "Fusion," but Ellison acknowledged it became so disjointed that he understood why it was skewered as "Project Confusion."
Despite all the manpower and money that Oracle poured into its cloud computing expansion, the company still couldn't build everything on its own. To fill the gaps, Oracle has spent more than $3.5 billion buying some of the early pioneers in cloud computing, including RightNow Technologies and Taleo.
"This was as difficult a thing that we have ever done at Oracle," Ellison conceded Wednesday during a presentation that The Associated Press watched on a webcast. He said he now believes Oracle has "the most comprehensive cloud on planet Earth."
All boasting aside, Oracle will have to prove that it can adjust to the changes triggered by cloud computing. All this while still trying to profit from the old model of installing and maintaining software on the premises of its corporate and government customers.
Ellison acknowledged it won't be easy, saying "very few technology companies cross the chasm from one generation to the next."
Oracle is in no danger of fading away anytime soon. The company remains one of the world's most successful software makers, with annual revenue of about $37 billon and a market value of $137 billion.
But the 67-year-old Ellison, an elder statesman among Silicon Valley's CEOs, doesn't want to risk becoming obsolescent. He is trying to stay a step ahead of longtime rival SAP as it also embraces cloud computing while Oracle tries to catch up to one of Ellison's former proteges, Marc Benioff, who is now CEO of Salesforce.com. Not long after leaving Oracle to start Salesforce, Benioff emerged as cloud computing's more persuasive evangelist.
Salesforce.com is expected to generate $3 billion in annual revenue this year and has a market value of $19 billion.
Ellison, who has an estimated fortune of $36 billion, was one of Salesforce's earliest investors. He also owns a 46 percent stake in a Salesforce rival, NetSuite, run by another former Oracle executive, Zach Nelson.
Oracle's expansion into cloud computing also puts Ellison on a collision course with an old antagonist, software entrepreneur David Duffield. Ellison bought Duffield's former company, PeopleSoft, for $11.1 billion in 2005 after a bitter takeover battle that lasted 18 months. Duffield has since started a cloud-computing service called Workday that sells human resources management tools.
Ellison predicted Oracle eventually will trump Salesforce and Workday by offering a wider and more secure range of services that will fulfill all the cloud computing needs of big companies and government agencies.
Oracle's new services include ""social relationship management" tools to analyze what people are saying on Facebook's social network and other online forums such as Twitter. In an apparent effort to underscore his commitment to Oracle's new focus, Ellison sent his first tweet shortly after leaving the stage Wednesday. His message promoted Oracle's new cloud computing applications while still saving enough space to throw a jab at SAP.
Intel’s Plans for Virtual TV Come into Focus
Excerpted from Reuters Report by Yinka Adegoke and Noel Randewich
Intel is counting on facial-recognition technology for targeted ads and a team of veteran entertainment dealmakers to win over reluctant media partners for its new virtual television service.
But so far it's proving a challenge to get the service off the ground, thanks to an unwillingness on the part of major media content providers to let Intel unbundle and license specific networks and shows at a discount to what cable and satellite partners pay.
Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, has kept its strategy to launch a slimmed down cable TV service under wraps as the tech giant risks getting into a completely new line of business.
According to five sources who have been negotiating with Intel for months, the company is emphasizing a set-top box (STB) employing Intel technology that can distinguish who is watching, potentially allowing Intel to target advertising.
The STB pitched by Intel doesn't identify specific people, but it could provide general data about viewers' gender or whether they're adults or children to help target advertising, two sources said.
Intel's plans put it in the middle of Silicon Valley's battle for the living room. Heavyweights such as Apple, Amazon, and Google believe the $100 billion US cable television ecosystem - dominated by major distributors such as Comcast and DirecTV and program makers like Walt Disney Co and Time Warner - is ripe for disruption for reasons ranging from shifting viewer habits to ever-increasing programming costs.
While none of these companies have so far been able to make major inroads, Intel thinks it can build a better STB and over-the-top (OTT) subscription service to deliver TV content to consumers, even though the initiative catapults it into virgin market territory. A successful TV service showcasing Intel technology could be a big step toward making its chips prevalent in more living room devices.
"If they can create a virtual network and it incorporates proprietary Intel technology, they could certainly bring something different to the subscription TV model." said JMP analyst Alex Gauna.
Intel's offering aims to exploit one of the TV industry's major issues: the reliability, or lack thereof, of Nielsen ratings data on audiences. Nielsen has long been the dominant provider of TV ratings, but the accuracy of its data has come under attack by some network programmers, who argue that its polling system of 50,000 homes is antiquated for the digital age.
For its part, Intel claims that the new interactive features in its STB would add greater value to TV advertising and help offset reduced revenue from licensing fees for network owners.
"They've told us the technology is going to be so much more interactive with ads that you can make more money. But it's just a little unproven," said one executive who has been involved in the talks.
An Intel representative declined to comment for this story.
Chip features making it easier for Hollywood studios to protect content streamed to computers, as well as tools for detecting faces and analyzing audiences, are examples of current proprietary technology that Intel would like to see widely adopted.
While Intel's processors power 80 percent of the world's PCs, its chips have not achieved a significant presence in smart-phones, tablets, and other interconnected devices. Intel executives say they are eager to make sure its semiconductors play major roles in new markets with big growth potential.
According to a company source, ensuring that its chips become prevalent in home entertainment devices would be the driving reason behind any Internet TV service it launches.
Comcast, for instance, recently announced the gradual rollout of an Intel-based set-top box that customers can control with their smart-phones. Called "X1," the platform will rely on data centers packed with high-end servers -- which typically also use Intel chips.
Intel last year wound down a push to make chips specifically for "smart" TVs after Google TV, which it had backed, failed to make a major splash with consumers.
At the same time, it formed the Intel Media business group with a mandate of promoting digital content on Intel-based platforms.
According to sources, Intel is proposing to media companies a service could include both a bundle of TV channels similar to a normal cable package and an on-demand component.
Intel is intent on launching its video service before the end of the year, sources said. Original plans called for it to be launched by November, said one of the sources, but that deadline likely will not be met.
The biggest problem Intel faces is its inability to reach deals with major content providers, which are reluctant to license their networks and TV shows at rates that could undercut their larger established cable and satellite partners.
Intel wants to keep its costs down by licensing smaller packages of TV networks instead of replicating the basic cable TV bundle of more than 100 channels. But network owners won't agree to smaller bundles without being paid a premium for the channels they choose to license.
"Why would I want you to take subscribers away from another distributor at a lower price?," asked the same media executive who spoke with Reuters on condition of anonymity.
To change that mindset, Intel has assembled a team of television industry veterans well-schooled in negotiating distribution deals. Leading the group as head of Intel Media is Erik Huggers, who worked on media at Microsoft before going to the BBC. Huggers enlisted as an adviser Garth Ancier, who most recently served as president for BBC Worldwide America and before that worked at NBC, FOX, and Disney.
In addition to Huggers and Ancier, sources said, two other names prominent in TV circles have emerged as consultants for Intel: entertainment lawyer Ken Ziffren and former MTV executive Nicole Browning.
Browning, who previously negotiated on the other side of the table for MTV, has been handling some of the talks with partners, sources said.
Ziffren built his reputation representing Hollywood talent - he was instrumental in negotiating the deal that returned the "Tonight Show" to Jay Leno. Lesser known is his firm's work negotiating deals for DirecTV's video-on-demand service and carriage agreements for pay-TV network Starz.
But even that quartet of executives may not be enough to resolve an intractable problem, which is that content companies have little incentive to offer their channels to Intel at a discount and Intel is loathe to pay a premium.
"They'd love a better deal but they won't get one," said Needham & Co analyst Laura Martin of Intel. "The industry has always worked on volume discounts."
Underscoring the difficulty insurgent tech companies face in securing content, Microsoft in January indefinitely postponed plans for its own online TV subscription service after deciding that licensing costs were too high, according to people familiar with those discussions.
And therein lies that dilemma that Intel and other insurgent OTT providers must tackle before their big plans can be realized.
Samsung Teams Up with Gaikai to Provide Cloud Gaming Services on HDTVs
Excerpted from XBit Labs Report by Anton Shilov
Samsung Electronics and Gaikai, a leading video game streaming company, this week unveiled a new cloud-based gaming service called “Samsung Cloud Gaming” that will be powered by Gaikai and will stream a mix of family-friendly and AAA video games directly to owners of Samsung LED 7000-series (2012 models) and up Smart TVs in the US.
"Samsung is excited to deliver this revolutionary gaming experience that takes advantage of all the benefits of cloud-computing, all on the central screen of the home - Samsung Smart TV. With Samsung cloud gaming, Samsung’s leadership in smart content and commitment to providing consumers with an innovative home entertainment experience is evident," said Kyung-Shik Lee, Vice President of Visual Display business at Samsung Electronics.
Samsung Cloud Gaming gives Smart TV users instant access to some of the video game industry’s biggest titles, without any need to download, install or patch/update games. In under a minute, consumers can find and start playing some of the most popular game titles on the market. Samsung will soon begin accepting sign-ups for the beta test of its cloud gaming service on Smart TVs in the United States.
Cloud-based gaming provides consumers with access to high-performance games on Samsung Smart TVs without the need or challenge of using a console or additional devices. This service will demonstrate how the concept of “Smart TV’s” becomes smarter as Samsung enables new capabilities like this. Consumers who own a 2012 Samsung LED 7000-series and up with a good Internet connection will have access to “Samsung cloud gaming” directly through Samsung’s Smart Hub. Consumers will be able to try the games for free and only pay for games they fall in love with, making it a very gamer-friendly service.
“We could not be more thrilled to be working with Samsung, the world’s leader in consumer electronics. Samsung cloud gaming will greatly expand the reach of the best games our industry can provide, then make them just as accessible as movies, TV shows and music,” said David Perry, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Gaikai.
Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning on Airtime, Facebook IPO, Pinterest, More
Excerpted from The Daily Beast Report by Marlow Stern
“They are the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren of the Internet!” proclaimed Jimmy Fallon.
The late-night-television host was introducing Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning at a star-studded event at Milk Studios in Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood to introduce their latest venture, Airtime.
The two are cofounders of the revolutionary peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program Napster, which forever changed the music industry. Parker also helped expand Facebook’s reach as the company’s former president — he was infamously portrayed by Justin Timberlake in“The Social Network”—and is still worth roughly $2.2 billion, despite Facebook’s plummeting stock price.
Airtime is a P2P video-chatting network (think: a classier Chatroulette) that’s fully integrated into Facebook chat. The network allows strangers to forge new friendships by video chatting with each other and sharing mutual interests (think: Google Plus).
“I can’t help but feel like with some of these services, we spend more time processing information than interacting with real people,” said Parker. “Facebook and Twitter aren’t truly real time. LIVE is the only real time.”
In a demo presentation, the two had stars like Jim Carrey, Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Ed Helms, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus chat on Airtime with each other, before bringing them out onstage. Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys also joined in on the fun, via remote locations. Oh, and Martha Stewart was sitting front row in the crowd.
Parker and Fanning took some time after their glitzy soiree to chat with The Daily Beast about what Airtime brings to the table, Facebook’s IPO disaster and its future, what they think of Pinterest and its $1.5 billion valuation, and other areas they’d like to see “disrupted.”
Marlow Stern: You said during the presentation, “Facebook doesn’t build new relationships, it’s just trying to be the most accurate model possible of your real-life social graph.” So how does Airtime help achieve what Facebook can’t in fostering new relationships?
Shawn Fanning: We are first taking advantage of the fact that there’s technology that allows you to do peer-to-peer video where you’re actually able to see the person interact in such a way that you’ll get to know them. Sean and I got to know each other in a chatroom, but it took a lot of time to build that relationship, so our idea was to have people have a conversation facilitated by a host, Airtime. So rather than approaching someone and having all sorts of awkward interaction and taking a risk, you get to utilize Facebook integration to find a common ground and find things to talk about.
Sean Parker: It’s actually amazing that no one’s done anything with the interest graph. It’s only been used for targeted ads, and applications haven’t leveraged that in an interesting way. Fanning likes to talk a lot about the service being a host, and a lot of our engineering effort went into the “matcher algorithm”—basically our matching service that’s able to look at all sorts of things like conversation length, how quickly you get “nexted,” explicit feedback. You add that on top of the interests graph and all the videos people are watching, and you get a very nuanced view of people.
Stern: People are calling Airtime a combination of Chatroulette, as far as the video-chatting element is concerned, and Google Plus, since you share interests with each other.
Parker: We try to avoid obvious comparisons in general. No one’s ever built a product leveraging Facebook’s graph that allows you to share stored video experiences with your friends. It’s just never been done.
Stern: How do you stop the crazy masturbators that invaded Chatroulette?
Parker: When it’s connected to your profile and Facebook account, I think that changes the dynamic completely. But we also have a very high-functioning abuse-prevention system that’s flagging this stuff.
Fanning: We have face-detection called OpenCV.
Stern: How do you think Airtime will affect dating? It seems like it could serve as an updated version of video dating.
Fanning: The reality of the Internet is, as far as people meeting new people, the only time this ever happens is in dating sites where there’s an overt agenda, or online gaming where you can have shared experiences, but they’re all virtual with assumed identities.
Parker: It’s way more real. You know how someone really looks and acts. Whether it’s making a new friend or some kind of romantic thing, there’s so much more depth to it and you can actually evaluate. The whole rub with online dating is people just make up fake profiles with fake pictures. You can use our service in a fantastical way and be creative and weird and some other version of yourself, but it’s still a high-bandwidth relationship. You can’t really hide who you are.
Stern: How does Airtime work in concert with Facebook?
Parker: If on Airtime I send you a chat request, then the person on Facebook gets a pop-up, and if they click, now we’re both chatting. It’s a pretty seamless and deep integration.
Stern: What are your thoughts on Facebook and its plummeting stock price? The founder of Ironfire Capital even came out Tuesday and claimed Facebook would “disappear” in less than a decade.
Parker: It doesn’t really matter. If you’ve been holding Facebook stock for this long, and you believe in the long vision of the company—that identity is central to everything we do in the real world and online, and that those two worlds have actually converged—then you basically recognize that there’s a huge number of businesses that are dependent on this identity layer, which includes your authentication, reputation, trust, social graph, and how information moves through that graph. There are all these businesses that are adjacent businesses to Facebook’s core ad business that they haven’t even scratched the surface of.
“If on Airtime I send you a chat request, then the person on Facebook gets a pop-up, and if they click, now we’re both chatting. It’s a pretty seamless and deep integration.”
Fanning: For Facebook, branching outside of the core interaction of staying in touch with your friends and managing that network, the platform has fostered all kinds of innovation.
Parker: Zynga has been a huge win for Facebook. All the non-core applications—ones that aren’t a core part of the product—there will be other winners among those applications. I think that the tax-and-toll strategy—creating a platform, helping to facilitate in the success of your platform partners, and then levying a tax for interfacing with your user base, and ultimately a tax on your success—is actually a pretty good scalable model that leads to a bunch of different markets.
Stern: What are your thoughts on Pinterest? Many found its recent $1.5 billion valuation to be pretty bloated.
Parker: It all seems a little frothy and a little crazy. The problem with a lot of these applications, whether it’s Pinterest or Social PM, is they’re so dependent on Facebook’s open graph, so it’s all just these viral loops, and these things can skyrocket and then collapse, and it just depends on the tuning. It’s one thing to be leveraging off Facebook or building an adjunct to Facebook, and it’s another to be dependent on Facebook.
Fanning: If you watch the way that content spreads from user to user on Airtime, it’s taking advantage of those connections and allowing them to grow and evolve. It’s giving the sense that we’re making that experience better for people over time. We think the need to extend your network and meet new people is a core need that all people share.
Stern: What do you think about working in concert with Apple? The company has experienced such a meteoric rise in the last decade.
Fanning: Does it matter that Sean blamed them for most of our problems today?
Parker: I jokingly blamed every technology company I could think of! But no, it would be awesome. I think we need to prove our product to the market first.
Stern: You two are both famed “disruptors” for shaking up the music industry with Napster. What other areas do you feel could use a little shaking up?
Parker: Politics is interesting because it hasn’t really been disrupted. I think marketplaces are really interesting. Nobody’s really done anything with eBay or Craigslist. There are these markets that are really archaic, and there isn’t even a reliable sense of identity on these systems.
Fanning: I’m interested in disruption as it relates to nutrition and health. People really bombard themselves with stuff and we don’t do a lot to manage our biochemistry. You spend a lot of life trying to figure out how not to suffer, and I think there’s a lot we can do with technology in that area that hasn’t really been explored.
Cloud Computing IPOs Hope to Overcome Facebook Woes
Excerpted from Financial Post Report
Data analysis software company Tableau Software and developer tools maker Atlassian are among several small, business software firms preparing to go public in the next 12 months, hoping a growing market for cloud computing will shield them from the aftermath of Facebook’s botched IPO and Europe’s woes.
Sources familiar with the situation said others include AppSense, whose user virtualization technology allows people to use different devices; Marin Software, which offers an online advertising management platform; Rapid7, which makes network security software; Rally Software, a provider of project management tools; and CollabNet, which offers web-based software development tools.
These business software companies join other tech firms that are also looking to go public.
Cloud-based phone systems provider RingCentral is close to picking bankers, sources familiar with the situation said. Ruckus Wireless, which supplies Wi-Fi products to mobile operators, has chosen Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as its lead underwriters, the sources said.
All the seven business software companies offer products for the software-as-a-service (SaaS), market, in which software and associated data are hosted on remote servers, or the cloud. This segment of the market has been increasing in popularity because it is viewed as less costly and easier to implement than traditional hosting methods.
Tech behemoths including Oracle, SAP, and IBM have spent billions to buy such companies over the past two years. The overall market for enterprise software grew 9.5 percent to $267 billion in 2011 and is expected to top $288 billion this year, according to Gartner.
That means these companies may form one bright spot in an otherwise moribund market for initial public offerings (IPOs).
This week was the slowest for IPO activity since January. Year-to-date global IPO proceeds total $53.2 billion, a decline of 44 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Facebook’s IPO in May further added to the chill, as market problems at its trading debut and a subsequent fall in its share price have burned scores of investors.
But these companies are hoping their dependence on businesses – as opposed to consumers – would set them apart from Facebook and other Internet companies.
“Based on talking to a lot of bankers, public software investors and analysts, the opportunity for SaaS companies to go public should be viewed differently from the fortunes of consumer-facing Internet companies or other potential IPO candidates,” Marin Software CEO Chris Lien said. “There are some strong underlying reasons why the next generation of software companies is emerging.”
San Francisco-based Marin, which employs 330 people worldwide, generated $36 million in revenue and is expected to grow by over 50 percent this year, Lien said. In January, Singapore-based Temasek Holdings and SAP Ventures, the investment arm of SAP, became the latest investors in the company.
Marin Software is expected to choose bankers to underwrite its IPO in a few months, said Lien, who founded the company in 2006.
To be sure, one risk for investors in cloud-based companies could be the growing incidence of Internet security breaches, the most recent example of which came this week when social networking site LinkedIn and online dating service eHarmony said the passwords of millions of online accounts had been compromised.
The Facebook IPO debacle could also hurt the valuations these companies hope to achieve in a public offering.
“High quality companies right now in today’s environment can go out and markets are open for business,” Rapid7 CEO Mike Tuchen said. “Facebook stumbling isn’t a window-closing event, though there will be more scrutiny to pricing.”
Tuchen declined to comment on his company’s IPO plans.
These challenges mean that many of these processes are likely to be dual-track, where the company explores both an IPO and a sale.
CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli said with his company generating cash and closing on a recent $4.5 million capital raise with existing investors, it is weighing all options equally – going public, being acquired or recapitalizing with a private equity firm. Ruckus Wireless said it is “looking at all options.” The other companies and the banks declined to comment.
Thanks to the Jobs Act, these companies have little to lose in at least preparing for IPO filings. The law allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue to file registration statements confidentially, giving them room to resolve any regulatory issues out of the public eye and even pull an offering without the stigma attached to a withdrawal.
AppSense, whose investors include Goldman Sachs, and Tableau had revenue of around $70 million in 2011. Rally Software’s revenue was about $50 million, Atlassian’s about $102 million, and Ruckus’s about $120 million.
A test of investor appetite for business software companies could come as early as this summer, when Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow, which filed to go public earlier this year, are expected to debut, sources familiar with the situation said. Palo Alto declined to comment, while ServiceNow did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Workday, a business management software company, has hired Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to lead its initial public offering later this year, sources previously told Reuters.
These offerings are expected to be among this year’s largest tech IPOs, and would follow the listings of other enterprise software companies, including Guidewire Software, Jive Software Inc and Demandware, which all saw their shares rise after their debut.
“Enterprise software is extremely sticky,” said Tom Blakey, a tech portfolio manager at Boston’s Essex Investment Management, which manages $1.1 billion. “If there is a maintenance stream attributed to the product, it’s recurring. You can start to see that there’s an intrinsic value to these revenue streams versus revenue that is derived from a network effect, such as certain business lines tied to social media-related companies.”
EMC & Terremark Partner to Provide Cloud Computing Applications
Excerpted from Computer Business Review Report
EMC will provide its advanced technology infrastructure for Terremark's Enterprise Cloud Private Edition as well as public and hybrid deployments.
EMC is teaming up with Terremark, a Verizon company, to identify and provide cloud-based applications using Terremark's service capabilities and EMC's cloud-optimized information infrastructure technologies.
Under the agreement, EMC will provide its advanced technology infrastructure for Terremark's Enterprise Cloud Private Edition as well as public and hybrid deployments.
The companies will work together to help IT organizations improve business agility, gain efficiency and control costs as they adopt cloud computing.
EMC Americas and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Executive Vice President Bill Scannell said the company has partnered with Terremark to help customers realize benefits of cloud computing.
"This announcement symbolizes the dramatic customer value that can be derived through joint collaboration and will help customers transform their business operations and ultimately deliver IT as a service," Scannell said.
Terremark has also achieved Platinum-level in the EMC Velocity Service Provider Partner Program.
The Velocity Service Provider Partner Program provides partner management resources and methodologies as well as sales tools and marketing campaign assets to help service providers deploy differentiated cloud offerings built on EMC technology.
US Unveils Single Standard for Cloud-Computing Services
Excerpted from Washington Post Report by Timothy Smith
The General Services Administration (GSA) earlier this week unveiled a single authentication standard for government cloud-computing services.
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), will standardize the basic security requirements that cloud-computing providers, such as Google and Microsoft, will have to meet before receiving government contracts.
The new guidelines will require contractors to hire third-party assessment organizations that will verify whether they meet the basic security requirements.
The program, developed by GSA, the Defense and Homeland Security departments and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will set one government-wide cloud security program, which means a vendor such as Microsoft would not have to repeat the security approval process every time it wants to bid on a cloud-computing contract.
FedRAMP’s website lists nine accredited third-party assessment organizations that vendors can use to authenticate more than 160 basic security controls, including spam filter capabilities and encryption standards.
This is the latest development in the White House’s cloud-first policy, to streamline many government computing functions. Cloud services are often more efficient and more secure than computing handled in house, said Steven Van Roekel, the US Chief Information Officer (CIO).
“The key to security is consistency,” Van Roekel said in an interview. “When you’re in these disparate federal systems you don’t have as many consistent guidelines or controls as companies do on one system.”
The guidelines announced Wednesday set up that consistent standard.
They come as the government is consolidating computer services, such as e-mail, to cloud-based systems. As an example, a single federal agency may operate on more than a dozen separate e-mail systems. The Agriculture Department recently shifted from 21 e-mail providers to one cloud system provided by Microsoft.
The initiative should also help smaller vendors compete for cloud-computing contracts, said Dan Cruz, GSA’s Deputy Press Secretary.
“FedRAMP’s model of ‘do once, use many times’ is helpful to smaller cloud service providers seeking to do business with the federal government by eliminating the need to expend resources for duplicative security authorizations with each federal agency,” he said.
Adaptive Computing Gets 15th Cloud Patent
Excerpted from ITWeb Business Report by Nadine Arendse
Adaptive Computing, manager of the world's largest private cloud and technical computing systems, has announced that it has been granted its 15th cloud computing patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office, US Patent No. 8 179 490, PRWeb reports.
This patent is the most recent in a long line of core cloud computing patents issued to David Jackson, Adaptive Computing's CTO and Founder.
The growing Adaptive Computing patent portfolio covers key cloud computing concepts such as elastic computing, cloudbursting, dynamic provisioning, multi-tenancy, compute resource guarantees, usage billing and more. These patented techniques have formed the basis of Adaptive's products and are now widely used in the industry.
Enterprises today are increasingly moving their computing workloads to public and private clouds, taking advantage of cloud computing's lower costs and higher service levels. Adaptive Computing's innovations have made these advantages possible.
Virtual Strategy writes that, in recognition of its patent portfolio, Adaptive Computing recently received a Utah Genius Award for being one of the top patent companies in Utah. Presented annually by Bateman IP Law Group, KSL, and Zions Bank, the Utah Genius Awards recognize companies that excel in patents and trademarks at both the national and international levels.
The most recent patents awarded cover concepts core to the next generation of cloud computing. These include methods of supporting multi-tier applications, sharing resources in public-private hybrid clouds, guaranteeing service delivery while efficiently utilizing cloud resources, enabling multi-tenant cloud computing, and facilitating time-based policy enforcement.
Adaptive Computing, founded in 2001, has long been an innovator in the cloud computing space. “Many of these patents have 2004 priority dates, and were filed when few were even thinking about cloud computing,” said Rob Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “David Jackson's forethought and vision are evident throughout these patents.”
UN Considers Internet Tax on Web Companies
Excerpted from MediaPost Report by Gavin O'Malley
With global growth at risk, top web companies are reportedly facing the threat of an “Internet tax” -- and from the least likely of bodies: the United Nations.
That’s right, the UN “is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations,” reports CNet.
Offered for debate at a December meeting of a UN agency called the International Telecommunication Union, the European proposal reportedly seeks to levy US companies for the bandwidth they use outside of the States.
“In response, Cisco VP Robert Pepper has argued that any such charge could cause Web services to block queries from developing nations, ‘effectively cutting them off from the Internet,’ ” Engadget writes.
Last week, as The Hill’s Hillicon Valley blog reported, a bipartisan coalition in Congress laid down a clear marker in opposition to growing calls for the United Nations to have more control over the global Internet.
“What this really highlights is the true problem here, which is that whatever happens here is happening behind the scenes, in backrooms, without public scrutiny,” notes TechDirt. “Just as we've seen with ACTA, TPP, SOPA and lots of other things, a big part of the problem is the near total lack of transparency in what's being discussed around these ideas.”
“The Internet has flourished outside of government control,” Jason Llorenz, Executive Director of the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership, reasons on The Huffington Post.“The private sector has fostered innovation and enabled educational, health and entertainment opportunities to reach people around the world.”
The motion is expected to be discussed at a December meeting of the ITU council, where all 193 member-countries will be allowed to vote.
Coming Events of Interest
Cloud Expo - June 11th-14th in New York, NY. Two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in New York at the tenth annual Cloud Expo being held at the Javits Convention Center. A vast selection of technical and strategic General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, Power Panels, Breakout Sessions, and a bustling Expo Floor.
IEEE 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing - June 18th-21st in Taipa, Macao. ICDCS brings together scientists and engineers in industry, academia, and government: Cloud Computing Systems, Algorithms and Theory, Distributed OS and Middleware, Data Management and Data Centers, Network/Web/P2P Protocols and Applications, Fault Tolerance and Dependability, Wireless, Mobile, Sensor, and Ubiquitous Computing, Security and Privacy.
Cloud Management Summit - June 19th in Mountain View, CA. A forum for corporate decision-makers to learn about how to manage today's public, private, and hybrid clouds using the latest cloud solutions and strategies aimed at addressing their application management, access control, performance management, helpdesk, security, storage, and service management requirements on-premise and in the cloud.
2012 Creative Storage Conference - June 26th in Culver City. CA. In association with key industry sponsors, CS2012 is finalizing a series of technology, application, and trend sessions that will feature distinguished experts from the professional media and entertainment industries.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 8th-9th in Santa Monica. CA. CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
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