Cloud Hopping

Cloud computing for the every day user is right around the corner. More than simply the next tech buzz word, companies are  putting into motion business plans that address what is deemed the future of computing. Probably the most significant news came out of Camp Microsoft. The semi-mythical Midori has already received coverage this year as Microsoft’s future operating system that will replace Windows. Now even more intriguing, Midori is reported to be a cloud computing operating system. This is a bold yet necessary move, and finally Microsoft has beat Google to the punch. Google has discussed the browser as the future operating system. Surely it has plans to develop more than the programs and tools, but also a browser/OS as well. It is nice to know there is competition for a cloud OS considering all the issues surrounding Android.

One issue with the cloud routinely brought up is security. While there is not any good updates here, companies can now rely on Zscaler for web filtering through a cloud based service. I imagine this offering will have strong appeal because it relieves the burden of running filters and security on your own servers. AT&T also announced, though garbled,  a complete end to end cloud solution dubbed Synaptic Hosting. The significance here is that AT&T will not only manage the services, but also the network it runs on, which gives the company greater control and presumably higher reliability.

Need more on the cloud, well BusinessWeek just released a special report titled the CEO Guide to Cloud Computing that provides a great deal more fodder to the discussion. Humorously, Dell decided it would try to trademark “cloud computing” and in completely unrelated news Delta decided to take cloud computing literally and the era of the tag cloud is on notice.

Can $1 Billion Solve the Online Video Conundrum?

During the past few months it seems that online video has become the most important issue for the internet. Some the myriad of topics include monetization, distribution, infrastructure, network neutrality and piracy. The Viacom vs Google lawsuit directly and indirectly touches on many of these issues and could have a dramatic impact in determining the future of the internet. Viacom wants Google’s YouTube to better police its site and remove copyright violations, where Google contends that the DMCA only requires that it remove copyright material after receiving a request from the content owner.

While Google appears to be technically compliant with the law, clearly this represents a major problem for growth in online video because content owners cannot possibly expend the needed resources to monitor and track all violations across the web. BusinessWeek provides a scalable solution where both content owners and online video sites would share the responsibility. It would provide greater management of copyrighted material as well as allow start up sites to thrive and innovate (which is the true purpose of the DMCA).

Additionally, Ars Technica digs deeper to uncover how Viacom and other content owners can beat piracy of its content through pure good old capitalistic competition. The article looks at how consumers are drawn to services that provide the best balance of price, convenience and quality. It is fairly hard to beat piracy on price (free), but there is absolutely room to undercut them on convenience and quality. Great examples on the industry moving in this direction can be seen in Hulu and Comedy Central.com

Nielsen/NetRatings new rating system

Determining the ranking or readership of online sites has often been a confounding problem. The recent leading metric has been page views, however new technology (read AJAX) has made this very unreliable.

Nielsen/NetRatings announced that it will now rate sites by total time spent by a visitor on a site. Here is a great quote by Scott Karp (Editor of Publishing 2.0):“The problem is that the Web is not a monolithic medium,” writes Scott Karp. “Reading a blog, using instant messaging, and using Web search are utterly different — the idea that one metric can be used as a yardstick to compare them is absurd on the face of it.

…Maybe it’s time we dropped the obsession with old media metrics and started thinking about Web native metrics.” I am constantly asked about online ranking of sites and while there are several options, each has its own set of unique problems as discussed in this BusinessWeek article. Thoughts?