The annual Google I/O event has come and gone, with plenty of news specific to Android. While the event focuses on developers, consumers will see benefits in Android thanks to improvements in Google’s core services and many new APIs for developers to use in Android apps. There was no new Nexus phone, no update to the Nexus 7 tablet, nor a new Nexus 11 tablet. But for those willing to shell out $649, there is a modified Galaxy S 4 coming soon. Google announced that in June, customers can order the handset through the Google Play store. Instead of the phone running Samsung’s customized TouchWiz software, it will instead run on pure Android, just like the Nexus 4. That means it will get future software updates directly through Google and not Samsung or a network provider. Of course, some of the newest Samsung features won’t be present on the phone: I wouldn’t expect Samsung’s new camera modes to be there, nor would I expect gestures to work for hands-free scrolling or swiping. Still, in light of no new Nexus hardware, the unlocked handset could appeal to hardcore Android enthusiasts. So without the release of Android 4.3 at Google I/O, does that mean Android hasn’t improved? Not at all; in fact, Google essentially boosted Android’s software without needing to wait for carriers and handset makers to upgrade the software. How did this happen? A large part of the 3.5 hour Google I/O keynote was dedicated to new Android services and APIs, plus a new application called Hangouts. The new Hangouts app replaces Google Talk and is Google’s effort to unify its messaging platform. The app supports video calls with up to 10 participants, SMS notifications of incoming chat requests when offline, text chat and works across platforms: You can communication with other users on the web or on iOS devices. Hangouts also highlights a great new feature in Android: Support for synchronized notifications. If you get a notification on one device and take action, the notification won’t appear on other devices or in the Chrome browser. Google also introduced its music subscription and discovery service called Google Play Music All Access. For a $9.99 monthly fee — $7.99 if you start a 30-day trial by June 30 — you get unlimited access to stream tracks thought the Play Music app and on the web. Human curators surface top songs and albums while music recommendations come from Google’s Knowledge Graph and your Google+ circles. Gaming got a supercharge in Android as well. Developers can use the new Google Play Games services that allow cross-platform gaming complete with achievements and leaderboards. Game progress can also be saved to the cloud, allowing gamers to pick up where the left off, even from another device. Android also saw one other big announcement this week, but it didn’t happen at Google I/O. The Bluetooth SIG announced that Android will gain support for Bluetooth Smart and Smart Ready devices in the coming months. That’s likely to be included in an actual Android release as some developers told me that Google will be completely changing the Bluetooth software stack in Android. Regardless, this means widespread support for Bluetooth 4.0 Smart and Smart Ready accessories such as watches, heart rate monitors and other low-powered companion devices. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industryAnalyzing the wearable computing marketTakeaways from mobile’s second quarter    
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Tumblr’s fate could be decided Sunday by Yahoo’s board of directors. AllThingsD reported late Friday that Yahoo is closing in on a $1.1 billion deal for the site, moving quickly to cement what would be the biggest deal of CEO Marissa Mayer’s tenure at the venerable but lackluster internet pioneer. After reporting Thursday that Yahoo was considering a number of options for Tumblr, including partnerships or strategic investments, ATD reported Friday that Mayer had decided to go all in. Om reported Thursday that Yahoo was worried about counteroffers from Facebook, much how Facebook stole Instagram from Twitter after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s courtship of the photo-sharing site. Now the board plans to meet Sunday to consider giving final approval to the offer. Tumblr’s backers will likely be pleased with a $1.1 billion price tag, especially if, as reported, it involves cash However, it’s far from certain that such an outlay would do anything to revive Yahoo’s fortunes. Mayer certainly has been trying to bring new blood into the company of late, snapping up a number of smaller mobile startups before focusing on Tumblr over the last month. Yahoo has scheduled a press event for Monday evening in New York to discuss “something special,” but it wouldn’t hint at anything else. We’ll be there to cover the event, but in the meantime, here’s Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp’s appearance at our paidContent Live conference in April, discussing his company’s fortunes: Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsThe state of cross-platform media measurementSocial third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook    
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Toward the tail end of Google I/O on Friday, Sunil James, a Google product manager (on left in picture), and John Cormie, a software engineer focusing on networking for Google Compute Engine (GCE), showed off new network capabilities for GCE that can enable hybrid clouds running between GCE deployments and on-premise data centers. GCE customers are now able to do things like establish virtual private Layer 3 networks and assign static public IP addresses to instances, James said. Connecting networks will also become possible. And a load-balancing service is on the way “as part of the native fabric for Google Compute Engine,” James said. Developers interested in trying out GCE load balancing can fill out a form to do so. Developers can also sign up for early access to all emerging Google Cloud Platform features. The load balancing and routing services are the sorts of things that could help more businesses make the decision to try real projects on the newly publicly available Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) piece of the Google Cloud Platform. And the new capabilities move Google a few steps closer campaign to becoming a top, widely used IaaS provider — if not one day bigger than Amazon Web Services then at least No. 2. That position is already feasible for Google as it is. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and dataThe promise of SDNs in the enterpriseA near-term outlook for big data    
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Redbox Instant by Verizon is going to bring its streaming service to Google TV devices soon: The company demonstrated a prototype of its app at Google I/O Friday, and a representative told me that the app will launch in earnest within the next few weeks. After that, the company is going to launch a channel on Roku media streamers. Check out a photo of the app UI below: Redbox Instant by Verizon’s prototype app was on display on an LG Google TV that ran the next version of Google TV that is based on Android 4.2.2 aka Jelly Bean. That version will come to Google TV devices in the third quarter of this year, but I was told that the Redbox Instant app will be available before that, and that is going to work just fine with the current version of Google TV. However, the service won’t be available on Google TV devices using an Intel processor, which means that owners of the Logitech Revue and other first-generation devices won’t be able to use it. Redbox Instant first launched on select Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players as well as PCs and mobile devices in March. The joint-venture between Redbox and Verizon has since added support for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 as well as select LG Smart TVs. I was told by a representative Friday that the company is looking to add support for Roku players soon after rolling out the Google TV app. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.OTT technologies and strategies for broadcastersWhat the shift to the cloud means for the future EPGWho and what to watch in the new era of the living room    
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Data analytics star Tableau had a successful initial public offering on Friday, closing the day up nearly 64 percent at $50.75 per share. That means the company brought in about $254 million (it sold 5 million shares, while stockholders sold 3.4 million) and has a market cap of $2.9 billion. Shares have remained relatively steady in after-hours trading, trending down only slightly. “We’re thrilled,” Tableau co-founder and CEO Christian Chabot told me during a call after the market closed. One should hope so. Chabot and his fellow co-founders stand to make a lot of money if today’s closing price holds up, as does its sole investor NEA. The firm put $15 million into Tableau since it launched in 2003, and has rode that sum to profitability and more than $127 million in annual revenue. Here’s a quick chart (made using Tableau Public) showing who owns how many share and what they’re potentially worth. The company didn’t really need more capital to operate, Chabot said, but one of the primary drivers was to raise awareness of the company. It has about 12,000 customers, he said, but there are millions more possible users. As part of attracting them, the company is going to expand globally and is working to improve its reach across mobile devices, the cloud and the Mac operating system. “I don’t believe in the this whole ‘or’ philosophy with computers,” Chabot said. “It’s ‘and’” — meaning people will use desktops and tablets and smartphones. More prominence and more users singing its praises might also dispel the notion that Tableau is just about visualization. It has some fairly advanced features under the covers (as a commenter to my earlier post about the company’s influence pointed out), even if they’re hidden by the relatively simple user experience. “Tableau is not a visualization company, per se, it’s really an analytics company,” Chabot said. However, if the company really wants to expand its reach to everyone one who wants to gain knowledge from data — something Chabot calls a “timeless human need” — it might actually need to get simpler. More marketing can let potential business users know about new features like forecasting and data-extraction, but it won’t make a dentist is Des Moines better at formatting his data. After raising $254 million in its IPO, though, Tableau is in a good place to do whatever it has to. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeoutNewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeoutThe importance of putting the U and I in visualization    
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Some investors, particularly angel investors, may see equity crowdfunding as a threat to traditional venture capital. But not InCube Ventures. Over the past few years, the San Jose, Calif.-based life sciences venture capital firm has co-invested with accredited individual investors on a handful of deals.  On Friday, the firm went one big step further with the launch of VentureHealth, an equity crowdfunding site for biomedical technology companies. As report after report has shown, venture capital funding for life sciences companies has been on the decline. This week, for example, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) revealed that venture funding in the life sciences sector dropped 14 percent in the first quarter of this year. VentureHealth wants to give health startups — both early, but particularly later stage — a new option for raising funding, while embracing a model that enables doctors, health care professionals and others with sufficient means to support companies addressing issues they care about. “The life sciences venture industry has been shrinking – there’s less capital available for really exciting companies,” said InCube managing director and VentureHealth co-founder Andrew Farquharson. “To the extent that we can mobilize capital into companies that need it, we’re meeting our mission.” VentureHealth isn’t the first attempt at bringing crowdfunding to health care. MedStartr and Health Tech Hatch offer entrepreneurs a platform for raising relatively small amounts of seed capital without giving up equity. And last week HeathFundr launched an equity crowdfunding site targeting medical device and other health entrepreneurs looking for Series A-range funding. But unlike HealthFundr, CircleUp and other equity crowdfunding sites that have recently emerged, VentureHealth doesn’t offer securities through a registered broker dealer. Instead of taking a commission on each transaction, it’s compensated through a combination of fees and carried interest, which is a percentage of the profits earned by investors when a company is sold or experiences another kind of liquidity event. While the amount can vary, the company said it will tend to be about 20 percent. That’s a decent-sized payout, but Farquharson said its model means that VentureHealth only wins when its investors win so it’s extra incentivized to find the best deals. Over the past decade or so, Farquharson and his co-founder Mir Imran, a medical inventor who holds more than 200 patents, have invested in a range of companies, from BodyMedia, a wearable technology company recently sold to Jawbone to epilepsy treatment company Neurolink. Given their track record and experience, he believes VentureHealth could give interested investors a well-curated selection of deals and entrepreneurs the extra support they may need. For now, Farquharson said, they interact with every accredited investor on the site but, when it’s implemented, the JOBS Act will enable VentureHealth to reach a broader pool of investors and expand its options. The site currently has no active deals listed, but Farquharson estimates that it could offer five or six deals over the next 10 months. Once VentureHealth scales sufficiently, InCube plans so spin it off as a standalone company. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunityConnected world: the consumer technology revolutionSocial 2013: The enterprise strikes back    
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Hydroelectricity generation exploits the tremendous height differential that occurs naturally at waterfalls or artificially at dams as water flows through the system. Now, efforts are underway to harness a differential of another sort for both energy storage and generation: the pressure under the sea. A Norwegian company called Subhydro is making forays into underwater hydroelectrical power plants, and Canadian company Hydrostor is creating an underwater grid storage system. Think of water rushing in through the open hatch of a submarine, and you get an idea of the forces at work underwater. Atmospheric pressure and the weight of the water combine to create pressures that compound with increasing depth. At a depth of 400 meters (almost a quarter mile), for example, the pressure is that of 40 atmospheres, one atmosphere being the pressure we experience at sea level. Subhydro envisions installing large concrete tanks at depths of 400-800 meters, and the deeper the better for maximizing energy generation. When the “hatch” is opened, water is allowed to flow into the tanks through a turbine that drives an electric generator. The more and larger the tanks, the longer the generation can go on. When the tanks are filled, the turbine can be reversed to pump out the water, a process that draws on the power grid and consumes energy. In this way, the pumped storage plant functions like an underwater battery that can be re-charged, much like a hydroelectric plant on dry land pumps water into an upper reservoir after it has passed through a turbine. According to Subhydro, the efficiency of the underwater plant is about 80 percent, comparable to efficiencies achieved at conventional plants. Integrating the pumped storage plant with wind or solar farms could create a grid storage system that harnesses excess renewable energy generation to pump out the tanks and flood them during peak hours of production. Another approach to underwater grid storage is in the works at a depth of 80 meters in Lake Ontario, just off shore of Toronto. There, Hydrostor will begin building underwater tanks that will hold compressed air. Surplus energy from renewables (wind, solar) will provide the energy to compress air from the atmosphere and pump it in to the tanks. To put energy back into the grid, the air is allowed to surface, driving generators as it expands back into the atmosphere. Hydrostor is partnering with Toronto Hydro to build the 1MW/4MWh compressed air energy storage demonstration facility. The system will run at 70 percent efficiency, according to Hydrostor. Earlier this month MaRS Cleantech Fund announced an investment in Hydrostor’s tech. Clearly, there are still some hurdles to overcome before energy companies everywhere take the plunge. The environmental impact of offshore submerged facilities will need to be considered, as will the building materials themselves. To withstand the underwater pressure, Subhydro is working with research partners to develop thin concrete reinforced with steel fibers, while Hydrostor’s system will use inflatable polyester bags to hold compressed air. Building underwater facilities is itself energy-intensive, so whether the process can be made cost and energy-effective will determine whether cleantech is ready to get its feet wet. Image via Knut Gangåssæter/Doghouse Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The next generation of battery technologyHow the Energy Storage Market Could Pay Itself OffAEP: Deploying the Future of Backyard Batteries    
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YouTube announced this week that it is going to roll out its new channel design to all of its publishers at the beginning of June. All channels that still use the previous design will automatically be converted on June 5 — but the new channels are just the first step towards a bigger goal of unifying YouTube’s design across all platforms. YouTube Senior UX Designer Josh Sassoon and his colleague Tom Broxton, who leads the Monetization UX team at YouTube, gave a sneak peek at the multi-screen design principles that will guide YouTube’s future looks during a session at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday. The big theme was eerily familiar to anyone following our I/O coverage this week: YouTube wants to unify its experience across all screens, the duo explained, while paying attention to the specific use cases for each and every screen. The duo showed off some design concepts during their presentation, with some featuring the same kind of tile-based design that has been dominating Google’s mobile design language lately brought to the desktop, and at least one playing with the same kind of multi-column design that Google just launched with Google+ for a possible redesign of YouTube’s homepage. Many of these things were just presented as examples of the design process, which is very data-driven and based on both A/B testing and traditional user research. Fun fact: YouTube has been passing out paper assignment booklets to select users, asking them to track when in the day they’re accessing the site and with which devices. However, Sassoon and Broxton also shared a few slides of what they called sneak peeks — not necessarily final versions of what YouTube will look like, but definitely explorations that hint at where things are going: Worth noting in this shot is that YouTube is trying to unify the subscribe button across platforms — which makes a lot of sense, given how much of a focus the site has put on channels. Also, take a look at how gorgeous this TV UI looks. And once again, there’s a theme of unification across its desktop, tablet, Android, iPhone and ultimately TV platforms. As for the current redesign: YouTube first introduced the newly designed channel page, dubbed One Channel, in February, and the site said that it has seen a 20 percent growth in page views on participating channels. All in all, more than 100 million channels have already opted in to the new design, according to a post on the YouTube Creators blog. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How consumer media will change in 2013Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising    
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Database startup Drawn to Scale, creator of the SQL-on-Hadoop technology called Spire, is closing down. Co-founder and CEO Bradford Stephens officially announced the closure in a blog post on Friday. The company’s product, Spire, which provided full SQL support on top of the HBase NoSQL database, was one of the first products to try to blend Hadoop’s scalability with the robustness and familiarity of SQL. That’s now an increasingly crowded space (and has grown since that linked graphic was created). In March, Drawn to Scale expanded its support to MongoDB, as well. I wasn’t shocked when Stephens told me the news — questions about the four-year-old company’s financial health had been swirling for a while — but to hear of its financial woes was a bit surprising. His account in the post pretty much echoes what I had heard from others: “It seemed we had everything going for us — paid customers such as American Express, Orange Telecom, Flurry, and 4 others. Our technology worked brilliantly, we had a big hiring pipeline, and we had great media presence against our competitors who raised 10-100x more cash.” He added: “Yet five days before we signed term sheets for a big A round or sold the company, we started getting hit by a series of black swans — and we just didn’t have what we needed to recover. I’ll leave the public detail at that level, but I will say that paying employees’ health insurance out of your meager savings is a powerful incentive to change course.” Up to this point, the company had raised $925,000 from RTP Ventures, IA Ventures and SK Ventures. There’s no word yet on what will come of the company’s intellectual property. As Stephens — who’s now doing an entrepreneur-in-residence gig at Ping Identity and helping out other startups (including popular wardrobe app Cloth) — succinctly put it during a phone discussion, “We just don’t have the horsepower to keep running the company.” Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Scaling Hadoop clusters: the role of cluster managementThe importance of putting the U and I in visualization2012: The Hadoop infrastructure market booms    
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Who says Canada is boring? The mayor of the country’s biggest city is at the center of a crack cocaine scandal, and now U.S. blog Gawker is asking readers to chip in and buy the video evidence for $200,000. In case you missed it, the controversy turns on Toronto’s buffoonish mayor, Rob Ford, who has embarrassed the city numerous times in the past but has now outdone himself: Reporters from Gawker and the Toronto Star claim to have witnessed a clear video tape that shows Hizzoner sucking on a glass crack pipe and calling the leader of Canada’s Liberal party, Justin Trudeau, “a faggot.” The video in question is now in possession of shadowy figures who want cash for it. The Star, a respected newspaper, turned down an offer to sell it for $40,000 and Gawker, which says the price is now $200,000, has taken to Indiegogo – a site normally used to raise money for artsy people — to ask the public to buy the video. The “Rob Ford Crackstarter” (see pic at right) has 10 days to reach its goal and has already pulled in $26,000 as of Friday afternoon. Gawker’s gambit raises some very juicy ethical questions. First, while bringing down crack-smoking mayors is clearly in the public interest (see Barry, Marion), it’s less clear whether it’s acceptable to pay people who are likely serious criminals in order to advance the story. And while check-book journalism has been around for centuries, turning it over to the public could have unforeseen consequences. Until now, publicly funded journalism has been largely been contained to organizations like Pro Publica that launch investigations into things like patient safety and vote buying. Is the world ready for a publicly funded version of TMZ where everyone can pool money to see celebrity’s private lives? For now, the political dimensions of the scandal are moving too fast to assess the media fallout. We’ll report back next week on what happens to the tape — and the money collected by Gawker. (Image by Chris Howey via Shutterstock) Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.    
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Google I/O 2013 has created a lot of buzz and of course, a lot of words. Here is my pick of some of the best pieces about Google’s annual developer conference and the news coming out from there, and here’s a link to some of our best pieces from the week. Google please be a benevolent internet overlord. Dan Gillmor writes for The Guardian and shows why he continues to be one of the clearest thinkers when it comes to the internet, companies and us, the people. Mark Sigal’s 6 key takeaways from the Google I/O keynote. A really good roundup. Everything Google is trying to kill. Classic Gizmodo piece where in they tell us that Adobe, Spotify, Skype, Pandora, PayPal, Textbooks, Flickr and Siri are some of things Google is trying to put out of business. Tyler Hayes thinks Google’s Play music service is going to have a tougher time in the market than most people think. At Google conference, cameras in the bathroom. Okay, bullet dodged. Great piece on how Google got its unified messaging act together and built the new Hangouts. Welcome to the Google Island. Only Mat Honan can do this. Even Google’s own developers won’t be seen wearing Google glasses. Or so says FastCompany. The Design that conquered Google. New Yorker picks up on the design plus data symbiosis I have been writing about and focuses on Google’s liberal use of the cards metaphor. All the mashed potatoes. John Gruber in full effect.     
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WebRTC, the new technology that enables plugin-free voice and video chat within the browser, should be available on more than one billion unique endpoints (think: desktop browsers and mobile devices) “within a week,” according to Google’s WebRTC engineering lead Justin Uberti, who gave an update on WebRTC’s progress at Google I/O Friday. WebRTC is going to reach that milestone thanks in part to Firefox 22, which was just released this week. The new version of Firefox comes with WebRTC enabled in its beta version, which should add a large number of users to the addressable market for WebRTC developers. Uberti also said that WebRTC is going to come to iOS devices soon: Apple hasn’t joined the efforts to implement and standardize WebRTC yet, but Google wants to nonetheless give developers a way to address users on iPads and iPhones through the release of a native toolkit. Image courtesy of Flickr user  Tsahi Levent-Levi. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The 2013 task management tools marketHow consumer media will change in 2013Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back    
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Bitcoin is a cyber-currency of growing interest to speculators, the media and — most recently — the U.S. government. Many stories about Bitcoin, which is mined by computers and circulates without a central bank, contain sinister or science-fiction elements that make it hard to tell if the currency is for real or just an overblown gimmick. On Thursday evening, GigaOM hosted a meetup in San Jose where six Bitcoin authorities, including investors and engineers, shared their views on how the currency is evolving and who is using it. Here are three of the larger ideas to emerge from the discussion (if you want to catch up on the basics of Bitcoin, see “Yes, you should care about Bitcoin and here’s why“): Bitcoin can help ordinary people Wences Casares, a venture capitalist and CEO of Lemon Wallet, grew up in Argentina, where he experienced first hand what happens when a government mismanages its currency: inflation, capital controls and the destruction of family savings. Today, the same thing is happening all over again as desperate Argentines try to convert their pesos into a store of value that the government can’t seize or destroy. One option is Bitcoin. Casares explained how some people in his country are using “old Android phones” to acquire and exchange Bitcoins at a time when the government is clamping down on the trade in U.S. dollars. More remarkably, Casares noted, is that many of the people using Bitcoin don’t know much about technology — but they do know, through hard experience, about currencies and can recognize alternate sources of money. Other speakers and audience members also described the potential of cyber-currencies like Bitcoin to ameliorate the broken or compromised banking infrastructure in places like Latin America and Asia. In the larger picture, Bitcoin could be just one part of an impending revolution in the world’s money transfer networks. Specifically, new currencies and transfer platforms may provide a way for people, including those who rely on remittances, to escape the high transfer fees imposed by credit card and wire companies — and simply exchange money directly with one another around the world at almost no cost. Bitcoin is complicated — and is going to stay that way for a while Mike Hearn is a young engineer from Google who uses his 20 percent time to work on developing Bitcoin software. At the meetup, he chatted about infrastructure and security with Bennett Hoffman, a former Microsoft employee who is building a new Bitcoin exchange called Buttercoin. The two engineers agreed that the system that creates Bitcoins is secure and stable, even if parts of the surrounding ecosystem (exchanges, wallets and so on) are not. Hearn said Bitcoin is not ready for “your grandma” just yet — and that is, in part, a choice by those who are building and fine-tuning the Bitcoin open source code bequeathed by the currency’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakaomot. Hearn’s point is that he and others are focused now on improving the processing and ledger system that facilitates Bitcoin transactions; they are ensuring that it can scale in the same way that the Visa payment network is able to handle sales spikes. This focus on “the guts” of Bitcoin means that, for now, the software will remain complicated and will be a challenge to those who aspire to build consumer-facing interfaces on top of it. This won’t, however, prevent Bitcoin from gaining traction in the real world. David Barrett, CEO of Expensify, explained earlier in the evening that his firm now allows companies to reimburse their employees’ expense reports in Bitcoin. According to Barrett, the Bitcoin option is not a gimmick but rather a cheap and practical solution for companies to pay employees across borders. Bitcoin will be regulated — and that’s a good thing Bitcoin watchers gasped this weekend when the Department of Homeland Security executed a seizure warrant against the owner of Mt. Gox, the Japanese exchange where many people trade the currency. The law enforcement action, which comes after U.S. securities regulators said they are looking at Bitcoin, posed a new liquidity threat to the currency and also reinforced its outlaw reputation. Surprisingly, the Bitcoin backers at the event appeared to welcome the government’s growing involvement. According to Micky Malka of Ribbit Capital, which is investing in Bitcoin ventures, regulation is not just inevitable — but desirable. “I’m already regulated by eight central banks,” said Malka, explaining that regulation is simply part of any mature financial system and that, in the case of Bitcoin, it is likely to introduce a new level of stability. Malka and others, including the Bitcoin Foundation, said they are less interested in libertarian fantasies than they are in establishing a rational and informed regulatory structure around the currency. Malka added that his biggest fear for Bitcoin is not the U.S. government but shenanigans by speculators. The bottom line The San Jose event felt at times like a cross between an investor seminar and a church revival, with the packed room sometimes applauding wildly at the blue skies of Bitcoin. But that doesn’t mean there’s not something very real going on here — a lot of very smart and credible people are putting a lot of time and money on the line in an effort to redefine the world’s financial infrastructure. According to Wences Caseres, the moment feels like 1992, when the world was on the cusp of discovering the world wide web but hadn’t yet found the right user interface. He might be right. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012The evolution of the virtual goods marketThe 2013 task management tools market    
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Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome. Here is one cool enough to keep you busy during this weekend. Skylanders Cloud Patrol ($1.99, Universal) is a carnival-style shooting game where you tap to shoot at your target to win coins. The targets you are shooting at are mischievous trolls that have broken out of prison. In this game you play one of a number of different Skylanders. As a Skylander you are responsible for hunting down and eliminating the escaped trolls. To shoot a troll, or anything else for that matter, you simply tap on the screen at the target you want to hit. You can also swipe your finger up, down, across and in a variety of pattern to lock on to a series of targets in quick succession. When shooting in such a manner, the game has the same interactive feel as Fruit Ninja. And like Fruit Ninja there are targets on the screen, in this case mines, that you must avoid shooting at all costs. If you shoot and hit a mine, it will explode and end the game. As you progress through the game you are presented with a never-ending series of targets at which to aim. Each collection of targets are laid out like individual levels. After you successfully hit all of the targets on a given level, you will be flown to the next level in the cloud and presented with a new collection of targets. These targets can be barrels, boxes, balloons, presents, sheep (yes, sheep) and of course trolls. Things do get progressively difficult as the targets you are aiming to hit do not stay in one place. The trolls will hide behind shields, duck under rocks and even fly around the screen using propeller caps. It really does resemble a carnival-style shooting game. Some of the trolls are armed with weapons that they will use to shoot at you. You must shoot down the projectiles aimed at you before they get too close and kill your Skylander. Swirling around the screen intermixed with the trolls are the mines.  The mines always seem to change their pattern and place themselves right in front of a troll as you are tapping on the screen to shoot. There are also magical power-ups, crates packed with explosives that will kill all visible trolls on the screen, and golden coins that you can tap on to collect. When you do finally get overwhelmed and either shoot a mine or get shot by a troll, the game will end. Your score will be tallied, coins will be counted and you will be awarded gems for each of the posted achievements you have accomplished. The coins and gems collected can be used to buy magic items as well as different Skylanders.  The magic items can be used while playing the game to give you an advantage over the trolls you are shooting.  However, switching out your Skylander for a more powerful Skylander with special abilities can really make a difference in how well you perform.  Between each level, there are in-app purchases where you can buy more gems.  The gems can be traded for gold coins.  This can certainly help you power-up at a faster rate by enabling you to achieve your goals faster. What really sets the game apart however is that you can also make out-of-app purchases.  This is actually the main reason that the entire Skylander series of games exists.  By purchasing real toy models of the Skylanders at your local toy or hobby store, you can use the web activation code that comes with the toy model to unlock its corresponding Skylander character within the game itself.  Through earning gems and coins in the game, buying gems and coins through iTunes in-app purchase, or buying toy models at a retail store, you can grow your Skylander army. Rather than exclusively use Apple’s GameCenter, Skylanders also utilizes Activision’s online gamers community, Activate. With Activate you can save game progress and challenge your Activate friends to various Showdowns.  These Showdowns are like goals, and if you win the Showdown you will be awarded with gems and coins.  The interaction between the game and Activate is smooth and reliable.  This weekend is as good a time as any to Activate an Activision online gaming account and start hunting trolls. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How do developers ride the Siri wave?Connectivity means making the machine disappearAccess vs. ownership: Why UltraViolet has already lost    
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Over the past couple of months, massive open online course (MOOC) providers have been the focus of dissension on some college campuses. But now online learning company 2U is getting some pushback of its own. Last fall, the company, which has partnered with several leading universities for online masters degree programs that feature small classes and live instruction, announced a new for-credit online program for undergraduates. But three of the 10 schools that had originally committed to the program have since backed out. Last month, Duke revealed that it was withdrawing from the program after a faculty vote against the program. And, according to Inside Higher Ed, Vanderbilt and University of Rochester have also pulled out as of Friday, with Wake Forest sitting on the fence. “Each school has their own process for evaluating these opportunities,” 2U’s SVP of communications Chance Patterson said, adding that the company is moving ahead with its plans to launch the program this fall with the remaining schools, including Northwestern, Emory and Brandeis. 2U also said that Boston College has since joined the consortium and that it’s in talks with 20 other schools. At Duke, faculty concerns over the lack of administrator transparency related to the 2U deal, as well as unease with awarding school credit to students not admitted to the college, apparently led to the withdrawal. Other issues led Vanderbilt and University of Rochester to back away from the 2U consortium. While several schools work with different online learning companies, University of Rochester reportedly chose Coursera over 2U because of the MOOC provider’s ability to reach a larger audience. Vanderbilt raised the issue of cost; while efforts like the MOOCs try to provide educational experiences at a lower price, 2U’s program costs the same as an on-campus for-credit program. Vanderbilt, as well as Duke, still maintain partnerships with Coursera for non-credit-granting courses. The decisions to back away from 2U come after faculty resistance to online learning programs at other institutions. Earlier this month, San Jose State University professors refused to teach an edX course on justice developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to the country’s university system.  And in April, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the effects of MOOCs on U.S. universities. 2U’s model, which focuses on small class sizes, live instruction and real teacher-student interaction, exists in stark contrast to the mega-sized virtual classrooms created by the MOOC providers. But it’s still bringing a new and different instructional approach to slow-moving academia. Even though one could argue that 2U’s flavor of online education isn’t as disruptive as MOOCs — like traditional college courses, it promotes teacher-student relationships, live classes and paid courses — it’s still causing some faculty to wonder about its long-term impact on their institutions and employment prospects. For example, the New York Times reported that some Duke professors were concerned that it might eventually cause the university to offer fewer courses and hire fewer professors. Ultimately, these on-campus debates emphasize that transitioning to online learning isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Faculty and administrators raising concerns aren’t rejecting online learning wholesale, they’re trying to determine the approaches that work best for their students, missions and economic needs. As MOOC providers and other online learning companies make bigger headway, we’ll inevitably see more of these tussles — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013How HR can make the case for workforce analyticsThe 2013 task management tools market    
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Don’t look now but it looks like Yahoo’s mobile apps push is bearing fruit, at least according to new data from Onavo. Case in point: Yahoo Weather, which rolled out recently, already has what Onavo CEO Guy Rosen calls an “unprecedented” 3 percent market share among U.S. iPhone owners. That’s about 1.5 million users total which makes it the 91st most popular iPhone app three weeks after release, according to Onavo Insights data. That’s very good for a new app, Rosen said in an interview. Other Yahoo mobile apps including Yahoo Messenger and the Yahoo app are also doing well. “In general, what we found is that although Yahoo has been quiet on mobile, when we look at the top apps, we see quite a few up there. They have a decent footprint.” How does Onavo get to these numbers? It uses data gleaned from its free iPhone (and now Android) apps including Onavo Extend, which compresses data flowing into and out of your phone; Onavo Counts, which watches how much time you actually spend using a given app; and Onavo Protect, which scans traffic flowing into your phone for malware. Then it aggregates that data (minus the personally identifiable bits) and runs statistics to suss out usage patterns. That data forms the core of reports that the company then sells to app developers. This data is far more useful to app makers than app store download figures because it shows actual engagement. If your app is the mobile equivalent of shelfware, it’s helpful to know that. Rosen said “millions” of people use Onavo’s iPhone apps but would not specify further. “We use a panel methodology with our user base as the sample and apply statistical methodologies to make sure it’s valid,” he said in an interview. The current app stats do not yet factor in Onavo’s Android users, although they will be incorporated in time. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.A near-term outlook for big dataDissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital futureThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro    
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In the next few months, 420,000 U.S. Cellular customers in the Midwest will find themselves without a mobile network. Sprint on Friday closed a $480 million deal with U.S. Cellular that will hand all of the latter’s spectrum in Chicago, St. Louis and the surrounding regions into Sprint’s waiting arms. This is no mere transfer of network title, though. Sprint plans to shut down U.S. Cellular’s network completely some time in those two metropolitan regions in the next several months (Champagne, Ill., and South Bend, Ind., will also be affected). And despite the fact that U.S. Cellular’s systems uses the same CDMA technology in the same PCS frequencies, Sprint isn’t supporting its existing handsets. All of those customers must either start over with new devices and new service plans on the Sprint network or go find a new mobile operator entirely. Sprint Regional VP for the Midwest Kevin Gleason told GigaOM that Sprint planned to make the transition as easy as possible for U.S. Cellular’s customers by offering them plenty of incentive to move to Sprint. “I believe our recapture rate will be high,” Gleason said. “We’ve already started communicating with them and several of them have already made the switch.” Sprint has sent out an initial batch of letters notifying them about the transaction but Gleason said Sprint will soon follow up, detailing the timing of the network shutdown and the discount offers Sprint is making to draw those customers under the Sprint umbrella. While Gleason wouldn’t give any specific details on the exact amount of the discounts, he said they would take many forms: device discounts over Sprint’s usual subsidies, trade-in fees for older phones, porting credits for making the switch and activation fee waivers. Many customers will be able to get new phones and comparable service plans without having to pay a dime, he said. Many will also be able to upgrade to fancier devices such as the iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S 4 for a much lower than price than other customers would pay, Gleason said. He added that switching customers would also have a great deal of flexibility in plan choices, since Sprint is extending the discount offers to its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid brands as well. In general, Sprint and U.S. Cellular’s contract plans are comparable, and in the case of its unlimited data plans, Sprint is actually cheaper. But depending on the circumstances, not every customer will be getting an equitable deal. For instance if you happen to have just bought a new high-end smartphone or tablet, Sprint incentive discounts won’t cover the full cost of replacing it. What’s worse is that brand new smartphone essentially become useless in a few months when the Chicago and St. Louis networks go dead (though it would work on U.S. Cellular’s other networks). Some customers may also balk at the idea of signing new two-year contracts if they want to take full advantage of the discount offers. Gleason acknowledged that some customers will feel like they’re getting a raw deal, but he expects those cases will be kept to minimum. He pointed out that 60 percent of U.S. Cellular customers in affected cities have let their contracts lapse and the large majority of them use feature phones. Those subscribers are ripe for an upgrade, he said. That’s one of the main reasons why U.S. Cellular opted for a wholesale replacement of U.S. Cellular’s networks and devices, rather than a gradual phase out like Sprint is doing with its Nextel iDEN network, Gleason said. So many of those U.S. Cellular devices are old or obsolete that it decided to start fresh with phones optimized for Sprint’s new Network Vision architecture, which boasts the most up-to-date CDMA and LTE technologies. We’ll know more details about the sunset timeline and the specific discounts in the next couple of weeks. And if you’re a Chicagoan, you’re probably wondering what will happen to the name of U.S. Cellular Field, the home of the White Sox, now that the carrier is leaving the city. Well, it won’t become Sprint Field. Gleason said U.S. Cellular is keeping the naming the rights. U.S. Cellular Field hoto courtesy of Shutterstock user Alan Mars Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.New solutions for the evolving mobile networkCES 2012: a recap and analysis12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012    
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Maybe being honest doesn’t pay, after all: Switzerland-based file hoster RapidShare has laid off 45 of its 60 employees to cut down on costs as it tries to reinvent itself and focus more on B2B cloud storage services. The cuts were first reported by Swiss daily 20min, who was told by the company’s new CEO Kurt Sidler that RapidShare definitely won’t shut down. “Unfortunately, we have to part with a number of employees,” Sidler told the paper, adding: “But RapidShare will continue to operate, and we have concrete plans for our future.” That future likely won’t look at all like RapidShare’s past: The company used to run the world’s most popular one-click file hoster, and was frequented by millions of file sharers looking for safer alternatives when music labels and others started to go after P2P users. However, Rapidshare quickly found itself in court, and fought long legal battles with rights holders in Germany and elsewhere. The company tried to appease rights holders by putting restrictions on some aspects of its service; RapidShare was one of the first companies to get rid of its rewards program, which would compensate uploaders with especially popular files. It also pressured users to get registered accounts, and finally introduced bandwidth limits in late 2012, restricting users to 30 GB of bandwidth per day – not enough for people who were using the service to offer movies and other copyrighted files for download. Rapidshare had hoped that all of these measures would get the company some love from rights holders, as it was looking to offer video games and eventually also movies through a paid download store. The idea was to redirect downloaders looking for free, unlicensed copies, and swerve up legitimate content instead. However, Holllywood apparently didn’t play ball, and RapidShare nixed its plan for paid downloads at the end of 2011. The company is now looking to get a stronger foothold in the B2B cloud storage market, and sell personal file storage and backup solutions to consumers. However, the mass layoffs weren’t the first sign that these plans may not be going as expected: Sidler, who joined the company just two weeks ago, is RapidShare’s fourth CEO since 2010. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley PastA near-term outlook for big data    
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Google went and pre-empted Apple’s long-rumored iRadio streaming music service with a subscription music service of its own at this week’s Google I/O developer conference. Apple’s own developer event, WWDC, starts June 10, but the word is that its music service may not be ready to go by then. The Verge says Apple is still “bogged down in licensing talks” with music publishers. Two of the big ones are still holding out, Sony/ATV and BMG, according to the Verge’s sources. That’s partly because what Apple is trying to do is not the same as Google Play Music All Access. Google’s service is a standard subscription service, like Spotify, and it will cost users $10 per month. It’s also not clear what the music catalog will look like for that service because Google has not yet announced which publishers have signed up. iRadio is reportedly more complicated because of what Apple is trying to build and how it likes to do business. iRadio won’t be a straight-up web radio service; there will also be some on-demand aspects to it. And Apple also isn’t willing to pay music publishers an advance for access to their catalogs. Instead, Apple has agreed to give them a share of ad revenue, per-play fees and a guaranteed minimum payment, according to the Verge. Apple already makes billions from its current content service, iTunes. It’s not essential that Apple have its own streaming music subscription service as answer to Google in a few weeks. But the company does need to acknowledge that times and habits have changed when it comes to music ownership. The developers conference seems a perfect place to debut it, but a fall event later this year when new hardware is set to be announced would be fine too; three more months doesn’t make that big of a difference at this point. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Analyzing the wearable computing marketMonetizing music in the post-scarcity ageForecast: the future of the digital music industry    
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The original idea behind soap operas was that daily episodes would keep viewers hooked and advertisers happy. But few people have time to devote to mid-day TV any more, and as TV viewing shifts online, the model is changing. It’s been just two and a half weeks weeks since popular soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children were reborn as online-only shows — but production company Prospect Park has already decided to cut back on the number of new episodes released online each week. The change in schedule, the company claims, is due to the fact that viewers are “binge-watching” instead of watching one episode a day, and this makes it too hard for them to keep up. Starting on April 29, Prospect Park — which licensed the soaps from ABC — ran new, 30-minute episodes of each show every Monday through Thursday, followed by a recap on Friday. The shows are available on Hulu and Hulu Plus, or can be downloaded from iTunes. They’ve received “millions” of views, Prospect Park cofounders Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz wrote in a letter to fans (PDF) this week, and have “consistently been in the top ten shows viewed on Hulu.” But most viewers aren’t watching these shows the way they traditionally watched soap operas on TV. Instead, as with other TV shows online, “our shows are primarily consumed on different days than when they originally air,” Frank and Kwatinetz wrote: “Primarily, fans have been binge viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule).” In addition, viewers aren’t adhering to traditional soap-watching habits. When the shows were on ABC, “viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was.” By contrast, online viewers “seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode…yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up.” Prospect Park is also concerned by the fact that, when the shows aired on ABC, viewers often watched both — but online things are different: “The majority of our viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren’t viewing the shows when they did before. Part of the reason for choosing between the shows may be that the largest viewing takes place either between 12 PM and 1 PM (when people generally can only fit one episode during lunch time) or between 5 PM and 7 PM (when the vast majority of competing shows are a half hour long). We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much.” Overall, Frank and Kwatinetz conclude that “When it comes to online viewing, most of us are just trying to find time to watch series comprised of 13 to 22 episodes a season — so asking viewers to assign time for over 100 episodes per show is a daunting task.” So starting Monday, May 20, the schedules will change. Each soap will now air just two new episodes a week: New episodes of All My Children will air online on Mondays and Wednesdays, and new episodes of One Life to Live will air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a recap episode on Friday. “Because Hulu agrees with our findings,” the founders wrote, “for the meantime they will keep all of our episodes on Hulu.com for free to give viewers the opportunity to find us and catch up.” Frank and Kwatinetz acknowledge that “our most dedicated viewers will be upset,” but “we need to devise a model that works for all viewers and follows how they want, and are actually watching, online” in order to ensure that the shows “not meet the fate they experienced previously.” The Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Who and what to watch in the new era of the living roomOTT technologies and strategies for broadcastersWhat the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG    
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Millions of people access Twitter every month, and the sheer volume of tweets flowing through the company’s platform is remarkable. Different companies have tried to harness the value of those tweets and derive information from the 140 character blips. But it would seem that making suggestions to users about the best book to read or movie to watch based on tweets isn’t an easy challenge. Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers. “It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.” Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow. “The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.” I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests. Of course, there are the obvious potential pitfalls of building a product around someone else’s platform, although Haridas said they support Facebook and are adding other platforms. But there’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media.  As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How consumer media will change in 2013Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012The state of cross-platform media measurement    
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Aruba Networks is already building a good deal of the world’s enterprise Wi-Fi networks, pumping wireless signals to malls, conference centers and hotels around the globe. Now it has another use for those networks beyond mere connectivity: it can pinpoint a smartphone’s location within those locations’ maze-like corridors. Aruba has acquired Meridian Apps, a Portland, Ore.,-based startup that uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate. (The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.) Meridian is one of many companies using Wi-Fi signals to gain its bearings, but Meridian, like its competitor Wifarer, also builds apps for businesses that want location-awareness to be key part of their mobile offering. Meridian has designed museum guide apps for the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s built department locator apps for Macy’s and incorporated casino floor plans into the Bellagio’s mobile app. While this kind of kind of technology can be used to bring the usual bevy of location-based services to building interiors, it has the potential of making those services much more granular. For instance, many of the museum apps developed by Meridian and Wifarer are able to determine not just what room you’re in, but what exhibit you’re actually looking at — the app can immediate populate your smartphone screen with details about the wooly mammoth or Van Gogh painting you’re admiring. This kind of hyper-local content is attracting the interest of the big mobile services players, including Apple and Google. Aruba’s particular interest in Meridian probably has something to do with the fact that its technology is largely infrastructure-dependent. As Meridian CTO Nick Farina explained in his blog, even though smartphones have the ability to sniff out their own locations by measuring Wi-Fi signals, Meridian’s technology relies on access points to make those measurements, thus sparing the phone’s battery and allowing it to work on more restricted devices like the iPhone. Aruba is the No. 2 enterprise WLAN supplier in the world, supplying networks for every manner of hospital, corporate campus, convention center or mall. You can imagine that many of those customers would be very interested in buying not just a network from Aruba, but also a means to use that network to provide location-aware content and services to their employees and customers. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.CES 2012: a recap and analysisWhat to watch in mobile in 2013Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate    
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It’s 2013, and yet two big questions still dominate the discussion any time a sufficiently large number of cloud computing types gather in the same room: How many players can the market support, and are cloud resources a commodity? The topic arose at the clouderati-filled Cloud 2020 meetup in Las Vegas last week (where someone suggested we’ll have a cloud duopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google) and it’s back in the public eye again this week with the general availability of Google Compute Engine. I think we might get an idea how the cloud computing market will play out by looking at the fast-food industry. The analogy goes like this: Fast food restaurants offer their consumers essentially the same things as public clouds offer their customers – convenience, speed, standardization, flexibility and everything else that comes with not having to prepare a meal from scratch or deploy applications on physical gear. And if all anyone wanted was fast, cheap hamburgers, fries and maybe some sort of chicken sandwich, the more than 33,000 McDonald’s across the world would probably do the trick. However, when I come to any major intersection in a big city (and even in some small towns), I usually see no less than two national fast food chains taking up corner real estate. If I drive a little down the road, I’ll likely see a few more, and possibly some regional chains thrown in, as well. Not all hamburgers are created equal, it seems. Why should cloud computing be any different? If all anyone wanted was a virtual server, they’d probably go with the omnipresent Amazon Web Services. But when features, price, security, network connectivity and related services come into play, it becomes easy to see why there’s such an appetite for more options. Amazon is to McDonald’s as Google is to … Amazon Web Services = McDonald’s and Yum Brands rolled into one: AWS is to the cloud what McDonald’s is to fast food. It was the first, it’s the biggest and it’s the best known. All things being equal, there would be no reason for anyone to go anywhere else for cloud computing because AWS delivers reasonable services at a fair price (sometimes downright cheap), is omnipresent and can pretty much handle whatever scale you throw at it. Only, if we consider the virtual server the hamburger of public cloud, the object store the French fries and the cloud database a chicken sandwich, AWS starts to look like a lot more than just a McDonald’s. You might look at it more like Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. The Amazon platform is about far more than just machine images and some standard storage and database features. It has myriad services covering everything from configuration to big data, and they’re all designed to integrate tightly with one another — like one of those KFC/Taco Bell combination restaurants that dot the urban landscape. AWS, like McDonald’s, is the undisputed champion. Source: Wikipedia Commons Rackspace = Wendy’s: Wendy’s is the No. 2 fast-food franchise in the United States, a title I think Rackspace probably holds in the cloud space (although assessing cloud market share is a little more difficult than assessing fast-food market share). And much like Wendy’s places a premium on the quality of its products, Rackspace places a premium on the quality of its service. CEO Lanham Napier has gone so far as to say it’s “playing a different game” than Amazon. What he means is that Rackspace doesn’t need to compete with AWS by constantly driving down prices because Rackspace customers value service and will pay for it. Maybe, but the company might take a hint from what’s happening with Wendy’s as it struggles to maintain its No. 2 status against a feisty Burger King that’s largely following the McDonald’s playbook. If market share is important, higher prices aren’t often the best recipe for maintaining it. The Angry Whopper, like App Engine, probably isn’t for everyone. Google = Burger King: That cloud version of Burger King nipping at Rackspace’s heels is Google. It already has all the standard fare in servers, storage and databases, but it’s also hipper than the rest (or at least it tries to be), it takes some chances on product design (sometimes to the love-it-or-hate-it extreme) and, like Burger King with the Whopper, what it does well, it does really well. In Google’s case, that’s perform at scale. If Google keeps adding services and cutting the costs of everything, there’s no reason it can’t become the world’s No. 2 cloud provider — some have already bestowed that honor upon it — and maybe challenge AWS a decade down the road. Microsoft = Arby’s: Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to market it otherwise, Windows Azure is still largely viewed as a cloud platform for running .NET applications and generally doing all things Windows. Not that that’s a bad thing — a lot of people really like Windows and, by many accounts, Windows Azure is a fine platform. It’s like going to Arby’s: the menu offers a lot of things, but you go for the roast beef. Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma et al = In-N-Out Burger, Culvers, Five Guys et al: These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract. Yes, In-N-Out is delicious — and that’s about the entire menu. VMware = Del Taco: According to my colleage Barb Darrow, VMware’s new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will “be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware.” Del Taco sounds like a Mexican place but also has hamburgers, fries, shakes and even iced coffee. And I don’t know anyone who eats there. OpenStack = Frozen French fries, or cheeseburger-flavored Doritos: It really depends on who you ask (some would even say it’s like kale). If you’re grilling burgers and cooking fries, you’re essentially trying to recreate the fast-food experience at home. On the bright side, when you’re making the hamburger patties and cooking the fries, you can control how much salt you add and ensure everyone who handles them washes their hands. It might turn out great, but it’s never really the same. Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m beginning to suspect that OpenStack-based public clouds (of the non-Rackspace( rax) variety) will end up being a lot like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos. In name, they’re like cheeseburgers, but after a few bites you’re left saying, “Hey, Doritos doesn’t make cheeseburgers …” Everyone else = everyone else: Even after all this, we’re still left a bunch of different cloud providers and a bunch of different fast food chains. You might compare the telcos to Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees in that they’re big and make money, but they’re pretty much non-factors in the grand scheme of things. Then there are your various web hosts and others, which might compare with some local chain restaurants. And different countries will certainly have their own cloud providers just like they have their own takes on fast food. In the end, though, it’s just hard to see how cloud computing becomes a two-horse race any more than the fast-food industry is a two-horse race. Sure, there are three clear leaders (with No. 1 having a big lead), but there’s plenty of business to go around because aside from some core similarities, no two providers are the same. And as long as more applications are developed and need a cloud to call home, there will be developers and CIOs with very different ideas of what makes a cloud platform great. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyondInfrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightTakeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data    
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Apple’s CEO is headed to Washington next week to talk taxes. He’s not just going to be defending Apple’s practice of keeping billions of profits offshore, Tim Cook is going to be armed with some suggestions for future policies too. And no, he doesn’t think Apple should get a free pass on bringing its money back home. Cook told the Washington Post that he has ideas for how to help convince companies like his own to bring back their overseas earnings to the U.S.:  “If you look at it today, to repatriate cash to the U.S., you need to pay 35 percent of that cash. And that is a very high number,” Cook said in an interview Thursday. “We are not proposing that it be zero. I know many of our peers believe that. But I don’t view that. But I think it has to be reasonable.” Apple is set to pay $7 billion in taxes in the U.S. this year, he told the paper. He also said he believes that Apple is “likely the largest corporate taxpayer in the U.S.” But the company has — along with a lot of its peers — found creative ways to make sure that number is not any higher. Apple has $145 billion in its coffers, and $100 billion of that is from profits derived from sales overseas. But the company has not brought that money back to the U.S. because of the current corporate tax rate. Even when the company decided to issue a larger dividend for shareholders, Apple elected to borrow money rather than use profits from overseas to fund that, partly because of the tax burden. This will be Cook’s first testimony before Congress, but not his first trip to Washington in an official capacity. A year ago he visited with House Speaker John Boehner, signaling his interest in engagement with Washington and public policy would be somewhat of a departure from his predecessor’s. Cook also told the Post Apple believes “in good corporate citizenship.” And he has made some good U.S. corporate citizen moves since becoming CEO. In addition to instituting a charitable-giving matching program for employees, he’s also laid out plans to bring production back to the U.S. of one model of Mac. Cook told Politico that it would be an existing product that will be made here. Not only will it be put together in the U.S., he said some of the parts would be manufactured in Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Kentucky. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Flash analysis: Steve JobsForecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015How consumer media will change in 2013    
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During a fireside chat with four Google Research heavyweights — artificial-intelligence guru Peter Norvig, Google Glass guy Thad Starner, MapReduce paper co-author Jeff Dean and distributed computing wizard Alfred Spector — on Thursday, an audience member sucked up the air in the overcrowded room when he asked “where we’ll be 10 years from now.” Without a doubt, the panel, at Google I/O, was an apt forum for that question. If any company is innovating in a big way, it’s Google, with recent advancements in voice recognition, wearable technology, quantum computing and other realms. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see some of the Google luminaries’ ideas actually come into being. Here’s what they had to say: “Speech recognition and vision are showing dramatic improvements over the last few years. We just need to scale them up and make them work better. … They’re (mobile devices) going to vanish into much smaller devices that you carry around and aren’t full-size laptops.” — Jeff Dean “We’re getting more contextualized. The computer is not what you go to to use. It’s something that’s around you all the time and sort of more integrated into your life, rather than a separate thing.” — Peter Norvig “I would argue that we’re currently living the singularity, where the tool stops and the mind begins will start becoming blurry.” — Thad Starner So there you have it, folks — the computer as a smaller and more natural extension of the human brain. Now, let’s set the kitchen timer for 10 years and see what actually happens. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How emerging technologies will influence collaborationAnalyzing the wearable computing marketThe 2013 task management tools market    
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