Forget about flashy Web 2.0 applications. The real, geeky coolness of the Web is the growing acreage of data centers that deliver bits to billions of devices. At GigaOM's Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, infrastructure--"clouds" of servers, storage and networks--was the headliner.
Conference host Om Malik kicked off the event, which is centered on the massive build out of infrastructure to power the wired planet.
(Credit: Dan Farber)Jonathan Yarmis, vice president of advanced, emerging and disruptive technologies at AMR Research, said changes in the next five years will make the past Internet revolution feel like child's play. He didn't explain exactly how the next five years will be more revolutionary than evolutionary, but outlined the convergence of several technology trends.
Jonathan Yarmis
(Credit: Dan Farber)The combination of social networking, mobility, alternative business models (advertising and different license and revenue models) and cloud and stream computing are mutually reinforcing trends that are driving innovations. The average life of a cell phone is 21 months, which allows users to take advantage of improvements in infrastructure.
"Cloud computing is not just for software as a service, but EaaS--Everything as a Service. Many things as discrete products become cloud-based offerings. It offers us an independence of device and location that is profoundly important," Yarmis said. Spoken like a true analyst--come up with another way to market a concept that is also known as on demand, cloud, SaaS, or utility computing.
One of the infrastructure challenges is not just storing and analyzing the growing body of data but reading, reacting, and responding in real time to disposable streams of data, Yarmis explained. The network and software needs to get much smarter and faster to enable real-time filtering and streaming for every user.
"We've reached a tipping point. All of the waves of disruptive tech are coming together at the same time," Yarmis said. He predicted that the economic downturn will help spur the adoption of cloud computing. Given the lower cost model and technological advances pioneered by companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com in cloud computing, that's a sure bet.
Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.
Stock photography houses have been under siege from the millions of amateurs shooting quality photos and making them available for free under Creative Commons licenses on sites like Flickr. PicApp hopes to give the stock photo houses a way to monetize their copyrighted photos across the Web.
Developed by an Israeli company, PicScout, PicApp embeds images like a video into a page, using Flash, and includes an advertisement. The revenue is shared with the stock photo houses, such as Corbis or Getty Images, representing the photographers. PicApp options include embedding photos on Web pages as well as bookmarking and e-mailing them to a friend. PicApp also provides a place for users to store their PicApp photo selections online.
PicApp offers a selection of high-quality images to embed on Web pages.
Here is an example of an embedded image:
Om Malik posted about PicApp earlier and assessed the service as follows:
While most of us tech bloggers don't have a pressing need for news photos to accompany our posts, the service can be useful for small Web sites and blogs that follow politics and news. Hollywood gossip blogs could find use for PicApp. That said, PicApp will need a very large number of embeds in order to bring any meaningful revenues. I think it is a challenge that has confounded all "embed"-based businesses. On the other hand, larger sites that can provide large traffic volume like PopSugar and Defamer can afford to pay for the photos and use that as a way to stand out from an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Blog network GigaOm has launched OStatic to cover open-source software.
OStatic is an example of GigaOm's beyond-blogging approach, integrating various services as part of a more complete microsite. In addition to blogs, OStatic includes a comprehensive directory of 150,000 open-source applications (similar to SourceForge), 30,000 closed-source applications, and a question-and-answer forum similar to Yahoo Answers. Readers can participate by contributing product reviews.
"We plant to track open source as a business and to make it easy to access information about various open-source projects," said Om Malik, founder and editor of GigaOm.
OStatic has about nine contributors who will be blogging about the news and events shaking up the open-source world.
The timing is right for OStatic as evidenced by growing acceptance of open source in corporations and the increasing valuations of open-source companies, Malik said. Sun Microsystems, for example, recently acquired MySQL for $1 billion.
OStatic was built in conjunction with Vox Holdings.
(Credit:
GigaOm)
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