The wind industry had close to $4.8 billion in transaction value in 2010, which included private fund-raising deals, initial public offerings, and mergers and acquisitions. Solar generated a transaction value of $3.2 billion, and energy efficiency, which includes smart grid and LED lighting companies, followed with $2.5 billion.

The transaction values run parallel to the cleantech investing numbers for 2010, which found that solar startups continued to draw the most money in venture capital investment last year, while energy-efficiency startups garnered the largest number of deals, according to the Cleantech Group. However, given utility-scale wind is a more matured market, there are fewer investments in next wind technology startups.

A bulk of the transaction value that went to wind was for building energy generation projects, the report noted. An analysis by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) showed that wind energy companies had grabbed the most money from a Treasury Department program that was set up in 2009 to subsidize renewable energy generation construction. As of November of last year, money that went to wind companies accounted for 85 percent of what the government had given out (solar took 8 percent).

In terms of the number of deals, the energy efficiency sector took the top spot, garnering 104 deals (fundraising rounds and M&A) last year, the Peachtree report said. Solar ranked second with 99 deals, followed by wind with 35 deals.

The report surmised that the strong interest in energy efficiency companies and projects will continue partly because they require less money and give quicker returns than more capital-intensive businesses such as solar and biofuel. Apparently, psychology also played a role, the report said, noting that many so-called energy-efficiency technologies are formerly called information technology and many investors came from the IT world.

Overall, $14.7 billion flowed into 371 fund-raising deals and mergers and acquisitions across all greentech sectors in 2010, and that reflected a 55-percent jump from 2009. Fund-raising deals, including equity investments in companies or projects, totaled $10.1 billion, a 65-percent hike from 2009. Mergers and acquisitions accounted for $4.6 billion in 2010, a 37 percent increase from the previous year.

So who are the losers? Bioenergy firms such as makers of biofuels to power cars. About $1.4 billion flowed into that sector, a 27-percent decline from 2009. Investors showed a strong interest in biofuel a few years back, when gasoline prices jumped dramatically and lawmakers began to approve policies and funds to jumpstart this new industry.

It has become painfully clear since then that figuring out how to make fuels from plants is trickier and takes more time and money than many had anticipated. Many companies have pushed back the time they will start mass-producing biofuels, prompting the government to dramatically scale back its expectation of gradually replacing fossil fuel with more renewable sources.

The energy storage sector, meanwhile, saw a 40-percent drop in deal values. But the report said the number is skewed by A123 Systems’ $378 million IPO in 2009, therefore, the storage business actually had a good year in 2010. Other fields that received less money included ocean and tidal power, carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen and fuel cell technologies.

Related Content From GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Top 10 Greentech Companies of 2010
• 7 Things That Spell Growing Pains for Greentech in 2011
• Green IT 2011: China Marches Towards Greentech Dominance

Photo courtesy of Christopher Chappelear

As Commerce Under Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco put it in a statement today, “There are many new and exciting renewable energy opportunities waiting for us in the ocean.” But the newness of this technology means these opportunities are also shrouded in uncertainty. How should siting proposals be evaluated? Will noise from ocean installations influence migratory marine animals? A round of federal grants totaling more than $4.2 million announced on Tuesday will support a crop of research projects seeking answers to these questions and more over the next three years. (An eighth project funded in this grant round will look at best practices for storing carbon dioxide under the ocean floor.)

The results could have lasting effects on the nascent market for these technologies as they move beyond the research and development stage to pursue permits for large-scale deployments, paving the way for new planning and evaluation processes. According to a report released earlier this month by the research firm Emerging Energy Research, “The global ocean energy sector is at a turning point,” with more than 45 wave and tidal prototypes slated for ocean testing in 2010 and 2011, up from only nine tested last year.

Despite its promise, however, to provide continuous electricity — a benefit that solar and wind don’t offer — development of so-called “hydrokinetic” technology (relating to the kinetic energy of moving fluid) has run into technical and fundraising difficulties. For example, the California Utilities Commission rejected a power purchase agreement from utility Pacific Gas & Electric to buy electricity from a project by Finavera Renewables, saying the technology was too unproven and costly.

So far, few studies have looked into the environmental impact of ocean and tidal power equipment worldwide. As researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State explained recently, some of the limited studies have taken place outside the U.S., focusing on wildlife not commonly found in the estuaries and oceans hugging this country.

Here’s what the seven projects awarded funding today by the Department of Energy, the Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for ocean energy research will be investigating:

1. Parametrix, an engineering, planning and environmental sciences firm in Auburn, Wash., scored $499,000 for a 2-year project using statistics to help determine how siting proposals for renewable ocean energy projects should be evaluated. The team will be using probabilistic statistics to integrate information from a range of sources in a variety of forms, including oceanographic and ecological data, stakeholder input, human use data and cumulative impacts.

2. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program in Ithaca, N.Y., won a $499,000 grant for a 3-year project looking at how noise from offshore energy projects affects marine animals. More specifically, the lab plans to “measure, characterize and evaluate the influences of construction and operation noises,” of these installations on “acoustically active” migratory marine vertebrates that live in the project area seasonally.

3. University of Rhode Island plans to develop and test a set of protocols for collecting and comparing scientifically valid data about offshore renewable energy issues, and develop a “conceptual framework” for evaluating the cumulative environmental impact of offshore renewable energy development. The group won a grant of $745,000 over two years.

4. The University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Scientists in Seattle will be evaluating three technologies — echo sounders, acoustic cameras and multibeam sonar — for their ability to monitor animal densities at sites where hydrokinetic projects are proposed. The team, which scored a $746,000 grant over two years, plans to deploy instruments at the site of a tidal energy demo project proposed by the Snohomish Public Utility District, in Washington’s northern Admirality Inlet.

5. Pacific Energy Ventures, based in Portland, Ore., plans to build a framework for identifying, collecting and comparing environmental data that’s relevant to baseline studies, as well as monitoring of operational wave, tidal, and offshore wind projects on the West Coast. According to the project description, however, the tool will be portable to other regions and marine ecosystems and consistent with programs in Europe. The project has been awarded $499,000 in grant money over two years.

6. The University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies in Fayetteville, Ark., plans to develop a system for designing the layout of an offshore facility and generating realistic visualizations of the project. The system will allow users to import geospatial data and define wave and light conditions, among other things. This project won a $497,000 grant over three years.

7. The University of Massachusetts’ Marine Renewable Energy Center in Dartmouth, Mass. plans to develop a roadmap for assessing spatial resources at offshore renewable energy sites. The group also plans to craft a plan for monitoring offshore wind and hydrokinetic energy resources once facilities are up and running. According to the project description, most of the evaluations in this study will use models and existing data, as well as field tests to look at specific survey technologies. The project won a $748,000 grant over two years.

Chart courtesy of Emerging Energy Research. Top photo courtesy of Flickr user Wonderlane. Lower photo courtesy of Wavebob.

For more research, check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• The Real Reason Google Is Buying Wind Power
• Facebook’s Coal-Powered Problem
• Report: Cleantech’s Third Quarter Growing Pains

While renewables have driven investment in the energy industry, however, clean power has seen a drop from the nearly $471 million invested in 15 deals in the renewable energy sector during the third quarter of last year, and the approximately $1.2 billion in 24 deals in the same quarter of 2008.

Tracking investments by venture capital firms, corporations, private equity firms and individuals into companies that have closed at least one round of venture financing, VentureSource reports that venture investors poured a total of $5.5 billion into 662 deals with companies based in the U.S. during the third quarter. That’s a 5 percent drop in the amount invested, but a slightly higher number of deals (up 2 percent) compared to the same period in 2009.

Early stage investments, including seed and first rounds, made up a slightly larger portion of the activity during the third quarter of 2010 than in the same quarter a year earlier. According to VentureSource, seed- and first-round investments made up 34 percent of deal activity and 20 percent of the capital invested during this most recent quarter. That’s up from 31 percent of deals and 15 percent of capital invested in the third quarter of 2009.

Yet, as Jeff St. John explained in his latest Green IT Quarterly Wrap-up on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), the green technology sector as a whole saw a substantial drop-off in early-stage venture capital and an even steeper decline in solar power investments during the third quarter of 2010. Firms with novel manufacturing and materials offerings have struggled to compete with entrenched suppliers of more “bankable” technologies, and solar power has become a harder sell with VCs.

The information technology industry took the lion’s share of investment during the third quarter, according to the VentureSource report, with $2.8 billion in 232 deals — up 35 percent from the same period last year in terms of capital invested. Software in particular saw significant activity, with $1 billion invested into 159 deals. That’s a whopping 67 percent increase in the amount invested compared to the year earlier quarter.

Image courtesy of NREL.

For more research, check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• The Real Reason Google Is Buying Wind Power
• Facebook’s Coal-Powered Problem
• Report: Cleantech’s Third Quarter Growing Pains

Speaking of Big Data, we saw even more evidence that startups selling the tools of tomorrow (i.e., Hadoop and NoSQL) are in a good position to capitalize if they follow the right strategy. Cloudera continued to bolster its partner portfolio to ensure that it will be the platform layer for Hadoop as it increasingly sees adoption among enterprises. Provided Cloudera maintains a reputation of stability, it’s about the only vendor selling distributed data crunching until Microsoft rolls out its Dryad project commercially. For database startups pushing NoSQL, organizations appear willing to give them a chance, but they will need to address reputation issues stemming from a few high-profile failures.

Elsewhere in the sector, in the realm of public clouds, the quarter was marked by perpetual motion. Very few CIOs are still questioning the value proposition for cloud computing, so providers are pushing to differentiate themselves wherever possible. Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Joyent, RightScale… everyone rolled out a variety of new features to make their respective offerings as palatable as possible to as many groups as possible. As the market shapes up, we see it will be a marathon, and providers that sat in the background early might end driving momentum in the future.

The internal cloud market was defined by attempts to peddle turnkey solutions addressing users’ needs around multi-tenancy, provisioning and self-service. VMware did it with vCenter Director, OpenStack did it with its collection of technologies, and a handful of startups did it with their own products. There are some disruptive options — none more so than OpenStack – but it will be a tall order for anyone to compete with VMware increasingly driving the cloud discussion.

We also learned the price the web companies must pay to deal with their success: millions in capital expenditures to meet current and future demand. With Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter all significantly upping their infrastructure investments, it will be interesting to see what services they roll out next.

For a full recap and analysis of the news and trends that defined the past quarter, read the entire report here.

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Wednesday’s announcement provided no details as to when Alstom and BrightSource expected to start building solar-thermal plants together, or the scale of their plans. The two did say they would combine Alstom’s plant integration experience and power generation equipment with BrightSource’s solar field and tower-based technology to tailor projects to specific customer needs. As to where they planned to focus their efforts, the two looked “in particular in the Mediterranean ring and Africa,” according to their press release.

Desertec, whose consortium members include power and engineering giants Siemens and ABB, solar developer Solar Millenium, and thin-film giant First Solar, has also been envisioned primarily as a solar-thermal power project. Capturing the sun to heat water or other liquids and generate steam to spin a turbine can be less expensive than solar PV at massive scales, and it can also offer a means of storing heat energy to generate power when the sun goes down.

The Desertec initiative remains in the early stages of raising money, and it will likely require quite a bit of government support to reassure investors in such a massive scheme. BrightSource and Alstom will also, in all likelihood, face a long a difficult road when it comes to financing.

BrightSource is one of few solar-thermal startups still standing as an independent company in a time when many companies have been acquired, shut down or scaled back. Siemens bought Israeli solar-thermal startup Solel for $418 million last year, and French nuclear power giant Areva bought startup Ausra for an undisclosed sum in February. Google-backed eSolar, meanwhile, has seen would-be project partner NRG Energy drop solar thermal plans in favor of photovoltaics for a proposed 92-megawatt solar project. In August, Schott Solar said it would halve its production of solar thermal gear and lay off 30 workers. There’s a big difference between developing new technology and finding the financing to build a massive power plant, after all.

In that context, BrightSource’s relationship with Alstom could prove crucial in boosting prospective investors’ confidence in the company. Alstom also invested $55 million in BrightSource in May as part of a Series D round that has since climbed to a total of $176 million. The Oakland, Calif.-based company is expected to announce an IPO soon, although whether that comes next year or later is the subject of much speculation.

In the meantime, BrightSource has been pushing ahead with its own 392-megawatt Ivanpah solar-thermal plant, supported by a a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. BrightSource plans to start construction of Ivanpah by the end of this year, and it expects to complete it in 2013.

For more research on cleantech financing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Cleantech Financing  Trends 2010 & Beyond
• Smart Algorithms: The Future of the Energy Industry
• Renewable Energy Charging Up Electrical Transmission Tech

Image courtesy of BrightSource.

Among the highlights for greentech in the four-year comprehensive spending review presented by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on Wednesday are £200 million for green energy development projects (including off-shore wind and port infrastructure for massive turbines), £1 billion for a financing program called the Green Investment bank, and up to £1 billion for a planned carbon capture demonstration project. As of this morning, when E.ON announced it will not continue in the competition for the carbon capture demo funds, Iberdrola SA is the only company still in the running for that project.

The spending review also includes £860 million for renewable heating incentives over the next four years, and the feed-in tariff is slated to hold fast until at least 2013, as previously planned.

The Green Investment Bank, according to the text of the spending review, is envisioned as a “radical new contribution to financing green infrastructure,” with an “explicit mandate to tackle risk that the market currently cannot adequately finance.”

The program’s public funding has been set for about half of the amount anticipated by some advocates and one-sixth of what others have said would be necessary to help keep the UK on track with its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Andy Atkins, executive director of the environmental group Friends of the Earth commented today that the Green Investment Bank “will need significantly more than the £1 billion allocated to be effective.” Osborne described the £1 billion as a “backstop” for the program, with sales of government assets expected to bring in “significant” proceeds and hopes for the bank to spur private investment.

For more on cleantech financing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Report: Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond
• EPRI’s Solar Power Phrasebook — A Guide for Future Communications
• Report: Cleantech’s Third Quarter Growing Pains

Image courtesy of Flickr user phault.

The idea behind iSeeU is pretty simple: Mount a mirror on your cell phone, and you’ll be able to film yourself during a call with a rear-facing camera. Check out the rather charming video below for a quick demo.

The neatest thing about iSeeU seems to be that you can easily swivel it around, making it possible to share all kinds of stuff without having to move the phone (or switch camera inputs on the 4G, for that matter). The company also has a number of additional videos up on YouTube, but there’s really not that much more to explain. It’s a cell phone accessory, after all, albeit a clever one.

Related content on GigaOm Pro (subscription required):

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How Intel Clawed Huge Profits from the Global Downturn (From Ars Technica) It helps to be among the most important companies in a field that will never decrease in importance. Intel was poised to strike whichever iron was hot, even during the downturn.

Cloudharmony: KT’s Cloud Faster than Amazon, Rackspace (From the Cloudscaling blog) The point here isn’t to illustrate that internal clouds are faster than public clouds (they probably should be), but that you can achieve this performance using commodity gear and building for failure.

Twitter Solves its Data Formatting Challenge (From Computerworld) The decision to choose the Google-created protocol buffers was based on the 12TB of data Twitter stores each day. If you’re wondering why it relies so heavily on NoSQL and Hadoop, here’s a big reason.

Overland Storage Announces Acquisition of MaxiScale Inc. (From Marketwire) That didn’t take long. MaxiScale has been around for about a year (or thereabouts) and it’s already been bought. We shouldn’t be surprised. If you have good scale-out storage technology, you’re on somebody’s list.

Verizon Reveals Plans for Massive NY Data Center (From the Web Host Industry Review) Verizon has been building out its cloud footprint lately; is this new data center part of that strategy? Of course, it has another business that might need additional capacity …

For more cloud-related news analysis and research, visit GigaOM Pro.

Image courtesy of Intel.

Keeping with its strategy of the past several months, Cloudera added even more partners to its expansive stable. It now counts data-management vendor Talend and NoSQL-database startup Membase among its technology partners, and Japanese service provider NTT DATA has signed on as a Cloudera reseller in the country. Additionally, business-intelligence and data-integration peddler Pentaho released Hadoop integrations for both of its product lines, compatible with the Cloudera, Apache and Amazon Elastic MapReduce Hadoop distributions. Existing Cloudera partnerships also expanded — namely, partner Quest Software officially released the OraOop connector between Hadoop and Oracle Database, and Vertica Systems released its second-generation connector for the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH).

Cloudera also upgraded CDH to incorporate additional security and cloud capabilities. For security, the latest CDH upgrade adds the Kerberos authentication standard recently integrated into Yahoo’s Hadoop with Security distribution. On the cloud front, Cloudera has integrated the Apache Whirr product, which according to Cloudera “is a tool for quickly starting and managing clusters running on cloud services like Amazon EC2.”

Cloudera’s spate of Hadoop World news is hardly surprising. When I spoke with CEO Mike Olson last week, he indicated that Cloudera is determined to become the de facto Hadoop platform: a strategy that means partners, partners and more partners. If someone is going to integrate Hadoop support into existing software, develop higher-level Hadoop tools or just deploy their own Hadoop cluster, Cloudera wants CDH to be part of the plan. Considering there are still dozens of database, BI and analytics vendors that have yet to announce a Hadoop strategy, not to mention potential customers, Cloudera has plenty of opportunity ahead of it.

This untapped potential is the reason Olson is so excited about Cloudera’s future (he cites the potential to “build a billion-dollar business”) and why he isn’t sweating to follow in recent partners’ footsteps by getting acquired in the short term.  “This opportunity is still too nascent and too potentially enormous for us to do anything other than focus on building the greatest business that we can possibly build,” he explained.

Startups Karmasphere and Datameer used Hadoop World to let the world know that their flagship products — Karmasphere Studio: Professional Edition and Datameer Analytics Solution — are generally available. The Karmasphere product is designed to ease the process of developing Hadoop workloads and applications, even from the desktop, while Datameer targets BI professionals with a spreadsheet-style Hadoop analysis tool. Unlike Cloudera, Karmasphere and Datameer aren’t yet household names in the Big Data community, but they could be on their way. A recent survey showed a steep learning curve as the No. 1 impediment to Hadoop development, and this is exactly the issue Karmasphere and Datameer address.

Image courtesy of Flickr user melaclaro.

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Fortunately, a crop of companies are eager to solve the problem with single sign-on (SSO) solutions, which provide dashboards that allow administrators to add and configure SaaS applications for an entire workforce. Users get the simplicity of a single access point for all their web applications, and companies can easily set and track policies.

Another feature companies relish is integration with Active Directory, the de facto standard from Microsoft in enterprise identity management that allows administration of roles and assignments for individuals and their access credentials.

Here are a few contenders in this cloud SaaS management arena including their self-described categories:

• Okta: identity and access management software. Okta, which recently hit the scene following a $10 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz this past summer, promotes the concept of a Cloud Area Network, described as a collection of on-demand services.
• OneLogin: single sign on for the cloud and SaaS. OneLogin, funded by Charles River Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, also fits directly in this arena. The company claims to have over 900 pre-integrated applications and offers a free plan for a single user, as well as paid group plans.
• ProtectNetwork: cloud-based e-credential management service. ProtectNetwork is a product of 9 Star Research, a company started in 2002 and likely familiar with e-credential management software before the cloud came along. They now have ProtectNetwork as an online, hosted offering for identity management.
• Conformity: cloud identity and SaaS management solutions. Based in Austin, Texas, Conformity is backed by Guggenheim Venture Partners. The company has a thorough website on SaaS identity management issues, as well as some clever marketing as the anti-SSO SSO. Go figure.

On the surface, a managed single sign-on solution for companies seems like a no-brainer. (I expect there are other companies I missed in the roundup). But there’s a bigger issue and opportunity here, in my opinion: Rather than merely managing the sign-ons and security, these services could back a step to the selection of SaaS applications themselves.

SSO providers can aggregate the menu of applications at each company and the amount of application use. Combine that with clever polling of customers’ favorite applications, and you start to build a database where pattern-matching across companies (anonymously) could drive SaaS sales. The metadata about the applications becomes more valuable, in my opinion, than the service of managing the sign-ons.

Perhaps these SSO providers give birth to enterprise SaaS app stores. Customers will like the fact that they can benchmark and see patterns of application use amongst peers, and SaaS providers could benefit from a direct-line sales and marketing channel. No doubt there are still plenty of short-term sign-on challenges to solve, but if SaaS sign-ons are the enterprise check-in, I think we’ll see these SSO providers expanding to other interesting territory soon.

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user Klearchos Kapoutsis.

The company is developing a cloud-based enterprise performance management system. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is currently keeping covers on its product plans. All it says that it’s working with Fortune 1000 companies and building a “new kind of end-to-end system for developing and running analytical applications.”

In a blog post, Ben Horowitz, partner at Andreessen Horowitz and infrastructure zen-master, outlines the story of Romanian-born Gheorghe and writes:

Proferi is still in stealth mode, so the easiest way for me to describe them is through the lens of their inventor. Proferi is to enterprise software applications as the United States is to Communist Romania. Historically, like Communist Romania, enterprise software has been highly restrictive, inflexible, slow-to-change, slow in general and, quite frankly, oppressive. In addition, customers have been forced to conform their business processes to the underlying data models, limiting the software’s general usefulness. As he did with his own life, Christian has completely re-imagined the category from top to bottom.

With Proferi, the solution resides in the cloud, but this is only the beginning. Christian throws out the old data models, databases, and data restrictions. He then ejects the scale restrictions, broken user interaction paradigms, and performance bottlenecks. Rather than defining their business by their data model, customers define their business by the real people and processes that they use. And the resulting applications perform 1000X faster than their communist, excuse me, enterprise software counterparts.

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• Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility
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But as we discuss in a post at GigaOM Pro, regulated industries can certainly make use of existing cloud solutions, and existing examples prove as much.

CloudAudit (discussed in a recent podcast with George Reese, CTO of Minneapolis-based cloud management firm enStratus) is one industry solution for data-sensitive industries. The process, still in development, helps cloud computing providers self-certify their data centers by providing consistent descriptions of the capabilities, accreditations and features of their centers. The hope is that prospective customers will more easily be able to compare the offerings of different providers.

In health care, the United States’ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) regulates the handling of personally identifiable health data. Amazon is one cloud provider that claims its services meet HIPAA’s stringent requirements for storage and processing of data. Case studies with healthcare service providers like MedCommons provide real-world examples of success in storing data with Amazon.

No one is seriously suggesting a bank or hospital migrate all of its IT to a public cloud, but taking the time to segment existing data and workflows lets customers make effective use of complementary solutions. Here are the four broad categories where cloud technologies could help regulated industries:

• Commodity public cloud. This is typically the cheapest cloud resource, suitable for non-sensitive data. Service level agreements (SLAs) are weak or non-existent and offer little security. The most basic cloud offerings from the likes of Amazon and Rackspace fill this niche.
• External private cloud. Hosted in an external data center but with additional physical and virtual security measures, the external private cloud will typically offer stronger SLAs and contractual protections at a higher cost. It is suitable for some sensitive data and workflows.
• External niche cloud. This is a more expensive option. The external niche cloud is probably audited, and suitable for most sensitive data. It’s intended to meet the particular requirements of an industry like financial services, health care or government. The external niche cloud can be optimized to comply with specific regulations, reduce latency, increase redundancy or other legal, technical or business requirements.
• Internal cloud. If suitably secured and managed, this is ideal for keeping the most sensitive or valuable data in-house. It involves the adoption of cloud computing methods such as virtualization and elasticity within the existing enterprise data center. These internal clouds are normally only effective at delivering cost and efficiency savings when deployed at significant scale.

Prospective cloud customers need to understand their data and what they wish to achieve with it. Rather than treating all of it the same, effective use of different cloud solutions will require an initial effort to segment data according to criteria like sensitivity and speed of change. Detailed and personally identifiable patient records are far less suitable for processing on a public cloud than a set of anonymized statistics. By identifying and experimenting with discrete sets of “safe” data, even customers in the most heavily regulated industries can begin to explore the costs and benefits of bringing cloud computing into their regular workflow.

Read the full post here.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user WTL

• Read Replicas can be created using the AWS management console or RDS APIs or RDS Command Line tools.
• The Read Replica will have the same MySQL version as the original.
• Read Replicas are billed at the same rates as standard DB instances.
• The Replicas can have more storage and processing power independent of the original DB instance.

You can get more details on Read Replicas on the AWS Blog. For original press release, click here.

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First, there’s demand for analytics, and where better to see this than in the filthy-rich, technology-savvy financial services market? An InformationWeek survey commissioned by SAS and Platform Computing shows that both buy-side and sell-side firms are struggling with too much data, inflexible analytics software and hard-to-understand results. Further, a majority of firms surveyed admitted to performing key analyses either never or only in an ad hoc manner. But the good news is that, in the next year, many plan to increase their focus on risk management across the board.

Enter Hadoop. Cloudera cites financial services as one of two vertical markets adopting Hadoop most aggressively, with primary use cases being fraud detection, complex ETL and risk analysis. At Cloudera’s upcoming Hadoop World event, in fact, one of the first presenters will be Bank of America’s managing director for big data and analytics. On the infrastructure level, storing and processing data with Hadoop is also relatively inexpensive because it’s ideally suited to run on clusters of commodity servers.

But Hadoop isn’t perfect. A recent survey commissioned by Hadoop-centric startup Karmasphere indicates that there are several big obstacles to using it. Products aiming to make Hadoop easier to deploy and use — like those offered by Cloudera, Karmasphere, Datameer and IBM — directly address all three of these concerns.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots. Financial services firms (along with many others) are facing increased pressure to analyze their data, and they’re increasingly turning to Hadoop to help them do it. The number of vendors peddling Hadoop-based solutions is small. If they’re not already, those currently operating should start experiencing significant customer traction.  Given the ripeness of the commercial Hadoop market, something tells me they won’t have the market to themselves for long.

Read the full post here.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user matze_ott.

Image courtesy of iFixit.

iFixit did one of its legendary tear-downs today – analyzing the hardware of a freshly-shipped Apple TV — and guess what they found? 8 GB of Flash storage. Apple hasn’t publicly revealed how much Flash storage the device is packing, mostly because it’s marketed as a streaming media player.

Users are supposed to rent streams straight from Apple or play back local content from their Mac or PC, with an option to stream videos straight from an iPad coming in November. But they’re not supposed to hoard these files on their Apple TV.

So why would the device have 8 GB of storage? For apps, of course. Eight GB isn’t all that much if you want to store HD video files, but it’s plenty to save apps. In fact, most iPhone app developers try to keep their apps under 10 MB, because anything larger would have to be downloaded via Wi-Fi, as opposed to through AT&T’s 3G network. Apple TV app developers obviously won’t have to deal with constraints like these, but the current iPhone / iPad app space shows you can do plenty with very little.

iFixit also found there is space for another Flash memory chip for future models. Furthermore, the hardware of the Apple TV is remarkably similar to that of the iPad, featuring the same processor, Flash memory chip and Wi-Fi chip set.

This means the Apple TV is technically capable of running apps similar to those currently available on the iPad, especially given that the Apple TV does, in fact, seem to run the same OS as the iPad. Members of the jailbreak community were able to confirm yesterday that Apple TV runs a flavor of iOS 4.1.

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