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Liked: theRizznFamily's Xbox - Sep 19 2011
I told theRizznFamily ‘Hey man, it is time to play games’ and YAY! he listened! Gamer score is 28,993. That is a boost of 595 points over last time! He played Alan Wake finishing an amazing 31 achievements, and then I came out of my trance and realized it was all over.
Liked: Steven Hodson Joins Medacity As Opinion Columnist
Medacity (a publication of Nichenet Pty Ltd) is proud to announce that tech opinion writer Steven Hodson has joined the team as its first dedicated opinion writer. Hodson, who previously worked for Nichenet is a similar role at The Inquisitr, will be offering regular opinion pieces and selected coverage of the new media sphere. Hodson, a veteran blogger and podcaster with a particular interest in Microsoft products, has a long history in tech blogging, and is best loved for his sometimes controversial, but always honest opinions on the tech news of the day. “It’s a great pleasure to be working with Steven again, and I know that he will, as he always does on any site he writes for, bring a unique edge to Medacity” said Nichenet CEO and Medacity Editor Duncan Riley.
Liked: awesomepeoplehangingouttogether: The cast of the original Star...
awesomepeoplehangingouttogether: The cast of the original Star Wars trilogy “ARB,” I believe the parlance goes. Thing is: we should store copies of this photo in every library and every time capsule. Because, I think this may be very important.
Liked: All you Netflix whiners need to STHU. Seriously.
There is a war going on right now and while it might not be bloody or leaving bodies strewn all over the place it is a nasty war and you my friend are the frontline troopers. It is a war of attrition and big money. It is war that has only just started and already the battle lines are being blurred with corporate greed and misinformation, and above all our own greed in getting every thing that we can for free, or at least as cheap as is possible even if that means we could be shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot. The war I am referring to is the one between the old guard entertainment media companies; like television networks, cable companies, movie companies and the music industry, and the new Internet versions of those companies such as Netflix, the hapless Hulu, music services like Pandora and Spotify, and other video and music streaming services that seem to be launching every day. As per usual this is a war over who is making money off of us, the consumer. For the old guard it is about creating an illusion of scarcity of their products and about controlling every aspect of the entertainment pipeline. For the new media companies it is about letting you choose what you want to watch, or listen to, when you watch, and where you watch it. It is also about being able to break down the walls of ownership; or at least it would like to be about that as well. At the frontlines of this war is Netflix as they attempt to bring about one of the biggest changes ever seen in the entertainment industry. However they are not only having to fight an old guard that is doing everything that it possibly can to protect their archaic business model and their control over the business, but Netflix is also having to deal with the ingratitude of those they are trying to help. The fact is that we are acting more like Brutus than a willing participant to a media revolution. This was most recently made obvious when Netflix announced a change to their pricing model that saw the company splitting their DVD mail service and their streaming service, and then charging $15.98 per month if you wanted both services. From the uproar that followed you would have thought you had take our favorite blankie or pacifier away from us. Every where you read about people screaming how Netflix was ripping them off and how they were going to give the company the royal finger while killing off their subscriptions. Now I should point out that I live in Canada and as such we only just recently got Netflix here, albeit a rather gutted version compared to the US, for which we pay $7.99 per month for a service that has been severely crippled by Canadian laws and media companies that wanted exorbitant amounts of money in exchange for streaming rights. In contrast to many pundits in Canada I gladly pay my money each month because I already get immense value for that paltry $7.99 per month (or 26¢ per day); but there is a much more important factor here which seems to be escaping all these childish whiners. Let’s look at who is the enemy here. Really, think about it for a moment. Here we have a conglomerate of entertainment companies who are making billions of dollars a year and who are scrambling to hold on to their cash cows by any method possible. It doesn’t matter what the consumer wants because that isn’t in the interest of their bottom lines, it isn’t in the interest of their being able to control the marketplace. When Netflix first started out it was just a DVD mailing company and no threat to the old media companies but then it saw a shift coming in the way that we the consumers wanted to consume our media. No longer did we want to watch television on a schedule set by the networks. We didn’t want to be overcharged through the rectum to watch generally crappy movies in an environment that seemed more like being stuck in a dungeon than an enjoyable viewing experience. Neither did we want to be wallet raped for music that was 99% garbage. Thankfully Netflix was smart enough to see where the consuming future was headed and they started building out a platform that is both a threat to the established entertainment business and extremely easy for the consumer to use. The moment that they threw that streaming switch however, they became a giant threat to the entertainment companies. And remember, video streaming is the future, a future that might be being held hostage by the carriers with their caps and the entertainment companies and their outrageous streaming rights fees but a future that is coming at us like a steamroller with no brakes. So it was no surprise that company that had built itself around being agile and always looking to the future would at some point come to question its need for old media DVDs. At some point it was inevitable that Netflix would start the process of weaning us off of those DVDs and moving to a pure streaming video company, unfortunately it has happened faster than the consumer is able to handle hence the ridiculous outrage over Netflix’s move to separate the two types of business. Here’s the thing though. The future is coming, and it’s coming fast but in the process the old media companies are fighting for survival which means that they will do anything that they can to delay that future. This is why you get moves like Starz pulling out of negotiation with Netflix for a new contract for their content to be streamed on Netflix. The thing is that it isn’t like the deal being offered by Netflix wasn’t a good one, like $300 million per year to carry the Starz content, but the fact that it wasn’t enough money. What Starz wanted, and I imagine this will also become another negotiation point for other old media entertainment companies, is that they wanted Netflix to set up a tiered pricing system that would see Starz content charged more for. Thank goodness for us the consumer Netflix said go screw yourself and walked away. Now Starz is potentially in negotiations with Amazon, and you can probably bet those discussions will include this tiered pricing idea, which leaves one wondering if Amazon will agree and thereby laying the groundwork for future screwing of the the consumer; and protecting the old media companies a little longer. The fact that Netflix was willing to walk away from this is the best thing that could have happened for the consumer but instead of thanking Netflix we are all stomping our feet like whiny little kids. Whining over the fact that we will now have to pay 53¢ a day because we want to hang on to a dying media format that a very large percentage of people don’t even watch when it shows up in their mailbox via USPS, another business that is in the verge of totally collapsing. We stand there flailing our arms about how rotten Netflix is and telling all our friends how the company is ripping us all off when in fact we should be doing everything w can to get more and more people to subscribe to the service. Instead of pulling our less than a Starbuck’s coffee a day from the service we should be thanking the company for taking a strong stance on something that is a benefit to the consumer. Sure it might be self-serving but Netflix is our best warrior on this new battlefield. It is a company that is working hard to bring us the best in entertainment at a price that is absolutely ridiculous in how cheap it is and it is doing this in the face of opposing forces that will keep going until the last conglomerate dies off. We should be giving Netflix the thumbs up instead of a knife in the back.
Liked: Big News: Microsoft utters the words “Media Center” (updated)
Well yesterday, in another epic (or at least epically long) blog post, Steven Sinofsky hinted for the first time about the future of Media Center: In this, and a subsequent post, I want to talk about four topics in particular: Feedback (which I’ll cover today), the Ribbon, Metro, and Media Center. I hope to add a bit of additional “focus, light, and magnification” without distorting the bigger picture here. Granted, he didn’t say much, other than that it’s on his list of things to talk about, but at least (we think) we know now that Media Center will be included, in some form, in Windows 8. … UPDATE: A new blog post by Steven Sinofsky has just been posted, and he makes it clear that Windows Media Center will continue to be included with at least some versions of Windows: While not a central topic of feedback, I received about 50 emails about Media Center. I want to reassure customers that Media Center will definitely be part of Windows 8. No doubt about it. Sinofsky goes on to say that Media Center will not be included in early builds of Windows 8, along with things like DVD Creator and Windows 7 games, but that Media Center will make it into at least some SKUs of Windows 8. Sinofsky also notes the low usage numbers of Media Center, with only 6% of Windows 7 users globally launching it. Perhaps if it was better marketed, with fewer conflicting products (see below), it might be faring better? … There has been a lot of speculation recently that Microsoft would seek to consolidate its various Media player offerings: currently we have Window Media Center, Windows Media Player, the Zune software, Windows Live Picture Gallery, Windows Live Movie Maker, and probably a few more in nooks and crannies lurking about in Windows somewhere. Then there’s Xbox Live, of course, coming as we know in some form to the PC. The truth is, we really don’t know what direction Microsoft is heading in regards to both Media Center and the media capabilities now available through Windows Live, or how they will fit into Windows 8. Will we get a full blown consolidation? Would Windows Live Essentials even make sense anymore in a Windows 8 app-centric model (and what becomes of Windows 7 users? Will Microsoft maintain two sets of apps for the two operating systems?)? We’re going to be packing in a lot of information to parse coming out of Build, that’s for sure. Here’s hoping we leave with more answers than questions.As usual, the buildup to Build, and what will be revealed about Windows 8 and its surrounding ecosystem, is much more about what Microsoft is NOT saying than what it has. After the Windows 8 demo at this summer’s D8 conference, where Steven Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green revealed that the new tablet interface for Windows 8 would run apps written in HTML5 and JavaScript (throwing .Net developers into a tizzy), not much new has been revealed about the new OS, expected to be previewed at Build and released sometime next year. Oh yes we’ve heard about the Ribbon in Windows Explorer, and a bit of esoterica about faster file moves, but much remains to be revealed.
Liked: The Myth of Reputation
We worry about our reputation. How are we perceived? What do people say about us? If we’re not around, what gets said differently? The trick is that reputation comes from the perspectives of others, and as such, it’s not ours to worry about.
Ask my dozens of haters and they’ll say I’m overrated, have nothing new to say, and am in it for the money. Ask my devoted and loyal following and they’ll say that everything I put out is a gem and that I can spin garbage into gold. Both are right. It’s a perspective.
When I started Blog Topics, people wrote angry posts stating that I was evil for selling this, and that topics exist everywhere for free. At the same time those posts were being labored over, hundreds of people subscribed to Blog Topics and are still subscribed, getting weekly writing advice. When I’m an hour or two late with publishing the latest issue, I get emails asking for it. Both are right. You can get topics anywhere for free. You can pay for writing advice from me.
Some of your clients will love what you did. Others will say you were a waste of their money. Both might be right. It just depends. I have both types of reputation, and have earned it in all cases. So, what counts as reputation? Do you count the masses? When has that ever been a good idea? Consensus just means that people stop forming their own opinion and go with what’s around them.
The other slippery part of reputation comes from outward perceptions based on status. Because I’ve been around the Internet for a while, some no longer know my origins, no longer know from what meager beginnings I’ve come, and they form opinions that way. The past fades (sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse), and with it fades some of what bolsters up the image of who you are to newcomers.
Reputation isn’t useful to me. What I’ve learned is that connecting with my core audience and community matters to me. What I’ve learned is that execution is what you can focus on that can help. What I’ve learned is that you don’t care about reputation; you care about repetition. If I please a client, I want that client to refer me. If I please my audience, I want them to share that with others. Beyond that, I am face down and doing the work.
Worrying about reputation means that you have less time to do what needs doing. I’ve come to appreciate that my detractors spend time reading my posts, and then composing posts on why I’m bad or wrong or whatever. I love that they spend so much time commenting back and forth on such posts with why I’m wrong. Because all that time they use for that is time I’m using to build value for the people who matter to me. You need that time. Worrying about reputation doesn’t pay you anything. It doesn’t change other people’s opinions.
The only thing that changes opinions is your success, and success (the kind that’s worth anything) is built on helping others. Count yourself successful when your clients or audience get what they want. That’s the focus.
Leave reputation conversations for those who have the time to waste having them.
The Myth of Reputation
Reputation is Slippery
Why I Learned to Stop Caring About Reputation
Reputation Takes Time That You Need
Liked: Hurricane Path FAIL
Picture by: Cody on FB :3
Liked: VMworld 2011 Recap: VMware Tackles the Consumerization of IT
VMworld 2011 attracted a record number of more than 19,000 customers, partners, press and analysts, and 250 sponsors and exhibitors signifying major interest from the IT industry in cloud computing and the next generation of IT. With the theme of “Your Cloud. Own it,” VMworld 2011 featured more than 175 unique breakout sessions across 10 tracks from companies and customers driving innovation in the virtualization and cloud industry. There were a lot of n Another product in the works is Horizon Mobile. This is a technology that enables users to have completely separate work and personal environments on a single mobile device running Google’s Android operating system. LG, Samsung and other smart-phone and tablet manufacturers are expected to make Horizon Mobile available “in the coming months,” according to VMware. Horizon is being touted as a universal broker that can connect VMware View, Horizon Mobile and Project Octopus. The idea here is, now that we have all these solutions, how do we bridge the gap between them? How do we connect them so they make sense, integrate and work together rather than being separate islands? The answer is the universal broker that would allow the same user logging into View to get their files and would allow that same user to also get their files on their mobile devices using Octopus. VXLAN is a new IETF submitted by VMware, Cisco and others, which is meant to make networking virtualization aware by separation of location, and the identity of IP-addressing. VMware has done lots of effort to improve compute and storage, but does not focus yet on making networking more suitable for virtualization. VXLAN enables a virtual machine to keep its IP-configuration when it is moved to another datacenter/network. Moreover, Dell and VMware jointly announced the availability of the Dell Cloud based on VMware vCloud Datacenter Services designed to provide a seamless multi-tenant environment for running virtual systems. The Dell vCloud data center services will provide options for public laaS hosted in a secure Dell data center. Same thing also goes for NetApp and VMware, who also announced a joint cloud solution. VMware cloud infrastructure and management on NetApp enables organization to evolve to a secure cloud computing model at their own pace, gaining greater flexibility and efficiency without needing to rip and replace their existing infrastructure. During the conference, EMC also introduced the next generation EMC Virtual Storage Integrator 5.0. VSI 5 is a free VMware vCenter plug-in that lets IT achieve simple and efficient data center operations and accelerate their trip into the cloud. VMworld 2011 Recap: VMware Tackles the Consumerization of IT is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We’ve been covering the VMworld 2011 since the event started on August 29th. We even had a live coverage via #theCube. The said event was hosted by our very own John Furrier, CEO and Founder of SiliconAngle together with Dave Vellante, CEO and founder of Wikibon. VMworld is an annual conference for IT professionals, focusing on virtual server environments, put on by VMware.
ew announcements by VMware throughout the course of the week. To name a few, there was Project AppBlast and Project Octopus, both very interesting. AppBlast enables your Windows Mac, Linux application to be presented on any HTML 5 and what they showed us looked very similar to what you would see from a Citrix XenApp application. The difference: AppBlast will be embedded in a browser, with no plug-in needed.
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Liked: Q&A with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the Creator of Ruby
Heroku doesn’t ask me to do anything for them. You can consider them my sponsor. I’m dedicated to the design and implementation of Ruby full time. I’m working on Ruby 1.9, which is the current version. We’re also starting on 2.0. And we’re working on the small dialect of Ruby for embedded devices. What is your vision for that? The embedded systems? The goal of Ruby is to make programmers happy. I started out to make a programming language that would make me happy, and as a side effect it’s made many, many programmers happy. Especially Web developers. But Ruby hasn’t reached developers who work on embedded devices, mobile devices, controllers, things like that. I hope to make them happy too. You’ve mentioned that Heroku’s deployment model is very good. Has Heroku or Platform-as-a-Service in general influenced the way you approach Ruby? I don’t think so. Ruby and Ruby on Rails have made programming easier and faster, but deployment remained an issue. Herkou is improving that. We share a design philosophy, but that hasn’t changed Ruby. You designed Ruby for yourself. Has Ruby’s popularity affected the way you develop the language? The basic philosophy has not changed, but with so many people using Ruby nowit’s hard to make big changes. Changes have to be made more slowly compared to 10 years ago. Do you have plans to bring concurrency to the language? You’ve talked about the actor model in the past. Real concurrency is very difficult to implement. We’ve taken a few approaches. One is using the JVM, since so many resources have been dedicated to making concurrency work on the JVM. So we run JRuby on the JVM. Then there’s the forking model process, which implements a type of concurrency. And third, there’s an experimental process called multiple virtual machines or MVM. Each virtual machine gets a thread. There’s a guy working on this at the University of Tokyo, he just published a paper on it. It could end up being integrated into Ruby in the future, but I don’t know yet. You’ve mentioned that the community is Ruby’s greatest asset. Do you have any advice for open source teams building communities? Unlike the technical aspect of building software, community is about human relationships. Some developers don’t like this part, but sometimes the human relationships are important. In fact, they’re often the MOST important part of a project. Sometimes you’ll have a hostile person come into the community. When I have a difficult conversation with someone, I have a rule: I remember there must be a reason for them to be hostile. You try to see the issue from their perspective? To stay civil? To stay civil, yes. And to stay calm, to keep from getting angry. What is your favorite language other than Ruby? Actually, Lisp is my favorite. It’s the ancestor for every good language. Recently I’ve studied the Lua language from Brazil. It shares a lot with the small dialect of Ruby. I’ve learned a lot from it. The list goes on, I’m a language geek. Q&A with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the Creator of Ruby is a post from: SiliconANGLE
Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto created Ruby in 1993 and released it to the public in 1995. Since then, Ruby and the framework Ruby on Rails have taken off, earning a seat at the programming table along side other popular languages like Java and PHP. Matz was recently hired by Heroku, the Ruby platform-as-a-service owned by Salesforce.com, as the chief architect of Ruby. I sat down with him at the Dreamforce event to talk about his role at Heroku, the future of Ruby and his advice for open source developers.
What are you doing for Heroku? What sorts of problems are you working on?
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Liked: Why Geolocation isn’t Quite “There Yet”
This weekend, we cowered to think that major cities on the American east coast would be pummeled by Hurricane Irene. We watched CNN and Twitter to see how things were going. Geolocation tools like Foursquare could have been amazing during a natural disaster like Irene. Imagine if any check-in tagged with #Irene were pulled onto a map, and then you could see what sort of damage was done to millions of places in real time? How useful would something like that be? Geolocation picked up as a meme in early 2010 and then slowed down significantly for the following reasons: 1.) Let’s face it: . OK, so let me get this straight. You are going to give me rewards for letting the entire world know where I hang out on a regular basis? I see the benefits, but I’m not sure they outweigh the risks. This is especially true for public accounts. 2.) Many geolocation networks got numbers, but failed to capture critical mass…anywhere. I won’t get into naming names, but I’ve seen social networks with gobs of features fail. Why? Features do help you sell a social network. However, unless our friends are using it, we don’t care. Facebook had a lot of features from the beginning. What really helped it take off was the fact that they targeted schools hard and heavy before expanding. They didn’t rush to get 10 million users all over the world. They got 30,000 of heavily concentrated users, and then got 30,000 more concentrated users. It became so popular at the “it” places (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.), everyone wanted an account. It’s not just important that people sign up for your site. It’s important that they use it. To Foursquare’s credit, it helped them tremendously to lock down New York City and San Francisco. 3.) Geolocation desperately needs context that can be defined through APIs. The Hurricane Irene example above is a fantastic example of a useful app that could be built quickly on geolocation APIs. What if someone wanted to build organicfoodfinder.com, which would allow users to check into and find spots that served organic meals? What if we wanted to call out restaurants who had bad service by checking in and leaving comments, or crowd source bike routes by checking in to spots along the way? It’s hard to add functionality to geolocation applications that will make everyone happy, but it’s relatively easy through services like Apigee or Mashery to build robust APIs that support any kind of functionality through third party applications. If an application like Foursquare can provide the current data and basic functionality a geolocation service would want to use, they could theoretically be the Facebook of the real world. Instead of sharing links, we would share places. We could play games in the real world the same way people play Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Foursquare has some action around their API, but not even near the potential it could have. I’ve said this before and will say it again: the money in a social network is often in the lurkers. Make something valuable for them and things will get interesting in geolocation again very quickly. [Cross-posted at Michelle’s Blog] Why Geolocation isn’t Quite “There Yet” is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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Liked: HP's Dead TouchPad Claims No. 2 Best-Selling Tablet Spot
How’d HP do it? Seemingly by just slashing the price to $99. But even at bargain basement prices, consumers want usability. For other also-ran tablets who aspire to nip at Apple’s heels, there’s a lesson here in finding the sweet spot between price, design, and function.
HP had high hopes that its TouchPad could catch up to Apple’s iPad in the tablet marketplace. But after putting the device out for $499, the company saw few
sales. HP then slashed the price by $50. Still, no sales. Next, a $100 discount arrived at retail stores, yet still, the TouchPad couldn’t touch the iPad.
Then at last, HP had a dramatic change of heart, deciding to discontinue the TouchPad line and radically reduce prices, to $99 for each device. Suddenly, HP had its
Apple moment. Lines were soon out the door, with customers camping outside in the earling morning before retail stores opened. The TouchPad topped the charts at
Amazon—sold out everywhere online including at HP.com. Best Buy and other retailers couldn’t keep up with consumer demand. HP promised to deliver more
TouchPads. Many purchasers even received apology notes from retailers saying they were unfortunately out of stock.
Ironically, HP’s discontinued TouchPad could soon be the second best-selling tablet of all time, behind only the iPad. If heavy discounts were all it took
for TouchPads to fly off shelves, should other tablet makers take note? Do competitors have a chance against Apple selling at the same $499 price tag? And is
there a sweet spot between $99 and $499—a spot where the price is low enough to sway consumers away from the iPad, while still being economic for the device
makers too?
“There is only one credible player and category leader—and that is Apple’s iPad,” says Trip Chowdhry, an analyst Global Equities Research who specializes
in the tablet space. “We don’t see any second player at all—only leftovers.”
Included in the leftovers, Chowdhry says, are all devices running Android, Windows, RIM, and HP’s WebOS. While Apple has no issue boasting of the 28.7
million iPads it’s sold, other device makers are less comfortable revealing numbers. Most will only say how many devices they’ve shipped—which is a far
cry from how many they’ve actually sold. For example, Samsung is said to have shipped 2 million Galaxy Tabs; BlackBerry, roughly 500,000 PlayBooks; and Acer, about
2.5 million Iconia Tabs. Yet Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps says, “There’s a pretty big gap between their shipment and sell-through numbers.”
Chowdhry agrees, estimating that none have actually “sold more than 10% to 15% of what they claim to have shipped.”
That means if HP’s heavily subsidized TouchPad continues to sell out in-store and online, says Chowdhry, it’s on track to become the second best-selling tablet on the market,
since reports indicate HP’s intial order was for
between 500,000 to one million units.
Price is clearly on the minds of consumers. In her Forrester Research report released Monday, Epps argues that
when Amazon releases its tablet on the market, it has the potential to become the top competitor to Apple’s iPad. The reason? It likely will be marketed at
a significantly lower price. “If Amazon launches at a price point significantly lower than competing tablets—some sources suggest that it may be able to
launch a 9-inch LCD touchscreen tablet for as low as $299—and has enough supply to meet demand, Forrester estimates that Amazon could sell as many as 3
million to 5 million tablets in Q4 2011 alone,” Epps says—meaning Amazon’s offering would leapfrog over competeting devices that have been on the market much longer.
Yet price isn’t enough. When Motorola lowered the price of its Xoom tablet, for example, it made a negligible difference in sales. The Android-based device
did little to attract consumers, nor differentiate itself enough from other Android tablets. Sometimes, no product is worth the cost, no matter how
discounted. Case in point: Nokia’s widely panned N-Gage mobile phone—which looked like a taco—could never sell, even when the compny lowered the price from
$299 to $199 to $99. “What is negative about Android? The user interface sucks,” Chowdhry says. “It’s so complicated that you need a user manual to use it.”
HP’s WebOS, on the other hand, “felt like it had a higher level of quality and finish than the software that Google has offered,” adds Epps.
(Of course, HP’s TouchPad couldn’t sell at $399, a much deeper discount than any Android-based tablet has seen, and only began finding interest after dropping to the
fire-sale price of $99. It’s hard to say whether decent reviews played a role in the TouchPad’s success at the discount price, or whether the $99 sale alone is responsible for its newfound success. In other words, if a Toshiba Thrive and an HP TouchPad were both on sale for $99, which would you prefer to buy?)
Beyond price and software, services are likely a device maker’s biggest differentiator. Apple boasts 100,000 iPad apps, for instance. One reason Epps is so optimistic for Amazon’s tablet is because it’ll likely come with signifcant cloud services. Microsoft might have an advantage over others by offering Xbox Live accounts. Other tablet makers could introduce appealing features such as free six-month subscription plans to Netflix. (HP tried a similar strategy when it offered customers 50GB free storage on Box.net.) And Epps even imagines some could offer
more innovative broadband models, like purchasing surfing time on an hourly or daily basis, rather than by contract or a monthly plan.
The idea, simply, is to introduce more diversity into an ecosystem filled with poor iPad knockoffs. Now, it’s clear that no tablet can match Apple’s iPad at competitve or even slightly discounted
prices—all have tried, and all have failed. (Samsung Galaxy Tab, Toshiba Thrive, HP TouchPad, BlackBerry Playbook—the list goes on.) Competitors must find a
sweet spot in price to sell the tablet, possibly in the $300 to $399 range, and make up for any deficiencies through services.
That’s the only way tablet makers can hope to become second place to Apple. And as both Epps and Chowdhry remind me, second place—behind Apple—isn’t even all that impressive. “If you think selling 200,000 or 300,000 over the span of two months or so is good, well then you are probably right,” Chowdhry says. ”But keep in mind that that’s what Apple will probably be selling in just a few hours.” [Image: Flickr user Ben Dodson]
Liked: Bradley: HP may "resurrect" TouchPad?
HP Personal Systems Group EVP Todd Bradley is currently over in China, where he spoke to Reuters about the future of the PSG. Speaking somewhat candidly, Bradley admitted that the preferred path for the PSG is a spin-off as an independent company and not an attempt to sell the massive PC manufacturing arm of HP to another company. Quashing rumors about his possible departure, Bradley said that he intends to stay on through this transition, and to lead the separated company if it comes to that. He also broached the subject of webOS, which he claims to have not been in China to discuss, even though he has said previously that “a number of companies” have approached HP about the mobile operating system. What caught us by surprise was a line in the Reuters story: “Bradley said the company could resurrect HP’s short-lived TouchPad tablet computer.” There’s not a direct quote on the subject, but we can’t help but be conflicted about the prospects. On one hand, HP very publicly trashed webOS hardware and it would be a massive public relations reversal to switch around to building and selling the TouchPad again, not to mention the expenses HP has already incurred in shutting down manufacturing and the discounting to fire sale pricing. On the flip side of the coin, the response to the discounted TouchPad has been so intense that even HP was caught off guard by the demand. Of course, that’s demand for a full-fledged tablet priced at $100 – a price where HP is taking a considerable loss. It’s important not to mistake enthusiasm for a great deal for enthusiasm for the platform. For sure, the shut down and fire sale have greatly increased awareness of webOS, but actual desire is a fickle thing. But if HP can pull off closing down the product, dumping it into the market at negative margins, and then brining it back to life as a healthy ecosystem, that’d be the public relations coup of the decade. We’re not sure HP’s quite that savvy.
Liked: EMC’s Steve Manley Talks Backup, Dedupe at VMworld 2011
Manley kicked of the convo with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante by talking a bit about his role in the company, following with his opinion of the major influencers in the market. He highlighted that customers haven’t been seeing as much user experience shifts as changes under the surface, driven for one by the rise of deduplication in the past decade. The latest example of that is Permabit, which announced it has doubled Albireo’s dedupe rate by 250 percent within a year. Manley continued to talk about what he thinks the market should be looking out for: “Because of the amount of data you have, and because of things like virtualization where servers are much more heavily loaded then they ever were before… for backup to be able to hit its window we need the applications and system that own the data need to take a more active role in the backup.” Different businesses, or admins for that matter, are also starting to take control of their network’s backup, says Manley, meaning each unit can become responsible for its own data. In a multi-vendor environment, this can lead to compliance issues, which is why organizations need to centralize these operations as well to achieve a balance of some sort, according to him. The third topic that came up during Manley’s visit to theCube was how the cloud has gotten denser. More VMs mean higher compute resource utilization, and enterprises don’t have enough left for backup. VMware offers a solution in the of change block tracking: “VMware can tell us, here’s what interesting since the last time you did your backup. And then you just apply your deduplication against that,” he said. EMC’s Steve Manley Talks Backup, Dedupe at VMworld 2011 is a post from: SiliconANGLE
Steven Manley, CTO of EMC’s Backup and Recovery group attended VMworld and made his first appearance in theCube. He discussed backup, where EMC stands in this market, and his take on the industry.
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