Cloudera, it seems, is always the bridesmaid and never the bride. It continuously partners with hot commodities that get snatched up by big-time vendors shortly thereafter. First it was Netezza, then it was Teradata, and yesterday it was EMC, via the storage leader’s newly acquired Greenplum product line. The partnership with Greenplum had been in the works since the spring (months before EMC bought Greenplum in July), and IBM bought Netezza a mere two months after the Cloudera-Netezza partnership was announced. If analysts’ predictions are correct, Teradata should find a new home any time now, too.

How long will it be before someone (let’s say IBM or Oracle) realizes the trend and snatches up Cloudera? Because Hadoop seems pretty obviously to be the next big thing in enterprise analytics, and because Cloudera is driving the momentum , I’m guessing it won’t be long.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Stu Seeger.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

From M&A to R&D, Cloud is Driving IT Activity

The Incredible, Growing, Commercial Hadoop Market

Can Greenplum Become the Sun Microsystems of Databases?

Amazon Introduces “Micro Instances” on EC2 (From CloudPundit) AWS advertises Micro Instances as being ideal for low-traffic web apps and lightweight process, but the use cases might be quite a bit broader. Oh, and  it’s further price pressure on the competition.

ARM Announces Cortex A-15 Eagle Microprocessor (From EE Times) Kudos to Stacey for being on this trend early, because it looks certain to bear fruit now. It’s not surprising to see interest from Dell, which continues to prove that it gets webscale.

HPC Meets Cloud Computing with Dell’s New Server (From PC World) Speaking of Dell getting webscale, here are details on its newest high-density server. The PowerEdge C6105 runs on AMD Opteron 4000 processors and is designed for scale-out environments.

Random Access Compute Capacity (RACC) (From ElasticVapor) I thought about this a lot as cloud computing was catching on a few years ago; it makes even more sense today. The cloud is a collection of distributed resources, so why not do distributed computing?

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

Getting Your Information Out Again

One question that’ss easy to forget about when shopping around for software is how easily you can pull your information out of a given application. Whether you may want to move to a new tool, your existing tool’s developers stop supporting it or you simply want to be able to back up your data, being able to export data is a crucial consideration.

The presence of an API in a tool is not a guarantee that there is an easy export option, but it tends to be a good indicator. Furthermore, an API means that if you need to hack together an export tool of your own, it’s typically doable — you won’t find your business or organization in a problematic situation. It may require bringing in some expert help to create the tool, but that’s still going to be less expensive than having someone retype an entire database in another application.

Robust and Growing Tools

APIs create opportunities for development beyond what an application’s creators may be able — or willing — to do on their own. For example, Basecamp is a good project management tool, but 37signals has very carefully considered what features to add; it hasn’t chosen to add every suggested feature. But there is an API for the web-based application that lets anyone create the features that they need. If you browse through just the add-ons Basecamp links to, you’ll be there for a while.

You can find a wide variety of tools that add on to Basecamp right now. On a less well-known application, you may not have immediate access to add-ons, but you will still have the option of creating your own (or hiring a programmer to build a tool that makes use of the API) fairly quickly.

This sort of robust development is a good sign for the long-term support of a tool, as well. When users have invested in a tool to the point that they’ve created a plugin or a helper tool, they’re far less likely to switch away, which in turn means that the creators have more incentive to continue supporting the tool and even to integrate plugins in the future.

Looking for an API when choosing tools simply makes sense for a growing enterprise. It should be just as important a consideration as the price or features of the tools you are considering.

Is an API on your shopping list?

Image by Flickr user skistz

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Alex Bogusky, widely regarded as the guru of advertising until he recently left the helm of MDC Partners, describes the SuperMe as, “a highly-sharable and incredibly robust digital version of our selves… We have created these alter egos and now we not only refuse to live without them but we have a new expectation for the contribution that other products and services should make to our lives.”

That expectation, says Bogusky, is that products and services must help to support or augment the SuperMe in some way. In his post, Bogusky looks at this possibility in detail, using the auto industry as an example (if you can’t think of a way your car can augment your digital SuperMe, you’ll be impressed by his ideas).

But the concept of the SuperMe has implications for those using and enjoying social media as well as those trying to harness it for brand-building purposes. To build a brand through social networking, you must ensure that your brand helps others build their brand. Your brand must support your audience’s SuperMes.

Individuals and the SuperMe

Following Bogusky’s logic, we social media users want to work on our SuperMes as and when and how we choose. The more, and richer, the opportunities we have to do that, the better. We select social networking tools — and their specific features — based on what those tools facilitate (how they support us in developing our SuperMes), as well as who else is using those tools. But, as Bogusky says, we’ll also select whatever products we can, to some degree, on the basis of the value they provide to our SuperMes.

The questions of privacy and security around the content we place on social networks relates directly to the authenticity of our SuperMes as realistic reflections of who we actually are. This applies as much to the issues of prospective employers finding photos of your last wild party online as it does to strangers being able to access your personal information through a casual web search.

Would you use Twitter to contact a contractor about a quick work question, rather than sending them an email or using Twitter’s DM feature, which would keep the message private? Even something as simple as this decsions plays directly into the issue of the SuperMe. The manner in which you’d respond to a work query posed this way does, too.

These questions ultimately relate to the bigger issue of the types of information we, as users, use to build our SuperMes. They raise issues around what constitutes true authenticity — do you need to reflect every aspect of your life or personality in your SuperMe? — as well as the strength of our desire to belong within our individual social networks, our social circles, and our communities.

Organizations and the SuperMe

Organizations that understand the concept of the SuperMe can harness it and use it to their advantage.

Perhaps your staff will be more satisfied if you allow them access to Facebook and Twitter at work, and find subtle ways to encourage them to include work contacts, and report company news, in the information they publish. I found out about Yahoo’s takeover of Flickr through the Twitter and Flickr streams of a friend who works there. I’m kept up-to-date on the social club antics of a company my friend works for through her social network activity — activity that makes me want to work for her employee-focused employer.

Businesses that want to build their brands among consumer audiences might consider how they can augment customers’ SuperMes. One company I know held a competition that required customers to take pictures of themselves at recognizable national sites with the company’s products, and submit them to an online gallery, as part of a competition to celebrate the organization reaching a truly global customer base. Facebook Groups and Pages, Twitter competitions and Flickr groups are just some of the tools that organizations can use to engage audience members in ways that help them build their SuperMes.

As Bogusky points out in his article, though, your brand can support customers’ SuperMes without actually employing any specific social networks, through products themselves. For example, provide a camera in the rear-view mirror of the car you’re about to release, enabling drivers to take pictures of the kids in the back seat. You could tie this in to an online competition — submit your pictures of families on holiday in family cars, for example — but the addition of the functionality itself gives users the opportunity to develop their SuperMes in new ways.

Tapping into the basic human need to belong, in this case through the opportunities provided by social networking, and by grasping the notion of the SuperMe, might be a good way to build your brand, whether it’s personal or professional.

How are you using social media to meet the needs of your — or your customers’ — SuperMes?

Image by stock.xchng user gökçe –.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

I own every major Twitter client for the iPhone, and many for the iPad. Some were free, but most were bought and paid for. They each have their merits and I’ve used them all variously at one time or another, though some more than others. But no more.

Twitter seemed like a good idea when I joined the social network more than two years ago, and while 140 characters isn’t a lot of space to work with, it’s brief and, in theory, decidedly easy to take in with just a quick look once in a while. Never did I imagine that my pretty, essential stream would become the bloated, polluted river of “information” that greets me today when I boot up an app or navigate to Twitter on the web. I don’t need to know, for instance, what your dermatologist thinks that rash is.

It’s no longer a communicative tool, frankly. I used to praise its value as a search and research venue, and that’s all it’s become, with all the personality of a schizophrenic Google. And don’t get me wrong, despite the negative connotations of schizophrenic as a descriptor, I do appreciate it when I’m trying to find up-to-the-second information. But at all other times, whether it’s looking to make meaningful professional connections or just catching up with friends, I’ve lost any reason to sneak a peek.

At best, Twitter is a terrible, attention-fracturing distraction. At worst, it’s a fruitless conduit for otherwise powerful creative energy that trains you to think and act in brief, dissociated pointless installments. So I’m sorry Twitter, but you’re the first to go as part of my recovery plan. Maybe I’ll see you the next time I absolutely need to know the score of the Blue Jay’s game as it’s happening.

What’s your experience with Twitter? How have you found your experience to change over time using the service? Do you find it helps or hurts your productivity?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Social currency isn’t just “buzz,” says Erich Joachimsthaler, the Founder and CEO of Vivaldi Partners, it “represents a shared asset of consumers and company-owned brands.” It’s not something that companies create and control on their own, he advises, but there are six “levers” that organizations can use to encourage or impact social currency:

• affiliation
• conversation
• utility
• advocacy
• information
• identity

Deconstructing Social Currency

Social currency isn’t viral marketing, social media or digital communications. But it’s fair to say that online brands have a range of tools and technologies at their disposal to help push the levers of social currency.

Take a look at WebWorkerDaily, for example. This site’s users feel a sense of unity when they find others who use the site; WWD users may also feel an affiliation with other users of the GigaOM network of sites. One way in which WWD tries to boost that sense of unity is through our user profiles, which tell the stories of individual WWD readers. To our users, the WebWorkerDaily brand stands for something, and they identify themselves — and other WWD users they read about and meet — with the brand qualities they perceive.

For many of our users, WWD might come up in work conversations with colleagues and friends — there’s a lot to talk about here, and the site’s comments and content sharing tools support users’ desire to communicate with one another about, and advocate for, WWD. This also points to the brand’s utility, in terms of the value WWD information and conversations deliver to those working on the web, as well as how easy it is for users to communicate that information to their contacts. That public advocacy through conversation builds identity and a sense of affiliation, and reinforces the brand’s utility further.

As you can see, the levers of social currency interact in many places and on many levels. Some of these interactions can be influenced by the WWD team, but there are large areas of this shared space that are beyond the team’s control. For more detailed examples of market-leading brands, see the report itself.

Social Currency in Action

Social currency isn’t new, but it seems the “global village” has made this phenomenon more prevalent, and more important for companies operating online. I can think of two recent examples that appear to at least hint at the power of social currency for online brands.

First up: Facebook. Battles over the site’s privacy policy rage (GigaOM Pro link, subscription required) as Facebook’s default settings make more and more user information accessible to people outside the site itself. Facebook says it focuses on users, yet the site’s notorious for its poor usability. Both pieces of evidence seem, to me at least, to suggest that Facebook is focused more heavily on being the biggest than the best.

As an example, the “Friends” link on the site simply provides logged-in users with tools to help Facebook build its userbase. I’d expected the Friends link to provide me with a list of my Facebook friends. But perhaps the fact that Facebook values its own visibility over user expectations is part of its approach to building social currency.

A large portion of Facebook’s users have railed against the complexity of the site’s privacy settings, causing the service’s founder to make public addresses on the steps being taken to appease user concerns. Yet a recent protest, Quit Facebook Day, failed to attract a groundswell of user response.

The second example is Apple. In recent years, the company has caused consternation around everything from digital rights management and content policies to product manufacture quality and environmental and social responsibility.

A recent spoof of CEO Steve Jobs’ iPad launch brief coupled his hyperbolic effusions over the “unbelievably great” iPad with a briefing scene from Star Wars to make comment about the brand’s unjustified self-importance. Yet Apple sold 2 million iPad units in the first 60 days after launch, and the Apple business continues to expand.

It seems that for every brand advocate that Facebook and Apple have, there are several detractors, yet the brands flourish. Is social currency a contributing factor to this paradox? It seems so.

Where have you seen social currency in action? How much do you think social currency accounts for major web brands’ ongoing — and growing — patronage by users who are nonetheless dissatisfied with some aspect of the brands, and have plenty of competitors to consider?

Image by stock.xchng user cararr.

Coupled with the increase in Internet bandwidth, cloud computing has facilitated the development of many of the fantastic web apps that I use and love today as services like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 and Google’s App Engine has lowered the app vendors’ startup costs and provided reliable scalability for when their user bases grow.

When it comes to mobility and collaboration, cloud computing has delivered advances that I already take for granted. Because I primarily work in the cloud, I can access my work from anywhere, using a multitude of devices. This is beneficial beyond just being able to hop between a desktop machine and a laptop. When most of one’s tools live online, switching from PC to Mac (or vice versa) is much less burdensome than it could have been in the past. And if I suddenly found that my main laptop had died, my Time Machine backup was corrupted and I only had in iPad  to work on — as happened to designer Shane Pearlman recently — it wouldn’t be an absolute disaster.

Having my work available online makes collaboration far easier than it ever was before. Rather than emailing files to my colleagues and trying (and failing) to keep track of all the different versions, using a tool like Google Docs means I can have one document that everyone can access — it’s even possible to have more than one person editing that document at any one time, if I wish. Couple that kind of access with project management and corporate social networking features and collaboration with the rest of my team, which is spread all over the globe, is a snap. And developers have seemingly only scratched the surface of the collaborative possibilities.

Personally, I love having all of my main work tools available in the cloud. It means I can always get at my work, whether I’m logging on with either of my laptops, on my phone, on a desktop machine or even using someone else’s computer — I simply open a browser, load up a few tabs and I’m ready to go.  If a hard drive failure or some other catastrophe strikes my computer, I know that my work is safe and I can get back up and running with minimal downtime.

While this veritable explosion of web apps has made all of our web working lives considerably easier, it’s also made things cheaper. While running a virtual team like WebWorkerDaily’s would still be possible without the cloud, it would probably be a lot more expensive. Instead of using an array of fairly inexpensive cloud-based tools, not only would we have to either buy or develop all the software we need, we’d also have to have the infrastructure on which to run it and hire additional staff just to keep the systems running. Without the cloud, many of the virtual businesses that have sprung up over the past few years wouldn’t exist, because the costs would be too prohibitive. And I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.

Of course, working in the cloud is not without its drawbacks and risks. It requires an Internet connection, and such connectivity is not yet ubiquitous. Data portability is also an issue, because once you start using a particular web app, it can be tricky to move your data to another service. There’s also the question of trusting web app vendors with your data — what happens if the vendor goes bust, corrupts your data somehow, or is hacked? Many of these issues can be mitigated, however — by having appropriate local backup strategies, for example — and some of them are being addressed by web app vendors themselves.

Cloud computing has clearly had a huge impact on my working life over the past few years, but I wanted to get the thoughts of the WWD readership: How has cloud computing changed the way that you work?

Who said that the advertising models of print and yesteryear would be sustainable online? Everyone just hoped they’d translate, because porting old models onto new platforms didn’t require much innovation or effort. I’d argue that any publisher that has their eggs completely in the ad banner basket is missing the boat and is in for a Titanic-sized rude awakening.

The good news is that I’ve seen inklings of integrated campaigns online from some forward-thinking advertisers who are realizing that the old advertising methods don’t work so well online and that ad banner fatigue hit consumers in about, oh, 1999. Kudos to the companies who may not yet be getting it right, but are fighting the good fight to bust out of the old models and create some new ones.

So what are the new options for advertisers to reach potential customers? I don’t have a magic bullet for you, sorry, but I do have some wild and wacky ideas about advertising (hate it) versus social communications (love it).

• integration — think of how you can integrate your brand appropriate into conversations. Hint: Strategic social media marketing.
• placement — find interesting ways to place your brand into someone’s information stream. Hint: Virtual goods and gifts.
• overlay — develop ways to put your content into new places and spaces. Hint: Augmented reality.
• cross-platform — don’t just think Mac/PC or Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Hint: Hybrid online/offline.

I’ll leave you with these final thoughts and then let you ruminate — or argue with me, if you like. Most people do not want to consume ads. Many just barely tolerate them. A growing number of people completely reject them. If you look at the trends in communications over the last two decades, the patterns are clear. Learn from our past mistakes. Don’t be afraid to be different. Just make sure you have a strategy, some patience, and a flexible plan.

And please…don’t be an ostrich.

What is the future of advertising on the social web?

Photos by stock.xcnhg users flaivoloka and josecarli respectively

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

The fact is that companies aren’t willing to field test new mobile tech unless they receive a huge incentive to do so. Breaking ground with new tech often falls then to freelancers and contractors who have a greater degree of freedom regarding choice of tools they use. Not only is it just plain cool that field testing new toys often falls to us and then trickles up, it’s also a responsibility I think web workers and the places that support them should openly and actively embrace.

Sometimes this means taking a risk with your money and investing in something relatively untested, but that’s not necessarily what I mean to encourage. Some may not be so quick to drop hard-earned cash on things that might end up collecting dust on a closet shelf. You don’t always have to spend your own money to test things, though. There are ways to have your cake and eat it, too.

Firstly, if you think you can make a strong enough case, you can roll equipment and software purchase or rental costs into your contract price. This can work more often than you’d think, partly because companies like to spend money on software and equipment since it makes them feel like they’ll have a greater chance of getting a quality product back. I still can’t really get over how many times I’ve been asked to suggest a paid alternative to the free tools that I’ve written into contracts.

Secondly, you could ask for things you want to try out to be adopted at the places you frequent for work. That could mean the local coffee shop, or it could be your neighborhood coworking office, if you’re lucky enough to have one. For example, I’d like to get Qi-standard wireless induction charging pads to be made available at my own coworking haunt. It wouldn’t be hard, since there are even inexpensive Nintendo Wii charging accessories using that standard. You may face resistance and skepticism, but if a few others support your argument, you shouldn’t have too much trouble working something out.

Helping to discover and spread the word about new mobile tech advances is rewarding in its own right, but it also benefits you as a web working professional. You’ll be occupying the cutting edge, and it’ll show in the products you deliver and in how knowledgeable you come across to employers and peers. That’s worth the price of a few duds, even if you are buying your own gear instead of folding it into contracts.

Does anyone else feel that part of their role as a web worker is to test out new things, or is it just my way of justifying an extreme gadget-buying process addiction?