Jorge Pereira

I was doing some research on knowledge management last night, and came across this quote  from 1865 from an editorial in the Boston Post talking about the arrest for fraud of a Joshua Coopersmith, who had been attempting to raise funds for work on a telephone:

"Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."

I loved this!! Great quote to place on the wall for any startup!  Made me think of all the things that we have been told we could not do, and we did (not to this extent of course)

I think I can come up with a few more like this, but none that has had as much impact as the phone…   Can you think of any?

On Monday of this  week Google announced  the general availability of Google+ Hangout On Air.

A great very personal “webcast” overview of the service by the Google team can be found  here  or you can listen to it below…

This recorded session gives an overview of the setup, a professional broadcaster gives tips and tricks, and answers many questions from the large audience ! -

The service is excellent… ( Yes you can have better video quality, but it is free!  )

I believe this feature has leapfrogged Microsoft, Skype, vSee and the so many others out there.      All part of the process to get everyone into the Google+ platform.

A couple of things of note mentioned include:

• You can upload your session into YouTube
• Your post is by default public.
• You can mark your session as private – (2 hours limit, but can be longer if you want to mark it as public)
• If you place a session in a Google+ Business Page, your video will be posted from your manager account.    (no other way, as YouTube does not recognize Google Pages accounts.)
• It scales !

Jason Calacanis ( Wikipedia, website, @jason ) has done it again…  

Side note: (I have learned so much from his 250+ This Week on Startups webcasts -   I have listen  or viewed every single one, and look forward to new ones every week)

Jason sent out to his subscribers “The Age of Excellence”   which is an *excellent*  piece on how technologist, have created today’s demand for excellent.  

His point:  

Either a person or product is excellent and hugely successful or it’s practically nonexistent.

Think about it… If you visit a new site or use a new app, and it does not match your expectations, you simply move on and keep searching right?   But, think about what does this mean to the startup?  Does the first version need to be perfect? What happened to iteration on the open?

I do not agree with his comments on Europeans being behind on Excellence, but a small “nit” considering the article as a whole.

You can listen to the MP3 piece here    (Excellent reading by  Lon Harris @lon  )

You can read the piece at   Launch.co blog

I am using my iPad more for content creation…

You can say what you want, but in the end, It is an amazing device…

With this week’s introduction of Google Drive,   the conversation about “cloud drives”  has significantly increased amongst the tech community…  But have we lost a bit of focus on what a cloud drive is ?

To me,   and granted, I might not be in the majority here, there is a simple definition:

To be able to securely store and retrieve files (of any type) on the Internet (cloud) , and be able to access them from a device using the device’s standard file system (drive). 

Any other characteristics and features are additional functions (bells and whistles) that should be able to enable/disable at will.

Please do not get me wrong.   I *love*  Dropbox,  SkyDrive, Egnyte and use them all daily.   I was anxiously waiting for Google Drive I am sure I will be using as well, but,  it seems like none of these services hit on the basic definition of what a cloud drive is intended to be.    To me they are more file synchronization  tools and not really cloud drives…

It is so puzzling!  I am no developer, but it seems like it would not be a significant  programing challenge to enable this.  I know, this last comment, would probably lead you to thing “what a complainer”, but let me just say: Perhaps, but opinions and feedback drive product improvements right?

Let me explain a bit more detail:

Background: Like most of us (well maybe not “most”)  I use a desktop, a laptop, a thin client device, a table device and have several virtual machines that I use for one purpose or another (work/ test /learn / play) daily.

Goal / Desire 1:   I want to make my file library available to all of *my* devices.

Options:

Now let’s go one step forward:

Goal / Desire 2: I want to make parts of my file library available to other people/groups some public others privately.

Options:

Understandably, Of the above ones, today, web-based and file-sync are the best options.

There are two features which I think are driving the development of the current set of popular products, and thus the state of where we are.  they are:

1. off-line availability
2. User and group permissions.

What about the ability to securely map a drive to “the network”  and use it / go with it?  (a true cloud drive in my opinion)  — There has been multiple attempts to doing this over the years. and even a standard (webDAV) was created for it, but unfortunately nothing “really popular” – in Unix (and Mac) you can use native commands to map a drive.   Several applications are available which have different features and approaches including:

[Side bar:  Licensing on the above products can get expensive, as they are all based on a per device bases.  Some offer free versions, but not all – or limited in capabilities)

Summary / Conclusion:

Will continue to use my TNTDrive / AmazonS3 as primary personal cloud drive and DropBox for sharing.  The others will continue to serve as secondary online tools.

I must confess, I was really hoping Google Drive would be different (adding links to my Google Docs is just not that compelling) .  I am still hoping community feedback would drive 

If just one of them would set a folder property that would set that folder to “cloud-only” that would be nice!   (I know easier said than done)

Further Reading on this topic:

• An excellent  (and up-to-date) list of products at alternative.to site
• Laptop magazine: Google Drive review
• online storage product comparison  blog entry

Not to worry!   Microsoft has posted all of the PowerPoint and videos at http://www.mms-2012.com/digitalmms    regardless if you attended or not, you can register and browse through the sessions…   Thank you  Microsoft!! 

For those of you that want to download the content for offline viewing:

• Videos:   Stefan Roth has created a PowerShell script that will download the sessions based on a customizable sessions.txt file –  Thank you Stefan!!    (Great PowerShell script to learn from if you are into developing)
• PowerPoints:  You can find  all of the PowerPoint  in one file for downloading at  this myITforum.com blog entry.  — Kudos to them !!

Great content for a raining afternoon or evening!

BTW – MMS 2013 will be in New Orleans…

It has been an interesting challenge. Using my iPad to type an article (offline), save it locally, make revisions over time, add some pictures and then, when its ready, post it to the correct blog.

Been searching for an app for a while. I have used many, some paid, some free, and they always fall short in one aspect or another…

I am excited, because I think I found on in Blogsy.

Summary

These guys have done a great job at thinking about the many different elements that comprise the creative activity of blog writing… Easy interface optimized for writing. Drag and drop of images. Formatting. Tag handling. Multiple blog platform handling. And so much more… I was happy to pay, the $5 bucks! and highly recommend it.

Welcome to WordPress.

Today I  moved my wordpress.com hosted  blog.jorgep.com  into my own hosted version.

More to come on my experience, but it has been exceptionally good.. It is an amazing product! –

I have not figured out yet how to reroute old links into the new links, but I am working on it…

I am asked often to about this topic,   having written a number of individual posts in the past, I thought, why not put it all together? So here it is… Let me know if you find it useful or have any comments!  – Cheers.

Cloud computing (or cloud services) is the new buzz in the world of IT services. The term, which is still pretty nebulous for many users, refers to a model in which computing resources are hosted and delivered via the Internet than can dynamically grow and shrink depending on its demand and you pay only for the actual usage of the service. IT departments do not have to worry about hardware, software, software, data center space, network scalability or any other specialized applications in order for it to work properly. Generally speaking, the term would refer to anything that involves delivery of any service via the Internet.

Types of Services provided via cloud computing

Cloud computing can be used to provide services on a much larger scale than any individual service provider would be able to handle. This is primarily because the resources available would theoretically be without any limits.

Three main types of hosted services would work really well on a cloud computing network. These are:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Cloud based infrastructure services provide an strong alternative for companies that do not want to invest dollars and time in expensive servers, data centers, software, and networking equipment. Instead, they simply rent a space managed by the client, and pay only for what they consume. Thus it becomes easy for them to manage the expenditure on these services. Examples of this type of services are data storage services (SaaS) , Desktop as a services (DaaS) – or VDI and Communications as a Service (CaaS) – virtual PBX.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): This type of service allows clients to build their own applications using a centralized software deployment platform. The positive side of such service is that the clients do not have to worry about dealing with the hassles of setting up hardware and software platforms for development, testing and deploying their applications. The service provider hosts the platform, on which cloud based applications can be launched. The service provider only maintains the platform, and the computers connected to the network provide the resources necessary to run the applications. Some popular examples are Microsoft Azure, Google Apps, and force.com
3. Software as a Service (SaaS): a service in which software applications are made available over the Internet in a way that a clients can access completely via a web-browser. Some examples of such services would be the ones provided by Salesforce.com, Microsoft Online Service, Microsoft Dynamics, and of course, Google Docs and Gmail.

Key Benefits

Now that we understand a bit more about the definition of cloud services, let us move on to talking a bit deeper about the key advantages offered by cloud services; we can summarize them into five areas: Quick and Easy setup; Significant acquisition and operational cost savings; On-demand scalability; Anytime/Anywhere Access; and Always up-to-date.

IT setup, maintenance and support can be a time-consuming and expensive proposition.  This is especially true for small-to-medium businesses.   Cloud services essentially allows businesses to transfer the responsibility for IT maintenance, software upgrades and any system issues onto the service provider, allowing the business to focus on their core business instead of their IT infrastructure.

• Quick and Easy to setup — There is no need to install new hardware or software as everything is run by the provider.  Typically you provision and manage the service via a web-based interface.
• Significant acquisition and operational cost saving — Businesses that move to the cloud can experience an immediate savings on many different levels – IT hardware and software expenditure is cut dramatically, and fewer staff or support resources are needed for IT maintenance. Last September, analyst group IDC estimated that a business can instantly reduce their IT spending by approximately 54%, moving to a cloud based solution.  Ultimately, cloud services helps significantly reduce CAPEX and/or move CAPEX to OPEX.
• Always up-to-date/available –  Primarily because of the healthy competition, service providers constantly improve upon their offerings, upgrading their systems and adding new features, while insuring compatibility.   In turn you experience less downtime than when managing IT in-house, and any problems can be solved far quicker by being fixed centrally. IDC estimates that businesses operating in the cloud achieve 97% greater IT reliability.
• On-demand scalability — If your business is growing fast or has seasonal spikes, you can go large quickly because cloud systems are built to cope with sharp increases in workload. Cloud based “pay as you go” style services, allow you to easily increase your use of cloud services as your business grows, or decrease if you need to temporarily scale down.
• Anytime/Anywhere Access  –  Today’s employees expect to have the same technology and access, be they at work, home or on the go traveling.  They are used to to collaborating online and accessing their data from any mobile device at hand, not expecting to work in one location nor fixed to a 9 to 5 work-time schedule. Cloud services are designed from the ground-up to expect usage anywhere and anytime, and for the most part device independent.
• Greater level of security — Argued by some, cloud services can be far more secure than traditional in-house IT, especially those used by small and medium business.  It’s all about economies of scale – many cloud suppliers employ security experts, invest vast amounts of money into securing their applications and develop technology beyond the means of any small business.

Given these advantages, it is not surprising that cloud computing is fast becoming the option of choice for many organizations that need to use web based computing environments for cutting down on investments and building a common, centralized environment for their employees to work on.

Big Names on the Field

Thanks to the convergence of multiple technology trends, including virtualization, data center consolidation, web-services, browser and commercialization of hardware advancements, there is simply no way of ignoring or denying the impact that cloud services are having within the industry. Placing files, email and applications on the cloud has its significant advantages over local/custom build infrastructures, ranging from availability, cost, ease of use and, contrary to popular misconception, better security. These advantages have propelled the popularity of cloud services off the charts.

Some of the most popular service providers include:

• Google – One of the earliest cloud-based service providers, they have made their mark by offering full featured applications (email, document collaboration, and communications) and other related services for free and/or very small fees. Their Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform, Google Apps allows users from around the world to perform almost all office tasks completely online without the need for physical/local resources. Many vendors are now building towards their platform.
• Amazon – While others cautiously approached the cloud services space, Amazon went all-in and offered one of the most complete service offering around. Marketed under the Amazon web services umbrella, many products and services are now available. Amongst the most well known are: Amazon EC2 is a complete virtual computing environment, which allows users to launch instances of servers with a variety of operating systems as platforms; Amazon S3 offers storage and retrieval of any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web; Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon RDS are their database offerings and a whole lot more.   [ Side note:   I would go on a limb here, and say that Amazon is probably the largest cloud services provider out there… ]
• Microsoft – Oh yes, the software giant has officially stated that it is now fully on board and is “betting the company” on cloud services. Key offerings are under multiple brands: For businesses, Microsoft Online Services, offering Exchange, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Communication Server and LiveMeeting; and Windows Azure™, a platform allows developers to get all the processing power they require to develop their programs, and manage web based applications. For the consumer, Windows Live (including Hotmail and SkyDrive) and Microsoft Office Live.
• SalesForce -As one of the very first widely successful Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, SalesForce.com has remained a leader in sales and customer relationship management (CRM) – They have expanded their initial model into a complete solution offering ( force.com ) Infrastructure, Development and Collaboration platforms. They work closely with Google in the application space.
• Rackspace – Being a file hosting service to begin with, it was no surprise that RackspaceCloud was introduced in late 2009. the offerings are around the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space and they include Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers and Cloud Files.
• VMware – VCloud is an initiative from VMware which will allow customers to migrate work on demand from their internal systems of cooperating VMware hypervisors to a remote cloud of VMware hypervisors. This is a new offering, but a very interesting one, which we are watching closely.
• GoGrid – A cloud infrastructure service provider that offers hosting Linux and Windows virtual machines managed by a multi-server control panel.
• DropBox – a storage and file hosting service that allows users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet. Although the files are stored on the “cloud” (Dropbox servers), it uses file synchronization across devices, as its primary method of sharing data, and therefore the data is replicated across authorized devices / users.
• Egnyte – Specialty provider of online storage, file sharing, online backup, FTP, and large file transfer capabilities. Key distinction is their shared drive mapping to cloud-based storage.
• Desktone -    cloud-hosted Desktops as a Service (DaaS), provides the ability to deliver virtual desktops in the cloud -  desktops to users connected on any device, anywhere – without the upfront costs and complexity of traditional desktop virtualization–transforming desktops from a CAPEX to OPEX item.

The above is only a small sampling of the companies offering cloud services. There are many more coming to the market with new and innovative services. Cloud services is one the most significant changes that has happened to the industry in recent times, and in the coming years, its popularity can only be expected to rise even further.

Names you might also know cloud services include: IT-as-a-Service, Cloud Computing, Utility Computing, Grid Computing, shared hosted services.

You got to take note about a small piece of yesterday’s news:

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print, instead focusing on its online encyclopedia,yesterdays Publishing print editions of its flagship encyclopedia.

Not unexpected, but the fact that it was finally announced it is amazing… 244 years!

Sources:

• Encyclopedia Britannica ends print, goes digital
  
• Last entry for Encyclopaedia Britannica book form | The Montgomery Advertiser | montgomeryadvertiser.com.