The ‘cloud’ stands for a worldwide infrastructure of computers that can deliver applications and content to any place on the Internet. Early examples of clouds are content distribution networks (CDN), which can serve web content from a worldwide distributed network of servers. Because the servers are closer to the user the user will see quicker […]
In the future, the dominant traffic on the internet will be video. However, it will not look like TV. Instead it will be more like video on demand, for everybody. The early internet was mainly used for interactive terminal traffic, but that soon gave way to file transfer. In the late nineties, web traffic took […]
Google App Engine is an infrastructure to deliver applications through Google’s cloud. You can drop applications written in Python in it, and let Google do the hosting. I am setting up a business based on this (GriddleJuiz). So the first obvious questions are: where is the cloud, and does it perform? With the help of […]
In my previous post I discussed the technical qualities of Google’s new browser, Chrome. On a strategic business level, Chrome is the kick-off for a new battle for platform dominance. How can substituting one piece of free software (the browser) for another have such business impact? To understand that, you will have to look at […]
Google’s new browser, Chrome, appears to be a major improvement not so much for its functionality but for its stability. In software land, version 2 of something indicates the first serious incorporation of user feedback. In this way, Web 2.0 addressed user needs for more interactivity and multi-user, multi-site collaboration. In software land, version 2.0 […]
Computers are terribly reliable, in general. Today’s computers execute millions of instructions each second, with an error rate that is inconceivable in other technologies. Yet, if you have hundreds of thousands of machines, you do need to take care of failures. A Cnet article elaborates on the Google situation (a Google cluster has several thousands […]
At the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 last week in London, Jim Cicconi, chief lobbyist at AT&T warned that the Internet will be fully clogged by 2010. When I worked at AT&T Bell Labs around 20 years ago, the phrase “imminent death of the net predicted” was already a running joke, so something else must […]
Websites can go down. But there is a lot more that can go wrong with all your digital assets online. Have you ever heard about site-defamations, spoofing, identity theft, plagiarism, and software vulnerabilies? How much revenue will you lose, or damage will you suffer, if any of these happen? If so, do you know how […]
The International Herald Tribune reports on an experiment done by Random House, a distributor of audio books. They released digitally watermarked books and then monitored file sharing networks for these books. It turned out that pirated copies were often made from physical CDs. “Our feeling is that DRM (Digital Rights Management, another word for copy […]