Ray Ozzie

Richardson spoke about remote management but did not offer many (or any) details about Talko’s product or its timing, according two attendees. “We did learn that they run on AWS and he said it would be a communications service for mobile — something that takes into account the pervasiveness of mobile devices and tries to provide a more engaging experience,” one attendee said. That’s pretty much all that Ozzie has said publicly about Talko, which was once called Cocomo.

Last March, Ozzie signaled that he was open to using a wide array of services including but not limited to those from Microsoft, where he was chief software architect then chief strategist and which he left in 2011. Talko has netted $4 million in funding that we know about.

The Talko team also includes Neil Ozzie, (Ozzie’s son), Eric Patey, and Matt Pope. Patey, Pope and Richardson were with Ray at Groove Networks, his last startup, which Microsoft acquired in 2005. A check of LinkedIn also shows other employees including Richard Speyer, another Microsoft veteran who also spent time at Endeca and Howard Nager, from Digitas and Microsoft. Some have been with him since his days at Iris Associates, the Lotus Development Corp.-affiliated company that built Lotus Notes, now a part of IBM.

There has been speculation that Talko/Cocomo is working on a Mobile backend as a Service (MBaaS). But for now we’ll be stuck in guesswork mode because Ozzie’s not talking. Reached by email, Ray Ozzie had no comment.

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Mundie’s title change — from chief research and strategy officer — and retirement plans were announced internally earlier this month, but Fried surfaced the news for the rest of the world. Most of Mundie’s duties will be assumed by Eric Rudder, Microsoft’s chief technical strategy officer, Fried also reported.

According to Mundie’s updated bio:

“For more than a decade, Mundie has also been Microsoft’s principal technology-policy liaison to the U.S. and foreign governments, with an emphasis on China, India and Russia. He has served on the U.S. National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee and the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. In April 2009 Mundie was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.”

Mundie and Ray Ozzie shared Bill Gates’ strategic vision duties when Gates stepped down in 2006. Both Mundie and Ozzie spent early years of their respective careers at Data General, a Boston-area minicomputer maker.  Ozzie left Microsoft in 2010, in a move that caused many to question just who would drive future Microsoft’s tech vision. One of the candidates for that role, Windows group president  Steven Sinofsky, left the company in November, just after the Windows 8 launch.

While it’s no surprise for Mundie to retire, many will now wonder even more about who will set the software company’s tech agenda going forward.  Ballmer’s background is in sales and marketing.

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The news, what there is of it, was first reported by Pando Daily.  There’s not a ton of detail — Ozzie has a penchant for discretion but TechCrunch and others speculate that Talko will enter the “Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) fray.  These frameworks — by companies like Kinvey, Stackmob and Parse, make it easier for programmers to work on their actual applications without sweating the backend infrastructure.

The company had gone under the name Cocomo but is now called Talko Inc., according to the filing and this press release announcing that Ozzie has joined the board of Sparklabs, a South Korean accelerator.

As we reported last March, Cocomo hired a handful of folks in Boston and Seattle areas including Microsoft veterans Eric Patey, Matt Pope and Ransom Richardson.

What Ozzie does now is noteworthy because of what he’s already done. He was hand-picked by Bill Gates to be Gates’ successor as chief software architect at Microsoft. In that role, he shepherded Windows Azure through its contentious formative years and probably has the scars to prove it. He announced his exit from Microsoft in late 2010.

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Odersky is something of a superstar in the Java programming world. He wrote Javac, the most widely used Java compiler, and now he’s the force behind the fast-growing Scala programming language. That language makes it easier for developers to code for “parallelism,”  which is what allows tens of thousands of people to use an application at the same time without crashing it.

In the pre-cloud, client-server era, you might have had a couple hundred  – or maybe thousand –  users hammering on a server-based application. But they accessed it from company-issued PCs, so programmers could assume a finite number of users and make sure they had enough server power and bandwidth to support that number.

That all goes away in today’s world, where millions of people use popular applications at the same time. How many smartphone users hit Twitter during a major sporting event? Or on election day? Your guess is as good as mine. It is that scale that parallelism enables and that Scala helps make easier to program.

Why Scala?

Up until a few years ago, to make applications perform better you installed a faster processor. But we’ve pretty much maxed out the speed limit for individual chips. So best way to get better performance now is to use chips with multiple cores, all operating at a high speed, and to spread the workload among them. Here’s an admittedly simplistic analogy: Instead of packing multiple tons of cargo onto a single huge freighter, you divvy the load up among an array of smaller boats that can move faster.

The key is to have a captain who knows how to take advantage of that expanded fleet — or, to bring the analogy back to the tech world, an application that knows how to take advantage of those multiple cores. Instead of writing a program that runs on a single core, you have to write a program that’s smarter about deploying the workloads among many cores.

“Single-core performance is running out of steam, and you need to parallelize everything,” Odersky told me in a recent interview. You do that through what’s known as functional programming. Ray Ozzie, the former chief software architect for Microsoft and no slouch when it comes to coding, likens functional programming to spreadsheets where each cell in the spreadsheet containing that formula acts as an independent processor working concurrently to keep the spreadsheet updated. It’s a parallel computing system enabled by functional programming, Ozzie says via email.

Scala works with Java and compiles in the JVM, which is significant because many, many of the world’s enterprise applications are written in Java. It’s not a stretch to say there are millions of Java programmers (Oracle, which now owns Java, claims 9 million.)  With Scala these programmers can keep using their Java libraries, frameworks and the JVM while also taking advantage of functional programming, which tends to be less verbose than Java code.

That brevity leads to more compact, elegant software compared to older-style imperative programming. With imperative programming, variables can evolve over time, while in functional programming variables keep the same value. The notion of shifting variables poses a problem in a parallel process where one part of the program executes based on an older value that has since changed.

Scala gains steam

In September, Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady used data from Github and Stackoverflow to show Scala on its way to becoming a top-tier language, along with Java, Javascript, PHP, and Python. Other functional languages such as Erlang and Haskel have their admirers but their user base isn’t growing as fast, according to this data.

Odersky, a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, is also co-founder and CTO of Typesafe, a San Francisco startup that promotes the use of Scala and related Akka middleware, especially in the enterprise. Typesafe customers include LinkedIn and the Dutch Border Patrol, which uses a Scala-based application to photograph every car coming into the country and quickly know — based on the license plate — whether to stop that car or not. Twitter and FourSquare are also Scala users. Odersky also teaches a Coursera class on Scala that drew an astounding 45,000 registrants.

“I studied with lots of amazing people at MIT, but very few successfully cross that academic-to-business divide, and Martin has,” says Bill Kaiser, a partner with Greylock Partners, a Typesafe investor. Odersky’s ongoing interaction with students allows him to stay involved in what’s new in programming, adds Mark Brewer, CEO of Typesafe, who jokes that Odersky spends about 50 hours a week on Typesafe business and another 50 teaching.

The programming pantheon

Those two and others make the case that Odersky belongs in the same pantheon of programming gods as James Gosling, the father of Java itself; Niklaus Wirth, who wrote Pascal (and with whom Odersky studied); Anders Hejlsberg, of Turbo Pascal fame; and Bjarne Stoustrup, who wrote C++ and other languages.

Rod Johnson, the co-founder of Springsource, now part of VMware, and now a director of Typesafe, says Martin “absolutely” belongs in this august company. “Considering prior art in each case, I would rate Scala as a more impressive — and original — achievement than Java or C# and on a par with C++,” Johnson says via email. “The way Scala successfully mixes functions and objects; the way in which it resolves the multiple inheritance problem; its effective type inference; and its interoperability with Java are all particularly impressive.”

The next frontier

Odersky said the explosion of mobile devices continues to challenge programmers. While new languages and tools like Scala helped, more needs to be done to deliver software that keeps up with the new hardware. For one thing, it needs to be much easier for non-programming geniuses to both write and troubleshoot such software.

“If you want to write a multi-threaded application now it’s still nightmarishly difficult. There are lots of mistakes that are hard to detect. We have to make programming these kinds of applications feasible for everyone, not just experts and that is very hard,” he says.

For more on Odersky and Scala, check out this video of a talk he gave at Intel.

Intel hosts Dr. Martin Odersky presenting Scala 2.10 from Typesafe on Vimeo.

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The site experienced a major outage early Tuesday. At 8:35 a.m. PST, it posted that it took down a bad database and was working to restore the affected database cluster. Over the course of the morning the company’s status site alternated between “major service outage” and “partial service outage” messages.

Distributed version control is so much harder to use when your central server is down. #Github—
Greg Raiz (@graiz) September 11, 2012

The problems may be rippling from outages on Monday when the site was down for just short of 20 minutes, according to The Next Web.

Github going down is no small thing. Developers from newbies to superstars like Ray Ozzie (former chief software architect for Microsoft ) love the site, which acts as a central repository for much of the open-source code that runs our world.

As one Twitter poster commented, if Github isn’t working, real work doesn’t get done.

Staring at "Page did not respond in a timely fashion" just realized #github being down is now more important for me than fb or twitter down—
Adrian Spinei (@aspinei) September 11, 2012

A spokesman for the San Francisco-based company said it will publish a post mortem to its blog later today.

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Welcome to the age of Github, when software development is as much about mashing up or connecting snippets of existing code as it is about writing that code in the first place.

As more applications move to the cloud, the preferred method of managing development — and for finding code that already exists — is Github, the open source code repository and versioning system used by more than 1.4 million developers (according to the Github site.)

No less an expert than Ray Ozzie, former chief software architect at Microsoft, gave Github itself, and the open source development model it represents, a rousing endorsement at the recent GeekWire Summit.

“Development is much more of an assembly process than it ever has been in the past, because there are so many components out there, on Github or wherever, that you can assemble into a working solution very, very rapidly,” Ozzie said. While Microsoft was diametrically opposed to open source — and is still a bastion of commercial, proprietary software — the company softened that stance during Ozzie’s tenure, so his stance here shouldn’t have been too much of a shock.

While Github’s sweet spot is open source development, there’s quite a bit of commercial code work going on there as well, said Uri Cohen, VP of product management for Gigaspaces, a frequent user.

Developers like Cohen and Peter Eddy, a Boston-based programmer, know this well and attest that Github adds a recycling option to the old build-versus-buy decision.

Depending on what the end product is, developers can find almost any function they need  as a free library or as a cheap hosted service, said Eddy. That means reusing rather than writing a lot of this code.

Eddy sees this as the continuation of a trend. A decade ago, there were free operating systems and some simple databases that developers could build on. Five years ago, there were  ”really good, free databases” and “pretty good” free web frameworks. “Now there are plenty of good, even great libraries and frameworks for almost anything you can imagine — natural language processing, Google-style MapReduce, statistics, message buses, VoIP servers, machine learning,” Eddy said.

Eric Fernberg, a developer with Boston-based SignedOn.com, said that Github also makes it easier to reuse any code that is written in-house. “We do everything here modularly, so we take the snippets of our code and reuse them for every client,” he said.

The Github repository is searchable and ranks projects and repositories regularly by popularity, and it gives developers a single place to manage both the code itself and relevant material.

“You cooperate with the community not just on the source code but the documentation and anything related to the project, which is a big plus,” Cohen said. “We can share our doc with users, then can take it, change it and donate it back. It’s a huge advantage.”

Code repository alternatives include Bitbucket.org and Google Code, but neither have gained anything near Github’s mindshare, at least according to an unscientific sample of developers.

Update: Many prefer Github’s Git source control system to the SVM SVN versioning system in Google Code. Google Code supports Git, SVN and Mercurial repositories. “The question is whether you want to expose what you’re doing to a site managed by Google, which is a giant, and who knows what they’ll do with it,” said Cohen.

As developers seek to create quality products quickly that work in this world of multiple mobile devices, this agile development model of reusable code that is well-managed and tracked  will remain critical.

Ozzie photo courtesy of Jeff Sandquist.

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Ray Ozzie, the former Microsoft executive charged with driving the development of Windows Azure, may not choose the product he helped build for his own stealth startup. Ozzie told attendees of the Geekwire Summit Wednesday in Seattle that he is evaluating Azure, along with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, for use by his mysterious startup.

That startup, Cocomo, remains in stealth mode, but will focus on mobility, Ozzie said.

He reiterated several times that startups in this new era have to be agile, flexible and creative in their choice of tools.

“I believe in Azure an awful lot. I’m close to those folks, I know the capabilities of Azure and Amazon and OpenStack, and we’re playing with that. The best thing for any entrepreneur is to understand the solution and be very agile about the languages and hosting technologies and to use what works,” he said.

To build a startup today, “you have to return to zero, assess the technologies that are out there, the processes for development which are much different … assess what technology you have to build. Today it’s much more about the assembly process than in the past. There are so many components in Github, etc.,” Ozzie said.

As for Cocomo,  he gave a few hints.  It will involve “cloud-based backends, phones, pads and so on on the front end,” he said. And it will be all about communications. “Today that’s what we’d call social productivity, but in the past was called groupware or cooperative work. I like envisioning tools for new environments that let people do things in ways that are more fun, more productivity.”

Cocomo has a handful of employees in the Boston and Seattle areas, including Microsoft vets Eric Patey, Matt Pope and Ransom Richardson.

Cocomo will be closely watched because of Ozzie, who was the force behind Lotus Notes, the pioneering collaboration product from Lotus, and his work at Microsoft, where Bill Gates designated him as chief software architect. In that role, Ozzie had to drive the tricky — and contentious — transition from on-premises software that made a ton of money, to the new world of cloud computing as embodied in Azure.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jeff Sandquist.

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Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft and the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — most recently Node.js support in Windows Azure  and the decision to back Hadoop at the expense of an internal Dryad project, squarely at Gates’ feet.

The story recounts a meeting in the summer of 2008 where some (unnamed) top Microsoft execs argued against opening up more to open source while Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect, and Sam Ramji, the open source strategist, argued the opposite. According to Wired:

Then Bill Gates stood up.

He walked to the whiteboard and drew a diagram of how the system could work, from copyrights to code contribution to patents, and he said — in no uncertain terms — that the company had to make the move.

That was it: Microsoft had to be more open to open source. The story quotes a number of former and current Microsoft employees who might be trying to curry favor with their former or current boss, but the account rings true. Here’s why.

1: Microsoft is nothing if not pragmatic

The company will fight, fight, fight for its own agenda, but if it senses futility, it will declare victory and reverse course. I have heard Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer counsel a company that was engaged in a fruitless tussle with another company to do exactly that: “Declare victory and move on.”  And that’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to see Word and PowerPoint on the iPad or iPhone — not too long after Ballmer mockingly stomped on an iPhone at the company sales meeting. If Microsoft believes that the X86-based PC is on the losing side of history, it will do what it can to keep its money-making Office — if not Windows — on every device on the planet. The decision to support ARM architectures in the upcoming Windows 8 is just the beginning of that journey.

And that is why a company with a CEO who once likened Linux to cancer can now with a straight face bring Node.js, Hadoop, even Linux itself into the fold. There are now reports that Microsoft is recruiting Linux experts whose mission it will be “to identify, define, scope, implement and drive to completion software projects that promote full, transparent interoperability between Windows and Linux in Microsoft virtual and cloud environments.”

2: Once it gets the memo — often late — Microsoft goes all out

Microsoft is often late to the party, but once it gets there, look out! It was late to spreadsheets (after Lotus); it was late to word processing (after WordPerfect); it was late to PC databases (after dBase, Foxpro, Paradox.) It was famously late to the Internet — but once Gates decided to turn the ship around — as Netscape Navigator posed a huge threat — that ship was turned around. Gates’ 1995 memo on the Internet tidal wave is one example of this. Anyone remember Navigator now? Or even Netscape? Years later, Gates even had the good grace in one speech to claim to have “discovered the Internet”  (wait for it) after everyone else did.

It’s tempting now, with iPhones and Android phones tearing up the market, and more businesses flocking to Apple hardware,  to write Microsoft off. Word to the wise: don’t be hasty.

3:  Microsoft works best when it’s under the gun

And the corollary is that Microsoft works worst when it’s dominant. Ask most shops why they upgrade Office (or Windows) and it’s typically because they want to stay legal — not because they’re dying for new features. It’s hard to remember in this age of Google Chrome and Firefox and Opera, that Internet Explorer was once the upstart browser. It left Netscape Navigator in the dust because Microsoft had to make it better than Navigator or no one would use it. On the other hand, many people feel that Microsoft Office, the undisputed leader in productivity software suites, remains fat and feature bloated. In short: Office could still use a good competitor. (Pre-emptive apologies to the Open Office, Google Apps fans out there.)

The Microsoft SQL Server team remains scrappy and innovative. Why? Because they have a dominant competitor (still) in Oracle. As Cade Metz, the reporter who wrote this article says: Microsoft is “a company that’s at its best when it’s freaking out.”

To be clear, Microsoft had an open source strategy before this 2008 meeting. For example,  it had already worked with Samba, an open source effort to foster interoperability between Windows clients and Linux servers — although cynics said much of that peaceful coexistence came about because of legal anti-trust action.

But the Wired account holds that it was Gates’ statement at that meeting that blew away any lingering obstructionism in the ranks and forced Microsoft to get off its duff when it comes to open source. Given the boundless regard that Microsoft employees hold for Gates, only he could get the famously fractious product groups to get on board with open source.

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Ozzie, the former chief software architect for Microsoft — and the force behind Windows Azure — is looking for a lead UX/UI designer, according to a job posting spotted on Facebook on Wednesday night. Candidates are asked to send their information to jobs@cocomo.com.

Details are slim, but the effort is clearly focused on mobility, and, interestingly, the ideal candidate should show proficiency in iOS and Android, according to the ad. There is no mention of Windows Phone.

According to the post:

We’re looking for a highly skilled, detail-oriented candidate who will bring deep interaction design & visual design capabilities to the core team.  It’s key that you already understand and embrace the conceptual models, constraints and affordances of the mobile/social design environment – which today means interest in the likes of

- iOS & Android, in both phone & pad form factors

- HTML/CSS, JS, WebGL as applied to the mobile environment

- Email & SMS, Facebook, Goggle+, [sic] Twitter

- Our multi-faceted identities, and issues of privacy & openness

- The social anthropology of our ever-growing use of mobile

Ozzie, who also led the team that developed Lotus Notes, is well-respected by programmers. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once called him the best programmer on the planet — and that was when Ozzie was still at Lotus Development Corp., a competitor to Microsoft. Gates later handpicked Ozzie as his successor as the chief software architect at Microsoft.

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Nearly everyone agrees that Azure has huge promise. It’s a soup-to-nuts Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developing, deploying and hosting applications. And yet, much of that promise remains unfulfilled. Despite its support for a full complement of computer languages, Azure remains Windows .NET-centric.

In July 2010, seven months after Azure went live, Microsoft claimed 10,000 users. Since then, it has only said that Azure has added thousands of more users monthly. That total number may be big, but it’s unclear how many of these customers are viable commercial users as opposed to tire kickers.

For better or worse, Azure is viewed as an attempt to lock customers into Microsoft’s Windows-centric worldview, this time in the cloud. That may be fine for the admittedly huge population of .NET developers, but new-age web shops don’t take to that idea. Nor do they necessarily like the idea of having Microsoft infrastructure as their only deployment option which is currently the case.

It’s hard to compete with Amazon

A long-time Microsoft development partner who builds e-commerce websites exemplifies Microsoft’s problem. His tool set includes SQL Server and other parts of the Microsoft stack, but he deploys the sites on Amazon Web Services. He tried Azure, but gave up in frustration.

Why? He gives Azure an F-grade mostly because Azure is all about Azure. “It’s a programming platform that can only be used in Azure. Legacy apps are out in the cold — it’s only new development. And the coup de grace is that five years after [Microsoft leadership] finally figured out that they need to be able to run what amounts to an elastic cloud instance, they’re still only in beta with that,” he said. “Meanwhile, Amazon adds features and flourishes every month.”

He was referring to Microsoft’s decision last year to make more bite-sized bits of infrastructure available to developers — to make Azure more AWS-like. Part of this was the availability of Azure VM Roles. This technology was a step in the right direction for companies more interested in using parts of Microsoft Windows Azure infrastructure rather than the whole shebang. As Derrick Harris wrote last October:

[The Azure VM role]…is very close to what traditional IaaS offerings provide for users. In fact, AWS actually has been allowing users to run existing Windows Server licenses in its cloud for several months. By adding the VM role capability, Microsoft is making Azure a direct competitor to IaaS clouds that offer Windows instances, most so AWS.

(Update: Microsoft said the pilot for the above-mentioned AWS program has expired. The company now offers a new Service Agreement benefit for license mobility that applies to all qualified hosters –including Azure).

Microsoft also launched Extra Small Instances, at 5 cents per hour (now 4 cents per hour). AWS subsequently offered Windows Micro Instances on its cloud for 3 cents per hour.

Lack of deployment choices

Another roadblock is that, thus far, there is no option for companies wanting to run Azure-based private clouds in-house. That’s a big one for many financial institutions and others with compliance issues, said the chief architect of a company that builds internal clouds for customers. “All of my customers want and need private clouds. Azure is not there yet,” he said. He is evaluating OpenStack, the open-source IaaS backed by Rackspace, NASA, HP, Dell and others, for many of these clients.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure Appliance, plans for which were announced in July 2010, would make that possible for some large customers, but the product isn’t yet available. Aiming to propagate Azure beyond its own data centers, Microsoft said that Fujitsu, Dell and HP were building out their own Azure clouds to host customers. Of those three, only Fujitsu’s implementation is online. Rackspace is also talking about offering an Azure option.

Naysayers maintain that Microsoft’s Windows-Office power isn’t carrying over into the cloud realm. “Customers just do not care what’s running in the cloud — the Microsoft brand means nothing there … and Microsoft seems to think it can take 10 years to get this right, just as it took 10 years to get SharePoint right, but this is a whole new era,” said the e-commerce developer.

The CIO of a large hotel chain concurred. He’s willing to go to Azure, provided it gives him the price and service-level agreements (SLAs) he requires. But there’s nothing magic about Microsoft’s name in this space. And the lack of deployment choice means he is less likely to go there.

New age venue, new age competitors

Microsoft, which wielded its Windows-Office power to pummel dozens of rivals from Borland to WordPerfect in the client-server era may not find those weapons helpful in the cloud where companies like VMware and Salesforce.com have more credibility. VMware, the server virtualization powerhouse, launched its Cloud Foundry earlier this year as the “open” cloud PaaS that allows developers to use their integrated development environment (IDE) of choice and deploy on their cloud of choice.

It doesn’t help Microsoft’s cause that some of its biggest hardware allies have mixed loyalties. Dell is both in the Azure and the OpenStack camp as is HP. An HP executive privately expressed concern over Microsoft’s cloud direction after the departure of Bob Muglia, the Microsoft Server & Tools president who led Azure. Muglia left last summer after a strategic disagreement with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Muglia’s departure, was “a huge red flag for us,” the executive said. Muglia’s exit was doubly unsettling coming just months after the departure of Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect. Many thought Ozzie brought Microsoft some needed perspective on the cloud, whereas most other Microsoft execs had vested interests in preserving their on-premises software business and had no incentive to see cloud services cannibalize their sales.

All of this isn’t to say Azure has no fans. A large integrator in the Washington, D.C. area has done some Azure deals for small and mid-market companies. “We see SaaS services as the real traction [for Azure], followed by IaaS for test, dev, disaster recovery/business continuity and storage,” he said. “Law firms have found that for some case types, [Azure] storage can be a great deal versus buying massive amounts of storage for a case that will only require the large storage need for a short time and small (usually supported on site after the initial scrub) storage amount for longer term.”

David MacLaren, CEO and founder of VRX Studios, looked at Amazon, Google and Microsoft options when he needed to build a cloud-based Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. He opted for Microsoft Azure partly because all of his customers — including 10,000 hotels around the world — are businesses that already have Windows expertise. With Azure, he was also able to tap into Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network — the one used by Xbox — as needed.

When the resulting Mediavalet service needs a content delivery push, “it takes two minutes to turn on CDN to light up 25 additional data centers around the world — all without calling Akamai and telling them how we want it done.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user TechFlash Todd.

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