StackOps 360 comprises four main products: a deployment automation tool; a pre-packaged high availability tool for service providers with tight service-level agreements (SLAs) to fulfil; a chargeback facility for those who want to set up pay-as-you-go public clouds or service internal business customers; and an extensible UI development framework called StackOps Portal.

OpenStack abstracted

“We have kind of abstracted the whole OpenStack for a sysadmin who doesn’t have the time to get trained on OpenStack,” COO and co-founder Arturo Suarez explained to me, referring to the StackOps Automation tool.

As for the chargeback tool, Suarez explained that it collects metrics from the layers above the user’s Openstack infrastructure, as well as from that infrastructure itself. “You can create products which are going to be a mix of parameters coming from pure infrastructure – CPU, RAM, etc – or from the applications running on top,” he said. “

The StackOps Portal is interesting, too – eschewing the Horizon UI of OpenStack itself, it is instead an extensible HTML5 rich web application that can be used to manage any public or private OpenStack clouds, regardless of the vendor behind the distro.

Lower learning curve?

Of course, StackOps is far from the only company trying to take the effort out of OpenStack deployments for smaller users. Nebula is a key competitor, although Suarez is somewhat dismissive of that company’s plug-and-play model, which is based around a hardware controller.

“They’re selling the controller. The cost of that solution is really going to be higher because they’re using specific components,” he said. “Nebula also does not have a portal – they have Horizon in a fancy interface, nicely tuned, but it still doesn’t allow you to do some of the operations that you need to do in your cloud, such as managing your catalog.”

Suarez also pointed out that, unlike many competitors, StackOps doesn’t rely on third-party products such as Puppet (see disclosure) or Chef to handle deployments. He claimed there was risk involved with using such tools, especially with Puppet’s ties to VMware, and suggested the learning curve was higher using them than with his company’s package. “You really don’t need to know OpenStack to deploy an OpenStack Cloud with StackOps,” he said.

StackOps certainly talks a good game, and it will be interesting to see how its easy-as-possible approach to OpenStack plays out in the small service provider market, as a counterpoint to the likes of OnApp. The company just opened an office in Austin, Texas, to push harder into the American market. “When it comes to selling cloud, it’s much faster than here in Europe,” Suarez observed.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Bearing the rather clunky name of “Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers”, the app does require a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud service, but the fundamentals are present: you can use it to access, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on an iPad or iPhone — although the app is optimized for the iPhone 5, so don’t expect a tablet-friendly experience.

According to the product blurb:

“Documents look like the originals, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics and shapes. When you make quick edits or add comments to a document, the formatting and content remain intact.”

The app can be used on Office documents received as email attachments, or those stored on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro or SharePoint. If your desktop Office 2013 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud, you can also pull up documents that were recently viewed there, from your mobile device.

It is possible to edit documents while offline. The app is compatible with iPhone 4 and up, and with the 3rd generation iPad and up (and yes, with the iPad mini too). Devices have to run iOS 6.1 or later.

It doesn’t seem the rollout is global just yet, though. My iPad mini, which is set to the U.K. App Store, isn’t seeing it at the time of writing. No sign of an Android version, either.

UPDATE (5am PT): Microsoft has now published a blog post explaining the functionality in greater detail.

NOTE: This article originally bore the headline “Microsoft quietly pushes out Office for iPhone and iPad”. A few minutes after posting the “… and iPad” was excised because, while the app will work on iPads, it’s not optimized for them.

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So, in theory, apart from having advance notice to patch their own systems, those agencies could exploit that zero-day vulnerability to hack into your data, before Microsoft gives you a chance to patch the flaw. And it’s not just Microsoft. According to the report, “thousands of [U.S.] technology, finance and manufacturing firms” are closely aligned with American national security agencies, passing them information such as vulnerability details and hardware and software specifications, and giving them access to overseas facilities and data.

In return, Bloomberg claims, the agencies give the companies information about foreign attacks on their systems. Google is cited as an example of this, with Sergey Brin allegedly having been invited to sit in on a secret intelligence briefing after an attack by Chinese hackers in 2010. Of course, the companies aren’t the only sources of useful flaws — security expert and activist Christopher Soghoian detailed late last year how some security researchers sell vulnerability information to governments for large sums of cash too. “This is the [U.S.] government buying a flaw without the intention of fixing it,” Soghoian explained in his Harvard University presentation. (Thanks to Jeff Ausloos for alerting me to that one.)

Backbone hacking

The Bloomberg report also notes claims recently made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden that the U.S. hacks network backbones in China and Hong King. Although the evidence for this “Blarney” program appears scantier than that for PRISM, the gist is that the scheme captures metadata from internet-connected devices such as computers and smartphones around the world, including OS version, Java software version and browser. Again, this would make it easier for the agencies to target and hack such devices.

On the domestic front, the piece also claims a security system called Einstein 3, which is meant to protect U.S. government systems, can “expose the private content of the emails under certain circumstances.”

Who’s the customer?

But it’s the claims about U.S. tech vendors and their apparently voluntary information exchange with the country’s spy agencies that will most bother governments and their public sector organizations around the world.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw seemingly confirmed this cooperation in the Bloomberg article, saying the early release of vulnerability information helps to give the U.S. government an “early start” in protecting its systems. Other “trusted partners” reportedly include Intel’s security business McAfee, which apparently acts as a consultant of sorts to spy agencies wanting to know more about network architectures around the world.

There’s no suggestion that any of this data-sharing is illegal – but for many governmental customers around the world it will suggest that their vendors have undisclosed interests that don’t align with their own. For some in the U.S. tech industry, these revelations may turn out to be as damaging as PRISM, if not more so.

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The report on this lengthy interrogation is now out. And guess what: the committee is less than impressed with Google’s performance. Indeed, the language of the report could only constitute a more direct accusation of lying if, well, it used that word.

Here’s committee chair Margaret Hodge:

“Google generates enormous profits in the UK. But despite an $18 billion turnover between 2006 and 2011 it paid the equivalent of just $16 million in taxes to the UK government.

“Google brazenly argued before this committee that its tax arrangements in the UK are defensible and lawful. It claimed that its advertising sales take place in Ireland, not in the UK. This argument is deeply unconvincing and has been undermined by information from whistleblowers, including ex-employees of Google, who told us that UK based staff are engaged in selling.

“The staff in Ireland simply process the bills. Google also conceded at this second hearing that its engineers in the UK are contributing to product development. The company’s highly contrived tax arrangement has no purpose other than to enable the company to avoid UK corporation tax.”

Hodge went on to say Google wouldn’t be able to repair its reputation until it “arranges to pay its fair share of tax in the country where it earns the profits from the business it conducts.” Whether or not Google values its reputation over the money it saves remains to be seen.

The committee did also point out the flipside to all this, which is that the British tax authorities’ rules are over-complex and riddled with loopholes. However, it argued that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) should “now fully investigate Google in the light of the evidence provided by whistleblowers”, because it now looks like the company was not acting lawfully.

Who’d have thought there was something wrong with paying corporate tax at a rate of 0.09 percent?

Anyway, I’ve spoken to HMRC but it says it won’t discuss any individual or business’s tax affairs. So, even if it does open an investigation into Google, we won’t know until it comes out through Google’s U.S. filings.

And here’s what Google had to say in response to the report:

“As we’ve always said, Google complies with all the tax rules in the UK, and it is the politicians who make those rules. It’s clear from this report that the Public Accounts Committee wants to see international companies paying more tax where their customers are located, but that’s not how the rules operate today. We welcome the call to make the current system simpler and more transparent.”

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This explains why the Commission’s initial reaction to the scandal was so weak. Ever since it became clear how angry Europeans are over being spied on through the likes of Facebook and Google, though, it’s been talking a tougher game — Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, whose proposals for a revised data protection law are said to be the antidote to this surveillance, is now demanding a full explanation from the U.S.

Clipped clause

However, there’s now a fresh wrinkle to this ever-expanding story: according to a Financial Times report on Thursday, the U.S. has already neutered the relevant part of those proposals. The article quotes three unnamed senior EU officials as saying the Obama administration leaned on the Commission back in January 2012 to remove a so-called “anti-FISA” clause (the proposals were subsequently published on the 25th of that month).

We already knew U.S. firms were lobbying against other aspects of the new law, but the news of this political intervention is something else.

The original wording of Article 42 of the proposed legislation would have cancelled out the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), at least as far as Europeans are concerned, by nullifying “any US request for technology and telecoms companies to hand over data on EU citizens”, the report stated.

According to the FT, the EU member states were against the clause anyway because it didn’t make a whole lot of sense – the servers for these web services are largely in the U.S. and therefore under U.S. jurisdiction – but that didn’t stop the U.S. sending over heavyweights to lobby against it. These included U.S. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano and Commerce Department legal chief Cameron Kerry.

Now you see it…

Here’s what may have alarmed the U.S. so much. You won’t find these words in the published proposals, of course, but a leaked version from a couple months before stated that:

“No judgment of a court or tribunal and no decision of an administrative authority of a third country requiring a controller or processor to disclose personal data shall be recognized or be enforceable in any manner, without prejudice to a mutual assistance treaty or an international agreement in force between the requesting third country and the Union or a Member State.”

In other words, the U.S. FISA court shouldn’t be able to demand data on EU citizens from Google, Yahoo or any other U.S. web firms, at least not without some kind of formal agreement with the EU.

It’s certainly true that this would have been a hard sell – as the EU countries pointed out, the jurisdictional aspect of this clause made little sense (the same might be said of the proposed right to be forgotten, which is still in the text). Clearly the U.S. doesn’t want to let foreign rules apply to data processed in its territory. But, at the same time, how are the EU authorities then supposed to protect their citizens in an online context, where the U.S. still reigns? Are they supposed to just give up?

There are no easy answers here. All that can be said for sure is that the PRISM scandal might force these backroom negotiations into the light, and make it a bit clearer for EU citizens as to how hard their representatives are fighting on their behalf – or not, as may be the case.

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And to achieve that, the company is opening it up. Developers could obviously already write apps for the SmartWatch using Sony’s SDK, but now they can write their own alternative firmware and flash it to the device. It’s called the Open SmartWatch Project and, according to Sony, it will make it possible to “create new experimental use cases and innovations” around the SmartWatch hardware.

It should go without saying that those flashing their watches do so at their own risk and may find their warranty voided. There is a Sony hacker guide for the project, full of reference information.

Sony is kicking off the project with a SmartWatch Arduino hackathon this coming Saturday in Malmö, Sweden — the idea there is have Arduino firmware run on the SmartWatch.

The creation of the Open SmartWatch Project suggests Sony may have found its own user experience efforts lacking, but overall it’s a good thing. It gives developers a relatively affordable (currently around $95) and attractive piece of hardware to play around with and create new smart watch ideas on, and it should feed ideas back to Sony in case the company decides to take a third crack at the concept.

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No prizes for guessing where the Toronto-based GhostBird folks are heading – as they wrote in a blog post on Wednesday, they’re off to help the revitalized Flickr team make new iOS and Android apps. KitCam and PhotoForge 2 won’t see any further updates, and you won’t be able to download them from the App Store anymore.

As for Rondee, well, this one is a bit more puzzling. It’s a San Diego, CA.-based free conference calling service that obviously caters to the enterprise market – or at least, it will be until July 12. The company’s website recommends that customers should flee to rival service Instant Conference.

Meanwhile, the Rondee team will join Yahoo’s Small Business unit. At the moment, there is no Yahoo conference call service for small businesses – that division only deals with web hosting, domain registration, ecommerce and marketing services and business email. That may change.

Neither the Rondee nor GhostBird takeovers came with disclosed terms, but I think it’s fair to say we’re not in Tumblr territory here.

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The data center is sited in Luleå on the northern Swedish coast, and it went live on Wednesday. As with Google’s new Finnish data center, Facebook is counting on the northern European environment to help cut cooling costs – not by way of seawater cooling, this time, but using good old cold air. The remaining excess heat is used to keep the associated offices warm.

According to a post on Wednesday, water is nonetheless providing hydroelectric energy for the operation. This accounts for all of the data center’s electricity needs, and the post states that “the supply is also so reliable that we have been able to reduce the number of backup generators required at the site by more than 70 percent.”

The Luleå facility is almost entirely based on Facebook’s Open Compute Project designs, which also help on the energy efficiency front by doing away with extraneous materials. The company reckons the data center averages 1.07 on the power usage efficiency (PUE) scale.

Having a data center in Europe is a very good idea when it comes to meeting European data protection laws (which are probably about to get tougher). The only reason Facebook can legally process EU citizens’ personal data in the U.S. is its membership of the U.S-EU Safe Harbor program — after Edward Snowden’s leak, that arrangement now looks shaky to say the least.

It’s hard to say what the fallout from the scandal will be just yet, but processing those citizens’ data within EU borders may help Facebook stay on the right side of the law.

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That’s the problem that David Crawford is trying to fix with his cloud analytics startup MetricaDB, one of our Structure 2013 LaunchPad finalists. It’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool for individual analysts who don’t care whether the data is held in a NoSQL database or behind a Salesforce or Google Analytics API – they just want to deal with it in one place.

Crawford’s a one-man band at the moment and the 8-month-old MetricaDB is a bootstrapped affair, but it seems pretty effective for such an early product (albeit a product that’s already evolved from simply enabling SQL queries against MongoDB data).

After signing up, you click on the different SaaS products you use to gain a view on your customer – Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Salesforce, Stripe and so on – and end up with a SQL console that puts all that data in straightforward tables. Then you can run SQL queries (MetricaDB is built on Postgres) or what have you and export the results to Excel.

So, for example, a user could look at support tickets on his or her company’s cloud CRM system and join it to the Stripe billing system to see how the biggest spenders feel they’re being treated.

“You’re not looking up the API libraries or running a script,” Crawford said. “You attach multiple services and they all just appear as tables in the same database – pulling the data together and doing something across the different sources is just a SQL join.”

Crawford is pitching MetricaDB as a product for individual analysts who are “tired of waiting for engineers to get the data they want and have them deliver an Excel spreadsheet” – down the line he wants to add enough features to make it a fully-fledged enterprise play, but right now he’s attacking the market from the bottom up.

“What I’ve learned about security in the SaaS world is it’s largely a brand perception issue,” Crawford said. “I need to build the brand so people will be comfortable giving me access to their proprietary data and knowing I’ll steer it well.”

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As both Vodafone and Kabel Deutschland said on Wednesday in near-identical statements, the British telecoms giant has made a preliminary approach regarding a possible takeover, but “there is no certainty that any offer will ultimately be made nor as to the terms on which any such offer might be made.”

The Financial Times has noted that Vodafone has been eyeing up Kabel Deutschland since February at least, and also that John Malone’s Liberty Global – which recently gobbled up Virgin Media in the UK to become the largest ISP outside China — might turn out to be a rival bidder.

For Vodafone, the second-biggest cellular carrier in Germany, Kabel Deutschland might prove a handy way to step up its fight against Deutsche Telekom, the country’s leading carrier on both mobile and fixed-line fronts.

Vodafone already has several million broadband subscribers in the country – funnily enough, it signed an agreement to resell Deutsche Telekom’s up-to-100Mbps VDSL connectivity just last month — but Kabel Deutschland has around 8.5 million subscribers, many of whom (such as myself) are already basking in the glow of similar speeds.

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