Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Mobile: 07/29/10

2010년 7월 29일 목요일

Blogging on the iPad: A Sad State of Affairs

Blogging on the iPad is a sorry state of affairs — I’m also coming at this from the angle of a prose blog, not a photo blog. Both WordPress and BlogPress allow you to do the same basic features: type in your thoughts and press publish. Neither of the apps let you define links or format your text — you’re limited to plain style. Some of this, I am led to believe from researching other apps with the same problem (Evernote), is how restrictive Apple is on its rich text features. On the other hand, all of the Office-style apps out there let you format text, so I don’t know what’s up. What I do know is, neither of these two apps even come close to the feature set most bloggers need.

WordPress (Free)

As the official app for WordPress, it’s a sad commentary when the best I can say is, “Some of the time, it doesn’t crash. And it’s free.” A quick five minute double-check of some features yielded four crashes. It crashed inserting a picture. It crashed while canceling edits. I wouldn’t be surprised if it crashed while crashing. When I was able to successfully insert a picture, it didn’t show up in the local draft; I had to go out to the local view to see it, and even then it was just code, not a visual. You can, however, manage comments, pages, and assign categories within the WordPress App.

Buying Guide: Apple’s New iMac

Apple updated its iMac and Mac Pro desktop line today with little or no design changes, but the technical specifications of these two machines are finally in line with what you can get from their Windows-running counterparts.

Let’s take a look at these two machines side by side for anyone looking to upgrade or switch.

First of all, if you’re looking to buy one of those shiny new 27″ Apple Cinema Displays to go with a new iMac, wait to make your purchase as those won’t be available until September. In my opinion, Dell’s monitor offerings are priced very competitively to Apple’s, but you lose out on that Apple touch such as an aluminum enclosure and built-in MagSafe adapter. I have a 30″ Dell LCD hooked up to my 27″ iMac and it performs perfectly with Apple’s Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter.

China Media Drops The F-Bomb on Tencent - Novell's New Cloud Partner

The news came recently that Novell will be developing a cloud-computing platform with Tencent, China's largest Internet service provider. As part of the deal, the two companies will establish a research laboratory in Shenzen, China that will be used to develop the data center network that will serve as the cloud platform.

These kinds of deals often seem distant as our knowledge of China's Internet community is a bit limited. But sometimes news comes out that provides a whole new insight.

That's exactly what happened this week when China Computerworld dropped the F-bomb on Tencent in an article and featured the company's mascot bleeding from knife wounds.

Whoa! And we thought the media here can be tough.

Weekly Poll: Is the Cloud Infrastructure Market Too Crowded?

We wrote last week about the state of the cloud services market and how crowded it is becoming.

Cloud Bzz lists more than 30 providers. That includes companies that provide enterprise private clouds, public clouds and public sector clouds. John Treadway's take is that over the next few years there will be at most five or six companies that matter in the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space.

Augment Reality for the Enterprise - SAP Employee Unveils Prototype

SAP BusinessObjects logo SAP employee Timo Elliott has unveiled a prototype for an augmented reality business intelligence iPhone app. He emphasizes that it's a prototype, not a supported product. It's not available for download yet, but Elliott gives us a look at what an augmented enterprise could look like.

Elliot released some proof-of-concept mock-ups on his blog earlier this year (see our coverage), but the project is now in development at SAP in the BusinessObjects Innovation Center, which Elliot says is based on Google Labs.

Augmented enterprise - small

The app prototype enables users to mashup location information with any sort of corporate data available in an enterprise's BusinessObjects OnDemand account. The use case Elliot demonstrates is locating the nearest customers and displaying supplemental information.

When Startups Grow Out of the Cloud

Cloud computing has been a boon to tech startups, allowing them to build, launch and scale without substantial up-front investment in hardware. But at what point does the moving from the cloud to a data center make more sense - for both performance and cost?

Facebook announced plans earlier this year to build a custom data center in Prineville, Oregon, and Twitter announced last week that it plans to build one near Salt Lake City, Utah. And web app maker 37Signals isn't building its own data center, but it did reveal last week that it will move its infrastructure from Rackspace hosting to a colocation space in a Chicago data center.

As Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of Technical Operations said at last month's Structure 2010 conference, "For a consumer web site starting today, I would absolutely run on the cloud. It allows you to focus on building your product. But if you have 10 million users, that's a pretty big check I'm writing to someone else. How much control do I have?"

Verizon Smartphones (Droids?) Use More Data than iPhones

A study from wireless billing vendor Validas has revealed that Verizon Wireless smartphone owners are now exceeding the data usage of iPhone owners, who are currently restricted to AT&T. According to the study, average data consumption on Verizon smartphones is 421 MB as opposed to 338 MB on the iPhone. Out of all the vendors, Verizon Wireless has seen the largest data usage increase over the past year, jumping from 33.4% to 42.9%.

Since Blackberry devices were excluded from the study (and they compress data anyway), that leaves Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian and Palm's webOS to blame (or thank?) for the Verizon phones' data-hogging ways. But given Motorola's extremely strong Droid sales, most of that data usage is likely to have occurred with Droid devices like the Motorola Droid.

The 2009-2010 Validas study looks at year-over-year trends in wireless data usage across U.S. carriers. The data was drawn from 20,000 consumer wireless bills, analyzed from January through May 2010. To be clear, Validas did not detail the Droid's data usage in the study versus the other phones. We're assuming Droid data usage surpassed data usage on other phones. Below we explain why that assumption is a likely one.

Golfscape Augmented Reality Rangefinder for iPhone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld1tMwZi-n0&feature=player_embedded

Hands On with Golfscape AR Rangefinder for iPhone

As the popularity of augmented reality (AR) grows and the technology becomes increasingly easier to develop, it is hard to find an area of our every day lives that is not being augmented. Sports have played a large role in the proliferation of AR - you can thank the technology for telling you where the first-down line is on Sunday - and it's being brought right down to field level now with mobile applications. Last weekend during a brief vacation, I played a round of golf and was able to test out Golfscape, an iPhone app that helps golfers determine distances with an AR rangefinder.

Golfscape is made by Shotzoom Software, the company behind the popular Golfshot app which provides GPS distances, stat tracking and score keeping. Why the AR functionality isn't simply packaged in with the original Golfshot app is almost beyond me - it may have something to do with the fact that Shotzoom charges $29.99 for Golfshot and $19.99 for Golfscape.

Fake Chinese iPads No Longer Hot Sellers

China's vibrant "shanzhai" (also "shanzai") industry, which modifies or knocks off existing electronic products, quickly pounced on the iPad as it did many other phones and devices. Shanzai.com, a site that reviews these ersatz gadgets, reported the first iPad clone in March. Since then the faux iPads have reportedly been selling like crazy. "China's shanzhai industry is rolling out 'iPads' faster that people can say 'one gig or two'!" CNNGo wrote in June.

But months after the iPad's release, Chinese news media are reporting that the market for fake iPads has slowed dramatically. Why?

Lax intellectual property enforcement has fueled China's scrappy shanzhai industry, especially for consumer electronics. Shanzai phones and gadgets are often cheaper, more available and may come with creative twists, like the inPad's multiple USB ports or the slide-out keyboard that doubles as a stand on an unnamed, but clearly iPad-inspired, tablet device.

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