Posts tagged Real
Facebook’s Real Mobile Question, Post-Instagram: Can It Challenge Apple and Google?
Apr 9th
Facebook made a smart move today, acquiring red-hot mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion. Not only does Facebook now own an important mobile property, but it also took its biggest threat – a thriving mobile-only social network – off the market. Brilliant.
But that’s just part of a bigger, unanswered question: Can Facebook become an important mobile platform, the way Apple’s iOS and Google Android have? And if so, what does that look like? How does Instagram fit in?
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Facebook, as we’ve seen over the years, seems too ambitious to be happy just being a social network. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt didn’t name it one of the tech industry’s “gang of four” – along with Apple, Amazon and Google – just because it’s a fun place to share status updates and connect with friends. Facebook likely has its sights set on being as important as Apple and Google are in today’s mobile industry, and as powerful as Microsoft Windows once was on the desktop.
So far, Facebook is doing OK in mobile. It has more than 400 million active mobile users, which is a lot. Its main Facebook app was listed as Apple’s most popular of all-time. Thousands of well-known mobile apps are “social” because of Facebook integration, so Facebook is acting as a platform of sorts there. And now, of course, it owns the mobile photo-sharing company that arguably represented its biggest threat, so that’s good.
But so far, Facebook isn’t exactly in a position of supreme power in mobile. It doesn’t yet have an operating system that handset makers are using as the basis for phones. It doesn’t own an app platform or distribution store yet. Its mobile products aren’t particularly inventive or addictive. Its users could potentially go away as quickly as they arrived – see: MySpace on the web. And it doesn’t make any money from mobile yet: Facebook does “not currently directly generate meaningful revenue” from mobile, it says in its IPO filing.
Expect to see more noise in these areas over the next year or so. Mobile is just too important for Facebook’s future for it to sit out and cede control to Google and Apple – especially given Facebook’s combative relationship with both companies, and the relative lack of success Facebook’s big partner Microsoft is having in mobile.
Whether it’s a proper Facebook mobile OS – forked from Android? – or a browser-based HTML5 app market, or something completely different, Facebook should start to attack the mobile platform market sometime sooner rather than later.
How does Instagram fit in? Given how quickly the deal reportedly happened – days, not weeks – it’s probably too early to say. There could probably be a version of Instagram ready to go for any Facebook phone platform that eventually launches. That wasn’t even something Google Android could say a week ago. Instagram may become part of the photo-sharing process in Facebook’s own app. Et cetera.
And knowing how well the Instagram team has built delightful mobile products so far, it could also be a smart idea to include them on the design process of future, broader Facebook mobile products.
Big picture summary of today’s news: The Instagram deal is a good one, but it’s a modest step in Facebook’s overall mobile plans. There’s still much more, much bigger progress to make.
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What Is The Real Value Of Branded Search Campaigns?
Apr 5th
Enterprise SEM practices apply not just to direct response advertisers, but to brand advertisers as well. We’ll dive into that logic after a brief stroll down memory lane. The earliest adopters of sophisticated paid search practices were those companies with deep roots in direct response…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
What Will Happen to RIM: 4 Real Possibilities
Apr 4th
Research In Motion, the BlackBerry pioneer that lost its way, finally admitted last week that it’s in need of a major transformation. After falling way behind rivals Apple and Google in the smartphone industry, RIM must reinvent itself or else.
The possibilities for RIM range from a quick sale to a slow, successful rebuilding process. There isn’t a single, obvious outcome. And it doesn’t look good: Almost all signs point to RIM reducing its staff significantly.
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Option 1: Drop It Like It’s Hot
One option is for RIM to sell itself right now for the highest amount it can get. While the BlackBerry phone platform isn’t competitive anymore, and the once-iconic brand isn’t worth much, there are parts of RIM that could be useful to someone.
For example: Its back-end service infrastructure and business. Its millions of subscribers around the world. Its patents. Its large corporate contracts to outfit companies with thousands of devices. Or its direct access to promising engineers in Waterloo, Ontario, graduating from Canada’s biggest engineering university.
The trouble with this scenario is finding a buyer willing to pay an acceptable amount of money for the company, knowing its assets are declining in value and the company is in disarray. Any acquirer would be forced to quickly reduce headcount, with the baggage that comes along with that.
Why buy RIM today for an amount you know will shrink as time goes on? When I first wrote in 2009 that Microsoft should buy RIM to jumpstart its mobile business, it would have probably cost $35 billion to get the deal done. Today, the market values RIM at less than $7 billion. Anyway, Microsoft – still the most logical acquirer – is busy with Nokia right now. That may or may not be the right long-term bet, but adding RIM to the mix just adds more chaos.
Other buyers could potentially include Facebook, Amazon, Google or even Apple. But none is likely to spend more than the bare minimum for whatever scraps it finds useful. That doesn’t give this scenario much hope. So I’m assigning a 20% probability to RIM selling itself within a year for $7 billion or more.
Option 2: Control-Alt-Delete
Rebooting RIM may be the best long-term strategy to keep the company independent. This concept has been successful for IBM, famously. But it’s a lot easier said than done.
The move that makes the most sense now is getting rid of RIM’s handset business and trying to make the BlackBerry platform something that corporations and governments can’t live without, regardless of their choice of devices. Selling handsets still represents the majority of RIM’s sales – 68% last quarter – but it’s a money loser.
Still, this means shedding a huge number of employees and betting on a software and services platform that might never catch on in the open market. (Pulling out of the handset business, then, would have to be a carefully calculated move.)
This means RIM will shrink in all metrics and may never become as big as the RIM of 2008. But that’s reality, and you can’t recreate the past.
This is a bold strategy, but RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins may finally be ballsy enough to do it. I’d say that there’s a 40% chance RIM will announce plans to widely open its platform within a year. (It’s already starting.) And there’s perhaps a 10% chance it’s wild enough to also announce plans to wind down the handset business. (This may not make sense right away, though it would be the strongest way to proclaim RIM’s new mission.)
Option 3: Slip and Slide
Another strategy – the one that RIM’s old bosses had been using for years – is to stick with the status quo, pretend everything is fine, and assume that whatever RIM will be able to ship next year will be better enough.
Under this model, RIM would likely continue to lose market value and financial viability, until it’s either sold in a fire sale or goes out of business.
Given RIM’s history, there’s perhaps a 30% chance that sticking with the old plan will also be the new plan. But it does sound like Heins actually knows he can’t do that.
Option 4: Miracle Comeback
One last possibility is that RIM will orchestrate one of the world’s greatest all-time comebacks. This is admittedly far-fetched and probably less than 1% likely. But it’s not completely impossible.
It would require creating a product or service that leapfrogs Apple, Google and the rest of the mobile industry, and becomes an immediate must-buy. Something so amazing that I’d drop my iPhone and run to the Verizon store to buy RIM’s new toy.
This sounds unlikely, especially given RIM’s track record. The iPhone was truly an unbelievable product when it launched, but Apple had that capability in its DNA. Even before Steve Jobs came back to rescue Apple, it was still shipping the best computers in the world. Apple just wasn’t moving in the right strategic direction or thinking about the future in the right way, and Jobs changed that.
It would be tough to argue that RIM has the right recipe of talent, leadership and vision to make this reality. But it’s not completely impossible. And it would make for a truly amazing story.
More likely: A modest push toward becoming primarily a mobile service provider and away from hardware sales. This is probably the safest and soundest bet.
Previously: The End of RIM As We Know It
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Google+ Bowling: Real Life Bowling Rethought for Real Life
Apr 1st
One area that has been woefully underserved by Google is the bowling community. Today, Google has announced plans to right that wrong with the introduction of Google Bowling to Portland, Oregon, soon to also launch in NYC and California.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
iCloud, Not the New iPad, is Apple’s Real Key to the Post-PC Revolution
Mar 16th
Apple’s new iPad goes on sale today. People – already lined up around the world – will likely buy more than a million of them this weekend, and tens of millions this year. And there will be much talk about Apple’s “post-PC” revolution.
But the real key to Apple’s post-PC dreams – slipping past Windows and becoming the dominant consumer electronics platform for the decades ahead – isn’t this new iPad, or any single gadget.
It’s actually iCloud, Apple’s cloud service and storage platform, which doesn’t get the respect and attention it deserves.
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Why iCloud?
Because the iPad, without it, isn’t really that much different than the PCs it’s trying to replace. Sure, the iPad is cheaper, prettier, more portable, and touch-controlled. And it runs a less sophisticated operating system than a PC or Mac. But at its essence, it’s a client terminal, the way a Windows PC or Mac is.
What makes the iPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, and gradually, even the Mac, “post-PC” devices, is the idea that they’re all tied together behind the scenes: Your work, your entertainment, your apps, everything. It’s not that they just replace a PC in your home. It’s that they go beyond what a PC ever offered.
That’s where iCloud comes into play.
Today, iCloud mostly just seems like Apple’s proprietary storage and synchronization service. That’s an important start, just as iTunes sync was a critical (and proprietary) Apple tool that helped make the iPod so successful. But it’s also just the beginning. Just as Apple adds new features to its iPads and iPhones, iOS and Mac OS each year, expect new iCloud features as well, designed to gradually move more of your computing life off of individual devices and into the cloud.
The practical benefits? Using multiple devices for the same project. Borrowing friends’ devices for a little work or entertainment. Activating new gadgets and making them “yours” quickly. Sharing iPads. Reducing the required computing and storage resources (and price) of future hardware. And much more that we can’t even dream of.
What does this mean for Apple’s competition? A few takeaways:
If Apple’s campaign is successful – and it’s on the right track – just offering hardware devices to compete with the iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV won’t be enough.
Rivals will not only need competitive hardware, pricing, and app stores, but the cloud-based glue that iCloud presents. And this is not going to be easy, especially for companies whose strength is hardware and not software or cloud services, such as Samsung, Nokia, HTC, etc. (Amazon may actually do okay here, though its interface designs aren’t often pretty. See: Amazon MP3 “cloud locker.”)
In theory, this could be a positive trend for Google, as Google has been focused on cloud-based services forever (Gmail, Google Docs, etc.) and doesn’t have legacy PC baggage. But Google faces an uphill battle of offering its cloud services to a host of hardware partners that have to shoehorn them into hardware designed by different people than the software. It may work, but it’s probably never going to be as elegant as if one company were to make it all. Perhaps that’s why Google is buying Motorola – if it’s smart, it will actually try hard to make great, integrated devices there. It could end up being the best competition for Apple in the long run, or maybe not.
Microsoft will need an iCloud answer, too, for Windows 8 devices. Adding complexity there is that Microsoft plans two different user interfaces for Windows 8: The simple, “Metro” UI that you’ve seen on Windows phones and the new Xbox interface, and the old-style Windows look.
But if the cloud/sync service is designed the right way, that won’t make a difference. Just as iCloud needs to be able to connect iPhones to Macs to TVs, Microsoft’s service might as well be able to connect a Windows workstation to a fancy watch. This old-vs.-new hurdle actually makes a sync service like iCloud even more potentially useful, if it can bring the two Windows together in a clever and useful way. (Then there is the separate issue of whether consumer Microsoft customers and “enterprise” customers should use the same or different cloud services.)
Lastly, this could improve the fortunes for Dropbox, the leading cloud storage and sync startup. What Dropbox does is different than what iCloud does, but it offers a wonderful service, well-known brand, and a good reputation. Imagine Dropbox as a core feature of Android or Windows, expanded to include more services. It could happen. (Or, Dropbox could forge ahead and maybe even become one of the big platform companies over time. Who knows.) Also: Box, the other big cloud storage startup.
So, enjoy your new iPad this weekend. Drool over a potential Apple television set if you must. But the real thing to watch is iCloud. It will play a big role in Apple’s ultimate success or failure in the post-PC era.
Also: Why the New iPad is So Huge for Apple
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Hadoop Users Could Get Their First Taste of Real Encryption
Mar 13th
Here’s the problem: Data has already gotten too big for its britches. There are increasing corporate mergers and takeovers, greater pressure among businesses in both private and public sectors to consolidate resources, and to boot, federal regulations mandating privacy restrictions and security policies. Especially in the healthcare industry, the first “big data” technologies to emerge from the former Yahoo project that became Hadoop, have been a godsend.
Hadoop breaks simple data stores free from the bounds of single volumes, enabling them to be distributed in shards across multiple storage devices. Normally a database system hasn’t had to deal with encryption. If you encrypt the volume it’s stored on, that should be good enough – at least, that’s what the U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s NIST agency said in 2007 (PDF available here). But that was before the big data problem was even identified, and years before the first Yahoo teams went to work on it.
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Is Encrypting the Wire “Good Enough?”
Up to now, the rule has been this: If a volume housing a database can be encrypted, and the encryption of that volume is handled at the operating system level, that should be good enough. This is sometimes called wire-level encryption, and it’s handled at the file system level. If you can encrypt an NTFS volume, for instance, then anything that presents the unencrypted contents of that volume transparently to the database manager should be, well, good enough. Anyone who steals the hard drive ends up with nothing he can read.
According to guidance published by the American Medical Association (PDF available here), if you use a “good enough” disk encryption system using NIST’s standards, then when there is a security breach, you are exempt from having to notify your patients. “While HIPAA-covered entities and their business associates are not required to follow this guidance,” the AMA’s report reads, “if your practice does follow the specified technologies and methodologies, you will avoid having to comply with the extensive notification requirements otherwise required by the HITECH Act in the event of a security breach.”
So there’s a little incentive for healthcare services to encrypt their data stores. This is where the government’s best laid plans run smack into the great wall of progress. Up to now, the rule has been this: If a volume that includes clusters of Hadoop data can be encrypted, and the encryption of that volume is handled at the operating system level, that should be good enough. But as the documentation for CDH3, Cloudera’s latest commercial implementation of Apache Hadoop, clearly indicates (PDF available here), the security for the system is presumed to be provided at the access level, where an individual is granted or denied access to the system.
“The security features in CDH3 meet the needs of most Hadoop customers because typically the cluster is accessible only to trusted personnel,” the documentation reads. “In particular, Hadoop’s current threat model assumes that users cannot: 1. Have root access to cluster machines; 2. Have root access to shared client machines; 3. Read or modify packets on the network of the cluster… It should be noted that CDH3 does not support data encryption. RPC data may be encrypted on the wire, but actual user data is not encrypted and there is no built-in support for on-disk encryption. For most current Hadoop users, this lack of data encryption is acceptable because of the assumptions stated above. However, if customers someday need data encryption, that functionality can be added later and the current security features are an important prerequisite for a complete security solution.”
If an user of an encrypted volume can read the volume, then evidently he has access, whether by grant or by force. And there’s the real problem, because NIST specifications were written at a time when the operating system took care of the whole accessibility problem. Hadoop’s standard security model is to accept that the user was granted access because, well, he’s using the data, isn’t he? If this gets to be a bother, then whenever that “someday” rolls around, we should be able to address the issue.
Enter Gazzang
That someday has already happened. The latest venture from Larry Warnock, the former executive of CMS pioneer Vignette Systems, is called Gazzang. For about four years, Gazzang has been producing an encryption solution that’s now applied to MySQL databases, called ezNcrypt. It’s had a version of ezNcrypt for Hadoop for a little while, but it’s lacked the kind of management tools that compel administrators to maintain the encryption keys on separate volumes. Today, Gazzang announced the release of a cloud-based encryption platform that provides customers with the encryption, the policy-making tools for securing and ensuring access, and the key management tools as a service.
“The cloud-based platform transparently encrypts and secures data ‘on the fly’ whether in the cloud or on premises, ensuring there is minimal performance lag in the encryption or decryption process,” reads a data sheet published by Gazzang this morning (PDF available here). “The platform also includes advanced key management and access controls that help organizations meet compliance regulations and allow users to store their cryptographic keys separate from the encrypted data.”
Citing a Forrester report that tagged data susceptible of falling through the encryption gap as “toxic data,” Warnock said this in a blog post this morning: “Organizations that fail to protect and encrypt this data leave themselves exposed to attacks and possibly even fines. Companies like Stratfor, Sony, and Epsilon – who failed to encrypt toxic data – all took severe hits to their brand and combined lost millions of dollars in potential revenue. But worse still, is these companies all lost the trust of their customers. How do you put a price on that? People will shy away from organizations that aren’t trusted stewards of their information. This includes not only the data itself but the histories of their data, application and Web usage. Retroactively trying to protect this data is far more difficult than securing it at the outset. Organizations must consider this before it is too late.”
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Real Estate Marketing Lincoln NE – Black Hills Today
Mar 12th
 BigPond News |
Real Estate Marketing Lincoln NE
Black Hills Today It's called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. If you have a website that is not on the first page of Google and other search engines, then it's NOT WORKING. You need us to come in an optimize it so it will be noticed. THIS IS A FIRST COME FIRST SERVE … ONS Interactive Solutions Pvt Ltd Launches New Twitter/Facebook Marketing Plan … Search Marketing and Social Media in Regulated Industries |
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The Internet: It’s like Real Life, Only With Buttons
Mar 8th
Every time I read about social media these days, I end up hearing about how social sharing metrics are becoming a bigger factor in everything from organic rankings to driving additional clicks from visitors already on your site. And it makes total sense. If Google sees that a blog post has a ton of…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
How To Optimize Twitter: Be Real, Profiles, RT, Hashtags & More
Mar 8th
Getting found and heard on Twitter isn’t as easy as the early days. The party is getting bigger and the saturation level is getting murkier. Here’s how brands can best optimize with the times and stay in the tweet game without losing time and money.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
RSA 2012: VMware CTO Proposes Virtual Business Phones to Secure Real Ones
Feb 28th
In a simultaneous announcement at the RSA security conference in San Francisco and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday afternoon, VMware Chief Technology Officer Dr. Stephen Herrod made two extraordinary revelations. One is that his company is working on a technology that would give businesses with “BYOD” policies for their employees a way to deploy virtual phones on virtual devices. This would maintain business assets on devices that employees purchase for themselves and use as their work phones.
“The idea is actually pretty simple,” explained Dr. Herrod to attendees of the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA. “You have your phone that you go out and buy, and you go to an app store and download a level 2 hypervisor that’s going to be in place there. Then when you show up at work, what you’re able to do is, rather than get a work-issued phone, you’re going to get a work-issued virtual phone.”
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VMware is currently developing the concept for Android phones, but did not show a working model Monday. The virtual phone may contain company-approved apps, which would still be downloaded to the device over the air, though they would then reside on the virtual envelope.
“Basically, think of it as having two personalities on that phone, separated by a hardware virtualization layer. What’s important is that, the corporate phone is owned by my company, not by me. I’m in charge of everything that’s on the personal phone, but when I start up that application, it’s all encrypted, it’s all communicating over automatic VPN… and only those applications approved by the corporation can actually fit on that corporate phone.”
A virtual corporate phone could revolutionize the way mobile devices are secured and administered by companies, and it could also have an impact on purchasing choices. Apple’s tight control over the apps distribution process makes it an unlikely candidate for following up on Android’s head start toward this feature.
But it also would give incentive for administrators to deploy some kind of corporate device virtualization portal, which sounds more like VMware’s bread-and-butter. Herrod didn’t specifically mention such a product, though he did allude to its existence with respect to another open experiment the company revealed today, one which would absolutely require such a tool for its existence.
It’s part of VMware’s multi-faceted “Project Octopus,” the existence of which was first revealed at VMworld last September. Think of Octopus as providing (among many other things) an alternative for DropBox, for all those enterprises that have come to realize their employees are storing corporate assets in public clouds through their private devices. Octopus, whatever it ends up being called, would give employees a cloud they could use instead, while staying within the policy boundaries of their employers.
“DropBox is an incredible app, a great way to get access to your files wherever you happen to be. It’s very convenient,” acknowledged VMware’s Herrod. “And enterprises don’t have an alternative for that right now.” Octopus would offer corporations the same file sync and share service as DropBox, while maintaining the data behind their own firewalls, and enabling richer policies. For example, admins would have the ability to revoke access to specific files within a set number of days. Or, if an employee leaves the company, the admin could make certain that person cannot use the company’s apps or access corporate data.
“I think you’ll see a lot of solutions like these that become different ways of containing the applications and the data, ultimately fitting into this broker concept that has to be third-party aware, but also with unique aspects that each company might need,” added Herrod. Obviously there will be more arms to the proverbial Octopus than just the two.
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