Friday, 22 July 2011

  • Google Places Makes its Move, Pushes Other Reviews Into the Background (Updated With Google's Commen

    Updated with comment from Google below. This was probably something you could see coming: Google Places, the search giant's relatively new play in local search and reviews, today announced that it has revamped Place pages and removed excerpts from reviews on 3rd party services.

    For now, sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, JudysBook or Europe's Qype will be linked-to at the bottom of a list of Google Places reviews. (Sometimes they appear at the top.) This seems to me like the kind of thing that could be discussed in an examination of potentially monopolistic business practices. Independent review sites have had to know, though, that the company that delivered them up in search results for so long would be tempted to just create its own content and keep review searchers on Google's own sites. Google Places is a very compelling service for users, too.

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    Maybe it'll be ok; maybe a lot of people will click through and visit other local review sites, still. I know I sometimes start at Google Places to check open and closing times for restaurants and then go to Yelp for more reviews. For how long will Yelp have more reviews though, if all paths through Google lead first and foremost to more Google?

    Google says that in the long run, it hopes to make writing and posting reviews even faster and easier (it's quite easy already, the Google Places iPhone app for example is a model of usability), it hopes to take those Google Places reviews and display them all over the rest of Google sites and services where they might be useful and it hopes to serve up more personalized content - like reviews of places written by people you know. Perhaps people in your "inner Circles?"

    googlepowerplaces.jpg

    There are a lot of different ways to look at this change, including from the perspective of small businesspeople and the tech consultants that serve them.

    "Jeez - Can't these guys knock it off with the changes already?" asked Search Engine Consultant Dev Basu today in comments on a hotly discussed post by Google Maps and Search consultant Mike Blumenthal. "I spent the better half of last year educating clients in hotel and hospitality verticals to not put all their eggs in Google reviews. Instead, we decided to run Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Hotels.com programs to incent reviews."

    Blumenthal argued, though, that Google still links to other review sites and presumably will still surface them in search. Thus he argues that the best practice for local businesses remain the same: to cultivate reviews on 3 independent sites in addition to Google Places.

    We'll see how things look in the future. Google Places is a great service, but competition between multiple innovators is ultimately better.

    Update: A Google spokesperson emailed to provide the following feedback (sometimes they are very nice, I swear) "the headline, second paragraph and overall suggestion about why we made today's changes is inaccurate.

    "This line from our LatLong blog post is most instructive:

    "Based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we've heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now been removed from Place pages.

    "If you could please update your post to reflect this sentiment, that'd be much appreciated."

    If you can explain to me the substantive difference between that and what I did say, please let me know in comments below and include your mailing adress. I will send you a big cookie. So goes it, sometimes.

    So, readers, apparently Google would like you to know that they did not put excerpts from their own reviews on Places pages, remove excerpts from other sites' reviews and leave only one line of links to 3rd party sites because they wanted visitors to remain on Google sites instead of going elsewhere. Regardless of the intention, I suspect you'll agree with me what the most likely consequences are.

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    Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/g-sDqVcqcRg/google_places_makes_its_move_pushes_other_reviews.php

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  • From a Basement to the Stars: How the OpenStack Cloud Was Born

    Openstack_Timeline.jpg

    OpenStack is a popular open source cloud operating system used by more than 90 companies and the U.S. government. In the world of cloud, OpenStack is where the cool kids hang out and where some of the most talented developers in the world program. Yet, it almost never came to be.

    OpensStack had its one-year anniversary on July 19. The cloud structure has its roots in NASA. The story of OpenStack is really the story of how NASA created its Do It Yourself cloud environment - NASA Nebula. With just a few developers working on a side project in the basement of the NASA Ames Research Center outside of Mountain View, Calif., the seeds of OpenStack and Nebula were planted. Yet, as with any government program, lack of funding almost killed the project several times and threatens to kill its future. It took the president to really get it off the ground.

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    NASA's cloud initiative was the brainchild of former agency CTO for IT Chris Kemp. Kemp has since left NASA to be an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley but his idea of a NASA-created cloud operating structure lives on. The Nebula plan started out as a way to optimize NASA developers' use of NASA.net, an internal agency alternative to the public-facing websites of NASA.gov., and intended to provide services to the rest of the NASA community (the agency is very spread out with centers across the country).

    According to current Ames CTO Ray O'Brien, there was a dinner in Mountain View that included NASA's chief architect and several C-level executives of Ames in 2009. Over Indian food, the idea to start a project that could provide massive, scalable computing power was pitched and the term cloud bandied about as a way to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for all of NASA. O'Brien was not at the dinner but he later became the project manager for Nebula. So, NASA.net was scrapped and Nebula was born.

    And then almost died.

    OpenStack_Container.jpg

    NASA has a very strict budget that is more or less set in stone from 2010 to 2013 per terms of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. This was the act that took the $6 billion or so that it cost to run the space shuttle program and dispersed it to the rest of the agency. To get funding as a federal program, Nebula would have needed to be proposed in 2007. So, Nebula was essentially bootstrapped by the Ames Research Center for the first part of its life.

    This is when the big movers and shakers got into the mix.

    Chris Kemp met with then CIO of the federal government Vivek Kundra, a huge proponent of cloud computing and government transparency. This is where the president steps in. It was also around this time that the Obama White House announced that the open government initiative that included Recovery.gov, Data.gov and USASpending.gov, along with the U.S. IT Dashboard. Kundra, being the first-ever federal CIO, had the ear of president Obama. Kemp and Kundra were able to strike a deal that USASpending.gov and its corollary sites would be hosted with Nebula. That way, NASA's budget would not be affected and the White House (more specifically, the Office of Management and Budgets) would fund Nebula.

    Work on the Nebula IaaS started to ramp up, especially as the IT world became more aware of the capabilities of the cloud. Nebula was designed to carry working-class science loads - basically, NASA's tonnage of data about space - as opposed to a Web-hosting services the way Amazon Web Services does. Hence, Nebula has the ability to be massive (not that AWS does not, Nebula is just a different type of animal).

    The Nebula team at Ames started running into problems. Everything went wrong that could possibly go wrong. They were building an infrastructure from scratch and feeling their way through the problems. Hardware, software, databases, client management, virtual machines ... rain - anything and everything that could go wrong did. One of the biggest problems that the Nebula team faced was that it did not have a sufficient controller to manage Nebula. The team got together one weekend and decided to put an end to that and wrote an entirely new code controller for Nebula that became Nova, which "has been empowering NASA users since May 2010," according to O'Brien.

    NASA_DIY_Cloud.jpg

    "We always knew that NASA would have an open-source road map," O'Brien said at the Cloud Control Conference in Boston this week. "We just had to build the source code."

    Funding was still a problem. But, the project had caught the eye of NASA CIO Linda Cureton and Nebula had a new champion. Cureton was able to name Nebula an "official agency project" and use funds from other NASA centers (such as the Goddard Space Flight Center).

    That is when Rackspace called.

    RackSpace Called NASA.jpg

    Almost every bit of code that NASA creates is later open sourced. That is what has happened with Nebula. The resulting creation of NASA+Rackspace= Openstack.

    Tim O'Reilly says that "NASA and Rackspace are taking amazing steps to my vision of an open cloud future," according to the OpenStack website. O'Brien provided a quote from an anonymous Ames IT official that said "Nebula could be the Linux of cloud."

    NASA would eventually love to let the open source community develop OpenStack while the agency just becomes a customer. That is the plan though currently NASA is still putting a lot of resources into developing and mainting Nebula and OpenStack. It has been around for a year. The guess is that it will be here a lot longer than that.

    Image Source: NASA Ames Research Center CTO for IT Ray O'Brien Power Point Presentation from Boston Cloud Control Conference 2011, July 20.

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    Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/_WdIbjriaoQ/from_a_basement_to_the_stars_how_the_openstack_clo.php

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  • 2degrees users overloaded with random late-night texts -- the alcohol apparently not to blame

    When we send out an embarrassing text message at 2am, at least we can -- in the words of Jaime Foxx -- blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol. Unfortunately for New Zealand mobile carrier 2degrees, pinning it on the Henney, just ain't gonna cut it this time. Early Wednesday morning, a few unlucky users were greeted by an influx of hundreds of unsolicited text messages. A few of those affected took to the company's Facebook page for answers, and were provided with the following response:

    Early this morning, a software implementation problem caused a small number of people to receive texts not intended for them. Our network team quickly identified the problem and resolved it by 2:30am. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this may have caused.

    On second thought, judging from the reactions that apology received, the outfit might have been better off using the Blue Top as a scapegoat.

    2degrees users overloaded with random late-night texts -- the alcohol apparently not to blame originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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    Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/21/2degrees-users-overloaded-with-random-late-night-texts-the-al/

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Thursday, 21 July 2011

jasenrosse

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