Cto

Just two months after starting a flame war of sorts over whether it would acquire or go into competition with companies that were just “filling holes” in its service, Twitter is finally moving to fill one of the biggest holes the social network has had since it launched: the lack of a built-in link shortener. A post on the Twitter blog explains how the company has been shortening links in direct messages since March, in part to provide more security against phishing attempts — and will soon roll out the use of the t.co link shortener as a “wrapper” for all links.

The term “wrapper” means that every link that passes through Twitter will be shortened via the t.co system — and not just long links, but even links that have already been shortened by some other method, such as a competing service like Bit.ly or a white-label version such as the New York Times custom shortener. These links will still appear to users in the same way, but they will be shortened via t.co as they make their way through the Twitter system. When it comes to long links, Twitter hasn’t decided yet what they will look like exactly, as staffer Sean Garrett explains in the blog post:

A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

Garrett also explained that t.co links will be a maximum of 20 characters, so once the feature is rolled out to all users, links added to tweets will only use up 20 characters, regardless of their actual size.

The immediate response from many observers was to see the new feature as a Bit.ly killer, and it is clearly competition for that service, which was one of a number of link shorteners that sprang up to fill the void when Twitter first launched. But Bit.ly has moved on from its reliance on Twitter, as Betaworks founder John Borthwick described in a recent blog post. In any case, it’s clear that the real point of Twitter’s new feature isn’t to kill Bit.ly or any other service, but to accumulate data about the links that are shared on the network. As the Twitter blog post describes it:

Routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.

As Bit.ly understood long before Twitter did (or before Twitter did anything about it), the data underlying the links that are shared by users is far more important than the simple act of shortening a link. The analytical data that could emerge from seeing everything that is shared in tens of millions of tweets every day could produce an incredibly valuable storehouse of information about what stories or websites or content is getting the most activity, in real time. It’s about time the service started paying attention to it.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Max Klingensmith

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Industry trends come and go. The ones that stay with us and have lasting impact are those that fundamentally change the cost equation. Public clouds clearly pass this test. The potential savings approach 10x and, in cost sensitive industries, those that move to the cloud fastest will have a substantial cost advantage over those that don’t.

 

And, as much as I like saving money, the much more important game changer is speed of execution. Those companies depending upon public clouds will noticeably more nimble. Project approval to delivery times fall dramatically when there is no capital expense to be approved. When the financial risk of new projects is small, riskier projects can be tried. The pace of innovation increases. Companies where innovation is tied the financial approval cycle and the hardware ordering to install lag are at a fundamental disadvantage.

 

Clouds change companies for the better, clouds drive down costs, and clouds change the competitive landscape in industries. We have started what will be an exciting decade.

 

Earlier today I ran across a good article by Rodrigo Flores, CTO of newScale. In this article, Rodrigo says;

 

First, give up the fight: Enable the safe, controlled use of public clouds. There’s plenty of anecdotal and survey data indicating the use of public clouds by developers is large. A newScale informal poll in April found that about 40% of enterprises are using clouds – rogue, uncontrolled, under the covers, maybe. But they are using public clouds.

 

The move to the cloud is happening now. He also predicts:

 

IT operations groups are going to be increasingly evaluated against the service and customer satisfaction levels provided by public clouds. One day soon, the CFO may walk into the data center and ask, “What is the cost per hour for internal infrastructure, how do IT operations costs compare to public clouds, and which service levels do IT operations provide?” That day will happen this year.

 

This is a super important point. It was previously nearly impossible to know what it would cost to bring an application up and host it for its operational life. There was no credible alternative to hosting the application internally. Now, with care and some work, a comparison is possible and I expect that comparison to be made many times this year. This comparison won’t always be made accurately but the question will be asked and every company now has access to the data to be able to credibly make the comparison.  

 

I particularly like his point that self service is much better than “good service”.  Folks really don’t want to waste time calling service personal no matter how well trained those folks are. Customers just want to get their jobs done with as little friction as possible. Less phone calls are good.

 

Think like an ATM: Embrace self-service immediately. Bank tellers may be lovely people, but most consumers prefer ATMs for standard transactions. The same applies to clouds. The ability by the customer to get his or her own resources without an onerous process is critical.

 

Self service is cheaper, faster, and less frustrating for all involved. I’ve seen considerable confusion on this point. Many people tell me that customers want to be called on by sales representatives and they want the human interaction from the customer service team. To me, it just sounds like living in the past. These are old, slow, and inefficient models.

 

Public clouds are the new world order.  Read the full article at:   The Competitive Threat of Public Clouds.

 

James Hamilton

e: jrh@mvdirona.com

w: http://www.mvdirona.com

b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com

 

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From Perspectives.

In July of last year, Twitter Search usage was exploding. As such, Twitter hired a new high-profile engineer, Doug Cook, to take over as the new “Director of Search.” Cook has now left the company, we’ve learned.

When reached for comment, Twitter confirmed the departure, but would not give a reason for the split. We had also heard that the reason Cook is out is that the search team is being split into at least two different groups now. Twitter’s comment on the matter seems to confirm that:

We are investing even more on search and have created new teams to focus our efforts on inference, discovery and real-time search infrastructure.

Twitter would not say if there will be a new Director of Search, but we hear the role may simply not exist anymore with this new multi-team approach.

Search is one of the most important aspects of Twitter these days. It’s not only useful, it’s tied directly into Twitter’s first big plan to make money: Sponsored Tweets. It also is the key to hashtag relevance and a number of other things Twitter is working on — undoubtedly things like analytics.

Search on Twitter began when Twitter bought Summize in the Summer of 2008. That service morphed into Twitter Search, a service that resided at search.twitter.com. By March of 2009, the product was so useful that we wrote it was time to start thinking of Twitter as a search engine. By April of that year, they rolled search into the main Twitter product, and it has been a core feature since.

This is one of the first fairly major shakeups at Twitter (aside from when Ev Williams took the CEO title from creator Jack Dorsey in 2008). This news follows the promotion of Greg Pass (a co-founder of Summize) to be Twitter’s first CTO, as we broke in April. That move was made to make room for Michael Abbott, Palm’s former head of software and services, to take over as VP of Engineering.

Cook came to Twitter from Yahoo, where was a VP of engineering. He took over the search responsibilities from Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury, another Summize co-founder. Cook also runs the wine search engine Able Grape. His LinkedIn profile lists this as his only current job. Recent tweets suggest his next move may be vacationing.

Startups need to have a great lawyer, accountant, patent attorney, etc. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it.

Why Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers
I was having coffee with a friend who teaches at the U.C. Berkeley Boalt Law School and runs their entrepreneurship program. Our conversation led us to Scott Walkers post Why Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers and why we both recommend that entrepreneurs print it out and tape it to their wall.

I remember when I encountered bullet #1 on Walkers list.

You Can’t Sign This Deal
After being in business for all of seven months, one of our first deals at Epiphany was with a software company called Visio, (now owned by Microsoft.) After some heroics from our CTO in extracting data from SAP, the Visio CFO loved our product, thought we could save them a ton of time and money and wanted it installed ASAP. We were excited that we were getting our first six-figure check and a reference customer. Then Visio gave us their boilerplate contract.

We passed it to our law firm who promptly threw up all of it.

“You guys can’t sign this. It has you putting your software in escrow, giving them all of your source code if you go out of business, indemnifying them from all possible lawsuits, not selling to competitors, first rights on a number of irrelevant issues and has a clause about promising them your first-born children.” I stopped listening for a while as it dawned on me that the deal I thought we had was probably now gone. I was feeling pretty deflated. I tuned back in when our lawyer said, “Let us start negotiating better terms with Visio’s company counsel.”

When I was a younger entrepreneur my answer would have been, “Ok. See if you can get us better terms. Call me when you’re done.” This time I said, “Make a list of the issues in bullet form, send them to me and I’ll get back to you.”

Strategy Questions Not Legal Questions
The issues our lawyer had raised about the contract, while correct, were strategy questions the founders needed to answer, not legal questions. Negotiating deal points before we thought through our strategy at best would have cost us a ton of money with little progress.

Looking at the Visio contract the question we were faced with was; how bad would the short term consequences be in signing the deal?  The answer to that was easy – none.  We’d have money in the bank and a reference customer.

The next question was, how bad would the deal points Visio was asking for screw us in the long term?  This was more complex.  Some of them would have limited our ability to sell to other software companies. Those were clearly unacceptable. Some of their other requests were just “comfort” issues like putting the software in escrow to protect Visio in case our startup went out of business.

Finally, there was a class of what I call “business development contract terms.” This happens in every company when a contract is passed around for review and everyone feels they have to mark it up with extraneous demands to feel like they had their say. Most of these points might have sounded great in law school but were impossible for a startup to deliver.

So we had to decide what deal points we could live with that wouldn’t kill our company.  For example, I could agree to put our software in escrow if Visio would pay for all the legal and logistical expenses (knowing full well it was a “see, we’re doing our job” issue the Visio lawyers were insisting on, but one that Visio would never implement.) Other deal points, which my lawyers said were fatal, were also easy to agree to – don’t sell to competitors? We could easily agree to a 90-day non-compete as a sign of good faith (what Visio didn’t know is that we had no bandwidth to take on another customer while we were getting their software installed.)

My co-founder and a few board members brainstormed to make sure we weren’t missing anything. Then we got on the phone.

Why Lawyers Don’t Run Startups
We realized that our goal 1) was to get a deal done, 2) on terms we could live with and 3) it required talking to someone senior at Visio with the authority to make decisions on their side. Only then could we have our lawyer spend any time on the contract.

We called the Visio CFO.

We explained that their boilerplate contract was something we couldn’t sign because it would put us out of business. We said we would be happy to work with him in providing assurances on issues that were of importance to him and his company.

We suggested that we see if we could agree to them in this call. But we wondered if he had the flexibility (meaning the authority) to overrule his lawyer on their standard contract?  (It now became a matter of pride that he could.) We said that if we agreed on the big issues we could send the deal back to our lawyers. (He was surprised to hear about half of the things in his own contract.  “It says what?!”)

We agreed to the major points in a half hour. The lawyers had the final contract done in two days.

Lessons Learned

Lawyers provide a service; they are not running your company.

If you find a lawyer who talks about solutions not problems, hold on to them.

In every company that gives you a contract there’s someone who wants a deal.  When you run into contract issues, call them first for advice.

Recognize whether you have a legal problem or strategy problem.

The web has great blogs by lawyers who get it.  Read them.

Steve Blank teaches entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. He also wrote about building early stage companies in his book, Four Steps to the Epiphany. This post was originally published on his blog, and it is republished here with permission.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Avoid Legal Time Bombs
• How To Negotiate A Commercial Lease
• The 5 Brokers To Avoid When Buying Small Business Insurance

Microsoft is losing two high-profile executives. Both J. Allard, "Chief Experience Offer" and Entertainment and Device Division's CTO, and Robbie Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices Division, are leaving the company per a Steve Ballmer email from this morning. These are the guys behind the Xbox, Zune, Project Natal, and the dead Courier project -- so basically all of Microsoft's hit entertainment projects from the last decade.

From: Steve Ballmer Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:01 AM To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG) Subject: Executive Leadership Transitions After almost 22 years with the company, Robbie Bach has decided to retire from Microsoft. I have worked with Robbie during his entire tenure at Microsoft, and count him as both a friend and a great business partner and leader. Robbie has always had great timing, and is going out on a high note - this has been a phenomenal year for E&D overall, and with the coming launches of both Windows Phone 7 and "Project Natal," the rest of the year looks stupendous as well. While we are announcing Robbie's retirement today, he will remain here through the fall, ensuring we have a smooth transition.

The iPad as a Family Computer —

Chuck Hollis, VP and global marketing CTO at EMC:

All the PCs and laptops are basically not being used. All the Macs are not being used. All have been powered off.

Everyone in the family is waiting for their turn at the iPad.

It was just a few years ago that Adobe’s Flash revolutionized video publishing by enabling media companies to reach a vast number of consumers with a plugin that ensured a consistent rich media experience across multiple operating systems and browsers. Now, Brightcove might be at the forefront of the next revolution of video publishing, as those companies face a new challenge: how to publish video on multiple devices, all of which have different software support and different encoding requirements.

Of course, at the center of both shifts is Jeremy Allaire, who spearheaded the creation of Flash video while CTO of Macromedia. At that time, Flash solved a significant problem for publishers. With its help, it didn’t matter whether you were serving video in Internet Explorer, Firefox or another browser, so long as the Flash plugin was installed, that multimedia experience would be the same regardless of the actual setup.

Now, Allaire says Brightcove is helping to solve a similar problem for video publishers: how to deal with the complexity of publishing video in an ecosystem where the old Flash model of using a single browser plugin for multiplatform video delivery is broken. Thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple’s insistence on not supporting Flash on the iPhone or the iPad, media companies that want to deliver video to those devices need to also be able to support HTML5 and H.264 encoding.

And there are indications that more complexity is on its way. Google is expected to open-source its VP8 video codec later this month, providing an alternative to H.264 and the open-source Ogg Theora codec. With support in Google’s Chrome browser, as well as Firefox and Opera, VP8 could become the codec of choice for the open source crowd. VP8 could also be used for video delivery in Android smartphones and in upcoming Google TV products, which are expected to run on the Android operating system.

But it’s doubtful that Apple will adopt VP8, as the company has already made big bets on H.264 and a recent email from Steve Jobs warns that patent pools might be going after Ogg Theora and other open-source codecs in the future. Microsoft, too, has said it will only support H.264 in the next version of its web browser, Internet Explorer 9.

With that in mind, publishers need to either pick and choose which devices, codecs and plugins they’re going to support, or they need to find a way to deliver to all of them with minimal investment in encoding, delivery and development. In other words, it’s almost like 2004 all over again, when media companies had to choose between serving video in Windows Media Player, RealPlayer or Apple Quicktime — all of which had varying levels of adoption across different operating systems, not to mention varying levels of video quality and usefulness.

Allaire noted in a dinner meeting with the press last night that it was Flash that helped bridge the divide between the different browsers and operating systems back in the day. Ironically, he said, what Brightcove does now is reduce the complexity for video publishers wishing to reach multiple platforms and devices.

So in this new generation of video publishing, it’s not a plugin or the application that will solve the problem of how to reach consumers on various devices, but the publishing platform itself. It’s Brightcove and other video management and platforms like it that will help to drive more video across more devices — and they’ll be doing so whether those devices support Flash, HTML5 video encoded in H.264, Ogg Theora, VP8 or any other codec.

Related content on GigaOM Pro:

What Does the Future Hold For Browsers? (subscription required)

A new, top secret, "people-powered" search engine named Slangwho -- being built in New York -- appears to finally be launching in a few weeks.

We've been hearing buzz about Slangwho for months. Yet no one seems to know what it is, who's funding it, etc. Some new teaser videos suggest the site, which has been in beta testing for a while, is getting close to launching to the public -- specifically, May 14.

Slangwho is differentiating itself as "powered by the people," and these videos hit on that point, suggesting that search results from big-time search engines like Google and Bing aren't tailored enough to the individual user. The videos' description reads, "These videos are a commentary on the ‘black box’ algorithms used by most search engines to determine search results. Slangwho’s search results are determined by users...not by a box."

Slangwho's search results are determined by user reviews in comments, we understand. But we aren't quite sure how that works yet.

We got in touch with Slangwho's chief marketing officer Sasha A. Tcherevkoff, who is well known in some New York circles as one of the owners behind Pop Burger, the hip burger joint in the Meatpacking District, across the street from Google's New York office. Sasha is mum on what Slangwho is and does, but he tells us these videos are directed by Italian director and producer Aaron Chiesa and are called "Black Box Series."

He also filled us in on who a few more of his partners in Slangwho are: CEO John Shriber and CTO Roman Zaks.

A quick search reveals that Shriber and Zaks are principals at One-Up Ventures, "a privately held investment firm with an opportunistic 'hybrid' investment approach." The guys also teamed up several years ago to launch Roomster.com, a roommate finder. But that's all we could quickly find.

Either way, sounds interesting and ambitious, but also very challenging. We won't praise or trash the site until we've seen it, but there is a reason that Google has been able to grow and maintain its huge share of the search market -- people are generally pretty happy with how it works. And anything "powered by the people" is tough to scale.

Still, there's always room for new ideas, and we look forward to learning more about Slangwho.

Here are those videos via Vimeo:

Join the conversation about this story »

Browser vendor Opera Software is well-known for its support of open web standards. So hot on the heels of the release of Opera 10.52 for Mac, I thought I’d chat to Bruce Lawson, a web evangelist at Opera, about the Open vs. Closed debate, which we’re covering as an ongoing series on the GigaOM Network, to get his take on why open standards matter for web workers — and the web as a whole. Below is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Simon: Can you briefly outline Opera’s stance on open standards?

Lawson: Of all the browsers currently available, Opera has been around the longest, and has always supported open standards. Note I don’t mean open source; although there are overlaps between the two movements, they’re not the same. You could make an open-source Photoshop clone, for example, but as the Photoshop data format PSD isn’t an open standard, so you couldn’t use it in your clone. We believe that if data is transferred in open, royalty-free formats then it is more future-proof and more manipulable than data that is held in proprietary formats. You’re also protected against being locked into one company’s products — if you don’t like us tomorrow, you can change. I have university essays in a proprietary Tasword format that I can’t open any more as the format was tied to one program, which is now discontinued.

And we put our money where our mouth is: Out of 600 employees, about 25 devote most of their time working on actually making the standards — both the “sexy” standards like HTML5, CSS (our CTO Håkon Wium Lie was co-creator of CSS), SVG, geolocation and widgets, and also the “industry standards” that drive the TV and mobile applications industry, such as CE-HTML, JIL and BONDI.

Simon: The web designers and developers in the WebWorkerDaily audience should all be aware of the benefits of open standards as they use them daily in their work, but why are they important for everyone else? If I’m, say, a copywriter or a lawyer, why should I care?

Lawson: Apart from the future-proofing aspect I explained before, you also have the advantage of portability. An HTML document, for example, will open just about anywhere — PC, Mac, Linux, mobile devices, netbooks etc. Documents authored to W3C standards can work with all the world’s languages, and can be run on mobile devices, TVs and even the much-vaunted web-enabled fridge. There’s also the question of accessibility. Open web standards developed by the W3C have to go through a process to ensure they are accessible — that is, the information contained in documents developed according to the standard can be made available to people with disabilities so, for example, a blind person can hear a description of an image, or a person who can’t use a mouse can navigate a web page using only the keyboard. That accessibility isn’t automatic — the developer has to be professional and take care to use the language correctly — but there is nothing inherently blocking that accessibility. It seems to me that a copywriter would want her purple prose to be available to as many people as possible, and the lawyer would know that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities.

Simon: Opera has been championing support for standards for some time now. Was the decision to support open standards primarily an ideological one, or a commercial one?

Lawson: Both. Our customers (for our embedded browsers, our mobile browsers, etc.) require us to adhere to industry standards, so if we don’t then we don’t get the business. Open standards, as I explained before, ensure the widest possible reach, so it’s sensible to champion them and support them.

Fundamentally (and here’s the ideology) we believe that you should be able to reach any website from any device: a desktop, a phone, an in-car browser, a digital picture frame. It won’t necessarily look exactly the same everywhere (in fact, it shouldn’t — a web page might be easier to read if reformatted to fit a mobile phone screen, for example), but you should be able to access it and interact with it.

Simon: It seems to me that open standards take a long time to develop, due to the amount of wrangling it takes to get agreement from all interested parties in reaching the most acceptable solution. Do you think that open standards hinder or slow the pace of browser innovation (and the web, generally)?

Lawson: It does take a long time to develop open standards. But that standardization process pays off very quickly. Developing a typical web page now is much quicker if you do it to those standards than it was during the dark days of the last Browser War, when you had to develop parallel code bases for IE and Netscape, or choose one of them and lock out people who used the other browser.

As to whether open standards slow the development of the browser — that could be true, if we were selfish. If, for example, you wanted to include some new feature in a browser it is indeed much faster just to develop it and add it in, rather than wait for it to be standardized. But that definitely inhibits the development of the open, interoperable web, and for us that’s much, much more important.

In fact, open standards can speed up browser development. Take, for example, XMLHttpRequest — XHR — the technology that powers Ajax-driven websites that feel as responsive as desktop apps. It was invented by Microsoft. Every other browser vendor saw the value of this technology and spent countless man-hours reverse engineering it to get into their browsers. Now, XHR has been standardized. Any new browser vendor wishing to implement XHR just picks up the spec and implements it, with no need for all that reverse engineering. And because the specification is well-written (disclosure: it was edited by Anne van Kesteren, a colleague of mine at Opera) it can be implemented in a way that is interoperable with existing browsers and websites. Everybody wins.

Simon: There’s new browser war raging at the moment — the major vendors all have pretty good products. Competition in the market is fierce, and seems to be being waged on three fronts: features, speed and standards. What future developments are you looking forward to the most?

Lawson: Personally, I’m excited about HTML5 (so excited, in fact, I’m writing a book about it). HTML is the language that the web is based on, and it hasn’t been overhauled in a decade. The new version — which already has great support in modern browsers — allows websites to be even more like desktop applications, encompassing on-the-fly image generation, native video and audio, data storage in the browser and offline applications. Consumers might not know there’s a whole new evolution under the hood, but they will notice new robustness, interoperability and things “just working” — no more messages to download and install new plugins.

Widgets are very exciting, too. You can write an app that behaves like a native app, has access to the file system but is written using web standards, so can be run on any smartphone with a widget manager (see more at widgets.opera.com)

What browser developments are you looking forward to the most?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Photo by stock.xchng user beuford00

Playdom is continuing its shopping spree today with the acquisition of social game developer Merscom. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

It appears that the acquisition is based around talent and Merscom’s branded games business. Playdom says that it plans to leverage Merscom’s expertise in working with IP owners as the gaming giant moves to develop partnerships with “powerful global brands.” Founded 16 years ago, Merscom has produced over 250 games in total and over 30 casual games for such brands as Lifetime Networks, Paramount and Starz Entertainment and is currently developing games for Sea World, Purina, National Geographic and NBC Universal.

Playdom, which recently brought on a new CTO, has steadily been expanding its presence on Facebook, most recently acquiring Facebook game developer Offbeat Creations and developer Three Melons. Playdom also invested $5 million in Facebook game developer MetroGames. Merscom has a number of Facebook games that will be added to Playdom’s arsenal.

In November, Playdom raised a massive $43 million at a $260 million valuation. According to our stats from November, Playdom has 28 million monthly game users. 60% of traffic is from MySpace v. 40% from Facebook. Playdom’s main competitor is gaming giant Zynga, which is a leading game developer on Facebook.

Back in February, John Treadway, director of cloud computing portfolio at Boston-based Unisys, wrote that, "I think we might be at the very beginning of an interesting new phase in the evolution of cloud computing -- regional and local clouds."

Treadway rightly points out that local and regional hosting is hardly new, as smaller players have been "operating in the shadows of the big hosting companies" for many years. Such firms often simply resell the data center capacity of large players, he notes, but some of them have their own facilities. North Carolina's Hosted Solutions and Massachusetts' InetServices are two examples. Another is Minnesota-based VISI.com's recently launched Reliacloud.

Sponsor

Guest author Graeme Thickins is a technology writer, analyst, blogger and startup advisor. He began writing about cloud long before it was even called that. He blogs at www.tech-surf-blog.com, is a contributor at www.minnov8.com, and has guest posted several times at ReadWriteWeb. Disclosure: He has had a consulting relationship with VISI/Reliacloud.

According to Treadway, it's only natural for some local hosters to start new cloud initiatives to keep their customers from ending up at Amazon, Rackspace or the like. "Some will be successful, while others will fail," he maintains. But he predicts that a market segment will develop for regional cloud providers.

Building a Regional Cloud

The challenge of putting together such a service is not as daunting as some might assume given the tools available today, says Jason Baker, CTO VISI.com and ReliaCloud. "Our service was built using technology from VMOps, a venture-backed cloud stack provider based in Cupertino, California," he says.

He said other tools his company evaluated included VMware, Xen Cloud from Citrix, Eucalyptus, and others. He noted that Reliacloud is based on Xen this release, but that the firm is planning for other hypervisors in version 2.

"We built our own front end for self-service on top of VMOps' APIs, though we later realized what VMOps had out of the box would have saved us considerable time," said Baker. "We use the Tucows Platypus billing system, monitor our cloud with Nagios, and our storage is based on OpenSolaris ZFS managing Dell storage shelves." He noted that VMOps will be adding more enterprise storage options.

Part of ReliaCloud's early success was due to an existing customer base. "[It] was in beta for about three months," said Johnny Hatch, product manager. "During the beta period, the service was free, and nearly 100 customers signed up," he said, noting about half of them were existing VISI customers.

Why Go Regional?

Here are some of the things Baker said his firm learned during the process of planning and launching the Reliacloud service:

"We found customers want to keep tabs on where their applications are running. They also want to be able to audit their cloud service provider, they need custom configurations, and they like the extra comfort of knowing the people who are running the cloud. These companies find a regional/local cloud to be attractive." Examples of those customers include tech startups and interactive marketing agencies.

"In some cases, regulatory issues favor the regional/local cloud as well," Baker said. "In healthcare and financial services, the fact that a company can know for sure where its data is located at all times - meaning, in which legal jurisdictions - is more than comforting."

The Future

Baker admits ReliaCloud is still early in its cloud journey, but so far he is pleased. "Our success to date has been heartening." VISI had a busy first quarter. After launching the Reliacloud service in February, the firm announced in late March it had been acquired by TDS Telecommunications Corp. TDS, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, markets communications services to business and residential customers in 30 states, including Minnesota.

Treadway positions the regional cloud trend this way: "An analogy comes to mind. Think of the big hosting companies as giant boulders. They take up a lot of space, but they leave a lot of space between them for rocks, stones, pebbles, and sand. Local and regional clouds are there to fill the empty spaces." And, he says, there are a whole lot of those empty spaces.

Discuss

How to "Like" Anything on the Web (Safely) —

Worried about Facebook "like" fraud? You should be. Thanks to Facebook's overly simple implementation of the new Facebook Like Button, anyone can post a "Like This" button on their website pointing to any URL of their choosing. In other words, users can be tricked into liking websites they're not even on. You can bet that enterprising spammers have already figured out how to use this technology for their own nefarious purposes.

If you want a safer solution, there's a new Facebook "like" bookmarklet you can use instead.

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The bookmarklet was created by Kyle Bragger, formerly the CTO of Cork'd, a social networking site for wine lovers, and now working on his own project, Forrst, an invite-only community for developers and designers.

Not only does using the bookmarklet he created protect you from "like fraud" as described here, it's also a handy way to like anything on the Internet - even if there's no "like" button available on that page.

How to Use the Facebook Like Bookmarklet

To use the bookmarklet, just drag this link to your bookmarks bar in your web browser: Like-o-matic.

Once there, you can click it anytime you're on a page or website you like.

Like ReadWriteWeb, for example? Click the button. Although there's no "Facebook Like Button" for the website as a whole (you can, however, find us on Facebook), you'll be given the opportunity to "like" ReadWriteWeb.

After clicking the bookmarklet once, you'll see a message appear at the top of the screen: "Be the first of your friends to like this." Click the button with the thumbs up on it and it will register your like on Facebook and post it to your News Feed.

That's all there is to it.

By using the bookmarklet instead of the like buttons on the websites themselves, you can be sure that your Facebook "like" will be pointing to the real thing. Plus, it allows you to "like" anything you want - even a site that isn't using Facebook buttons. Nice!

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Facebook’s ambition —

Ambition.

It’s the one word that kept coming up in conversations I had around the halls today at Facebook’s F8 event. Whenever I heard that word it was clear we were talking about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Compared to last week’s weak moves by Twitter, where its CEO barely even announced anything, yesterday’s moves by Facebook were huge.

OK, I heard another few words:

“Visionary.”

“Scary.”

“Huge.”

“Unbelieveable.”

“Blown away.”

“Zuck has balls.” or “Facebook has balls.”

“Big moves.”

Heck, listen to David Kirkpatrick, who worked for Fortune for more than 20 years and just finished a book, Facebook Effect, about Facebook. I catch up with him here before the press conference, which happened just after Zuckerberg and team made tons of announcements:

Listen to the words he uses: “This is not just another company, it is a transformational phenomenon.”

“It is really great, but it is really scary in some ways too.”

By the way, after I talk with David I talk with quite a few other movers and shakers in the tech press in that video so you can get a sense of how we all reacted to the news. Then, at about 20 minutes into that video you get to see the full press conference (I have the only video of it on the Web that I’ve seen so far).

Before I explain more about what I mean when I say Facebook wants to own your digital fingerprints, there are a few other reactions I want to get in here. The first is with a couple of guys from the National Hockey League. Listen to how excited they are about the new features they turned on yesterday on NHL.com. You can “like” every player there. Some players already have hundreds of likes in just the first few hours.

Then watch how Pandora’s CTO, Tom Conrad, describes Facebook’s moves and how Pandora is now much more social because of these changes. “Mark is right when he says Web experiences want to be social.”

Finally, head over to Facebook’s official site and watch some of the videos if you haven’t seen them yet.

WHY IS THIS SO AMBITIOUS?

These moves are ambitious for a few reasons:

1. It gets Facebook plastered all over the web. Already Facebook likes are on many many sites and I’d expect to see Facebook’s new social features to show up on at least 30% of the web’s most popular sites within a month.
2. It lets us apply our social graph “fingerprint” to sites we visit. You do this by adding social plugins to your site, which is pretty easy to do.
3. It lets us apply our behavior “fingerprint” to sites we visit. Again, by adding social plugins onto your sites.
4. Facebook gets to study everything we touch now and will bring a much more complete stream back to the mother ship. This lets them build new analytics features for publishers, too, as All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill writes, but now Facebook will have the best data on the web for advertisers to study.
5. Facebook gets us to keep our profile data up to date. Marketer Ed Dale nailed why this is such a big deal.
6. Facebook gets to overlay a commerce system, called Credits, on top of all this. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook writes about that.
7. Facebook has opened up to enable all this stuff to flow back and forth and has removed the 24-hour limitation on storing data gained from its API. This is probably the biggest deal for developers, Inside Facebook writes about that, but they’ve also made their API more granular so that sites can ask for, and get, very specific data instead of getting everything stored on a user. We’ll be talking about this for a while, because it actually has good implications for privacy.
8. All this new data will enable Facebook to build new kinds of search experiences, as All Facebook hints at in a post where they say Facebook is trying to build a version fo the semantic web. Search Engine Land goes further in detail about what these changes will mean.
9. It lets Facebook minimize the need for a “public” fan page, like mine. Inside Facebook explains more in detail why this is true. Mostly because they’ll spit all those bits over onto my blog, if I add the code to my blog (which I’m pretty sure I will).
10. Finally a stream of focused bits for the people who are actually visiting your page can be pushed back out to you, as Inside Facebook demonstrates.
11. They made the API much simpler and shipped a powerful graph API so more developers can build apps for Facebook (this has been one of the advantages of Twitter, for instance, because Twitter’s API was simple to figure out). Heck, you can even hit it from a web browser to see what it returns. Here is what it returns for http://graph.facebook.com/scobleizer (if you want to try it yourself, just include your Facebook name instead of mine).

Is this all a deal with the devil, as RWW asks? Absolutely! Sebastien Provencher has another concern: that Facebook will gather data but not sure the goodies back (like analytics and monetization). GigaOm’s Liz Gannes notes that Facebook now is a single point of failure for the Web. Leo Laporte says he won’t use the new Facebook features on his sites. Dave Winer goes even further and says that the answer to all this must be “no.”

These are legitimate concerns. Let’s explore why:

Let’s key in on #2: your social graph — the people connected to you in various ways — is a fingerprint. My social graph is different than yours. So, when I click “like” on a hockey player on NHL, I’ve applied my fingerprint to that hockey player. Now what if 1,000 other people do that? That site really has a lot of details about the average user that’s visiting: details they never would have had access to before. But that’s not what’s scary. What’s scary is the traffic boost that these sites will get. Why? Because those 1,000 people will drag all their friends over. Actually, no, that’s not scary either.

What we’re really scared about is another very powerful company is forming. One that we don’t yet fully trust. Heck, just a few years ago Facebook erased me from the web for 24 hours. I can’t forget that, even though now I’m good friends with most of the Facebook execs. Let’s say Facebook wanted to kick you off the system, it could, and that could have deep implications for your business, career, etc.

Now go further, we’re all going to be very addicted to Facebook’s new features very quickly. The website that doesn’t have Facebook “likes” on it will seem weird in a few months. In a few years? Almost every site, I predict, will have them, and the other components that you can check out above (and more that will come soon, both from Facebook as well as other developers).

My fears are that Facebook might turn evil and use its position against organizations, the way that Apple locks out organizations from shipping apps (do you have Google Voice app on your iPhone yet? I don’t). Imagine if Facebook wanted to turn off the New York Times, for instance. It could. And that’s a LOT of power to give to one organization, even one that’s earned my trust like Facebook has. This is why I keep hoping Google has a clue (so far it hasn’t).

Tomorrow during the Gillmor Gang I’ll try to talk about the identity fingerprints that Facebook now has under its control. It is a scary world, but one that has huge benefits to all of us.

Today I told someone like I felt like I was at the completion of a major piece of commerce infrastructure that would affect our lives for decades. I likened it to the cross-continental railroad. Remember that? Well it changed the world. It opened the west. Made new careers possible. Let fresh food from California get to Chicago before it spoiled and all that. But it created an organization that had a LOT of power that wasn’t always used well.

Today I told Zuckerberg that he now has the modern-day railroad in his grasp and challenged him to both win our trust and not abuse the major power he’s going to aggregate.

So far I’m hearing all the right things from him and the employees around him. They know that this is a major, ambitious, move and they are going to move carefully and deliberately from here. They better or else we’ll see regulators move into control this business like we’ve never seen in our industry. One CEO, who asked not to be named, told me in the hallways today that Facebook is now a utility that the industry is going to rely on and he noted that utilities usually are heavily regulated to make sure that they don’t abuse the power they have over people and businesses.

The moves Facebook made today ARE that significant. Don’t miss Facebook’s ambition.

Oh, and if you’d like to hear more later today we’ll do a special Gillmor Gang and we’ll have Bret Taylor of Facebook on to fill in more details at noon Pacific Time. Watch building43 live then.

Fujitsu Making $537 Million Investment in Cloud Computing —

The Nikkei Daily in Japan is reporting that Fujitsu will invest $537 million in cloud computing for 2011.

That seems like a staggering investment to us but perhaps it's not at all surprising considering the metamorphosis in the IT sector.

According to The Nikkei and Reuters, the investments will be for more servers and external memory storage at data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and Singapore.

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Fujitsu is not a name that is often thought of in terms of cloud computing. But it is one of the largest IT management services companies in the world, competing with the likes of companies such as CA and Microsoft, two providers with deep investments of their own in cloud computing.

A little more insight into the investment came at the Symantec conference last week during an interview with Fujitsu CTO Dr. Joseph Reger.

According to TechPulse 360, Reger said that relationships are developing, so to speak.

"The IT industry and the cloud thing are in the dating stage... Dating is when you see only the bright side, the opportunities and you don't sit down and worry about what could be the issues."

And like a lot of enterprise technology companies, Fujitsu is pushing for is own cloud stack for he enterprise:

"It is a step away from current IT but it needs to be connected to the current IT: so private-public cloud. We're thinking about trusted boundaries, the security perimeters and so on. And we are seriously hoping that the cloud will be just another incarnation of IT, not a total different thing. Meaning that there will be a cloud stack where everybody can contribute... Because if the cloud is like an end to end proprietary big heater proposition, that's not good for us, for you [Symantec] and for our customers either."

Open standards, anyone?

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As it promised, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has moved very quickly to replace CTO and EVP of products Ari Balogh, who said earlier this month that he was leaving for “personal reasons.” The company says Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) veteran Blake Irving will be its new chief product officer. Irving had been a long-time executive at Microsoft, who—among other roles—led the back-end of its Windows Live platform, but “retired” three years ago, shortly before a major reorganization of Microsoft’s online operations. He’s worked since as a professor at Pepperdine’s business school.

In a release, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz cites Irving’s “large scale internet expertise from a mature company” as driving his hiring and says his focus will include “speeding key inputs and decision making into product strategy and direction.” Irving delivers his own accolades to Yahoo in a blog post here. Related to the hiring, Yahoo says Chief Scientist Prabhakar Raghavan will now report directly to Bartz.

The speed at which Yahoo has filled Balogh’s position provides a contrast to how it has handled some of its other senior executive vacancies. Sales chief Joanne Bradford left in mid-March but the company has said it expects the search for her replacement to take a “couple of months,” while it called off this fall a more than seven-month long search for someone to lead its international operations, saying it was unable to find “anyone who was up to our needs.”

Related

• MSN Signs Video Deals; Search Efforts Still Sketchy; Gates Goes Full Time on Advertising
• Yahoo CTO Balogh To Leave; Replacement To Be Named In "Coming Weeks"

Peter Yared is founder and CEO of social app development company Transpond.

XAuth, Google’s attempt to head off Facebook’s domination of online content sharing, is fraught with problems. It appears to be built with good intentions, allowing smaller social services to persist in a Facebook- and Twitter-dominated world. But unlike OAuth, the standard many of those services use today to link publishers’ websites to their services and which allows any website to work directly with any identity provider, XAuth actually stands in between the two and directs traffic. And that spells trouble. I should know. I’ve tried what they’re doing before.

I was the CTO of Sun Microsystem’s Liberty Alliance, where we invented the concept of federated identity, and am the inventor on the patent that covers federated identity. We first attempted to do the exact same thing –stand in between the websites and the identity providers in order to provide a seamless interaction. But no one wanted a third party standing between them. Instead, we delivered a specification that is very similar to how OAuth works today. Trying to evolve OAuth so that it becomes a service that intermediates direct relationships is a nonstarter.

The thesis of XAuth is that there are too many login and sharing services for a publisher to choose from, and that XAuth would only show the ones that are relevant to a user. This is the same principle as Google’s OpenSocial platform for developing social applications. OpenSocial’s creators posited that there were too many social networks for developers to choose from, so Google would provide a single open API that would access multiple social networks. We all know how that played out – there is only one social network that matters anymore.

The point of logging in and sharing is to share with friends. If people are all on one social network, why do they need to choose from a list of 20 providers to share? Most publishers offer logging in and sharing via Facebook and Twitter, which are both very easy to implement, and they get to service the vast majority of their customers.

I believe it is no coincidence that XAuth is launching right before Facebook’s F8 conference, its annual gathering for developers. The aim of XAuth is not to make it easier for users to login and share information, but to curb the inroads that Facebook is making into Google’s core advertising business. Facebook’s $500 million in estimated annual revenue is still small compared to Google’s $23 billion. But Facebook has steadily progressed over the past year, passing Google first in terms of minutes spent online, and recently in terms of unique visits.

Why should Google be so worried about Facebook? It really boils down to an obvious truth. Facebook is about people, and Google is about the algorithm. And who uses computers? People. And the algorithm doesn’t even work anymore. Search for “futon” and take a look at all of the results that have been gamed by advertisers. Who can tell you what a futon is the most comfortable? Not Google.

By spreading Facebook features into websites, Facebook will learn who is using which sites and what content is popular for which types of people. Websites will increase registrations, increase pageviews, increase sales, and most importantly be able to display much more highly targeted ads. The ads that Facebook displays next to profiles are way more targeted than the ads that Google thinks someone might like based on the content of a page.

To better understand the urgency of XAuth, I’ve included a table laying out current and upcoming Facebook features that publishers will love to integrate into their sites and that will displace some of Google’s most lucrative features. The people at Google are not stupid, and they will have to pull more tricks out of their hat than just XAuth.

Current/Future Facebook Feature	Replaced Google Feature	Benefit to Publisher	Benefit to Facebook
Facebook Connect	Google Friend Connect	Increased registrations and logins.	Learn which sites are popular and how they are visited.
Facebook Search	Google Site Search	Returns what products and content is popular within a social network, increasing pageviews and sales.	Learn what products and search terms are popular.
Facebook Like	Google Buzz	Posts content to newsfeeds drawing traffic from friends.	Learn in real time what content is popular and viral.
Facebook Banner Ads	Google DoubleClick	Higher CPMs since social and profile targeting are better than content or behavioral targeting.	Google’s banner ad revenue.
Facebook Text Ads	Google AdSense	Higher CPMs since social and profile targeting are better than content targeting.	Google’s text ad revenue.

Can the algorithm evolve to beat the people? If it doesn’t, Google could face a Facebook-dominated world. Here’s an illustration of what one popular publisher, the Huffington Post, might look like after Facebook takes over. It’s Google’s worst nightmare.

Tags: OAuth, XAuth

Companies: Facebook, Google

People: Peter Yared

Syncing Contacts: The Impossible Dream —

Of all the problems that plague the plugged-in, social worker, one of the simplest remains the hardest to solve: Synching contacts. Most of us have so many contacts spread across so many networks we lose track of them, can't access them when and where we need to and miss opportunities to connect. All we want is to synchronize all of our contact lists. A master rolodex. Why is that so hard?

\Google offered to connect me with Joseph Smarr, the former CTO of Plaxo, a company that's been trying to create this for, oh, 18 years now, and now with Google on a team focused on the social Web. I asked Smarr to help me understand the limitations of contact syncing today, why something so simple is actually complex, and when we can expect it to get easier.

Why can't I keep my Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and other contact lists in sync both ways, right now?
It's basically technically impossible. And that's assuming all the parties are cooperating, which they aren't, and that it's what you actually want, which you don't. 

I don't?
What you actually want is a little more complicated than "make it all the same everywhere." If I'm connected to somebody on LinkedIn, I want them in my address book, that's pretty clear. But then if I disconnect them from LinkedIn, do I want their info deleted from my address book? Maybe not. And do I want to be connected to everyone on LinkedIn who is in my address book? Maybe not. Some people use multiple social networks with the same sets of people and want it to all sync. Some people partition different aspects of their life by keeping LinkedIn just for professional stuff, or Facebook just for friendly stuff, or Twitter just for celebrities. Different people end up wanting different things.

The whole Buzz rollout has been the most notorious fail of the year around not being careful about how people want to use their contacts across different contexts. What lessons can you draw from that experience?
You have to make sure users really understand what they are doing and have the right controls and don't get surprised. The rule is, if you've surprised your users, then you haven't done a good job. The problem is you can't always anticipate what's going to surprise users, and different users have different expectations. Lots of Buzz users were very happy: thank goodness that it magically helped me follow all these people and didn't make me do a whole bunch of work. And other people were surprised and dismayed. It's exactly the same functionality, so one-size-fits-all doesn't always work.

How do you manage relationships across different social networks? 
I'm a great example of someone who doesn't have the tools I need to do as good a job as I'd like to do. The challenge for me is that not everyone is on every platform, whether it's Plaxo or Facebook or Twitter. That's why I've been so passionate about open standards for moving data between these social networks. I shouldn't have to get everyone on Gmail just so I can email them. I shouldn't have to get on Sprint to call them. It's lunacy to think that we have to get everyone in one place because that's the only way sharing will ever happen. 

So how do we get companies to let go a little bit and cooperate to help us manage contacts across networks?
The game-changer is the rise of smartphones. Social media players need to be on smartphones to be relevant, and it's forcing those companies to build all the APIs they'd need to play with each other as well. 

So all I have to do is wait a little longer until this problem is solved?
Consumers need to demand this, use Get Satisfaction, and blog, and ask companies "How come it doesn't work this way?" Anyplace where you store data and don't have sufficient access to make it work with the other tools you use, you should be making those companies aware that you're not happy about it.

But if Facebook and Google aren't agreeing on a way to help me sync those contacts, how can I know who to lobby?
The problem is that a lot of the sites don't want to publicly shame the other sites by saying "Click here to connect with Facebook — oh, doesn't work? Go yell at Zuckerman." Plus, there are legitimate concerns on behalf of LinkedIn and Facebook and others around protecting their users' privacy. But ultimately you either trust users and try to give them the tools to help them make smart decisions and to clean up the damage after the fact, or you act paternalistically and say sorry, we need to save you from yourself.

Has managing contacts become a mass consumer problem, and not just a problem for us geeks?
Absolutely! People want to stay in touch with one another. That's a basic human emotion. And people are using all kinds of different tools because we're in a world where nobody has dominant market share. Whether it's sharing status updates or sharing photos or just knowing where your friends are and what they're doing, that fragmentation is going to continue, and it's very healthy as long as consumers have the choice to connect up the tools they use and communicate across the services. 

I've been at this over 8 years and sometimes I'm not sure we're any further ahead than when I started. But this has become more of a mainstream problem. Before social networking and before smartphones, maybe this was a power user problem. But now everybody is faced with this.

And people are so used to this all being so terrible that a lot of them don't even realize how good it could be. It's only when you have a taste of this magic that people will crave the work that it takes to get it done for real.

Meanwhile, it feels like a full-time job to manage all my data.

It is a full time job. And that's the other sad thing. Think of all the great content and personal interactions you're missing and I'm missing and that we're all missing. It's one of those things you don't notice because you don't see it. 

But think about the moments when your friend shared some photos or a blog post or something, and you think, I would have missed that you'd done that. And I'm so happy you got married or you went on a cool trip or you got a new job.

And you know there are so many more people you care about who are doing those things. You're just not hearing about them, or worse, they're just not sharing it in the first place because they're so pessimistic that the right people will even hear it, or that they'll be able to do it with the right level of privacy controls.

There's so many great human-to-human moments in store of staying in touch, and having a more intimate relationship, and sharing that joy -- if we can just work things out. That's what keeps me motivated.

em>Alexandra Samuel is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University, and the co-founder of Social Signal, a Vancouver-based social media agency. You can follow Alex on Twitter as awsamuel or her blog at alexandrasamuel.com.

Pip.io integrates public and private online conversations —

In most circumstances, you wouldn’t talk about the latest WordPress release to your mom.  You also wouldn’t want to broadcast the pics from your best friend’s bachelor party to your boss.  In the real world, we use filters to make conversations contextual.  In the voyeuristic and very public world of social media though, there are often no ways of making these distinctions.

Pip.io is a social network that, according to its CEO Leo Shimizu, “is based on the core principles of privacy”.  Pip.io does indeed aggregate from Twitter, Facebook, RSS and YouTube in the same way FriendFeed does, but it allows you to broadcast messages to only certain people within your social circle.  Messages can be assigned “targets”, allowing our conversations to hit with more relevance and less noise.

Between email and public feeds, “There’s all this in between that’s missing”.  Learn how Pip.io can help bring back contextual conversations from their CEO Leo Shimizu and CTO David Chen.

Learn more at:

Pip.io’s website: http://pip.io

Pip.io’s CrunchBase Profile: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pipio

Verizon, AT&T & Cisco Talk Up Internet of Things —

You know that a trend is ramping up when big companies begin to namecheck it. That's what is happening to the Internet of Things, an emerging trend where real-world objects are connected to the Internet. Senior executives from two major U.S. broadband and telecommunications companies - Verizon and AT&T - plus the CTO of the world's biggest network systems provider Cisco, have recently discussed the Internet of Things.

As part of a patriotic statement about how the U.S. leads the world in Internet innovation, Verizon chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg said today that the "'Internet of Things' will infuse intelligence into all our systems and present us with a whole new way to run a home, an enterprise, a community or an economy."

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Seidenberg said that "in a 4G world, wireless will connect everything" and that "there's really no limit to the number of connections that can be part of the mobile grid: vehicles, appliances, buildings, roads, medical monitors."

AT&T have also been making noises about the Internet of Things. At the recent CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, AT&T announced a partnership with a company called American Security Logistics (ASL), to "wirelessly connect a series of location based tracking devices that can be used to help keep tabs on an array of valuables - from people to pets to pallets." The first product will be a cargo shipping tracking and monitoring application. Other products in the pipeline include pet tracking, child safety and Alzheimer's patient monitoring.

Both Verizon and AT&T are positioning their wireless networks as key parts of the emerging Internet of Things.

Cisco is another company getting in on the trend. At CTIA, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said that by 2013, the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion - up from 500 million in 2007. According to Warrior, "we're heading into the Internet of Things."

Warrior sees high growth in the Internet of Things. "With more machine-to-machine connections and wireless sensors everywhere," she said, "the Internet is no longer just an information superhighway [but] a platform that will transform many industries."

These bigco utterings remind me of when web 2.0 first began to creep into corporate speak in around 2005. It's still early days for the Internet of Things, but prepare yourself to hear a lot more of this term.

ReadWriteWeb has been at the cutting edge of defining and explaining the nascent Internet of Things, see our extensive archives for more information. If you're new to the topic, check out Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Internet of Things and Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009.

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