After Cloud Connect in Mountain View, Barton George asked me some questions on cloud computing and some 2009 predictions. Here’s the clip; his writeup is available on his blog.

I’d like to compliment Barton on his ability to pick exactly the worst moment in the entire video clip to use as a thumbnail. And yes, I am this dorky looking.

I’m never big on predictions; they’re an easy way to look dumb in retrospect and few people keep score on accuracy after the fact. But it does seem to be a January ritual.

Recent US politics aside, it’s unwise to pin your hopes on a single person. But I’m going to do so, because that person is Dave Cutler. Dave is a lead developer for Windows Azure. That means it won’t suck.

Dave is legend: For starters, he built VMS, then built a compartmentalized OS that could run both VMS and UNIX called Mica. This was years ahead of its time.

I had a great conversation about the birth of operating systems with Peter Christy recently, who explained that early on, Digital was very supportive of VMS, forcing engineers to use it instead of older machines. But then they lost their nerve, and weren’t willing to do the same thing for Mica.

So Dave headed to Microsoft.

[Read more]

The first half of 2009 is shaping up to be a very busy time for the Bitcurrent team. We have  events that we’re going to be attending, participating in, coordinating, or otherwise making noise at. We’ll post more details on each event–along with discount codes–shortly. Here’s a quick overview.

Cloud Connect: [January 20-22, Mountain View, CA] I’m speaking on a panel called “Is Lock-In Inevitable? Or Can the Cloud Learn From the Lessons of the Past?” with Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady, Appistry’s Sam Charrington, and IBM’s Bob Sutor. Cloud Connect is the brainchild of David Berlind, and it’s a dose of reality to conferences.

Green:Net09: [March 24, San Francisco, CA] GigaOm’s tech conference, tied to Earth2Tech, promises to do for green what Structure did for IT infrastructure. One day, good speakers, in San Francisco.

SIIA Netgain and CODiEs: [May 3-5, San Francisco, CA] This conference is focusing on the business of software, including issues like the impact of mobility, funding in a lousy economy, and dealing with the impact of free software. It’s our first time working with the SIIA guys but the content and speakers are already amazing.

[Read more]

There was a question from the audience: “Gee, Steve, what’s the difference between what you’re proposing and straight up virtualization?”

Good question. Glad you asked. Good enough question in fact to insert part 1.5 inbetween parts 1 and 2.

The definition of cloud computing remains nebulous at best. We’re entering a phase where everything is claiming to be a cloud — if you offer something hosted, it’s a cloud. By such a loose definition, the tech biz has been selling clouds since we’ve been renting mainframe time. To offer a little contrast, Amazon EC2 is a huge cluster of virtual machines that you rent a-la cheap dedicated virtual servers. [Read more]

Montreal-based Identi.ca recently closed funding from Montrealstartup, as I wrote yesterday on GigaOm. Sometimes, when I chat with people for a story, they have a lot to say that can’t make it into the 300 or so words of a blog like GigaOm.

Here’s the transcript of the chat I had with Evan Prodromou, the company’s founder, and Daniel Drouet of MSU. Evan’s travelled and coded pretty much everywhere, and started Wikitravel; and Daniel built out the île sans fil wireless network in Montreal. They had some great insights into the future of micromessaging in general.

Bitcurrent: Why are you investing in an open source micromessaging platform, when even Twitter, a closed-source platform with millions of users, is baffled at how to make money

Daniel Drouet: Before making an investment we try to understand where the true value of a service lies. Many online services require scale to succeed, typically millions of users and page views, but we don’t think that is the case with Identica. If you look at Evan’s answer to this question Identica is much more about providing an organization or community with a platform that can be adapted to suit their needs. So it’s not about who has the most users, it’s about providing a valuable service to many smaller groups.

Evan Prodromou: I’ll answer this one, even though I shouldn’t: we’ve got commercialization options that Twitter doesn’t. Because we’re Open Source, we can do commercial, enterprise, and public Web implementations on a fee basis. Because we’re federated, we can make a hosted service that works either for public use, for private group use, or some combination of the two. Those are two places Twitter just can’t go.

Bitcurrent: Why open source?

[Read more]

I was hassled by Alistair last year about the infrastructure choices at my company because I chose not to leverage the capacity and cost benefits of EC2. The reason, I explained, had everything to do with SLAs. My servers dish up content and application flow for phone calls. Jitter and delay are everything in that scenario because unlike web browsers that give visual cues to show they’re working, a phone call just gives dead air. And dead air is dangerous. [Read more]

You’ve seen bad metaphors for the Internet. Pop culture is filled with films where special effects show computer networks as highways, with towering servers encroaching on light-filled roads. These scenes try to represent the Internet as, well, a series of tubes (Play this clip from Hackers to jog your memory.)*

This happens a lot in Hollywood, and in too many cyberpunk novels (like one I’m finishing now just to spite myself.) I forgive William Gibson’s “collective hallucination” and Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse because, well, they’re good books.

But maybe the UI of the future will look like this after all, at least for certain applications. Check out Britain from Above by way of the folks at Flowing Data. Warning: clicking this video may make your browser lock up for a minute for some reason. Be patient, or go to the Youtube playlist.

There are clips for telecommunications, air traffic, and even shipping on the site itself, which is well worth the visit.

I’m a huge believer in visualizing information and making the world more understandable, and the convergence of things like geomapping and GPS are making understanding even easier. These clips resemble nothing if not an RTS for the real world. It makes me want to click and drag routes for cars and boats.

I used to think Tron was a great movie, but not really a UI. Now I’m starting to wonder how these flying-through-data approaches, first conceived as a network metaphor for the non nerd, can become user interfaces.

This is how the prescient visuals of Minority Report slowly become reality.

We’re about to drink from a firehose of positional data as location-aware personal devices replace traditional cellphones and we move towards a sensor-driven world. We have the cloud computing infrastructure to handle massive computing and fast data retrieval. How long until Britain From Above becomes a live Google Earth overlay?

Oh, wait. It already is. Here’s the site’s Google Earth layer. When will web analytics catch up with this?

(*For real fun, check out the eighties-era Mac copy dialog at 8:18 in that Hackers clip. Anachronisms, FTW!)