This Friday Erick Schonfeld and I are moderating the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. Several participants have asked us what questions we’re going to ask. Of course, the whole idea of events like this one is to bring together as many of the movers and shakers as we can fit onto the stage, and then let the dynamics of the group shape the discussion. Besides, there’s nothing worse than journalists asked canned questions and getting back prepared answers.

So we won’t be sharing our questions until show time. But they’re really not that hard to suss, if we pause and consider what cloud computing represents today, tomorrow, and in the future when we drop the cloud and just call it what we do. The vision of cloud computing has been around for a long time, going by a succession of names that reflects the emergence of the massive uber computer that the Net has engendered.

With all the hype about cloud computing, you’d think we’re in the early stages of this revolution, with many years to go before the technology is mature enough for prime time. But in fact, the first instantiation of a working cloud application (and by implication a supporting platform) came with the beta launch of Gmail in 2005. My first email on the platform (which is still available to me by clicking the Oldest link) was May 2, 2005.

Gmail was launched with a social media strategy that foreshadowed the current wave of cloud evolution, with a core group of influencers and insiders each given a handful of invites with which to “friend” people. The on-demand service also featured a scalable storage model where the available size automagically grew whenever you approached the apparent limit. And the initial inability to delete items encouraged a new usage model that was continually reinforced by feature additions that took advantage of the disruptive model.

The dynamic threading of conversations pushed items of timely interest to the top of the stack. The merging of chat threads into the common archive made searching all the more authoritative and valuable, and all the harder to switch away from. The elasticity and just in time scalability of cloud computing became a staple for those who stopped by for a taste and ended up staying the night.

Behind the scenes, Google was leveraging the cloud they’d built to support search and the page rank crawl that informed its relevance engine. With Gmail as a proof of concept, Google Docs as a tactical shiv into the Office gut, and Firefox as the wedge to keep IE pinned down, the stage was set for the first clone of Google’s cloud-as-a-service: Amazon Web Services. AWS time-shared the Amazon infrastructure, harnessing LAMP developers to prototype and scale startups into position via the same social media viral spread Gmail used.

Now the cloud model began to metastasize, as social media juggernauts had the fuel to escape the gravitational pull of the incumbent platform vendors and rapidly build out identity clouds. The resultant aristocracy of Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail/Apps/Reader/Salesforce brought Microsoft into the game with Mesh, Azure, and the nextgen Silverlight rich media platform. Apple, the iPhone, and the AppStore completed the the picture.

Ironically, it’s Microsoft’s Hailstorm which first modeled today’s landscape almost 10 years ago, with the on-demand atomization of the InBox, the social graph (contacts), and the realtime inference engine now known as search. Identity, the very thing that brought down Hailstorm, is now being traded like a virtual stock market by the social media clouds as a new form of wealth. The more agile the social graph, the greater power the social clouds have to leverage the commoditization of cloud computing to rapidly adapt and scale.

Just as the economic crisis is a global phenomenon, so too is the cloud. If the network is the computer, then soon the network of clouds is the Cloud. Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture.

On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can’t tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other?

This guest post is written by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google. Over the last 20 years he has alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com.

In this Q&A-style post, Kevin delves into the standards that make up the emerging open social stack (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial), looking at the infrastructure problems they address, and exploring some of the live implementations, including Plaxo and Google Friend Connect.

Q: We keep hearing that “Google wants to make the web more social.” What does that mean?

Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends. Today’s social networking sites, are the online contexts where you and your friends go to be social, and the time we spend on them shows the attraction.

But the model of going to a single website to interact with other people is changing. In the future, we expect everything on the web will become more social, augmenting the many things you already do on the web. Whether you’re shopping, deciding what to read, or researching a topic, knowing what your friends, or family, or the people you respect think about that product, book, or source of information is a vital part of the web.

I call this the “social cloud,” meaning that “social” will be integrated with the web so that you don’t think about it anymore. Charlene Li calls this same idea “social networks become like air.” The web itself is like this — following links seems like second nature to us because we know a URL can take us anywhere. Social isn’t there yet, but that’s the highest level goal of the OpenSocial project — to make interacting with people a natural part of how we use the web

Q: What are the hurdles to the web becoming more social today?

For every website to become social, each site needs to know something about you and who your friends are.

How do they solve this now? By asking you to fill out a form and by spamming all your friends. For many people, that’s enough of a deterrent that they will simply leave the site. For others, there is no value to providing personal information to yet another site, so they lie. If you’re forced to enter a zip code, you tell them 90210 or 12345, and websites end up puzzled by how many users they have in Beverley Hills and Schenectady.

Then, once you’ve done the whole registration “song and dance” (submit your email address to the site, login to your email, check the spam folder, then click a link to go back to the site), you still have to find all of your friends on that site and establish those relationships again each time you join a new site.

This model doesn’t scale because users end up only joining a small number of sites, and it doesn’t help the web as a whole become more social when most sites have inaccurate information about their members. We need open standards to enable the exchange of this kind of information.

Q: How do OpenSocial and open standards help?

There are three main components to social activity on the web — people, friends, and activities.

Representing people has several aspects. First, there is the notion of identity. Email addresses are one way to identify people on the web, but as social networks have become increasingly popular, personal profiles (and the unique URLs that go with them) have emerged as a common way for people to find and connect with one another. OpenID is the standard that lets you prove to other websites that you own such a URL, thus letting you link your online identities.

Then, to represent people more fully within OpenSocial, we started looking for things that social sites have in common. We talked to many social networking sites, looked at their data structures, and found that they were actually very similar. Under the hood, most of these sites had names, photographs, addresses, phone numbers, preferences. Based on these commonalities, we defined a model for representing people. This model is expressed in the Portable Contacts standard, which is also used in OpenSocial for people and friends.

What makes these sites different from each other to their users are the communities of people who inhabit them. You’re happy to share information with people you know and trust, so long as you’re confident the website won’t share that information with anyone else. The most successful social sites, therefore, become trusted custodians of your social data.

This brings us to the second component of social activity: friends. Once we can represent people, we need a model for who your friends are and which friends can see what information about you. Within a site, this is straightforward because the site is in control, but in order for the whole web to become more social, there must be a way to share this information between websites. That’s OAuth.

Today, if a site wants to know who you’re friends with on a social site, it will often ask you for your user name and password. The site will then login to the social site with your user name, pretending to be you, look at the webpages there, and pull the data out. The problem is that by handing over your credentials, you’re also giving the site full access to everything in your social account, relying on faith that it will only do what you want it to do. But what if you accidentally give this information to a malicious site? What if the user interface is confusing and you accidentally let a site send out emails to your whole address book?

By contrast, OAuth lets you grant permission for very specific tasks. You may let another site see all your profile data or just your name and image. You may let it see all the people you know or just a subset – your family or colleagues. Additionally, OAuth lets the social site know that a request is being made on behalf of a specific user, so if the social site reveals different information to different people, that can be taken into account, e.g. if you share your photos with some friends but not others. As the web becomes increasingly social, having an standard protocol to express this from website to website is very important.

The last piece of this social web is activities — what you and your friends are doing around the web. Leisa Reichelt calls this “ambient intimacy,” the idea that you care little about the activities of strangers, but you’re very interested in the activities of people you know. What is more, with your close friends, you care what they had for lunch, how they’re feeling, and what they’re thinking. This flow of phatic information makes social sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Seesmic, Picasa, et al., enormously attractive — they feed a basic human desire to know about others.

The challenge with sharing activities is that it can’t be a chore. This is why OpenSocial allows any application to generate an activity and provides a way to send those activities from one place to another. The social networking site can then filter those activities in a way that makes sense for their users.

When these events flow from one place to another, everyone is better off. If I can bring the information I have invested in a social networking site elsewhere, to say, a Bay Area biking website, when I post a comment like “I just rode this trail, here’s a photograph from the summit,” the site can feed that information back to the network, where my friends who are also interested in cycling can click over to the biking website. Additionally, other bikers on the website can see me, recognize that we share an interest, and establish a relationship within that context. Social networks get richer information, the cycling site spreads through friendship networks, and users get the benefit of being able to control what they share with whom.

Q: We’ve also heard that Google wants to open up the social web. What does that mean?

When I talk about OpenSocial and “we,” it’s important to remember that OpenSocial isn’t a Google project. OpenSocial is an industry-wide standards effort. From the beginning, we worked with many other groups to put this together and to form an independent foundation. All of the standards work is public, and it is very much an open dialog.

We also don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so OpenSocial uses existing standards whenever possible. The OAuth standard and Portable Contacts are both examples of this. The person specification in OpenSocial is the same as the Portable Contacts standard, which was developed in parallel. This allows people to use only those components that they need, while still being compatible with the entire OpenSocial specification.

We’re looking for interoperability not just with shared standards, but also with shared code, and so the community has also built open source implementations. For example, the core social networking server for Google is Shindig, an Apache open source project with both Java and PHP implementations that is used by many of the large social networking sites.

This is important because these standards have applicability beyond just social networking sites. They work for personal dashboard sites like MyAOL, MyYahoo, and iGoogle, as well as sites that are not purely social but are still designed around people — e.g. LinkedIn, Xing, and Viadeo. Their primary focus is on business, but having a standard model for people and for activities is still useful. Similarly, Portable Contacts maps well to other sites with people lists, such as webmail, and the open source gadget standard has been broadly adopted by different companies.

Q: What efforts are underway to make it easy for people and websites to use these standards?

For more websites to become social, they need to be able to connect to this infrastructure. While we have defined the REST APIs and are providing client libraries to access them, there is still a lot of integration work that needs to happen in order for websites to adopt these standards. As these roll out across more social sites, the rest of the web gets even more value from calling them.

There was a great example of this recently, where Plaxo demonstrated how they saw a 92% update rate using OpenID, OAuth and Contacts API to let users and their contacts onboard in one step rather than by asking for passwords and scraping.

Ning approached this integration problem by making it easy for anyone to create a social network for a specific group of users — church groups, soccer teams, any interest group – even the OpenSocial community itself. Their adoption of OpenSocial means that many more niche social networks will be able to use these social applications.

Another example is Google Friend Connect, which is designed to let any website become a social website as easily as adding Google Maps. Just add a small amount of Javascript and couple of pages, and suddenly users are able to sign in to the site, interact with each other, and comment. Friend Connect runs code on our servers to connect these open standards — OpenID for login, Portable Contacts and OAuth for connecting your friend lists from many sites, and OpenSocial for creating applications. Additionally, you can send your activities back to your social networks, using OAuth and activity streams.

Q: What can we expect to see more of in the coming weeks and months?

I’ve talked about this at several different layers — the aspirations and barriers to them, as well as the implementations that we have seen.

At the moment, OpenSocial is deployed to sites representing over 700M users around the world and this is growing consistently.

Friend Connect is running on tens of thousands of websites, drawing more users and more connections every day.

As more sites start to implement these open APIs to allow connections between sites, these virtuous cycles will become more obvious and we’ll start to see a second degree of growth in connections between sites, not just within sites.

I also expect to see a slight transition within the application space from apps for individuals to apps for groups. With Ning and Friend Connect, we see groups of people associated around an idea or a website. As developers start to see this, I expect we’ll should see some exciting applications that are deployed across websites and a strong movement towards the pervasive web sociality that is the high-level goal of OpenSocial.

The future of OpenSocial isn’t a fixed roadmap, it is an open mailing list where future specification changes are discussed, with working examples expected. Among the topics currently being debated are realtime chat , an Albums API to share users’ photos and other media, and a virtual currency model for Application developers.

As the consensus around these composable, open standards grows, and more and more sites implement them, we are making the web pervasively social for everyone online.

At a time when many people are saying innovation is dead along with the economy as we knew it, I can’t help but feel the hot breath of a surge in the power of the network. As Marc Andreessen reminds in his fascinating conversation with Charlie Rose, the Internet didn’t take off until the browser. The infrastructure was in place for some time already, but when the browser appeared, the TV generation sat up and took notice.

Now we’re at the threshold of the realtime moment, and history seems to be repeating itself. For some of us, the advent of a reasonably realtime message bus over public networks has changed something about the existing infrastructure in ways that are not yet important to a broad section of Internet dwellers. The numbers are adding up — 175 million Facebook users, tens of thousands of instant Twitter followers, constant texting and video chats among the teenage crowd — a semi-secret economy of interactive media that is sucking the chewy chocolate center out of the one-way broadcast sector.

The standard attack on realtime is that it is the new crack. We’re all addicted to our devices, to the flow of alerts, messages, and bite-sized information chunks. We no longer have time for blog posts, refreshing our Twitter streams for pointers to what our friends think is important. It’s the revenge of the short attention span brought on by 30-second television ads — the myth of multi-tasking spread across a sea of factoids that Nick Carr fears will destroy scholarship and ultimately thinking.

Of course this is true and also completely irrelevant. My daughter told her mother today that her boyfriend was spending too much time on IM and video-chat, and not enough on getting his homework done. She actually said these words: “I told him you have to get away from the computer sometimes, turn it off, give yourself time to think.” This is the same daughter who will give up anything – makeup, TV, food — just as long as I don’t take her computer or iPhone away.

So realtime is the new crack, and even the naivest of our culture realizes it can eat our brains. But does that mean we will stop moving faster and faster? No. Does that mean we will give up our blackberries when we become president? No. Then what will happen to us?

The browser brought us an explosion of Web pages, produced first by professionals, then by small business owners, and finally, with blogs, by anybody. The struggle became one of time and location; RSS and search to the rescue. The time from idea to publish to consumption approached realtime.

The devices then took charge, widening the amount of time to consume the impossible flow. The Blackberry expanded work to all hours. The iPhone blurred the distinction between work and play. Twitter blurred personal and public into a single stream of updates. Facebook blurred real and virtual friendships. That’s where we are now.

Realtime has to be managed. The first tools in any transformative period are hard coded to the sensibilities of the radicals, the pioneers on the front lines. Scoble may appear ridiculous in his zeal for the extremes of the social media envelope, but his calculation is much more conservative than you might think at first glance. By opening himself to the tyranny of the crowd, he connects with that reality we each face.

The difference between 150 friends in our address book and 5,000 in Facebook is vanishingly small: we don’t have time for either. Trying to capture the nuances of friendship in a social media context is no more difficult than in high school, or easier. This is our life’s work, learning how to balance our needs with those of those we care about.

Once we reach a certain point in the shift, the tools begin to be more malleable as technologists surrender some control in search of viral spread. Bookmarks in the early browsers led to del.icio.us, Yahoo’s index to Digg, banner ads to page rank. The two-way quality of the network encouraged the viral spread of sharing.

Swallowed as we are in this vortex of change, it’s hard to see where the tools are going. Realtime has to draw on the human elements to ease the transition, harness the power, quiet the fear. The anger about Twitter mania, the reluctance to delve into the civil rights aspects of the quarantining of our data, the fratricide going on between bloggers and journalists — all these are symptoms of the power of this struggle for our minds.

Andreessen is one good reason why we’ll work our way through this. He talks impossibly fast, probably only a small fraction of the speed at which he thinks. Listening to him is an exciting and sometimes daunting experience, like listening to The Dark SIde of the Moon at 78 rpm.

Charlie Rose:
So to play offense for a newspaper for you means what?

Marc Andreessen:
Oh, you got to kill the print edition.

Charlie Rose:
You would stop the presses tomorrow?

Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.

Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.

Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.

Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.

Marc Andreessen:
Stop the presses tomorrow. I’ll tell you what. The stocks would go up. Look at what’s happened to the stocks. This investors are through this. The investors are through the transition. You talk to any smart investor who controls any amount of money, he will tell you that the game is up. Like it’s completely over. And so the investors have completely written off the print operations. There is no value in these stock prices attributable to print anymore at all. It’s gone.

Charlie Rose:
So you would recommend to the owners of the New York Times, stop printing papers.

Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, absolutely. You have to. You have to –

Charlie Rose:
And take your losses –

Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. You have to.

Charlie Rose:
Like a courageous person.

Marc Andreessen:
Chronic pain? Acute pain. How many years — music industry, same thing. How many years of chronic pain do you want to take to avoid taking a year of acute pain?

My 8 year old daughter doesn’t read the newspaper off or online, but I found her showing my wife new emoticons in Gchat today. Now she’s on a speakerphone talking with a friend while playing a game over the Net. I rarely see or talk with friends from high school or earlier, but what’s to prevent these virtual friendships from continuing to flourish for a lifetime? What are the consequences of the lowering of the barriers of space and time? We’re finding out, in realtime.

Marketo, an SaaS company focused on providing marketing automation software for B2B companies, has launched a bigger, better version of its sales and marketing optimization application. The software allows web-based marketing and sales teams collaborate on a single revenue cycle, turning web visitors and sales leads into customers using tools like email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, sales lead insight. The software is up and running for the client within an hour, saving clients time and money. What’s fascinating is that Marketo has partnered with Salesforce.com to provide seamless integration in the cloud of the two systems, helping enterprises work efficiently and easily between two cloud-based applications.

With over 140 customers and $1 million in revenue in less than a year in operation, including Thomson Reuters and Demandbase, Marketo is gaining traction in the web-based marketing cloud. Marketo closed a Series B round last summer from Storm Ventures and Tae Hea Nahm, bringing total investment to $13.5 million. Marketo was founded by executives from Epiphany, a marketing automation firm that sold to SSA Global for $300 million.

Marketo’s upgraded software includes over 200 new features (all customer requested) including improved Salesforce.com integration, real time alerts and advanced data quality. CEO Phil Fernandez think Marketo’s technology is “disruptive” in the web-based marketing spaces; calling the software “the first sophisticated marketing application in the cloud.” Fernandez said Marketo is trying to “help companies spread their brands across the web” efficiently and consistently. While Marketo has competitors, like vTrenz, Ferndandez said that no other similar company has seen such rapid growth in a small amount of time. Fernadez also said that Marketo is looking to expand its cloud integration partnerships later this year. It looks like cloud computing has spread to the marketing space.

CrunchBase Information

Marketo

Salesforce

Information provided by CrunchBase

Fred Wilson finds himself on two sides of the fundamental issue of our time: the user’s right to access data the way he or she wants to. On one side, that of the user, Wilson is an investor and board member of Boxee, a startup that translates web pages into a form more easily consumable on a TV screen. One site in particular, Hulu, just shut Boxee down at the insistence of the content providers for material on the NBC and Fox-owned site.

Boxee’s popular because it leverages Hulu’s free access to mainstream content in an on-demand solution. It’s the long-awaited rollup of TV or the computer, where on demand entertainment can be watched on the big screen under computer control. The studios don’t want us getting used to that methodology, especially not when it breaks out of the tightly controlled box where you can watch for free (ad-supported) or pay (DVD and Pay per view on demand) but not free on demand on the big screen.

The main reason for this is the one users mentioned in the Hulu comments, namely that the Boxee/Hulu combination encouraged users to quit using satellite and cable services and their DVRs and time shift off the Net instead. It’s a variant of the reason Apple doesn’t open up AppleTV to direct recording and playing of studio content so as to protect the pay to download iTunes service.

Fred suggests users don’t understand the distinction between watching via Safari or Firefox and via Boxee. That may be true, but we certainly do understand it probably has to do with the studios protecting the networks and the set manufacturers just like they did when they all stonewalled DVRs until enough competition developed between satellite and cable to trigger the dissemination of free recorders to encourage switching.

The other side of the Where’s My Data Home version game that Fred is involved in is Twitter, where he has a similar investment and board role. Twitter has spent much of the last month or so rate limiting its third party developers, degrading their user experiences and in some cases, killing the add-ons outright. While it’s hard to tell whether the blame lies with outages like this week’s slowdown of Twitter messages moving to FriendFeed (near real time to 30 minutes at last word), the net effect is to raise questions about the viability of the satellite service.

FriendFeed aggregates many different activity and news streams, but Twitter produces the lion’s share of traffic to and from the smaller site. None of this would be noteworthy except that Twitter has been anything but open about how and with whom they will share “their” data. The history of Twitter’s removal of Track, acquisition of Summize search services, and recent surfacing of packaged search terms suggests the long awaited business model is tied to controlling the data pipeline, much as the studios control theirs in the case of Hulu, Boxee, iTunes et al.

Wilson commends Hulu for being open and transparent and “allowing the community to discuss and debate this decision out in the open” on the Hulu blog. He’s right about Boxee and should take his own advice to heart and encourage Twitter to do the same about user’s concerns on its site. “Open and transparent” is the first step forward to a time when users can use third party sites such as FriendFeed without fear that they will be cut off from living in the new converged media reality. Right now even Facebook looks more responsive to user concerns than Twitter.

Widget provider JS-Kit has struck a deal with software vendor Sun Microsystems to provide cross-platform widgets to Sun’s internal and external properties. JS-Kit offers rating, polling, commenting and widgets that can be ad-supported or ad-free (in which case, the company charges a monthly fee).

Widget making is appealing to enterprises. It’s not the first time businesses have outsourced widget-making to JS-Kit. WorldNow, Jet Blue, Experian, and Evite have all partnered with JS-Kit to create community-based technologies to their digital platforms. JS-Kit also recently struck a deal with AOL’s widget maker Userplane to offer each others widgets to promotes mass distribution.

With numerous partnerships and an acquisition of commenting provider Haloscan, JS-Kit has steadily grown from a commenting system to a widget platform. With over 600,000 sites and blogs using JS-Kit’s widgets, JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux says publishers have a broad reach for implementing social networking functionality now that the company using Facebook Connect and OpenID.

When Microsoft launched “Live Workspaces” last year we were sufficiently underwhelmed. But Microsoft didn’t have to wow us. The software giant could, and has been taking its time playing catch-up with web enabled productivity suites (namely Google Docs) while it continues milking the desktop software cash cow.

So far much of the competition has been centered around web apps that mimic the majority of functions users need (Google Docs, Zoho, Thinkfree, Transmedia, LiveDocuments). However, two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, are bringing web-top-like sharing and collaboration to the Microsoft Office Suite millions of people already own.

We have 200 Beta invites available here.

Their company, DocVerse, is making light-weight plugins for Microsoft office that let users share and collaboratively edit documents within Microsoft Office and on the web. Their first release is for Microsoft Powerpoint. The plugin is ideal for people looking to quickly iterate on a presentation.

DocVerse’s functionality balances the collaborative power of web-based editors and full functionality enabled by file syncing solutions (like Dropbox or Box.net).

When a user installs a plugin and creates a DocVerse account, any changes they make to a presentation linked to DocVerse is synced in near real time to a copy in the cloud. The user can then share that file through a url publicly or privately behind a login screen on their web-top Flash-based client. The viewer can also make edits or add comments to the document from the web. Each edit becomes part of a “news feed” listing all the updates the document has undergone.

Saving them updates both the web and desktop versions. If two people save edits to the same element, the owner is asked to approve the changes. Version control ensures you can always revert if you make a mistake.

While Microsoft is a clear and present competitor, DocVerse is betting they can release a better product sooner.

This past weekend, Mobile CDN made a fairly significant move in the mobile world when it streamed footage of the NBA All-Star game live over mobile phones. Why? Mobile CDN launched the first live streaming application approved by Apple and that works over any wireless network Edge, 3G and WiFi phones. Until now, Apple hasn’t officially allowed iPhones to access streaming applications.

So how did Mobile CDN break down Apple’s barriers? Mobile CDN approached streaming application, Orb, and asked the company to repurpose their existing technology to make a solution that could both be high quality and high capacity, in order to reach all iPhone users concurrently.

The first run of the streaming application did very well at Apple’s application store. The NBA All-Star Game app reached number 16 in iTunes applications, was the featured app on iPhone App Store home page (when viewed on iPhone) and was the most popular sports app at the time of the game.

Founded by mobile veteran Euan McLeod (worked on mobile at Turner Broadcasting and Limelight Networks), Mobile CDN has made a game-changing breakthrough for the iPhone. If Mobile CDN has approval from Apple to stream events live, this could be a powerful tool for many enterprises. The company said that it has signed deals with some other “large media and broadcast companies” to stream events live via the App Store, but was unable to reveal the events or companies. This partnership is also advantageous to the Apple and the iPhone, if watching events live on an iPhone becomes a mainstream phenomenon (which could very likely happen).

Sunday I finally pulled the trigger on a move I’ve been contemplating for a very long time. If you’d asked me 5 or even 10 years ago whether I’d move back to Comcast for anything except virtual dominatrix sessions, I’d have made, and lost, a sizable bet. That’s what I did on Sunday, consolidated a lot of services round Comcast and its Triple Play suite of services.

Since some point in the last century when I threw over Comcast for satellite television, we’ve been customers of Dish Network and its parent Echostar. For the past few years, we’ve held out against HDTV, but an upsell by Comcast, whose broadband service we switched to from DSL two years ago, brought us a free HD DVR and most disruptively Comcast on demand channels for only some $20 a month more.

Once inside our perimeter, Comcast fanned out and attacked us in several key areas. The DVR and our only HD screen in the living room became the locus of the high value all-family shows we valued. But what I hadn’t immediately realized was that HD eats dramatically into the 20-hour recording time, forcing us to triage shows toward the more common denominator of the family and inexorably toward the on-demand cache.

Comcast on-demand is the frontier of media change, where pricing models vie not just with free and varied network strategies but also the computer and disruptors such as Hulu. NBC charges $.99 sense for the last 4 editions of 30 Rock, but you can watch that same range on Hulu for the price of watching some on-demand commercials. The list of free network shows is growing on CBS and ABC, including the delicious Damages on FX.

We’ve tapered off on the cable political shows, but with the Dish DVRs and their more plentiful 80 hours storage we could warehouse them. Olbermann and Maddow are now released on podcast, so switching to Comcast has become more doable. The basic come-on package that brought Comcast in only includes HBO for HD movies, so the combination of family consensus, limited recording time, and having to pay for all the Dish movie channels in POTS (plain old television stations) resolution began to grate.

Of course, these cable guys know exactly what is going on here, what they can charge and offer to get us to think about switching, and then how to push us over the edge. I’m convinced that they are behind the worldwide financial crisis, finally forcing us to actually add up the cost of all these services and then give us a “deal” that cost, in our case, $55 a month less.

Now we’re an all-Comcast household, with phone, broadband, and video. Somehow I’ve gone over to a world where we used to scream with hatred at unexplained outages that were rivaled only by hold times to have the privilege of informing them that service was interrupted. To be fair (can’t believe I’m being fair about Comcast) the pilot installation was remarkable for its stability; broadband service promised (and ultimately delivered) substantially higher speeds than the AT&T DSL service before it, but suffered for several months before settling down.

But the real reason I even entertained the notion of the switch was because of the new dynamics of the network. It’s not so much that Comcast has to maintain a reasonable standard of quality in the face of real competition from satellite, although that certainly has helped bring cable back with its bundled services and HD coverage. More importantly, Net services such as Netflix and Slingbox have made it possible to route around both cable and satellite for all but breaking news.

No, wait, breaking news is flipping too. CBS Interactive makes 60 Minutes available on its site soon after broadcast, and I listened to the ground to air chatter of the Flight that went into the Hudson from a Dan Farber Tweet hours before I saw it the next morning on the Today show.

Then there’s the loop back to the cloud, the upstream link. A week ago, we recorded a NewsGang Live discussion streamed live on Ustream. NewsGang combines a phone conference call with video from my MacBook Air, an open source free video switching tool called CamTwist, and another open source audio switching tool called Soundflower to create the video stream. Ustream has released an iPhone app that streams the show live where WiFi is available, but not yet over 3G.

In the process of getting all these services to route over the MacBook AIr, I’d somehow forgotten to turn on recording of the conference call audio, but luckily the video was recording to the Ustream server. When I stopped recording at the end of the conversation, a Save prompt offered an Upload to YouTube option. Two hours later the show was on YouTube, which sent an RSS item to FriendFeed, which forwarded it to Twitter. Clicking the Twitter link on the iPhone plays the show over 3G.

Even in these early days, two-way realtime media is now available. The former gatekeepers are now competing to provide services to enable this elastic network. You could call it cloud computing and you’d be right. As with PCs and consumer electronics, it’s not so much that costs drop as that capabilities grow. The dial, which used to be set on receive only, is now moving toward the center, where straight up, symmetrical services, is the new black.

Like voice in Triple Play, satellite needs to be bundled to survive. Not coincidentally, Echostar’s Charles Ergen has been buying up SIrius/XM notes in hopes of forcing a takeover either by him or, as now appears likely DIrectTV owner John Malone. Satellite has no play upstream, and a satellite consolidation will likely be just the first step in bundling the Net to complete the roundtrip.

UPDATE: FileSociety’s services are not free. Global Edit charges a yearly fee as well as transfer and storage fees. But the company claims its pricing structure is cost-effective.

GlobalEdit, image management system that provides creative workflow tools has launched a digital file sharing service called FileSociety and already has some big-name early adopters. FileSociety allows enterprises the freedom to control and transfer digital video, image and graphic files at fast speeds. FileSociety appears to be a replacement for the former way of transferring large digital files, FTP, which was often slow and unreliable. The significance of this innovation is that businesses will be able to harness existing web connections to transfer cumbersome files instead of using FTP software.

FileSociety’s uses Aspera’s patented Fasp transport technology to provide secure transfers and even boasts speeds being 100 times faster that FTP applications. McGraw Hill, Victoria’s Secret, Showtime, Saatchi & Saatchi and Warner Brothers are all users of FileSociety’s new technology. And the glowing testimony speaks for itself:

Carl Hixson Vice President, Digital Asset Management McGraw-Hill Companies said:

FileSociety opens entirely new opportunities for our company. A typical layout file that would previously have taken 30 minutes to transfer to a design office in Asia now takes 11 seconds. Multiply this across the volume of files that we move and it’s a game changer. The system is also under the control of our creative staff which gives them the freedom and speed to take control of the production process. This is an important innovation.

A common gambit in the open standards arena is the invite-only event. This is where a group of developers, marketing types, and entrepreneurs decide the time is right to codify their work in a momentum play. Such a moment presented itself this week when an OpenID UI event was held at the Facebook offices in Palo Alto.

OpenID has achieved extraordinary amounts of promotion, contributions, and adoption in the past year. The group presenting this private event was in large part responsible for this success, but with some important caveats. Open standards is as much if not more about politics than technology, and some of the political players such as Dave Winer and Marc Canter were left out of the loop.

Also, the members of the core group include folks who work for some of the major platform vendors in the space, and it can become difficult to separate out the open aspects of this subtle world from the spin that inevitably accompanies the information and innovation. The stated purpose of this particular event was to encourage a discussion about user interface issues in hopes of moving more quickly and effectively than a larger open group.

After some pointed comments by Winer and a FriendFeed thread, the event was “opened” to streaming video and a chat room for feedback. A back channel email thread started by Canter added some interested bystanders including some participation from the Identity Internet Workshop where OpenID and OAuth were given significant support in the early days. But those in charge of the event held firm on the original closed intent of the session, discussing further more open events but offering no commitments.

Aside from the obvious irony of a closed event about Open standards, the actual procedings produced an exciting demo of an experimental wiring up of Plaxo and Google in two clicks. While there was a tenuous relationship to a UI experience, the success of a project that had been demonstrated in an earlier open event at Digg headquarters produced palpable optimism that real progress was being made.

In retrospect, the organizers succeeded in promoting their agenda, with all of its attendant good vibes about open source, open standards, and a more up-to-date process for bringing competitors into alignment in the Web 3.0 space. But they failed by making the mistake of connecting their valuable and generous efforts to a process that at a minimum brings their motives into question.

Why should such a meeting be private? It raises the question: who is not invited, and why. The answer that came back was one of purpose and expertise, that those who were actively working in the space would be welcome. Coders, marketers, organizers, representatives of major platforms. Makes sense, but why would those not invested in the event want to come in any case. Well, because they are invested.

The history of open standards is rife with examples of a curious alliance between the media and the outsiders of a process. First, it is interesting, newsworthy, challenging of orthodoxy and entropy, the very forces that retard more hierarchical organizations such as the ones the Open Stack organizers are trying to improve upon. And again, if this needs to be repeated, the history of profoundly disruptive technologies such as XML, RSS, Twitter, and indeed everything about the current Web x.0 landscape comes in significant part from the combination of the bigcos and the so-called outsiders to the process.

It’s more than a little ironic that the organizers of this event include Chris Messina, whose central role in routing around similar issues with private events led to BarCamp and all of his fine work in the Open stack. His response to concerns from those not invited (a large group if you take into account the world population) was to categorize (my paraphrase) those concerns as noise. Messina’s election to the board of the OpenID Foundation is deserved and a significant moment in the evolution of his and the others’ efforts, but now is not the time to climb on board the Ark and pull up the ladders.

The 92% demo and its clear signal that users are ready for coherent agreements with vendors about who owns their data (users) is a signal moment in the open evolution of the network. At a time when Microsoft is mandating openness in its core strategy, when Google and other vendors are profiting handsomely on technologies built via open source, when YouTube and Ustream and a thousand endpoints are blooming with direct worldwide access at virtually no cost to ideas, innovation, and a way out of this economic disaster we’re bearing — now is the time for systems that include rather than pick and choose winners.

Of course, you can go the old route and lock down the intellectual property, choose your business partners and favored suppliers, and so on. But if you build your enterprise on an open API platform and then close the barn door, the after-taste can be difficult to get rid of. Trying to hold back the Web doesn’t work, and those who succeed by understanding that have to renew their vows each day. That’s the ticket for admission to the Open Process.

IBM is advancing its aggressive cloud computing strategy with a string of announcements this week. The most recent was IBM’s partnership with Amazon Web Services to allow access of its software to solution providers using Amazon’s cloud computing applications. The partnerships offers pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products through Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service. The partnership makes sense because Amazon has been an early leader in the cloud computing sphere, and IBM is making strides towards becoming the master of cloud computing. Microsoft is readying its own cloud-computing software service, Windows Azure, that will allow developers to create services and applications that are supported by Microsoft’s data centers.

IBM is also providing free Amazon Machine Images of its software applications for development and test purposes, in an effort to enable software developers to quickly build applications based on IBM software within Amazon EC2. IBM also said that its Tivoli service management software will be used on Amazon EC2 to help clients control the infrastructures in the cloud computing sphere.

Amazon expanded on the reasoning behind this deal on its Web Services blog:

“Existing IBM customers can use the licenses they’ve already bought while still taking advantage of the elastic nature of AWS to handle spikes and peaks. These licenses retain their value and can be used to handle steady state processing needs, with more licenses available (on an hourly basis) in the cloud for peak times. This clean and innovative new model should clear up some of the uncertainty which can cause potential users to think twice before jumping in to cloud computing. “

So the implication here is that IBM is using Amazon as supplier to play in the cloud computing sphere and is also pricing the transition so that it is easy for existing customers to switch to cloud computing. IBM has been making aggressive moves towards making its mark in the cloud computing sphere, including its recent partnership with Juniper Networks to offer cloud computing services to IBM clients, which we reported on earlier this week. For more information on cloud computing, please join TechCrunch and TechCrunchIT for a round table discussion and meeting on cloud computing on February 27, 2009.