Media Dojo

Archive for the ‘Cloud Presentations’ Category

Busy Monday, people. The research I did for GigaOm Pro on mobile cloud computing published today. I still need to negotiate with them what kind of excerpt I can put on this site….he who pays the piper calls the tune and all that. Aside from feeding my naked self-interest, you need to check out a subscription to GigaOm Pro. It’s one of the best deals out there and should strike terror into the hearts of other research shops.

I’m In Langley, WA this coming Saturday September 19th to speak about the media play for cloud computing at New Media 2012. I like the agenda and set up. Each speaker gets five min to make their case. Then comes a panel discussion. The line-up includes people from the telecom world, gaming, visual media and journalism. Here’s the speaker list:

Tom Kennedy, Former Director, Multimedia, WashingtonPost.com
Brent Friedman, Partner, Electric Farm Entertainment
John du Pre Gauntt, Author, Consultant, Technologist
Joe Pulizzi, Junta 42; Author, Get Content, Get Customer
Alexis Gerard, Founder, Future Image Report
Robert Gilman, Founder, Context Institute
Russell Sparkman, Founder, Fusionspark Media
Marcia Hofmann, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
George Henny, Co-CEO, Whidbey Telecom and Fibercloud
Joseph M. Tringali, Co-Founder, General Manager 5TH Cell Media

There’s also the venue—the Clyde Theater. It’ll seat about 200. Tickets are still available for the event which will run from 1pm until 330pm Saturday.

Hope to see you there.

Since the last post 33 days ago,

We moved our house…

took a Canadian vacation to decompress…

I then wrote a research report for GigaOm Pro on mobile cloud computing…

Woof.

But I’m back….

Quick update to say that I’ve been asked by GigaOm Pro (the subscription version) to author a report on mobile cloud computing. It should publish after Labor Day. I’d like to thank Mike and crew for allowing the opportunity.

I’ll be canvassing both the mobile and cloud computing sectors for data and insight.We’re still knocking around the outline which should be sorted by next week. Suffice to say that it’s going to pivot between an app-centric and service-centric view of Act II of the Mobile Internet.

Ping me with ideas and contacts if you’ve got a strong view on mobile cloud computing.

And BTW, I should be fully moved in by Saturday so can finally get back to regular posting.

The last company to present during last week’s AWS event was Zumobi. Spun out of Microsoft Research in 2006, Zumobi is betting on superphones such as iPhone, Android and Palm Pre as platforms for mobile application-based advertising. According to John SanGiovanni, Zumobi co-founder and VP of Product Design, superphones sport full fidelity browsers, robust SDKs, 3G speeds, as well as GPS capability. Given superphones’ capacity for high-end processing and rendering, branded mobile applications rather than display banners constitute the most important mobile advertising inventory.

Zumobi got its first taste of cloud computing with AWS through the 2008 Summer Olympics. Lenovo and Intel were the main sponsors for branded mobile apps that needed to stay in synch with the evolving action in Beijing in terms of updating scores and provoding other context tual information. With the large amount of stored data that needed to be accessed rapidly, Zumobi started out with Amazon S3 as its primary data store for the Olympics. That experience led to the next branded project which was working on the Xbox 360 launch for Microsoft. For that project, Zumobi tried out EC2 for the first time. They also worked on their own back-end to tune some of their internal load balancing systems to accommodate the Amazon infrastructure. Then came work with American Idol which pushed the AWS partnership harder as scale and speed requirements co-mingled. By that time, roughly 7-9 months ago, Zumobi decided to port nearly all of its operational infrastructure over to AWS.

Aside from the evolution of the Zumobi/AWS relationship, John focused on how to parse some of the blizzard of iPhone and other superphone statistics spit out by the research industry and the media. There may well be over 1 billion apps downloaded from the iPhone app store. But the vast majority of these are “transient” apps (e.g. beer sloshing and fart sounds), meaning that they live isolated on the mobile device for a limited period of time and then are uninstalled. There is very little scope for network interaction.

Zumobi places its future on mobile applications in which there is a strong content anchor. By that, John meant that there is a recurring, refreshing dose of content that keeps the app active and conversing with a network service. Hence, a branded app from REI that allows a skier to source snow conditions on selected resorts fits the criteria. Zumobi partners heavily with media companies to get rich recurring content to fuel the app, drive the engagement with the user, and increase the value of the mobile app to a potential sponsor.

The issue brought up by superphones is that now, the bar is raised for recurring content to include video, real-time data, images all of which point to massive scalability issues with a mobile app. “In order for us to build a network of superphone applications, having a flexible data center is absolutely imperative”, he says. In concrete terms, John said that going wholesale with AWS has eliminated fixed costs (as a matter of course) , and save around 80% in variable costs. Along with the costs savings , SanGiovanni notes that Quality of Service, Quality Assurance, and geo-location functions have been greatly improved.

Of cource, whether this is a match made in heaven will be decided once Zumobi launches a major app right as AWS has a hiccup. I’ll be curious to see how the company plans for disaster recovery having put so many eggs into the same basket. That said, the fact that AWS was able to produce a clean example of a customer putting their operational destiny on the line is worth noting.

Time for the second installment of last week’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) meeting for local start-ups in Seattle. Rounding out the four customers presenting last Thursday were two Seattle-based media plays, nuTsie and Zumobi.

First up was Bob Wise, VP of Engineering of nuTsie, (www.nutsie.com), which allows people to port their iTunes play list across web and mobile platforms, including Blackberry and iPhone.  Basically, nuTsie takes a user’s existing iTunes library and rolls it into a streaming service much like Pandora. They don’t use the actual music in the library but the meta data about the songs and/or a playlist to create a super customized experience anytime, anywhere. If it seems a little disjointed there is method to the madness. Music licensing remains a mess even after a decade of industry tinkering. Like Pandora, Melodeo must make all its music streaming DCMA compliant so legally nuTsie is considering web radio rather than a a formal music distribution service.  The primary outlets are streaming for the web and for mobile phones. The business model is based on advertising for web streaming and subscriptions mobile phones.

For plumbing, Melodeo uses Amazon S3 to store and serve up the audio files (several TB in aggregate) that stream via a Flash player. The web-based nuTsie service gets about 10 million page views per month with about 10,000 hours of streaming music content served up each day between the web and mobile components. Both the streaming service and the mobile play are hosted on AWS. Bob said that for a typical load, it takes about 40 EC2 instances (think 40 virtual servers) that are about evenly split between large and small instances with one extra large instance for the main database. If you do a back of the envelope calculation it works out to roughly $10-15 per hour for pure compute capacity. Remember that nuTsie is also paying for data and certain transfer bandwidth charges.

source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

One aspect of Bob’s presentation I liked was how he illustrated the effect of business forces on technical design. Chris Anderson of Wired fame used music as exhibit A of his Long Tail hypothesis. Bob said that in his experience the long tail might be long but it’s also thin as fishing line. Basically, this means that ultimately the number of music plays instead of the number of music tracks is what makes or breaks the business. Given the fact that the action stays with a relatively small number of tracks, nuTsie uses Amazon S3 as a content delivery network (CDN). If it sounds strange to use a data storage service to serve up content, take a look at charging. With many other CDNs in the market, a business is charged according to how much data sits at the edge node plus the transfer bandwidth to the end user. Thus, the key cost point is how much you get charged for keeping music tracks in storage which aren’t being played very much. Sticking several TB of music data out there on various edge nodes is an expensive way to do things. If you look at parking data similar to parking cars, loading rarely played music or video on an edge node is a bit like using a parking meter or a temporary lot whereas oft-played content needs the equivalent of a monthly reserved space. It’s an imperfect comparison I know. However, it’s decently clear that some of the heavy lifting for media providers is to figure how thick is the head of their demand model and how thin is the tail. Otherwise, it’s money out the door, cloud or not.

The Mariners were practicing today at Safeco Field where Amazon Web Services held a developer and start-up afternoon. Adam Selipsky and Matt Tavis of AWS covered the business layer as well as what was under the hood. Four customers gave their perspective about how they use AWS. Trains passed by as did the occasional crack of a bat to add background music to the presos.

I came away from the afternoon thinking that cloud computing has shifted into 3rd gear. We’re not yet at freeway speeds but it is clear that a lot of the theory is being hammered into practical application. Adam and Matt’s job is to solidify the current AWS story. Given that I’ve seen Werner Vogels recite the AWS lineage on numerous occasions, I can’t say that I heard anything new. Paradoxically, that makes me feel good. It suggests that AWS is in the midst of the tedious though critical task of truly productizing the offer. It’s easy for snarky analysts to harp about cloud computing being another form of time sharing, something we’ve had since the 1960s. But while it’s one thing to understand what something is, it’s quite a different challenge to make that something work at scale. Kind of like the physicist who can model a fastball. Very good, professor. Now, hit the sucker when it’s thrown at you at 96mph. Thus, I’m not particularly fussed when I hear AWS repeat its basic story with some incremental additions thrown in. Indeed, I’d say their success measure by 2015 is to become as boring and crucial as the power companies they seek to emulate.

To me, the customers provided the more exciting content. Jeff Lawson, Twilio’s CEO, spoke about how they offer telephony as a web service using multiple cloud providers, not just AWS. Strip out the black magic, and Twilio is about making telephony app development accessible to web developers. So if your expertise isn’t SIP, 3GPP or some other exotic telecommunications protocol, no worries. You can add various telecom services to your web app using traditional web standards and tools. Cloud infrastructure, much of which is AWS, enables Twilio to split its internal world into three large domains, continents if you will. There’s a DEV zone in which Twilio’s staff developers access a simple, powerful API that has only five blocks for building voice mail systems, IVR, PBX, click-to-call and other telecom services. Then there’s a STAGE zone that lets the developer test the app. Then there’s a PROD zone which is the only cluster that touches external customers (e.g. web developers). Media providers and marketers need to take note that branded comms is a huge future growth and community building area. Nearly every marketer I know bleats about how they’re fed up with using page views as a negotiating currency for media buys. They want more engagement (whatever the hell that is) from consumers. Nothing seems more engaging than a direct conversation, either between a brand and a consumer or consumers communicating in the context of a branded environment. I can’t say that Twilio solves the engagement problem (let alone how to use telephony as an ad currency). But you don’t get more guts level customer dialog than when it’s spoken instead of written so something is bound to shake out. Cloud now makes it far more likely that a savvy web developer will catch lightning in a bottle by using telephony in a new way. Watch this space.

However, you can bet that serving up telephony or other latency-sensitive applications beg for more robust testing. John or Jane Q Public won’t be thinking, “oh well, the app’s still in BETA. They’ll get it right with the next rev.” Far more likely, ordinary people will think “this sucks!” and move on when they encounter a communications or media app that is late in delivering the goods. Enter SOASTA, which uses the cloud to be an Underwriters Laboratory equivalent for websites and web based apps. They remind me of those demo guys who bring down city office buildings with explosives except SOASTA’s job is to stress test major web sites for latency issues. A case in point is Intuit. Many remember April 15, 2007 when Turbotax melted at 1015pm, not the company’s best day. The problem, however, is that to get a proper test, you need to simulate a proper load. SOASTA uses AWS and other providers to simulate massive traffic loads (eg. 300,000 simultaneous users) in various combinations without the need to construct a separate test facility. According to SOASTA’s CEO Tom Lunibos, the dirty little secret of most Web 2.0 apps (1.0 for that matter) is that they were lit without having done more than cursory load testing. The idea was that you got it out there, had it melt, apologized to the users with some cute stick figure with a hard hat, and fixed your latency problem. Mainstream adoption and recessions are curing that stunt pronto. Tom  declared (rightly) that latency can be measured as lost sales. Outages in 1998 that were reported in PC Magazine of Information Week now grace the front pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Bottom line for media providers (especially gaming companies) is that latency is money. So blow up your pre-launch site. You’ll be glad you did.

Don’t want to get too long so I’ll follow up with Melodeo (cloud-based music serving) and Zumobi (mobile applications as marketing) in a separate post.

On Tuesday 31 March, I spent the day at Cloud Computing Expo at the Cloud Boot Camp run by Alan Williamson from AW2.0 from the UK. I did the entire day-long session because Alan is an independent systems integrator for cloud computing. TRANSLATION: he knows where the bodies are buried among the vendors landscapes.

Cloud computing isn’t the panacea that many are trying to foist onto media and marketing firms. In fact, there are certain applications in which loading them onto the cloud isn’t what you want. At the same time, shrewd buyers can achieve some stonking economies vis a vis their competitors by using the best parts of the current cloud infrastructure offers from the likes of Amazon, Google, GoGrid, Mosso and so forth. Media and marketing people need to start getting used to those names because they’ll start cropping up in strategy sessions.

Aside from a mind-numbing arrary of stats, war stories, insights, and customer horror/success stories, the main aspect I took away from Alan’s seminar is how we remain inside a 1994 mind set as it applies to cloud computing. Most everyone has an idea of the constituent parts of of the cloud, the main bottlenecks, and what to attack next. There is also a slew of narratives trying to capture the “essence” of cloud computing in some grand theory. The upshot is that there’s a lot of white space in the middle. Grand theories of how cloud computing will “change everything” jostle for position aside “how do I port my SQL database onto Amazon S3?” In other words, everyone knows that cloud computing could be hugely important, on par with Internet. At the same time, no one knows how all these constituent parts will fit together, who will make obscene money, who will survive but be different, and who’s toast.

Call me biased, but I start with the plumbing because all models leak eventually. Cloud computing will be no different. Alan’s take is unabashedly technical, with plenty of pointers to the good, the bad and the ugly.

Take a look at the posted slides at

http://www.aw20.co.uk/help/

I gave a talk on the impact of cloud computing on the media and marketing industries today in New York. Here is a link to the screencast:

NYC_CloudExpoMarch30_JohnGauntt_FINAL_PPT07.pptx

I’m giving a presentation on the impact of cloud computing on online marketing at the end of this month in NYC. There will also be a column in AdWeek that should come out at the same time. From that point, I plan to start regular posting on the subject.

thanks for the interest and stay tuned.