Author: Serkadis

Here’s some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

Ciena selected to upgrade Tata submarine cable to 100G.  Ciena (CIEN) announced that Tata Communications is launching 100 gigabits per second-enabled services on its TGN-Atlantic (TGN-A) subsea cable system, from New York to London. Based on the Ciena 6500 Packet-Optical Platform the GeoMesh networking solution is being used by Tata to upgrade its TGN-A submarine cable to 100G – the first on its global submarine network. The upgrade will be instrumental in increasing carrier network performance through consolidation of transport traffic. The TGN IP Transit Network (AS6453) makes up 20 percent of the world’s Internet routes and carries 4,200 Petabits of traffic per month on its Internet backbone. Ciena’s WaveLogic coherent receiver technology enables unobtrusive 40G/100G upgrades to existing submarine networks with only the addition of new terminal equipment, significantly extending the life of existing cable plants and further lengthening their lifespans into the future. “The move to 100G coherent technology on our TGN-Atlantic cable system demonstrates our leadership in global network infrastructure,” says Genius Wong, Senior Vice President of Global Network Services at Tata Communications. “Based on Ciena’s GeoMesh, this major deployment will bring maximum bandwidth, lower latencies, higher uptimes and seamless scalability for carriers and enterprises, today and in the future.”

MediaMath acquires Akamai’s ADS Data Cooperative Solutions.  Digital media-buying platform company MediaMath and Akamai (AKAM) announced MediaMath’s acquisition of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS) data cooperative which will augment MediaMath’s industry-leading Data Management Platform (DMP). MediaMath will acquire substantially all of the assets associated with Akamai’s ADS business, and will integrate the Akamai ADS team into its workforce. The two companies have also signed a multi-year relationship whereby MediaMath will have exclusive rights to leverage Akamai’s pixel-free technology for use within digital advertising and marketing applications. ”We’re excited to partner with MediaMath,” said Mike Afergan, Akamai’s Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Web Experience Division. “Together, we’ll be able to provide our joint customers with an even more effective set of tools to manage their data, understand their audience, and help enhance the quality of online marketing campaigns.”

TMG Health selects Level 3.  Level 3 Communications (LVLT) announced that TMG Health is depending on Level 3′s secure, redundant network solutions to better serve the needs of its clients and to improve the communications across its offices and data centers. In particular, Level 3 extended its network to the customer’s new National Operations Center in Jessup, Pennsylvania, to support a recent business expansion.  ”Level 3′s network solution makes us an attractive provider for our clients, and enables us to prove to existing and prospective clients that they can entrust us with their sensitive healthcare information,” said Chris Haran, chief information officer of TMG Health. “In addition, the fact that Level 3 owns and operates the entire network supporting our headquarters in Jessup — and protects it with a multi-layered security portfolio — allows us to reassure our customers that their sensitive data is secure. We couldn’t have expanded our operations center there without Level 3′s support.”

It seems that one of many recipes for viral success these days is to play off of an already viral phenomenon. Of course, it helps if you have the broadcasting power that comes with that of Saturday Night Live. This past weekend’s show was hosted by Adam Levine, who participated in one of the classic-to-some digital shorts.

The video would be YOLO, and features, in addition to Levine, comedy troupe The Lonely Island (which includes SNL vet Andy Samberg) and rapper Kendrick Lamar:

The video has the web abuzz here on Monday morning, and people all over Twitter are talking about how hilarious it is.

Yolo is now my ringtone! #snl

— Ciara Mc Donnell (@ciaramcdonn) January 28, 2013

yolo with kendrick lamar n adam levine LOOOOOOL #snl

— suzie (@suzanaodzala) January 28, 2013

Can’t get the chorus to “Yolo” out of my head.Also, cook your meat until it’s done. #TheLonelyIsland #SNL #AdamLevine #KendrickLamar

— Beth (@bethalicious83) January 28, 2013

Loved YOLO on #SNL and even better was @adamlevine as the Neil Diamond impersonator.

— Shannon Fitzgerald (@safitz2) January 28, 2013

Honestly, that #YOLO song the lonely island is really amazing. #teamadam #SNL #YouOughtaLookOut

— Craig Chavez (@ListDeCraig) January 28, 2013

Adam Levine Hosted SNL this week…this “YOLO” music video was a highlight of the show!!A must see! fb.me/InkyZJpG

— Bill & Shelly (@Lite98WakeUpSho) January 28, 2013

Can someone just pay me to sleep until noon and then watch the #YOLO digital short about a billion times? #SNL

— Jennifer Ballard (@itsjentastic) January 28, 2013

DVR’d#SNL. Heard there was a Digital Short. Yep, I went straight to it. #YOLO

— Ronnie (@texmexinjersey) January 28, 2013

THE LONELY ISLAND AND ADAM LEVINE!!! OMG!! SO HAPPY!!! lol #YOLO (only time I will ever use that) #SNL

— Sandra Porter (@Miss_SLP) January 28, 2013

An entire campus for modular data centers? That’s the concept for a new project coming together in Barcelona, where the government of Catalonia is teaming with AST Modular on the Barcelona Data Center Cluster, a 320,000 square foot development dedicated to modular deployments.

The campus will allow companies to lease lots on which they can gradually deploy data center capacity in phases by adding additional modules, which can either be housed on a slab or inside a “container colo” structure, based on customer preferences. The initiative is one of the first proposals to develop a large-scale campus around modular data centers, pre-fabricated structures built in factories that require less on-site infrastructure than a traditional data center. A number of colocation and wholesale data center specialists have offered space for container modules, most notable i/o Data Centers, which operates huge modular facilities in Phoenix and New Jersey.

The project will be located within Parc de l’Alba in Cerdanyola des Valles, a business park focused on attracting leading technology companies. The park is anchored by the ALBA Synchotron, a cluster of research laboratories built around a synchotron – a huge circular-shaped machine that uses arrays of magnets to generate bright beams of synchrotron light. The ALBA Synchotron opened last year.

“The BCN Data Center Cluster is an initiative part of the ongoing commitment of Government of Catalonia towards the promotion of Parc de l’Alba as one of Europe’s most advanced technology parks,” said Pere Solà, Parc de l’Alba’s General Director.

The data center project will commence this week with a launch event this week. The campus will feature 30 megawatts of power with dual A and B feeds, a natural gas ring which feeds the cluster, district cooling produced by co-generation power plants and access to the widest range of connectivity provider. The space devoted to data centers has been divided into modular lots for customers.

AST Modular is based in Barcelona and specializes in providing modular data centers to global customers including IBM and Opera. It has deployed modules that support IT gear in environments ranging from the cool climates of Iceland and the summer heat of the Iraqi desert. AST Modular will act as Barcelona Data Center Cluster’s technology advisor.

“In today’s Capex constrained environment, the BCN Data Center Cluster offer enterprise businesses in Europe the answer to their raising data center needs,” said Henry Daunert, CEO at AST Modular. “It is according to such speficic market conditions that we are suggesting for BCN DC Cluster a data center ‘build as you need’ model which is very agile and intends to align IT to business and reduce data center energy consumption. We are indeed thrilled to be driving the initiative from a technology standpoint.”

With today being Data Privacy Day, Google took to several of its blogs to outline three initiatives it says it is focused on, related to privacy as it pertains to protection of consumers’ information and government requests. The company will continue to advocate for the updating of privacy laws, it will continue its curent process for handling government rquests, and it will continue to provide consumers with the info about government requests as it has been doing, but expanding upon what is actually available.

“First, for several years we have advocated for updating laws like the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents. We’ll continue this effort strongly in 2013 through our membership in the Digital Due Process coalition and other initiatives,” says Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond. “Second, we’ll continue our long-standing strict process for handling these kinds of requests. When government agencies ask for our users’ personal information—like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email—our team does several things.”

These include: scrutinizing requests to make sure they satisfy the law and Google’s policies, evaluating the scope of the request, notifying users about legal demands “when appropriate,” and requiring government agencies conducting criminal investigations to use a search warrant before Google will provide a user’s search query info and private content from Google accounts.

Drummond elaborates on each of these things here.

As part of the third initiative, Google has added a new section to its transparency report which answers a variety of questions users might have about the legal process.

Last week, Google released the latest update to its Transparency Report, as it does every six months. More on what was included in that here. Hint: government requests for user data have been increasing in the U.S. and around the world.

Feeling a little cramped by the 64 GB of storage in your iPad? You may soon be able to stretch out and relax a little more on your tablet: The latest iOS 6.1 beta software hints at iPads with 128 GB of storage capacity. 9to5 Mac’s sources say that such a device would be identical to the current models, so the only difference would be the amount of flash memory.

Buried in the Apple’s iOS 6 beta code are references to the 128 GB of storage and was found by Twitter user @iNeal this past Saturday:

We should be seeing 128GB iDevices soon. iOS 6.1 beta 5 has 128G system partition key in BuildManifest.—
Neal (@iNeal) January 27, 2013

Assuming Apple does introduce a 128 GB iPad model, I’d expect the price jump to be $100 over the current 64 GB versions; Apple typically adds $100 for each step up to higher memory for its iOS devices. That would put this model at $799 for a Wi-Fi tablet, likely to appeal more to those who use their iPad as a primary device in place of a laptop. Or those that want to carry every MadMen episode in high-definition with them on their iPad.

Networking giant Cisco (CSCO) and storage specialist NetApp (NTAP) announced an expanded partnership to deliver new converged infrastructure under the FlexPod architecture. Cisco and NetApp are looking to present a shared vision of the unified data center, connecting enterprise clouds to service providers, enterprises to branch offices and clouds to clouds. The expanded partnership will provide deeper integration for the more than 2,100 FlexPod customers.

FlexPod is a Cisco and NetApp validated data center platform for hosting business applications on virtualized or bare-metal servers. The set of solutions will bring together NetApp Clustered ONTAP and NetApp FAS storage systems with Cisco UCS servers and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches to create dynamically provisioned pools of server, storage and network resources that can be scaled up and scaled down by service providers depending on application requirements.

To enhance architecture integration, FlexPod will provide the ability to manage up to 10,000 servers, allowing organizations to aggregate several FlexPod racks and enable multihop Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCOE).  Support is also being added for Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC) to allow cloud management solutions for FlexPod customers. To accelerate momentum in the service provider market Cisco and NetApp are developing flexible, massively scalable FlexPod solutions capable of handling multi-data-center service provider architectures.

ExpressPod, with support for VMware vSphere, will also soon include support for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, and will be extended to meet the compute, network and storage needs of branch offices. Cisco and NetApp are expanding solution coverage to add more mission-critical applications and private cloud solutions for the datacenter. Mission critical solutions include Oracle Database and applications, SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence and the SAP HANA platform, and private cloud offerings include Microsoft private cloud and Citrix CloudPlatform.

“The past 10 years of partnering with NetApp have proven to be successful in bringing a Cisco validated, FlexPod architecture to our customers,” said Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco. Building on that success, we’re now expanding our partnership to deliver deeper technology integration and broader solution development across the unified data center for an open, scalable, multicloud infrastructure. Together we can help our customers use their current data center investment to address the challenges of a mobile-cloud era.”

“NetApp and Cisco share a common vision for the future of the data center and will continue to collaborate on innovations that connect organizations under a holistic cloud architecture,” said Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations at NetApp. Our development, sales, and channel teams will work even closer to deliver new solutions that broaden the market opportunities for both companies and our partners, and help customers gain a competitive advantage from their flexible and efficient agile data center infrastructure.”

Lyatiss, a startup that came out of a French research consortium wants to create a new communication layer designed for the cloud and the upcoming world of federated apps. The idea is to use software installed on servers in different clouds — Amazon Web Services to start with — to monitor and then remediate problems associated with network traffic flows.

Lyatiss has raised $4 million in Series A funding from Idinvest Partners and others. It has headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. and a research office in Lyon France, where the company originally began as a spin out from Inria, the French National Computer Science Research Institute.

Lyatiss combines the ideas associated with software-defined networking –such as monitoring flow-level data and treating the networking layer as an abstraction — and applies them to business and performance rules associated with applications. In short, Lyatiss says it can do what many of the people who are excited about SDN really want — a way for the network to react and deliver what the application needs.

Pascale Vicat-Blanc, the CEO and a co-founder of the company, likens it to creating a version of TCP for the cloud. The company calls this application-defined networking, but it’s probably safer to think of it a means to tie the application to the performance of the underlying hardware despite the increasing layers of virtualization in the way. For example, customers using Lyatiss’ CloudWeaver software (delivered as a service, of course) have been able to track their network flows to see where CPU usage was heating up and where network bottlenecks were occurring, thus letting the customers reallocate or size up their virtual machines as needed.

The service differs from a cloud-based networking monitoring program product such as Boundary’s, which tracks individual packets at the network level in that it tracks the entire flow — which includes where the packet is going and what might be stopping it or slowing it down along the way as opposed to just noticing that it has slowed down or stopped. This level of information, which can include details like the performance of the CPU and how that affects the network, is far more detailed.

This brings us back to TCP. This protocol helps define how devices talk to the web, ensuring that all packets sent around the web join up with their buddies at your end device. The protocol helps divide and track the packets that comprise an email, a movie or a digital photograph. In much the same way CloudWeaver’s application-defined networking hopes to use flow information to track how an application performs across multiple virtual machines, web services and eventually clouds.

It has started with an Amazon-based service, and promises to monitor and then let developers tweak their AWS settings when something is running a bit too hot or slowly. Developers could use this to see an outage before it occurs and then take swift action using the same software.

Eventually the plan is for such things to happen automatically if the developer sets it up that way. For those working in the cloud where scale is essential, the ability to monitor such flows and then have the hardware react to the needs of the application is somewhat of a holy grail. Lyatiss hasn’t managed to achieve this yet, but that’s where it is heading.

Suddenly, I feel sorry for the folks over at Apple. Chicken Little bloggers and Wall Street analysts run round crying “The sky is falling!” Strangely, they are believed. Apple shares are down 38 percent from September’s all-time high. On Friday, the company’s market cap fell below Exxon’s. Suddenly, the world’s most valuable company isn’t. I just don’t feel right kicking fruit as it falls down, so as a gesture of goodwill my boycott ends today.

That’s not to say I have plans to buy any Apple products. I’m more than satisfied with Chromebook and my three Nexus devices. That said, as an act of solidarity, I let Apple auto-charge my credit card for iTunes Match renewal today. I don’t own a single device that supports the service, but, hey, what’s $24.95 between friends? I was a loyal OS X and iOS user until my boycott started in June 2012, protesting aggressive patent lawsuits — unaffectionately called innovation by litigation.

The reasons for my boycott are unchanged. Apple is still a patent bully that also intimidates others. But following my boycott, Apple made a series of missteps that sent stock and brand perceptions steeply downward. Siri still sucks. iPhone 5 underwhelms. Releasing Apple Maps makes the exec team look petty (dropping Google’s product in process) and incompetent. iPad mini costs too much. Court-ordered apology to Samsung misleads and lies.

From that perspective, my concern: Should sympathy swell around Apple’s state, boycotters could cause even more. Arrogant, highest market cap, cash-hording (mainly overseas) Apple is easy for people to hate. But fallen Apple is sympathetic. So I have another reason for backing off the boycott, which shouldn’t be reason for anyone to feel even sorrier for the company.

Not that there is any real reason for sympathy. During calendar 2012, Apple generated $164.7 billion revenue, which is considerably more than Microsoft ($73.2 billion) and Google ($50.18 billion) combined. Net profit reached $39.58 billion, or more than twice Microsoft (when including a goodwill charge). Even fallen, Apple is a mighty fruit.

Sour Apple

I wouldn’t worry that anyone working there will go hungry. Cofounder Steve Jobs left behind a money machine, unlike anything seen since Microsoft, which, no coincidence, led the last computing era. Apple may be contender to lead the cloud-connected device era, but cracks in the facade are everywhere.

1. Rising negative perceptions. For years, Apple was a perception stock, largely buoyed by smart marketing and Jobs’ ability to cast the so-called “Reality Distortion Field”, while generating cult-leader like adoration. Perceptions that lifted the stock high, now lay it low. How ironic, the people writing obsessively about Apple before continue to do so, but with more negative tone and concern as the bottom drops out of stock and brand.

2. “Where’s the innovation?“ It’s a common question among the Apple-obsessive. As 2013 started, analyst, blogger, reporter and social commentator puppy-love adoration gave way to persistent angst-questions about what’s next and why the stock, which soared in September, soured through most of fourth quarter. Everyone pines for Jobs’ “One More Thing” — that category creating or redefining new product and didn’t get it. Apple isn’t delivering.

3. iPhone’s uncertain future. iPhone is a monstrous money machine. Revenue rose to $30.67 billion in fourth quarter from $16.25 billion three months earlier. That’s 56 percent of total revenue, up from 45 percent in Q3. But shipments missed Wall Street consensus by more than 2 million units.

Meanwhile, iPhone 4 and huge iPhone 5 launch in China lifted fourth quarter — yes, iPhone 4, which Cook says was supply constrained for all three months, and that during iPhone 5’s first full quarter of sales. Carriers use subsidies to insulate buyers, offering iPhone 4 for free and 4S for $99. Those prices also determine iPhone’s perceived value to consumers, which for many is zero — they are unwilling to pay anything. Higher sales of lower-cost models mean thinner margins for Apple.

Then there is Android, which continues to widen its lead over iPhone, in large part thanks to Samsung. In fourth quarter 2011, Apple shipped more smartphones than Samsung — 23 million and 22.5 million, respectively, according to IDC. A year later, Samsung shipments rose 76 percent, with 63.7 million smartphones to Apple’s 47.8 million.

4. Concerns about iPad mini. The tablet costs either too much or too little. For the too-much crowd, iPad costs between $329 and $659, but based on BetaNews polls and analyst data, the sweet spot in the 7-7.9-inch tablet category is $199. If consumers continue to flock to lower-cost tablets, Apple loses. Meanwhile, the too-little crowd has a point. Every iPad mini sold helps to preserve Apple’s tablet market share but saps margins.

By my math, in fourth quarter, iPad category average selling prices fell 12.3 percent sequentially — from $535 to $467. But there’s more! Year over year, iPad ASPs are down $101, Apple’s CFO admits. Only the company’s inability to manufacture enough minis to meet demand during fourth quarter kept matters from being worse.

Contrasting Leadership

If I was anti-Apple, and I am not, all this trouble would be welcome. Something to really cheer about. But I like Apple, which is major reason for the boycott in the first place. I expect more from the company, and look sadly on greatness shaken from the trees as frost bites the crop.

Apple must learn from a bitter rival. Google innovates in all the ways, and more, Apple is perceived to. Name a day when there isn’t something new coming from the double-oh company — innovation at truly Internet speed. Meanwhile, at Apple, for all the talk about capitalizing on the so-called post-PC era, development goes at the old pace. Hell, the patent lawsuits move faster than Apple innovation. Last week I offered some pointers on how the company can get its mojo back. Perception, and reality, can with commitment.

But I wonder, observing the stark contrast of leadership. During the same week, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt made major trips to Asia — to China and North Korea, respectively. Cook culled relationships and deals in what he calls Apple’s most important country. Not North America, baby. His trip was really about money. Meanwhile Schmidt’s trip was more a goodwill mission. He and his daughter offer fascinating reflections, you should read. From the perspective of shareholders, Cook’s priority is right. But, personally, as a non-investor, I like Schmidt’s priority more.

Wrapping up, I’m still unhappy with Apple corporate behavior; now that perception, brand and stock sink, many more people are dissatisfied, too. I’m just one person, but every burden lifted must mean something. I’m off the boycott bandwagon, as you should be.

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox

MoTR 288 is 57 minutes long and is a 34.5 MB file in MP3 format.

CLICK HERE to download the file and listen directly.

HOSTS: Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

• First thoughts of the Acer W510 Windows 8 tablet / dock. Build quality, specs, performance, usage.
• Unlocking your phone is now illegal, although a carrier can still do it for you. Good, bad or just silly?
• Galaxy Note 8.0: looks legit and interesting; particularly because of the speaker at the top. A small tablet with voice, perhaps.
• Nokia Drive+ comes to other Windows Phones. Does this help Microsoft or Nokia?
• Nokia announces Nokia Music+ subscription service for Lumia owners
• Vine for iOS, Twitter video service

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For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!

Google Pours $1 Billion Into Data Centers in 3 Months – Google poured $1 billion into its data center operations in the fourth quarter of 2012, marking its highest quarterly investment ever in Internet infrastructure. The only time the company has spent more on capital expenditures was the fourth quarter of 2010, when it spent $2 billion purchase 111 8th Avenue, primarily for its office space.

Silicon Photonics: The Data Center at Light Speed – Intel has developed a prototype of a “photonic rack” with high-speed connections that allow new approaches to server design that separate components like CPUs and storage, allowing them to be upgraded independently. Here’s a video overview.

Hyve Brings Facebook’s Servers to Your Racks – Hyve Solutions is developing products based on Open Compute designs, so that other companies can begin to take advantage of some of the latest innovations in open hardware. At the recent Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, the Hyve team gave DCK a look at its latest hardware.

Rackspace Plans Major Cloud Expansion in UK – Rackspace Hosting plans a major expansion of its cloud computing infrastructure in the United Kingdom, and has hired Digital Realty Trust to build a new data center. Rackspace has been experiencing strong growth in its cloud business, as its total server count has grown by more than 10,000 over the past year while revenue has improved 27 percent.

Flash Memory at Scale: Fusion-io Goes Large – With growing demand for Flash memory from hyperscale and cloud companies, Fusion-io last week unveiled ioScale. Fusion-io’s Gary Orenstein describes the Fusion ioScale product in this video with Data Center Knowledge editor Rich Miller at the Open Compute Summit.

Stay current on Data Center Knowledge’s data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook or join our LinkedIn Group – Data Center Knowledge.

Once again electric car pioneer Tesla Motors is the lone firm out of its electric car peers that says it’s going to do something, and then actually (usually) does it. According to Automotive News, Tesla has now reached its goal of producing 400 Model S electric cars per week, or around 20,000 cars per year.

This rate of production has been Tesla’s goal for months — if not years — and it’s a big step on the company’s path to profitability this year. Back in November, during its latest quarterly earnings, Tesla said it was on track to reach this milestone after having to scale back its original production goals a couple months earlier in September. It also means that all those customers on the waiting list to get their Model S cars — there were 13,200 as of the third quarter — will get their cars sooner, rather than later.

However, as I’ve written before, Tesla seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the struggling world of independent electric car makers and batteries made for electric cars. Electric car infrastructure maker Better Place shuffled out its second CEO in as many months last week, and laid off a big chunk of staff in the face of very slow adoption of its electric car service in Israel.

Electric car startup Fisker hasn’t made any of its hybrid electric Karma cars in months, and is looking for a Chinese partner, investor or acquirer with deep pockets to offer it a lifeline. Fisker’s original production goal at the beginning of its life was 5,000 Karmas in 2011, and it’s made around 1,900. A123 Systems, which has been making batteries for Fisker’s Karma, went bankrupt last year and then was bought by Chinese auto tech giant Wanxiang.

For the auto giants like GM and Nissan, which have been making their own mainstream electric cars, production isn’t a problem. It’s just that sales are a little slow. GM sold a total of 23,461 Volts in 2012, up from the 7,671 sold in 2011, and Nissan sold 9,819 Leafs in 2012, according to AutoblogGreen. GM originally wanted to sell 45,000 Volts in 2012.

So why is it so hard for independent electric car companies to meet their targets, and large auto makers to hit sales targets? For the auto giants, the market is only just emerging. GM’s Volt and the Nissan LEAF are the first mass produced plug-in battery cars on the market in the U.S. Auto exec Bob Lutz, who kickstarted GM’s Volt and is now on the board of some startups, says the transition to electric cars will be very slow.

For independent car startups, commercial scale production can be daunting and take a lot longer than expected, too. Many things can go wrong, and the it can take months to streamline the process of auto manufacturing. Tesla was founded back in 2003, and its pilot car — where it made errors and suffered delays — was the original Roadster. It’s taken Tesla this many years to get to its closer to mainstream auto maker status just pushing out 400 cars per week.

Another week brings us closer to the Mobile World Congress event where Samsung is rumored to be showing off new Android tablet. The Galaxy Note 8.0 has been leaked, confirmed and now pictured by several sites, looking like a large Samsung Galaxy S 3 phone. That’s not a bad thing considering the GS3 is Samsung’s top-selling smartphone.

What intrigues me most about the images is speaker above the 8-inch display, which is expected to have a 1280 x 800 resolution.

That means the tablet is likely to have voice capabilities like a phone, although I don’t anticipate many to hold this slab to their head. It would work in a pinch, meaning you didn’t want to have a speakerphone conversation and didn’t have a wired or wireless headset handy.

Bear in mind that the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab had cellular voice capabilities, but here in the US, that feature was stripped out of the device for all 3G models.

If Samsung does out a new note at this size, the S-Pen and multiwindow software features could increase appeal. The company already supports these on the 5.5-inch Galaxy Note 2 and, after a recent software update, on the larger Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.

Speaking of software, I stumbled upon a handy app for Androids that helps determine the best cellular and Wi-Fi network near your location. Called OpenSignal 2, the free app uses crowdsourced information to create maps for coverage and speed, while also using a compass-like function to find the nearest Wi-Fi hotspots. OpenSignal 2 also keeps track of your mobile broadband usage and provides a speed testing feature too.

Late this past week, I started speculating on why it’s time for Google to make a smart watch. As the recent sales success of the Pebble e-paper smart watch shows — the product topped 80,000 backers on Kickstarter alone — there’s some consumer interest in wearable devices such as these.

Google actually already has a smart watch by proxy: It owns Motorola, which makes the MotoActv; perhaps one of the best Android-compatible watches on the market. It wouldn’t take much for Google to tweak or improve it. If the company is serious about wearable devices and quantified self gadgets, I’d think it could launch a revamped smart watch as early as this year’s Google I/O event.

If the company does so and gets even a small percent of Android device owners to use such a smart watch, it could gain access to tens of millions of  health-related data points such as steps taken, calories burned, heart rate. And as we already know: Google is all about gathering, indexing and using data.

French President François Hollande commissioned a report that was presented last Friday, which describes a new Internet tax that would attempt to collect revenue from Internet companies based on the amount of users whose data they track and monetize.

Should Internet data be taxed anywhere? Let us know what you think.

Eric Pfanner at The New York Times explains:

The report published Friday said a tax on data collection was justified on grounds that users of services like Google and Facebook are, in effect, working for these companies without pay by providing the personal information that lets them sell advertising.

The report says tax rates would be based on the number of users an Internet firm tracked, to be verified by outside auditors. The authors did not recommend tax rates or estimate how much money such a levy could raise.

Obviously the idea has been controversial, and has drawn a great deal of criticism. For example, Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider says the “French view of the Internet will make you want to pull your hair out,” adding, “Users are not, ‘in effect’ or otherwise, ‘working for these companies without pay by providing the personal information that lets them sell advertising. They are using products for free! NO ONE IS MAKING THEM USE FACEBOOK OR GOOGLE, SHEESH.”

Google is reportedly reviewing the report. Perhaps we’ll see a blog post about it from Google in the future.

France has been looking at Google’s tax practices for a couple years now, as the French government has accused the company (and others) of playing the tax system by placing their European operations in places like Ireland or Luxembourg, where tax rates are lower.

On Thursday, French Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg said France has decided to go after all big Internet firms “curbing legal tax avoidance,” as Reuters puts it, to collect payment of back taxes. Reporter Brian Love writes:

The government had decided, Montebourg said on France 2 television, “to launch tax retrieval procedures covering all of the Internet giants”.

He did not elaborate and it was not clear whether the comment, made in a wide-ranging interview about French industry, referred specifically to existing tax investigations of the Internet search engine and retail giants Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN), or was suggesting a broader campaign.

Amazon received a $252 million back tax bill from the French government in November.

Meanwhile, talks between Google and publishers in France over payments for links are at a stand-still, according to ZDNet, which cites French newspaper Le Monde. We reported on this situation last fall, when Google prepared a note about a link tax proposal by French lawmakers (backed by the publishers).

Google’s Director of Public Policy in France, Oliver Esper, said at the time, “The web has led to an explosion of content creation, by both professional and citizen journalists. So it’s not a secret that we think a law like the one proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the internet. We have said so publicly for three years.”

He later added, “We have always been and remain committed to collaborate with French Publishers associations as they experiment and develop sustainable economic models on the Internet.”

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt met with Hollande back in the fall to discuss the proposal, and the parties involved were supposed to resolve their issues by the end of the year (at least as far as the president was concerned), but so far, it sounds like little has been resolved.

As far as Internet taxes go, while French regulators’ plans may be designed to go after big companies like Google, where are the lines drawn? Will smaller players be affected as well? The very nature of the Internet is global, and that includes France.

Is this a good idea on France’s part? Let us know what you think.

After spending a week in bone-numbingly cold Germany, I have come back to work and here are some of the stories I found that are worth your time. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

• The trouble with social news: Aldo Cortesi shares his growing discontent with the social news ecosystem and in it, he nails some of the anxiety I have felt about the internet’s new news ecosystem.
• Financial trials of St. Louis Cardinals coach Mike Matheny: What a wonderful story of a baseball coach who lost all his money in the real estate bust and yet managed to keep it together for his family and his team. I have a lot of respect for Matheny, not just for his baseball skills but for coming to terms with this twist of fate.
• Dualtone derby: Okay, I made up the headline, but this story of Grammy Award-winning Nashville label Dualtone is a reminder of why doing things your own way comes with a price that is worth paying. Great story!
• How do hotel reservations work?: In case you ever wondered about it, now is your chance to find it all out.
• The soul of student debt: This is a different, unique take on the student debt that everyone talks about in America.
• The Caucasian king of K-Pop: K-Pop is Korean Pop, as in “Gangnam Style” and stuff, and Brad Moore from Ohio is drumming its beat. Short, sweet piece.
• The D2C Generation: The internet is creating new opportunities for designers who are going directly to consumers and finding success despite selling fewer items.

Nearly two years ago, news came out that ABC had canceled the long-running soap operas All My Children and One Life To Live. ABC had decided to replace them with food shows, saying the decision was guided by “extensive research into what today’s daytime viewers want and the changing viewing patterns of the audience.”

If daytime TV viewers didn’t want All My Children and One Life To Live, you could have fooled me, because when the news broke, the angry comments flooded the web.

Angry fans can find joy once again, because both shows are making a return, courtesy of Hulu. We have yet to see an official announcement, but TechCrunch is reporting that both will be back in shorter 30-minute episodes each weekday, starting in the spring on Hulu, as well as on iTunes and Prospect Park’s (the production company that licensed the soap operas from ABC) The Online Network, but Hulu will manage the ad sales and package them.

Prospect Park actually announced the shows’ return earlier this month, but didn’t mention Hulu or iTunes (via zap2it):

“We are pleased to confirm that Prospect Park is reviving the beloved soap operas, All My Children and One Life To Live as the anchor programs on The Online Network (TOLN). Today we are also pleased to confirm that Prospect Park has: 1) signed guild agreements with both SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and the DGA (Directors Guild of America); 2) entered into a consulting agreement with Agnes Nixon the creator of All My Children and One Life to Live guaranteeing her active involvement; 3) hired Foz McDermott (coordinating producer Heroes) as TOLN’s head of production, Jennifer Pepperman (Director, One Life to Live) as Executive Producer on One Life to Live, and Ginger Smith (Producer, All My Children) as Executive Producer on All My Children; and 4) arranged the necessary financing to begin production in February on both All My Children and One Life To Live.

Online video has become quite the savior for fans of canceled TV shows, showing that if there is big enough demand, your old favorites might have a chance at returning. Netflix has managed to pull off what many of us thought would never happen, in bringing back the cult favorite Arrested Development, which returns in May. Now, long-running soap operas are finding their way back to fans in what should be a happy moment for a lot of people.

If you ever wanted Apple’s tiny laptop, cash in your savings or dig out the credit card. Best Buy has a short sale going, discounting MacBook Air by $200. That means price starting at $799.99 today and tomorrow for an 11.6-inch model with Intel Core i5 processor and 64GB SSD. Double the storage for another 100 bucks.

The promotion, part of Winter Doorbuster Days, is Friday and Saturday. Best Buy discounts other goodies, but MacBook Air stands out for the price, which lowers the entry cost to joining the Mac Fan Club. But Best Buy also sells the Samsung ARM Chromebook, for $249.99, also with 11.6-inch panel, similar size and weight and comparable (if not better) ergonomics. And Best Buy can’t stock Chromebooks fast enough. While the company doesn’t release sales data, social network chatter reveals bounty hard to get. So can we just blame Chromebook for Best Buy’s sale?

I write this post on the Sammy Chromebook, by the way. In May, I moved from the then top-of-the-line MacBook Air and haven’t looked back. I don’t think Chrome OS is for everyone, or even most people, but those who embrace the cloud will be surprised.

Rarely a day goes by where I don’t see someone boast about buying Chromebook online. Ron Minnich posts today on Google+: “Ah, this Samsung ARM Chromebook is just so nice. I still can’t believe these things only sell for $249”.

Mike Beeson: “My personal Chromebook (Samsung $250 model) came today. I guess I can take my others back to work now”.

Oh this has got to hurt. “My wife just found out the hard way that her Samsung Chromebook does not work well when you accidentally dump your cup of coffee on it”, Padric Toman tells. “I felt bad for her, so I gave her my Chromebook. We are drying out the coffee soaked Chromebook right now. Maybe a miracle will happen”. You’re a good husband, Padric. “Maybe Google will be sympathetic and send us a new one”. Hey, Chromebook team, show him some compassion.

Even if he ends up buying a new one, $249 is a lot more manageable than $999 for cheapest-cost MacBook Air (at normal price). Value has different measures.

So do run down to Best Buy to buy MacBook Air cheap, but look at Chromebook while there. You just might save 550 bucks.

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox

Google is exploring the idea of making a smart watch according to a Business Insider source. The unnamed source suggests that Google is researching how to market such a device and BI notes certain relevant patents Google has that would support such a product. Even with the report, which I’d consider a rumor at this point, now’s the time for a Google smart watch for a number of reasons I can think of. The biggest one? Google already has a smart watch on the market.

Hello Moto

I’m talking about the Motorola MotoActv, the part smart watch, part exercise tracker that I bought nearly a year ago. Although Google has kept Motorola as a separate business division since purchasing the company in 2011, for all intents and purposes, whatever Motorola makes is a Google product. The watch also runs a highly customized version of Android. In fact, its been one of the most stable Android devices I’ve ever used.

I originally bought the watch to track my running activities because it’s ideal for that. Inside the watch are various sensors and radios including: Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and accelerometer. Flash storage of 8 or 16 GB adds room for music tracks which can be listened to through wired or wireless headphones. The software also supports my golf habit, tracking my scores, shots and providing detailed distance to the pin or to various golf hazards.

Later, I began wearing the watch every day when Motorola added support for the companion Android app for handsets built by other manufacturers. All of a sudden, my exercise tracker started notifying me of incoming messages, mail, tweets and upcoming calendar events. And it works well. Google could easily advance the device, features and software because it has a solid product to start with.

More data required, please

The second reason I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Google smart watch? The company really isn’t yet part of the wearable device market that’s gathering steam. Yes, Google’s Project Glass is entry here, but at $1,500 for a developer edition, it’s not a consumer device yet. It will take time before these high-tech glasses appear on retail shelves, if they ever do. And even if they do, they’re not likely to be part of the “quantified self” concept; a watch like the MotoActv is because it captures personal data such as steps taken, calories burned and more.

That reason alone is a good one for Google to design such a device. The company thrives on gathering and aggregating the world’s data but it really doesn’t have a good hook into health data. Even if Google could sell a smart watch to just 10 percent of Android devices owners, it would have access to quantified self data of over 50 million individuals in year, based on the 1.5 million Android devices that are activated every day. That’s some big data.

Since Google could easily build off of the existing MotoActv watch, I don’t think it would take too much time or effort to improve the device quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we see a Google smart watch at this year’s Google I/O event, in fact. Time will tell, of course.

As previously reported, Facebook has been blocking some apps from accessing data – namely the newly launched Wonder from Yandex and Twitter’s new Vine video app, which Facebook has reportedly kept from utilizing the Find Friends API.

Facebook issued a response to concerns about its Platform today in a post on its Developers Blog. Facebook’s Justin Osofsky writes:

For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you’re doing. Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they’re doing in your apps with people on Facebook. This is how our platform has been used by the most popular categories of apps, such as games, music, fitness, news and general lifestyle apps.

For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today (see I.10).

We are committed to helping you build great apps with Facebook, and will continue to invest in products that help you succeed while creating a healthy ecosystem.

So, don’t do things that Facebook already does, or piggyback off Facebook’s data in a way that does little to help Facebook users is pretty much the message they’re sending. In a statement to TechCrunch, Yandex already explained why it felt it wasn’t violating Facebook’s policies, before Facebook even pulled the data, but clearly that didn’t help. The companies, according to that publication, are talking about how to proceed.

A predictive model from machine learning service BigML claims it can help predict whether a Kickstarter campaign will be successful. The model analyzed nearly 17,000 campaigns and seems to show that target goals and the number of backers matter a lot. It’s hard to be certain how accurate the model is, but it is fun to play with.

Before digging into the Kickstarter data, though, a refresher on how BigML works is helpful. It’s a machine-learning service that discovers patterns within large datasets and then generates predictive models based on the data. The models are displayed as decision trees that place the factors most highly correlated with the target outcome up top and work their way down to less-predictive factors.

There’s also a feature that lets users predict the outcome of any given situation (a Kickstarter campaign, in this instance) by entering specific data points and receive a prediction on its outcome. Alternatively, BigML can ask users a series of questions based on the correlations it discovered — almost like a game of 21 questions — and the system will answer once it has enough info to make a prediction.

The Kickstarter predictions (available to play around with here) can get pretty complicated but there are some strong indicators of success. The most-important is the number of backers: the model is 80.5 percent confident that campaigns with more than 34 backers will succeed, while it’s 65 percent confident those with less than 34 backers will fail.

Up next is target goal, with smaller amounts resulting in a higher likelihood of success. The model is 92.6 percent confident that campaigns with more than 34 backers and aiming for less than $8,815.85 will succeed, while the confidence level is only 62 percent for those aiming for more. And if a successful campaign is all that matters, the target goal really should be less than $4,844.48 (a a confidence score of 96.3 percent versus 86 percent for higher goals).

However, few — if any — things are actually deal-breakers, according to the BigML model. For every decision a Kickstarter entrepreneurs makes about his or her campaign, or however many backers a campaign attracts, there’s still a branch of factors that can suggest success or failure. The amount of money each backer pledges can make big difference, obviously, and in some cases not choosing categories such as food, publishing or gaming can make a difference.

The likelihood that my hypothetical campaign with 222 backers, a goal of $10,000 and an average of $25 per backer will succeed: High. The likelihood that my hypothetical campaign with 100 backers, a $20,000 goal, an average of $40 per backer and and 6,697 Facebook followers will succeed: Low.

Kickstarter, for what it’s worth, gives a less-nuanced prediction of success that doesn’t always jive with the model’s predictions: “Of the projects that have reached 20% of their funding goal, 82% were successfully funded. Of the projects that have reached 60% of their funding goal, 98% were successfully funded.”

Perhaps this apparent discrepancy has something to do with the limited dataset that the model (created by BigML’s Justin Donaldson using data compiled by Dan Misener at Kickback Machine) uses. It only takes into account less than 17,000 campaigns that had a 52 percent success rate, whereas Kickstarter has handled more than 84,000 campaigns with a 43.6 percent success rate. Of the 35,282 that have been successful as of 11:22 a.m. PT on Jan. 25, approximately 80 percent raised between less than $9,999.

Even if it’s not entirely accurate, the BigML model is a lot of fun to play around with. And I think the service itself is indicative of a forthcoming wave of consumer-friendly web services that let anyone with some interesting data try to play data scientist. We’ll be talking a lot about the cutting edge of machine learning and big data at our Structure: Data conference (March 20-21 in New York), but there’s also a need to bring these concepts down to the masses (or at least non-data-scientists). And while machine learning might be a difficult thing to make foolproof, just being able to start working with it for free is pretty powerful.

Google has posted a recent Google+ Hangout to its Business YouTube channel, where a few members from the AdWords team talk about how ad positioning is determined, and how advertisers can optimize their bids and quality scores. It goes into factors that determine ad rank, bidding strategies and estimates, how quality score is calculated, and optimizing to achieve certain positions.

They’ll be doing another hangout on February 7.