With some help from Intel, Joyentis announcing it is the first cloud computing service to launch in mainland China.Joyent is working with Intel and the Qinhuangdao Economic and Technology Development Zone (QETDZ) to bring its infrastructure cloud computing service to the Chinese market. The Joyent service is already being promoted with a localized version of its web site.SponsorJoyent is a San Francisco based cloud computing service that launched in 2004. They are one of the pioneers of the cloud computing world. They were one of the first to offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) offerings. They now offer all three layers of the Cloud Stack - IaaS, Platform as a Service(PAAS) and Software as a Service(SaaS).The China deal is a major coup for Joyent, which competes with giants like Amazon Web Services. Joyent prides itself on being a self-funded company.It is interesting that QETDZ officials decided to embrace a cloud computing service. We are seeing a whole new level of innovation in application development that stems from the availability of cloud computing services. Companies are embracing cloud computing services in North America and elsewhere for its simplicity, scaling and elasticity. With a cloud computing infrastructure, China will be well-positioned to experience significant innovation in its technology developmentIn today's announcement, Intel cited Joyent's infrastructure as a measure for its support. Joyent's infrastructure is based on the Intel Xeon processor. The QETDZ is one of China's first state-level economic and technological development zones. It is heavily focused on technology development. They have coined the name of the region as "Data Valley."Joyent is immediately launching its base public cloud product. It plans to expand its product line in China over the next two quarters.Discuss

  At the IBM Information on Demandconference, we asked Robert Ashe to sketch how he sees integration between the company's business intelligence and collaboration technologies. What he shows is how business intelligence applications and Lotus productscould connect business users through mashups and social interactions. Ashe is a general manager at IBM who leads the company's Business Intelligence and Performance Management efforts. He was CEO at Cognos before the company was acquired by IBM in 2007.Sponsor[Disclosure: IBM paid for a plane ticket and hotel room for Alex Williams to attend the IBM Information On Demand Conference.]Discuss

  Some conversations are best illustrated by educated strangers. Instead of listening to my mother drone on awkwardly about oral contraceptives, breast examinations and what she deemed "special lady time", I wish I could have saved us both the embarrassment and consulted a health-related video site. Instructional video platform 5min is teaming up with HealthCentralto create just that. HealthCentral's vast network of sites like Foodfit, MyBreastCancerNetwork.comand WellSpherewill gain new video content via 5min's matching system. SponsorEarlier this month ReadWriteWeb covered 5min's partnership with major lifestyle TV network Scripps.5min is sharing Scripps content from sites like HGTV, the Food Networkand the DIY Networkand matching it to relevant 5min network partners. As of this evening HealthCentral will become a network partner with access to the content matching technology, content from 5min's health categoryand streaming video advertising. HealthCentral plans on exclusively selling video ad space to pharmaceutical and over-the-counter drug companies. In March, Nielsen released a reported that drug-related ad spending had been cut back by almost $1 billion dollars since 2007.While it's tough to say if spending has decreased due to a shift from TV to more affordable web-based placements, 5min and HealthCentral are about to find out. Discuss

  The Internet is a mess these days.Conversations are distributed and fragmented; a blog post's comments will almost surely appear on a number of sites other than the author's blog. Considering factors from Facebook shares, likes, and posts to comments on Google Reader or even content curators such as Hacker News, site owners have found it increasingly difficult over the past year or so to efficiently and effectively collect all the sentiments, media, entities, and data associated with any given piece of content. Salmon is a protocol that addresses this specific issue, and engineer John Panzerhas begunan open-source projectto help unify the conversations of the synaptic web.SponsorWrote Panzer on his blog, "A few days ago at the Real Time Web Summit, we had a session about Salmon, a protocol for re-aggregated distributed conversations around web content. I was hoping for some feedback and to generate some interest, and I was overwhelmed by the positive reactions."After the Summit, Panzer chose to expand Salmon's presence to include an open-source projectand a Google groups-powered mailing list.In order to increase the visibility of aggregated content and interactions to the original source of web content, content creators can include a Salmon link in RSS or Atom feeds. Readers or aggregators then realize the feed is Salmon-enabled and remembers the URL. When a user comments to the feed item, the aggregator then posts a version of the comment to the endpoint. Panzer and others cite real-time notification protocol PubSubHubbub as the ideal push mechanism for this process.According to the protocol summary, "The usual result is for the salmon to be published along with other comments on the source's web page. Note that sources are not obligated to actually publish the salmon - they may moderate them, spam block them, aggregate, or analyze them instead. However, if the source does publish the salmon in a comment feed, it has to maintain certain fields to make the protocol work end-to-end."In an influential blog post, Louis Gray writes, "PubSubHubbub essentially works as a middle-man conduit, taking information from a data's source passing along changed data to downstream destination sites. The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites."In this way, Salmon reflects the aims of such commenting services as Disqusand JS-Kit's Echo, both of which attempt to gather and push distributed data around blog content.Right now, the project site contains the Python/Google AppEngine source code for the Salmon demo. Writes Panzer, "I also intend to host the actual spec text there for the moment, along with the reference implementation code, and develop both in parallel based on discussions on the mailing list."Interested developers are encouraged to join the mailing list and contribute to the conversation.Discuss

  Fear of failure rarely keeps serial entrepreneurs down. In fact, said Marc Pincus, CEO of Zyngaat today's FailCon event, "As entrepreneurs and programmers we're used to failing aren't we? If you look at it as A/B testing until you get the perfect product, then it's not an issue. It's important to learn from it...Otherwise, honestly, why change a f@#king thing if you're not going to measure the impact?" SponsorWhile Pincus is doing well with Zynga, he first saw failure with Tribe. Despite the fact that Tribe is still considered one of the first social networking sites, the founder has since learned that if you're going to fail, "fail fast" and do it with clear success metrics in place.Another startup that has managed to leverage failure for success is customer service platform Get Satisfaction. On a personal front, co-founder Thor Muller failed in raising too much money at a time when his then company Trapezolacked direction. When the bubble burst, Muller was free to start Get Satisfaction with co-founder Lane Becker. Although you wouldn't normally relate their company with failure, Get Satisfaction offers startups an opportunity to fail publicly via a Q&A-style platform. Says Muller, "Companies used to get away with failing quietly. Now it's amplified, it's even SEOed. Good companies know that one of the best ways to convert people into loyal customers is to make amends for a failure." In March, ReadWriteWeb found that after customers complained about a company on Get Satisfaction, they often immediately offered solutions to fix it. We named it the leading idea aggregator for businesses. Says Becker, "There's value to perpetuating failure. As entrepreneurs need to believe that our successes will be at the end of this trajectory of failures, and we're not the only ones capitalizing on it"Becker went on to argue that bloggers and entrepreneurs were just as tied to the cycle of failure as Get Satisfaction. "Entrepreneurs need us to fail, otherwise there'd be no new companies to fund. Bloggers need us to fail. They need it to write at least two blog posts - one when we start and one when we finish." While Get Satisfaction's presentation put failure into a new context, the message was an upbeat one. The systemic failure that happens due to poor market conditions, poor social sentiment or new technologies displacing old ones is a necessity. Without a willingness to take risks and fail, experimentation and new innovations would cease to exist. For most of us, that's the reason we're in the technology industry to begin with. Photo Credits: Rebecca Reeveand Firefly the GreatDiscuss

  Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launcheda "Takedown Hall of Shame" for what it sees as egregious abuses of digital copyright regulations.Traditionally the champions of Creative Commons and other, more open methods of IP protection and creative sharing of content online, EFF is now calling out a bevy of big-name media corporations to make examples of them for takedown abuse. According to the EFF blog, "Some of the web's most interesting content has been yanked from popular websites with bogus copyright claims or other spurious legal threats." Read on to see who made the list and why.Sponsor"Free speech in the 21st century often depends on incorporating video clips and other content from various sources," explained EFF attorney Corynne McSherry. "It's what The Daily Show with Jon Stewart does every night. This is fair use of copyrighted or trademarked material and protected under U.S. law."But that hasn't stopped thin-skinned corporations and others from abusing the legal system to get these new works removed from the Internet. We wanted to document this censorship for all to see."Some of the entities that have made EFF's roundup are as follows:NPR, for attempting to stifle a video criticizing same-sex marriageDeBeers, for its humorless response to an online parodyNBC, for issuing a takedown for a satirical Obama video that went viralAnd a personal favorite, Ralph Lauren, who shot out a few takedownsafter our good friends at Photoshop Disasterspointed out that, even in already thin models, a woman's head is not likely to be wider than her pelvisOther honorees include Warner Music Group, CBS News, Universal Music Publishing Group, and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.Is the EFF conducting a witchhunt here, dear readers? Are some of these copyright claims warranted? Or do you, in fact, have an egregious takedown of your own to report? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.Discuss

  Back in April, Google launcheda new search feature in Labs that allowed users to find similar images.Initially rolled out for select images only, the capability is now being rolled out for what seems to be the majority of images in Google image search. This is particularly useful when search terms include homonyms, we think; and we applaud Google for removing a major pain point in our searches for pics of Teslathe band as opposed to Tesla the scientist or Tesla the automotive brand.SponsorThese days, image searches will look a bit more like this:Note the lilac-colored links under most images. Users can employ this feature for narrowing results to specific people, objects, poses, angles, or even identical images posted on different sites. Here's what happened when we clicked the "similar images" link under a thumbnail of hair metalists Tesla:And again, when we clicked a thumb that pictured the entire band playing live onstage:It would be interesting if the similarities became more and more granular, but results appear to occasionally broaden or simply stop refining a few clicks into the search process. For this search, however, we were able to see an entire set of photos from a single concert and multiple sources, which was pretty interesting.What do our readers think? Are similar images helpful to you in your quest for better image searches?Discuss

  If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populous country on earth behind China and India - but now Facebook thinks it can play Switzerland and lead a push for world peace. I'm not so sure that's a good idea.Facebookand the Persuasive(no, not pervasive, persuasive) Technology Labat Stanfordlaunched what they call the "dot peace" campaign today. There's reason to pause before enthusiastically supporting the effort. There are other ways that Facebook could make the world a better place and there are some reasons why the company deserves caution more than trust when it comes to its political agenda.SponsorFacebook is a company with a political or cultural agenda, make no mistake about that. Company executives, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, have long said that Facebook seeks to move the world toward increased sharing of personal information in order to increase empathy between people. They believe that's good for world peace (and Facebook's valuation, of course). Some people might argue that minding your own damn business is good for world peace, but Facebook has a different strategy.Sometimes that means working to change peoples' expectations of privacy. All's fair in love, war and social networking, perhaps, so more power to Facebook for seeking to tilt the balance towards sharing and away from privacy. Users could vote with their feet, or their browsers in this case - but that's complicated by the fact that Facebook keeps all the social capital users build up locked into its system if they want to leave.That's big picture background, but here are three reasons why Facebook's role in a movement to foster world peace deserves to be questioned.Set the Data Free, AlreadyThe new Peace.Facebookpage has some really interesting data displayed on it, showing how many people from opposite sides of historical conflicts have become friends on Facebook over the last 24 hours, surveys about the viability of peace and other information.That's great - but imagine how much more understanding of the contemporary human condition could be derived from making that data and more freely available in anonymous aggregate for the rest of the world to analyze. These are "neat tricks" Facebook is doing with slices of its data - but isn't the lesson of the age that a network of minds is generally more effective at innovating than any one company can be? This is an ongoing part of the story and one we'll have a lot more to say about in coming weeks and months - but for now we'll just say that if Facebook really wants to change the world for good it should open up its unique birds-eye view of our behavior and interactions.In the 1960's anti-racist activists were able to prove that banks were systematically denying mortgage loans to African Americans. Redlining, as it was called, was exposed through analysis of data. When data is opened to analysis, patterns can be discovered - some of them unjust acts of systematic violence. The world is an unjust place and the social activity of 300 million people on Facebook will inevitably be useful in exposing some of those patterns of injustice.Shallow Political AnalysisThe first example of peace-through-Facebook you'll find highlighted on the new Peace.Facebook page is a march organized in the nation of Colombia against the leftist insurgent group FARC. As writer Eric Eldon put it a year ago on VentureBeat: "Thing is, right-wing Colombian guerrillas with close ties to the country's U.S.-backed government have also been implicated in numerous terrorist activities. That topic seems to have been covered in much greater detail by European media than their counterparts here in the U.S... If I were Facebook... I'd think hard about using that example."The group protested against, the FARC, is one side of the longest-running civil war in the world. They may be a violent, authoritarian, drug-corrupted bunch of thugs but their opponents are a shadowy paramilitary group made up in part of Colombian police who remove their uniforms at night and chainsaw off the heads of civilians in towns suspected of offering FARC support. The US is deeply implicated, in bad ways, and it's a seriously ugly situation. It's among the worst in Latin America and there are some pretty gruesome stories about Latin America in the 80's in particular.Facebook wants to pick sides in that fight? People may argue that it was a march against violence that was organized on Facebook, but that's one of the most violent countries on earth and Facebook refers to the march as anti-FARC. Since when is organizing street protests against one party in a brutal, decades-old fight a means of helping "people better understand each other?"That looks like a dangerously shallow understanding of how the world works and what the obstacles to peace are.Peter ThielFacebook's first and most important investor is PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel is a big believer in what's called The Singularity, defined by the Singularity Instituteas "the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence." Thiel believes that investing in the Singularity means thinking ahead about how humanity can benefit from our relationships with these smarter-than-human machines instead of being hurt by them. He says that the Singularity will either lead to the biggest economic boom in human history or it will lead to an apocalypse. Literally.Facebook's machine intelligence is very real; its system is learning quickly about how humans interact and how different people respond to different events, for example. Let's hope that the very wealthy Thiel, the very young Zuckerberg and the rest of the company's insular brain-trust can steer that machine towards truly helping humanity and not making an even worse mess of things. Given this dodgy philosophical background, it would be easier to trust Facebook as a humble servantof a global movement for world peace - doing its part by facilitating communication and opening its data to observation by the world at large. Instead we get very selective data interpretation done behind closed doors and presented to hundreds of millions of people as a way to take action.I can't help but feel uneasy about all this, as much as I enjoy using Facebook.Discuss

  We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungleand Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).SponsorMissing in Action: Native Mobile InterfaceWhat has held up adoption, in our opinion, is the lack of native mobile interfaces. This is a problem in other markets as well (as we cover here in relation to Basecamp). In the real world, many of the people who matter are out and about, meeting people face to face. Perhaps developers, who spend most of their day coding at a desk, miss the nuances of this usage case. Many developers point out that there are too many mobile devices with different standards.These sound like bad excuses. You could cover the lion's share of the market with native interfaces for iPhone, Android and Blackberry; the rest can follow later. As a developer, you need to test for usability on all three. Solicit beta users who are fans of each type. Don't rely on the one device that you use and that your fellow coders happen to love.Timebridge caught our attention for using SMS intelligently, allowing us to ping a reminder just before a meeting. This is a smart use of the lowest common denominator that all mobile devices support.The sync between Blackberry (my device) and calendars for Outlook, Google (my calendar) and iCal works just fine at a technical level, at least one way. One problem is that these calendars get "polluted" easily with a lot of team calendars. Google Calendar does not feel like mycalendar. Third-party apps can access Google Calendar very easily. Google has done a great job there, but it makes the calendar so crowded that it becomes useless.That is easily fixed by changing some settings. But even then, I never consult my schedule. I rely on the calendar in my BlackBerry, which is always with me, even when I am far from any desktop or Internet access.The sync has to be two-way, then. When I change something in my BlackBerry calendar, it should reflect in my Google calendar, so that any scheduling app that accesses my Google calendar will see the updated real calendar. This does not appear to be available yet.But my colleagues use iPhone and Android phones, and I have no idea what the people who I schedule external meetings with use. To earn serious adoption, a scheduling and calendaring system has to offer: (1) an effective lowest-common-denominator way to interface (SMS and/or email), and (2) a native interface for leading smartphones.Two Modes: Sharing and PollingPeople generally schedule two types of meetings. Gross simplification alert!Sharing, when one individual, who is much in demand, sets the schedule.Our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick uses Tungle in this way. A lot of startups want to speak with him. If he wants to talk to them back, he simply says, "Here is my calendar, figure out what works for you." Yori created Timebridge when he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Mayfield Fund, and he has interviewed a lot of the assistants who schedule meetings for VCs (another species that many people want to get on their calendar). Yes, when you have 2% of funds under management, you can afford to have an assistant schedule your meetings! For less wealthy "influentials," the sharing mode of a calendaring service is ideal.Poll, when many peers need to negotiate a time.Perhaps you are starting a new project and need input from several people. You control the scheduling but cannot simply say, "This is when we'll all meet." Herding cats is hard. I have used Doodle for this purpose, and it is effective (though like all of these services, it's missing native Blackberry support).Timebridge claims to offer both modes. For company use, this is essential because both usage cases are common.Don't Just Schedule: Launch the MeetingWhat really impressed me when I first saw Timebridge was that it automatically launched a screen-sharing service. This is a great way for the meeting controller to show presentations and demos or just the agenda and objectives. (It was interesting to learn that this was a re-skinned version of DimDim, a company we have covered before and put in our 2008 Best Of Enterprise list.)Timebridge can also automatically connect to FreeConference.com, a service we use all the time.So, if you are at a desktop, you would join using screen-sharing. If not, you would use the telephone bridge.This is an important next step. It is not just about "When can we meet?" but also about the subsequent question, "Where and how do we meet."Missing in action? Skype. It would be neat if the calendaring system would either automatically launch an existing Skype chat room or create one for all of the participants.Make Meetings More Productive? Really?Here is the nightmare scenario: third-party calendaring becomes so ubiquitous and effective that we spend a lot more time in unproductive meetings.Timebridge has set for itself the noble mission of making meetings more productive. Its tagline is "Make meetings great!"I remain skeptical. That is an art, a management art. It all depends on who is driving the meeting. Yori agrees but says that by instilling best practices, the average will improve. He may be right. The basics are well known. For each meeting you need:One objective,An agenda,Agreed actions.But this moves us into new territory. This is the world of project management systems. In a heterogenous world, each participant may be using a different system. There is no point in having "objectives" and "actions" in Timebridge if participants monitor and manage that sort of thing in Basecamp or (getting back to the mobile issue) on their BlackBerry or iPhone.One area where Yori convinced me that simple changes could mean a lot was in starting meetings on time. The time suck of waiting 15 minutes for Mr. Dilly and Ms. Dally to show up on a call causes a lot of teeth-grinding. Sending SMS reminders helps, but how else to change late arrival habits is unclear.Why Microsoft Exchange Is Threatened by Third-Party CalendaringIn ye olden days, a company standardized on either Lotus Notes (IBM) or Microsoft Exchange. Notes is still very much around, despite its venerable age, but Yori told us that it rarely shows up. Most users are on Outlook and Exchange, with an increasing number on Gmail and Google Calendar.With everyone on the same calendar system, scheduling meetings is easy. Why stick with Outlook and Exchange when Gmail is cheaper and more Web-native? The reason for many of the folks in enterprise IT who make these decisions is that calendaring is easy if everyone uses the same system.Third-party calendaring vendors such as Timebridge, Doodle and Tungle live in a heterogeneous world where you do not know what calendar anyone is using. Increasingly, it comes down to three: Outlook, Google and iCal. Yes, these are from the big three: Microsoft, Google and Apple.Calendaring is a side issue for Apple. But it is critical in the bruising battle between Microsoft and Google for dominance of the office market.With Outlook email unlinked from calendaring, Google is in better shape to win over big accounts to Gmail. (And once on Gmail, other apps tend to follow.)Discuss

  I always looked forward to seeing new "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC" ads on television. As a long-time Mac fan and a marketing pro, I really admired these spots. They were smart and edgy, yet friendly. They were fun. They differentiated Macs from PCs. From a marketing perspective, they were appropriate to Apple's David fighting Microsoft's Goliath. And they worked really well, perhaps better than any other mass-market technology product ads.Now I wince every time I see a new one, hoping its smug attitude and condescending tone doesn't go too far.SponsorThis guest post was written by Frank Cioffi.I also relished how Apple's spots unhinged Microsoft, prompting the Goliath to produce its own, usually inept, TV ads that broke a major rule of marketing: never appear reactive to a smaller competitor. Microsoft's PC ads and the flurry of Ballmer-isms that accompanied them, all on the heels of the Windows Vista catastrophe, actually seemed to reinforce Apple's point.But what has worked for Apple over the last three years doesn't seem to work as well now. Call it a psychographic observation, but the theme is getting tired, and the emotional impact of the ads has shifted. The superior, mocking tone of the ads sometimes goes too far, especially now as the new Windows 7 is being well received. Don't get me wrong. I'm a born-and-raised New Yorker. I like sarcasm. But for me, edgy has gone over the edgein some of these ads.Do we Mac users tend to feel superior? Of course. We knowwe enjoy the world's most elegant operating system. But when a Mac evangelist like me starts feeling mildly apologetic about these spots and empathizing with the PC guy, something is amiss.Does Apple's research show that prospective Mac customers, their intended audience, still like these ads? I assume so. But perhaps Microsoft's jab at Apple in its TV ads earlier this year(the one in which PC buyer Lauren says, "Maybe I'm not cool enough" to be a Mac person) was accurate, signaling that Apple's approach borders on arrogance, especially as it gains ever greater market share.While Mac's market share still pales in comparison to Windows, Apple is no longer a David. With its omnipresent retail stores, the iconic iPod and the runaway popularity of the iPhone, Apple is a real and perceived leader. It has a market cap of over $170 billion and more cash than Cisco or Microsoft. Its TV ads, its recent mishandling of App Store developer issues and criticism from prominent tech journalists show that the Apple perception machine is showing cracks. The company is starting to appeararrogant.To its credit, Apple's iPhone television ads are clean and crisp, relaying useful features and the latest apps. And not all of the Mac-PC ads are disdainful. The recent onewith actor Robert Loggia as PC's coach is fun. But the spot portraying a top-of-the-line PC modelas a semi-sleazy sales guy? That's when I cringe. The new spotsreacting to Windows 7? Not so bad, but they still rely too much on criticizing Microsoft. There's a difference between conveying product superiority and having a superior attitude.For this Mac fan, these ads are past their peak. They were great fun for a while. But it's time to shift the tone or move on. Certainly Apple's creative teams can come up with a follow-up act that is informative, entertaining and edgy, without sounding smug. Otherwise, Apple runs the risk of (gasp!) emulating Microsoft.Guest author: Frank Cioffi is editor and publisher of Apple Investor News, the Apple-only news aggregator and part of the Tech Investor News network..Discuss

  When so many conferences feature CEOs rehashing their past successes, FailCondoes exactly the opposite. The event asks successful founders, investors and developers to discuss their past blunders and what they've learned from them. While this may seem like a series of sob stories, the result is actually a list of practical tips on how to reduce risk, manage teams and recover from adversity. In today's afternoon sessions several panelists shared their war stories and set the stage for lessons. SponsorGnipfounder Eric Marcoullier had some colorful words for the audience, "Sometimes I feel like a stolen watch salesman. When someone asks to hear about one of my failures I can open up my coat and ask which one they'd like to see."While the entrepreneur / programmer is best known for his successes with MyBlogLogand gaming site IGN, Marcoullier talked about the recent layoff of seven of twelve employees from his API aggregation platform company. Says Marcoullier, "Misery is nature's way of telling you you're doing it wrong...Since we've changed directions, we're currently working on a new platform and we've released more features in one month than we had in the previous 6 months. I don't know if we're going to succeed, but we're going to find out a lot faster now." Meanwhile, social Q&A site Aardvark's cofounder Max Ventilla talks about the importance of hiring the right people, building a culture of iteration/experimentation and setting the stage for continual learning. Aardvark is a great example of a well-executed real-time company and we first gave it a favorable review in late March.Says Ventilla, "There's an infinite number of B+ players available to hire, but you've got to get people who are passionate about the product and who will attract other good employees." Ventilla explains that co-founders should be patient and continue to experiment with processes and products. He stresses that startups should task specific people in an organization to disseminate data and discuss new approaches as a group. "Transparency needs to be a default," says Ventilla. "Executives need to be willing to learn and discuss business in order to gain collective wisdom as a company." Discuss

  Amazon is providing users with the ability to run relational databases in the cloud. The service, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), means that customers now have another way to use a cloud service for a function normally administered by an IT department.Werner Vogels, chief technology officer for Amazon, says the new service means that RDS customers will not have to deal with "the 'muck' of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business." RDS will take care of the headaches such as patching and IT administration of the relational database.SponsorAccording to Vogels, RDS provides the full capabilities of a MySQLDatabase. The goal is to make it simple for customers to move their databases to RDS without needing to make modifications. Like all Amazon Web Services, RDS scales based on usage. The customer may use as much storage, power and memory as they need. Costs ebb and flow depending on how much they use. Storage, for instance, is managed through API calls.RDS pricing per instance is as follows:In addition to RDS, Amazon now offers Simple DB and Amazon EC2- Relational Database AMI. The Simple DB service is a simpler version of RDS. According to Vogels, it is designed for applications that do not require a relational model and principally demand indexing and querying capabilities. The Amazon EC2- Relational Database AMI is designed for users who have particular relational database requirements and want full control.RDS may be a bit slow to adoption as security is the big issue for the enterprise. But this issue will wane as people recognize that cloud offerings can be as secure as on-premise systems. Further, we are sure that security concerns will mellow when companies compare the costs and time requirements of RDS to what they do on-premise.In that regard, prices are already decreasing for EC2. Starting November 1, Amazon is dropping its per-hour pricesfor the following:That's a 15 percent drop in cost from the current prices for Linux instances.Discuss

  Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_web_in_five_years.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutesthat we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.SponsorHighlighted comments include:Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away."We're starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video."Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time."We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.There's lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt's interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.That's the roadmap, though, that's guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OSto Google Social Search.Does that sound like a compelling vision of the future? Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google's plans. What do you think the web will look like in five years?Discuss

  Buying a single article from a scientific journal is usually prohibitively expensive if you are not a student or teacher at a school that subscribes to the journal. Most academic journals are available only behind these paywalls, but Deep Dyve just announceda new product that could radically change the marketplace for scientific, technical and medical articles. Until now, Deep Dyve only indexedarticles and directed users to the journal's own site. Starting today, users can rent articles from Deep Dyve. Accounts start with a pay-as-you-go account, by which users are charged $0.99 to keep an article for one day, and go up to an unlimited account for $19.99 per month.SponsorDeep Dyve also offers an intermediate account for $9.99 per month, by which users can download 20 articles and keep them for up to seven days. You can sign upfor a trial account here. Deep Dyve accepts only PayPal for payments.Unless you subscribe to the unlimited plan, the only issue with Deep Dyve's new plan is that you can rent articles but not print them. This is a minor issue, however, because most users are just looking at these articles for a few facts or a bibliography and don't need them for extended periods of time. At $19.99 per month, the unlimited plan is cheaper than buying one article from a journal per month, so the price of the service won't be an issue for most of the service's target audience anyway.Target Audience: Knowledge WorkersDepp Dyve saysthat its target audience is the 50 million knowledge workers in the US. This is a somewhat optimistic view. After all, how many of these knowledge workers need access to the latest articles from the Journal of Leukocyte Biology? Still, there clearly is an untapped market here, and no one but Deep Dyve is trying to exploit it.Disruptive or Just an Extension of the Publishers' Business Model?Deep Dyve offers users a plethora of features, including persistent searches, email, RSS alerts and the ability to bookmark articles. What is most interesting about the company, however, is this new and potentially disruptive business model. The company has indexed over 30 million articles from thousands of journals. Most of these weren't easily available to the public until now. Few users would buy an article for $30 when confronted with a journal paywall. $0.99, though, is a far more palatable price.According tothe company's CEO Bill Park, the publishers that are working with Deep Dyve believe that this new model will help them expand their market without cannibalizing their current business model, which is mostly based on selling institutional subscriptions anyway.It will be interesting to see how users react to this new service. We think this has the potential to be a very disruptive service, especially if Deep Dyve continues to expand its database and partnerships at the current pace. Discuss