I saw a comment on the Cinemin blog where the person used it to project movies on the ceiling of their hotel room while traveling.  I think the entertainment uses are great but I’m really excited by the possibilities for ad hoc expression.  Those of us in technology tend to think of “sharing” in the digital sense almost as much as we do in the physical. Share a link, share a tweet, share a picture.  There are companies like ShareThis with business models based on sharing digital content (and the meta data around those action).

Still, physical sharing carries messages in a very powerful way and the ability to bridge the digital<->physical divide is like a super power.  Will future generations of smart phones have pico projectors?

Connected devices may increasingly “nudge” us in physical ways in order to share information.  Right now the phone vibrates when there’s an incoming call.  In the future, the nudge might be an electrical impulse rich with information.

I call the ever growing number of connected mobile devices the pico cloud.  The tiniest partition of the internet network.  You’re probably thinking, “Will there really be a trillion connected mobile devices?”  I agree, it’s a lot; about 100 devices for every person on earth with a population nearly twice what it is today.  Still, I wouldn’t bet against it.

Each of these devices will be capable of saying “I’m here” to any number of other devices in the pico cloud.  And they will all capture and transport information that will inform our physical interaction with the world.

No doubt the protocols for identity, security, routing, and management of the pico cloud will need to evolve in concert with the flood of devices.

UPDATE: This TED talk by Patti Maes from MIT Fluid Interfaces lab gives a great demo of the possibilites – called 6th sense.

Glad the GSA is keeping tabs on our tax $$.  Has Oracle/SAP/Google/Salesforce seen this?!?

Cloud Computing – Why IT matters

Bonus: definition #68. Cloud computing is a generic term used to describe the disruptive transformation in I.T. towards a service based economy driven by a set of economic, cultural and technological conditions.

A generally accepted definition may be found at the NIST cloud computing group:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models

When evaluating cloud computing providers for your business, consider these three simple facts and how they relate to scale:

First and foremost cloud computing is, in the words of Tim O’Reilly a crappy “low-margin business“.

[Update: It is not my intent to disparage cloud infrastructure providers or argue that it is a crappy business - just that the infrastructure piece will be commoditized and follow Clayton Christensen's "law of conservation of attractive profits" described by Tim here]

Jeff Bezos and Amazon understand this better than most. How many really profitable online booksellers can you name?

If you spend any time in the Cloud Computing Google Group you will hear a common argument against the value proposition of public clouds. It goes something like this:

1. Cloud providers must always maintain enough excess capacity to meet the greatest aggregate computing demand of their customers.
2. This is enormously expensive.
3. That expense will be passed on to you, the customer.
4. You’re better off building/leasing a tailored solution.

Joe’s “Cloudonomics Law #4: Aggregate demand is smoother than individual” seems to refute this claim, but only if we are talking at massive scale, ala Google / Microsoft / Amazon / IBM / HP-EDS / Oracle / Salesforce / Telcos.

Smaller providers who cannot reach this massive scale, and thus compete on lower margins, will need to push the aforementioned group hard on cloud related standards. Otherwise, they will be pushed back towards a hybrid hosting model. The OCCI cloud interoperability group is working hard on standards that should help keep the ecosystem healthy but the biggest providers have not yet indicated a willingness to participate.

Second, vendors will lock you in (on some level).

Which cloud providers are open and transparent enough to earn your trust? This one is tough because cloud providers aren’t equal in terms of what they provide, e.g. infrastructure, application, service, platform, etc. Quite simply the higher you move up the stack, from infrastructure to platform, the more you are at risk for lock-in.

And don’t forget data lock-in. Once you acquire Terrabytes of data in a cloud it may not be quick, cheap, or easy to move the data to another provider.

Third, if you are going to invest considerable resources into moving applications and data to the cloud, you have to place a bet.

The provider you choose must be capable of withstanding fierce competition from all sides. They have to finish the race and it would be nice if they placed.

The on-demand pay-by-the-drink model is very appealing on the surface, but it doesn’t account for the substantial investment in training for your staff nor does it begin to cover required changes to IT processes. We need more data on the less obvious (and sometimes hidden) costs of moving to the cloud.

We’re in the early stages of a highly capitalized build out of cloud infrastructure and services. As George Reese says in his post “The First Step Into the Cloud“

If you are a small or medium-sized business (SMB), this discussion is moot—it’s foolish for an SMB to ever own any servers for any reason. The risks and costs of managing these servers will always exceed the risks and costs associated with leveraging cloud equivalents.

For enterprises it is more complicated. Take baby steps. Start building cloud competency in your organization by deploying non-mission critical applications to the cloud.

A PC suddenly becomes a terminal through which you can access and manipulate a mammoth computer that literally expands to meet your needs. What used to be hard or even impossible suddenly becomes easy.

When I first mentioned CloudLite, I was alluding to this idea (of using your PC to “access and manipulate a mammoth computer” on the net). What is important about the Carr quote is how you define computer. In the context of most articles written about cloud computing, the computer is synonymous with a virtual machine (VM) image running on 1-n cores of a physical server residing in some data center. You pay by the number of compute cycles used and the volume of data transferred to and from the VM.

An ongoing debate rages in the cloudsphere over benefit vs. cost, risk vs. reward and target uses of the cloud. Every week a new article (or HUNDRED) is written to argue what the cloud is and isn’t. Rehashed questions include: Is the primary benefit flexible scaling of internet applications? or processor intensive and paralleled apps? Is the cloud secure enough for the enterprise? When will we see SLAs that inspire a typical CTO to move mission critical services to the cloud? Who will win the cloud wars? What are/will be the killer apps? Grid vs. Cloud. Private vs. Public. Amazon vs. Google vs. Microsoft. Colo vs. Cloud? Capex vs. Opex.  Meh.

It feels like the pre-recession economy, full of hype and hope and promise. It also seems that information about innovative and tangible uses of the cloud is harder to find than the manufactured instruments of debate and the poor attempts at thought leadership that clog our feed readers.

Web2

Not surprisingly, many Web2 companies started and/or grew up in the cloud, particularly the early adopters of infrastructure providers Amazon Web Services, Mosso, Joyent, CohesiveFT, GoGrid, Appistry, etc. Without a clear business model, Web2 companies had to scale quickly and keep the cash burn rate low. Every available resource was needed for growing the user base.

While some of the services offered by these companies won’t survive the cold winter of the global economy, they should be recognized for leading our climb into the clouds – hanging bolts and pitons along the way.

We can , yes?

Right now, there are numerous examples of thoughtful analysis and technology leadership [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] in cloud computing. That’s just a start. Grab the rope. Follow them and find more.

This is another way of saying we need more of the good stuff. More examples of how businesses are moving to the clouds – More lead climbers. More people hanging pitons.

Lite

In that vein, I’ll be posting a series on what I call CloudLite.

With much of the focus in cloud computing on running massively scalable, highly available applications and services, there’s an overlooked segment of applications that run locally yet leverage the immense resources of the cloud. I’ll explore why I think the thick(er) client is particularly well-suited to cloud computing and how we should see new protocols in the mix for P2C (Peer2Cloud).

Stay tuned…