(Credit:
Activision)
In the last year, consumers spent more money on video games in Britain than on films, including both trips to movie theaters and films on DVD, new figures compiled for U.K.'s Daily Telegraph indicate.
In the 12 months leading up to the end of September, 1.73 billion British pounds (about $2.8 billion) were spent on video games, according to data-monitoring company GFK Chart-Track. The U.K. Film Council said 1 billion British pounds ($1.6 billion) were spent at the British box office during the same period, with an additional 198 million British pounds ($320 million) spent on films released on DVD and Blu-ray.
- U.K. video games: 1.73 billion pounds ($2.8 billion)
- U.K. film: 1.198 billion pounds ($1.93 billion)
This means that approximately 532 million pounds ($860 million) more was spent on video games in 2009, roughly 30 percent more than on films. And while 1.73 billion pounds is impressive, it's still well shy of the $20 billion predicted for U.S. game sales in 2009. In fact, the U.S. spent $2.7 billion on games in November 2009 alone.
Video games, by no means a niche in the U.K, or most other parts of the world, are obviously big business and these statistics clearly show that the growth in new forms of digital entertainment specifically available via a computer or game console is having a major impact on more traditional forms of entertainment.
Contributing to the success of gaming in the U.K. were price cuts to jump-start sales, as well as tie-ins to supermarkets, greatly expanding the potential number of buyers and targeting gamers at the check-out stand, according to The Daily Telegraph. Further, Amazon.co.uk reported that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the No. 1 seller for 2009, beating out DVDs of "Harry Potter" and "Twilight."
The industry data compiled by GFK Chart-Track also shows that the number of games consoles being used in Britain nearly doubled in 2009 to 25 million which means there are enough consoles for nine out of every ten households in the country to have one.
According to the report, only television--including DVDs of television shows, along with the cost of the license and satellite subscriptions--and music are bigger forms of entertainment.
(Credit:
IBM)
IBM is continuing its investment in cloud computing with a new lab in Hong Kong, expanding the presence of its IBM China Development Laboratory (CDL), the company's largest with more than 5,000 developers on staff.
The laboratory builds on the e-mail technology of Outblaze Limited, a Hong Kong-based company whose messaging assets were acquired by IBM earlier this year and incorporated into the Lotus brand. The new lab claims to be the first of its kind in Hong Kong and shows both the importance of global development teams and IBM's focus on growth in emerging markets, a user segment that is theoretically more adaptable to different methods of application consumption and likely well-acquainted with browser-based applications.
Overall, the fourth quarter of 2009 has seen several interesting cloud-related announcements from IBM, including the LotusLive service that launched in October and already claims more than 18 million active users. Big Blue also launched the Cloud Academy program designed to help educators and students pursue cloud-computing initiatives and better take advantage of collaboration technology in their studies.
IBM has taken a leading role in the development and adoption of cloud services while other large vendors such as SAP, HP, Oracle, Sun and Microsoft have all made cloud-oriented announcements with few proof points that their efforts will be successful. There is no certainty that IBM will be successful either, but the company has at least made consistent progress in both technology and user adoption.
IBM representatives told me that the company will continue to focus on delivering "the most reliable and secure cloud services" architected to meet the needs of consumers as well as their mainstay enterprise buying audience. Totally logical, and still surprising that the other big vendors haven't figured out how to attract their core user base to cloud platforms and services.
The cloud remains a bit of an anomaly in the tech world, dominated by Amazon, an e-commerce site, while stalwart IT vendors like Microsoft continue to take baby steps toward mainstreaming their efforts.
My blogging colleague, James Urquhart, wrote this week about Microsoft's new business unit that merges its cloud and on-premise server group into one development team, which makes sense, at least in theory.
Practically speaking, Microsoft is way behind the curve and has a lot of ground to make. I've written in the past that the opportunity is theirs to lose, and it's hard to see how they plan to win, even with this new structure.
One of the headlines that caught my eye today is this blog post from the Amazon Web Services team about a new Memcached as a service offering from Gear6.
(Credit:
Memcached)
Similarly, Gear6 has added features such as replication, clustering, optimized memory utilization and management to create what it calls a Memcached distribution, much in the same manner as Linux distributions are packaged. Joaquin Ruiz, executive vice president of products at Gear6, provided me with additional insight into why Memcached is popular with Web 2.0 sites and why it matters for cloud computing.
The problem, according to Ruiz, is dynamic data services. In a recent blog post, he pointed to the tight connection between dynamic content and Web 2.0; that is, one defines the other. In this Web 2.0 world, the LAMP (and to some extent Java and Ruby) stack "provided a low-cost, efficient development foundation for Web 2.0 but did not free us from the monolithic, vertically oriented, "scale-up" platforms. Memcached provided the heavy lifting in terms of horizontally scaling ("scale-out") on non-monolithic SMP server architectures from Intel and AMD."
In the Facebook example, the Memcached tier stores members' personalized dynamic content, such as status updates, wall posts, etc., so that they can be quickly accessed when queried. It's a similar set up for Twitter tweets or comments on photos on Flickr. While latency in a social application is mildly annoying, latency in a transactional application could mean lost revenue.
Dynamic data services will likely remain an important part of cloud services, which brings us back to the idea of a Memcached service on a cloud platform. Amazon's Jeff Barr noted, "powerful, high-level services like this allow application developers to spend more time focusing on the novel and value-added aspects of their application and less time on the underlying infrastructure."
Anything that developers and companies can take advantage of to serve data faster and more efficiently means they have time to do other things, including increasing their bottom line.
With infrastructure services like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and VMware making it easy to take advantage of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs of cloud computing, it seems obvious to jump on the cloud bandwagon for new IT projects.
But, developers are generally left on their own to deal with the pain of deploying their apps to the cloud: configuring application servers, libraries, disk partitions, networking, clustering, service connections, and virtual private networks. After they get their app installed they also need to install management agents that run on top of the application layer.
If you really want to take advantage of the cloud and optimize return on investment, you'll want the on-boarding process to be easy and fast and you won't install that agent. Agent-based solutions are inherently inflexible. Deploying agent-based solutions in a cloud-based environment, which is, by definition, highly flexible, is often like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In agent-based solutions, hard-coded agents are installed on every machine to monitor the application. If a change to the application configuration occurs--such as the IT department adds a node or upgrades a component--the agents must be updated as well.
Each agent and management server must be configured separately with management and monitoring solutions generally not portable. When every change to an environment requires installation of multiple agents on each server and configuration of multiple management servers, it becomes a tall order to move an application from a traditional infrastructure to the cloud, or from one cloud infrastructure to another: private to public, public to hybrid, or hybrid to private.
How do you get around this so you can actually capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing? Go virtual. Move application management, including easy on-boarding, from above the application stack into the underlying virtual layer, along with the rest of the cloud infrastructure.
I was recently briefed by webappVM CEO Isaac Roth on how the company is pioneering this new approach. He said the virtual path allows you to actually realize all of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs that come with the promise of cloud computing.
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Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.
Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link (replete with sales-y text) to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share. What could possibly go wrong?
Linking to Amazon or other online retailers is obviously nothing new, though Amazon has been particularly successful in using its link networks for both sales and to garner higher Google rankings for organic advertising.
This new program does introduce an issue related to link fraud, where spammers and scammers leverage URL-shortening services for spam links. Currently there is no way to verify that the link you click actually goes to Amazon. It's a bit surprising that it decided to use an URL-shortener that it doesn't own, though I suppose the network effect of the URLs helps perpetuate the life of the links.
There is also a risk of nondisclosure wherein in Twitter users attempt to push products that offer some kind of gain to them that they don't clearly state to you. While I understand the argument for disclosure on blogs and media in general, Twitter remains a playground for people to post whatever they want. I highly doubt all the celebrities with accounts would bother wasting their precious time if they weren't posting for their own gain.
Interestingly, there is no mention of whether Twitter is an Amazon Associate, suggesting that Twitter won't see any of the revenue share. I'd like to think that they cut a deal that gives them a piece of the pie, but to date we haven't seen Twitter monetize itself too effectively.
Twitter is quickly becoming the flash news vehicle for everything from news alerts to product placement. And based on a very quick review of my Bitly account, Twitter users just love to click on links. But, I still have to wonder if Twitter will ever get beyond its current role as a marketing tool?
If recent research is any indication, Amazon.com and Google are winning the cloud game.
Evans Data on Tuesday released a report (registration required) on how developers perceive cloud service providers related to cloud services offerings, including their completeness and the companies' ability to execute on the vision.
Janel Garvin, the founder of Evans Data and the author of the report, provides excellent insight into the current state of the market and how quickly things could change, if certain large vendors (notably AT&T and Microsoft) got their acts together more quickly.
Given their robust services, it isn't surprising that Amazon and Google top the list. And although IBM, VMware, and Microsoft trail, each offers important components of cloud infrastructure.
... Read moreAmazon Payments today launched a new service that brings the company's payment processing tools to mobile devices. Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS) includes a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow mobile developers and merchants to provide payment options to their customers within mobile Web sites and applications--including the convenience of Amazon's 1-Click checkout system.
There are already a number of mobile payment providers, but Amazon is the big dog of the e-commerce world with an enormous amount of customer accounts already in use. This could be an excellent option for companies that offer mass-market mobile applications and are looking for ways to easily accept payments.
The service will automatically detect the request origin, meaning a Web or mobile browser, or a mobile application so that developers don't need to re-work their applications.
... Read moreArguments for and against the cloud are starting to calm down a bit, and most people agree that the cloud is somewhere in your future, if not in your present.
Instead of arguing semantics of application development and delivery, the discussion should really be around how to deal with a mix of on-premise and on-demand, a combination that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
I spent the first half of this week in Las Vegas at a nontech trade show, and missed both VMworld and the Red Hat Summit. However, watching and reading from afar, I noticed two major themes in discussion around both cloud computing and virtualization: cloud interoperability and the lack of application management tools.
Cloud interoperability--the ability to abstract the programmatic differences from one cloud to another--is a key to adoption. If we assume that some percentage of private compute clouds will be based on virtualization, and we know that a large percentage of public clouds already are, then the ability to move among virtual machines is a critical function in this regard.
Red Hat is obviously taking interoperability seriously, with Thursday's launch of Deltacloud, a new open-source project "designed to enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts, and applications that can interoperate across the public and private clouds."
Let's remember that right now, there is a difference between managing applications that are in your own data center and managing those at a cloud provider. Missing here are new management tools that cross borders in a seamless manner and don't discriminate against different hypervisors or application platforms.
Cloud application management isn't so much about workloads as it is the ability to move applications and associated data from cloud to cloud and system to system with no interference. This new realm of internal-external systems management opens up a world of opportunities but faces some significant speed bumps.
I noted last week that Amazon's announcement of virtual private clouds presents a challenge for many cloud-oriented start-ups. The issue is that Amazon calls the shots on the cloud and VMware on virtualization. And while both companies have done fairly well by their users (let's say better than we would expect from Microsoft or Oracle), innovation is stuck within their respective ways of doing things.
Regardless, there is a cloud management opportunity, with open-source projects like Puppet, as well as Red Hat's new release of Network Satellite 5.3. While neither is cloud-specific, applications that support large-scale infrastructure management are perhaps the first step in harnessing the computing power inside and attached to your data center.
Arguments for and against the cloud are starting to calm down a bit--and most agree that the cloud is somewhere in your future. The discussion should really be around how to deal with a mix of on-premise and on-demand, a combination that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
A huge amount of digital ink has been spilled trying to define "the cloud" and "cloud computing" and now Amazon Web Services has once again upped the ante with its latest Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) services.
The VPC, outlined here by fellow CNET blogger James Urquhart, provides a way for companies to create a logically separated set of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and a secure VPN connection to their own networks. Effectively, it takes a chunk of Amazon's services and makes it private. Still on the Internet and still on shared hardware, but private.
The VPC use case is for enterprises to use cloud services outside their firewall, connected in a secure manner. This is very compelling to IT shops that need more resources but have to date been concerned about security. And while this approach can certainly be called a "private cloud," I believe the more likely private use case is that of an "enterprise cloud" that is behind the firewall and adheres to compute cloud principles (elasticity, seamless scaling, etc.).
Where the computational resources live seems to be the crux of the private vs. public cloud discussion, and now that Amazon has defined private clouds as part of an Internet-hosted infrastructure I expect we'll see more references to "enterprise clouds" as the software matures.
The enterprise cloud is really just an actualized version of the "compute cloud" concept that we've seen for the last 10 years (and I've written about repeatedly) with a deployment model that mirrors Internet-based cloud services.
A "compute cloud" is a different animal, according to the developers of Eucalyptus, an open-source, EC2-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service. Typically based on virtual machines, "cloud computing allows users to dynamically provision processing time and storage space from a ubiquitous 'cloud' of computational resources."
Incidentally, Amazon's new offering not only resets the semantics of how we talk about cloud computing but also puts serious pressure on other cloud providers to offer feature parity. Few other providers offer the full breadth of AWS services and those that do are constantly playing catch-up.
Another aspect of the new offering is the impact it has on a variety of start-ups that have attempted to do similar things, or to augment AWS in ways that Amazon hasn't yet tried. As with so many other platforms, the risk of building on top of something you don't own (i.e. EC2) is significant. And while AWS continues to be very innovative, start-ups are going to have to be very agile to outfox Amazon.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
According to a new report by researchers in Australia, stress tests have revealed that the "infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues."
The seven-month study of Amazon's EC2, Google's App Engine, and Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services simulated 2,000 concurrent users connecting to services from each of the three providers, with researchers measuring response times and other performance indicators.
The results were at best mixed, and at worst, severely dysfunctional. For example, I'd never heard that when using Google App Engine, none of your data-processing tasks can last longer than 30 seconds, lest the service throw an exception back at you.
Researchers found that the three platforms "delivered wildly variable performance results as Amazon, Google and Microsoft trialled, added and dropped new features."
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