In an effort to force users of its HTC Dream to do a software update that fixes a 911 call bug, Rogers has disconnected Internet from all its Android customers. Here’s the full text I just received on my phone:

Rogers/Fido Safety Message: URGENT Reminder 911 Calls HTC Dream software update: Mandatory software update is now available to help ensure 911 calls are completed from your phone. Please go immediately to rogers.com/dreamsoftwareupdate on your PC to download.

In order to help ensure 911 calls are completed internet access was temporarily disabled on your phone at 01/24/10 6:00AM EST. To reactivate internet service, please complete your software update immediately. Upon completion, internet access will be re enabled within 24 hours.

For users of Macintosh and Windows 7, please call 1- 888-764-3771(1-888-ROGERS1) for update instructions.

We apologize for the inconvenience but we prioritize customer safety above all.

The issue stems from a requirement that 911 services have access to GPS data, but it’s worsened by the fact that Rogers insists on using its own version of Google’s Android OS, with its own restrictions and application icons, rather than staying in step with a more broadly tested operating system.

Other carriers, such as T-Mobile, unlock handsets that are purchased outright, leaving the choice of operating system and upgrades to the user. Two weeks ago, for example, I bought a Nokia handset at a T-Mobile store for the full $50 price, and within 24 hours of asking, T-Mobile had sent me the unlock code. Canadian carriers don’t buy this; in fact, they claim that unlocking a phone constitutes copyright infringement.

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Over the course of 6 demos, the ECS team have shown how a single application can be moved between clouds with a minimal amount of code changes. Our video messaging application, which is fully detailed and can be tried for yourself at www.interopcloud.com, was first written with a back-end and a front end on Amazon Web Services. We introduced load-balancing of the front and back ends with Rightscale, and tested this with SOASTA CloudTest.

We then showed how the back end can be moved in house with MongoDB, and today (pictured right) we looked at moving the front end to a Google App Engine application, and that this could be done with a minimum of code changes. Later today we’ll be looking at how to handle multiple levels and versions of a cloud application to form a virtual development lab with Skytap.

This is the question Alistair Croll first asked Werner Vogels in the fireside chat session at ECS. Werner admitted he’d been caught off guard by the question but admitted that the future is automation for sure and scripts are powerful tools to achieve this.

An example of an enterprise use case for cloud computing

Werner related the case of the NASDAQ which had a lack of capital, which was restricting innovation and making it difficult for them to solve the technical problems around handling complex historical stock queries.

They solved this by having every ticker symbol for 10 minutes written to a text file in Amazon S3. An Adobe Air application was created which allowed you to specify a symbol and a date range. The app would download the text files for that time period – meaning you can do joins, queries etc. The computation is done by the customer’s desktop which means there is no resource investment. They were able to use cloud technology to keep things “nice and simple”

Cost savings can include people

Werner talked about the idea that when assessing the cost of cloud computing versus in-house infrastructure, you have to think about the total cost of ownership not just hardware. Werner talked about the example of the Indy 500. He said they have a very nice website which offers a flash environment with multiple video streams including views from the cockpits of drivers’ cars with audio feeds and telemetry. This is a high load application but it only runs three times a year. They found that they had to move a lot of engineers into data centers to keep their servers up. When they moved to cloud infrastructure they made 75% cost savings, the majority of which was on the people side; now they can manage everything from their armchair at home.

On Amazon direction and strategy

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Alistair Croll today opened the Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas by drawing analogies between cloud computing and the early days of electricity generation.

It used to be that companies would have their own generators, they had generator rooms and technicians much like we have server rooms and techies that run them now.

What happened was a major shift; the creation of a grid enabled the separation of electricity generation from usage. Power didn’t have to be next to the work being done. This enabled cost savings for all electricity users and meant that anyone could make use of the grid to power their businesses, not just the largest companies.

The question is, is cloud computing like electricity? Are we moving to a utility model of computing? [Read more]

When Google Maps v2 hit mobile devices, it used a clever trick of cell tower triangulation to guess where you were without GPS. Google’s new service, Latitude, lets you share your location with friends. That makes it a great enabler for ad-hoc get-togethers, based on proximity – “Hey, looks like you’re a few blocks away at the gym, want to grab a bite?” But it’s not just about social networking and locational advertising: Applications with location awareness could change the way we live.

The idea isn’t new-Loopt is already quite popular with the iPhone crowd (which for some reason can’t have Latitude just yet, despite their likelihood to use it). But this is Google: Latitude has more far-reaching implications.  The next killer apps will come from this convergence of location-based services, personal preferences, social networks and mobile devices.

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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!)

Ever sent a mail you regret?

Google has been introducing a wide range of features lately. Their GMail labs are proposing all kinds of enhancements. But this one proves just how mainstream the web has become: Mail Goggles.

A pun on Beer Goggles, the plug-in asks you skill testing questions when you might be drunk.

There’s some controversy over Google’s product development approach. On the one hand, Google has taken new approaches — simple search engines, an entirely new approach to email (remember when labels were new?) But at the same time, the company has started sharecropping development, by letting people submit plug-ins, GMail enhancements, and so on.

That’s a tricky line to walk. On the one hand, you want to keep things simple. On the other hand, you want to reap the wisdom of the crowds and keep innovating. While new features keep the geeks happy, Street View confuses many of the Google Maps faithful.

So the real question is: Google Goggles might work, but if it’s too hard to set up, only the math nerds will use it. And they can do arithmetic unconscious. How about tracking my shaky mouse movements, or using my webcam to check for eye redness? Now that’s easy to use.

Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.

Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.

Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.

Using the Internet Way-Back Machine, I decided to go scoop up some issues of Networkshop News and see how they stood up to scrutiny nine years later. Here’s one on how networks change if the PC is no longer the dominant client, from March, 2000.

How do you think it stacks up?

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VMware just announced some cool stuff at VMworld, and the show is just beginning. I will be there in Las Vegas Tuesday through Thursday this week to catch up with friends in the virtualization ecosystem, but it looks like I already missed the big announcements.

It’s a great idea to federate between on premise and off premise clouds, allowing enterprises to use compute capacity on site and then to use off-site clouds when capacity peaks. Some call this cloudbursting.

So why are the enterprises yawning? Right now, this architecture is mostly useful for scientific computing and number crunching, neither of which often sit on VMware in the first place. It’s not that useful for transactional web computing because the vast bulk of transactional computing requires back-end database and storage access. Sending your spike traffic off-site, to a cloud that doesn’t have an up to date copy of your database, isn’t going to be that productive for most types of web transactions.
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Just read an interesting article on Forbes.com by Dan Woods entitled “Parsing the Cloud“. Dan makes a similar argument to our own Ian Rae, suggesting that specialized clouds will be required to meet the privacy, regulatory, geographic latency and application architecture demands of cloud consumers.

This begs the question, who will build all these specialized clouds? Are there incumbents who simply need to evolve, or will we see the birth of dozens or hundreds of new cloud providers?

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