GigaOM

Updated: With the Microsoft-Yahoo battle fading from the dynamic random memories of our over stimulated brains, it is time to turn our attention to Hewlett-Packard’s $12 billion $13.9 billion deal to acquire EDS, a services giant in its own right. The news was announced this morning. HP will purchase EDS at a price of $25 per share. Continue Reading

Last month, I wrote about Facebook’s insatiable hunger for hardware. Over the weekend, Spencer Ante of Business Week reported that Palo Alto-based social networking company had raised about $100 million from Triplepoint Capital, a venture lending operation. “It will be used entirely for servers,” Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu told Business Week’s Ante. That gives us a sense of how much hardware is gulping down.

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New York-based cloud computing startup 10gen launched today with backing from CEO Kevin Ryan’s startup network, Alleycorp. It makes sense, since with several ventures already under his belt, Ryan probably has enough customers to both justify the buildout and break even right away. And the founders know scaling, having built out ad network DoubleClick.

But is it always a good idea to build your own cloud when you get big enough to do so?

Yesterday, for example, I had a great chat with Lana Holmes, a Bay area startup maven, about product management and how to focus on doing the one thing that matters to your company. “The example I use is Amazon,” she said. “They just focused on selling books. And look at them now.”

At their root, Amazon’s EC2 and S3 offerings are the result of excess capacity from sales. The offerings have paved the way for an online world in which compute power is a commodity. The company has subsequently built, on top of those offerings, a layer of billing, services and support for them.

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HP Labs is asking academic and research institutions for research proposals that focus on cloud computing, sustainable IT, transferring data seamlessly across a variety of media, dealing with the information explosion and dynamic computing. The computer company will offer $50,000 or $75,000 for selected proposals — primarily to pay a graduate student to help. While it’s nice to get a graduate student, an academic who really finds compelling solutions to these infrastructure problems might be able to get more money out of a VC searching for the next hot startup.

I have a major problem with many of the Web 2.0 companies that I meet in my job as a venture capitalist: They lack even the most basic understanding of Internet operations.

I realize that the Web 2.0 community generally views Internet operations and network engineering as router-hugging relics of the past century desperately clutching to their cryptic, SSH-enabled command line interfaces, but I have recently been reminded by some of my friends working on Web 2.0 applications that Internet operations can actually have a major impact on this century’s application performance and operating costs. Continue Reading

Mosso, an on demand hosting start-up is embracing Cloud Computing with open arms, and today launched the beta of CloudFS, a new web-based storage offering that will compete with Amazon’s S3. Mosso plans to charge $0.15 per gigabyte, and will remain in beta till end of third quarter.