Media Dojo

Archive for the ‘Cloudinomics’ Category

I know you’ve read ad nauseum about the upcoming Guide to Cloud Computing for Media People. Well, scratch the “upcoming” part.  It’s done and dusted. Time to let loose an excerpt of the demon child that’s ruled my free time (what little there is) since November.

Media Dojo Cloud Computing Guide Excerpt

This excerpt is about 1/4 of a 60+ page whitepaper. The Preface, Foreward and Table of Contents should give you a decent map of the work.

I’m releasing this under Creative Commons to spark a conversation in the technology, media and marketing industries about cloud computing—the good, the bad and the ugly. That said, I’m not just throwing this thing out in the wild. If you’re interested in the full version, you need to send me an email to get a conversation started.

john.gauntt <AT> media-dojo.com

My goal with this work is to launch a new think tank focusing on the intersection of media, technology and marketing. I need all the help I can get.

This year’s U.S. Open Tennis men’s final saw Juan Martin del Potro stun number 1 ranked Roger Federer in a four hour, five set drama. Potro’s first victory in a major tournament denied Federer a sixth consecutive U.S. Open title and provided tennis fans one of the most riveting finishes in recent memory. Aside from the buzz courtside and on television, the 2009 U.S. Open also broke new ground for live video streaming. Here are a few stats from the 2009 tournament which went from August 31 until September 13:

Live Match Streaming on USOpen.org:

• There were nearly 14 million (13,891,115) activated streams on USOpen.org.
• More than 2.5 million hours of live streaming were viewed (2,531,236 hours).
• 157 matches were streamed live.
• The interactive media console to access live streaming was launched 3.8 million times over the course of the tournament.
• The average length of stay on the media console was two hours and forty-five minutes.

While the 300 hours total video content of the 2009 U.S. Open tournament doesn’t match the 2200 hours of online video content connected with the 2008 Beijing Games, the U.S. Open tournament is among the single sport leaders in online video streaming. Behind the scenes, there was a clutch of online video companies that brought everything together. I spoke recently with Darcy Lorincz, CEO of Origin Digital about the U.S. Open as well as how they’re using Microsoft Azure to support their video encoding/transcoding efforts. For more info on Origin Digital, check out the Media Dojo Tear Sheet.

Media Dojo: First, let’s start off with the DNA of the company

Darcy Lorincz: We’ve been in the business of media processing for over a decade. The original company was started in 97 and called Live On Line. We spun out Origin Digital in October 2006 and were acquired by Accenture in May 2008. Where we concentrate is in encoding and transcoding, heavy lifting of video, audio and image assets. We started out like most video companies by racking and stacking boxes against customer workflows. Historically in the encoding and transcoding business, you put a box against a job and when the job is over you wonder where it’s going to be used next.

MD: Is that how you got into cloud computing?

DL: Well, it was a little more complicated. The whole game here is efficiency—in the hardware, in the workflow, in the delivery, in the people. At the first level of efficiency, you’re mainly talking about automating how you ingest video content and assign resources against it. So we built an automation layer that helped us get away from a lot of the bespoke operating systems for all the devices we needed to support. After you automate how you take in video content as a file or as physical media, the next level up is virtualizing the resources. This gave us the ability to load more customer jobs onto the same machines to boost utilization from the typical 10-20% level all the way to nearly 60% before we brought in more resources. Cloud computing is the third layer up in which we’re now bringing elastic resources into our data centers. When the automation layer detects that we’re running close to our internal capacity, it starts pulling compute resources directly from Azure depending on the specs of a given customer job. It might be that if a customer service level agreement (SLA) states that we’ve got to encode a job for X number of formats within a hour, we might spin up 200-300 Azure instances to crunch it in parallel. If the SLA says we’ve got 10 hours to do the same job, we’ll spin up 20-30 to run longer. But the beauty of cloud computing in general is that ability to dimension resources against a business relationship more than a technology constraint.

MD: What about the U.S. Open tournament?

DL: Two years ago, most broadcasters only cared about linear programming of video to your television. They still care about that but now want to guarantee what happens on your second and third screens because there are viable options for them to monetize their media in all of those mediums now. It’s real dollars now not funny money. So they need to figure how to scale that, how to maintain quality. Live events like the U.S. Open are a massive issue because you have these huge spikes in interest and activity. With typical professional sporting events, you might get 1-2m online and mobile viewers showing up. We had 13 million digital viewers over the course of two weeks with this tournament.

MD: You mentioned mobile video a couple of times. How big is that getting? Where do you see it going?

DL: 2009 has definitely been a huge growth year for mobile video. I don’t have exact stats but it’s been at least 10 fold growth from 2008 for sure. From a pure bit traffic POV, mobile growth doesn’t compare to online video. But it’s arguably more significant because mobile video is growing so fast from a base where we never saw that kind of consumption before. Mobile growth isn’t simply smarter devices. It’s also smarter consumers. Additionally, content owners are a lot more savvy about the mobile medium perhaps because of some lessons learned in online video beforehand. So they’re presenting you with content that’s optimized for mobile as opposed to content that’s been shrinkwrapped for mobile. It’s becoming a one click experience rather than the consumer needing to hack through various carrier decks to find something.

MD: Last question. Where is the opportunity going forward in online video in terms of new customers and new money?

DL: It’s true that we started mainly in the media & entertainment vertical. However, M&E isn’t where the majority of opportunity is today. The real opportunity is in enterprises using video as a storytelling medium for their internal and external corporate communications. Our customer base are the Fortune 500 companies. Video evolution is a big issue in that market. How does the marketing department, HR and other corporate arms use the new medium to create a more interactive experience for their constituents whether they are employees, partners in the value chain or even consumers? While enterprise customers need to be sophisticated in creating and positioning their messages, they shouldn’t need to worry about distribution. So we see our position and advantage with cloud computing as being able to put resources against that massive need. Enterprise clients can dump their video into our automation system and it just gets published and distributed where it needs to go in all the formats and bit rates that the people on the other end need to have. In that sense, we’re like a head end for enterprise video.

Chances are the next killing in media and marketing will be hosted on a computing cloud.

This sudden, explosive value creation in media probably won’t advance the state of cloud technology one jot. More likely, successful media innovators will identify some powerful yet unarticulated human hunger for a new type of entertainment, learning, communication and community. They will use cloud computing to serve that need.

All this talk about unarticulated needs sounds theoretical, right?

Climb into your time machine and go back to 1995 to ask people about their online search habits. You might find 10 people at a UNIX conference who could give you a decent answer. Good luck finding anyone who cared about search in the studios or advertising agencies in Hollywood, London or Madison Avenue.

Fast forward five years to 2000. Internet hype is deafening. The money is gushing. New companies bloom like algae. Search has become important. But the search market is largely locked up by Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite and especially Yahoo!  And besides, everyone knows that push technology is the next big thing.

Fire up your time machine again and travel to 2005. What a rocky ride you took through stock market implosions, terrorism, war, and the meteor strike of Google’s IPO. The 1990s are a sepia toned memory. But the search market is well established. We have a currency. We know digital is the future. And we know that bidding on keywords will get us to that future.

It must be time for social networks, mobile Internet and the real-time web to emerge to scramble our assumptions yet again.

Make no mistake. The future has NEVER been a smooth march to the upper right corner of the graph.

Futures lurch.

When the future lurches in a different direction, market analysts and executives quickly gravitate to either the utopian or curmudgeon schools of thought. Both camps try to connect the dots to the future based on an extension of today’s features and functions. Worse, both schools assume that future businesses will be based on meeting today’s needs faster, better, and cheaper. Sure, you can make money doing that. You might even get rich.

But you won’t make a killing.

To do that, you’ve got to radically upset the prevailing balance of productivity and investment in a given industry. Before electricity came into the workplace, 19^th century manufacturing productivity largely tracked investment in steam power and machinery. But a 20^th century capitalist using new ways to organize work around electricity and electric machinery could realize huge efficiency gains without making a near equal corresponding investment.

Henry Ford didn’t make a single contribution to understanding electricity. Instead, he used electricity to transform manufacturing with the assembly line. And once customers understood that they really “needed” electric irons, refrigerators, automobiles and power tools, it didn’t matter that your water wheel, steam engine and belts were fully amortized. It didn’t matter that there were still plenty of applications for traditional power sources and methods.

Try as you might, you could no longer make a killing by using steam. Competition had lurched in a different direction.

I believe cloud computing will be a catalyst for radically upsetting the balance of media productivity and investment over the next few years. The new organizational models and investment profiles enabled by OPEX-based, on-demand, as-needed access to computing resources will rip most media and marketing production out of the piece-work orientation that dominates today. For the media and marketing industries, computing clouds will become a medium for mass customization on the supply side and direct-to-consumer on the demand side. The barriers to entry will never be lower. The barriers to success will never be higher.

Please don’t think I’m being a Vulcan with all this talk of industrializing media production and distribution. Before designing or embarking on a campaign, marketers will still need to answer who buys, why they buy and how they buy. No intelligent media creator will try to substitute software for a compelling story, vivid characters, and unique takes on age-old human dramas.

Cloud computing won’t change those imperatives and thank goodness for that.

However, I strongly believe that cloud computing will change the environment in which the media and marketing industries approach these challenges. If you tilt the environment and iterate like hell, a tornado of extinction and the birth of new species is virtually guaranteed. That’s evolution in biology and in business.

Therefore, when you’re on the cusp of a lurch into a future, the crucial test isn’t engineering.

It’s imagination.

I can -repost from the GigaOm Pro site.

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SUMMARY: What happens when you promise end-users a persistent connection to data, applications and services regardless of the device they’re using? Mobile cloud computing aims to deliver just such a promise. Mobile access to popular web-based services such as Facebook and Gmail, combined with next-generation smartphones like the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android devices, is driving broad adoption of mobile data. However, the center of economic gravity is shifting. Historically, access to the mobile network was the service. But as users have expanded the uses for those bits, what the user does in a given session becomes fundamental to how much the service provider can charge the user or a third party (e.g. an advertiser). Thus, it’s likely that the mobile, IT and MCC sectors will continue their current marriage of convenience to attack a rare convergence of both short-term and longer term opportunity. However, in the process of adapting to an Internet that’s becoming more global, mobile and web-based by the day, the mobile and IT industries will be forced into new ways of doing business.
Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2009/09/report-how-mobile-cloud-computing-will-change-tech/#ixzz0TBqT54Ws

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My next gig for them is going to look at Augmented Reality. That’s a fancy term for overlaying computer generated information on real world images. Kind of like when they paint the yellow first down marker on the field during the football game. Of course, things are heating up in the marketing world as well as training.  If you’re connected to AR, feel free to drop a note (john.gauntt AT media-dojo.com)

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.

All too often, the term “media” is larded with the specific baggage of the entertainment industry. I take a more expansionist view of media, along the lines of Marshall McLuhan, one of my intellectual heros.

To me, media is an extension of our nervous system, both in how we think and, more importantly, how we act. Media can entertain, sure. But it also needs to inform. It’s not typical to think of WORD, PDF, or XLS as media. But these file types face similar challenges as other media types in the quest to capture a user’s attention and mental investment to help them achieve a goal.

For a long time, however, the need for enterprise information to connect to the user through design of a decent user interface took second place. Users forced themselves to forget all those hellish rows, columns, macros and other stuff to get to the information underneath.

Nowhere has the importance of information and the impotence of decent UI design been most pronounced than in mobile information. Shrink wrapping poor desktop interfaces to create perfectly horrible mobile interfaces was a time honored tradition until Apple put a match to tons of dry pent-up demand with iPhone.

Now, cloud computing is promising to take mobile information to the next stage. One of the pleasant surprises in doing the research for GigaOm on mobile cloud computing was that it surfaced enterprise media applications that are pushing the envelope as hard as entertainment oriented apps. Through that project, I met Roambi (roaming business intelligence) out of Del Mar, CA. Media Dojo Tear Sheet–Roambi

Romabi is a cloud-based mobile media play for enterprises. I call it a media play because it transforms numeric data into unique visualizations that are specifically designed to be viewed on an iPhone.

I spoke with Roambi CEO Santiago Becerra and his team about data visualization as an application and aesthetic for smartphones, specifically iPhone.

Media Dojo: Please define Data Visualization..

Santiago Becerra: Data visualization tools and applications enhance the user’s comprehension and absorption of information that is presented to them. The goal is to help users consume data in a much more insightful way to where they can derive the meaning of the data more easily.

MD: You and your team started in the business intelligence and data visualization worlds before launching Roambi. What drew you to mobile devices?

SB: We got ahold of the iPhone when it first came out and were quickly impressed that we weren’t holding a phone in our hands but a handheld computer. We were so inspired by the graphical capabilities and power of the phone that we thought it was the perfect platform for data visualization. What we found in our research is that the mobile market was very successful at connecting people to people but not so successful at connecting people to their data, especially their numerical data.

That’s where we saw a need for and a benefit from data visualization tailored to a small screen device. Typically, when data intensive enterprise tools move to a small screen device, they tend to be desktop solutions that have been mashed down to fit into a smaller package. That leaves the user experience completely unusable and unreadable as you try to navigate around. That’s where we saw a need for and a benefit from data visualization tailored to a small screen device.

MD: What about customers? Who is trying this out?

SB: Although our background is business intelligence, our target market is data visualization, which is much larger. It’s about being able to consume any type of numeric data that’s flowing around the organization. Around 80-90 percent of the “stuff” you find in a firm is operational information that flows in PDF, XLS or even in print outs. The mindset is for people on the go who need to access this information much faster, sometimes in more physically challenging circumstances. We’re getting a lot of traction from pharmas with large sales forces who are typically out of the office. They come in and out of offices many times each day.

MD: How does it work in practice?

SB: We have a web publisher that ingests the numeric data, re-formats and interprets it for optimal viewing on the iPhone. The web publisher sits on a server that’s either installed in-house or accessed by the customer as part of a SaaS offer. The user needs to download a free client onto the iPhone for display and storage. We make revenue either through the software licence or the SaaS subscription.

MD: How does Romabi employ cloud computing?

SB: What brought us to the cloud was the tremendous uncertainty about how big and how fast the business in this space would grow. There were no comparable services to gauge our capacity needs. Basically, we were looking for a way to scale quickly. The most flexible option was the cloud. That allows a small company like ours to gain tremendous capacity from day one. Aside from the local code that runs on the iPhone, all the rest is in the cloud. In house we only have our source code for developers. All the production is cloud-based.

MD: Last question. I know you work with Saleforce.com with data visualizations. Are there appreciable differences working with a partner who’s already in the cloud versus one who is not?

SB: Historically, we tapped on other vendors APIs such as SAP and went through the same process or inheriting their security model and working from there. However, some things are easier in the cloud. For example, with SalesForce we can access a set of pre-canned templates that are instantly available to any mobile SF user without having to go through our web publisher app. So if a SF user with an iPhone downloads our app and goes to the SF portal, he will see standard SF reports instantly available to download without going through the publisher to convert it. On-premise it’s not as easy. We’ve got to have IT help us with the on-premise data.

Another equally important aspect is the ease with keeping the data up to date via a cloud-based partner. SalesForce is always live and always changing. Rather than uploading and reformatting a XLS file each time it changes, the SF visualization changes with changes in the data.

Over 100 million games installed in 18 months. 40 million monthly players. 9 million daily players. Already profitable. 200+ staff spread around offices in Europe, US and China.

And, by the way, they don’t own a single server.

It’s often the case that when you use the terms “social”  or “cloud-based” to describe a company or a business venture, a lot of people roll their eyes—often for good reason. The bullshit to hard numbers ratio often exposes that you’re dealing with just the marketing phrase.

In the case of Playfish, the numbers speak for themselves. Founded in late 2007 by people with deep roots in the mobile ecosystem (e.g. Nokia, Glu Mobile), Playfish launched to take advantage of Facebook and MySpace as distribution channels for games. For quick overview of the company, check out the MD Tear Sheet.

Earlier this month I spoke with Sebastien de Halleux, Playfish co-founder and COO, as part of a research project for GigaOm Pro. The following is a more extended interview.

Media Dojo: Please define social gaming…

Sebastien de Halleux: Social gaming focuses the value on the interaction between friends via games as opposed to concentrating the value on the product side by selling a copy of a game. So we’re heavy on the idea of a game as a service and the connected nature of social experience as opposed to concentrating the value on the product side of selling a copy of a game.

MD: To state the obvious, then, how do you make money?

SH: From a business model point-of-view, the Playfish model employs micro-transactions during the game as well as in-game advertising.

MD: How does Playfish operate in the cloud?

SH: All of our business and commercial infrastructure runs on the cloud. The company literally only has laptops. We use Amazon S3 for storage, EC2 for computing, and use Cloud Front for content distribution across the fixed and mobile web. We were founded in October 2007, which was the first time you could get an entire company purely in the cloud.

MD: There’s a lot of mobile DNA in the company as well, how do you see social gaming in the mobile space?

SH: Today, there are about 1.5 billion web users worldwide who have access via a laptop or PC versus 3.5 billion mobile users, many of whom have some level of access to the Internet on their mobile device. So there’s already a very strong skew toward mobile computing in general as an access layer, especially outside the US. Social gaming is all about bringing a shared experience to a group of friends, wherever they are, whatever their access preferences might be.

It’s clear that more people are shifting a greater amount of their time from the bigger screen stationary experience to the smaller screen mobile experience via smartphones and netbooks. It’s not a function of us dictating that the user must have a specific device to enjoy a particular kind of content experience. It’s a function of the user choosing the stream that’s most adapted to their lifestyle at any given moment. As a service-based game company, you need to be able to offer a meaningful experience to people regardless of their access device or the social gaming model runs into problems.

MD: How does this work in practice?

SH: We launched an iPhone and iPod Touch version of one of our most popular titles, “Who has the Biggest Brain?” at South by Southwest this past March. It reached number 2 position in the Apple App store in the UK and was a top 5 mobile game in many other countries. The look and feel of the game is the same whether you play on your iPhone or your laptop even though the underlying rendering technology and input method is different. The key similarity is that your friends, who are Facebook friends in this case, are present as part of the experience regardless of whether you’re using your iPhone or a laptop. Moreover, your score and your progress within the game are preserved even if you pause it, change access devices, and re-start.

What’s important for the user is that they no longer think of the device as the platform but much more as the means to connect to the service. For us, the “platform” is the social network.

MD: What needs improving for the user to forget or not care about the access device they use to play one of your games?

SH: The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile media device but has atrocious connectivity once you get away from a Wi-Fi connection. It’s typically a use case never to assume 100% connectivity to a mobile cloud service. Managing this duality of being based in the cloud, but needing to maintain availability to the end user on questionable infrastructure is a huge technical and design challenge. Practically, this means that we still need to have the user download a client application into their device, mostly to handle the lack of bandwidth plus the frequent interruption of mobile connectivity. You often need to push updates to the client in order to update the service, which isn’t a good experience. So one of the milestones we want to see is the day when you can run a game in a mobile experience using Flash or something comparable to the web development model instead of needing a specific mobile client. That will require a big jump in mobile connectivity.

MD: What about on the cloud computing side? What needs to happen to take it to the next level?

SH: In terms of the cloud industry ecosystem, there are several forces in play. First, we are reaching a scale with 40 million monthly accesses to where we start to have increasing leverage as buyers of cloud services. When we started, AWS was the only credible provider. They’re still a close partner. But I think the market needs more mature options among different cloud providers, especially across geographies. At the moment, we’re very happy with our current partner but I think it’s important for the cloud industry to stay competitive. The second thing is more cloud specific services for businesses like ours. For example, our business depends heavily on micro-transactions. But it’s not uncommon for certain online payment providers to require a static IP address, which is a contradiction in a cloud environment. How to design a cloud-native billing layer is still pretty open territory. The next one would be cloud enabling layers, the tools that enable a company like our to manage and optimize the operational aspects of running a cloud-based business. Sure, there are companies focusing on this problem but many are tied to existing cloud providers. We’re like to see more cloud agnostic tool providers.

MD: Last question, how do you see games pushing cloud computing forward?

SH: Games will help cloud computing progress because of the sheer scale of demand it puts on the infrastructure. We’re probably one of the largest AWS Cloud Front customers because we need to push huge Flash files all over the Internet. This is a demand level you don’t see as much with business applications. The demand for game services will play a big role in developing cloud infrastructure, and especially tailoring it for low latency, efficient distribution and always-on connectivity. Latency and performance is everything if you’re offering games for multi-player experience.

To date, my idea of a “serious game” revolved around a pool table, money and a shot of straight liquor. PC-based or web-based games seemed more appropriate for the kids or geeks. It’s stereotypical, I know, but supported by years of anecdotal evidence.

However, I’m changing my view of games after a trip over to Breakaway Ltd. in Hunt Valley Maryland. At the end of May, the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism bussed us over there to hear about serious games. We learned that the Pentagon as well as healthcare institutions like Texas A&M took games very serious indeed. For a quick one pager on Breakaway, check out the Media Dojo Tear Sheet—Breakaway Ltd.

The problem is thus: how do you enable people to tinker with real concepts based on real situations—but without real consequences? Just as product engineers take great pains to stress their inventions to the breaking point before deploying them in the field, many of those who play for the highest stakes (war fighters and healthcare) are looking hard at game-based simulations to help them test-drive strategies or ideas before they go live.

I followed up with Breakaway CEO Doug Whatley this week to discuss how serious games might impact the cloud if, as we both agree, it’s a category that’s likely to diffuse beyond the defense and healthcare communities to other industry sectors.

Media Dojo: First, tell me how games chew up computing resources

Doug Whatley: Part of the reason that games are so cutting edge is that people often need to buy the latest and greatest machines to play the latest and greatest video games. So the best games always have a very high machine spec compared to the installed base. Since serious games are coming out of modeling and simulation, they fit naturally for the military because they were already training people in flight simulators or something similar. And for medicine, the fact that they have this very expensive, sophisticated dummy attached to a PC meant that medical customers were accustomed to buying a lot of equipment as well. The issue now for serious games is that if they’re to move beyond military or healthcare to become a regular part of training and education, the client hardware issue grows in importance. Often, you don’t find anything other than really old machines throughout government and the civil sectors. If you go into your local fire station, they’re likely to have a really old PC. So the ability for us to deliver them the latest training (or not) via a game simulation is more of an issue of them not having the equipment to run the software.

MD: Does Cloud Computing solve this problem?

DW: The appeal about cloud computing is that someone can sign on over the web and play the latest training game in the cloud without having to upgrade their local PC. That’s the perfect world. But in all areas of storage, processing and bandwidth, the resources in the cloud are being pulled pretty hard for games. The amount of data necessary for a lot of these simulations can be very large. Whether it’s the military or Homeland Security with their terrain databases, all of the DBs backing up that information are very large and all that data needs to be stored somewhere. If you have satellite images and other earth sensing data, it adds up pretty quick. To show people details of an actual city, that’s many GB of data. So the data storage and having a centralized location to keep that up to date is very useful. But because there’s so much data the throughput is very important as well. And the fact that you’re doing very sophisticated physics based simulations against those environments means that the processing is really getting hammered.

MD: What are the holes that need to be filled by cloud providers to drive adoption by game publishers like Breakaway?

DW: One of the biggest holes for adoption of cloud by games makers is the virtualization of certain kinds of hardware like 3D accelerators. It goes back to the processing needed in the cloud to where the web-based user experience mimics what you’d find if they had a latest version machine. There’s just not enough availability of virtualized hardware based in the cloud to really make game-based simulation a broad-based offering.

Another thing is that right now the cloud service providers are focused on the e-retailer market rather than the application vendor or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) market. Cloud providers need to step it up on the app vendor side as opposed to just expanding my sales capacity. Every cloud vendor has a riff talking about your web site getting mentioned on Good Morning America followed by a huge traffic spike. That variable burst capacity is great. But what if I’m an app service vendor and I’m pushing your cloud that hard all the time? It’s a different situation.

MD: Let’s imagine the cloud vendors are able to virtualize hardware better and provide an app-centric as opposed to website-centric service offer. How would that change your business of using game technology for simulations, modeling and training?

DW: What cloud-based delivery enables me to do is change my business to a subscription model. For example, if I create a fire training application, and allow firemen throughout the world to subscribe to my training service, that gives me such global reach that it completely changes my business economics. Right now, I’m out there trying to sell applications in a box and get people to buy them and go install them. With a cloud-based approach, I can switch to a more subscription based model. That’s actually what my customers want. That’s how the training budgets are paid for now. This goes back to the modeling and simulation versus training. It’s very common for companies or government employees to say, “I’m willing to pay $9.95 per person per month to have all my people trained in all these different areas”. That’s how they’re naturally inclined to purchase versus now where I have to convince them to buy in a different way.

Guilty as charged for light posting since the AWS gathering two weeks ago. Closing on the sale of my house long-distance has turned into a voyage into the surreal. Yesterday, I told one of the bankers of my intention to be one of the first in line for Tim Burton’s re-make of Alice in Wonderland, which will have Johnny Depp playing the Mad Hatter. I figured I owed myself a dose of reality after falling down the rabbit hole of US real estate circa 2009.

Thankfully, tomorrow I’ll be going to SF for Structure ‘09. Om Malik and the crew at GigaOm have put together the right people for anyone needing the best single, slurp of cloud computing. Naturally, some of the usual suspects like Werner Vogels, Marc Benioff, Russ Daniels, Lew Tucker and others will be there. But there’s also a good selection of “middle layer” companies who can fill in a lot of the white space.

Media oriented players will be thin on the ground. But we’re still in the stage where it’s more important to know what’s under the hood than it’s exact fit into the media and marketing worlds. They’re running at wildly different speeds but are converging (colliding?) rapidly. I’ll be there as Media Dojo to corral more interviews and participation in my summer-long project, which will be a Cloud Computing Guide for the Media and Marketing Industries. Trips off the tongue, huh? Right now, it’s more important to be clear than creative. I’ll inject chutzpah into the title as we get closer to publication, which will be near end of Sept./early Oct.

Expect a raft of posts based on that event and more information about the MD Guide over the next few days.

Compared to real estate, I’m glad to be back working with something tangible like cloud computing.

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.