Frank wants to use that energy to get started with his new show soon. His plan is to have first episodes up at the end of March and release three new episodes every week. He told me he hasn’t made up his mind yet on how to distribute the show, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if the episodes end up on YouTube one way or another. Frank said that he’s been getting advice from Craig Benzine ( aka wheezywaiter) as well as the VlogBrothers John and Hank Green on the matter. All three of them are veteran YouTube stars.

Speaking of YouTube: the Google-owned video site has been on a buying spree in recent months, securing talent for premium channels by paying out sizable advances. So why go to Kickstarter, instead of just asking YouTube for a check? Said Frank:

Kickstarter is an amazing way to get the audience involved from the ground up, which is a big part of what I am trying to do with this show. That said, I would certainly be open to having YouTube as a partner in this. They are the epicenter of online video and home to some of the best new talent on the web and beyond.

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Box, formerly known as Box.net, is one of several companies — including fan-favorite Dropbox as well as Microsoft, and Google — competing to store your digital paraphernalia — Word documents, presentations, photographs, whatever — in the cloud and make it accessible from your devices of choice.

A big part of the update is the facelift Box gave virtually all Android clients. “We worked closely with Google to build a modern interface using Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich principles. That Android 4 UI will run cross all Android clients,” said Matthew Self, VP of platform engineering for Box. (Ice Cream Sandwich is Google’s name for the latest Android smartphone OS.)

Given the number of Android flavors in the field — every carrier has its own — and different versions of each, that single UI claim is no small feat. Self estimates there are easily hundreds of device-Android combinations out there.

Also new to Android: Users will be able to upload multiple files in batch mode and in background and can invite collaborators to work on  a document from their device. And, they can comment on these documents from their phones, Self said.

While Box supports a wide variety of non-Android devices–including Apple  iPhones and iPads, RIM’s Blackberry and Blackberry Playbook, even HP’s defunct TouchPad — Android appears to be the favorite.

“Android has eclipsed iPhone on the phone side and it’s growing fast in tablets.  There are a lot of Android phones coming into the enterprise,” Self said. He cited Gartner numbers showing Android with 50 percent of the smartphone market, Apple iOS with 25 percent and Microsoft with just 2 percent — a number he does not think will improve much.

That explains why Box offers no native Windows Phone support at all, although an HTML5 browser-based client runs on most devices. Self discounted the ability of Microsoft to gain significant market share in smartphones even though the new Windows Phone Mango OS has been well reviewed.

Update: A Box spokesman wrote in to clarify the company’s position on Windows Phone. He said:

At Box, we want to make it dead simple for our users to share and collaborate on business content from any device. We’ve invested aggressively in building amazing experiences on iOS and Android because those are the platforms our customers are using, but we’re always tracking adoption and demand, and will support Windows when we see it get traction in the organizations we serve.

With the updated Android clients comes support for four new languages — French, Italian, German, and Spanish– so Box is no longer an English-only experience.  The company will show off its new offerings next week at the Global World Congress in Barcelona.

It’s becoming clear that Box is banking on Android at the expense of Windows Phone and even Apple’s popular devices. The fact that Microsoft’s SkyDrive and  Apple’s iCloud cloud storage services could be considered Box competitors might be a motivating factor.

Still, given RIM’s Blackberry woes, the continued fragmentation of the Android market and the worry that Google’s acquisition of Motorola is causing rival handset makers –all of which could help Microsoft’s smartphone efforts– this looks like a risky move.

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What the company promises here is wide deployment choice for companies that want to build internal private clouds for security or other reasons or want to put all or part of their workloads into a public cloud.

As a systems integrator with a global presence, Dimension Data or DiData, can boast geographic coverage that gives it an advantage over other cloud providers. “We do about $5.8 billion a year and have 14,000 employees — we have the wherewithal to serve customers all over the world,” said Keao Caindec, CMO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit. (Dimension Data is a Johannesburg, South Africa-based subsidiary of NTT Holdings.)

Dimension Data Cloud Services layer OpSource’s software know-how atop EMC storage, VMware virtualization, Cisco networking and Dell servers, Caindec said.

The platform is managed by Dimension Data’s Cloud Control which provides the workflow orchestration, resource provisioning, and billing. A service administration layer does all the metering, sets the permissions and enforcement.

These cloud services hit a market that is rapidly filling up with cloud computing options. Just last week, EMC — which already backs the VCE company that bundles EMC storage, VMware and Cisco UCS servers — said it would team up with a VMware and Atos, a French IT giant with global presence, on Canopy, another wide-ranging cloud services initiative. And, another tech triumvirate – Cisco, VMware and NetApp — offer a FlexPod hardware-software bundle that competes with the VCE’s Vblock offerings.

The biggest webscale clouds — the prototypes of which are run by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Zynga — tend to deploy commodity “scale-out” hardware. That trend leaves premium vendors — EMC, Cisco, NetApp — looking for ways to embed their pricier hardware in cloud deployments. Hence all the joint efforts. Last week it was Canopy, this week DiData, stay tuned for more.

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Kamala Harris worked with Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft, and Research in Motion on what appears to be a formal agreement to help app developers comply with an already existing California law that requires them to have privacy policies. The main change is that the six companies responsible for the vast majority of app downloads in the U.S. must now provide app developers with a way to link to an app’s privacy policy on their own Web sites or insert the text of the policy within the app. But the statement released by Harris’ office was “not intended to impose legally binding obligations on the (mobile companies).”

It’s hard to imagine the new agreement having too much of an effect on mobile privacy. Even if “the majority” of mobile apps lack privacy policies (per Harris’ office), the majority of those downloading apps blow right past those privacy policies in order to install their new toy. Those who do read the policies are in store for some of the finest legalese yet created as to hide as much as possible the notion that free apps depend on the collection of personal data. Having a policy is much better than not having a policy, but greater emphasis on making those policies easier to understand would be appreciated.

Harris’ agreement stops short of pinpointing specific uses of personal information that might harm consumers, but it does make it easier for app developers to post policies and for consumers to report violations of those policies, so it’s probably better than nothing. The AG’s press release said the parties will reconvene in six months, at which point there will likely have been yet another incident along the lines of Path’s address-book snafu that drew widespread attention.

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FISMA was meant to define a framework for protecting government information and operations against natural or man-made threats. Three levels of threat — low, moderate and high — were defined, based on the potential impact of a security breach. The latest action in the cloud comes as cloud providers lay claim to the “FISMA moderate” designation, meaning that the threat of a breach could result in “moderate” damage in terms of loss of “confidentiality, integrity or availability.”

Gaining a “FISMA moderate” designation is an important checklist item that would make cloud services more palatable to government agencies that want to move to the least expensive deployment option but also protect their data. Virtustream is the latest cloud vendor to hoist the FISMA moderate flag, saying Monday that its Vienna, Va., data center earned the moderate level FISMA authorization and accreditation certificate. It already held the FISMA “Low” accreditation. To attain moderate ranking, it had to show sufficient “physical controls and procedures to ensure that the site is secure via biometrics and other controls and is highly available through redundancy,” according to a Virtustream statement.

Amazon Web Services claimed the FISMA moderate mantle in September. As AWS evangelist Jeff Barr wrote at the time:

After receiving our FISMA Low level certification and accreditation, we took the next step and started to pursue the far more stringent FISMA Moderate level. This work has been completed, and the door is now open for a much wider range of US Government agencies to use AWS as their cloud provider. Based on detailed security baselines established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), FISMA Moderate certification and accreditation required us to address an extensive set of security configuration and controls.

There’s nothing wrong with these FISMA claims; it’s just that they’re not really official — yet. FedRAMP will take another three or four months to review and generate a list of compliant companies, said a spokesman for the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

One thing is clear: the race is on to win government cloud business, said John Pescatore, Internet security analyst and VP at Gartner. “There’s definitely going to be money in direct sales to the government but also sales to companies like defense contractors that do business with the government.” Being on that FISMA-approved list will be non-negotiable to most high-tech companies.

Already there have been some nasty, revenue-driven vendor spats over FISMA claims, such as when Microsoft publicly questioned Google’s claim of FISMA compliance for Google Apps.

Sorry states: FedRAMP for feds only

One problem is that while FedRAMP pertains to federal cloud deployments only, many worry that budget-constrained states and cities will read any FISMA certification as some sort of safety guarantee. (The TechAmerica Foundation last week released its own set of best practices and guidelines for cloud deployment.)

Jeff Gould, president of Peerstone Inc., warned of this issue. “FISMA is a federal standard, but you also have a lot of state and local governments wanting to save money. Many will point to the FISMA badge as justification, although it is irrelevant to them,” he said. “We’ve got a race to the bottom where CIOs in smaller government entities are looking for any excuse to get the cheapest thing. The danger is that the vendors will take this FISMA certification as a blanket label to say ‘I’m the safe and secure cloud.’”

There’s little doubt that, over time, more of the government’s data and workloads will move to the cloud. But there’s no substitute for due diligence — which is what the FedRAMP effort proposes. The last thing any of these constituencies — cloud vendors, agencies, integrators, the government itself — needs is a public snafu.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user g_kovacs.

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Distimo said that of the top 110 apps that appear in both the  Android Market and Amazon Appstore, 42 of them make more money on Amazon than on Android Market. Overall, 28 percent of the revenue in those top apps came from the Appstore. That’s a big showing for an Appstore that is less than one year old and has 26,826 available applications, compared to more than 400,000 worldwide for Android Market, according to Distimo.

Amazon Appstore is turning out to be a great place for paid app downloads, compared to Android Market which monetizes better through in-app purchase. Distimo said paid apps in Appstore made up 65 percent of all apps, while the percentage of paid apps in Android Market has slipped from 38 percent to 32 percent over the last seven months. Of the top 200 grossing Android Market apps, 66 percent of the revenue comes from in-app purchases.

The rise of Amazon Appstore is due in large part to the emergence of the Kindle Fire, which has been a major accelerant for Appstore and is now used more than any other Android tablet. In December, the total number of downloads generated by the top 100 apps in the Appstore increased fourteen-fold compared to two months earlier. While Android Market generated 22 times more new apps than the Appstore in September last year, by December and January, the number of new apps on Amazon had surged, cutting the Market’s advantage for new apps to about 5-1.

The fact that paid app downloads are bigger proportionately on Amazon than on Android Market may be due in part to Amazon’s pricing controls. One of the key differences between the two stores is that Amazon can change the price of apps, a provision that concerned some app makers. That control has apparently resulted in the average price of the top 100 paid applications in Amazon Appstore being 40 percent lower than in the Market. The average price of the top 100 applications is $3.76 in Google’s Android Market and $2.24 in Amazon Appstore. The game Monopoly, for example, was available for 99 cents in Appstore for a limited time last month, compared to a fixed price of $4.99 for the whole month in the Market. Amazon’s simple one-click check-out process and its overall reputation for commerce may also be driving paid downloads.

One interesting fact that emerged is that about 50 percent of Amazon’s apps don’t appear in Android Market, said Distimo. That suggests that, while many app makers are simply porting over their apps from Android Market to Amazon Appstore, a big number of apps are bypassing the Market and going straight to Amazon. It’s unclear if this is just Kindle-versions of established Android apps, but it still suggests that developers are making specific investments in Amazon apps.

The strong showing by Amazon Appstore appears to back up early anecdotal evidence I gathered in December, in which a number of Android developers reported seeing a big boost for paid app downloads on Appstore. It’s pretty amazing considering that a big proportion of these downloads is coming from just one device: the Kindle Fire. Appstore also provides apps for other Android devices, but it’s really shining because it’s the app store for Fire owners. Appstore benefits in some ways from its smaller base of apps, which makes discovery easier for users, who don’t have to wade through as many options. It will be interesting to see if Amazon can still remain as lucrative if its appstore attracts a lot more apps.

Overall, what this means for Android developers is that, if they’re looking to make money from paid downloads, they really need to think about Amazon Appstore. The work to submit an app to Amazon increasingly looks like a solid bet. And it may make sense for developers to look at the Fire as its own distinct platform. Android Market still has the largest reach compared to Appstore, which is still limited to the U.S. But more and more, we’re seeing how the Kindle Fire is providing an outsized impact on the Android ecosystem, which has gained a pretty potent way to make money from Android apps.

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It is quitting time, and you know the drill. You grab your coat and slip on your Bluetooth for a quick call with a client on the commute home. You stop at the grocery store and, while you are in line, pluck out your BlackBerry to respond to emails. You arrive home, sit down to dinner and try hard to resist the flashing red light on your smartphone. Dinner is done: Time to check your email again, clear the dishes, and sit on the couch for some TV — with your computer on your lap, of course. Just a few last emails and then it is time for bed. You will soon wake up to do it all over again tomorrow.

The constant drip of communication in what used to be known as “off hours” is the subject of a lengthy article in the publication, which offers a run down of opinion on the issue out of the Wharton School. The piece asks: what’s driving our constant need for connection? What’s it doing to us and whose problem is it?

It kicks off with a list of high-profile companies that have recently done something to tackle their employees’ information overload, including French IT company Atos, Deutsche Telekom, Google and Volkswagen. From banning email to switching of BlackBerries after hours, these companies using various techniques to force staff to power down their devices – and their brains – for a much-needed rest. Countries are even trying to get hyper-connected workers to switch off – Brazil recently passed a law requiring employers to pay overtime when they ask employees to check emails or take calls out of hours. But experts from Wharton suggest that the problem runs deeper than a tweaking rules or policies can reach.

“These policies provide important signals about what the company stands for, but often fall short as workable solutions,” says Stewart Friedman, a Wharton practice professor of management. Why? Our communication addiction goes right to the heart of our most fundamental anxieties, according to Carolyn Marvin, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication:

We sometimes talk as if it’s technology that does it to us, that makes us this way. But the problem is deeper. Technology is just a very efficient way of implementing a view we already have of ourselves. That’s the notion that who we are is our ability to produce in the marketplace and constantly show that we are producing. Being a successful member of middle class society is showing our dedication to professional work and being available at all hours of the day.

And Marvin isn’t the only expert who feels that the primary combatant in the war against communication-induced burnout should be the individual, not the organization. Craig Chappelow, global portfolio manager at the Center for Creative Leadership, who also contributes to the Knowledge@Wharton article, puts the responsibility for policing boundaries squarely on the shoulders of “individual leaders,” who he says, should “model the kinds of behaviors they expect to see. It’s the boss who should be saying: ‘We’re better if we are not working all weekend long.’” And, he adds, this sort of policy should begin at home: “In my family, we have a rule: No BlackBerries until breakfast is over.”

Who do you think bears the primary responsibility for policing after-hours use of communication devices?

Image courtesy of Flickr use Orange Steeler.

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For example, voice-over-IP and texting services are up 114 percent from the first half of the year, presaging a future when the line items of texting and voice plans could disappear. Already companies are declining to buy texting plans for their employees, rightly recognizing that they can communicate via text without going through the carrier’s SMS system. It is a phenomenon already cutting into revenues at European carriers, and it will be felt soon here in the U.S.

Meanwhile, VoIP calling services, whether they are via Skype or Viber, are on the rise as well. And while carriers that are transitioning to LTE networks will eventually move their voice calling over to IP calls, it is unclear if the price paid for voice plans will see a subsequent drop. But data plans will only represent almost 40 percent of the average revenue per user (ARPU) by the end of the first quarter this year, according to Chetan Sharma, an industry consultant. This is a problem for two reasons, the first being that if people stop buying voice or texting plans, operators have a large hole to fill in ARPU. Second, the per-gigabyte price of VoIP calls or IM would not fill that hole but would also replace a higher-margin service with a lower-margin one.

So is compromise in the air?

In the wake of these losses in revenue, Allot’s recommendation to carriers is now compromise. A few years ago Allot was selling new types of pricing plans to help carriers cut down on bandwidth-hogging video applications while some carriers were trying to curb usage of new service by changing their terms of service to forbid users from streaming video to their phones. Allot called it. A backlash to the terms of service changes and carrier’s realizing that pricing was a better and more profitable carrot to use has reshaped the industry. It is becoming difficult to find someone with an unlimited mobile broadband plan.

I will take Allot’s recommendation that carriers should work with over-the-top providers pretty seriously. Already Skype, whose business comprises 79 percent of the VoIP traffic that Allot notes is rising, has a deal with Verizon that could represent the new breed of compromise. Unfortunately, details of their arrangement are hard to ferret out, but it seems to benefit Verizon over the consumer.

Also, we still waste a lot of time on YouTube

Aside from predicting the future for mobile operators, Allot’s data shows how much of our present we spend surfing YouTube on mobile networks. Globally, almost one out of every four packets (24 percent) traversing the mobile network was from YouTube, and it also accounts for 62 percent of all streaming traffic.

It appears from the report that the next big worry on the horizon will be HD video streaming traffic. YouTube’s HD-streaming traffic has increased by 300 percent from the first half to the second half of the year. Better and bigger screens are to blame for this boost, according to Allot, but I think faster LTE networks that are rolling out around the country play a role. Faster networks mean we can stream higher-def content, although we may end up paying for it in overage charges later.

And in those faster networks, along with our tendency to guzzle video content, may lie the secret to mobile operators’ success. Customers are already used to paying a set amount for voice, texting and data, but right now more than half of that amount is voice and texting. The challenge for carriers will be in shifting their pricing so customers pay about the same amount per month but “see” more of that going to data and less to voice or texting plans. Perhaps consumers would pay a bit for a VoIP plan that exempts Skype from counting against their data plan or ensures they could make a call.

For carriers, the worst thing that could happen from a pricing perspective is that consumers begin dumping voice and texting plans and acclimatizing to paying them less overall. But if operators cooperate with VoIP, IM and even video-calling services to offer an easier on-ramp to IP communications as well as plans that shift more of the costs paid by a consumer over to data, they may win. Companies like AT&T might be able to keep the same amount of consumer wallet share, co-opt their competition and probably eke out a few quarters of higher margins.

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The deal gives Yandex access to Twitter’s firehose, and allows users to search it at twitter.yandex.ru, giving them almost instant access to vast troves of data streaming off the messaging service.

The move comes just hours after the Moscow-based service launched a program to incorporate more social networking data into its search results.

And it also comes after Google, which trails Yandex in the Russian market, famously ended its own deal with Twitter — a move that killed off its own real-time search product.

That decision was just one part of an ongoing spat between the two companies, but it appears that Yandex wants to try and take advantage of the situation to further extend its lead over Google in its home market. Currently Yandex is responsible for around 60 percent of Russian searches, but its rival recently stole a few points and moved up to control around a quarter of the market.

Although the terms of the deal aren’t known, it’s likely that Yandex is paying a substantial fee to access Twitter’s data: Microsoft is thought to pay around $30 million each year for the firehose.

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The latest beta is the first to include support Android 4.0 devices. Although there are very few official handsets that run the latest version of Google’s mobile platform known as Ice Cream Sandwich, it’s good to see that some developers are preparing their apps for Android 4.0. And just a few minutes after installing Swype on my Galaxy Nexus handset, I was tracing out words at a fairly high speed. The keyboard could actually convert me from a two-handed into more of a one-handed smartphone user.

On the tablet scene, annual slate sales for 2011 showed that Android tablets are beginning to take more of the market from Apple’s successful iPad. Research firm iHS reported that Apple sold a total of 40.4 million units last year, accounting for 62 percent of all tablets sold. In 2010, the iPad took 87 percent of the market. So has Android finally found some footing in the tablet market?

It has if you count the Android-based Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet devices, which together accounted for 11 percent of all tablet sales in 2011. That’s nearly half of the market share gains Android tablets made on the iPad. The low cost of these media slates — $199 to $249 — is a likely factor, but another commonality is a strong ecosystem of digital media. Samsung may not have the same breadth of media options available, which is why I suspect it’s new Galaxy Tab 2 will be priced to compete with these low-cost slates.

Even though Android 4.0 is just getting on both smartphones and tablets now, rumors surfaced that Android 5.0 will launch in the second quarter of this year. DigiTimes reported the news, citing Taiwan-based supply chain makers. There’s a few problems with this report, however.

DigiTimes claims that “Android 4.0 did not perform as well as expected.” It’s far too early to make such a statement when only one tablet — the Asus Transformer Prime, which I think is the best large Android tablet yet — and one smartphone, the Galaxy Nexus, come with Android 4.0. Could Google announce high level plans for Android 5.0 in the second quarter? Sure, it could; likely at its yearly Google I/O developer conference. But I wouldn’t expect such software to launch on devices in 2012.

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