NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratories, Inc.

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Agence France Presse

NTT DoCoMo envisions a future where a stressed-out businessman may unwind from his hectic life by taking a virtual stroll through medieval Tokyo and chatting with the avatars of his real-world friends while admiring pollution-free views of Mount Fuji from the comfort of his living room. He would be wearing three-dimensional glasses and moving about by waving a super-networked mobile phone that is attached to his wrist like a watch. The wearable phone that DoCoMo envisions for 2020 will be fitted with a small flip-out screen and capable of projecting images onto a wall or into thin air in the form of a hologram. It also will serve as an ID to enter the family home or to board a flight and to video-chat with friends and the office and as a remote control to give orders to home appliances. Partially charged kinetically through body movements, the device will be equipped with simultaneous translation software to connect the user to anyone, anywhere, anytime. "By having a phone you can do almost everything," says DoCoMo's Takeshi Natsuno. DoCoMo co-develops phones with manufacturers. Recent offerings include Fujitsu's bright-yellow Kids Phone F05A, which features a pull-string alarm that emits a shrill noise and sends an email alert to the parents that instantly pinpoints the child's location. The two halves of another phone are held together magnetically and can be easily separated, allowing users to talk and surf the Internet at the same time, or to split the device into a TV and a remote control. Other products include a cell phone with a small solar panel that in a pinch can give the user a few extra minutes of power, a phone with a 10-megapixel camera, and a range of waterproof models.

From "Japan's Mobile Phone Marvels Go Back to the Future"
Agence France Presse (12/30/09) Zeller, Frank
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I4U: "The Freescale Tablet is intended to enable a second generation of smartbook products with prices less than $200 and featuring form factors that fully leverage the power, performance and functionality advantages of ARM processor technology."(author unknown)

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For companies protective of their IT operations and data, wholesale public cloud computing adoption can be a difficult pill to swallow. But cloud momentum is too strong a trend to ignore. Enter the hybrid cloud — a panacea of sorts, enabling companies to maintain a mix of on-premise and off-premise cloud computing resources, both public and private, managed through a common framework to simplify operations. This concept has steadily gathered steam over the last year and a half, and now appears poised to capture the minds, and wallets, of corporations in 2010.

First, let’s take a look at the reasons leading corporations to consider hybrid clouds, then the means for them to get there. Data security and control are most frequently mentioned as the drivers for corporations to own and manage a portion of their infrastructure. Most corporations have longstanding cultural biases toward keeping core IT assets in-house that are unlikely to change anytime soon.

That said, companies also want to take advantage of public cloud resources. One reason hybrid clouds are proliferating is to enable “cloudbursting,” or the ability to seamlessly and automatically grow workloads into public cloud resources for a period of time, and then decommission them once the heavy loads subside. For industries such as finance and health care, compliance regulations limit the number of public cloud offerings they can use, forcing some of their infrastructure to remain in-house.

Simple negotiating leverage will lead companies not to put all of their eggs in one public cloud basket, and maintaining private infrastructure provides one way to control, although not necessarily minimize, infrastructure costs. Also, the demands of a typical enterprise do not have the wide load swings of web applications, and in the cases where resource demand can be forecasted, owning infrastructure as a financed capital expense can be more advantageous than high monthly operating expenses.

The hybrid cloud market is being addressed by large technology vendors as well as open-source software projects in what might be classified as the ultimate battle between lock-in and unlock. On the large vendor side, VMware has been busy enabling both enterprises and service providers with a range of virtualization tools to deliver migration of virtual machines between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures. The company’s vCloud Express initiative allows service providers to offer infrastructure as a service offerings for enterprises while maintaining compatibility with internal VMware deployments.

More on The Cloud

• Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010? Tech Insider
• Jolicloud’s Beta Netbook OS: Run It With Windows Tech Insider
• IDC 2010 Forecast: Apple’s iPad Arrives & Frenetic Tech M&A Tech Insider
• Open-Source Business Models Aren’t Dead-End Streets Tech Insider

HP recently announced three offerings aimed at companies using both physical on-premise and cloud servers, including HP Operations Orchestration for provisioning, HP Cloud Assure for cost control, and HP Communications as a Service for service providers to offer small businesses on-demand solutions.

Microsoft has focused its Azure cloud platform on enterprises that can use the same Windows and .NET development frameworks on services internally and on the cloud. See our posts “Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line” and “Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010?” Even Amazon has started to reach towards hybrid deployment models with its Virtual Private Cloud service positioned as “a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.”

Approaching the market from another direction is a set of companies and open-source software projects that provide on-premise and public cloud integration. Eucalyptus is perhaps the best known in this category and provides open-source software infrastructure for on-premise cloud computing. Eucalyptus includes the ability to work within VMware environments and provision resources to Amazon Web Services.

Open Nebula, an open-source project out of the Distributed Systems Architecture Group at the Complutense University of Madrid, creates a new virtualization layer that “supports the dynamic execution of multi-tier services on a distributed infrastructure consisting of both data center resources and remote cloud resources.” And Nimbus, focused primarily on the scientific community, also provides a virtualization framework to help manage cloud deployments for infrastructure as a service.

The good news for enterprises considering hybrid cloud computing deployments is the range of options on the table. From the fully integrated end-to-end solutions like VMware or Azure, to the open-source solutions that provide more choice, the time is right to jump in and benefit from the cost savings, flexibility, and technology advances delivered by hybrid clouds.

As we’ve noted before, Mozilla’s Raindrop messaging project holds a lot of promise. Like many early-stage, open-source Mozilla projects, the design of Raindrop isn’t being widely publicized, but there are now more interface clues as to why it could be important.

The underlying design philosophy behind Raindrop is that email is broken. We are flooded with messages from social networking applications, our regular email inboxes, and more. Spam proliferates. Clearly, there is a need for a better way to sift and sort our message flows. That’s what Raindrop — slated to be a free, open-source offering — aims to be.

Raindrop aggregates messages into sortable and siftable views that can be useful on both desktop and mobile devices. On the desktop, aerial inbox views like this one have been shown:

Throughout November and December, Mozilla design guru Andy Chung has been posting screenshots and experimental designs for Raindrop, found here.  To get a sense of how Raindrop might work on mobile devices, take a look at Chung’s mockups here:

In the first image above, you can see how Inbox messaging flows, social networking flows, and other views can be accessed through a dashboard-like interface. In the view below, you can see how views of messages from multiple types of social networking sites co-exist in one view:

Raindrop has remained mostly a concept in 2009, but I expect that it will be one of the more interesting projects to watch next year. The challenge with it, Google Wave and other messaging aggregators, is getting interfaces and features exactly right, and providing users with lots of views of message flows. Previous “universal inbox” projects have not beaten those challenges, but Raindrop will take a shot next year.

eyeOS Blog: "We're happy to present to the eyeOS community the result of more than six months of work together with the great IBM US team, where eyeOS will be the Sample Workload of the new System Z serie Solution Edition for Cloud Computing"(author unknown)

Terrastore is a new-born document store which provides advanced scalability and elasticity features without sacrificing consistency.

Here are a few highlights:

• Ubiquitous: based on the universally supported HTTP protocol.
• Distributed: nodes can run and live everywhere on your network.
• Elastic: you can add and remove nodes dynamically to/from your running cluster with no downtime and no changes at all to your configuration.
• Scalable at the data layer: documents are partitioned and distributed among your nodes, with automatic and transparent re-balancing when nodes join and leave.
• Scalable at the computational layer: query and update operations are distributed to the nodes which actually holds the queried/updated data, minimizing network traffic and spreading computational load.
• Consistent: providing per-document consistency, you're guaranteed to always get the latest value of a single document, with read committed isolation for concurrent modifications.
• Schemaless: providing a collection-based interface holding JSON documents with no pre-defined schema, you can just create your collections and put everything you want into.
• Easy operations: install a fully working cluster in just a few commands and no XML to edit.
• Features rich: support for push-down predicates, range queries and server-side update functions.

Read, participate, download and clone it!

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As 2009 draws to a close, the debate over the implementation of usage-based billing frameworks (so-called “metered billing”) for broadband services is far from over. But while as Stacey has pointed out, some broadband execs believe metered billing is inevitable, existing and proposed implementations contain significant shortcomings. So if metered billing is inevitable, what would be a fair construct? Or is it even possible to be fair?

One of the reasons so many consumers view metered billing negatively is that early attempts to implement it have been somewhat crude. For example, most metered billing incorporates a flat price up to a ceiling (the “cap”) and a per-gigabyte (GB) charge above that level (the “meter”). Criticism of such an approach rightly points to the following deficiencies:

• Most non-technical consumers don’t know what a gigabyte is. Head over to the computer section of any Best Buy, for example, and you’ll see hard drive capacities expressed in term of photos, songs or movies. If retailers have figured out how to speak the language of the average consumer, why can’t broadband operators?
• Even technical consumers (myself included) have no idea how many gigabytes they consume in a given month. As a result they’re unsure if they’ll be penalized for their usage or not.
• Most offerings fail to provide consumers with real-time visibility into monthly usage — which is appalling given the tools available to most wireless users.
• Just as electric utilities are trying to encourage energy consumption during non-peak hours, cap-and-meter models treat a byte at 3:00 a.m. as having the same cost as a byte at 7:00 p.m.

Arguably the fairest approach would be one in which the entire bill is variable and in which unit (per-byte) cost declines as usage increases. Fair in that all users pay relative to the quantity of resources they consume but, like any good business relationship, heavier users enjoy volume discounts. This approach might seem too radical for all involved, however; even consumers who save money may look askance.

So assuming the above problems could be ameliorated, and further assuming that the “cap-and-meter” approach is the one that prevails, what exactly is a fair cap?

In 2009 the average U.S. broadband household downloaded 7.27 GB/month, according to market research firm IDC, a figure it expects to grow to 12.5 GB/month by 2013. However, looking at the average is deceiving because the mean is undoubtedly much lower. Using a simple “80/20 rule” (20 percent of the users consume 80 percent of the traffic) results in the top 20 percent of users downloading 29.1 GB/month (growing to 50.3 by 2013) while the lower 80 percent download 1.8 GB/month (growing to 3.1 by 2013). A 90/10 split results in the top 10 percent of users downloading 65.4 GB/month (growing to 113.2 by 2013).

These back-of-the napkin numbers don’t conclusively show exactly what a cap should be but they do suggest that it should high (say at least 30 GB and probably more like 65 GB) and also that it should be indexed to increase annually as average traffic loads increase. Without indexing the cap consumers would encounter the same problem many encounter with the alternative minimum tax.

Yet while capping and metering is not the best approach to usage-based billing, it seems to be the train that’s leaving the station. Broadband service providers have rolled out caps ranging anywhere from 5GB to 250GB; those at the low end would be well advised to push them higher, unless their real goal is to encourage heavy users to churn off their networks.

Kevin Walsh has over 25 years of telecommunications and networking industry experience and is currently an executive at Zeugma Systems.

Technology Review

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are working on a project called BOOM, which is developing new programming techniques for cloud computing. BOOM researchers hope to make cloud computing more efficient by using database programming techniques originally developed in the 1980s, which are designed to collect large data sets and process them in various ways. "We can't keep programming computers the way we are," says Berkeley professor Joseph Hellerstein. "People don't have an easy way to write programs that take advantage of the fact that they could rent 100 machines at Amazon." Bloom researchers are adapting an old language called Datalog to develop Bloom, a new language that would provide an easier way for programmers to work with cloud computing resources. The group also is creating a Bloom library that can be used with popular languages such as Java and Python. Oxford University professor Georg Gottlob, a Datalog expert, says the language may have been ahead of its time, but is gaining in popularity with the rise of distributed computing applications.

From "Less Clumsy Code for the Cloud"
Technology Review (12/16/09) Naone, Erica
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UCSD News

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and nine other universities are collaborating on the Multi-Scale Systems Center (MuSyC), a new research center that will focus on improving the design of computing systems, particularly as it relates to energy efficiency. "Energy is one of the key issues to be solved in order for systems to work more efficiently," says UCSD professor Tajana Simunic Rosing. "At a very small scale such as a brain-machine interface, without energy you cannot do anything at all. At a very large scale such as a data center, if you are not efficient about how you deal with energy, you go bankrupt." The researchers say the project's multi-scale approach comes from the recognition that a new generation of applications is emerging that will run in distributed form on platforms that unite high-performance computing clusters with broad classes of mobile systems and large groups of sensors. By focusing on energy efficiency, MuSyC plans to lay a foundation for "energy smart" distributed systems that are aware of the balance between energy availability and demand, and are capable of adjusting their behavior through dynamic and adaptive optimization. The center's research agenda is initially structured to explore distributed sensor and control systems, large-scale systems, and small-scale systems. The center also may explore intermediate-scale systems such as mobile and portable devices, depending on additional funding after the center's first year of operation.

From "Making MuSyC: Scientists Explore Energy Efficiency in Multi-Scale Computing Systems"
UCSD News (12/15/09) Ramsey, Doug
View Full Article(author unknown)02244816750084022823

IT Expert Voice: "IPv6 has been “the next generation of TCP/IP protocols” for so long that you can be forgiven for thinking that it will never be useful. However, with Windows 7, Microsoft has finally given network administrators a reason to consider using IPv6."(author unknown)