GigaOM

As a few hundred scruffy protesters gathered in Ottawa yesterday to support Net Neutrality, busloads of teenagers on school trips to visit Canada’s seat of government walked past them, blissfully unaware that the fight to keep Facebook free was happening right next to them.

Neutrality should be an easy sell: Nobody wants ISPs to be able to treat traffic differently, fearing it will lead to monthly “Google plans” or “Skype charges.”

But it quickly gets complicated. Rather than trying to win one battle, special interest groups bring in other fights: Tier-two ISPs want unfettered access to the last mile on wholesale links. Privacy advocates warn of prying eyes on the wires and at the borders. The specter of copyright enforcement looms large. And telcos complain that peer-to-peer is breaking their networks. Continue »

Virtualization holds lots of promise: Move your physical machines to virtual ones, and you’ll reclaim capacity at the same time that you make operations easier. But applications seldom run on one machine; instead they’re a combination of servers, switches and routers. 3Tera’s recently announced product road map may let companies provision whole data centers atop cloud grids like Amazon’s EC2. Call it a Virtual Data Center.

“Most large-scale systems, in order to move up the ladder and serve more customers, require more and more resources,” said Bert Armijo, 3Tera’s VP of product and marketing. “If you manage them as individual virtual machines, the problem is that the human load — the ability to actually remember what’s running where and to manipulate it all — becomes overwhelming. At some point, somebody makes a very small mistake that results in a very large outage.”

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First the money flowed to social sites like Facebook that showed the world how to get users to interact. Then it moved on to “roll your own” platforms like Ning that allowed people to build their own social microsites. But as Web 2.0 startups get increasingly specialized, the money is following, as today’s announcement from social publishing platform Wetpaint of a $25 million Series C funding round, shows.

In the wake of Ning’s $60 million Series D round, which pegged that company’s valuation at $560 million, startups that encourage users to collaborate and publish remain hot. According to Wetpaint CEO Ben Elowitz, the build-your-own-Wiki site is adding 2,000 new sites a day — a compounded monthly growth rate of 20 percent. “When we launched, we wanted to tackle social publishing,” he said. “Our goal was a consumer-friendly wiki.” Today’s round, which was co-led by DAG Ventures, brings total investment in the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm to $40 million. Update: Fidelity Investments joined as an investor with this round as well, Kara Swisher notes, though exactly how much it invested is unclear. Continue »

MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam.

Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects that Americans will receive 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, double the number sent in 2006. And Nielsen calls mobile social networking the next big thing, estimating 2.8 million unique mobile MySpace users and 1.8 million mobile Facebook users in December 2007.

According to antispam firm Cloudmark, spammers are already embracing these new technologies: Between 15 percent and 30 percent of friend requests on some of the largest social networks lead to a spammy profile.

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You can tell a lot from a gamer’s hardware. And in the gaming world, nobody knows more about the platforms on which PC gamers run their games than the Steam game distribution network. In 2000, Half-Life was one of the best-rated, best-selling games of all time. Created by Valve, it was distributed through traditional retail channels. When it came time to release the sequel, however, Valve went direct. Using the Steam platform — Steam’s desktop software handles game registration, purchasing and patching, sort of like an iTunes for gamers — Valve distributed its game directly to consumers.

Traditional game publishers weren’t happy. But the resulting legal battle between Valve and Vivendi was ultimately won in Valve’s favor. Today, the Steam network lists 259 titles, and delivers games to roughly 1.3 million users. The distribution model has also revitalized veteran games like Deus Ex, as well as breakout indie titles such as Portal, Ragdoll Kungfu and Audiosurf. In January, the company launched Steamworks, a set of publishing and development tools with gameplay and sales analytics built in. And on March 17, Epic announced that it would distribute its Unreal series on the Steampowered network.

One of the things the Steam agent does is collect data on gamers’ systems. Since 2004, Valve has published these statistics periodically. They represent a snapshot of the world’s gaming desktops, detailing everything from language to video cards to storage space.

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Ask any IT professional what they dread most, and they’ll likely tell you that it’s change. Specifically, the act of putting a new application into production: There’s simply no way to know what will happen.

Companies spend a tremendous amount of time and money in staging environments, trying to see whether or not their new code will work. Only the largest banks and utilities have the resources to completely replicate the production systems, and none can truly simulate the real world.

Jonah Paransky, VP of marketing for testing-sandbox startup StackSafe, says that roughly 43 percent of IT problems can be traced back to lack of pre-production testing. “Over half of the changes we see in our research never end up being tested against the end-to-end IT service.” StackSafe tackles the problem by copying an entire application into a virtual appliance, letting IT change it, and testing the result.

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