Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Yes, Microhoo buzz is back, even if it never really went away. This time it was London's The Sunday Times stirring the pot, reporting that Microsoft will be making a $20 billion play for Yahoo!'s search business. BoomTown's Kara Swisher quickly shot holes into the story, and she has the Rolodex to confirm or debunk nearly all of the Microhoo chatter. The deal didn't make sense. The alleged new management team didn't make sense. The price -- significantly more than all of Yahoo! is worth -- certainly didn't add up. However, convincingly putting out one fire doesn't mean that another one isn't about to be rekindled somewhere else. Microhoo chatter will never die, because, quite frankly, it makes too much sense. Fool

Before Yahoo offered this hosted solution, users had to either deploy Zimbra on their own servers, or partner with a 'Zimbra Hosted Service Providers'. Zimbra did not release any information about the pricing for this hosted solution, but the company guarantees a 99.9% uptime and will provide 24/7 support. Otherwise, the hosted Zimbra platform provides the same feature set as the self-hosted version, though faculty and staff get a few extra features for group scheduling and Outlook synchronization. Zimbra also offers schools the option to run advertising on the service, though we assume that most schools will opt out of this. In the educational market, Zimbra is competing directly with Google, which has been providing an ' Education Edition ' of Google Apps for about two years already, and which, thanks to the inclusion of Google Docs and Sites, provides a slightly more comprehensive feature set than Yahoo currently can. Source

We are really curious what this project's outcome will be. I'd love to conenct to any of the above mentioned parties. A handful of Silicon Valley's biggest tech names are teaming up on a cloud computing project. HP, Intel and Yahoo are pooling their resources to create a half-dozen new cloud computing centers for researchers. These centers will be powered by massive computers, big enough to support data-intensive research into cloud computing. Cloud computing is a Silicon Valley buzzword that essentially refers to software that exists and is managed online, like Salesforce, Yahoo Maps and Google Documents, for example. HP, Intel and Yahoo have already poured millions of dollars into cloud computing. No word yet on how much this latest collaboration will cost. Source

"ACM SIGKDD is pleased to present Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan with its 2008 Innovation Award for his important contributions to the advancement of the data mining and knowledge discovery," said Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, chair of ACM SIGKDD. "Dr. Ramakrishnan's visionary research on techniques for scaling data mining algorithms to large datasets, and on mining ordered and streaming data has significantly influenced ongoing developments in the industry." The award is given to one individual or one group of collaborators who has made significant technical innovations in the field of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery that have been transferred to practice in significant ways, or that have significantly influenced direction of research and development in the field. The previous ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award winners include Rakesh Agrawal (IBM), Jerome Friedman (Stanford University), Heikki Mannila (Helsinki University of T...

Hardware and services giant Hewlett-Packard, chip-maker Intel and web portal Yahoo! are to build “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment”. This will comprise six giant data centres, located around the world and based mainly on HP and Intel kit, each containing between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores. This platform will be used as a test bed for experimental ‘cloud computing’ services. Research partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research.