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Posts Tagged ‘cloud-computing’

Later today, Facebook will be announcing the launch of a new Fellowship program, inviting Ph.D. engineering students across the United States who are working on fields related to social computing and other Internet technologies to apply for one of five valuable fellowships. The company has launched a new site for the program here.

Students chosen to receive a fellowship will have their tuition and fees paid for the entire academic year, a $30,000 stipend, $5,000 to spend towards a computer, and another $5,000 to pay for travel and conference fees. They’ll also have the chance to apply to a paid internship at Facebook for the following summer.

Here are some of the areas Facebook says it is interested in:

Internet Economics: auction theory and algorithmic game theory relevant to online advertising auctions.
Cloud Computing: storage, databases, and optimization for computing in a massively distributed environment.
Social Computing: models, algorithms and systems around social networks, social media, social search and collaborative environments.
Data Mining and Machine Learning: learning algorithms, feature generation, and evaluation methods to produce effective online and offline models of behavioral signals.
Systems: Hardware, operating system, runtime, and language support for fast, scalable, efficient data centers.
Information Retrieval: search algorithms, information extraction, question answering, cross-lingual retrieval and multimedia retrieval

Applications are due February 15, 2010, and the winners will be announced on March 29. You can find more details on eligibility at the site’s homepage.

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Online shopping has come along in leaps and bounds since 1994 when the first e-commerce transaction actually occurred — but as dotcom bombs UrbanFetch and Kozmo proved, delivery can be the most painful point in the ecommerce chain. Enter Shutl, which today launches an on-demand delivery platform that aggregates transportation carriers. Think of it as cloud computing for the logistics industry, focusing primarily on local same-day courier firms.

Launching in London first, the service is targeted at multi-channel retailers and their customers, promising delivery within 90 minutes of purchase in urban areas — and all this at a lower cost to retailers than their standard delivery charge. The company is keeping quiet on delivery time or cost if you happen to live in the ‘burbs or the boondocks.

The Shutl platform will initially plug into retailers’ websites, enabling the retailer to offer its customers immediate home delivery of goods, delivered directly from their local stores. All the couriers have GPS units and this data is aggregated so customers can watch their delivery en route in real-time on a map.

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Today at Le Web in Paris, Ryan Sarver (a participant in our RealTime CrunchUp last month), Twitter’s Director of Platform announced a new conference that will take place next year in San Francisco: Chirp.

The conference, which will be geared towards developers, is likely to be similar in some ways to Facebook’s F8 conference that is held each year in San Francisco. Not too many details were given but there is a landing page up already for the event (which is scheduled to take place sometime in 2010).

At the event, Twitter will likely have a lot to talk about as there are already over 50,000 apps in the Twitter ecosystem. And next year the company plans to open the so-called “firehose” of data to all companies that want access, Sarver announced today.

And there is a new developer website launching next week that will include things such as a status dashboard, tutorials, and more.

Update: As he let us know in the comments, it looks like Ryan Carson of Carsonified will be producing the event. Carson is known for putting on the popular Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) events.

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During IBM’s Q3 earnings call a few weeks ago, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge highlighted business analytics as a sector where Big Blue is investing significant amounts of cash. The company recently acquired data analytics company SPSS for $1.2 billion and business analytics firm RedPill. Tonight, IBM is unveiling a new internal analytics product that the company is touting as the “largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics in the world,” which launches internally with more than a petabyte of information. Along with this internal product, IBM will launch a companion product for clients to build upon this cloud-based architecture, called IBM Smart Analytics Cloud.

The internal product, dubbed Blue Insight, will provide 200,000 employees in IBM’s sales and development department with the ability to extract data and information to make decisions and gain further insight at the point of sale. Blue Insight will gather information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data. For example, sales execs may use customizable queries of real time data to understand revenue opportunities and how many sales in their region are closing to help improve prediction. Or a manufacturing process engineer can evaluate real-time data on the plant floor to identify trends and data to improve yield and reduce shipment delivery times.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud offering for clients will similarly deliver powerful business intelligence via the scalable, private cloud. The product will lets the client import data and than transform this information into insights to develop strategies and decisions. The service sill offer the ability to create reports, analysis, dashboards, and scorecards to monitor business performance and measure results.

IBM has been shifting its focus towards software and services as opposed to hardware and Big Blue’s strong earnings are an indication that this strategy is paying off in a big way. It’s not surpising that company is continuing to invest in R&D in cloud computing and business analytics, which seems to be the future for both Big Blue and other enterprise-focused tech giants like Oracle.

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It’s been about a year since Brightcove released the last upgrade to its professional online video platform with Brightcove 3. On Monday, it’s going to release Brightcove 4, and it’s a massive upgrade.

Brightcove 4 now supports a native video player on the iPhone, in Facebook, and live video streaming on the Web. It’s got Twitter integration for sharing videos, faster-loading video players, the ability to switch between Flash streaming and HTTP, adaptive streaming based on a user’s device and bandwidth, behind-the-firewall video delivery, support for most major ad servers, better analytics, and a new, cheaper, entry-level subscription service called Brightcove Express.

The biggest new feature is the iPhone player. Instead of clicking off into the Quicktime player, Brightcove uses the Quicktime APIs to render the player within an app. Developers are going to love this because they can skin the player any way they want, tie it into the same ads served through a publisher’s Brightcove player on the Web, add email and Twitter sharing, and Coverflow-style browsing.

The Facebook integration will also be popular. Brightcove 4 offers a template which allows for Facebook Connect logins with realtime comments which appear in each commenter’s Facebook stream. Brightcove videos shared on Facebook will also be playable within the stream, just like YouTube videos.

Brightcove 4 will also support live video streams for the first time. Live videos of events can be scheduled, archived, mixed with on-demand videos, and tied into the same advertising backend. If a publisher has a huge event and would rather use their own CDN, they can do that as well. Why now? “We waited until there was sufficient market demand,” says CEO Jeremy Allaire. Yet more evidence that live video on the Web may be finding its legs.

So far Brightcove is mostly used by media companies and professional video publishers who can afford to pay at least $500 a month for the service. But with this release, Brightcove is also trying to broaden its appeal with service plans which now begin at $99 a month. It’s still not a consumer platform, and probably never will be. But for professional Web video publishers and companies with video marketing budgets, the new entry point should help to expand Brightcove’s market.

I am not sure why Brightcove holds all of this good stuff back until they can package it in a new, numbered release, since it is a Web-based service, which could just as easily upgrade on a rolling basis. But doing it all at once like this does highlight all the changes to the code-base, and shows why Brightcove is considered the leading Web video platform for professional use. Brightcove boast 800 customers which use its players across 2,500 different Web sites. Collectively, they reach 135 million unique viewers per month, according to Allaire.

He won’t disclose exact revenues other than to say that it is in the “tens of millions” of dollars a year, and growing at a 50 percent annual rate. But he does say that the company, which has raised a total of $91 million in venture capital, isn’t burning any more cash. “During the first half of this year we were profitable and cash flow positive,” he says. Like everyone else, Brightcove cut back on expenses last year, and even went through layoffs of 13 percent of its workforce. The fourth quarter was the low point, but demand started picking up again at the beginning of the year, especially from branded goods companies, marketing departments, and even manufacturers looking to add video to their sites. Last quarter, Allaire hired 30 people, and currently employs 180. Next quarter he is looking to hire 30 more.

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Salesforce.com CEO and founder Marc Benioff took the stage today at Oracle OpenWorld. The fact that Benioff is making an appearance is very strange considering Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison have been at odds over the past year. They are the perfect Frenemies. Taking the stage with Benioff is Michael Dell, which isn’t surprising considering the recent partnership between Dell computers and Salesforce.com.

Benioff and Ellison have an interesting past. Benioff worked at Oracle for some years and Ellison was one of the first investors as Salesforce, which Benioff highlighted in his speech. Benioff enumerated on the power of cloud computing, saying that it is more elastic, scalable and generally easier for companies to use. Salesforce currently has 63,200 paying customers.

Michael Dell came on stage, also prosthelytizing the virtues of cloud computing and software as a service. He says that the success of cloud technologies is the reason why Dell bought IT consulting firm Perrot Systems.

Benioff didn’t spare any digs at Oracle, saying that when he used to come to Open World he used to feel it was targeted towards just large businesses. But Salesforce, he says, can be used by both small and large businesses. He emphasized Salesforce’s “top” security systems, which aren’t compromised despite being in the cloud. Benioff spoke about powers of Salesforce’s application management Force.com platform and app exchange.

The Service Cloud, which is Salesforce’s fastest growing product line, is hoping to revolutionize call center technologies, says Benioff. Salesforce recently launched a new version of the Service Cloud, adding in-depth integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Dell was actually a pilot partner using the Service Cloud.

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When Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff launched his CRM platform in the cloud in 1999, he embarked on a “No Software” campaign to tout his “Software as a Service” agenda. Today, hosting service Rackspace is promoting a similar campaign with the launch of NoMoreServers.com, a site dedicated to the emergence of Computing-as-a-Service models (like hosting, cloud computing and SaaS) to power enterprise IT.

NoMoreServers.com is a rally cry of the computing-as-a-service era. The site seeks to empower businesses to acknowledge the decline of in-house computing and the rise of the All Cloud Enterprise (ACE). Covering hosting, cloud computing, SaaS, and the key vendors driving them (eg: Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Salesforce, etc), NoMoreServers.com will feature daily commentary explaining all things cloud computing. The site will include third-party content and news about hosting, cloud computing and will have a live community portal for visitors to engage on the topic of outsourcing computing.

Rackspace deliver hosting and cloud services to businesses and has more than 70,000 customers, including over 51,000 cloud computing customers. Hosting guru Andrew Schroepfer is taking lead of the new site. Schroepfer founded, led, and sold Tier1 Research, a research firm focused on the hosting and data center industry. Rackspace also recently partnered with Robert Scoble to launch Building 43, which aims to help businesses use modern technology and social sites to increase their exposure and the money they’re making by offering valuable advice.

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According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. According to Larry Ellison, it’s nonsense and water vapor.

The chief executive of Oracle last week at the Churchill Club sat down with former Motorola CEO Ed Zander for a fireside chat about the future of the company he co-founded, the pending acquisition of Sun and the implications thereof, and the state of the economy in general.

Most amusing however, was his ranting on cloud computing, captured on video by TechPulse360. Of course, we’ve heard his refreshingly critical take of the buzzword du jour before, but he continues to make it a valid point. (after the jump)

NetSuite, a company that provides cloud-based business management software suites, is furthering its mobile strategy by launching a free iPhone app to compliment its web-based products. The iPhone app gives NetSuite users on-the-go access to the company’s on-demand SaaS offerings, which include real-time dashboards with financial and customer data from CRMs and other applications.

A competitor to Salesforce.com, NetSuite offers four main types of cloud computing software: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), CRM, accounting, and ecommerce software. In any business, mobile access makes business processes speedier, so NetSuite has tried to make the crossover between the web and the iPhone (or iPod touch) seamless.

With the new app, users get real-time access to their NetSuite calendar and task lists, including the ability to accept or decline events and mark tasks complete. With respect to the CRM, sales reps can see leads, view client purchase history and contacts, and review past orders. Users can also access accounting information, browse financial trends and graphs, read performance indicator reports and receive and generate detailed financial scorecards.

NetSuite faces competition primarily from tech giants Salesforce.com and Microsoft, which both offer business application suites such as CRMs and ERPs. Salesforce has had an iPhone app (as well as apps for Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices) to compliment its products since early this year and has similar functionality to NetSuite’s app. Of course the larger picture for most companies is whether they trust all of their business data going in the cloud and then within an app, but as more and more companies become increasingly comfortable with the idea of the cloud, this concern is minimized.

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Good morning, Chrome OS! It seems that Google Tweeted last night about a strange and mysterious video purporting to show Google Chrome OS in the flesh. Our thoughts? Damn, this is going to be a fun OS.

From login to browsing to game playing, this little OS seems to be solid, smooth, and actually quite pretty. It’s amazing what a company can do with a few billion dollars and some of the brightest minds in the business.

Click through for the video. Also, as MG pointed out, this could be fake as all get out.

UPDATE - Yes, it is fake. Feh.