Asking for a second opinion is always a good idea when scanning suspicious files. With more than 40 antivirus engines available, Google’s VirusTotal online service makes for a great choice for checking a file for viruses.
Submitting an item for verification can be done easily either through the online interface or via their own desktop c… (read more)
Generic drugs can be inexpensive and effective alternatives to their branded counterparts. But according to this devastating Fortune investigation, they can also be useless on a good day and deadly on a bad one — that is, if they were manufactured by Ranbaxy, an Indian drug maker. In this epic piece, Katherine Eban uncovers downright fraud in how generics were tested (or, rather, weren’t) and exposes a corporate culture so steeped in greed and dysfunction that fistfights were known to break out during executive meetings. Although concerned employees tried to alert the FDA and other regulatory agencies to the company’s behavior, progress in stopping the distribution of potentially dangerous medications crawled along at a turtle’s pace. Sure, the company was eventually both punished and sold (it’s now one of the fastest-growing pharmaceutical businesses in the U.S.). But when FDA inspectors were asked whether they would be comfortable taking a Ranbaxy-made drug, such as a generic cholesterol medication, “like eight out of eight” said no.
OK, you know I have to say it: Of course this scandal boils down to a massive management problem. We could argue for days about the political implications of the recent Inspector General’s report, which investigates whether an arm of the I.R.S. was inappropriately targeting groups with “Tea Party” in their names, delaying their paperwork for tax-exempt status in the process. And there’s still a lot that we don’t yet know. But amidst this chaos is a story about who was — and wasn’t — making decisions and communicating them in the Cincinnati field office. The gist is that decisions about applications were being made in a vacuum that lacked leadership, and movement on the applications was further delayed by massive miscommunication between units. And while many of the recommendations by the IG’s office could prove useful, some merely encourage additional training. Could more training really help fix the dynamics of an office that former employees claim was “overworked, understaffed, and lacked a layer of experienced middle managers”? The head of the tax-exempt division is likely technically correct when she blamed lower-level workers, but the absence of leaders all around may, in fact, be the more important story.
The conventional wisdom is that you can spot a liar by watching body language and eye movements, but researchers have discovered that liars also give themselves away through the language they use. Liars swear more, on average, probably because the cognitive energy required for telling an untruth makes it harder for them to rein in profanities, say Lyn M. Van Swol of the University of Wisconsin, Deepak Malhotra of Harvard Business School, and Wisconsin doctoral candidate Michael T. Braun. Liars also tend to favor more-complex sentences and third-person pronouns (“they,” “it,” “one”), maybe as a way of distancing themselves from the icky lie. And they’re wordy, unless of course they’re lying by omission, in which case they can be quite tight-lipped. —Andy O’Connell
Should You Get Paid for Instagramming?
This in-depth interview with computer scientist turned digital critic Jaron Lanier, who has a new book out, is worth reading in its entirety. One of his main arguments is that people should receive micropayments in exchange for data they provide via the likes of Facebook, and he uses two photography companies — Kodak and Instagram — to explain why this is necessary in our new economy. In the predigital era, 140,000 Kodak employees physically manufactured cameras in exchange for wages and benefits and thus earned the protection of a social safety net. With Instagram, just as much, if not more, effort goes into supporting the business — millions of people contribute their photos and data — but only 13 people are actually employed by Instagram and receive its concrete benefits. In other words, there’s as much human activity involved in taking Instagram photos, but with a tiny fraction of economic activity occurring among an even tinier fraction of people. “We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant, people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment,” says Lanier. “And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?” (In other news, Evgeny Morozov disagrees.)
In an issue devoted to innovation, The New Yorker explores what’s probably going to be the biggest disrupter of higher education since the invention of the community college: online courses. Nathan Heller finds professors and grad students at elite universities taking a warily optimistic view of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Sure, the experience of sitting through an online course isn’t the same as being on a leafy campus amid brilliant, engaged students, but the vast majority of college enrollees miss out on the ivied experience anyway, slogging through courses taught by bored professors on campuses where students are there to get a diploma and get out. MOOCs would be an improvement over that. In these early days it’s unclear how companies such as Coursera and Udacity, which package courses and offer them to students and other schools, are going to make a profit. The thinking is that somehow they’ll find a way to make money by doing something that traditional universities haven’t been able to do for a century or more: Increase the productivity of professors. —Andy O’Connell
The Huggers Among Us: A Guide to Greetings (The Atlantic Wire)
Design Ascends to the Corporate Heights (Wired)
How to Dress for Success at the Defense Intelligence Agency (U.S. News and World Report)
Millions of people access Twitter every month, and the sheer volume of tweets flowing through the company’s platform is remarkable. Different companies have tried to harness the value of those tweets and derive information from the 140 character blips. But it would seem that making suggestions to users about the best book to read or movie to watch based on tweets isn’t an easy challenge.
Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers.
“It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.”
Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow.
“The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.”
I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests.
Of course, there are the obvious potential pitfalls of building a product around someone else’s platform, although Haridas said they support Facebook and are adding other platforms. But there’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media. As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching.
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Online advertisers have been nervous the past few weeks as Mozilla moved forward with its plans to block third-party cookies by default in its Firefox browser. Some advertiser groups have even claimed that Mozilla’s policy will “undermine American small businesses.” It seems that Mozilla listened as it has decided to postpone the implementation of its policy.
In a blog post from Thursday, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich said that Mozilla has delayed the implementation of its new anti-cookie patch in Firefox so that it can test for false positives and false negatives. As you may know, the new anti-cookie policy is meant to block third party cookies from sites you haven’t visited while leaving cookies from previously visited sites intact. Eich says that fales positives and false negatives may get in the way of how this policy is meant to work:
False positives. For example, say you visit a site named foo.com, which embeds cookie-setting content from a site named foocdn.com. With the patch, Firefox sets cookies from foo.com because you visited it, yet blocks cookies from foocdn.com because you never visited foocdn.com directly, even though there is actually just one company behind both sites.
False negatives. Meanwhile, in the other direction, just because you visit a site once does not mean you are ok with it tracking you all over the Internet on unrelated sites, forever more. Suppose you click on an ad by accident, for example. Or a site you trust directly starts setting third-party cookies you do not want.
The anti-cookie patch will be turned off by default in the Firefox 22 beta will Mozilla works on these issues. Users on the beta will be able to turn on the patch, however, and mess around with the settings. Mozilla, of course, encourages feedback as it works on it. Those who are using the Aurora release will find that the anti-cookie patch is turned on by default however.
In the end, Eich says that Mozilla’s work on the patch doesn’t represent any change to its previous anti-cookie philosophy:
We have heard important feedback from concerned site owners. We are always committed to user privacy, and remain committed to shipping a version of the patch that is “on” by default. We are mindful that this is an important change; we always knew it would take a little longer than most patches as we put it through its paces.
For those who read this as Mozilla softening our stance on protecting privacy and putting users first, in a word: no. False positives break sites that users intentionally visit. (Fortunately, we haven’t seen too many such problems, but greater testing scale is needed.) False negatives enable tracking where it is not wanted. The patch as-is needs more work.
[h/t: PC World]
Aruba Networks is already building a good deal of the world’s enterprise Wi-Fi networks, pumping wireless signals to malls, conference centers and hotels around the globe. Now it has another use for those networks beyond mere connectivity: it can pinpoint a smartphone’s location within those locations’ maze-like corridors.
Aruba has acquired Meridian Apps, a Portland, Ore.,-based startup that uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate. (The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.) Meridian is one of many companies using Wi-Fi signals to gain its bearings, but Meridian, like its competitor Wifarer, also builds apps for businesses that want location-awareness to be key part of their mobile offering.
Meridian has designed museum guide apps for the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s built department locator apps for Macy’s and incorporated casino floor plans into the Bellagio’s mobile app.
While this kind of kind of technology can be used to bring the usual bevy of location-based services to building interiors, it has the potential of making those services much more granular. For instance, many of the museum apps developed by Meridian and Wifarer are able to determine not just what room you’re in, but what exhibit you’re actually looking at — the app can immediate populate your smartphone screen with details about the wooly mammoth or Van Gogh painting you’re admiring. This kind of hyper-local content is attracting the interest of the big mobile services players, including Apple and Google.
Aruba’s particular interest in Meridian probably has something to do with the fact that its technology is largely infrastructure-dependent. As Meridian CTO Nick Farina explained in his blog, even though smartphones have the ability to sniff out their own locations by measuring Wi-Fi signals, Meridian’s technology relies on access points to make those measurements, thus sparing the phone’s battery and allowing it to work on more restricted devices like the iPhone.
Aruba is the No. 2 enterprise WLAN supplier in the world, supplying networks for every manner of hospital, corporate campus, convention center or mall. You can imagine that many of those customers would be very interested in buying not just a network from Aruba, but also a means to use that network to provide location-aware content and services to their employees and customers.
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Now that Defense Distributed is on the defensive, it’s time to think a bit harder about what 3D printing really means. To that end, Michigan Tech is sponsoring a Printers For Peace contest that is encouraging designers and engineers to make amazing stuff using a 3D printer that can change the world for the better. “Unfortunately, the only thing many people know about 3D printing is that it can be used to make guns,” writes Dr. Joshua Pearce, founder of the project.
“This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing.”
The deadline for the contest is September 1st and they’ll announce winners on the 4th. They are looking for designers to build things that will help, not harm, people.
The winner of best project will win a Type A Machines Series 1 3D Printer and the runner-up gets a simpler RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printing kit.
With all the press attention on 3D printing is the gateway to firearms anarchy, it’s refreshing to see someone take a different path. By backing 3D printing engineers into a corner, DefDist and the government are simply using fear to achieve competing goals. The results will be both needlessly draconian legislation and a variant of the Streisand Effect that will spread these arguably faulty plans far and wide. When the government outlawed DVD decryption code you could buy a T-shirt with the code printed on it. The same will happen in this case, although this code, when run, could take off fingers and give legislators more ammunition for a full crackdown on home 3D printing.
Let us know if you enter and good luck. We need more weapons against poverty and fewer weapons against each other.
We don’t often think about the way we usually operate at work, whether we’re performing an informal five-step process for evaluating a new proposal, or setting priorities for managing our time. But our ability to improve the ways we do things depends on defining and shaping our daily habits of mind and practice — our “standard work.”
Consider the experience of my friend Lynn Kelley, who joined Union Pacific Railroad, the largest railroad network in the United States with 46,000 employees, as vice president of continuous improvement about two years ago. When she arrived, she learned that a large proportion of the workforce would retire over the next decade. So the organization started documenting standard operating procedures to capture employee know-how and wisdom. She told me, “I initially thought standard work would make people into robots. Instead we learned to use standard work to involve workers in documenting and improving their work. Managers think that they should find out what the best practice is and then roll it out. But we decided if we did that, we’d pay for it in worker engagement. Instead, we look for work groups that are willing to be involved in developing their own standard work, and implement there first.”
In the discussion that followed my post on balancing compliance and autonomy, I learned that there is great richness and breadth in the reasoning behind how organizations have defined standard ways of doing things. But it struck me that the reasons broke down into three broad categories: (1) to ensure people comply with “must do” procedures (e.g., safety checklists), to achieve consistency, avoid safety or regulatory problems, or handle emergencies; (2) to make people aware of “should do” practices (a routine that has been determined to be the best way to do things), to achieve adaptability, flexibility, and even innovation; and (3) to let people know where they have discretion in what they “may do” (e.g., give up to $50 to customers who have been treated badly), to foster creativity, innovation, flexibility to meet customer needs in real-time, and worker job satisfaction.
“Must Do” Procedures. Avoidable failures continue to plague us in almost every realm of organizational activity. In his book, The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, makes the case for the simple checklist as a way to avoid failures and manage complexity, especially when human lives are at stake. Airplane pilots developed the checklists they use for takeoffs and landings to make sure that planes don’t fall out of the sky due to avoidable mistakes. Gawande tells of dramatic reductions in infections when putting a “central line” in patients by checking off the steps, such as washing hands and cleaning the patient’s skin with antiseptic. Checklists help with memory recall and clearly set out the minimum necessary steps in a process. As Gawande says, “Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided — and even enhanced — by procedure.” “Must do” procedures also require permission for deviation.
“Should Do” Practices. How can we do the work of the organization, execute its strategy and fulfill its mission, better. The disciplines for how workers should do their work best are well defined by certain process improvement methods I’ve discussed previously, some well-known and others less so. To distill: when something has been standardized, that standard becomes the foundation for experiments to improve the work. Workers identify problems in delivering what customers want, develop a hypothesis about how work can be improved to deliver the required quality level, change one variable at a time, and observe whether it makes the work better. Adhering to the standard ensures that improvements will be sustained; it also facilitates training. “Should do” practices provide help for workers on what to do in the zone between “must do” procedures and “may do” discretion. And a final key point: to make many small and rapid improvements to the work on a continuous basis, people need to be strongly engaged in generating new ideas and conducting experiments.
“May Do” Discretion. To build an organization’s capabilities, and to increase people’s overall engagement and motivation, leaders should give team members every opportunity to take initiative and be creative. Your people want autonomy to master their work and fulfill the organization’s purpose. Therefore, an organization should be explicit about where it encourages initiative. One obvious area, as described above, is to ask people to look for ways to improve their work. Another example is in handling customer dissatisfaction incidents. For example at Ritz Carlton employees can spend up to a certain dollar limit to solve a guest’s issue. Or at Starbucks, employees follow an approach that encourages them to be flexible in their customer interactions. As Kelley told me, “When customers need service in real time, workers who are empowered to be flexible within standards can better meet those needs…because you can’t anticipate each one — or write a script in advance! Putting decision-making closest to the people who touch the customer is key.” “May do” discretion helps workers do what they probably should do, not what they must do.
We need to do away with the notion that standards necessarily mean rigidity. Rather, standard work can help people do their jobs consistently and reliably, and improve how they do it. Instead of considering your people as mindless, uniform “workers” (as Frederick Winslow Taylor did in a bygone era) who must be constantly supervised and arm-twisted into doing the correct thing, companies like Union Pacific are helping them do their jobs better using a flexible view of standard operating procedures. The traditional view that efficiency requires bureaucracy and that bureaucracy impedes flexibility should be replaced with a new model: clever application of standard work allows you to have efficiency and flexibility.
Now that Google’s latest experiment has caught the eye of congress and privacy advocates, many Google Glass fans are wary that the devices may be over-regulated before they even appear on the market. The congressional privacy caucus even sent an open letter to Google CEO Larry Page this week, asking for clarification and details on Google’s Glass privacy policies.
While many member of congress will no doubt judge Glass by the provocative headlines it is producing, at least one congresswoman is checking out the technology for herself. U.S. Representative Michelle Bachmann was spotted in the halls of congress this week trying out Google Glass. Though Bachmann is not a member of the congressional privacy caucus, her position in the Tea Party movement could influence conservative Americans’ opinions of the new technology. A photo of the congresswoman wearing the device was tweeted on Wednesday by NBC News Capitol Hill reporter Luke Russert:
Rep. Bachmann tries out Google Glass at House #GOP mtg http://t.co/fe3WE9thc6
Of course, Bachmann’s conservative and religious stances in congress have often made her a laughing stock in social media, and this occasion is no different. Replies to Russert’s picture include some funny and some mean tweets:
@LukeRussert @ZekeJMiller she probably thinks it runs on fairy dust
Only person in the world who looks less crazy wearing em. MT @LukeRussert Bachmann tries out Google Glass @ #GOP mtg http://t.co/PIQzvSRqPP
@LukeRussert @daveweigel I’d like to think Apple arranged this to make google glass look forever LAAAAAME!!
@LukeRussert Your “Bachmann in Glass” will look great alongside my “Cheney on Segway.” http://t.co/Up947bBHWI
Summit Investments said on Friday that it has launched Polar System, which is is designed to gather 50,000 barrels of crude oil per day, in Williams County, North Dakota. Summit Investments (or Summit Midstream Partners, LLC) owns a 69% limited partnership stake in Summit Midstream Partners, LP, which is focused on exploring energy assets in North America. Summit Investments is headquartered in Dallas, TX with offices in Houston, TX, Denver, CO and Atlanta, GA.
PRESS RELEASE
DALLAS, May 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Summit Midstream Partners, LLC (“Summit Investments”), the privately held company that owns and controls the general partner of Summit Midstream Partners, LP (NYSE: SMLP) and owns a 69.1% limited partner interest in SMLP, announced today that it has commenced operations of the Polar Crude Oil and Water Gathering System (the “Polar System”) in the Bakken Shale Play in Williams County, North Dakota. The Polar System is designed to gather 50,000 barrels of crude oil per day and 25,000 barrels of water per day from the Bakken and Three Forks shale formations in North Dakota. The Polar System includes approximately 50 miles of crude oil gathering pipeline and 35 miles of water gathering pipeline. Crude oil gathered on the Polar System is delivered to the COLT Hub Terminal in Epping, North Dakota under long-term, fee-based gathering agreements. Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp. is the anchor customer on the Polar System.
Steve Newby , President and CEO of Summit Investments commented, “The start-up of the Polar System is a key milestone for Summit as it diversifies our service offerings and provides much needed gathering infrastructure in the region. We are excited about the potential of the Polar System given its strategic location in one of the largest and fastest growing crude oil basins in the United States.”
About Summit Midstream Partners, LLC
Summit Midstream Partners, LLC is a growth-oriented midstream energy company focused on owning and operating midstream energy infrastructure assets that are strategically located in the core areas of unconventional resource basins, primarily shale formations, in North America. Through its ownership of (i) Summit Midstream GP, LLC, the general partner of Summit Midstream Partners, LP; (ii) a 69.1% limited partner interest in Summit Midstream Partners, LP; (iii) a 100% ownership of Red Rock Gathering Company, LLC; and (iv) a 100% ownership of Meadowlark Midstream Company, LLC, Summit Investments provides primarily fee-based natural gas gathering, treating, processing, and compression services, as well as crude oil and water gathering services supporting some of the largest oil and gas exploration and production companies in North America in the Piceance Basin in western Colorado, the Fort Worth Basin in north-central Texas, the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah, the Williston Basin in northwestern North Dakota, and the Denver-Julesburg Basin in northeastern Colorado. Summit Investments is headquartered in Dallas, TX with offices in Houston, TX, Denver, CO and Atlanta, GA.
Summit Investments was formed in 2009 by members of management and funds controlled by Energy Capital Partners II, LLC. Together with its affiliates, Energy Capital Partners is a private equity firm with over $7.5 billion in capital commitments that is focused on investing in North America’s energy infrastructure. In August 2011, Energy Capital Partners sold an interest in Summit Investments to GE Energy Financial Services. GE Energy Financial Services invests globally in essential, long-lived and capital-intensive energy assets.
For more information, visit Summit’s website at www.summitmidstream.com, Energy Capital Partners at www.ecpartners.com and GE Energy Financial Services at www.geenergyfinancialservices.com.
SOURCE Summit Midstream Partners, LLC
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Google has just announced that it’s deals platform, Google Offers, is about to get some enhanced visibility inside Google+.
Starting today, with a initial test run of a handful of brands, Google+ users will be able to see, save and share Offers from their stream.
“Millions of people follow brands they love on Google+ to keep tabs on them, get the latest news on products, join in on the conversation or simply to be entertained. Many people also engage with businesses to get great deals and discounts. Starting today, we’re making it easier to discover, save and share offers right from Google+.” says Google’s Dennis Troper.
The small group of brands that are part of this include ZAGAT, Hello Kitty, Art.com, NOOK, and Adafruit Industries. They will now be able to share offers with those who have them in circles. With one click, you’ll be able to save these offers straight from the post in your stream. After that, simply redeem using the Google Offers app of via email confirmation.
Tableau Software has raised $254.2 million after selling 8.2 million shares at $31 each, above its $28 to $30 range, via join bookruners Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Tableau itself is selling 5 million shares while certain stockholders are unloading 3.2 million. New Enterprise Associates and Meritech Capital own stakes in Seattle-based.
PRESS RELEASE
Tableau Software, Inc. (NYSE: DATA) today announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 8,200,000 shares of its Class A common stock at a price to the public of $31.00 per share. A total of 5,000,000 shares are being offered by Tableau Software, and a total of 3,200,000 shares are being offered by certain selling stockholders. The shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2013 under the symbol “DATA”. In addition, the underwriters have been granted a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,230,000 shares of Class A common stock from Tableau Software. Tableau Software will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders.
Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC are acting as lead joint book-running managers for the offering. Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC are acting as book-running managers. UBS Securities LLC and BMO Capital Markets Corp. are acting as co-lead managers, and JMP Securities LLC is acting as co-manager.
A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and was declared effective on May 16, 2013. The offering is being made only by means of a prospectus. A copy of the final prospectus relating to the offering, when available, may be obtained from: Goldman, Sachs & Co., Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, email: [email protected]; or from Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10014, telephone: 1-866-718-1649, email: [email protected].
This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
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It’s 2013, and yet two big questions still dominate the discussion any time a sufficiently large number of cloud computing types gather in the same room: How many players can the market support, and are cloud resources a commodity?
The topic arose at the clouderati-filled Cloud 2020 meetup in Las Vegas last week (where someone suggested we’ll have a cloud duopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google) and it’s back in the public eye again this week with the general availability of Google Compute Engine. I think we might get an idea how the cloud computing market will play out by looking at the fast-food industry.
The analogy goes like this: Fast food restaurants offer their consumers essentially the same things as public clouds offer their customers – convenience, speed, standardization, flexibility and everything else that comes with not having to prepare a meal from scratch or deploy applications on physical gear. And if all anyone wanted was fast, cheap hamburgers, fries and maybe some sort of chicken sandwich, the more than 33,000 McDonald’s across the world would probably do the trick.
However, when I come to any major intersection in a big city (and even in some small towns), I usually see no less than two national fast food chains taking up corner real estate. If I drive a little down the road, I’ll likely see a few more, and possibly some regional chains thrown in, as well.
Not all hamburgers are created equal, it seems.
Why should cloud computing be any different? If all anyone wanted was a virtual server, they’d probably go with the omnipresent Amazon Web Services. But when features, price, security, network connectivity and related services come into play, it becomes easy to see why there’s such an appetite for more options.
Amazon Web Services = McDonald’s and Yum Brands rolled into one: AWS is to the cloud what McDonald’s is to fast food. It was the first, it’s the biggest and it’s the best known. All things being equal, there would be no reason for anyone to go anywhere else for cloud computing because AWS delivers reasonable services at a fair price (sometimes downright cheap), is omnipresent and can pretty much handle whatever scale you throw at it.
Only, if we consider the virtual server the hamburger of public cloud, the object store the French fries and the cloud database a chicken sandwich, AWS starts to look like a lot more than just a McDonald’s. You might look at it more like Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. The Amazon platform is about far more than just machine images and some standard storage and database features. It has myriad services covering everything from configuration to big data, and they’re all designed to integrate tightly with one another — like one of those KFC/Taco Bell combination restaurants that dot the urban landscape.
AWS, like McDonald’s, is the undisputed champion. Source: Wikipedia Commons
Rackspace = Wendy’s: Wendy’s is the No. 2 fast-food franchise in the United States, a title I think Rackspace probably holds in the cloud space (although assessing cloud market share is a little more difficult than assessing fast-food market share). And much like Wendy’s places a premium on the quality of its products, Rackspace places a premium on the quality of its service. CEO Lanham Napier has gone so far as to say it’s “playing a different game” than Amazon.
What he means is that Rackspace doesn’t need to compete with AWS by constantly driving down prices because Rackspace customers value service and will pay for it. Maybe, but the company might take a hint from what’s happening with Wendy’s as it struggles to maintain its No. 2 status against a feisty Burger King that’s largely following the McDonald’s playbook. If market share is important, higher prices aren’t often the best recipe for maintaining it.
The Angry Whopper, like App Engine, probably isn’t for everyone.
Google = Burger King: That cloud version of Burger King nipping at Rackspace’s heels is Google. It already has all the standard fare in servers, storage and databases, but it’s also hipper than the rest (or at least it tries to be), it takes some chances on product design (sometimes to the love-it-or-hate-it extreme) and, like Burger King with the Whopper, what it does well, it does really well. In Google’s case, that’s perform at scale.
If Google keeps adding services and cutting the costs of everything, there’s no reason it can’t become the world’s No. 2 cloud provider — some have already bestowed that honor upon it — and maybe challenge AWS a decade down the road.
Microsoft = Arby’s: Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to market it otherwise, Windows Azure is still largely viewed as a cloud platform for running .NET applications and generally doing all things Windows. Not that that’s a bad thing — a lot of people really like Windows and, by many accounts, Windows Azure is a fine platform. It’s like going to Arby’s: the menu offers a lot of things, but you go for the roast beef.
Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma et al = In-N-Out Burger, Culvers, Five Guys et al: These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract.
Yes, In-N-Out is delicious — and that’s about the entire menu.
VMware = Del Taco: According to my colleage Barb Darrow, VMware’s new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will “be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware.” Del Taco sounds like a Mexican place but also has hamburgers, fries, shakes and even iced coffee. And I don’t know anyone who eats there.
OpenStack = Frozen French fries, or cheeseburger-flavored Doritos: It really depends on who you ask (some would even say it’s like kale). If you’re grilling burgers and cooking fries, you’re essentially trying to recreate the fast-food experience at home. On the bright side, when you’re making the hamburger patties and cooking the fries, you can control how much salt you add and ensure everyone who handles them washes their hands. It might turn out great, but it’s never really the same.
Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m beginning to suspect that OpenStack-based public clouds (of the non-Rackspace( rax) variety) will end up being a lot like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos. In name, they’re like cheeseburgers, but after a few bites you’re left saying, “Hey, Doritos doesn’t make cheeseburgers …”
Everyone else = everyone else: Even after all this, we’re still left a bunch of different cloud providers and a bunch of different fast food chains. You might compare the telcos to Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees in that they’re big and make money, but they’re pretty much non-factors in the grand scheme of things. Then there are your various web hosts and others, which might compare with some local chain restaurants. And different countries will certainly have their own cloud providers just like they have their own takes on fast food.
In the end, though, it’s just hard to see how cloud computing becomes a two-horse race any more than the fast-food industry is a two-horse race. Sure, there are three clear leaders (with No. 1 having a big lead), but there’s plenty of business to go around because aside from some core similarities, no two providers are the same. And as long as more applications are developed and need a cloud to call home, there will be developers and CIOs with very different ideas of what makes a cloud platform great.
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It’s Friday and we’re ready for some humor. So let’s get to our Data Center Knowledge caption contest, with a new cartoon drawn by Diane Alber, our favorite data center cartoonist!
This week we present “Green Lighting.” Diane writes: “I just went to tour an amazing lighting center and they talked about they had a very large focus on green lighting by using LEDs and other light fixtures. So I thought Kip and Gary would take this “green lighting” thing to a new level.” Enter your caption suggestion below. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.
Click to enlarge.
The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.
The winner will receive his or her caption in a signed print by Diane. Also, we must announce the winner of the previous cartoon, Joe, who submitted, “LEED Platinum here we come!” for May Flowers.
For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.
Apple’s CEO is headed to Washington next week to talk taxes. He’s not just going to be defending Apple’s practice of keeping billions of profits offshore, Tim Cook is going to be armed with some suggestions for future policies too. And no, he doesn’t think Apple should get a free pass on bringing its money back home.
Cook told the Washington Post that he has ideas for how to help convince companies like his own to bring back their overseas earnings to the U.S.:
“If you look at it today, to repatriate cash to the U.S., you need to pay 35 percent of that cash. And that is a very high number,” Cook said in an interview Thursday. “We are not proposing that it be zero. I know many of our peers believe that. But I don’t view that. But I think it has to be reasonable.”
Apple is set to pay $7 billion in taxes in the U.S. this year, he told the paper. He also said he believes that Apple is “likely the largest corporate taxpayer in the U.S.”
But the company has — along with a lot of its peers — found creative ways to make sure that number is not any higher. Apple has $145 billion in its coffers, and $100 billion of that is from profits derived from sales overseas. But the company has not brought that money back to the U.S. because of the current corporate tax rate. Even when the company decided to issue a larger dividend for shareholders, Apple elected to borrow money rather than use profits from overseas to fund that, partly because of the tax burden.
This will be Cook’s first testimony before Congress, but not his first trip to Washington in an official capacity. A year ago he visited with House Speaker John Boehner, signaling his interest in engagement with Washington and public policy would be somewhat of a departure from his predecessor’s.
Cook also told the Post Apple believes “in good corporate citizenship.” And he has made some good U.S. corporate citizen moves since becoming CEO. In addition to instituting a charitable-giving matching program for employees, he’s also laid out plans to bring production back to the U.S. of one model of Mac. Cook told Politico that it would be an existing product that will be made here. Not only will it be put together in the U.S., he said some of the parts would be manufactured in Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Kentucky.
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A class of third graders from North Philadelphia recently wrote to Vice President Biden about reducing gun violence. This week, the Vice President sat down to share some of these children's words with you — and an expression that belonged to his mom: "out of the mouths of babes come gems of wisdom." Take a listen.
Visit WhiteHouse.gov/BeingBiden to check out all of the episodes and to sign up to receive email updates when new stories are posted.
Yesterday, Nintendo said that today’s Nintendo Direct would solely focus on games coming out this summer. That was mostly true, but the company did take time to reveal a new partnership with Sega that will either make Sonic fans very happy, or very disappointed.
First up, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announced that the popular Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games franchise will be back in time for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. The game will be the first time the series has debuted on the Wii U with improved graphics and gameplay. The highlight was a curling minigame that takes advantage of the Gamepad.
In even bigger news, Iwata said that Nintendo has entered into a partnership with Sega that will see the next proper Sonic game – Sonic Lost World – released exclusively on Wii U and 3DS.
The final bit of news from Nintendo’s new partnership from Sega revealed that more Sega Game Gear games will be released on the Nintendo 3DS eShop in the near future.
Iwata then turned it over to Nintendo of America where they announced that The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons will be launching on May 30 for the Nintendo 3DS eShop. Each game will cost $5.99, but the price will be reduced to $4.99 each for the first three weeks to ensure that everybody can experience the game connectivity features.
They also announced a number of release dates for other Nintendo 3DS and Wii U games. Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, which features a new world exclusive to the 3DS version, will be out on May 24. Animal Crossing: New Leaf will be out on June 9. The sole Wii U game from Nintendo of America was Game and Wario, which they say will be out on June 23 for only $39.99.
Nintendo of America gave the mic back to Iwata where he announced that New Super Luigi U, the Luigi-centric spin off of last year’s New Super Mario U, will be out on June 20 on the Nintendo eShop. The game will feature multiplayer, but will not have Mario. Instead, the game will include Nabby as a playable character. Players of the original game may remember Nabby as the character that stole items from Mario. As a playable character, Nabby is not affected by power ups, but he is also immune to all enemy attacks. Iwata says that he’s meant for players who find 2D Mario platformers to be too challenging.
As an added bonus for fans, Nintendo will be releasing a separate retail version of New Super Luigi U at retail on August 25. The retail version of the title does not require the original New Super Mario Bros. U to play. The DLC version releasing on June 20 will cost $19.99, and the retail version will cost $29.99.
Platinum Games’ The Wonderful 101 will be out on September 15. There was no price announced, but you can assume that it will be probably go for the full $59.99.
Iwata also dished out some new details on Pikmin 3. The game will feature three new protagonists – Alph, Brittany and Charlie – who are trying to collect food for their dying homeworld. As such, players will have to collect fruits and turn them into juice if they want to keep exploring. There is no time limit this time around though, and players can replay previous days to collect more fruit. Pikmin 3 will be out on August 4.
On a final note, Reggie Fils-Aime announced that Nintendo has partnered with Best Buy to bring the E3 experience to gamers in America and Canada. During the week of E3, select Best Buy locations will have exclusive E3 demos in stores for fans to play.
The next Nintendo Direct is scheduled to take place in June before E3. We’re likely to not hear much on the Nintendo front until then.
If you want to watch the Nintendo Direct yourself, you can do so below:
After being delayed due to a bomb scare, the sentencing phase of Jodi Arias’ trial has begun.
Arias was found guilty last week for the brutal murder of her former boyfriend, Travis Alexander. Alexander’s body was found in a bathtub at his home with a slit throat, nearly 30 stab wounds, and a bullet wound to the head. Now, the jury in Arias’ trial will decide whether she will receive the death penalty for her crime.
According to an Associated Press report, the testimony at today’s hearing has been very emotional. Alexander’s family members told jurors the various ways in which the murder affected their lives, including health problems and nightmares. Some members of the jury were reportedly brought to tears by the family’s testimony.
The sentencing will continue on Monday, with witnesses formerly close to Arias expected to provide testimony. The jury will decide, based on Arias’ crime, her past, and their own feelings about the case, whether Arias is to die or spend the rest of her life in prison. The prosecution is reportedly arguing that the nature of her crime makes the death penalty the appropriate sentence, while Arias’ defense is arguing that she does not deserve to die. Arias stated in an interview shortly after her guilty verdict that she would rather die than serve a life sentence.
During a fireside chat with four Google Research heavyweights — artificial-intelligence guru Peter Norvig, Google Glass guy Thad Starner, MapReduce paper co-author Jeff Dean and distributed computing wizard Alfred Spector — on Thursday, an audience member sucked up the air in the overcrowded room when he asked “where we’ll be 10 years from now.”
Without a doubt, the panel, at Google I/O, was an apt forum for that question. If any company is innovating in a big way, it’s Google, with recent advancements in voice recognition, wearable technology, quantum computing and other realms. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see some of the Google luminaries’ ideas actually come into being. Here’s what they had to say:
“Speech recognition and vision are showing dramatic improvements over the last few years. We just need to scale them up and make them work better. … They’re (mobile devices) going to vanish into much smaller devices that you carry around and aren’t full-size laptops.” — Jeff Dean
“We’re getting more contextualized. The computer is not what you go to to use. It’s something that’s around you all the time and sort of more integrated into your life, rather than a separate thing.” — Peter Norvig
“I would argue that we’re currently living the singularity, where the tool stops and the mind begins will start becoming blurry.” — Thad Starner
So there you have it, folks — the computer as a smaller and more natural extension of the human brain. Now, let’s set the kitchen timer for 10 years and see what actually happens.
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