Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

BM has jumped onto the cloud computing bandwagon. The company launched Bluehouse, a Web-based social networking and collaboration service designed for business. It incorporates social networking for business, contact sharing, online meetings, joint projects, and many other online community features. Bluehouse is intended as a way for businesses to connect with partners, agencies, suppliers, customers, and outside experts. Source

AUSTIN, Texas--Caringo Inc., the leading provider of content storage software, today announced the availability of an interface between CAStor™ and Alfresco, a leading open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management that eliminates the cost and complexity of traditional ECM systems. XeniT, a valued member of the CaringoConnect developer community, built the interface and has registered it at Alfresco Forge. The interface replaces the traditional file-system based document store of Alfresco enabling all content such as business records and documents to be stored in CAStor. End users store and retrieve documents using the standard Alfresco interfaces with no impact to their behavior. The solution delivers a comprehensive infrastructure to manage business critical content and ensure it is retained and preserved in a compliant storage repository. The interface implemented by XeniT, is in production at one of the largest Belgian insurance companies, which is managing three million...

I have written about the Query 2.0 and Query 3.0 frameworks. I haven't had the time to do sketch that all out. I soon will. Read my predictions on Query if you need to read more on that. Google is the Query 1.0 leader. Microsoft is planning to up Google's old 1.0 plans with its $ 44 Bn acquisition of Yahoo, but I really wonder if that will help them. We have several newer players like Facebook, LinkedIn, all offering parts of the Query 2.0 architecture. You know who is already heading towards the Query 2.5 (if not already 3) Model? Yes, you guessed it right! Amazon!!! I was getting some warmth from their data centers when I saw that they were doing simple DB query, they offer simpler and easier means of offering you data or to say in the data terms "result sets". The key is simplification, we are seeing a simplification of infrastructure and true, Virtualization is helping us get there. But it will just disappear in the Q4Q Optimization , meaning Quest for Query Opti...

Fremont, CA , August 19, 2008-- 3PAR ® (NYSE Arca: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage , announced today that Web 2.0 social media company Demand Media ™ has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage to support its rapidly growing social media business. Demand Media uses its network of vertically-oriented Web properties to connect content creators and large audiences with advertisers. To improve infrastructure agility, storage scalability, and capacity utilization over the data lifecycle, the social media company has implemented multiple 3PAR InServ ® Storage Servers in addition to 3PAR Thin Provisioning and 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software. Demand Media has also chosen to deploy an entire virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint , which combines 3PAR Utility Storage with products from HP and VMware ® to create a complete utility computing environment. Demand Media’s previous storage environment lacked flexibility and was difficult to scale in response to rapid busin...

So who is Kevin Lawton? Kevin has been involved in the x86 virtualization field since 1994, when he left MIT to create the "bochs" Open Source project, which was used to bootstrap many virtualization projects such as VMware, Xen, and QEMU. He is a founding member of a number of companies, including both hardware and software startups that target the enterprise datacenter. Kevin is on the board of advisors for Start-Up Phase Forum, and sometimes vets investment theses in the virtualization space for the venture community. He has chosen to pursue an executive MBA starting 2008. And where can you find Bochs project? Quoting Boch's site: Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Currently, Bochs can be compiled to emulate a 386, 486, Pentium/PentiumII/PentiumIII/Pentium4 or x86-64 CPU including optional MMX...

Paul Strong, research scientist at online retail giant eBay, acknowledges that social networking requires a whole new storage paradigm. "The big difference with respect to social networking is that it is not transactional in nature, rather it is more like fixed content as people include pictures, audio, video, and so forth," explains Paul Strong, research scientist at online retail giant eBay, in an email to Byte and Switch. With the demand for fixed content expected to rise, firms will be confronted with a different set of challenges, he warns. "This type of storage is essentially cheaper, i.e. commodity, but you end up with a lot more of it to manage," writes the exec. "You care less about the performance and robustness of your individual storage components because you want capacity." Essentially, firms will end up mirroring recent trends in servers, where lots of cheap, commodity components are connected together, Strong thinks. "This shifts the em...

I've created our Avastu's Research Group in LinkedIn. Join us in the "Community Driven Market Research and Analysis" initiative. We are certain that swarm intelligence and swarm research will eventually be the path to successful and high-performance societies. So you want to contribute and research collaboratively in: Greener and Alternative Fuels Research Biotechnology Research (Malaria eradication etc) Genome Research Pharma Then you would like to join us. We will ensure that you get projects. You could be anywhere in the world and still be part of this community driven model. Why? Because learning does not happen behind closed doors, its open now. Join us!!!

NY times reporting: Plaxo, an early social networking site that helps people keep their address books updated, is up for auction, people briefed on the offering said Wednesday night. The company, which has not made a profit, is seeking as much as $100 million, these people said. Plaxo, which has been overtaken by rivals like Linked In and Facebook , has tried to reinvent itself as an aggregate of information from other social networking sites. In October, the company started Plaxo Pulse, a service that collects information from Facebook, MySpace , Twitter, Digg and others, moving away from Plaxo’s original mission simply to keep electronic address books up-to-date. Indeed, Plaxo’s core business stirred some controversy because it sent out millions of e-mail messages on behalf of its users, creating the impression that the company was distributing spam. Link

I am NOT a big fan of FaceBook. Someone really has to come up with a good explanation as to why I ought to move to Facebook. Not those many groups that Jeff has pointed to. Sorry, LinkedIn does not have porn-addicted folks forming their own groups. Sorry that LinkedIn was good enough to expand the network and who asked you to connect to everyone anyways, It can be addictive, there was a question in the Q&A where a MS guy called himself a "connection slut". Once I left, I never looked back. Facebook is great for business networking as well as socializing, and provides a platform for creating networks among like-minded people. There are hundreds if not thousands of groups across a variety of business topics. And joining a business-oriented group and engaging with the community make it easier to establish yourself as a brand and forge networks than relying on a third party to make an introduction to someone you don't know. You know Jeff, I'll tell you what is happen...

I have not really been excited about the Facebook story and besides I need a good professional network like that of LinkedIn and not some Facebook where the first thing you see is (under groups) genitals and more genitals. Not my kind of place, sorry. And when your source code is leaked, you are, in a way, "showing"! Anyways this one is a blow to investors. There is a lot of hype around Facebook but really this looks bad on Facebook. Really bad. First you have the lawsuit and then this, or maybe its them who leaked the code.