The dense cabling inside DC11, the new Equinix data center in Ashburn, Virginia, which opened this week. (Photo: Equinix)
For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week.
Open Compute Will Begin Building Network Switches – In a move that will likely accelerate the shakeup in the networking sector, the Open Compute Project said this week that it will expand its “open source hardware” initiative to include network switches. The announcement is the largest step yet in extending the open source hardware movement to networking, a sector which has been dominated by a handful of large vendors offering routers and switches managed by proprietary software.
Twitter Plans Major Data Center Expansion – Twitter has begun a major expansion of its data center infrastructure, adding space on both coasts in anticipation of huge growth for the microblogging service. Industry sources say Twitter is leasing a huge chunk of additional space in Sacramento, where it will expand its presence at the RagingWire data center campus.
Equinix Unveils New ‘Crown Jewel’ for Ashburn Campus – Equinix keeps growing in northern Virginia, expanding the largest Internet exchange in North America with the largest facility yet on an already immense campus. The new DC11 facility will support growing network traffic in Ashburn, which shows no signs of slowing as the integral East Coast network hub.
Iron Mountain is Taking the Data Center Underground – After several years of quietly developing space in its massive underground facility in Pennsylvania, Iron Mountain is entering the data center business in a bigger way. The company has announced plans to build and lease data centers, offering both colocation services and wholesale suites to enterprise and government customers.
Telx CEO Eric Shepcaro Passes Away – Eric Shepcaro, the Chief Executive Officer of Telx, passed away Saturday after an illness. Shepcaro led the company through a period of tremendous growth, during which it became a national provider of interconnection and colocation services, with operations in major Internet gateways in markets around the U.S.
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.
I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies in the world.
There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please read/watch our entire interview then reevaluate. He had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do anything (anything was help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project.” 7-days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? As an intern Apple awarded him a cash bonus, what VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder Tony Fadell said was something, “He had never done before.”
Apple
After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt said that this, ”Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five years.”
In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “Purple.” At the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It wasn’t good enough so they started again. That second version was the one Steve Jobs would unveil on stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that, 25-members of the team went to China hand-building from scratch each of the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into day shift and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day.
The Founding of Nest
After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on Nano, Shuffle, and parts of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV projects. By late 2009 he had hired 40-people and managed teams building these products, all in his mid-late twenties. That fall he had a two hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to buy a smart home, they’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.”
Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder relationship, stemming back from his early internship days at Apple. “We think very much alike, to the point where we complete each other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without him.”
But was this the idea to risk a promising future at Apple on? Matt had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in just a few short years. “The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go start. We could save 10% of energy, solve an epic problem, no innovation, multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?”
Matt quit his job in Spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and say “Hey will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy. Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt claims no one got divorced over the extreme conditions adding that “all the wives are happy now.”
Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that (Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date – I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.”
So here is Nest, in stealth, building an incredibly difficult hardware/software product, with limited funding, but still managing to assemble a killer engineering team, in the midst of a talent war with Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Twitter exploding all around. “It was a mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience. Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I think I was the youngest.”
A year after raising a Series A from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed, Shasta, and others, they shipped their first product. This spring Nest was widely rumored to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000 thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 is now +200 employees, and selling products in Lowe’s, Apple Stores, Best Buy, and about half their inventory is sold online. The company is not without controversy, having been sued by Honeywell for patient infringement, and as one friend in the home automation industry recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently acquired venture backed energy dashboard MyEnergy.
Building HARD-ware
Nest launched their first product a year after raising Series A, 18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent $10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own, is that there’s no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities hat, janitor hat, doesn’t matter, you have do it.”
Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in these complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.”
When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described working a holiday a few years previously. ”That’s what it takes,” he casually said. And if you really want to change the world I couldn’t agree more.
President Obama discusses the housing market, and urges Congress to confirm Mel Watt to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency and take action to give every responsible homeowner the chance to refinance and save money on their mortgage.
Here’s a little noodle-scratcher for you fellow mobile hardware nerds to ponder this evening. This little Motorola Mobility beauty, brandishing the model number XT1058, recently passed through the FCC and left the customary paper trail in its wake.
Alright, maybe calling it a beauty is a bit of a stretch, but here’s the kicker: the rudimentary sketch included with the listing looks bears a striking resemblance to a slew of earlier leaked images that purportedly showed off Motorola’s secretive X Phone.
Consider the alignment of those three circular elements on the back — those bits match up rather nicely with the camera, LED flash, and Motorola logo/button as seen in images of an unreleased smarpthone originally circulated by the team at Tinhte.vn. Even the seemingly curved section along the top edge where the device’s headphone jack lives and the placement of what appears to be the sleep/wake button are spot on when compared to those leaked photos.
Having a hard time visualizing all that? Here’s a side by side view to give you a sense of the similarities:
Of course, this doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out what the device is actually capable of — all the FCC’s listing reveals is that this thing sports radios for Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac and NFC. It could be that this is the first regulatory appearance of the so-called XFON, a device that noted gadget leaker @EvLeaks posted photos of earlier this month. After all, the XT1058 has been found to support AT&T’s particular LTE bands, and the XFON’s IMEI label clearly calls it out as an AT&T device.
At this point no one (save for the lucky chump who snapped those photos in the first place) can definitively say whether or not the XFON and this curious AT&T device are the same, but it’s distinctly possible. There are a few cosmetic similarities between the two — namely the Motorola logo stamped on the top left corner, the shape of the speaker grille, and the placement of the indicator LED and the front-facing camera. Don’t pay too much attention to the chunky chassis though, as it’s not uncommon for non-final hardware to undergo testing clad in patently ugly shells. You may recall that BlackBerry’s Dev Alpha and Beta devices lived in similarly unflattering boxes before the innards were officially unveiled at a series of simultaneous launch events back in January.
For all of the things that Google is expected to show off next week at its annual I/O developer conference (the refreshed Nexus 7, a unified chat system, redesigned Google Maps, etc.), a brand new smartphone wasn’t expected to be one of them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the X Phone (or XFON, whatever) won’t make an appearance in San Francisco, but there has been a distinct lack of chatter that leads me to think that such a smartphone isn’t on the agenda. After all, Google’s been downright lousy at keeping things under wraps lately.
As a refresher, Paranoid Android has been working on a way to implement Facebook Messenger’s “chat head” feature into all apps. Early results show that they have done a wonderful job. With their Halo feature, clicking a notification bubble (“chat head”) opens an overlaying applet to tend to the notification without having to close the app that you were using. It’s simply brilliant, and makes notifications and multitasking a breeze.
This new video shows multiple notifications working very smoothly, a feature that did not work the last time we saw Halo. To switch between notifications, all you have to do is hold down the notification bubble that appears on the screen and swipe until the notification you want to use is highlighted.
This is incredibly cool, and I can’t wait to try it myself.
Although Microsoft recently touted having sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses this week, careful observers noted that selling all those licenses doesn’t mean vendors have actually sold 100 million Windows 8 devices over the past half-year. ComputerWorld this week talked with Patrick Moorhead, a principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, who estimates that the actual number of Windows 8 devices being used out in the wild is closer to 59 million, since the most recent data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 is being used on around 4.2% of all Windows PCs.
With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!
If you have a game and would like to port over to PlayStation Mobile devices, but can’t afford the $99 license fee Sony usually charges developers, then I have some good news for you. For a limited time this summer, Sony has decided to open its Mobile Development program up to all new developers, and waive the license fee.
This could turn out to be a fantastic opportunity for both Sony and developers. If this plan works Sony could see an upswing in development while developers add another platform to launch their games on. This isn’t only limited to Android certified devices either, it also includes development for the PS Vita as well. Let’s hope this plan works out better than expected and Sony makes it a permanent deal.
Check out the video for the PlayStation Mobile Development Program after the break. I feel like the guy in it myself, how many of you can relate?
Another image of LG’s mysterious new device has made its way onto the internet today. This one comes courtesy of the infamous @evleaks twitter account and shows the device’s almost non-existent bezel. While nothing can be for certain, this is almost definitely the same device we got a glimpse of last week. It is probably safe to assume this is LG’s follow up to the Optimus G, although some more excitable folks believe it to be the next Nexus device.
Regardless of what it is, it is shaping up to be a gorgeous device with a very minimal design. We’ll be sure to keep you posted as we learn more, and don’t forget to hit the break for last week’s image in case you missed it.
Twitter is leasing more data center space at RagingWire’s 500,000-square-foot campus in Sacramento, Data Center Knowledge reported Friday, attributing its report to “industry sources.” There’s no square-footage figure available, but power use for the expansion is pegged at “more than 20 megawatts.” And so the mystery about Twitter’s infrastructure continues.
The reported expansion comes on top of Twitter’s existing infrastructure footprint, which apparently includes space at the Sacramento facility and might also include space at the data center custom-built for Twitter, which the company moved into in 2011. At that time, former Twitter vice president of engineering Michael Abbott wrote that the social network had arrived at its “final nesting ground.” But it seems that nesting ground was not big enough.
Like Facebook, Twitter is not a site for flat traffic. The infrastructure needs to accommodate traffic spikes — think of how people clung to Twitter during Hurricane Sandy — and having more space can keep Twitter ahead in those types of situations.
Keeping latency low as monthly active user count increases — it was at more than 200 million in December, up from 100 million in September 2011 — is likely a high priority, too.
More data center space also makes for better backup capability. Remember when Sandy proved the importance of being ready for disasters with flooding and power outages on the East Coast? A bigger footprint for Twitter translates into lower likelihood of a fail whale.
Twitter’s infrastructure expansion comes following news of other webscale players bumping up their respective footprints. Facebook reportedly will build a new data center in Altoona, Iowa, with the first phase measuring 476,000 square feet and costing $300 million. Also in Iowa, Google said it would expand its data center in the city of Council Bluffs, and Data Center Knowledge reported last month that LinkedIn is expanding its data center space, too.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
The company is worthy of merit for talking about its features in public and open-sourcing many of them, although it has been cagey about disclosing information about its infrastructure and the causes of service disruptions. We know very little about Twitter’s infrastructure, in contrast to Facebook and Google’s installations. In the past it was unclear where the custom-built data center was, as the plan in 2010 was for the Salt Lake City area, but then it was reported that Twitter was actually moving servers to Sacramento. Twitter’s status in Atlanta is another unsolved mystery.
Sharp will reportedly be laying off 5,000 employees as part of a three-year recovery plan to turn the company around. According to The Asahi Shimbun, the number of directors and advisory positions will be cut in half, and the number of employees at Sharp’s main office in Osaka, Japan will be reduced by 50%. Additional layoffs are also expected in China and Malaysia. In an effort to increase profits, the company will be revising its focus to producing smartphone displays, large-sized HDTV sets and 4K TVs. Sharp will reportedly announce its three-year recovery plan next Tuesday.
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg only launched his immigration reform political action group, Fwd.us, last month, but it’s already becoming controversial. On Friday Reuters and AllThingsD reported that the group, which boasted membership by some of Silicon Valley’s most recognizable entrepreneurs and investors, is losing two big names: entrepreneurs Elon Musk and David Sacks.
Reuters said that Musk departed because the group funded ads for senators vocalizing support for the oil pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, and oil drilling in Alaska. Think Progress reported last month that Fwd.us has spent a considerable amount of money on these anti-environmental ads. Various environmental groups have been protesting the ad funding.
Musk is the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors, and the chairman of solar installer SolarCity. Sacks is the founder of Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft last year. Other members of Fwd.us include Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, eBay’s (e ebay) John Donahoe, Dropbox’s Drew Houston and many others including Facebook alumni.
If Mark and others really cared deeply about immigration reform on a holistic level then the conversation would involve a whole lot of other people — members of non-engineering and non-technology corps. So, no, I don’t buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important. I know, because I am one. Perhaps FWD.us and Zuckerberg should start actually learning about the whole and real problem: a society disrupted in connected age.
Two of Dell’s largest shareholders have made a new takeover bid for the struggling computer company that will challenge a previous offer from Silverlake and Michael Dell. Activist investor Carl Ichan and Southeastern Asset Management on Friday announced a new plan that would give current Dell shareholders the option keep their stock and receive either $12 per share in cash or $12 in additional shares valued at $1.65 per share. The offer counters a $24.4 billion bid led by Dell founder Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners to take the company private. Icahn and Southeastern hold a combined 13% stake in the company, compared to the 16% controlled by Dell and Silver Lake.
On Tuesday night, PBS and TED joined forces to air TED Talks Education, a one-hour televised special, featuring passionate teachers, students and researchers from the field who shared their ideas about transforming the US education system. We were so inspired by these spirited speakers that we asked them to curate playlists of their favorite TED Talks for you to enjoy.
For those of you longing to bring the Google Now wallpapers to any homescreen, developer Bongoman has created a live wallpaper app that allows you to do just that. While it is technically a live wallpaper, the only time it changes is when switching from day to night, which means virtually no battery drain. The app allows you to flip through Google Now-esque cards and then simply tap to apply the desired wallpaper. All the locations included in Google Now are here and there’s even a separate app for those of you with an HD display. Both versions of Google Now Wallpapers are available from the Play Store free of charge. Hit the break for a slideshow and Play Store links.
But developing apps that will appeal to kids is a real challenge. A variety of enterprenuers and developers who work with technology intended for kids and parents spoke at the 500 Startups Mamabear conference in Mountain View Friday, where they talked about the challenges but potential benefits of building for the younger set.
Complying with privacy guidelines
One of the biggest hurdles for app developers — which should comfort parents concerned about the privacy of their kids — is complying with COPPA, the regulations from the FTC that limit the data that developers can collect from kids like names or photos, and which require developers to attain permission from parents before they acquire any data.
Building a viral social app while complying with COPPA can be tricky, and most notably, COPPA got Path into trouble when an FTC investigation found underage users on the app, which led to a $800,000 fine for the company and 3,000 accounts getting purged from the system.
Shai Samet, a lawyer and privacy consultant who runs the startup kidSAFE Seal Program, talked about how developers can work with the COPPA guidelines to create apps for kids, reminding them that all sorts of information, from real names to photos to videos to geolocation, is all information you need parental consent to collect. You also can’t include social plug-ins for apps like Facebook, or include behavior tracking ads like Google ads, both of which are common monetization strategies, if they’re targeted at kids.
“There’s really three key strategies to avoid COPPA regulations in some scenarios and be able to scale user growth,” he said. Samet pointed to three different tactics, which include anonymizing data from kids (so you’re not collecting real names), limiting sign-ups to kids over age 13 (if acquiring younger users isn’t a requirement for success), and picking the easiest form of acquiring parental consent (avoiding credit card numbers or social security numbers if possible and opting for email instead.) Shamet’s full presentation can be found online here.
App-testing with more distracted users
Plenty of app developers will host focus groups for their target audience to see how people respond to products and how they interact with devices. But when it comes to app-testing with kids, (especially those who aren’t verbal yet), it can be a lot harder to get feedback.
“Adults have no problem telling you what they think,” she said. “They’ll walk you through and say, ‘Here’s why I’m tapping on this.’” But for kids, you have to do a lot more observation to see how they interact with a game, since they might not tell you why they don’t like something. Plus, they’re extremely prone to distractions, and keeping them focused on the task is tricky too.
But if your focus group works well? Remembering to contact all of those people when your product ships to tell them about it can give you an automatic user base to start with.
Figuring out the content that works
It sounds obvious, but the people designing the apps for kids aren’t kids themselves, so figuring out the content that appeals to them can be somewhat of a learning process.
Mark Schlichting, CEO of NoodleWorks Interactive, said that in creating content for kids, age matters. For instance, an app designed for a toddler who doesn’t yet associate letters with words will have a totally different impact when the game is played by an eight-year old. Some age groups might find some material terrifying that wouldn’t bother a slightly older age group — understanding your audience here is key.
Plus, kids often find new uses for an app that the developer didn’t even intend. Schlichting said they found that kids were tapping a particular part of the app in a way that caused it to crash. A developer asked him if they should fix the app and make it un-tappable, but instead he said it’s important to capitalize on how kids are using it.
“I realized, this is an inherent play pattern that we didn’t know was in here,” he said. What are the things kids like in an app? Everything in an app should be highly tappable, responsive, and interruptive, he said. ”Don’t trick ‘em.”
A new report suggests that Google will unveil an update to its forgotten Wallet service later this month. According to AllThingsD, Google was originally planning to introduce a physical credit card at its annual I/O developers event, however it has since decided against it. The company will now reportedly announce new rewards, offers and loyalty points for Wallet users available from a wider selection of merchants to help the service better compete with Apple’s Passbook. Google’s vision of creating a mobile wallet has been hampered by carriers, which have favored an alternative mobile payment system known as ISIS. The lack of NFC-equipped devices and the limited number of compatible merchant sales terminals have also hurt Google’s efforts. A physical card would have allowed Google to bring its Wallet service to the masses, however CEO Larry Page was said to be displeased with a recent demo and decided to scrap the project.
HTC, always coming up with clever ways to market their product, released two new commercials for the HTC One today. Unlike previous commercials, these put the BlinkFeed feature of HTC’s newest flagship device front and center. For those who don’t know, BlinkFeed (introduced in Sense 5) is integrated into the One’s homescreen and combines various social media services and news sites into one customizable, image-centric feed. The idea is that by utilizing BlinkFeed, users don’t have to “dig like gophers” to find status updates and news articles. Hit the break both commercials.
The lack of applications on the Windows Phone platform is a serious problem Microsoft must fix if it wants to be a viable alternative to Android and the iPhone. The company on Friday revealed that the Windows Phone Store is now home to 145,000 apps and games, significantly less than Google and Apple’s offerings, and only slightly more than BlackBerry. It appears that developer interest for Microsoft’s mobile platform has slowed as well. Last June, the Windows Phone Store saw tremendous growth, doubling the number of apps in a six-month period to total 100,000. In the past 11 months, however, less than 45,000 new applications were added to the marketplace.
