Building webscale or cloud applications is hampered by figuring out ways to spread tasks out over thousands of computers without slowing things down, or requiring too many people to keep things running. Virtualization and faster storage helps, as do new databases (GigaOM Pro sub req’d) and caching techniques, but right now folks are trying to adapt how they program computers to reflect that one has now become many.

Bloom, a programming language created at the University of California, Berkeley by a group led by Joseph Hellerstein, is one such effort. Bloom was profiled this week as one of the top 10 emerging technologies by MIT’s Technology Review, because it could help cloud computing continue to scale. Here’s how, according to Technology Review:

The challenge is that these languages process data in static batches. They can’t process data that is constantly changing, such as readings from a network of sensors. The solution, ­Hellerstein explains, is to build into the language the notion that data can be dynamic, changing as it’s being processed. This sense of time enables a program to make provisions for data that might be arriving later — or never.

Hellerstein also gave an extensive interview to HPC in the Cloud this week about what Bloom is and the problem it’s trying to solve. From that interview:

To put it simply, our what our work is trying to do is start with the data itself and get people to talk about what should happen to the data step-by-step through a program without ever having them specify at all how many machines are involved. So, when you ask a query of a database you describe what data you want—not how to get it.

The interview lays out how this programming effort  came about (building network protocols) and who might care most about using Bloom (Amazon, Google or anyone with big data needs), but for me the best part of it was how Hellerstein underscored that the ability to harness a heck of a lot of servers and treat them as a single computer is the next big shift in information technology.

We can call it cloud computing, webscale applications or merely bigger data centers, but the key element here is that the hardware has gone social in ways that require many-to-many ways of communication and delivering instructions to the processors — inside the servers, between the servers, and soon, between data centers. The exciting aspect of this shift is that while larger companies like Google, Yahoo and Amazon are innovating, there is plenty of room for startups with a new appliance, server, networking technology or chunk of code to make waves — and hopefully, money.

For more on the effort, please check out the FAQ’s Hellerstein has posted on his blog.

Image courtesy of Flickr user tibchris

There has been plenty of talk about what Facebook would announce at the f8 conference this week, but the full magnitude of what the company has in mind didn’t really hit home until after the keynote by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a related presentation by Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor (Liz has a great overview of the issues here).

Both carried a single, unmistakable message: Facebook wants to own your activity on the Internet. Zuckerberg did his best to portray this as a great thing for users, but the corollary is inescapable: Facebook will be everywhere you are, watching what you do, keeping track of that data, and talking about what you’re doing to your friends and companies you “like.” A quick survey of the web shows that some seem to see this as a great idea (“Hey, I can show lots of cool stuff to my friends!”) and some are less enthusiastic (“Facebook is going to be following me and tracking my every movement!”).

The reaction from some observers on Twitter was positive. The LA Times said that it would “make sharing easier,” while Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group said, “A world that is more open and connected — always a good thing (despite some snarky comments); thanks FB for pushing open!!!” Her fellow Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang was less enthused, however, describing it as Facebook’s “crusade of colonization.” The New York Times’s response was somewhat more tempered, calling it “Facebook to Go.”

Silicon Alley Insider called it a plan to “infiltrate the web,” and Silicon Beat said Facebook wants to “conquer the world.” Kevin Marks of BT, a former engineer with Technorati, said that “Facebook wants to replace links between sites with a database stored on their servers that they control access to,” and Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of Gnip and MyBlogLog) quipped: “Coldplay’s ‘when I ruled the world’ playing at F8. Interesting, if appropriate, choice.” Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Media Entrepreneurship summed it up by saying that “Facebook wants to be the Internet,” while Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, said “we might look back at the 00’s as the golden age of the web, when we were ruled by Google, a benign dictator.”

As Liz has pointed out, the key to what Facebook wants to do is to control the hooks and tools that allow it to understand and participate in the social web, the “people-centered” web. By watching and indexing your “likes” and the likes of millions of others — Zuckerberg said that within 24 hours of his keynote, there would a billion “Like” buttons and plugins around the web — the company can create an incredibly powerful map of the relationships between people and their friends, and between people and the things they like, whether they are movies or bands or dishwashing detergent.

That’s a tremendous power to have, and the youthful CEO of Facebook makes it seem friendly and appealing. Why wouldn’t you want to share with your friends? But to use a popular phrase from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope Zuckerberg chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg

Any debate over open vs. closed systems has to touch on open-source software and the ways in which companies are attempting to build code as a community effort, while still profiting from it in some way. So I chatted with Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu, about how it walks the line between spending to support open-source software and finding a business model that works.

Canonical’s 330 employees are responsible for maintaining, supporting and selling service for Ubuntu, an open-source version of the Linux operating system for servers, desktops and computer manufacturers. Some 120-150 of the Canonical employees contribute directly to the new releases of the software that come out every six months, and most of the company’s revenue comes from supporting enterprise server customers and makers of computers that want to put Ubuntu on desktops. Consumers also download the software, but few pay Canonical for support. The company is not yet profitable.

Shuttleworth believes that in order to develop a strong business model around an open approach, one has to create an open option early, ideally through a strong standardization process and one also needs to have a lot of different open-source projects fighting it out.  For example, in the operating system world there wasn’t a strong history of open alternatives, which meant that Ubuntu had to out-open its proprietary competition, which has high costs.

In that way it has pushed Canonical perhaps further out toward open on the spectrum. Shuttleworth calculates the direct costs of being so open as bringing people together in ways that empowers them and makes them feel like members of a community, as well as reaching out and putting in place the infrastructure to create a company. However, there are indirect costs as well.

“There is a myth that being open is necessarily more efficient and cheaper, but there are no hordes of people showing up to do the hard stuff,” Shuttleworth says. “Occasionally wonderful, magical things happen — really incredible things do happen, like people show up unexpectedly with brilliant ideas — but it’s still hard and expensive and you still have to be willing to do all the hard and expensive things and do it in an open fashion. And you’re still likely to be accused of being open only when it’s convenient.”

He points to the cloud computing market as one that tends to give a lot of lip service toward openness but where a lack of a big standardization effort and robust open source competition could lead to a relatively closed ecosystem.

“The basic story there is pretty bad at the moment,” Shuttleworth says. He notes that proprietary infrastructure, hypervisors and even the APIs and ways data is stored can lock folks into one cloud for life. “We need real open alternatives early in the process, making it possible for people to build own cloud infrastructure that responds to the same APIs that Amazon’s do.”

He’s accepted that Amazon Web Services’ APIs for its web services, while not created through an open standards group, have become a de facto standard and said that it’s more efficient to build open-source code around Amazon APIs rather than try to develop new ones for accessing the cloud. Canonical has a partnership agreement with Eucalyptus, which offers open-source software to create an AWS-compatible cloud, where people can use Ubuntu  and Eucalyptus to create their own cloud computing platform. But Shuttleworth would like to see more open-source options other than Eucalyptus  for building out a cloud computing service of your own.

At the platform-as-a-service level, the issue around openness will be around moving data from cloud to cloud easily. There’s room there for an open standard or open databases, he said. But at every level, when considering building a business around open source software, he he believes that “you want a common and clear standard with competing open source versions using that standard.”

That keeps proprietary vendors at bay, and gives the companies building a business around the open-source software a chance to decide where they want to be on the open-to-closed spectrum. But it also introduces the prospect of fragmentation, which we’ll leave for a later post.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

For Open Cloud Computing, Look Inside Your Data Center

Is there a method to the madness that Apple uses when choosing cities for retail locations? After reading an Experian Simmons report that ranks designated market areas by the number of Apple customers in each, I suspect as much.

Using data collected with its Experian’s Micromarketer Generation3 analytics tool, Experian Simmons created an index that calculates a consumer propensity to own or use Apple products. A geographic market with an index score of 100 indicates the middle ground; higher scores reflect an area where consumers are more likely to use Apple wares while those with lower indices are less likely to do so. As the numbers make clear, markets with the highest scores generally have a greater number of Apple retail locations.

Source: Experian Simmons

Some notable markets from the report:

San Francisco – Oakland – San Jose, Calif. — With the highest index of 149, consumers in this area are nearly 50 percent more likely to buy and use Apple products than the average U.S. consumer and as such, is home to 12 retail locations. Given that this is where Apple’s headquarters is located, this makes perfect sense.
Boston — 31.3 percent of the Boston adult population uses Apple, earning it a spot just behind Apple’s home turf with an index of 145. Number of Apple retail locations: 11
New York City — Nearly one in three adults uses an Apple product — nearly 4.9 million people — truly justifying the Big Apple name. An index of 141 might be worth many Apple Stores, but the four in New York are spread out to attract the most traffic in densely populated areas.
Bluefield – Beckley – Oak Hill, W. Va. — With the lowest index score of 41, residents here won’t find an Apple Store within the state. Instead, they’d have to travel over 200 miles to either North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia or Pennsylvania for the Apple retail experience.

One could easily take a chicken-and-egg approach to the data and argue that perhaps there are more Apple customers in certain areas because there are more retail locations to begin with. I don’t think that’s the case, though. Customers from any market can simply purchase Apple products online — but folks in West Virginia don’t seem to be doing so.

I have little doubt that adding a retail location helps Apple’s sales, but I’m inclined to believe that the company puts more of its stores in markets where it already has a captive audience. And Apple stores are also service centers for Apple products — adding stores where you don’t have products to service may not be the best strategy for growth. Instead of repeating the mistake made by many retailers by building a store and hoping for audience, Apple builds the audience which helps support the store.

Twiiter, at its first-ever developers conference — known as Chirp — which is being held in San Francisco had its co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams provided some hard numbers behind the growth and size of the social network. Here are some of the most important ones we’ve collected so far:

105,779,710 registered users

3 billion API calls a day

175 employees

600 million searches per day

300,000 new users per day

180 million unique visitors per month

37 percent of active users use Twitter on their phones

75 percent of traffic comes from outside Twitter.com

100,000 registered applications

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): As Twitter Develops, Developers Quiver in Fear

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user lrargerich

SpringSource, a division of VMware, has purchased the open-source cloud messaging company behind the RabbitMQ software. The value of the deal was undisclosed, but the purchase of Rabbit Technologies Ltd. is yet another effort by VMware to become the operating system for enterprise clouds (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) and add value to its commoditized hypervisor. It’s also the latest example of a company selling proprietary software buying up an open-source software company aimed at the cloud.

Cloud providers use RabbitMQ to create a messaging server allowing them to quickly manage the flow of messages between applications. It can also be used to notify users of a web service when content on the site has changed, such as when someone posts a Facebook photo and the service sends an email out notifying all a user’s friends.

The RabbitMQ code was created by Cohesive FT and LShift based on the relatively young AMQP standards effort backed by major banks, Cisco and a handful of smaller companies. As hardware is virtualized, translating some of the network equipment like load balancers into software allow services running on the virtualized hardware to scale better. Hopefully we’ll learn more about SpringSource, RabbitMQ and VMware’s plans for becoming the cloud OS when VMware CEO Paul Maritz speaks at our Structure conference in June.

Introduction to AMQP Messaging with RabbitMQ
View more presentations from Dmitriy Samovskiy.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joshua Davis

Amazon Web Services has launched its Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which allows developers to create a push notification system for applications. The service allows companies to deliver messages to customers of their applications or even to other applications in a couple of different formats, among them HTTP and email. Amazon SNS could be used for system administrators in an IT department (notifying clients if they’re hitting a certain limit on storage capacity or that latency on their service is too high), or it could be used to build out notifications for mobile applications, such as letting consumers when friends check into a location, or when they have new email.

Developers using the service pay per instance, as with all Amazon cloud products. The price includes a per-request, notification delivery and data transfer fee, but developers can get started with Amazon SNS for free. Each month, Amazon SNS customers get the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests, the first 100,000 notifications over HTTP and the first 1,000 notifications over email free. After that, prices range from 6 cents to $2 per 100,000 messages sent for delivery and 8-15 cents per gigabyte of data transferred.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req’d):Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Siacoso (aka SC fiasco)

Before a dramatic split last August that saw Google CEO Eric Schmidt booted from the Apple board, Apple and Google had been the best of friends. Now that the two titans are broken up, it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple will buddy up with Facebook.

Apple and Google once shared a common enemy — Microsoft — and had different enough products and goals to coexist symbiotically. But with Google creating and selling Android devices as a direct competitor to the iPhone, swooping in to buy companies like AdMob under Apple’s nose and bringing the FCC in over anti-competitive maneuverings in iPhone app rejections, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has rallied his troops by calling bullsh*t on Google.

See our infographic on the chronology of the Google-Apple breakup

The situation poses a promising opportunity for other existing and emerging technology powerhouses. Who will be Apple’s new most-favored nation? It probably won’t be Amazon, given that little issue of the iPad and the iTunes Store. It could potentially be Microsoft, which is ironically looking for friends as it faces up Google in search and productivity products. But it’s clear that Apple holds grudges. How about Yahoo or AOL for their reach? They may have more baggage than assets. At this point signs and logic are pointing to Apple’s new best friend being Facebook.

TechCrunch reported earlier this week based on uncited sources that Apple will soon add Facebook Connect integration to iTunes. I’ve heard the same thing, and further that Facebook could become the social layer on top of the Apple experience. It would be similar to but broader than the way Google Maps is integrated into location information across iPhone applications — with deep implications for personalization and easy authentication across the user experience and for app developers. Instead of that crappy experience of leaving every app to go to the web to log in to Facebook Connect, you could integrate your Apple and Facebook accounts once, directly.

Apple, which has completely missed out on the social web, would get a huge leg up with the web’s premium social service. And the partnership could be just as helpful for Facebook (which, of course, has positioned itself squarely against Google as well), in terms of enabling commerce.

Facebook Connect on the iPhone today

That’s because the real prize here, for both Facebook and Apple, is authenticated payments for digital and real-world goods. Probably the single most important alliance to be brokered today is the connection between users’ online identity and their bank accounts. Spending money online and encouraging your friends to follow your lead is a huge market (here’s the obligatory call-back to the problematic but perhaps just before-its-time Facebook Beacon product). The Facebook social graph plus iTunes’ 125 million credit card accounts would be formidable. With their powers combined it would be much harder for PayPal, Google and Amazon to compete.




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 Facebook and Apple have long been chummy, with some of the earliest corporate participation on the site being the “Apple Students” group, which dated back to at least 2006 and foreshadowed the current Fan Page product. And funnily enough, just like Apple has lagged on social, Facebook has lagged on music.

Facebook already has the beginnings of an alliance with PayPal to allow international advertisers to pay without credit cards (PayPal says it has more than 81 million active accounts). But as TechCrunch points out, Apple’s Lala acquisition could help be the connector between the two companies, given the music startup’s previous experience working with Facebook on allowing users to gift songs.

Still, there’s one indicator that Facebook and Apple are definitely not on the same page yet. At launch, there was no Facebook iPad application — an obvious fit for the device — and someone on Apple’s crack app review team let through a paid Facebook rip-off app that fooled and confused customers last weekend until Facebook had it shut down for trademark infringement.

Photo of Steve Jobs by Curious Lee. Mark Zuckerberg by Deney Tereio via Flickr, Under CC License.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

With the iPad, Apple Takes Google to the Mat

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

There’s no point in worrying about your reputation anymore, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has decided; everything will eventually find its way into the public sphere anyway. Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson, however, thinks there is a way to manage your reputation, namely having your community of friends and those who know you through social networks defend you. Pete Kazanjy says his new service Unvarnished, a social network for reputation management that launched yesterday, takes something from both of those ideas.

Unlike LinkedIn, which gives a user ultimate control over what appears on their profile, Unvarnished takes the same approach as Yelp does to restaurants: Anyone can create a profile for any person and then review them, at which point the person being reviewed can “claim” their profile. They can’t delete or vote on negative reviews they’ve received, but they can respond to them — and they can encourage their friends, coworkers and social network followers to vote on them or provide their own.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Unvarnished is that the reviews are anonymous (Kazanjy prefers to say that the reviewer’s identity has been “obscured”) so that you never know, for example, who exactly provided that two-star rating. Although it seems like the kind of thing that no one in their right mind would want, Kazanjy says such anonymity is a crucial part of what makes Unvarnished different from LinkedIn. Human nature, he says, means that the reviews on a LinkedIn profile are almost always positive, and are often so banal and vague that they convey virtually no real information whatsoever.




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In some cases, those reviews may even be flat-out wrong. But no one will actually say what they really think because they don’t want to offend the person they’re reviewing — and besides, no one would ever authorize anything less than an enthusiastic review on their LinkedIn profile. Which, Kazanjy says, is like letting the owners of restaurants control what reviews appear on their Yelp pages — it ensures that nothing bad ever appears, and thus that no one ever gets a completely objective summary of all the information about that restaurant.

Even though you don’t know the identity of the person who left that bad review on Unvarnished, Kazanjy says the system is designed to track their behavior throughout the site, and that over time it creates a kind of persistent identity that’s almost as good as knowing who the person is (and users can reveal themselves in a comment or review at any time if they want to). Reviewers gain trust within the system by providing more reviews, and the service has an algorithm that looks at how long they’ve been a member, how many of their reviews are one-star vs. four or five, and so on. Users are awarded badges — new, novice and trusted — based on their activity, that others can view.

The bottom line is that the principle behind Unvarnished is a very real one: Your reputation is already being outsourced, whether you like it or not. All you can do is respond to criticism wherever it appears, and to get your friends and coworkers to do the same. Unvarnished offers a way to do that all in one place. It’s a valiant effort — but will it take off? The biggest issue for the service is that not everyone is going to want to confront those negative reviews, and/or hustle their friends to review them positively to counterbalance them. Of course, people already do that to some extent with LinkedIn, so what Unvarnished has to do is show that there is more value in the way it approaches online reputation.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user seeveeaar

Addicted to Groupon, LivingSocial, YouSwoop and TownHog (and the many other Groupon groupies), where the appeal of an amazing expiring deal snags you — but then you get busy and forget to ever print or use the coupon you bought? It happens to all too many of us. But now there’s a site — DealsGoRound — where you can buy and sell daily deals rather than let them go to waste.

DealsGoRound is a side project of Chicago entrepreneur Kris Petersen, and since beta-launching in 52 cities on March 1 has hosted just 30 transactions. Petersen tells us that he came up with the idea after letting a $160 pair of Segway tours of downtown Chicago expire because he was too busy with work and training for a marathon. “I realized my impulses didn’t always coexist with my calendar,” he said. The site doesn’t verify deals but it doesn’t take a cut of them, either; Petersen wants to monetize through advertising.

DealsGoRound bears a parallel to sites like Cardpool (our profile) and Plastic Jungle, which have emerged recently to buy and sell unused purchases in the $100 billion gift card market. Though interest (and venture funding) in Groupon-type businesses is exploding, it’s not there yet.

But other sites like 8coupons and Yipit have launched side services for daily deals too — aggregating and repackaging them on a map or an email, respectively. In a sense, these sites help grow the Groupon economy in that they increase distribution for deals, which are ultimately monetized by the companies that set them up when people purchase them.

Yipit, for example, sends a very nicely formatted email newsletter of all the deals in your local area, giving top billing to the ones in categories you’ve indicated you like. It’s the kind of thing that makes you unsubscribe from Groupon, losing their tight connection with you and their quantifiable recurring email recipient. After all, being a deal seeker isn’t about brand loyalty; it’s about finding the absolute best and most relevant deal as quickly as possible!

But these are young and evolving concepts. The folks at Yipit told me they’re trying to put together a local advertising network to sell highly targeted deals ads on local blogs and news outlets. As far as new businesses go, that certainly seems like a better and more scalable idea than creating yet another Groupon groupie with its own local ad sales team in every city.

I’m one of those people who has a tough time trying to schedule meetings. What’s worse is that times change, mostly because of the ever-shifting deadlines that come with blogging. That’s one of the main reasons my calendar constantly descends into chaos. I turned to professional help, but if you are both like me and are a Google Calendar user, scheduling help could now be as simple as turning on a feature inside Google Calendar.

The new gadget, available in Google Calendar Labs, is called Smart Rescheduler. And it is dead simple. Once turned on, you can select an event and click “Find a new time” and the machine does the rest, offering up multiple options for folks to chose from.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.

“That’s a search type problem and so we looked at our search algorithms and said yes, we can adapt these,”Mistery said. He pointed out that this can be used by consumers who are trying to schedule say dinner parties.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.
David Marmaros, creator of the gadget, writes on the Gmail Blog:

[W]e decided to apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times. [...] You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated [...]

I just tried it out, rescheduled a meeting, and yes: it works as advertised. For once, I am not going to complain about a Google product. :-)

Additional reporting by Liz Gannes.

Pat Gelsinger, who moved to EMC late last year after 30 years at Intel, is stirring things up at the storage giant with a plan to virtualize and federate storage so data and compute can truly be linked together (hat tip The Register). The implication of this vision is that organizations will have the ability to keep constantly changing information up to date around the world in real time despite the challenges of moving huge amounts of data over networks that measure data in in gigabytes rather than petabytes.

In a presentation on Thursday, Gelsinger pointed out that compute and storage are rapidly getting better about dealing with more information, while networks  are trying to catch up. “Compute is doubling every two years. Storage doubles every 15 months, and networking is much much much slower, like every four years, so how do you deal with latency bandwidth and consistency?” Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger’s answer is caching. Imagine a two-way content delivery network built on EMC appliances that tracks and replicates changes made to data at one node and then pushes them out to all the other nodes as quickly as possible. Gelsinger calls this freeing the information from physical storage, but it sounds more like making sure your information is in a bunch of different physical storage containers. He mentions EMC’s acquisition of intellectual property from Yotta Yotta as offering the breakthrough required to build this technology.

But at the end of the day, this is all a big if, not an actual product yet.  If EMC can link storage and virtualized machines together, the data center that “follows the sun” — basically moving compute loads around the world where it’s cheapest to run them – or automatic failover for cloud services become possible. However, it will be controlled by a proprietary hardware vendor, which certainly clouds its prospects a bit.