Apps, Software and Video Games shortly will go the way of the DVD – they will live in a ‘cloud’.
May 14th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Bandwidth is the key to the cloud. If you’ve got enough access to it, meaning if you’ve got a fast enough connection, then you don’t need any physical media or software to live in your PC, Mac or for that matter very soon your mobile phone and tablets.
We used to have giant ‘desktop’ computers that had to have HUGE hard drives in order for us to install many applications. For example, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, MS Office, CAD software, etc. all are very large installation packages. Couple this with your collection of MP3’s, photo’s, video’s and documents and most of us ran out of room on a PC that had 50-100 gigs of space for a hard drive.
The obvious to the consumer
Today, as a consumer we see convenient repositories for photo’s, music and videos and documents. Skydrive, GoogleDocs, Dropbox, Box, Amazon Cloud Drive. Now consumers are beginning to understand and use these places to store what they used to store on their home computers. Why? Several key reasons – first, once uploaded to a large mainstream cloud drive (and I mean to the likes of Google, MS or Amazon) your collection of ‘whatever’ is safe. How many of us have dropped or lost a laptop, had a hard drive fail, spilled coffee on our desks and then PC, etc. If you didn’t back it up to an external hard drive you lost it all. Worse yet, I’ve had friends who did and THAT and the hard drive failed shortly thereafter. Years of precious photos (and now videos more than ever thanks for our mobile phones) you can never get back or thousands of MP3’s gone (at $.99 each). Second, consumers now are getting familiar with storing their digital belongings off site and in a cloud. We hear about Amazon’s or Google’s cloud storage drive initiatives more and more everyday. They are fast becoming the new norm. And third – they are not expensive. Certainly not when compared to a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive that can fail without warning.
The not so obvious to us all
What’s not so obvious to consumers is what’s happening in the enterprise business realm. Years ago, you wanted to put up a business domain web site or had a business that required large databases, some required separate servers for clients that are uber security conscious, some needed to have their domain living on a separate server from others (especially the financial and health industries). Others needed production servers, staging servers and then after testing finally deployed an application or web service. Sometimes IT had to physically travel to the colo facility to apply a ‘patch’ to a newly deployed application and hoped that the patch worked as it was supposed to or else everything came to a screeching halt. Businesses lost money, time, and face sometimes. You’d pay Sun, Oracle, Cisco, EMC, etc. millions to deploy servers and DB’s for your environment. You’d spend money on hiring the right technical IT staff to deploy and sync and stitch all of this together. This WAS the norm.
Enterprise today is all moving into a cloud based environment – virtualization is the norm now.
Sun servers were all the rage in the 90’s. But they were VERY expensive. Robust, great customer service, but very costly. Today, you can run a linux box for a fraction of the cost. No more hard drives or servers (blades or otherwise). You can fire up an ‘instance’ and server through AWS in a few minutes. No going into a colo facility. Start-up’s can get to market almost instantaneously and for far less of a cost. You pay for what you use. No more buying a million dollar license for ATG, Vignette or Broadvision and installing 15 discs in a cage. You rent it now. Patches get uploaded by the cloud vendor in a virtual environment and tested before they are deployed to you.
With the rise of this ‘virtualization’, more and more apps or processes now get built into the browser. Java script was written just for this purpose and has allowed for far more sophisticated applications to run in a network environment and now on browsers. Other software will be embedded in browsers as time goes on that will mimic the functionality and hardware on your PC. You can bet on it.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Whereas IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers offer bare compute cycles and SaaS (software as a service) providers offeraccess to such apps as CRM online, PaaS offerings provide turnkey services for developers to get their apps up and running quickly, no infrastructure concerns needed.
Offered as a service, PaaS runs the gamut from development tools to middleware to database software to any “application platform” functionality that developers might require to construct applications. None of these above services come without their problems. But so did everything else before them.
IaaS focuses on managing virtual machines, and the risks are little different than with other cloud types — here, the main risk is rogue or unwarranted commandeering of services. IaaS requires governance and usage monitoring. But with this comes a good degree of convenience and business ROI.
Some of the most popular cloud services running virtually are; Microsoft Windows Azure, Googles App Engine (which offer a nonSQL relational SQL database service), VMware cloud foundry, Force.com ( from salesforce.com), Heroku (also from SF), Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Engine Ysrd Cloud (for Ruby on Rails enthusiasts), Engine Yard Orchestra (for PHP enthusiasts) and CumuLogic (for Java developers). Consumers never see or hear any of this but use web services that live on these services day in and day out.
What will be obvious to consumers in about 10 years or less
All of this bring me back around to bandwidth and apps. Once we have enough consumers that have access to real fast broadband (100mbps or more down and ideally 200mbps down), then the Apple and Android app store will disappear. Software discs will become obsolete. Video game installation discs – gone. Why, because once you have enough speed, apps can be loaded and accessed wirelessly via the web. The calls to databases, functionality and such can all be received instantly online. Its already happening, slowly. Examples of this in the entertainment space is Ultraviolet, bring your DVD’s to Wal-Mart and upload them to your digital locker – no more disc. Onlive, Livestream, Gaikai all stream video games without the need for a disc, Netflix (you know about them). Consumers are aware of these, but then you’ve also got GoogleDocs and Skydrive for documents and the creation of word and excel docs. We don’t need an install disc anymore.
Last week, it took me 4 days to upload 12,934 MP3’s to my cloud locker at Amazon Music drive. Less time than I ever thought. Available anytime for me to download if need be. That’s nearly $ 13,000 worth of music, stored for as little as $ 20.00 a year.
Mobile apps, software suites, video game discs, movies, music photos and more will still be here but will not physically be in your home forever. It’s inevitable.
Is Google + deflating Facebook’s IPO ?
July 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
First there was usenet, arpanet, listserve and BBS’s, AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, theGlobe, Tripod, Classmates, Homepage, then Homestead, GeoCities, Friendster, Sixdegrees, mySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Facebook and now we have Google +. All of these services at one point or the other were the AlphaDog of their time. Each of them for some period of internet time shared the limelight as THE ‘hot’ spot site to be seen and heard on. I had a block in GeoCities, used many a BBS (I dreamed in green and black back then), had a HomePage not a Homestead (disclaimer: I worked at HomePage.com) threw the most ridiculous backgrounds on my mySpace page with all of the ugliest stuff I could find on the planet, used Friendster, never did try a few other the others ( Sixdegrees, Bebo or Orkut). And of course have had a Facebook page since the ‘edu’ days when I tried to get in by using my old ‘edu’ email address from the University of Wisconsin (but that didn’t work for one reason or another I can’t recall). I’m not including Twitter in this post as I don’t consider it to be a place where you have a page that you call and fashion as your own – rather it’s a fire hose of information to share.
What’s interesting to note here is that nearly all of these early services back then lacked 2 major components unlike today – the addition of the mobile phone coupled with leveraging the GPS in phones to create a location-based user experience. This component has allowed all of us to extend our online personas to outside of our homes and desks where our main computer is. And, because of this, the use of these services and the traffic they generate like Facebook wouldn’t be possible. It has been said that over 100 million people access Facebook using a mobile phone every month (http://on.fb.me/rmoDN1). And that is just today. And about 300 million access Facebook on a computer monthly (http://tcrn.ch/owiarn).
Its been just about 1 month since Google + opened their doors to a select group of people. Invites now are beginning to trickle out, and it seems that Google + has over 10 million users thus far. That’s not bad. At that rate and when the general admission doors open up, 100-200 million users should be easily possible. By years end, I think we will see just those kind of numbers. And perhaps in 2 years, double that, say 400 million or more. Flash forward to the end of this year and the impending Facebook IPO. Now if you are on the Facebook IPO train, you’ve got to look hard over your shoulder and realize that it might be very possible that a few people who now use Facebook will begin to use Google + as more and more friends try the service. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Precedent has been set already. Look what’s happening to mySpace now? People who use and who have used all of these services are like minnows or lemmings – they all flock together and this happens quite quickly. There is no ‘loyalty’ I ever had to Classmates, AOL, mySpace and other sites I used like these. And today, given the proliferation of mobile phones and the ease at which we can access these sites along with the ‘notifications’ that come along with the mobile web apps we get, interacting and trying out any new service like Google+ is easier than ever before. So that’s what get me to think that the bankers on Wall Street are all smoking crack! Is Facebook really worth $ 100 billion dollars given the fact that Google + will more than likely have half the user base Facebook now has in a short 2 years? Does that mean that Google + just added $ 50 billion to the bottom line of Google? Perhaps Facebook valuations might stick to the wall a whole lot better had Google + not just launched, but given the history of these sites and the rapid following and user base Google + has already, the only ones that will make money from the FaceBook IPO will be the underwriters and Zuck. And if you haven’t tried Google + yet, run and get an invite from someone you know – it a breath of fresh air.
13 Movie Online Services is WAY too many. (PPV Part 2)
May 10th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Netflix 
vs. Google TV 2.0 PPV (powered by Honeycomb 3.1) 
vs. YouTube rentals 
vs. iTunes 
vs cable PPV vs 
VUDU vs. Blockbuster OnDemand 
vs 
Facebook OnDemand vs 
BigStar Movies vs CinemaNow OnDemand vs. Alphaline ( Sears/Roxio) vs. Redbox (due 2011) vs. 
Flixster via Warner Bros. vs anyone else ?
What happens when the airlines have a fare war? You know, you can fly from NY to L.A. for $xx.xx and then the next thing you know, another airline tops that price by $ 20.00? Or gives you a free bag to carry on board? All of a sudden 5 or more airlines have the same special going on. Who do you fly with? Decisions, decisions… It all begins to seem and look the same to you. You get to the same destination, same approximate times, using the same type of transportation, in the air for just about the same money. Who suffers? Ultimately the carriers do.
Meet the carriers. Not the airlines, but the carriers of movies online. I count thirteen (13) of them – eleven (11) of them are live as we speak. All boasting the same movies for the most part for the same prices. All rentable at the same time for about the same amount of time. And I’m not even counting Redbox as an online rentable service…yet. What’s a consumer to do – who do you choose? And why. Do you ‘subscribe’ to a Netflix monthly or do you pick off a film on a one-off basis from another provider. More importantly, how do all of these guys begin to differentiate themselves from each other? How and where do they market themselves? Netflix is clearly the 900lb gorilla today. I guess iTunes is # 2. But beyond them, I can’t really tell who’s in third place. But more importantly, do I really care? Do I need3 or 5 or 7 similar services? On top of all this, I have Verizon’s FIOS cable service at home with thousands of movies to choose from to watch on any given day/hour.
I have licensed movies before from each of the studios and it was no easy task. Number one, its VERY expensive. Figure an upfront fee to be paid to play, maybe between $500k-$1m. That’s just for starters. Then there are the guarantees against each title licensed. Therefore as a provider of online fare, you’ve got to re-coup that fee with a certain number of minimum rentals or turns of the gate so to speak. With nearly 13 services out there plus cable choices, I’m going to take a guess here a few will not make it. Not only must you guarantee upfront cash, you also must explain how you are going to market the studios films, how you will digitally protect them from piracy ( good luck on that one) and how you will separate yourself from the rest of the online movie ‘noise’. All of this and then compete with the new ‘premium’ $30.00 a pop cable TV onDemand offering ( not that I think that’s going to be too successful – it’s the least of these companies problems).
However, the one issue I have with all these services is this: I am unable to save ANYTHING I purchase or rent for viewing later on a rainy day. If I had a ‘digital’ locker – someplace to hold what I spend my money on to see so I can view it later (more than 24hrs later), that might sway me to use that service ALL THE TIME.
PROGRAM OR BE PROGRAMMED: 10 Commands for a Digital Age
January 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
One pretty smart guy. Cool book and no, this is NOT a paid advertisement.
Cloudy With NO Chance of Meatballs for $24.95
November 11th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Someone over at Sony must be watching too many 3 Stooges episodes late at night to think up a promotion like this.
What a terrible value for consumers. I guess their DVD outlets complained so instead of changing their thinking they upped the 24hr. ‘rental’ price. Yes, that’s right. If you’ve got a Sony Bravia TV you too can rent ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ for the incredibly fair price of $ 24.95 for a 24 hour term. Don’t everyone rush at once. And, those renters will be proud to know that they got to see the film BEFORE their friends got it on DVD….ooooohhh. Sony thinks that there’s a rush to see THIS film 28 days before you can see it or buy it on DVD (Jan 4th, 2010) for less than $24.95 and own the plastic disc and box? I feel really sorry for the suckers who rent it on Jan. 3rd, 2010 the day before its DVD release. If they wait just 24 more hours they can OWN it for less.
Sony, why not offer consumers something of value? Netflix list of 20 Sony films for free? 3-6 month pass to EpixHD online? Something on iTunes? Anything? This is ridiculous.
Satellite Internet is dead…bye-bye Directway and Wildblue
February 23rd, 2008 § 17 Comments
We moved outside of Los Angeles 2 years ago and I was forced to subscribe to Directway because there was no broadband coaxial cable nor DSL through the phone companies. Cell service was spotty, so I reluctantly bought a package from Directway (DirectTV sister company that supplies Internet access). I purchased a ‘professional’ package (or what they call a ‘business’ package) with a larger dish ( nearly $2,000 all in including installation ) and all. Supposedly I was going to get 500mbps upload and 2.0 mbps download for…$200.00 per month (Yikes!). The speed wasn’t even close. While I was spoiled by my TimeWarner connection when I did have broadband (3 mbps download) , Directway was barely better than dial-up for $ 200.00 a month. What a joke! Even after calling Directway many times for many months to complain, the service never came close to this kind of speed they claimed it could get . I was maybe getting 500mbps download. To top it off, they had a download ‘threshold’ that was suppose to dissuade people from downloading music and movies. They didn’t need that, because who could or who would want to download anything with the way (slow) their service worked. Then WildBlue came along (a bunch of guys from ATT and Direct got together to form this company). So, I switched. I had to purchase their dish (now I have 2 dishes growing in my backyard). But first, I had to get out of my 2 year contract with Directway which was not easy without paying a disconnect fee of about $ 200.00. So I decided to complain directly to the corporate parent. After a few weeks, I got through to someone there and they reluctantly agreed to let me out of my contract. So, I installed the Wildblue dish (only $250.00 cost) and bought their most expensive package $79.95 for the ‘Pro’ pack. Speed of 1.5 mbps download and 350mbps upload. It worked faster than the 2.0 mbps speed I was suppose to get at Directway. I thought I was in heaven. Until I met with WildBlue’s ‘FAP’ or Fair Usuage Policy’ which was no more than 17,000MB down and 5,000MB up. Since I blog and test various new pieces of software I quickly met that threshold’s ‘upload’ limit. Not download mind you, but upload. Must have uploaded too many blog text entries?? This was just plain stupid. So I called them and they told me that this was a 30 day ‘rolling’ policy and I’d have to reduce my uploading to be less than the 5,000MB for more than 30 days. Well, for $ 80.00 a month this was just unreasonable. So, I turned to Sprint who had just released a new EV-DO modem for plugging into a laptop or desktop. I could get my Internet access through a cell phone tower. So, I signed up, installed the modem at home and guess what. I have no threshold limits, and it works better than either satellite services for $60.00 a month. I then promptly called Wildblue back and lowered my monthly bill and speed to $49.00 a month (as low as I could get it). I will be disconnecting this service next week. Thanks Sprint. So, for anyone who is struck with either of these dinosaurs, drop them and disconnect, get as far away from them as you can as fast as you can. Try anything else but these services. I’m sure you’ll be much happier. Its just a matter of time before wi-fi and wi-max cover all of the rural areas that cable can’t and then hopefully these lame services will go out of business. Its just a matter of time. I plan on writing both of these companies again and I will include a link back to this blog. Hopefully others will read this and NOT send any business their way.
This just in…Google and Simon Fuller to debut TV show online
November 12th, 2007 § Leave a Comment
Good Monday Morning…on the heels of my last post comes a rumor just a few hours ago that Google and Simon Fuller (American Idol fame) are collaborating on a new TV show to debut online. (think ‘prom queen’ 
but even more production values added to the mix). Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
the WGA the strike and presenting the newest Network…the internet
November 10th, 2007 § 2 Comments
So, we have a strike
in Tinseltown and the studios SHOULD be giving the writers their fair share of future revenues that WILL be generated from viewing their work on the internet. Or maybe the writers should just form another guild entirely that is digital only for the web. It strikes me that there will be more producers and actors and writers that will migrate their efforts on the internet once its been shown that a new TV show can produce some significant coin from their debut online. Since there are many more households with broadband now than ever before I wonder how many people would watch ‘American Idol’ or ‘Lost’ online FIRST given the chance? And then watch the repeats on TV. I wonder what the online viewing numbers must measure for the advertisers to allow the web to ‘go first’. It could be an interesting paradigm shift if it happens one day.
Serendipity
October 8th, 2007 § 1 Comment
Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely.
