Category: Tech news

Look, I get it. It’s a great story, maybe the greatest in the history of American business. From Day One, Apple did things the right way: clean, elegant, beautiful. But they were brought to their knees by Microsoft’s colossal mediocrity. Their visionary founder was forced out. They teetered on the brink. And then–bam! They were saved (ironically, by Microsoft.) They regained their footing.

And then they built one of the most remarkable corporate empires that has ever been constructed. And they did it by doing things their way. Clean. Elegant. Beautiful. Insanely great.

So I can see why people who were Apple users during the dark days have a messianic zeal. Their ultimate triumph, after such long suffering at the brutal hands of inferiors, must seem to them more than remarkable. It must seem righteous. Add that to one of the weirdest and most unexpected things about the twenty-first century–the extent to which so many people defensively identify with the operating system on their phone–and Apple must seem like a living testament to the ultimate victory of truth, justice, and the American way.

But there’s nothing even remotely admirable about their latest coup. The road to today’s American patent system was paved with good intentions, but it has become a walking catastrophe, like a natural disaster that won’t go away, or even a kind of monster perpetually stalking the tech industry. And Apple’s knight in shining armor just went and retained the monster’s services.

There was a kind of understanding. Maybe you signed on to using patents only defensively. Maybe you wasted billions on patent portfolios to ensure a kind of Cold War mutual-assured-destruction détente. But you didn’t cut a deal with the monster unless you absolutely had to.

Apple didn’t have to. But they did anyways. Was it effective? Hell, yes–in many ways. And most of them are bad for everyone.

$1B in damages. Must. Start. Patenting. Everything.—
Aaron Levie (@levie) August 25, 2012

Of course it’s perfectly understandable that Apple would act in their own self-interest for the sake of a billion dollars (not to mention Steve Jobs’s declaration of “thermonuclear war.”) But this time they shouldn’t be celebrated. They should be castigated. Their deal with the patent monster wasn’t the right thing to do for anyone else but them–and that includes their users. Competition from Android makes iOS better, and vice versa.

More generally, thanks to the patent monster, the tech industry is lost in a legal swamp, its visibility occluded by a thick and noxious cloud of FUD, stalked by vicious trolls. Thanks to Apple’s latest move, the swamp is now deeper, the fog thicker, the patent trolls more deadly. No fanboy anywhere, no matter how devoted, should be applauding.

Image credit: Ian Boyd, Flickr.

Editor’s note: Ruben Daniels is CEO and co-founder of Cloud9 IDE, a leading cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that enables web and mobile developers to work together and collaborate in remote teams anywhere, anytime.

Software is taking over the world. This sentiment has become widely accepted throughout the tech community, most notably examined in depth by Marc Andreessen last year.  However, as software continues to infiltrate nearly every industry, there’s a serious consequence taking shape. The demand for development continues to grow exponentially, but the amount of qualified developers that are available to produce this commodity is not. Simply put, the world is running out of developers.

It’s no surprise that we’re seeing more investments being funneled into development technologies. It wasn’t long ago, however, that the general consensus was that making money in the developer space was hard. This thinking has started to shift with big investments in companies like Atlassian, Cloud9 IDE, Codecademy, and recently GitHub and Meteor to name a few.

It’s a nice start, but this is only the beginning of what’s to come, and with good reason. There is a big problem to solve in this space: we need to figure out how the developer community will be able to take on the enormous workload that is fast approaching. As software becomes universally relevant, developer effectiveness will become both the limiting factor and the competitive advantage for every industry.

What’s the solution?

One approach is to ramp up on developer education. With the increasing demand for developers, growing the pool of qualified talent is an obvious solution. Combine this with the present unemployment rate, and the opportunity that the modern web offers those who want to learn coding, and you’ll arrive at companies like Codecademy. Not only do they address the developer shortage problem, they help the economy at the same time. Realistically, however, this will increase the developer pool by a few percent at best. So, let’s look at ways to make the current developer pool more effective.

We all know the old adage “Work smarter, not harder.” For developers, there are two ways to work more effectively. The first is to start writing less code. Increasing the use of dynamic languages is one way, but we are seeing new initiatives that take this path to a whole new level. Companies like Meteor, Opalang, TypeSafe and Appcelerator are focused on improving productivity.

They have come up with innovative new ways to abstract away code writing and management, so that developers spend less time building complex web or mobile applications. Meteor, for instance, abstracts the network layer from the developer allowing code to be easily written as if it ran on a single system. Consequently, because the number of bugs grows exponentially with the size of the code base, decreasing original code writing inherently improves developer effectiveness.

The second way to increase effectiveness is to improve workflow so that developers can build better features faster. New and innovative tools can remove many of the mundane tasks that developers do on a daily basis, and provide the infrastructure to iterate toward a true solution without many sidesteps.

Companies like GitHub, Cloud9 IDE and Sauce Labs are paving this path. Where in the past companies like SpringSource and JBoss only had the open source services model to make money, nowadays the cloud provides a way to monetize much earlier and in a more straightforward way. GitHub is a classic example where, unlike its predecessor SourceForge, it has managed to leverage a successful subscription based freemium model for its service.

Up until now, innovation in the developer tooling space has been at a stand still. Now that there’s an opportunity to make money using cloud technologies, developer tools have become a viable business once again. There’s a sea change happening, which is why investment dollars are moving into developer solutions.

The Cloud Effect

Let’s take a closer look at how the cloud is transforming developer tooling. For the past 20 years or so we’ve seen the dominance of desktop tools, integrating many different types of tools in a single application. These so-called integrated development environments (IDE) all originate from the late 90s, early 2000s. The world has seen big innovations in user interfaces since then, as well as the coming of cloud and the evolution of agile software development – but not in the world of IDEs. The transition to the cloud requires a full redesign of the IDE, and we now see a proliferation of new ideas. Light Table recently showed how a new UX paradigm can help developers get immediate feedback when writing code. Based on ideas popularized by Bret Victor, these innovations can help developers focus on the creative part of application development, while inadvertent bugs are quickly caught.

By moving development to the cloud and offering the IDE as a service to developers, a significant amount of their workload has been removed such as downloading and installing the IDE and SDKs and managing their workspace. Without the cloud, developers have to be a system administrator for their own laptops. This is time that is wasted not writing code. The workspace is ready to use the second you log on with cloud IDEs, and these cloud-based workspaces give rise to many new workflows. A developer can easily share his or her workspace with colleagues, getting help when he or she is stuck.

Sharing is one of the popular operations that the web has made possible. Just send the URL to someone else to give that person access to your workspace. Cloud IDEs can make remote developers feel like they are sitting next to each other while writing or debugging code; in the same way Google Docs does for office tools. This not only saves time, but any constraints in forming remote teams will dissipate, and that will increase the ability for organizations to hire the best person for the job, regardless of their location. There are millions of developers working in remote teams that have already benefited from solving issues together in minutes, rather than hours or days.

The first cloud revolution promised flexibility by abstracting the hardware layer and allowing easy creation and destruction of virtual machines (VM). The second cloud revolution abstracts the VMs away and allows the developer to simply deal with the application runtime and services.

This revolution is happening right now and cloud IDEs play a pivotal role in removing the friction between development and operations. This so-called “dev-ops” is the promise to move some of the operational responsibility to the developer, in order to gain quick release cycles. The benefit is that developers can create and deliver features on their own without drag from process or organization. This drastically increases turnaround time and overall agility. Unlike the waterfall approach of the past, where full specs were written in 100+ page documents, dev-ops completes the agile vision whereby developers can shape and form applications by getting continuous feedback from users. A cloud IDE will be the nexus of all this activity, a central point to write and deploy to the cloud and learn from users.

Who Wins?

Big enterprise will be the big winner here. Enterprise is under pressure in the current economy; everyone is looking to create things faster and drop their internal overhead. Outsourcing, insourcing, right sourcing – it all means dealing with a dynamic workforce. A cloud IDE is uniquely positioned to gather all these resources in a team structure that works. The associated management overhead can be driven down drastically with the use of cloud-based developer tools. Just log in and you are good to go.

The developer space must adapt to deal with the growing demand on developers. The investments that we’re seeing right now are just the prelude to the enormous wave of innovation that will be created to deal with this growth. The software industry is relatively young, but the world has managed to withhold innovation for developers for a decade. You can feel the ground shaking. It is going to be amazing to see what will come and how this innovation will transform all industries worldwide.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) added support today for a browser specification that defines ways for  apps to allow resources to be accessed by web pages from different domains. The practice is called Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) and has been requested by AWS users for the past few years.

The new service represents another way that AWS automates tasks that developers once had to do themselves. We see this over and again fron AWS. They  abstract arduous tasks so developers can focus on building apps.

Jeff Barr writes on the AWS blog that developers can use the CORS specification  to build web applications that use JavaScript and HTML5 to interact directly with resources in Amazon S3 without the need for a proxy server.

Cross-scripting attacks have historically been used  to inject client-side script into Web pages viewed by other users. According to Wikipedia, “CORS makes it possible  to determine whether or not to allow the cross-origin request.  It is a compromise that allows greater flexibility, but is more secure than simply allowing all such requests.”

According to Brr:

You can implement HTML5 drag and drop uploads to Amazon S3, show upload progress, or update content directly from your web applications. External web pages, style sheets, and HTML5 applications hosted in different domains can now reference assets such as web fonts and images stored in an S3 bucket, enabling you to share these assets across multiple web sites.

The thread on Hacker News about the news shows how much credibility AWS has with its developer community:

Finally, I won’t have to proxy s3 requests through my own nginxes.

I’ve pled for this feature in the AWS forum, over their commercial support (which I bought just to bug them about this), and to werner vogels directly.

More information about CORS on AWS is available here.

With social networking having permeated the way we look for jobs, share photos and music, and discover news, a startup named Lore is on a mission to do the same for higher education, and potentially re-shape the way teachers and students communicate. Formerly known as CourseKit, the Thiel and Founder’s Fund-backed startup is doing that with a platform that is part Facebook and part Blackboard — for courses. In other words, Lore aims to act as a replacement for the infamous course management system with a gradebook, calendar and document uploading (for class assignments), while giving students a social network-style newsfeed for classroom conversations.

However, until now, Lore has been primarily focused on creating functional communities around courses, and students could only join Lore if a teacher invited them. While courses are remaining the central axis of the network, the startup has launched “Lore For Students,” which now lets students join themselves and create academic profiles, follow classmates and professors and join groups (like study sessions or clubs).

The network logged its first semester live this past spring, with professors at over 600 schools testing its framework. Co-founder Joseph Cohen tells us that, since July, thousands of coures across a range of disciplines have joined, from “Experimental Poetry” at UPenn to “Organizing For Power” at Harvard — with an average of more than one course per school on board.

In July, the startup launched an end-to-end redesign of its network. Taking feedback it received over the course of the spring, it combined pre-existing features like “Stream” and “Calendar” into a Facebook-inspired Timeline, or newsfeed.

The newsfeed allows teachers to make classroom conversations public by default, instead of relying on back-and-forth group emails. It also added a feature which lets students audit classes and academic profiles, in which students could share education, experience, honors and awards, courses, groups, CV, etc.

In terms of who’s using it? Cohen said that the most eager to adopt have been teachers who want to engage with students on a medium they’re more familiar with, as well as among those who create close relationships with individual students. It gives them the ability to stay in touch with students after the course ends — or even after graduation.

In comparison, Lore For Students, which launched in time for the new school year, gives college students the ability to create a learning profile to enable them to share what they’ve learned, what they’re studying and what they want to do after school, join class communities, academic groups and use real-time messaging to contact anyone in their network.

With 600+ schools on board, Lore has been able to build strong organic growth, without relying on paid user acquisition. However, while hundreds of institutions may be on the network, only one or two classes per school may be involved, so it’s got a long way to go before reaching critical mass. So, in an attempt to bring the whole school online, the team is starting with a targeted group of four schools and working with a team of students at those schools to push the envelope. And like other networks before it, the plan is to restrict access for schools until a certain number of students have joined — and worry about monetization once enough schools (and students) are using the network.

Sounds a bit like Facebook, which raises the question: Why wouldn’t students and teachers just use the omnipresent social network? That’s because context is key for social networks, Cohen says. Students don’t want to “friend” their professors on Facebook (or connect with them on LinkedIn in any significant capacity) and they don’t want to broadcast photos from last night’s party to the world of family members and grandmas on Facebook. Your network for learning is distinct from your social or professional network, so Lore wants to create a community which recognizes that — with a context that’ll make actually want to “follow” your favorite professors.

But why not create a social network for students separate from professors? Lore is betting that there’ll be enough of the experience on its network that doesn’t require professors it won’t stifle communication. And that having professors there gives the network’s learning context some credibility.

The New York-based startup raised $1 million in seed funding back in June of 2011, followed by a $5 million series A in January (led by The Social Capital Partnership). In April, education contrarian-turned-Stanford-professor Peter Thiel joined the startup’s roster of investors (with an undisclosed sum). Thiel said of the newly-rebranded startup: “The Internet is reshaping how people learn, and Lore is one of the companies making that happen. My course at Stanford is using Lore and we can see dynamics changing already.”

There’s no doubt that the right hybrid of social network that can get kids interacting in coursework-related conversations outside the class will have a big impact on education. Whether or not Lore is that tool remains to be seen. But giving students the ability to see a roster of people in their class, click on a face and view that person’s profile, what other courses and groups they’re in and join those — within a newsfeed-style interface they’re familiar with — can’t help but seem like it has a lot of potential.

As kids head back to school this month and next, some will find a rather new arrangement greeting them: blended classrooms.

These don’t feel like the ways that many of us attended class, with a single teacher lecturing at students from front and center (“Bueller?”). As it’s difficult–if not impossible–for cash-strapped schools to develop their own original learning products in house, startups are at the forefront of these changes. Thanks to many of them, more instruction is now being simultaneously delivered–by a live teacher, via web-based curricula, and in the form of students teaching one another, among other forms–within the walls of traditional classrooms.

Innosight Institute, a think tank started by HBS alums that focuses on innovations in education and health care, explains:

Educators and entrepreneurs are increasingly creating blended-learning environments –where rather than doing online learning at a distance, students learn in an adult-supervised school environment for at least part of the time..a small but growing number of schools are starting to introduce blended learning into their core programming for mainstream students.

This is at least partially a response to more technology-based tools and student data being accessible to educators, not to mention an increasing number of public and private funding opportunities in the space. (Department of Education funding for personalized learning initiatives will be distributed nationwide to the tune of $400M by the end of the year. This is just as some districtts, including many in Florida, are starting to require the use of blended learning approaches in an attempt to save money.)

As the number of online degrees being issued surpass traditional ones, this year the number of charter schools and districts trying startups’ alpha and beta versions of blended products and supportive offerings will be higher than ever. An increasing number of brick and mortar schools are now paying for tools that their faculty members have been requesting (more insights into individual student performance, ability to access information remotely), and startups are happy to provide licenses for technology that they are uniquely positioned to build (responsive systems for sharing curricula and cloud-based collaboration tools among them).

Rather than create one-off math or reading apps, ”middleware” companies for education are trying to help schools systemically implement blended techniques. Among the companies complimenting in-person instruction are Clever, which shared education software and hopes of standardizing APIs for schools at the most recent YC Demo Day. LearnSprout has recently launched tools to make information in Student Information Systems more transparent and secure. Instructure introduced its Canvas learning management system as an open way to increase teacher effectiveness and parental engagement. And New Tech Network has built Echo, a system that integrates Google Apps for Education and online assignment information to facilitate project-based learning.

One startup working to introduce blended designs and strategies to schools is San Carlos-based Education Elements. Its SaaS, cloud-based “hybrid learning management system” will be in 44 schools this fall (up from 11 last year), including Mission Dolores Academy and Aspire Public Schools. In recent months it has brought former Starbucks COO Howard Behar onto its board. Since raising $6M in Series A funding it’s also added Shelli Taylor of Disney English in China as COO and Jawbone exec David Sanchez to lead product and partnership development. In some ways Education Elements acts as classroom curator: making recommendations about buildout of physical spaces and how to best schedule course time between collaboration, teaching, and screentime (switching between modes based on “lab,” “classroom,” and “flex” plans).

Students at California and Wisconsin-based Rocketship Education schools, which focus heavily on online content to improve the quality of students’ time spent learning, have long been exposed to the concept of hybrid forms of instruction to help them meet Common Core State Standards. But CEO John Danner said that it hasn’t always been easy to find organizational partners who were as concerned with student performances as teachers were.

“Two or three years ago, no one had metrics,” said Danner, which caused his schools to start working towards other ways to measure individualized student performance. Alas, non-profit schools working to develop software with foundation funding was a distraction from their core objective, educating students. Enter Junyo, an entrepreneurial endeavor that looked to provide learning analytics to schools and now counts Rocketship among its clients. According to Danner, “If startups can deliver blended solutions to superintendents at affordable price points, they can help fill in the missing piece.”

Junyo will be piloting its personalized student platform with thousands of students this year between charter and public schools. The Menlo Park company says it looks to give parents and teachers feedback about learner performance that schools currently operate without. Blended is not just a focus on technology, said Junyo co-founder and former Oodle VP Kim Jacobson, but also values insights that can be made offline with the availability of more objective information.

Jennifer Carolan, co-founder of the NewSchools Seed Fund, says she’s seen a major shift in how teachers are providing lessons and connecting with their students. As a non-profit seed fund, it’s among the first of its kind and has invested in Education Elements and Junyo among other tech companies. “Emerging platforms like Edmodo, Education Elements and Engrade help raise attention for the tools, products, and apps that have come on the scene,” Carolan says. (The former said it had reached 80,000 schools when it announced that it had raised a $25M Series C funding round earlier this summer. Engrade’s reported 4.5M person user base helped it secure a $3M seed round recently.)

Even as the field is in its relative infancy, it’s already offered alternative options for planning classroom content–an area that has long been dominated by textbook publishers–along with the promise of more immediate information about student progress and learning..

Image from Innosight Institute K-12 Blended Learning Report.

I participated in a panel discussion at LinuxCon today with other journalists who cover Linux and open source goings-on, including our own Alex Williams. One of the questions that was asked was “What was the most important story for you this week?”

The answers from my peer journalists were interesting, and reflect the diversity in interest (and beats) between us all. From Google’s admission to using — and paying for support for — Ubuntu on the desktop, to Linus’s revelation of a Linux 4.0 release within the next couple of years, the things that piqued our various interests covered the spectrum of what happened this week.

When the question was posed to me, my immediate response was “The Hallway track”. For regular conference goers, this is a colloqualism to describe the ad-hoc conversations that spring up in the hallway between sessions. This is where conference participants most interact — both with one another and with session presenters. 

All this week I’ve overheard snippets of conversations between two or more impassioned interlocutors discussing kernel tuning, memory management, cgroups, containers, systemd, “fake NUMA”, and lots of other interesting technologies.

What has been most interesting, though, is the realization that this is open source development in action. Whether it’s witnessing an Amazon developer talk with a Rackspace developer, or a SUSE engineer talking with a Red Hat engineer, or a CloudStack dev talking with an OpenStack dev, the conversations are all focused, technical, and almost entirely without conflict. These are smart, talented people looking to solve interesting, complex technical problems.

The companies that employ these various folks may all be fighting tooth and nail for customers, but they’re doing so at a higher level in the “business stack”, and there’s plenty of room for each of them to satisfy customer needs in different ways. The technical conversations that occurred this week were all aimed at allowing those higher level business discussions to take place.

That is open source development. A diverse set of participants, sometimes with conflicting long-term goals, all working together to solve problems, create new and useful solutions, and hopefully have fun doing it. I didn’t see any acrimony or hostility this week, despite the presence of employees from companies that are fighting — sometimes bitterly — for the same limited set of customers.

As Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation executive director, observed in his opening remarks on Wednesday, while the suits were planning product roadmaps and business plans at VMware’s VMworld event, the folks who were actually solving problems were here with us this week, working together and kicking ass.

Open source is where it’s at.

When Digg launched Version 4 in August 2010, users weren’t happy about it. Some called it a revolt. As Kevin Rose said recently in a Reddit AMA, the company made some decisions during the rollout that “went against its core” to stave off declining traffic. As the story goes, it wasn’t long before the layoffs started and Rose (and other execs) resigned from the company.

Betaworks acquired Digg in July and put its News.me team in charge of the site. Six weeks later, the new operators launched a complete overhaul of Digg. However, while interest in Digg had remained (a surprising amount, according to new CEO John Borthwick), the new site removed user access to old data, i.e. everything they’d ever posted to the old iterations of the site, like Diggs, comments, articles, etc.

The new owners had focused on getting the new version up and operational (with less expensive infrastructure) instead, but they promised a rectification to the historic data problem in the near future.

Yesterday, the team did just that and actually seems to have gone beyond what is usually characteristic for new management or a deadpooled/acquired startup to do in terms of access to historic data. They launched the “Digg Archive,” a tool that lets users of the old site (i.e. before July 2012) retrieve their Diggs, submissions, saved articles, etc.

Digg said via blog post:

We believe that people own the data they create, so while we work to determine if and how this data makes its way into the new Digg, we wanted to provide a way for users to access their history. It took some digging through the old infrastructure, but the complete Digg Archive is now live.

While a number of companies allow people to export their data after big changes and other sites independently pick up the slack, Digg seems to be one of the few that has actually partnered with other startups to provide a home for its own data via automated importing.

The first is social and collaborative bookmarking site Kippt, a Y Combinator startup whose official launch we covered in June. Kippt enables users to organize links into lists, collect bookmarks and clips, add comments, and share content, etc.

Digg users can either go to the Digg Archive and enter user info (they’ll send you an email with a link/instructions or to Kippt.com/digg, Kipp’s automated, custom importer. Once imported, the site archives them and makes them searchable.

Users can also do the same for Pinboard, a simple, no-frills web archiving and bookmarking service. To do that, download your Digg Archive file, login/create a Pinboard account ($9.88 fee if you haven’t), and import.

The archive also lets users download their historic data as JSON or CSV, too. Pretty good for exporting, however, it seems Digg users aren’t able to search data via the Archive, though that might appear soon. The Digg community never really seems too happy with redesigns (or anyone, ever), and from what I’ve seen, the same goes for the new, new (new?) Digg. But at least they’ve taken steps to make them happy/depressed with access to a data-walk down memory lane. Though most Digg users seem to have just moved on to Buzzfeed or Reddit or imgur.

I am not one to argue with abundance. I am a big believer in the way we can create so much, all the time.

But I can’t stand an abundance of vendor one-upmanship and that’s just what I heard this morning at CloudOpen in a panel discussion about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) v. Platform as a Service (PaaS).

The conversation quickly turned to APIs. From there, it fell into a talk about their vision of an API and why or why not there should be one or many APIs to connect to IaaS environments – specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS). There was not one user on the panel.

But more so, in the context of the discussion, it is too early for an API death match. There are still way too many unknowns about how third party service providers and enterprise clients will integrate data centers with PaaS, IaaS or both. To cement one API makes no sense now. Open infrastructures still need to be baked out. We do not yet know how deep a functionality they will offer. Google has not yet said a lot about its APIs. So why are we talking about this?

Citrix Peder Ulander and Cloudstack’s Joe Brockmeier said it well to me today — it takes a long time to make a decision about transforming your infrastructure. It’s a once in a decade decision. Right now — for most customers it’s not about the API. And it shouldn’t be. It’s first about getting the blocks in place and establishing better automation and orchestration. That’s the DevOps way — a cultural change that has to take place before we start deciding what is the holy grail of APIs.

Opscode’s Chris Brown started with this beauty: “Who has the best API and why?”

Brown was at one time the founding member, architect, and lead developer for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). AWS has been in the IaaS business longer than anyone else. Chris, a technically brilliant fellow, knows the answer to the question. Greg DeKoenigsberg who works as vice president of community at Eucalyptus Systems did point to how AWS lacks IT administration capabilities. He said Eucalyptus offers that functionality via the AWS API.

Only Eucalyptus has full access to the AWS API for companies to use in their own enterprise environments. AWS has the copyright on the API. So if you want to use it like Eucalyptus does you need to get AWS okay. And so far, they have not made it available like they have for Eucalyptus.

There were some great points, mind you, especially from Google’s Craig McLuckie who said it is too early to talk about one API to rule them all. He said we are still trying to figure out the shape and direction of what an API stands for in an infrastructure setting. People are over focused on APIs and API convergence as the cure-all for the cloud space. He said we, as a community, have not thought through the semantics differences of an API.

And that is in part because we still do not know what shape architectures will take across the market. It also ignores what enterprise customers will want to do.

Mind you, this has been an awesome conference. My friend Rich Miller compares it to the Gluecon conference. An apt comparison as the conversation is great here. But it’s that conversation outside the vendor bubble that makes it meaningful.

One thing is certain. The cloud market is not moving at a rapid pace. Users are giving things a try. But they are not committing in any mass way. Its going to be a long process. Most know little about an IaaS. They know even less about PaaS. So the talk about the best API is just a vendor conversation – a way to gain some advantage that is only relevant in a marketing context.

The tablet-sized version of Breffo’s Spiderpodium. Photo by Lore Sjöberg/Wired

Some people, I understand, treat their iPad and iPhone with the dignity of a foreign potentate or a domestic feline. I treat mine more like a preschooler treats a teddy bear, dragging them with me from bed to work and back again, and bringing them along on cross-country road trips.

In such circumstances, for example watching Archer on Netflix while lying on a futon in the back of a cargo van, the usual set of stands and cases don’t cut it. That’s why I was delighted to come across the Breffo Spiderpodiums for iPad and iPhone in a random computer store in Washington state. That’s right, these aren’t manufacturer samples — I shelled out my own cash for them.

The Spiderpodium is well-named, because it’s precisely what you’d get if you somehow managed to convince a spider and a podium to mate. It has ever-so-slightly unnerving segmented legs surrounding a tiny platform. The legs — eight of them — bend easily but stay in place firmly, and they’re covered with a nice, friction-enhanced surface that holds onto plastic, aluminum and glass pretty impressively.

As the artwork on the package illustrates, you can bend the podium into all sorts of useful shapes, from a low stand for typing to a high stand for reading, to a sort of hanging mount for hanging over a treadmill or from a shelf. It’s kind of like a grade-school pipe-cleaner sculpture with a purpose.

I routinely came up with new ways to use the iPad stand — and new configurations for old uses — just for the pleasure of bending the legs into something interesting. It hangs very nicely over the steering wheel if I want to browse the web while eating drive-through, and in the absence of an actual table, I’ve found that with a bit of adjustment it can hold my iPad steady atop my thigh, or keep the screen level when lying in a soft bed.

The iPhone version is a little less handy. The small screen and palm-sized dimensions of the device make a stand a little less necessary and a little less useful. I have used it when the iPad was low on power, though. If I didn’t have the larger device, I’d probably use the smaller one more often.

There’s actually very little i-Specific about the Spiderpodium, despite the packaging. The iPhone version had no objections to holding my cheapie Android phone, and the iPad version was happy to wrap its creepy little legs around my Kindle, even sparing a limb to hold a mini-flashlight as an improvised book light. The iPad version was even able to hold my digital SLR camera, with zoom lens, at a steady upward tilt when properly positioned — very impressive for something that looks so spindly.

I was able to fasten my tablet to just about anything. Photo by Lore Sjöberg/Wired

The Spiderpodiums are both stronger and more clingy than you might expect from looking at them. I hung my iPhone and iPad over the smooth imitation leather of my passenger seat and took them on a none-to-gentle drive around the Portland hills. The iPad never displayed any interest in falling, or even shifting, and it took just a couple adjustments to get the iPhone at a stable rear-facing angle, which more of an issue with the tiny legs than their strength or friction.

Just to give the stands a thorough test, I hung them from the van’s ceiling for over 24 hours. I didn’t want to give up custody of my coveted Cupertino devices for that long, so I used appropriate substitutes — the aforementioned Android phone and a hard-shell iPad case with ballast. The legs didn’t unbend at all in spite of the constant pull of Mother Gravity. It’s hard to say how the firmness of the legs will fare over months and years, but over days of heavy use they stood up to — or hung down from — the challenge.

One drawback of the Spiderpodium is that while it’s strong, it’s not completely firm. If you actually touch your touch-screen devices with any particular force, they’ll briefly jiggle like a trademarked flavored gelatin dessert. This isn’t an issue when pausing movies, but — depending on the configuration — typing on the screen and playing fast-paced games can range from distracting to difficult.

Another drawback is that they aren’t designed to stow neatly like a folding case or Apple’s Smart Cover, so you’ll have to keep your podium separately in your purse, satchel or saddlebags.

The real determinator, though, is whether you subject your devices to odd circumstances. If you use your iDevices only on sturdy, level surfaces or for brief handheld purposes, you won’t find much use for the Spiderpodium beyond making funny shapes. But if you want to use your electronic devices in decidedly organic circumstances, these weird little bendies are a handy solution to a startling number of challenges.

WIRED Perfectly designed for its purpose, providing strength, grip, and a surprising amount of amusement. Bending it into strange arachnoid shapes will open your eyes to new uses for your devices. Stays put once configured.

TIRED iPhone version seems somewhat unnecessary. Doesn’t provide firm support while tap-typing. Though its versatility at mounting an iPad in odd positions is unmatched, it’s not as portable as a folding stand or keyboard case.

Photo by Lore Sjöberg/Wired

Homepage photograph courtesy of Breffo. All review photos by Lore Sjöberg/Wired

When paired with an iPhone or iPod, Nike’s new sensor-laden basketball shoes can measure your on-court performance. Photo by Jim Merithew/Wired

Nike+ used to be about running.

The original shoes-meets-iPod system was essentially a fancy digital pedometer. But even that simple setup resulted in a certain mania among enthusiasts, and Facebook feeds the world over remain clogged with run updates to this day. Despite its limitations, people warmed to Nike+ because it encouraged them to run farther and more often.

Now Nike has expanded its “+” empire by issuing both cross-training and basketball shoes equipped with the company’s digital dressing. This lets us non-runners taste the thrill of tracking our accomplishments, sharing them with friends, and virtually competing with others who’ve bought into the Nike+ ecosystem.

Being a dedicated, if aging, pick-up hoops player, I was initially excited about the new Hyperdunk+ b-ball kicks. The shoes feature a series of sensors embedded throughout, and a small rechargeable dongle that gets inserted in the sole under your foot will wirelessly transfer your stats via Bluetooth to your iPhone. My excitement faded pretty quickly, though, when I saw the price — $250 is a lot for shoes, especially given that I sometimes burn through a pair in as little as six months. Would they really be worth it?

The shoes track three metrics. First is Fuel Points, Nike’s proprietary system for measuring overall activity. Fuel Points are the same catch-all stat used by Nike’s new Fuel Band, and while they aren’t as clear as calories, steps, or some other comprehensible movement stat, they actually don’t take that long to get a handle on. You quickly learn how much activity it takes to reach, say, 1,000 points.

The second metric, and probably the most fun to play around with, is vertical leap. The shoes measure this by calculating time spent in the air, and it turns out this is pretty effective. Unless you are actively trying to cheat, the shoes give consistent readings. It doesn’t matter if you lift your legs, leave them straight, or kick out your feet David Lee Roth-style, your vertical leap stays the same.

Finally, the shoes gauge quickness by measuring steps per second. This seems simple, but it remains a little fuzzy in my head. (What about stride length?) It’s enough to know that if you simply run faster, you score higher.

That said, after playing a couple of games, I found having only these stats a little underwhelming. It just didn’t feel like much. Worse, the shoes didn’t integrate well with my Fuel Band. Whatever Fuel Points my shoes awarded me didn’t get added to my total on Nikeplus.com. To complete the circle, I had to wear my Fuel Band on the court, which I hate doing. I tried to show off my fancy new toys to my fellow players, but they too seemed unimpressed. I got more than a few snide remarks: “How much does this cost again?”

After a couple of weeks, however, I started to warm up to the Hyperdunks. By paying close attention to my stats while fiddling around with how I jump, I managed to increase my vertical leap by almost two inches — just by changing the way I leave the ground. I started concentrating on moving around more to increase my quickness points, and this in turn made me a more active player. As a bonus, I realized that I really like the shoes themselves. As one would expect from a pair of high-end Nikes, they’re light and supportive, and the advanced impact-absorbing materials feel great on the court.

In addition to tracking your game, there are two other things you can do with the shoes. In “Showcase” mode, you can use your iPhone to record yourself practicing for 30 seconds, then watch the results to study your form. It sounded corny, but the feature turned out to be pretty fun and actually kind of helpful. You can also download the Nike+ Training App, which measures your performance while you run through a bunch of pre-set drills. It’s a little like having an interactive private trainer. I’ve done this a couple of times now, and the app provides a good workout.

Overall, Nike+ Basketball still feels very 1.0. Even the ways in which you can crunch the few stats it tracks are very limited. You can’t, for example, see all your jumps in a month, or even review jumps from a single game on the website. Nor can you easily compare quickness from day to day. Transferring data from the shoes to your phone can be painfully slow if you played a long game. (Trust me, one thing antsy pick-up players won’t tolerate is waiting for you while your shoes download.) Presumably, Nike will be improving all of this over time.

All this brings me back to the price. They are expensive shoes. For a while, this made me wonder who they’re for. Ideally, they’ll work best if you have a bunch of friends who also use them so you can all compare stats on Facebook. But how many high-school or college kids have the money for these? Conversely, how many aging ballers (who may have the disposable income) really care enough to spend this kind of cash? No one in my cohort is even considering them, which means I have no one to share data with.

But maybe I’ve been looking at this wrong. Basketball, when you break it down, is not an expensive sport. You don’t even need to buy a ball — they usually just show up wherever you play. Compared to golf, cycling or tennis, there isn’t a lot of fancy equipment to purchase. So maybe laying out $250 for shoes isn’t so bad. They are great shoes, and, I found that they actually do inspire you to work just a little harder. They also make the game just a little more fun, if only for yourself. So yeah, maybe they are worth it.

WIRED Collects performance data while you play. Can help you improve your vertical leap. Makes you work harder, and the trainer app pays dividends. Really nice shoes.

TIRED Expensive. Stat tracking is minimal, and it doesn’t let you fiddle too deeply with the data it does collect. Wireless transfer from shoes to phone is slow. iOS only.

Photo courtesy of Lantronix

In 2010, Apple introduced AirPrint, an addition to the iOS ecosystem that enabled iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches to wirelessly print to one of a handful of new AirPrint-ready printers.

Of course, hardware made to work with the new system was scarce upon launch, and although AirPrint printers are easier to come by nowadays (you’ll find around 200 on retail shelves) printing is still an issue for those with older hardware. But if you just want to be able to print from your iPad, you don’t need to replace your existing printer or face the redundancy of multiple printers in the same house.

If you’re a genius, you can roll your own print server. Alternatively, there are a few easy software workarounds — FingerPrint, PrintCentral and Printopia are standouts — that will perform the necessary dirty work so you can print from an iOS device to any networked printer.

Most of the software solutions are pretty smooth, but I’ve found something even smoother: the xPrintServer Home Edition from Lantronix. It’s a little white box (about the size of two iPhones stacked on top of each other) that costs $100. You plug into your Wi-Fi router using an Ethernet jack. The xPrintServer will recognize almost any network-enabled printer in your house, and you can connect it to older USB printers as well.

Even though the XPrintServer found my Canon MX700 printer as soon as I plugged the device into my router, a few more steps were involved before any ink landed on paper. There’s a browser-based configuration menu (those are always fun) that’s accessible through any browser on the network. The interface closely resembles the type you’d use to administer your wireless router.

Configuration involves multiple steps, and naturally, the instructions are buried in the downloadable 37-page PDF manual. But the directions were clearly worded enough, and once I had it set up, printing from my iPad was a two-tap process. You just choose “Print” from the app’s drop-down menu, and this works system-wide on any device running iOS 4.2 or later. Of course, you need to be on the same network as your printer.

Mac users will be able to jump right in, but Windows users will need to download and install Apple’s tiny Bonjour Printer Wizard before their first print job. It’s mostly painless.

You’ll want to bookmark that configuration menu. It’s where you go to view pending print jobs and the users who sent them, in case you want to cancel a job or force a reprint after a paper jam. It’s also the place to find and install firmware updates, which I’d suggest you perform before you do any printing. If you do run into a technical problem that you can’t solve, the config menu has a convenient troubleshooting diagnostic system which sends reports to Lantronix’s tech support.

The xPrintServer’s case fully follows Apple’s pure and minimalist design language — just three ports (power, USB and Ethernet) and no other buttons. The only interface on the white chassis is the back-lit “X” in the Lantronix name. It serves as the device’s status indicator with a Morse code-style blinking. This is where it deviates from Apple’s philosophy: there are eight different patterns, but the secret of what each one means can only be found in the PDF manual. Even after consulting the manual, it will take a steel-trap memory to recall what each light pattern means.

The good news is that most people won’t need to solve the riddle of the blinking lights, because once it’s set up, the xPrintServer seems to work just fine. And Lantronix is constantly updating its supported printer list. After I filled in the “Add my printer” form on the company’s website to get the Canon MX700 on the list, it was added a few days later.

The suggested price is $100, but it’s available cheaper if you shop around online. That’s still a somewhat high price to pay for the convenience the xPrintServer offers. But it’s a more seamless solution than a software app, and it certainly beats having to buy a new printer just to serve your iPad and iPhone printer needs.

WIRED Gives iOS 4.2 (or later) devices printing capability on most networked and USB printers. No-hassle setup: In most cases, printers are auto-discovered. Compact design. Physical installation is easy.

TIRED Pricey; only makes sense if your printer can’t be replaced for under $100. Pages print in annoying, if effective, staccato bursts. Power cable requires extra electrical outlet near router. It’s all about AirPrint — no current Android support.

I was thinking about covering the launch of Google Birthday reminders, (which actually debuted Tuesday, sorry), but I decided instead to just post some pictures of what Google looks like these days. You may remember that the homepage was taken over with a giant Nexus 7 ad earlier this week, and now Google is getting all Facebook-like with these “birthday reminders.” Because really, my favorite thing about Facebook is how we’ve all been conditioned to leave messages like “hoping you’re having a great birthday!” on each others’ Timelines. Definitely the best part of social networking, right?

I especially like how these reminders even appear on the search result pages on Google, because there’s no better place to remind you to stop all that Interent research you were doing and go tell your friends you were happy they were born.

Yes, I’m being negative. I know you adore birthday reminders, and think this is a excellent new feature. Go ahead, tell me all about it. Also, no you can’t have your 5 minutes back you spent reading this post. And as to why is this on TechCrunch when it’s such old news? Because I felt like it. So there.

I’ll admit, maybe I’m just getting too old to care about birthdays. After I turned 21 OVER 10 YEARS AGO I stopped giving a crap about my birthday and those of my friends. It’s all downhill from there anyway. Well, unless until you hit 90 or 100. I’ll definitely post on your Facebook/Google+ then, if such a thing still exists.

Google Lately:

Google In Earlier Days:

Image credits: birthdays, 9 to 5 Google; blue links, Dalisocial

Over the past few days I’ve been in San Francisco for VMware’s annual show and in San Diego to spend some time with  the technologists at CloudOpen – the Linux Foundation’s first cloud only event.

The two shows demonstrate how the cloud world is maturing.  And as it matures, the stakes will get higher. That’s quite evident when you consider how much VMware is trying to move beyond its traditional story about virtualization. The company has asked to join OpenStack. And it is talking about it support for Amazon Web Services. They are definitely singing a different tune than we have heard before.

Here in San Diego – the story is about the technology and the next stage the of Linux movement. The talk here is all about the Linux kernel, APIs and the competing initiatives from OpenStack, Cloudstack and Eucalyptus Systems.

To sum it up — if VMworld is about the data center then CloudOpen is about the software.

Through all of this is a continuing discussion about what is an open cloud and what is not. Over the past few days, I’ve tried to crystallize the conversation to some extent. Here is my take:

• An open cloud has open APIs.
• An open cloud has a developer community that collaborates on developing the cloud infrastructure or platform environment.
• An open cloud has people who have deep experience in running open source projects.
• An open cloud gives users the rights to move data as wished.
• An open cloud is federated — you can run your apps and data across multiple cloud environments.
• An open cloud does not require an IT administrator to provision and manage.
• An open cloud does not require new hardware.
• An open cloud is not a rat’s nest of licenses.
• An open cloud is not a proprietary, new age mainframe.
• An open cloud is not washed with marketing.
• An open cloud can be forked.
• An open cloud has full view into the infrastructure environment.
• An open cloud is not hosted, legacy software

There are some points that I have probably not included that should be here. Please add your own in the comments.

Microsoft just launched a new search feature for Bing that lets you search your friends’ photos on Facebook. This new tool, says Microsoft, is essentially an expansion of the photo experience Bing introduced as part of Bing’s redesign earlier this year. Today’s launch takes this experience a bit further, though, and you can now browse your friends’ photos, ‘like’ them and add comments to them right on Bing.

Previously, clicking on a link to a photo in Bing’s sidebar would take you to Facebook. The experience actually looks quite a bit like Facebook’s standard photo pages, with your friends’ updates and comments on the right and a large version of the image on the left.

Bing and Facebook always had a very close relationship and Microsoft has worked hard to highlight this alliance in Bing’s social sidebar (Google, after all, doesn’t have access to this data). Indeed, while Bing offers a landing page for the new search feature, there won’t be a link to it from Bing itself. As a Microsoft spokesperson told me, the company expects that most people will engage with this tool through the sidebar.

Facebook’s users currently upload over 300 million photos to the social networking site every day and as Microsoft’s Ian Lin, a senior program manager on the Bing Social team, notes, “photo viewing is one of the most popular things people do on Facebook.”

Bing, of course, will respect your Facebook privacy settings and will only show images that you and your friends have made viewable. Your photos, Microsoft stresses, will never be shared with the public.

Twitter is announcing a new way for businesses to target their Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts, according to a new blog post from Product Management Director Kevin Weil. By directing their messages at specific user interests, advertisers can now potentially reach a much broader audience.

Actually, interest data already plays a role in Twitter advertising. Weil writes that Promoted Tweets and Accounts currently target “users who share interests with your current followers.” With today’s launch however, advertisers can explicitly identify the interests that they want to reach. There are currently more than 350 categories to choose from, such as education, home and garden, and animation. Or, instead of targeting a category, advertisers can identify a specific Twitter account, then Twitter will show the promoted content to users who have similar interests to that account’s followers.

This means that advertisers are no longer limited to reaching one specific subset of users, and can instead direct their ads at whichever audience segment they want. They can also customize their marketing messages to different types of users based on their interests. And if advertisers base their targeting on a specific account, they could replicate the common search advertising strategy of going after their competitor’s customers. (Though it’s not quite the same, because advertisers can’t “specifically target the followers of that @?username,” just users who have similar interests to those followers.)

Twitter has been talking about using its interest data to improve advertising since at least earlier this year. A company spokesperson gave me a little more context about how that interest data is gathered:

We look at a variety of signals, including but not limited to the follow graph and Tweets you engage with, to understand your interests. This is the case across the product. For example, we consider your interests to determine which content to show in Discover or which accounts to recommend in Who to Follow.

In addition to interest targeting, Twitter is also announcing a change to the auctions that determine which promoted content gets shown. The minimum bid in those auctions has been reduced from 50 cents to 1 cent. Lowering the cost will presumably make these programs more accessible to small businesses and allow existing advertisers to run more campaigns, but Weil writes that it’s not just about making things cheaper:

Great content matters: if you have engaging Promoted Tweet copy, you can win even if others bid higher. We believe the new lower minimum bid, in combination with interest targeting, will drive greater ROI for every campaign on Twitter.