Moore’s Law has enabled new applications by powering computing on an exponential price/performance curve. But increasingly, the proliferation of a new generation of large-scale applications is being constrained by another price/performance curve that hasn’t shown much improvement: IT operations and the cost of delivery. To create ever more sophisticated applications that can be delivered from public or private clouds, we have to ride a delivery cost curve that looks more like Moore’s Law. Otherwise, we’ll choke on our systems. Continue »

Another word for a low-hanging cloud is fog. I think that pretty accurately describes where the IT industry is when it comes to the cloud. Everyone has a different definition. Some further confuse the situation by using cloud as a new label on old technologies.

Let me offer a little clarity. Most of what today is called the cloud, three years ago was called utility computing: using virtualization and automation technologies to pool resources and bind them flexibly to workloads. These infrastructure services can help reduce costs, improve agility, and drive standardization — all important agendas for IT organizations. But this limited definition risks missing something more transformative. If it’s not the cloud, then what is? Continue »

The cloud promises to change the way businesses, governments and consumers access, use and move data. For many organizations, a big selling point in cloud infrastructure services is migrating massive data sets to relieve internal storage requirements, leverage vast computing power, reduce or contain their data center footprint, and free up IT resources for strategic business initiatives. As we move critical and non-critical data to the cloud, reliable, secure and fast access to that information is crucial. But given bandwidth and distance constraints, how do we move and manage that data to and from the cloud, and between different cloud services, in a cost-efficient, scalable manner?

Providers and consumers of cloud services should acknowledge that large distances between data and their applications result in latency, which is not typically found within local area networks. Cloud infrastructure services provide rapidly scalable architectures that can offer support to internal applications, without taxing or waiting for internal enterprise resources. But the promise of significant productivity gain is weakened when it becomes a labor-intensive and time-consuming task to move massive amounts of data into the cloud (hundreds of GBs or TBs). Additionally, if accessing the data is slow and cumbersome for the end user, it becomes a losing value proposition, for the cloud provider, the company and its end-user base. Continue »

A lot of things make Twitter special. The 140-character restriction makes the writing more potent, because people are forced to get to the point instead of rambling on. Anyone can search for things that are happening “right now,” as opposed to waiting hours (if not days) for Google to update its links. And unlike Facebook, discussions are open to the public, which encourages greater participation.

But one feature has been grossly overlooked in terms of what helps Twitter stand out: the ability to publish headlines to the Internet using only text-enabled cell phones. How is that special, you ask? Continue »

Last summer, when I got my first iPhone, I found myself spending an equal amount of time downloading and installing various applications — some paid, some free — and using the excellent Safari browser to surf the web. Over the past few months, I realized that I was barely using my browser anymore, that the applications had gotten so much better that I was content to let them speed me to my web destinations.

Sometime in the past few weeks, I had an even bigger realization: The browser is dead. And it’s because all those apps that now monopolize my time have taken their pick of browser parts from the bin and blossomed into a phenomenon all their own. Continue »

Balancing the interests of investors and entrepreneurs is an ongoing topic of discussion in Silicon Valley. But while numerous efforts to create new types of investment classes aimed at removing this imbalance (for examples, see the Founders Fund, Adeo Ressi’s The Funded and the newly launched SharesPost) have recently emerged, they fail to address the root cause, that of founders and investors being trapped in illiquid investments. Seeking downside protection, such as liquidation preferences, makes sense as investors are being asked to take a long position that could range from years to never. This problem is compounded by the fact that it’s very difficult to value early-stage companies, especially in industries like information technology and cleantech, in which there are so many external factors at play.

What’s needed is an instrument — call it Class R stock — that’s halfway between a conventional investment and a loan. Continue »