vogel's

iPad on the ceiling? RingO mounts it in a snap

If you ever wanted to move your iPad from the living room wall to the back of a car seat and then onto the ceiling, RingO is for you. The RingO Universal Tablet Mounting System from Vogel's is all about making your iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab easier to view in a variety of settings. It comes in two parts: a cover and a mount. The cover snaps onto the back of the tablet. The built-in round aluminum connector hooks up with any of a variety of mounts.

The $69.99 starter pack includes the case and a wall mount. The wall mount looks a bit like a hockey puck, but it's low profile enough to not throw off the feng shui in your living room. Once the tablet clicks into place, it can be rotated around. It might not impress like a wall-mounted 55-inch flat-panel TV, but you won't accidentally sit on the Galaxy Tab that you left on the sofa, either.

But why stop with walls?… Read more

The Cloud and eventual consistency

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recently revisited a post titled 'Eventually Consistent' , about building consistency models for globally distributed systems and the trade-offs required to process trillions of transactions. It's a little heady, but definitely worth a read if you are trying to figure out how to architect applications for the Cloud or other large system architectures.

Whether or not inconsistencies are acceptable depends on the client application. In all cases the developer needs to be aware that consistency guarantees are provided by the storage systems and need to be taken into account when developing applications. There are a number … Read more

Was InfoWorld's CTO of the Year award a year late?

Congratulations to Werner Vogels, the now legendary CTO of Amazon and one of the principle drivers of the Amazon Web Services vision. InfoWorld announced Sunday that Werner earned its CTO of the Year award. The accolades are rolling in from all over, but I think all agree that this was a well-deserved recognition for Werner and his team. In fact, Werner's recognition of the team effort that led to this award just makes him that much more of a class act.

What leaves me shaking my head, however, is that it took this long to see the incredible feat that Amazon pulled off, and the leadership that pushed a retail goods company to see compute capacity as a logical extension of their business.… Read more

Amazon's blueprint for cloud computing

In the early morning at Structure 08, AMR Research's Jonathan Yarmis described various tech trends around cloud computing. Mendel Rosenblum, a founder and technical lead behind VMware, outlined the role of virtualization in data centers.

Now Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO at Amazon.com, is talking about why Amazon is in the cloud computing business, how it got there, and why customers should want it. Instead of every company or developer doing the heavy lifting, dealing with the "muck" as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say, Amazon opened up its software-as-a-service stack (Amazon Web Services) … Read more

You think you know copyright?

Today on the Real Deal podcast, Tom and I interviewed Colette Vogele, attorney, Fellow at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, and host of the Rules for the Revolution podcast. We started to cover the concept of copyright from the perspective of the content producer separately from that of the consumer, but found that the line between the two is increasingly fuzzy. We all consume content. But with digital technologies, almost every one of us also produces, copies, or otherwise mangles the content that we are consuming.

We talked with Vogele about this, and went over not just the … Read more