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I like to think of the private cloud market as existing in two distinct eras — Before OpenStack and Anno OpenStack. It is now 3 A.O. (well, in a few months), and Oracle’s announced acquisition of Nimbula on Wednesday got me thinking of just how much the world has changed since OpenStack officially launched on July 18, 2010.

A report I wrote for GigaOM Pro in June 2010 (subscription req’d), entitled “Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,” seems like a good starting point for a private-cloud startup edition of “where are they now.” Ignoring the public companies on the list for the time being (with the exception of CA), here’s what has happened to the private companies and startups.

1. Abiquo: Abiquo has a new CEO, a tight partnership with NEC around selling to service providers and appears focused on the European market. The company raised about $14 million in 2010, but hasn’t really made a lot of noise stateside since then.
2. Appistry: Appistry made a huge shift in August 2011 and it now positions itself as a platform for running high-performance applications in areas such as life sciences, defense and financial services. Its biggest area of focus is genomics, where it is even developing new methods for analyzing genomes.
3. CA: CA bought a bunch of cloud startups in 2009 and 2010 — Cassatt, 3Tera, Oblicore and Nimsoft among them — but it has been essentially silent since then in terms of real innovation. Maybe these acquisitions are driving big business, but I was expecting a more-visionary strategy in terms of fusing them into a cohesive and forward-looking whole.
4. Cloud.com: Winner!!! Cloud.com had big-name users and workable technology, and it sold itself to Citrix for more than $200 million in 2011. It has since launched an open source competitor to OpenStack called Apache CloudStack and appears to be doing good business.
5. Elastra: Elastra is no more.
6. Enomaly: Enomaly’s products still technically exist, but Virtustream bought the company in 2011 with the primary goal of repurposing its intellectual property in the realm of cloud federation and gaining a toehold in China.
7. Eucalyptus Systems: If you ask CEO Marten Mickos, everything is great with Eucalyptus, and its whopping $55.5 million in venture capital (including a $30 million round in April 2012) and tens of thousands of downloads of its Amazon-compatible cloud softwware are proof. Ask anyone else and they’ll likely tell a different story.
8. GigaSpaces: GigaSpaces appears to be doing well enough, although it was around well before the term “private cloud.” It has always been much more about its in-memory data grid tech and apps that need dynamic scalability, although it does now offer a Platform-as-a-Service product that’s somewhat disconnected from the legacy business.
9. Joyent: Joyent has always been respected for its engineering chops, although rumors sometimes swirl about how much business the company — which has raised an incredible $115 million — is actually bringing in. Still, it continues to improve its public and private cloud offerings and has landed some big-name users.
10. Librato: Librato looks to have abandoned its resource-management product line to focus on measuring stuff — sensors, server use, whatever.  It wears that hat well, and Heroku is among its loyal users.
11. LongJump: In hindsight, LongJump’s business was not actually a great fit for that 2010 report, and its business appears about the same: you build apps in a user-friendly setting and they can run on LongJump’s infrastructure or your own.
12. Morphlabs: Morphlabs is the master of pivots, although it’s still hanging around and pushing out new products. Now an OpenStack-based cloud-software vendor, it released a new service-provider-focused platform called mCloud Osmium in February.
13. Nimbula: Nimbula, as noted above, is now part of Oracle in a move that is widely believed to be an “acquihire” situation, although neither company will comment on the details.
14. Platform Computing: IBM bought Platform Computing in October 2011 and appears to have refocused the company around its HPC roots. Not that that’s a bad thing — Platform was a $72 million company on its own in a niche market, and I’d guess IBM paid a fair price for it.
15. Virtustream: Another winner! Virtustream has been on fire since 2010 (actually buying up Enomaly) and looks to be the darling of the enterprise cloud space. It’s primarily a public cloud provider, but it has a strong private/hybrid cloud business that ties Virtustream back to customers’ data centers.
16. Voxel: Voxel, whose main business was a public cloud offering, got acquired for $30 million by managed hosting provider Internap in January 2012.

OpenStack is what happened to the private cloud market and forced so many acquisitions, pivots and even one closure. Users, investors and everyone, really, were waiting for some promise of cloud interoperability and portability (aka something other than Amazon, VMware or Microsoft) and OpenStack delivered it. Further, for the service provider community — which has arguably bolstered the sales of private cloud software since its inception — OpenStack provided a relatively engineering-free path to public cloud offerings (compared with building their own from scratch, that is) without fear of being at the mercy of a startup that might fold tomorrow and take its core technology with it.

I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet the majority of venture capital going toward “private cloud” in the past two years has gone to OpenStack-based startups. We’ve also seen nearly every large software vendor pin its cloud ambitions to OpenStack to some degree — Cisco, HP, IBM and Red Hat to name a few. Even Rackspace is now in the private cloud game thanks to OpenStack.

For buyers, a large, well-heeled and deep-pocketed community has to be more appealing than a disparate collection of startups all doing their own thing.

L to R: Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus, Chris Kemp of Nebula (an OpenStack startup) and Sameer Dholakia of Citrix at Structure 2012.
(c) Pinar Ozger

Who’s not doing OpenStack (at least in any meaningful way)? VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services — all companies with their own intellectual property, huge user bases and lots of money to back their visions. They all also have strong public cloud connections (some, obviously, stronger than others).

The cloud startups from 2010 that are still arguably thriving today share similar characteristics. They’ve been big on engineering, won major customers early on and raised a lot of money to help them maintain through any tough times. All but Cloud.com, now part of Citrix, have a very prominent public cloud component, too — which appears critical for a truly seamless hybrid environment — but it has staked out its own claim as the anti-OpenStack.

All of the aforementioned companies are/were doing infrastructure as a service primarily, but we’re already seeing a similar thing happen in the platform-as-a-service space thanks to Cloud Foundry. Providers that weren’t part of that community are jumping on board, and it’s just a few established holdovers that look like they’ll be able to push forward without riding Cloud Foundry’s coattails.

Perhaps this is telling for how the future of anything at the infrastructure or platform layers is going to play out. You’re either really early and really good, or you wait for an open source project — OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop, Open Compute, OpenFlow, etc. — and try to build on that. There’s following fast, and there’s following smart.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Alexey Repka.

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Fans hoping for a new 24 story in the form of a movie got some disappointing news this week. Film director Anton Fuqua told Indiewire in an interview this week that the movie project is now dead.

The movie project would have feature Kiefer Sutherland reprising his role as counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer. Rumors held that Sutherland was holding out for a better contract for the movie deal, Fuqua stated that the project simply fell apart after a while. From the Indiewire report:

“Yeah, that’s not happening. I don’t think it’s gonna happen at all, definitely not with me,” Fuqua shrugs, putting the stake in what has always been a pretty tenuous project. “I met with Kiefer [Sutherland], Fox wanted to do it, it was a matter of his schedule before he went off to do his new show [’Touch‘].” The story that circulated was that there were budgetary disputes, as well as the matter of a meager offer to Sutherland, and Fuqua leans towards that by admitting, “I don’t think he was able to get a proper agreement with Fox. The time just passed, and I went off to go to what I was doing.”

Though Jack Bauer won’t be returning any time soon, Sutherland can still be seen on Fox starring as a struggling parent in Touch. Fuqua, who is best known for directing the movie Training Day, has also moved on with other projects. He is currently attached to a biopic about Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and a military thriller called Hunter Killer.

Times Square is where Samsung is gearing up to unveil the Galaxy S IV tonight at a special press event, but the leaks won’t stop coming. The latest, from the same Chinese source that brought us videos of key features earlier today, is a long, extensive review of the supposed SGS IV hardware, laying bare all of its secrets and even going so far as to take a microscope to the new smartphone’s screen.

The review is, as mentioned, exhaustive (and also in Chinese), but there are some key elements worth drawing specific attention to. In the disappointing column, that metal-look border surrounding the phone does indeed appear to be plastic upon closer prodding. On the good side, it looks like the plastic backing for the device actually doesn’t feel like plastic, according to the reviewers, thanks to micro-perforations in the surface.

Taking the scope to the screen reveals improvements to the sub-pixel arrangement which help increase density and maximize the rendering of deep blacks, with changes that also help it improve its ability to render fine detail. The screen is reportedly better able to render images clearly, making it impossible to discern pixels with the reviewer’s naked eye. The camera also looks improved, in side-by-side comparisons with the iPhone 5, though the reviewer says accurate color rendering isn’t up to par with Apple’s smartphone.

The Samsung Galaxy S IV tested in the leaked review had an eight-core Samsung Exynos Octa processor on board (the one rumored for the international version, which makes sense), which led to it blowing away the competition in AnTuTu benchmarking tests. Users definitely won’t be disappointed by the GSIV’s performance if these leaks prove legit.

The review notes that Samsung has focused a lot on adding and refining screen transition animations and tap action effects, which are likely made possible by the big bump in processing power. It also supposedly has Smart Scrolling, Smart Pause, and Smart Rotation features onboard, which is in keeping with earlier reports about Samsung enabling eye-tracking interaction on the handset.

The leak may disappoint some who were hoping for more surprises later tonight, but Samsung likely isn’t too concerned: this phone will sell well, regardless of how much it has to demo to the press tonight has been publicized beforehand. Check out the full review at it168.com for all the poorly translated spoilers your heart could desire, and then follow along with our live coverage to get the full scoop.

Google is shaking things up even more today as the Wall Street Journal reports that the company is breaking up their mapping and commerce units.

According to the report, Google’s mapping unit will become part of the search division, and the commerce will fall under the advertising division.

The personnel blowback of this is that Google SVP Jeff Huber is out of a job – but not really. He’s actually moving on to another Google unit.

Huber joined Google back in 2003 and up until now was the Senior Vice President of Geo and Commerce, overseeing maps, payments, and travel. He also led engineering & development for AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and for Google Apps.

Huber will be joining Google X, the Sergey Brin-led secret projects wings of Google that is responsible for the company’s crazier ideas – like Google Glass.

Finishing up my first decade at Google, and excited to begin the next one at Google X. What would you like to see X do next?

— Jeff Huber (@jhuber) March 14, 2013

Of course, this isn’t the only big shift at Google this week. Yesterday, we told you that longtime Android head Andy Rubin was stepping down and being replaced by Sundar Pichai, SVP of Chrome and apps. Google CEO Larry Page said that Rubin would be starting a “new chapter” at Google, but didn’t do into any more details? Is everyone running to Google X?

In other, non-personnel-related drama, Google also announced that they were shutting down Google Reader on July 1st. So much drama in the MVHQ.

[Wall Street Journal]

I sometimes wonder if Larry Page is a neatness freak. After all, throwing out stuff defines his nearly two years back as chief executive. He has chucked more Google products than junk I discard from our apartment — there’s no hording around here. Nor at Google. But the last 24 hours is simply unprecedented for changes that broadly affect customers and partners. This Spring cleaning is something to behold.

Let’s start with today. Jeff Huber is out as head of Google Mapping and Commerce. He explains: “Finishing up my first decade at Google, and excited to return to my startup roots and begin the next one at Google X! Let me know what you’d like to see Google X do next”. The Wall Street Journal says there’s more: Google Maps will split from Commerce and become part of Search and the other folds into Advertising.

Bigger shocks came yesterday, with the sudden — and I do mean sudden — change regarding Android leadership. Andy Rubin has “decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google”, Page says. But the CEO doesn’t say what that is. Huber’s future is clear. Google X is the company’s internal think tank/research lab run by cofounder Sergey Brin. Chrome and Apps lead Sundar Pichai is now responsible for Android.

As if that wasn’t enough, later yesterday Google announced plans to retire — or in the words of colleague Alan Buckingham “execute” — a bunch of products or technologies. Among them: Apps Script, CalDAV API, Google Building Maker, Google Cloud Connect, Google Voice App for Blackberry, Search API for Shopping and Snapseed Desktop for Macintosh and Windows.

But one sent shockwaves across the web last night: Google Reader, which goes under the ax on July 1. I got a notice about the closure date when logging into the service this morning.

Users rally to save the service, which includes three petitions, and lots of angry social shares. In response to the outrage, colleague Mihaita Bamburic quips: “Your move, Google“.

In a few weeks, Page celebrates his second year as CEO. Surely now is time to assess the past year and look ahead, which perhaps precipitates this sudden Spring cleaning. But I wonder when and where it ends. Last week, Google began a new round of Motorola layoffs — 1,200 reportedly — tidying up the subsidiary.

I don’t believe Page is done and see this: The housekeeping is more than just clearing clutter. There is clear consolidation underway as the CEO brings trusted executives — those with whom he resonates or who share his vision — closer to the inner circle. Others will move on, which is one way to look at Huber and Rubin changes. They won’t be the last. Not before Page’s two-year anniversary on April 4.

A different Google emerges as Page’s vision, and that of his lieutenants, propagates — one that: cross-integrates more products and services, releases updates at faster pace and is much, much, much more aggressive in the market place. The Google you thought you knew is something else.

Photo Credit: meneame comunicacions, sl

In today’s talk, Bono — U2 frontman, founder of the anti-poverty organization ONE, and 2005 TED Prize winner – reflects on the past decade’s dramatic reduction in extreme poverty worldwide. “Exit the rockstar, enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist,” he says.

Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news)Since 2000, according to Bono’s data, eight million more AIDS patients are getting antiretroviral drugs; eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa have cut their rates of death due to malaria by 75 percent, and the mortality rate for kids under five has fallen by 2.65 million per year—that’s 7,256 lives saved every day.

“This fantastic news didn’t happen by itself. It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. And this great news gives birth to even more great news,” Bono says: the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day has declined from 43 percent in 1990, to 33 percent in 2000, to 21 percent in 2010. “If you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data,” Bono says. “This is everything.”

According to Bono’s calculations, if this trend continues, 2028 will see zero percent of the population living in extreme poverty.

“The opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can’t get this done until we accept that we can get this done,” says Bono. “Inertia is how we screw this up. Momentum is how we bend the arc of history down towards zero.”

Don’t miss this inspiring talk with a powerful message about the past 3,000 years of history. And for anyone interested in what it means to live in extreme poverty today, here is a series of nuanced essays and interviews that give insight.

1. In February 2010, John Lee Anderson reported from post-earthquake Haiti in The New Yorker. The piece follows Nadia Francois, who was deported back to Haiti from the U.S.; through her story, we see a country not only ravaged by poverty, violence and political upheaval, but also “almost uniquely victimized by nature,” Anderson writes.
   .
2. Until recently, Mali “was widely viewed as a gentle if very poor democracy,” Joshua Hammer wrote in The New York Review of Books last month. “But the country has long combined poverty, radical Islam, and tendencies to armed rebellion.” In 2011, he writes, that “combustible mix” came to a head as northern Mali became a terrorist haven.
   .
3. In her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo chronicles life in a slum in Mumbai, India, based on three years of research. In this interview in Guernica, Boo discusses her aim to investigate “what I didn’t know: how people get out of poverty,” she says. “Mumbai, especially, had so many contradictions. You have this manifest prosperity, but then more than half of its citizens lived in slums. The life expectancy in Mumbai is seven years shorter than the country as a whole. How can that be in one of India’s wealthiest cities?”
   .
4. In 2011, Philip Gourevitch wrote for The New Yorker about a cycling team in Rwanda through which boys like Gasore, an orphaned street kid, found second chances.
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5. Rio will host the World Cup in 2013 and the Olympics in 2016. Which puts the spotlight on “the persistent presence of the militias and drug gangs controlling its favelas, these fearfully poor but hardy communities located all across town,” Misha Glenny wrote in FT Magazine last fall. “The juxtaposition of opulence and misery in Rio highlights the moral disgrace of Brazil’s historical legacy. At the same time, it forces the authorities to make good on the genuine commitment of President Dilma Rousseff and her two predecessors to banish the scourge of chronic inequality.”
   .
6. In 2011, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a decade-later follow-up to her book Nickel and Dimed, in which she went undercover as a minimum-wage employee to report on the extreme hardships Americans in poverty faced.

There’s a reason why creative people in advertising get out of bed in the morning. It’s about making someone feel something — an emotion — in order to get them to act later. As we ponder a future of advertising bathed in delivering customized messages to each person, in their precise place on their every device at precisely the right moment, a word of caution: the medium is not the message. The message is still the message. Which means advertising is still very much about the brand messaging business, not just the reaching the consumer on any device business.

As a 30-year advertising practitioner, and a Chief Creative Officer of North America’s now largest digital agency, I’m truly amazed at the sophistication of the technologies and platforms for delivering ads to virtually every device, from the smallest hand held screen to Walgreen’s massive canvas in Times Square.

Vast amounts of Silicon Valley capital have accelerated our ability to deliver behaviorally targeted messages and videos that follow you from destination to destination and device to device. Publishers have even begun offering “in app” custom ad units specifically designed to match consumers’ touchscreen desires. As an industry, we have an amazing set of providers and tools at our disposal that connects the consumer with the brand.

But as any smart advertising person will tell you, the creative message itself plays at least half the role in determining the effectiveness of any advertising component. It’s the creative that will always tell an intriguing story, involve and hopefully, leave you inspired to act. This balance between medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and software solutions for delivering messages to devices — than the evolution or effectiveness of them.

We are still very much in the ideas business. Despite how much more sophisticated the algorithms get at search, contextual and behavioral ad serving, advertising still has to move you. And that comes down to the kind of creative that makes you feel an emotion… not just “think” or push you into “lower funnel” activation as many marketers are so anxious to do.

This means drawing you in, getting you involved, and making you react emotionally, which is just as important on a hand-held device as it is in a 30-second TV spot. Creatively, this has been the challenge for the web banner, the video pre-roll, and even the next in-app-native touch-screen rich-media ad. These units may drive our impression-based ad-supported model, but they’ve yet to adequately prove the ability to make the consumer feel.

This emotional requisite often referred to as the “The Big Ideal” or “Higher Order Benefit” was once the holy grail of real advertising currency. These days, it seems emotional ideas have been replaced by sophisticated algorithms that can deliver near-real-time metrics and drive dynamic optimization of creative ad messages. These algorithms allow us to churn out countless versions of copy and banner executions for one campaign — changing layouts on the fly and cramming the call to action into an ad from beginning to end — in many cases before we’ve even gotten the consumer’s attention.

Is this the future of advertising we are destined to produce? Turning the craft of brand storytelling into algorithm-driven copy factories?

The task we face as advertising practitioners is how to combine our efforts with media brethren to create seamless brand experiences and cascade them through new technologies and media platforms. In doing so, we serve a more involved, emotional system of messages on behalf of brands to the right people over time.

We have the technology. We have the talent. We have the ability to redefine the story to make one feel. We just need to remember that the medium isn’t the message and no matter how seduced we are by the science of advertising, we must remember that algorithms don’t feel, people do.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

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Google has a lot of information at its disposal, and it’s using it to great effect in its Field Trip app. The app debuted on Android devices last fall, but it just arrived on iOS last week. Using notifications and an optional Bluetooth connection, Field Trip turns your phone into the ultimate tour guide.

It was created by Niantic Labs, which acts as a startup within Google. The premise of Field Trip is very practical: Whether you’re interested in random historical or architectural trivia, are looking for fun things to do with your kids, want to see what local stores are offering deals, or just where the new speakeasy or hipster donut shop is that everyone’s been talking about, Field Trip can show you. Using the iPhone’s location services, the app will show you stuff as you pass by it. You can set your preferences for how often you get the notifications and how much or little you see of each source’s content.

But what it’s doing is basically augmented reality: the phone is using location data to help us interpret the physical world around us. Here’s a quick look at the iOS version:

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Today, Vice President Biden launched an audio series called “Being Biden.”

The series will combine a photo that offers a glimpse into the Vice Presidency with an audio recording of the Vice President narrating the moment and its significance. He will tell the story behind the story – of where he was when the photo was snapped, why it matters to him, and how the experience fits into the broader narrative of this Administration. From meetings at the White House to travels around the country, the Vice President will share his perspective in candid, behind-the-scenes snapshots.

In other words, he’ll explain what it’s like “Being Biden.”

Check out the first installment at whitehouse.gov/beingbiden. The series will be available at whitehouse.gov/beingbiden, and will also be shared through the @VP Twitter account. To recieve an email update when new stories are posted, sign up here.

Check out "Being Biden."

Surprise! Redbox Instant by Verizon officially launched to the public Thursday, just as I had predicted in an earlier story. The launch comes after a three-month-long closed beta test that Redbox Instant CEO Shawn Strickland characterized as a great learning opportunity during a phone conversation Thursday morning. “Now we are open for business,” he added.

Redbox Instant currently offers its subscribers access to 4,600 subscription titles and four Redbox DVD rentals for $8 a month. Customers can also digitally rent or buy around 4,000 movies for a fee to augment their subscriptions with newer fare. Strickland told me that the service saw interest from “hundreds of thousands” of consumers who signed up to join the closed beta test. Tens of thousands not only joined for a free trial, but stayed around to become paying customers after their trial period ended.

So who are those Redbox Instant customers? Strickland said that the beta test confirmed the company’s belief that it was primarily catering to people who still value physical rentals. “It’s a disc plus offering,” he said, with streaming supplementing DVD rentals. That’s also reflected in the type of content the company is making available for streaming. “It clearly starts with movies,” said Strickland, adding that the focus might evolve over time.

That approach is very different from Netflix, which also started out with a movie-focused DVD service, but now invests heavily in TV content. Does that mean Netflix and Redbox are going to be complementary, as opposed to arch-enemies? My conversation with Strickland left me with the impression that he would be okay with that — as long as people are paying for his company’s service as well.

“We think that the over-the-top space will evolve very similarly to the cable and network space,” he said. Meaning: You might get your content from more than one streaming provider in the future, just like you get it from more than one cable network.

Of course, a large part of the rise of cable networks like HBO or even AMC has been the production of original content, something that has been an increasing focus of Netflix and Hulu as well. CAA agent Peter Micelli speculated a few days ago that Redbox Instant may venture into original content as well. Strickland called this kind of talk “really premature,” explaining that Redbox Instant doesn’t even have enough insights into what kind of exclusive content its subscribers could be interested in yet. But he added: “From an industry perspective, there is a clear force in that direction.”

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Everyone knows how finicky the European Union is when it comes to data protection in the cloud, but until now there hasn’t been much noise regarding the humble smartphone app. Now a group of privacy regulators from across Europe has published its opinion on that subject, and the result may be a world of pain for anyone involved in the mobile ecosystem.

The group is called the Article 29 Working Party and, while it doesn’t make laws, it does have a great deal of influence over those who do, and over the way in which privacy laws are interpreted. Its opinion (PDF warning) on mobile apps will be unwelcome in many quarters because it states that just about everyone in the mobile industry — app developers, app store proprietors and even OS and device vendors — has a range of legal obligations around protecting and properly collecting and processing user data.

Compliance with E.U. data protection law means sticking to several principles. First and foremost, the user needs to give full and unambiguous consent to having their data processed. Data processing has to be for a legitimate purpose — like the app’s stated use case — and everyone has a responsibility to keep personal data secure.

Even those mobile players who are trying to stick to the rules may find the task more complex than they first imagine. Here’s an example given by the regulators (with bold type reflecting my emphasis):

“An app provides information about nearby restaurants. To be installed the app developer must seek consent. To access the geolocation data, the app developer must separately ask for consent, e.g. during installation or prior to accessing the geolocation. Specific means that the consent must be limited to the specific purpose of advising the user about nearby restaurants. The location data from the device may therefore only be accessed when the user is using the app for that purpose. The user’s consent to process geolocation data does not allow the app to continuously collect location data from the device. This further processing would require additional information and separate consent.

Similarly, for a communication app to access the contact list, the user must be able to select contacts that the user wishes to communicate with, instead of having to grant access to the entire address book (including contact details of non-users of that service that cannot have consented to the processing of data relating to them).”

How about app stores? Here, the working party recommends that apps “should not just be rated by users for how ‘cool’ they are, but also on the basis of their functionalities, with specific reference to privacy and security mechanisms”.

These kinds of recommendations may seem a tall order, but they are doable. However, the working party seems under no illusion about the challenge it faces. Here’s the whole problem with ensuring the rules get stuck to, distilled into a single passage:

“A high risk to data protection comes from the degree of fragmentation between the many players in the app development landscape. A single data item can, in real time, be transmitted from the device to be processed across the globe or be copied between chains of third-parties. Some of the best known apps are developed by major technology companies but many others are designed by small start-ups. A single programmer with an idea and little or no prior programming skills can reach a global audience in a short space of time. App developers unaware of the data protection requirements may create significant risks to the private life and reputation of users of smart devices. Simultaneously, third-party services such as advertising are developing rapidly, which, if integrated by an app developer without due regard, may disclose significant amounts of personal data.”

There’s the rub. The creation and distribution of apps can involve many, many parties, with services interlinked in a way that’s hard to keep track of — especially since one of the fundamentals of EU data protection law is that the user is kept fully informed of what’s happening with their data, the likelihood of proper compliance breaks down on that point alone. That’s before we even get to the thorny issue of who is situated where and whether sending data to that location means breaking the rules, or how many opportunities for a security breach get opened up by having so many links in the chain.

It’s one thing imposing these rules on a big cloud provider, but what about the one or two-person team that comes up with some app that taps into multiple APIs linking to services around the world? Are they supposed to have a designated data controller within their organization, keeping an eye on compliance? That’s hardly going to be top of their agenda when their app may have been created and set live practically on a whim.

What the Article 29 Working Party is doing here is noble — and I don’t mean that dismissively. We should all be thinking about this stuff. Low barriers to entry shouldn’t be an excuse for ignoring a cumulative effect of privacy erosion.

The question is, are these guidelines going to stay a wishlist, or are we going to see Europe’s regulators enforce them? That’s what these opinions often presage, so we may soon find out what privacy regulation really means in the mobile age.

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Samsung hasn’t even officially unveiled its new flagship Galaxy S 4 yet, but one carrier is already announcing it will carry it. No, it’s not AT&T or Verizon or Vodafone. It’s Tucows’ tiny mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Ting.

Ting said Thursday that it would be among the first in line to sell Samsung’s latest and greatest smartphone — which it coyly said is “commonly referred to as the Galaxy S4” — as soon as it is commercially available. (For all of the details of the official S 4 launch Thursday evening starting at 7pm ET (4pm PT), check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s live blog.)

“In advance of Samsung’s big launch event tomorrow, we’re excited to say that we’ll be able to offer the follow up to the Samsung Galaxy S3, which we’ll call the Samsung Galaxy S 4 unless we’re provided reason to do otherwise,” Tucows Content Development Manager Andrew Moore-Crispin wrote in Tucows’ blog Wednesday. “What’s more, we’ll be able to do so at around the same time as the major carriers; on or at least around the actual launch day.”

That’s quite a coup for Ting, since MVNOs typically have to wait months — if not forever — to become official retailers of the hottest mobile devices. Not only do MVNOs have to court handset vendors that often have cozy relationships with the big carriers, but they also have to get permission from their carrier partners. In Ting’s case, Sprint provides it network access and ultimately it gets to decide whether Ting or any other Sprint MVNO gets to sell the same devices in its portfolio.

In the last year, though, carriers and Sprint in particular have loosened the leashes on their MVNOS, giving them access to goodies like hot devices and new 4G networks they would normally reserve for themselves. Ting became the first LTE MVNO in August, tapping into Sprint’s brand new 4G service shortly after it launched, and it only had to wait to two months before it could sell the Galaxy S3.

Even more recently those market barriers hindering MVNOs fell further. MVNO Solavei got an early drop on U.S. carriers by becoming the first operator to sell the BlackBerry(BBRY) Z10. Ting’s early access to the Galaxy S 4 is another example that MVNOs no longer have to put up with the big carriers’ scraps.

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Later today, Samsung will reveal the Galaxy S4, perhaps the most highly anticipated Android handset release to date. The Galaxy S3 sold better than any Android handset in history, setting up the S4 for even more hype. Given what we’ve heard through the rumor mill, it could very well deliver. That’s no small accomplishment, either.

Competitors, unsurprisingly, have Galaxy envy. They’re trying to topple Samsung from its place atop the Android world. HTC makes its stand with the HTC One, but it probably won’t be enough. HTC once showed promise in the Android world, with the Nexus One followed by the Droid Incredible, but it has lost its luster in recent years. Blame it on its poor Sense UI, blame it on poor marketing; it doesn’t matter. Chances are remote for HTC making a serious dent in Samsung’s market share.

For years LG toiled in the Android market. They put out a number of handsets, most notably under their Optimus flagship line, but also weren’t able to make much of a dent. Their biggest successes came from mid-range handsets sold through prepaid carriers. The cost effectiveness won over customers in those markets, while contract customers typically stuck with big names like Samsung and Motorola.

LG, though, seemingly thinks its time has come. It made waves when Google commissioned it to build the Nexus 4. It also went for the high end of the market with the Optimus G — and it’s not afraid to let you know that while you have to wait for the Galaxy S4, you can get the Optimus G right now.

That is Times Square, in the heart of New York City. Millions of people will potentially see that enormous billboard. It likely won’t detract from Samsung’s sales; clever advertising is not necessarily effective advertising. But it does speak to LG’s desire to rise up the Android ranks.

Advertising isn’t the only trick LG has up its sleeve. At this evening’s event, Samsung will reportedly show off eye tracking features for the S4. When your eyes get to the bottom of the screen, it will automatically scroll up. And that’s just one potential use for eye tracking software. Want another one? You can look to LG for that.

The LG Optimus G Pro (CNET review), unveiled at Mobile World Congress last month, has the potential to disrupt the “phablet” market. (And yes, “phablet” deserves quotes, because it’s a cheesy term that will hopefully die out soon enough.) LG has big plans for it, too. In fact, it announced today that it will release eye-recognition software as an update. The phone isn’t yet available in America, and it doesn’t appear that LG has any plans to add the software to the plain old Optimus G. But it would appear that Samsung isn’t the only one coming out with this neat new technology.

Does LG have a chance where HTC does not? It’s possible. At the very least, LG is willing to go straight at the market titan. That might not do them many favors, but it shows that they are deadly serious about becoming a major Android player. Even if their plays don’t vault them to the top, they could enjoy a solid place at the table right behind Samsung.

Even that could take some serious work, though. As you can see from this App Brain report, LG doesn’t even have a handset in the top 20 (by their measurements, which count only AppBrain users). That could be a huge obstacle to hurdle. But with a series of quality handsets in the Nexus 4, Optimus G, and G Pro, perhaps LG is ready. It seems they have a bit more juice these days than HTC.

The post LG Takes Shots at Samsung appeared first on MobileMoo.

Next time you see someone awkwardly filming with their iPad, you can blame Google for encouraging them. On Thursday the company announced that the YouTube Capture app for recording and quickly uploading videos to YouTube is now available for the iPad and iPad mini. It was initially released in December on iOS to work with the iPhone and iPod touch only.

Capture for iPad and iPad mini comes with quick editing tools, has image stabilization and color correction, and the ability to add music to a clip, all within the app. Sharing options include Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

There is no such dedicated app for Android phones or tablets, but that’s likely because direct-to-YouTube uploading is already supported in Android.

The folks at YouTube are aware that filming with a device that is so large it requires two hands can be physically and socially awkward — it reminded users of the iPad app to “film wisely so your iPad isn’t blocking everyone’s view.” But mobile is a huge chunk of its business these days — 1 in 4 YouTube video views come from a mobile device, the company says. So supporting as many popular devices as possible is an important priority.

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A mother survives domestic abuse, but realizes she needs a civil protection order, as well as custody of her child, but she may not be able to afford legal representation.

Five years ago, a group of lawyers came together to support clients like her. They founded the DC Volunteers Lawyer Project (DCVLP) to recruit, train, and support attorneys to provide pro-bono services in three areas: (1) domestic violence, including with divorce, custody, child support, and immigration matters, (2) high-conflict child custody cases, and (3) assisting foster parents.

The DCVLP now has more than 700 volunteer lawyers who provide pro-bono services.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of visiting the DCVLP. I met with the remarkable founders and staff, listened to the story of a former client serving on the board, and heard about all the great work they are doing every single day here in Washington, DC.

White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett with the DC Volunteer Lawyers Project team.

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On Thursday, Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry announced plans to secure Android and iOS devices with Secure Work Space for BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10. The company cites evolving needs and “ever-growing variety of devices” that are used within the work space as the main reason for stepping up to fortify the security of the two mobile operating systems.

BlackBerry targets both smartphones and tablets running Android and iOS through data-at-rest and data-in-transit security capabilities. The company says that administrators will be able to create a “separate and secure work space” which contains corporate apps, calendar, contacts, web email and other features, and configure, interact, secure and wipe the new compatible devices.

BlackBerry claims that Secure Work Space will waive the need for an “expensive VPN infrastructure” to secure transferred data and MDM (Mobile Device Management) providers and multiple vendors, while also featuring easier deployment and worldwide and “flexible technical support”.

The Canadian smartphone maker says that Secure Work Space beta testing is underway for both Android and iOS mobile devices with the general availability to happen towards the end of Q2 2013. More details will be shared at BlackBerry Live in May, according to the company.

Photo Credit: Kheng Guan Toh/Shutterstock

Last year there was a record-breaking 3.3 gigawatts worth of solar panels — or 16 million individual solar panels — installed in the U.S., making solar power the fastest-growing energy source domestically. That’s according to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research.

In comparison, a large nuclear or coal plant can generate about a gigawatt, so there was the equivalent of three of these types of large power plants installed across rooftops in the U.S. in 2012. The 3.3GW worth of solar panels was more than the three previous years combined, said the report, and showed a 76 percent growth over 2011.

A gigawatt of those solar panels were installed in California, while Arizona and New Jersey also installed hundreds of megawatts. The fourth quarter in particular in the U.S. saw 1.3 GW worth of solar panels installed, which was a record-breaking quarter, said the report.

The reason that solar panels were the fastest growing type of energy in the U.S. last year was due to the fact that the price of solar panels has dropped dramatically. Companies are also offering financing deals that cover the upfront costs of the systems, and states are offering strong incentives. It’s not a coincidence that states like California with the best subsidies for solar panels had the most installations.

The growth of solar panels in the U.S. is supposed to continue, says the report. For 2013, the researchers have estimated that there will be 4.3GW of solar panels installed, which would be an increase of 29 percent over 2012.

There are now 300,000 solar panel systems operating in the U.S. and a total of 7.2 GW of cumulative solar panel power in the U.S. Concentrating solar systems — which use the sun’s heat instead of light to produce electricity — deliver 546 MW worth of power in the U.S.

The report is note worthy because solar is becoming a game changer. It, along with wind power, are just starting to deliver real volumes and change the way electricity is created in the U.S.

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