I find this a fascinating outcome - yes, Android should be very successful, but I find the higher levels of desirability suspect given relative market positioning. Possible reasons:
* Availability at relatively low cost -- yes (and getting cheaper)
* Usability - hah - not really
* Saturation advertising -- great to bump up wireless data usage, so very appealing to carriers
* Link to Google (for many synonymous with 'internet')
Amazon’s outage in third day: debate over cloud computing’s future begins
As Amazon’s web services outage passed its third day, the debate on the future of cloud computing is underway. The outage is costing web sites such as Reddit and Quora considerable losses as users turn elsewhere to get their social media needs met.
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service hosts thousands of major web sites that rely on it to serve pages to users. And users rely on these services to store their personal accounts and data remotely. So when the EC 2 service goes down, so do the web sites, and that means users can’t log in to access their data. It’s a big hiccup for an industry that is supposed to grow to $55 billion by 2014, according to market researcher IDC.
The duration of the outage has surprised many, since Amazon has a lot of backup computing infrastructure. If Amazon can’t safeguard the cloud, how can we rely on it? So the debate begins on the future of cloud computing and what to do to make users and companies put their trust in cloud vendors such as Amazon.
While painful, this is a healthy transition. Infrastructure as a Service is part of the IT toolkit, but requires a healthy does of risk assessment. Without signals that warn of risk, it's all to easy to collectively overcommit to an approach, and finish up with another textbook (sub-prime style) system collapse.
Startups (and resource constrained) have no choice but to accept limited redundancy or single points of failure, but enterprise computing requires that redundancy be designed into the system. This is the point made by George Reese of O'Reilly, overstated, but apt http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment....
My view - this is part of our collectively learning the upsides, downsides, and rules of engagement for shared 'cloud' resources.
Coiled conduits: The microscopic channels in this polymer roll are the right size and shape for bundles of severed nerve cells to grow through them. The scaffold, augmented with electrodes, is intended to transmit electrical signals between an amputee’s nervous system and prosthetic limb.
Credit: Ravi Bellamkonda, Georgia Tec
Human-Machine connectivity progress. Another step toward 'natural' interfaces?
I'm excited - really excited - to have made the move to the Citrix Startup Accelerator from Citrix Labs. So much so that I've moved my family from Sydney to Silicon Valley to make this happen. (We're settling in nicely, thanks.)
Under the circumstance, it shouldn't be a surprise that I think great innovation needs a global focus, which is why the Citrix Global Challenge is critically important for the Startup Accelerator. To kick this off I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the types of technologies and directions that are most interesting for the Startup Accelerator.
The list on the site talks about trends like 'mobile', 'cloud' and 'consumerization'. These are somewhat broad and the flavor of the moment, indeed, most of the breakout companies for the last few years could be described using these terms. To improve clarity I'd like to give an indication of one investment sweet-spot, what I call 'Alternative futures of the desktop.' Citrix has long pioneered alternative desktop visions, and is the leader in Virtual Computing - so new ways to solve the desktop problem are particularly interesting.
Primadesk is our first Startup Accelerator investment. Their vision is to let you "Search, manage and backup your personal cloud data with one simple interface no matter what device you use."
The challenge is that we have too many options for personal data in the cloud.I use Gmail for personal email, but also have old accounts on Hotmail and Yahoo. I have documents in many services ranging from files on the Mac, Google docs, Simplenote, Evernote, and half a dozen others. My backups are a mixed combination of Mozy, S3 (Jungledisk), and my home NAS. The founder of Primadesk recognized that these all act as silos, solving many individual problems well, but leaving severe compatibility gaps.
Primadesk simplifies access to your distributed personal digital assets. Their software gives you a single view of all those silos, allowing you to; search across all your documents and mail; backup from one service to another; drag and drop photos from one site to another. This plays into on of the themes where Citrix has long led: new desktop possibilities, new ways to provide the desktop experience.
If your startup has new approaches to desktop computing, to the use of mobile, or emerging use cases, we'd love to hear from you as we call for Citrix Global Challenge applications in Silicon Valley, Boston, Cambridge, Bangalore, and Sydney.
"There was a designer somewhere in the process who has thought about every single touch point, every single aspect, and has just made every single moment as valid, as graceful, as appropriate, as possible," he says. BankSimple is due to launch this year.
To design the experience, they looked for insights from behavioral economics, which relies on psychology to understand economic decisions. For instance, it's easier to get people to try something if they have to opt out of it rather than opt in. The team applied this insight to a feature of the bank that allows people to set aside funds toward a particular goal; it's not a separate account, just a line highlighted on the screen with a label like "Hawaii trip" or "new laptop." To encourage customers to try the feature, BankSimple starts them with the goal of saving $1,000 in an emergency fund.
There is something magical about taking a different tack on an existing problem. This sounds very appealing, but I wonder what happens to the user enthusiasm the first time all that hidden complexity surfaces in a SNAFU.
Fixing phones properly requires hardware makers to create their own updates incorporating Google's fix; they test those updates and pass them on to carriers, who also test the fixes before pushing them out to customers. Apps for Android devices, including ones developed by Google, could be updated through the Android Market, but system software has to be updated through the carrier's channel.
Android is a great model for adoption, but less so as these complex software artifacts become broadly spread, and poorly maintained.
On the other hand ... for the handset manufacturers, this is a not a completely bad thing -- they'd likely prefer that you throw it away and get a new one.
Indeed, for many people, it will be easier to discard the current phone, and purchase a new one without the limitation. Today this is relatively expensive -- tomorrow much less so. A cheap, disposable access point. Interesting times.
