Saturday, March 21, 2009

Cisco Unified Computing System: To Tidy Up Data Centers


Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior: "We're going to compete with HP. I don't want to sugarcoat that."
Looks like Cisco wants to do to data centers what Apple did to cellphones with its iPhone.

In this tight economy it is but natural that once partners will elbow into each other's space. But that is the cynical view to take. This is a story in innovation. As to how it will play out, we will have to wait and watch.



Tech companies like Amazon and Oracle have swam upstream in this dire economy. And now Cisco has come up with a major announcement. This will boost the morale of the larger economy. Otherwise it feels like there is bad news on every page of the newspaper.

In The News

Cisco's Unified Computing System Products Unavailable Through ... ChannelWeb
Cisco's Unified Computing Vision - Is It Too Much Cisco? InformationWeek
Cisco's Unified Computing system ITworld.com
Cisco's Unified Computing System stirs competition, old and new Search Networking
One Cisco Unified Computing System beats 15 coal-fired energy plants ZDNet A single Cisco chassis can hold as many as eight blade servers. A “networking fabric extender” can tie together 40 such chassis, bringing 320 servers under the control and supervision of Cisco’s Unified Computing System Manager software. ...... Every second, Web users view 1,200 videos on YouTube, share 11,000 songs and send 2,000,000 emails. This plus the equivalent of 3,000,000 trees turned into paper and printed can fit in the system memory of one Cisco Unified Computing System. ........ All 138,893,908 Individual Tax returns filed last year in the United States could be stored in the memory of one Cisco Unified Computing System. ....... It takes only 40% of the Cisco UCS’s system resources to host all of the US Wikipedia. ...... The amount of obsolete cabling and support infrastructure that could be eliminated equates to 3,007 miles of legacy servers and infrastructure, when set side by side. ......... 31,103,864,053 Kilowatt hours per year saved, by unifying aging traditional servers and supporting infrastructure. .......

This could:

  • Double the available electricity in the ten poorest countries worldwide increasing education, healthcare, and overall standard of living.
  • Equal the energy output of more than 15 U.S. coal-fired electric plants and 35 million tons of C02.
  • Almost equal the entire amount of wind energy produced in U.S.



Cisco Systems, Inc.Image via Wikipedia

Is Cisco really going to take on Apple? Not quite.

ZDNet - ‎Mar 20, 2009‎
Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital, maker of the Flip camcorder, has sparked a lot of discussion about the networking giant’s intentions. ...

Cisco Needs BMC To Supply Unified Virtual Management

InformationWeek - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
At stake is Cisco's blade server, which will combine converged network components, then link to virtualized network and store resources under a single ...

Cisco, Red Hat to bring unified computing system to Malaysia

NetworkWorld.com - ‎Mar 20, 2009‎
"UCS will result in a unified architecture tantamount to next generation data centres: data centre 3.0," said Cisco Malaysia managing director Anne Abraham. ...

Cisco's consumer electronics dream

CNET News - ‎Mar 20, 2009‎
by Marguerite Reardon If you haven't noticed, Cisco Systems, whose products have been used to build the Internet for 20 years, has spent the past 6 years ...

BusinessWeek’s Burrows: Cisco to battle Apple? Not likely

MacDailyNews - ‎12 hours ago‎
"Put me down as a skeptic regarding Cisco’s acquisition yesterday of Pure Digital, the maker of Flip video recorders. In fact, my first thought wasn’t ...

Home IBM Why Is IBM, Not Cisco, Buying Sun?

eWeek - ‎Mar 18, 2009‎
Cisco Systems, with its ambitions for dominance in the data center, seems like a much better suitor for Sun. Commenting on a pending acquisition is like ...
Video: Money Minute: IBM, AIG, Compensation

Cisco Israel head resigns

Ha'aretz - ‎2 hours ago‎
By Amitai Ziv Bina Rezinovsky, the general manager of Cisco Israel, announced her resignation at the end of last week. Rezinovsky, 41, has managed Cisco's ...

Laid-Off Janitors Protest At Cisco Headquarters

CBS 5 - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
Read more in our Privacy Policy At least 200 people gathered outside Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose on Thursday to protest the layoffs of about 75 ...
Fisher: Taking back the economy San Jose Mercury News

Around the Web 3.19.09: Cisco now makes servers, IE8 comes out ...

Los Angeles Times - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
Personal Technology -- Cisco Systems released its server computer -- an affront on companies for which it usually provides software. ...

Citigroup, FedEx, Alcoa, Cisco among big movers

The Associated Press - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
NASDAQ Cisco Systems Inc., down 27 cents at $16.23 The computer networking gear maker will buy Pure Digital, maker of the popular Flip Video camcorder, ...




















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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

NYTM 03/09/09: Fashion Institute of Technology



27th St & 7th Ave
btw 7th & 8th Ave
New York, NY 10001

March 9, 2009

- Drop.io
- FourSquare
- KindlingApp Your org's democratic suggestion box. Ideas + Collaboration + Voting = Progress!
- enjoysthin.gs : A website dedicated to collecting and sharing things you enjoy.
- the 3 you vote in
- and Prof. Panos Ipeirotis from NYU talking about the EconoMining project.

http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/boards/thread/6233383/


ooVoo - an incredibly easy way to have free, high-resolution, face-to-face video chats with up to 6 www.ooVoo.com
SpeakLike -- lets you email and chat with people who speak other languages. www.speaklike.com
Tigerbow - Tigerbow lets people send actual gifts to virtual places. http://tigerbow.com
ProCompare - Business Technology Recommendations, powered by a global community of IT professionals www.ProCompare.com


This was a new venue for the New York Tech MeetUp. The Diller building was razzmatazz. But this was a bigger venue, a better location, and nobody was pushing you out of the building as soon as the show was over. I paid cash so I had to wait. They did let me in right before the beginning, after having processed all those who paid online.

The presentations were great. The stage was great. Nate did a great job of hosting. Although I think he should say no to all announcement requests like Scott had decided to. Later I told him one one one, Nate, you are a public figure, one of the most important skills you will learn is to say no. He said, but if I were to say no to you you'd think I am a dick. I said you already said no to me, and I respected you for that. That was in reference to a funding advice I sought from him over email.



The presentations were great, but the mingling right after was greater, and the after party after that was the greatest. Thanks Alicia for buying me a drink, and thanks for the tip to go to the Sloan group on LinkedIn to try and get a MBA person. I shot out a few quick emails once back home.

Oh, hi there Stan.

I went from booth to booth afterwards and did the tech version of nice pin, nice tie. Met the guy who organized the Shorty Awards. That is for Twitter, for those of you who don't know. They just did the first one, now they will do it every year.

Most presentations tend to be dot coms seeking to add value in the online space. Some are going for ads, others are seeking to charge users for use. There were some remarkable applications on show.

Bloomberg To Help Ex-Wall Street Execs Start New Firms by Wall ...
Technorati: Discussion about “Bloomberg Announces $2 Million Fund...








- Drop.io
- foursquare
- KindlingApp
- enjoysthin.gs
- SpeakLike
- Tigerbow
- ProCompare
- and Prof. Panos Ipeirotis from NYU talking about the EconoMining project.





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Saturday, March 07, 2009

Jeff Jarvis: Bold Restructuring

Video: Eye To Eye With Katie Couric: Jeff Jarvis (CBS News)

American journalist Jeff Jarvis at the 2008 Wo...Image via Wikipedia

The Great Restructuring by Jeff Jarvis

This is a great blog post by Jeff Jarvis, someone I got to meet in person on February 3 at the Diller building. (NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09)

Davos 09: Open Bank full disclosure of performance and compensation. ...... a means to confirm that customers understood what they were buying ...... Bankers are in fortress mode ...... eimagined retail, education, and government. ....... obert Scoble, who has been arguing that the way out of our mess is to start a million companies ....... Shimon Peres, who made a forceful argument that the future will be secured with investment in technology (including biotechnology) and education (which he as much as said was the next thing to come after the internet wave). ........ giving trillions of dollars to the incumbents, to people like that sneering banker ....... We should, instead, be investing our money in entrepreneurs and technologists, the people who will change old industries, reimagining them under new rules with new people ..... need to look at replacing rather than just repairing these broken institutions .... We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future.
Scenario For News news - on both the content and business side - will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative. ....... provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together ........ open the process of news in blogs ...... Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. ....... less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation. ....... nvestigations matter more than ever ....... Do what you do best and link to the rest ........ covering a niche deeply ....... The old syndication model will die ..... he wire-service model is in jeopardy ..... any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms ........ EveryBlock will organize data; Outside.in will organize geo content; Daylife will organize news; Publish2 will organize links; Digg will help the crowd curate; Clickable will help sell ads; Google will serve ads; YouTube and Brightcove will serve videos ......... algorithms mining newly transparent government documents ........ Seth Godin’s prescription for The New York Times ..... Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site?
The Link Changes Everything The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads.
Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy



Jarvis is an imaginative optimist.

Instead of seeing job losses and folding companies and wrecked futures and dislocations he sees capitalism's creative destructions. Historic parallels still apply. What is happening right now to the economy seems to happen once every 70 years, has happened four times in a row now. After each such crisis the economy has come out better than ever before. Jarvis is suggesting the same is about to happen all over again. He is focused on the impending good news.



Not all the observations are his, he borrows as freely as he expounds. But they together are a great narrative to these wildly depressing times for the most. Many jobs are lost forever. But new, better jobs have to be created, and people need to be helped to transition to those new jobs.

What are some of his observations, and that of others he mentions?
  • The market is rightly bringing down the artificially high prices on a host of things.
  • An old building is being brought down so a new building can take its place.
  • This fundamental restructuring is to the economy but also to society. How we relate to each other is changing.
  • Many jobs lost now will never return. "In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." (New York Times)
  • Not just jobs, entire sectors of the US economy might disappear.
  • Newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast media, all are experiencing upheavals.
  • A lot of retail is going online.
  • Business travel will for the large part be replaced by more efficient communications.
  • Dirty energy will "shrivel."
  • Real estate construction will decline.
  • Health care and education will see reinvention and growth.
  • Ditto government.
The good news?
"Every one of the collapsing industries listed above will be replaced - in a different image, at a different scale - and that presents opportunities."

The promise is a new economy, a new society, a new world. Help people see through the transition.

Credit will have to flow again, spending will have to grow again. But they will go in new directions.

But right now we are in the destruction part of the cycle. Let the creation begin as soon as possible.

Jarvis has done a good job of describing where we are now and we are or should be going, but he has not done a good job of connecting the two. How do we help people with the transition? How to minimize disruptions? How to move people from lost jobs to better paying jobs?








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Friday, March 06, 2009

Twitter And The Time Dimension

My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...Image by luc legay via Flickr

Twitter is real time search. That is its functionality.

What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Facebook is more about space, the human space, the "social graph," as the Facebook people call it.

The next Twitter does not only text and links and photos but also video. And that might be a hardware and connectivity challenge more than a Twitter challenge. But it is only a matter of time before that video part also seeps in. But I don't wish to emphasize that too much. Text and links are enough for the most part. Photos are a plus, but not all that essential.

The next Twitter is not necessarily richer features, it is a Twitter that has 10 times more users and so is more useful to the existing users. An internet with more computers linked in is more useful. A Twitter with many more users will be more useful. A few Twitter users in every town on earth, and we will really have tipped the scale.



And it can't just be about real time search. The search functionality will have to get much better. Users should be able to dig into the archives and make sense. So Twitter can't be just about real time search, rather it has to be about snapshots in time and space.

Facebook will benefit from switching to real time status updates, but it will make a mistake in thinking it is competing with Twitter. They inhabit two quite separate spaces. The biggest lesson Facebook could learn right now is that just like to the Eskimo there are many different kinds of snow, there are many different kinds of friends. There are family, relatives, close friends, classmates, colleagues, acquaintances. Right now Facebook is at the one snow level of sophistication. And that is not good enough. Inner circle interaction should feel different from outer circle interaction. Facebook is not there yet.

How about adding a Hello function to Facebook which would be like the Follow function on Twitter? I can follow anyone I want on Twitter. On Facebook if we are not friends we are not friends, but I think I should be able to say hello to anyone I want to say hello to. They should see I said hello, and they should have the option to check out my profile, maybe they want to say hello as well. And maybe we talk. And decide to become friends down the line.
















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Thursday, March 05, 2009

What Should Facebook Do

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase

Facebook is in news today for wanting to catch up with Twitter. Facebook has the mass and the volume, but Twitter has the buzz and the momentum, something Facebook has plenty of. Facebook is a great site, but it could do with improvements.

(1) Do Not Become Twitter

Twitter has its place. Facebook has its place. Facebook would do itself a major disservice if it tried too hard to imitate Twitter. Twitter can not become Facebook. Facebook should not become Twitter.

On Twitter the emphasis is on real time, on 140 characters. On Facebook much more depth is possible. That depth is Facebook's competitive advantage. It should not let go. Instead it should enhance on that depth.



You go on Facebook to better organize your social reality, and to enhance that social reality. You go on Facebook to arrange to meet offline. That offline part is key. Facebook should make event planning seamless. It already does a good job.

(2) Existing Friends

The idea behind Facebook has been that you are only supposed to accept friend requests from people who are already your friends. It is supposed to be a walled garden. It errs on both sides. It does not do enough of it, it does too much of it.

You should be able to accept friend requests from everyone you know, but you don't want your boss to see the same side of you as your college roommate.

On the other hand, what's the point about so many interesting people being on Facebook if you can't make new friends on there? I was at almost 1500 friends and then Facebook went ahead and deleted my account. I got a new one that now has 500, almost all of which are people I know offline.

Friend: now that is a broad category. Facebook should introduce the concentric circles idea. Anybody should have the option to become your fan, but those fans should not see all those many aspects of you that your friends might. Fans should get a much more limited view. And close friends should see more than not so close friends. There should be a whole category called colleagues.

(3) Making New Friends On Facebook

I think that is probably the largest untapped potential of Facebook. Facebook should be a place where you go to meet people. But it has to be safe, and it has to be gradual. You should be able to explore shared interests and conversations for a long time without having to reveal your name or face.

The Unfacebook

Facebook could morph to become the leading dating site. But it should not do so by becoming like the other dating sites. Facebook can become a job site, a place you go to seek talent. Once you get that many people at one place online there are so many things you can do.

(4) Status Updates In Real Time

I believe they have already decided to do that. Good. About time. Here Facebook could really give Twitter a run for the money, especially if it not only does status updates in real time, and makes it URL friendly, but also does a good job of allowing people to search just the status updates.

(5) Allowing Celebrities To Mingle

If you had a million fans, what should your Facebook experience be like? I think people who end up with a large fan base on Facebook should have special features just for them. A million fans should be manageable because of Facebook. How exactly you would do that, I don't know, but I got a few ideas. Fans are not just after the celebrities they are after, they are also after each other. Make that happen. Celebrities should be able to interact with their fans. They should be able to "zoom in" to perhaps interacts one on one, to meet, arrange to meet.

(6) Deepening Friendships

Facebook should be one of the tools that allow you to become better friends with people you are already friends with.

(7) Facebook For Family

Maybe Facebook should help you build an inner core to your profile that only a few close people get to see. Perhaps status updates should be layered. Maybe you want one status feed for the eyes of your spouse only.

(8) Safety And Privacy

Those are paramount. Add all the features in the world, but if you botch these two, you are in bad shape. The idea is not to stop being a walled garden, but rather being many gardens, some more walled, some less, some out in the open.

(9) Photos, Videos, Links

Facebook totally took off with photos. I believe there are way more photos on Facebook than on Flickr, and that happened a long time ago. Flickr made a bad move: it started charging.

If Facebook wants to compete with Twitter, it needs to compete in the aggregation and sharing of links. Links are the number one action on Twitter. Make it easy for people to post, share, search.

(10) Status Stream

That has to be real time. I believe Facebook already did that. Good.

TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter







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Monday, March 02, 2009

TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook


TweetDeck

Twitter changed my life. Then TweetDeck came along and it changed my Twitter life. Twitter.com is you driving a car. TweetDeck, and you are in an 18-wheeler. You feel the power.

@paramendra

Power Twitter

That is when you really get it. Twitter is no longer a waste of time, but essential to your work and life. If you don't tweet, your career suffers a little that day. If you don't tweet, you are a little less happy that day, unless it is your day off. I recommend taking one day off a week.

@paramendra

Links, People: Twitter Planet

Bumping into great links, either to news or to information or sites - like Padmasree introduced me to Science Daily - is half the fun, the other half is bumping into great people. On Twitter I am a heat seeking missile looking for tech entrepreneur types. I have found some big ones, and several not so big ones, all exciting. Since I have never been a big fan of beer, this beats meeting them over beer. Or maybe not. I'd love to meet them in person. But Twitter is the only way for me to get to them one on one now. There is absolutely no other way.

But I am not just after celebrities, actually I avoid the non tech mini celebrities. Quite a few times I have ended up asking, excuse me, but are you someone famous? It is called not owning a TV.



One of my recent delights has been going on a Twitter world tour. And finding people in the top cities of the world. This beats New York City. In NYC you mostly see people from all over the world. On Twitter you actually interact with them, at will. I wish the NYC Subway were more like Twitter. I wish the subway was where you went for easy, impromptu conversations.

And, by the way, Brooke Ellison is a total sweetheart.
https://twitter.com/brookemellison/status/1273803450

@paramendra



I Speak More Languages Than I Thought I Did

Enter The Dragon: Google Translate.

I understand about 10 languages as is, six of them really well. But then one day I wrote to Steven in Chinese, he wrote back to me in Hindi. The guy does not speak a word of Hindi. In case you are wondering who Steven is, he is my very own personal emissary to China, my own Marco Polo, if you will.

I have tweeted in Russian, Portuguese, Spanish. To the world out there I say, bring it on.

Not long after I got on the flying saucer, I mean the TweetDeck, I went on a world tour. I went to some of the fanciest cities in the world, and checked out some of the top Tweets in those cities, started following some of them. My ranks swelled.

Since I really like to follow people I follow, I can't follow too many people. So for my next world tour, I think I will only visit cities and Tweet pages to read and comment. If some of that leads to me getting more followers, I am not complaining. Who wants to be a millionaire? Who wants to be popular?

@paramendra

Power Networking

Someone I met on Twitter who happens to have a Brown BA and a Columbia MBA is helping me find a top biz talent for my nascent corporate team.

@paramendra

Better Than Facebook

If I had only one hour to spend, and it was a choice between Facebook and Twitter, guess where I am going! Facebook does not even compare in terms of the online experience of tweeting. Twitter is more fun than Facebook, it is more fun than email, heck, it is more fun than search. Search is work, Twitter is fun work. Twitter is the smartest career move I have made this year so far. And this is not fun you later regret, like the morning after a bad - as in badass - college party. This is fun and thrill, as in the fun and thrill of knowledge, networking, great company, the feeling of living life on the edge. There is the feeling of uninhibition. Twitter is a drink that quenches and makes you thirsty.

@paramendra

TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

@paramendra

Steve Case: AOL Founder
JP Rangaswamy: CIO of British Telecom
http://twitter.com/jobsworth/statuses/1216881893

@paramendra







@paramendra



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