Stealth startup Makara is launching publicly tonight with its cloud-based application deployment and management platform. Formerly known as WebappVM, Makara has raised angel funding from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The startup also raised $6 million last year from Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures.
Rather than offer a system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara’s’s cloud-based platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product, which is self-service and self-managing, is available for free on its site.
Keeping tabs on the performance of an SMB’s network is a necessary, and often laborious, task. System admins need to be able to know if and where problems are occurring on their network. Network monitoring tools are useful because they can alert a user when a pipe is clogged; however, receiving an alert will not help a system admin identify the source of the clog. Packet analyzers solve this problem when used for specific links, but deploying and monitoring them throughout an entire network would exceed most SMB’s resources given the overhead. As a result, many companies are turning to flow analyzers, which capture and process data from flow technologies, such as Cisco’s NetFlow and sFlow, to monitor their network.
Plixer International, a company devoted to measuring network performance, is deploying significant updates to its SaaS flow analysis tool, Scrutinizer. The updates are designed to save system administrators time by creating a new reporting tool, the matrix, as well as by correlating data across the routers and switches; instead of simply giving views from individual routers. Additionally, the updates will provide statistics from Cisco ASA firewalls and have full support for NBAR definitions.
Fear of iPad is now beginning to circulate with increasing velocity. It seems folks are realizing that regardless of how many things were left off the machine, it still will be bought by virtually everybody on the planet who cares about tech and its show business arm, social media. That means it’s going to be a huge galactic success. That in turn means we have to be very afraid of Uncle Steve owning our data.
Dave Winer suggests this in his second of two posts in a row. Of course, Dave alternates between decrying the locked trunk aspects of the system’s design and crying wolf about the end result when all these mistakes end up as a raging success. In fact, Dave may have hit on an unintended truth in all of this debunking. Namely, it’s what’s been left out that really defines the iPad.
Take Flash. Please. When Jobs quarantined it on the iPhone, we all felt it was a tactical thing, more political than technical. Of course, it’s never been technical, even now when it’s kept off the iPad because it is responsible for such a great percentage of crashes in Safari or whatever. Actually, Flash is being kept off the iPlatform because It Sucks. Google’s HTML 5 liturgy is another contiguous example of how to sell the same message, but enquiring minds still want to know why we need a plug-in from a company that makes its real money from Photoshop.
The Adobe guys are terrific engineers who’ve built a wonderful ecosystem off of a hole in the Arctic Circle of computing called cross-platform ubiquity. But what happens when the OS sucks in the functionality of such a play, as Windows did to Symantec with desktop replacements, compression, and various system management utilities? Oh, and security (remember Bill Gates’ parting push to protect us from the network.) Most recently I heard from Symantec in the form of a Facebook giveaway or some such. And Google now produces software, services, browsers, and OS under the same plan. They can afford it; Adobe can’t.
So it comes down to this: if a site hosts Flash, they are making the same choice WordPerfect made in building an OS/2 version instead of a Windows one. This was when Microsoft was finally getting Windows up above the radiation layer of DOS, where WordPerfect had a stranglehold on the word processing market. IBM’s version of the nextgen OS was superior in many technical ways, but Microsoft had more money than God and they threw it at IBM and its DOS legacy stakeholders like Google did with Office a generation later.
There are certainly good arguments to be made for why Flash has legs, but unfortunately for those who make them they’re bucking Apple and its faux competitor Google. When you click on a YouTube icon in the browser, it launches on Flash. When you click on it in iPlatform it launches on HTML5, or rather the only part Flash cares about. YouTube owns most of the video market, so the user experience is that YouTube works everywhere. User bets on YouTube. They don’t care about HTML 5 or Flash, they want to see the movie, thanks goodbye.
Same with multitasking. Music evidently plays in the background with photos. Remember cut and paste on iPhone 1? No. With iPhone OS 3.0 they fixed that. Remember no video streaming? They fixed that. Didn’t have to buy a new one to fix that stuff, only to upgrade the speed and wait out AT&T’s buildout. Multitasking? Who knows whether we’ll even have to wait past the 3G iPad launch or even care, since we do most of our work inside multi-tabbed browsers. In other words, virtualize multitasking on the server side.
No USB. It’s going to be Christmas in July for the peripheral manufacturers plugging into the charging connector. No camera? If my iPhone can send clips to the Ustream site where they are automagically rendered in H.264 for live streaming, then maybe they can make their way into the Pad over WiFi or god forbid Bluetooth. Or a little clip-on at the top of the screen. The MacBook AIr is being componetized while undergoing an OS transplant. Goodbye Flash, no really. They’ll be able to hang on the way Microsoft demoed Silverlight video streaming down to the iPhone. The portability layer moves to the dev tools.
When we look at Google we think Cloud, but what’s really surprising is how we don’t notice how Cloud Apple has become. The magic of streaming has found its home with this device and the ones to quickly follow. Nothing is left out; it’s been moved to the Cloud where the bits are assembled and streamed back down. If there was anything left out of the iPad announcement, it was a better way of communicating how powerful this platform is and is becoming. No wonder developers are already complaining about only having 90 days to write the first wave of software. Contrary to what Dave Winer warns, they’re more afraid of being left out than locked in.
The Gillmor Gang on the iPad, with Nicholas Carr, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, and Kevin Marks. Recorded live Thursday, January 28, 2009.
The blog post, unambiguously titled “Building iPad Applications with Flash”, is mostly just to remind people of the company’s Packager for iPhone product, which will enable developers to make Flash apps function on the iPhone / iPod Touch through a work-around whereby Flash apps can be easily converted into iPhone apps using Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Adobe also published a post on its Adobe Flash Platform blog addressing the apparent lack of Flash support in the iPad.
Cloudkick, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that offers a free server management system to businesses, is rolling out its freemium model and additional features. Cloudkick provides detailed graphs on the health of your servers, and tools to categorize and keep information about what each server is doing. Cloudkick’s dashboard allows you to easily add or remove servers from Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting, and VPS.NET and then monitor an unlimited amount of instances. You can see all the servers in one place, and color-code and label each server.
Cloudkick will check whether servers are alive and functioning and then alert you, via email, if servers go down. Cloudkick also provides data on bandwith and other metrics on servers in easy to use graphs and tables, allowing you a visual snapshot of server activity. You can also access servers straight from web and can run commands through your web browser remotely, which is handy when you are trying to manage servers from another computer
Back in December at Le Web, Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced that Twitter would be holding the first conference of their own in 2010. Today, they’ve unveiled the details. Called Chirp, the conference will take place April 14 and 15 in San Francisco. Notably, this is exactly one week before Facebook’s big developer conference, f8, which will be April 21 and 22.
Day 1 of the Twitter conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. This day will contain the meat of the schedule. Highlighted talking points include OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, and the product roadmap. Right now, the only highlighted speakers include Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as well as COO Dick Costolo and Sarver, but you can expect more to be added. Day 2 will see the event move to the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason for a 24-hour “Hack Day” for Twitter third-party developers. Naturally, there will also be a big party after the conference with “free beer, food and music all night long.” No word on any performers yet, but you can be sure that much like f8, Twitter will bring in some big names to make their community happy.
We’ve only got a few days to go before Steve Jobs tells us what we’re spending our money on this year. From all the leaks and positioning announcements, it appears we’re being pushed into the Pay Zone. The NY Times, the top four or five TV shows, the embargo-free bestseller. The bet is we’ll pay for same-day-as access to discretionary consumption of media. I think he’s right. But is that as big a bang as the iPhone?
In and of itself, the tApplet does not change the world or even our corner of the world. But just as with the disruption triggered by the iPhone, this new disruption will move beyond the carriers and into the center of the creative core of the netertainment and information industries. In turn, this new wave of video, music, and text will quickly overturn some of the major stakeholders and rewrite how we spend our time at work and play.
It’s hard to think far enough back to remember how we used to use our computer time before realtime stole onto the stage. Back before my MacBook Air, which turned every other computer in the place into an appliance: the MacBook Pro for rendering video, the iMac for Web site design, the PC for nothing. Back when software was something I paid for, music something I shopped for, television something I set a timer for.
The MacBook Air’s disruption was the strategic removal of an internal CD/DVD drive. It declared independence from physical media, and bootstrapped existing devices to serve as feed machines for the rare need to rip a CD or backup a file for sneakernet. USB drives quickly eliminated even that requirement, and the move to cloud services sealed the deal.
Streaming media rushed quickly into the vacuum of tangible media. Once the location of the actual bits was made irrelevant by look-ahead caching, we quickly learned to validate those services which allowed us to share pointers to the material rather than the downloadable enclosures. Identity online became the control point for micropayments, and the incentive for providing behavior and social signals in return for discounts and sponsored bundling. WiFi became the razor, and the streams the blades.
In effect, we are now selling our gestures into the stream hoping to build up enough credit to buy these new devices as they reach the intersection of battery life, broadband, and social filtering. The overt and implicit affinity groups are the nodes in this realtime auction, harvesting the most elegant and intuitive of their tribe to finance access to the streams most relevant and informative of the next day’s work. Like dreams, these affinity surges work through the underlying themes, fears, yearning, and hopes we share.
Literally, what this means is a renaissance of the kind felt in the Sixties, when music, film, and political discourse conspired in a furnace of creativity. Today these devices are mere portals into this next wave, important only because of what they help to make possible. The iPhone’s genius was in combining the elements to produce a device capable of accelerating use of the network in realtime, to signal the arrival, the existence, of valuable things. Virtualized, homogenized into streams, predicatively cached to preserve the illusion of stability, voice activated to teach the network who we are.
Google has emerged as a great validator not just of the cloud model but the inspiration of the Jobs model: that we can imagine our way into the future we can only glimpse at any given moment. With the iPhone it was brain dead obvious that if the idea could be instantiated, the economic forces could be harnessed to improve the experience as more desired it. The more Apple and Google and Amazon succeed, the more they need to compete with their own success to survive and prosper.
Three machines: the Kindle, the Nexus One, the Apple tablet. Each offers something essential to the power of the creatives who will fuel this disruption. The Kindle is simple, cheap, battery frugal. The Nexus One is multi-tasking, cloud-fueled, realtime empowered. The Apple machine bridges the media across the digital shoals, most likely straddling the intersection of the creative arts now floundering in late night wars, 360 deals, and the great archives we’ve lost the right to share. These are the pre-existing conditions, just before another Golden Age is upon us.
The Gillmor Gang — Andrew Keen, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Sam Whitmore, Dan Farber, and Kevin Marks — on the Tablet Wars. Recorded live, Friday, January 22, 2010.
Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.
According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed.
As companies mature from fledgling startups into small and medium-sized businesses, it becomes harder to capture and analyze ideas coming from within an organization. Email and spreadsheets are the usual tools used to deal with internal collaboration, but these modes have no way of bringing the best ideas to the top: many times they are lost in the shuffle. Spigit, creators of an enterprise collaboration platform, has come out with a new SaaS product, WE by Spigit, aimed at addressing the collaboration problems small businesses face.
Often times when an enterprise software company moves downstream, they simply strip down many core functions of their enterprise product in order to make it affordable for SMB’s. WE by Spigit has additional features in their enterprise model, such as prediction and idea trading markets, but the main functions at the heart of their service remain unchanged.
When a company purchases WE by Spigit, they are able to create an “innovation community” where their employees (up to 500), are able to contribute and collaborate on projects immediately. Spigit employs constantly evolving algorithms in their system, which, when added to a thumbs up/down feedback system, creates a reputation value for a user. These values are useful because administrators will see topics and ideas which have the highest reputation rise to the top. Each community is hosted on Spigit’s servers.
Last week, Google announced a new feature for Google Docs that may be the closest thing to the fabled GDrive that we may ever get: the ability to upload and store any kind of file to your Google Docs account. This is a big deal, because it allows you to use Google as a storage service for the first time. But Google only went half way — they let you store the documents, but they didn’t actually build any desktop clients to help you sync them. For that, Google teamed with a handful of third parties. Today sees the launch of the most interesting of those: a desktop syncing client called Memeo Connect that lets you manage your Google Docs account from your desktop, giving you offline access to your Google Docs and making it easy to sync your files across multiple computers.
Most people probably aren’t very familiar with Memeo, but there’s a good chance you’ve come across one of their products at some point — the company makes the local backup software that comes with most external hard drives. But Memeo has also recently been offering some cloud-based file transfer services, which is probably why Google approached them last year about building a local client for the upcoming Google Docs storage feature. Memeo has built native applications for Mac and Windows (both of which are available today), and the service will cost $9/user per year. That’s on top of the $50/year fee you pay Google to become a Premier account holder (which you need to upload files).
We’ve only got a few days to go before Steve Jobs tells us what we’re spending our money on this year. From all the leaks and positioning announcements, it appears we’re being pushed into the Pay Zone. The NY Times, the top four or five TV shows, the embargo-free bestseller. The bet is we’ll pay for same-day-as access to discretionary consumption of media. I think he’s right. But is that as big a bang as the iPhone?
