I recently asked Cloudera CEO Mike Olson how a commercial open-source company balances community and commerce.
When it comes to open source, this isn't Olson's first rodeo; in his past life he served as CEO of the open-source database company Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. Olson understands the fragile balance that exists in open source; he's a firm believer that good community relations are critical for open-source companies. Case in point--since we last spoke, Cloudera launched the industry's first certification program for Hadoop and MapReduce, open source projects that support data intensive distributed applications.
Cloudera on Tuesday is expected to formally announce the closing of a $6 million series B funding round led by Greylock (whose past investments successes include Red Hat among many others).
Olson reports that fast growth in the business and rapid adoption of Hadoop/MapReduce drove heavy interest from investors. For Cloudera, apparently it's a buyer's market, so it decided to secure funding now to allow it to expand the business rapidly on all fronts.
So, with $11 million in the bank from top-tier VCs (Accel led the A round and participated in the B) along with individual investments from Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL), and Jeff Weiner (president of LinkedIn), Cloudera has successfully raised the smart money to compliment the big data all-star founding team from Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.
For a brief overview of Hadoop and Cloudera check out the video below.
... Read moreRed Hat announced a new JBoss Open Choice program today that gives developers the ability to employ and deploy more Java frameworks and applications than had previously been available.
With JBoss Open Choice, Red Hat says it "plans to provide application developers with the ability to choose the framework, language and programming technologies that best fit the application requirements they are trying to achieve without sacrificing reliability, availability, scalability or manageability across their projects."
Basically, this means that JBoss will interoperate more readily with popular programming models such as Spring, Seam, Struts, and Google Web Toolkit, all of which can be viewed as competitors to the JBoss app server.
While not earth-shaking, this announcement provides insight into the Java application server market--which is being supplanted in many situations by simple programming models. It also shows that a strategy of open-ness and integration, even with competitive products, is an inevitable path.
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Amazon.com's legal team is "investigating" open-sourcing their various Web services API's including those for EC2, and S3, Amazon's main cloud computing interfaces, according to Enomaly founder Reuven Cohen.
Amazon's APIs are already the de-facto standard used by thousands of Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and arguably the best designed method of interaction for various cloud services. By releasing the APIs as open source (creative commons, or no-sue covenant or whatever), Amazon cements its way of doing things into the greater marketplace, while opening up an even broader ecosystem of applications to interact with AWS.
If other companies, such as Eucalyptus can be assured that they won't fall on the wrong side of the legal fence, it only ensures that they will continue to grow their usage of the Amazon systems and methods.
This would be a win for everyone interested in cloud computing. Let's hope it's true.
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The new Japanese Wii Catering Channel (Demae Channel) lets you point and click your way to food delivery right from your Nintendo Wii.
Take a break from Wii Fit to order a pizza!
(Credit: Wii Demae Channel)There are categories for pizza, noodles, sandwiches, curry, burgers, chicken, and many other snacks, complete with visual menus that let you select toppings and save your orders for next time.
Food is a national obsession in Japan, but as far as I know delivery isn't as common as in other big cities, such as New York. I suspect Wii players will be able to easily rationalize ordering a meal to augment all the calories they burn off in a rousing game of Tennis.
These type of tie-ins seem like logical extensions to gameplay (even if they aren't necessarily the healthiest) now that most consoles have Internet connectivity. Sadly, most console manufacturers maintain the walled-garden approach and it will be awhile before we see an ecosystem of third-party providers crop up.
(Via Destructoid)
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In a recent report, research firm Screen Digest says that in-game advertising will hit $1 billion by 2014. Not bad, but nowhere near virtual goods, which may already be worth $5 billion in Asia alone.
Virtual goods have a low barrier to entry but a huge swath of virtual-world competition is trying to monetize users. Game play, branding, and the overall offering have to all mesh for virtual goods to sell well.
In-game advertising is complex and there are a few major players that control the games, consoles, and monetization, putting up some serious barriers to entry. To date, most in-games have been custom deals that are lucrative but don't scale well.
I've written in the past that standards will drive in-game advertising growth as it's currently too difficult to deal with the varied walled-gardens of both console and online games. And there are some interesting experiments under way, including a recent IGA deal with Posterscope to simultaneously run in-games on billboards. I'm not convinced it makes sense, but it is a cool attempt to bridge the physical and virtual worlds.
The next big innovation will be when in-game ads and virtual goods merge--allowing users to interact with ads to purchase products.
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Dell is now offering its ultra-hip Studio XPS 13-inch laptop with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. It's nice to see Dell taking Ubuntu seriously enough to offer it as a standard option, but a bit disappointing to see that they are not offering the latest 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope release.
In light of Ubuntu's recent move to cloud services--offering Web-based file sync and sharing I'd like to think that this is just an early step in a partnership. Dell must recognize that there is a large untapped market opportunity for not just netbooks, but for the services revenue to manage devices and files.
On a less positive note, I have to imagine that fewer technical users would be confused as to why they should choose Ubuntu when the top of the product page clearly states "Dell recommends Windows Vista Home Premium." No company that cares about its customers recommends Windows Vista Home Premium (zing!).
(Via Engadget)
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The tech media recently started taking serious notice of Hadoop, an open-source project developed to processing huge amounts of data, and the coverage is growing every day. According to ITDatabase, 161 stories have been written about Hadoop in the last three months alone, including a veritable "coming out party" in The New York Times.
Hadoop is interesting because it's proven in use at large Web shops, cloud-oriented, open-source, and it solves two major computing problems: handling large amounts of data, and writing parallel programs for large numbers of computers. Hadoop clusters can scale up to tens or hundreds of terabytes, or even petabytes.
But adoption doesn't always equal commercial success. I've written in the past about Cloudera, a company formed to support Hadoop, and recently sat down with CEO Mike Olson to get his thoughts on the burgeoning Hadoop ecosystem and how the company intends to balance community and commerce.
My initial question for Olson was how does the company succeed when users are happy with the open-source project?
Olson answered with several key points. Cloudera sees "big data" -- terabytes at least -- becoming a common problem for all kinds of companies. The early adopters of Hadoop were all Web 2.0 companies generating logs and mining them for user behavior data. But data processing at this scale is also an enterprise problem and enterprises aren't always early adopters and often require software to be supported by a vendor, not just a community.
Most enterprise buyers are very different from Facebook and Yahoo. They employ much smaller development and IT staff. They need strong SLAs and a quick response to problems from a vendor with deep expertise. Cloudera aims to solve those problems in ways that community support, mailing lists, and online forums can't.
This is typical of open-source projects that become more like products, and the challenge is ensuring that the project lives on and the commercialization efforts are balanced with good citizenship to non-customers.
The open-source community around Hadoop thus far appears to be pretty happy with Cloudera. The company has made its Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop available for free download, put a large amount of free training material on its Web site, and contributes to the open-source project with new features.
Good community relations are critical for open-source companies; getting this right is important for Cloudera.
Olson tells me that customers are running Hadoop in-house and, increasingly, in the cloud. A few weeks ago, Amazon even announced a hosted Hadoop offering called "Elastic MapReduce" -- more evidence that Hadoop has gone mainstream. From Olson's perspective, more Hadoop in the world means more demand for enterprise-grade services and support, and that creates a great opportunity for Cloudera to make life better for commercial users of the open-source project.
This is the key to maintaining the balance of commercial and community and others will certainly pay attention to how Cloudera interacts with the Hadoop community to learn what works and what doesn't.
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(Credit: Android)Despite an overwhelming wealth of confidence from Google's Android team, smartphones and other devices running the open-source operating system remain few and far between. As Crave's Kent German wrote earlier this week, 2009 was supposed to be the "year of Android" and five months into the year, not a single new Android device has landed in the United States.
But it looks like Panasonic is getting closer to taking the plunge into non-Japanese markets as the company launches the HT-03a, its first Android-based device for NTT Docomo this summer in Japan.
Speaking at a press conference in Japan, Keisuke Ishii, board member and director of the Mobile Terminal Business Unit at Panasonic Mobile Communications, said the company is "seriously considering developing an Android-based handset and entering overseas mobile phone markets in fiscal 2010."
"The global market for smartphones based on open-source platforms including Android will reach 100 million units in three years," Ishii said. "We are discussing specific measures to succeed in such a large market."
It is good to see big vendors like Panasonic embrace open source, but I wonder how much, if anything they'll give back to the Android development community. I also wonder what changes are taking place in Android that will make it so much easier for companies to bring new products to market much faster. A hundred million is a big number and Android hasn't yet proven its mettle.
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Two new sets of Lego are now available for those of you who like the world of physical architecture instead of the vapid realm of systems architecture that we techies constantly blather on about.
The Lego Guggenheim and Falling Water house are available now as part of the Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward exhibit.
I don't know what's next in the Lego Architecture series but I'd like to see the Bilbao Guggenheim.
You can order the sets online from Brickstructures.
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The holy ones...Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.
(Credit: Jeff Crouse)Update at 1:25 p.m. PDT May 23: More information on the piece has been added.
Call them a "holy trinity" or the "three wise men of software"--one way or another you will eventually give these guys all your money and continue to worship at their respective altars.
The EyeBeam Gallery in New York's Chelsea neighborhood has been showing a piece of art that captures Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates (along with a tiny, cherubic Steve Ballmer) as icons, in the original sense of word.
Jeff Crouse, the artist who conceptualized the piece, said the triptych doesn't have a name. It was part of an installation called Praying@Home. (His intern, Jennifer Jacobs, is the person who actually painted the trio.)
Unfortunately, the piece is no longer on display at EyeBeam. However, you can eternally gaze upon these saints right here.
(Via iPhone Savior)
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