A Computer That Doesn’t Feel Like A Computer

Its not a geek device, its a computing appliance. The iPad is a computer with an iPhone OS. Not a full fledged Os like we’re used to, no multitasking, terminal, filesystems… 
Just a list of Apps that can be installed and updated from the net. Simple, elegant, and exactly what most people who aren’t computer geeks need.
The perfect “laptop” for mom and dad…

Apple Sells Relationship, Not Hardware

The iPad’s amazing pricing just shows that Apple is really counting on people using the heck out of their device… that means buying apps, books, music and videos. Its building a relationship with its customer that gets stronger and stronger with each purchase on iTunes.

Customers who have all their applications, games, books, music and videos on iTunes are locked in the Apple ecosystem. They’re vested in it…
They’re not going to easily switch to an Android or a Zune…

HP\Dell\Asus\etc. only make money the moment you purchase their hardware (and on support and stuff) they make no difference if you use it or not. Microsoft too, only makes money when you buy your Windows license.

Apple on the other hand keeps monetizing its customers way after they left the Apple Store with their latest new device – when they buy content for their device. They keep and nurture a profitable relationship with their customers and thats a way better business than a one-off hardware\license sale…

(btw, Microsoft is learning about making profit from a relationship too… that’s what drives its Xbox business)

iBooks Can Change the Publishing Industry

Before the iTunes Music store, buying songs at a ridiculous 99c price was inconceivable. The iPhone App Store did the same to applications, changing the the economy (checkout this excellent App Economy graphic) of application taking prices down.

Same could (and would probably) happend with books…  but there’s more!

Unlike Amazin’s Kindle (and Sony’s reader and the rest of the bunch) which support a very limited interaction – text and some grey imagery – the iPad comes with a big, colorful touchscreen and a CPU that can handle 3D gaming.
The iPad’s hardware is perfect for interactive content and the Times Magazine demo showed during the launch shows a glimpse of  how our future books and magazines should look and feel on electronic media.
Electronic “print” is going to be much more interactive and rich which means the entire process of book production changes.
The publishers’ role changes from mass printing and delivery to production of interactive content, the way authors work changes, and distribution costs drop…

Tags: AAPL, Apple, iPad

I found the following comparison between the iPhone and the Droid ads hilarious.

Especially, the following Droid bullets:

• It is fast and it despises aesthetics.
• It is packaged inside missiles launched by stealth jets. (*)
• It is a robot and should mostly be handled by other robots.
• Droid is to be used with robotic hands in a low-lit hi-tech laboratory or warehouse.

Actually, in one of the ads they say they Droid is like a Scud, a soviet missile that’s not known for its accuracy…

In any case, I’ve used an Android device before (the Samsung Galaxy) and I can’t really find anything good to say about the device or the Android OS (and its Apps Market).
I can’t believe there are people in the blogsphere calling the Galaxy and Droid an iPhone alternative… 

Tags: Android, Droid, Galaxy, iPhone, Samsung

This couldn’t be more ironic. The title for the presentation by Dov Moran, CEO and Chairman of Modu, at the upcoming TheMarker convention: (translated from Hebrew: “How to go from a huge company to a large one, from large to medium, from medium to small and from small to miniature, or the opposite”)

(via Ido Keinan)

Tags: Dov Moran, Modu

Last week the NY Times reported that Twitter has raised about $100 million of new funding, making the company’s value to be $1 billion. Just to put things in perspective, they also provide an example:

For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year. Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with running advertisements on its Web site, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans to begin widely running ads until 2010.

Twitter previously raised $55 million and has said it still has $25 million of that in the bank. So the question is, what will it do with these $100 million? Or, as I see it, who will it acquire now?

As part of it efforts to find a business model, Twitter will most likely acquire companies that’ll help it form that model.I’m thinking\betting on two major trends for such a business model:

Manage Companies Presence on Twitter

Twitter’s most obvious business model is by helping companies manage their presence on Twitter and monitor how their brands are being discussed.

This makes companies who provide all sort of analytics information, CRM integration and even url-shorteners as potential acquisitions for a future Twitter business package…

Local Markets, Local Social Network

The minute I read about Twitter’s $100 million round I thought of companies like Foursquare. I wasn’t really surprised when I read today’s Techmeme and noticed Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey invested in Foursquare.
Also, the twitter team has been working very hard lately to make Twitter location aware, allowing users to share their location via their tweets and browse stuff that is happening around them.

Twitter is great in forming local communities (just checkout the local tweetups everywhere), gather news and provide all sort of local information. Fouresquare as well as other location based social networks doing can really help twitter tap into the long-tail local businesses market and take on companies such as Yelp.

So, what do you think Twitter’s latest valuation? What will it do with its newly raised $100mil?

Tags: Twitter

Yahoo! is releasing its own distribution of Hadoop:

Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data.
In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.
The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been tested and deployed at Yahoo! on the largest Hadoop clusters in the world.

Hadoop is free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation.
Yahoo! has been the primary developer and contributor to Apache’s Hadoop.
In 2006, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo, which provided a dedicated team and resources, to lead the project of developing the open-source software and turn Hadoop into a system that ran at web scale. Today, Yahoo! is running the largest Hadoop cluster in the world, which includes more than 25,000 servers and provides the framework for many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services.

Yahoo says its opening up the source code to Hadoop to “benefit the larger ecosystem increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.”.
As Nigel Daley, Quality and Release Engineering Manager at Yahoo! Grid Technologies, summarizes:

Hadoop is helping us solve key science and research problems in hours or days instead of months. It provides us a platform to solve extreme problems requiring massive amounts of data processing. It underpins major revenue-generating systems. Opening our distribution enables a faster pace of innovation for the entire Hadoop ecosystem and broadens the use — and ultimately the quality — of this key platform across the industry.

Tags: Apache Software Foundation, Google, Google Inc., Grid Technologies, Hadoop, Java, web scale, Yahoo

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand.

While Amazon’s EC2 has been great so far in allowing companies to run large, computational-heavy distributed tasks on the background, it has been really lacking on allowing companies to run online services in a manner that’s efficient and reliable.

The reason for this lack of support is basically because there was no way to do load balancing on EC2 machines allowing a service to efficiently scale across multiple EC2 instances.

With the launch of Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon is effectively making EC2 a viable host for online services, not just background jobs. Using these services you can not only scale a service across machines for reliability, you can also automatically add and remove computing resources as demand increases\decreases driving your operation costs down.

You can find more information at the detail pages for Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing and on the AWS developer weblog. Also, check out Werner Vogel’s blog post for some background on how Amazon is horizontally scaling its services.

Tags: Amazon, AMZN, AWS, EC2, fault-tolerant applications, load balancing

In a response to Microsoft watcher Todd Bishop’s post saying  Microsoft should buy Twitter, Mary Jo-Foley wrote Microsoft Shouldn’t Buy Twitter saying:

…But I’d argue Microsoft could simply do a Twitter clone — the same way that it has built its own Facebook-notification-like news stream into Windows Live — and reap similar results. In fact, the Softies are hinting they’ve already been experimenting with adding Twitter-like functionality to its business software (possibly via SharePoint). I’d bet the Xbox and maybe the Pink/Danger mobile teams have been looking at doing their own Twitter-like services too.

Seriously?! Microsoft could simply clone Twitter?!

Sure, Microsoft certainly has some brilliant tech folks that can surely implement or clone anything. It also has the resources to do that.
And yet, its mostly following the pack with its online offering pretty stagnant. Last time it tried anything like that was Live Home with its Facebook\FriendFeed like functionality and that’s pretty much dead…
It can certainly clone Twitter, probably even do a better job at it than the original, but will anyone bother using it?

Twitter has a fast growing, huge and vibrant community. Its also a well known brand name that’s getting a huge amount of media attention right now.
It survived its own fail whales, upgrade owls and all sorts of other nasty service downtimes simply because no one else can beat that…
You can clone technology but you can’t clone a community and brand strength…

Tags: Microsoft, MSFT, Twitter

I just finished installing Windows 7 Beta on my home machine to find a fish swimming on my desktop:

But not just any fish, its a Siamese fighting fish, also knows a “betta fish” (or just “betta”).
A subtle Microsoft joke? Hope it does a better job selectively breeding this one (and get rid of some mutations… err… SKUs) …

Tags: beta, Betta Fish, Microsoft, MSFT, Windows 7

Originally published on Cloud Avenue.

About a month ago, Microsoft rolled out its previously announced 3rd wave of Windows Live Services refresh.

The purpose of the release was to position the Live Services as the central hub for everything you do online – the new Live Home shows input from your various services (Hotmail, SkyDrive, etc.) as well as an activity stream composed of your friends’ activities on both Live Services as well as other external services such as Twitter, Flickr and blogs…

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Live Home, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows Live, social network, Windows Live Wave, Windows Live Wave 3

If you like the scrolling functionality as implemented in the iPhone (and Zune etc.) you’ll be happy to know its part of the Windows 7 operating system and implemented for anything with a scrollbar.

More Windows 7 goodies on Rafael Rivera’s blog…

Tags: Kinetic Scrolling, Microsoft, Multi-Touch, Panning, Windows 7