“The real reason we talk about the cloud so much is that everyone can draw one,” said Russ Daniels of HP, VP and CTO of HP’s cloud services strategy, who’s now been put in charge of technology for HP’s EDS division. Daniels joked that since the Internet has been around, people in the technology business have stood in front of whiteboards and illustrated the connection between any two things over the network by drawing a blob. So it’s easy for the word “cloud” to mean everything to everybody.

But while he’s trying to be precise about what exactly the cloud means, Daniels also wants that blob to be broadly applicable. He predicted that as HP reshapes its strategy from developing to execution, “Everything as a Service” will take hold for the company and the rest of the market. His motto, then:

A world of information, opportunities and experiences — from computing power to business processes to personal interactions — delivered wherever, however and whenever you need it.

What does that actually mean? The Internet is the nervous system, the cloud adds memory, Daniels said. The cloud has the ability not just to capture data but to analyze it. “We don’t execute business practices. We interact with each other,” he stressed. “The cloud really enables that to be facilitated and augmented and advanced in ways that were out of reach in previous architectures.”

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When you’re running a web app, what can you offload responsibility for by outsourcing to the cloud and what do you need to do yourself? The balance between the two is changing, as was discussed on a Structure panel that pitted hosting providers (of sorts) and rapidly growing startups against each other, with Javier Soltero of Hyperic (now SpringSource) in the middle doing web application performance monitoring. Joining Soltero were Rackspace Hosting Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman; Automattic founder and founding developer of WordPress.com Matt Mullenweg; James Lindenbaum, co-founder and CEO of Heroku; and David Lipscomb, SVP of Engineering for Netsuite. Independent investor Rohit Sharma moderated.

“There’s no such thing as a self-managing app that scales automatically and make you coffee in the morning — that’s just never going to happen,” said Soltero.

Using the analogy of the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic, Automattic’s Mullenweg declared, “We live in Jeff Bezos’ Amazonian republic. Every engineer is also a DBA. If you don’t understand how the database works, you shouldn’t be programming. You shouldn’t touch a keyboard.”

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YouTube is much closer to breaking even than widely thought, says a firm with intimate knowledge of global infrastructure costs. A widely publicized Credit Suisse report that said Google would lose $470 million on the site this year neglected to account for factors such as peering traffic, wholesale bandwidth deals and cheap data center locations. Where the bank said YouTube’s costs will amount to $711 million in 2009, RampRate, a San Francisco-based company that advises large companies on IT infrastructure, says the actual cost is $415 million.

Given Credit Suisse’s revenue estimate for YouTube, that would give the site an operating loss of $174 million this year. If you use other people’s revenue numbers — for instance, Jefferies said $500 million — the site would actually turn a profit.

I probably should have learned my lesson from my laptop battery crapping out and my iPhone dropping calls on the overloaded AT&T network at Moscone in San Francisco today. But at its developers’ conference, Apple offered some tasty new products that this consumer wants to get her grubby hands on. Here are the top five things announced at WWDC that I covet: Continue »

As CDNs try to evade commodification, they’re looking outward to bring more value-added services to their clients. To that end, Limelight Networks today announced its first-ever acquisition: dynamic video and audio ad insertion startup Kiptronic, which to date had raised $9 million in funding. Dan Rayburn reports that the value of the deal is around $12 million, but while Limelight says that’s inaccurate it’s declined to offer up an alternate figure.

Last year Akamai also bought an ad startup — aCerno, for behavioral advertising. Kiptronic handles targeting, too, but its focus is dynamically delivered ads to media in any environment — on a mobile device, on consoles, online or offline. It’s possible this could turn into a play for Limelight to use its precise content delivery information to power localized advertising on any device.

After laying off thousands yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer visited Stanford today in high spirits, telling students that his company is hiring and that he can’t think of a better time to start a business. “These are tough economic times, but these are times that are rich in opportunity,” was his message. “I don’t think the contraction is dramatic enough that we’re not going to see strong ideas come through.”

Well I guess the task at hand was an inspirational speech, so you can’t blame Ballmer for trying to deliver, but this wasn’t the kind that resulted in wet eyes and standing ovations. Not that he isn’t charismatic, it was just a little hollow in light of the economy. Continue »

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop for Child, today at the TED Conference claimed credit for instigating the rise of netbooks. He said we can thank OLPC, which he proposed three years ago, for estimates that netbooks will be half the market in 12 months.

But he decried the influence for-profit companies have had on OLPC, saying commercial markets have competed with the project mercilessly. And OLPC’s hardiness and specialization for children have not been replicated in netbooks, whereas they are some of the most important aspects of the product. OLPC has half a million devices in use today, and they are even being used by kids to teach their parents how to read and write.

So what Negroponte is going to do is open source the OLPC hardware, he said, and invite competitors to copy it. His hope is that will result in 5 to 6 million OLPC-type laptops per month going to children three years from now.