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April 25, 2011

The Cloud Doesn't Eliminate the Need for Redundancy

Last week's failure of Amazon Web Services has led many pundits to question the validity of the cloud model.

Anyone who believes that the AWS outage means that companies are better served managing their own data servers has probably never managed a data server.

Those who have managed data centers know that failures occur. And those failures can occur for many reasons - hardware failures, rack outages, power failures, software maintenance failures and network failures, in worst case those occurring among Tier 1 networks or the IP backbone.

For companies using traditional data centers to host their applications, the solution is to have a strong redundancy plan. A solid redundancy plan generally involves using two or more data centers, often in different geographic regions and connected to different backbone providers.

So, why is it that when many companies move to the cloud, they ignore that approach and use simple zone redundancy (if that) from Amazon? One company that withstood last week's AWS outages with virtually no impact was Netflix. And that's not suprising. Last December, Netflix posted about their approach to using AWS and "designing for failure". Among other things, the Netflix system automatically adjusts what it displays to users, based upon system availability. If the recommendation system is down, they automatically show popular titles rather than personalized suggestions. While Netflix uses AWS, they've not ceded responsibility for planning to others.

Amazon and other major cloud hosts provide for regional redundancy. This ensures that when a region goes down (as happened last week), you can automatically shift your traffic to the region that is still up. Had Quora, Foursquare and others used that approach, the AWS failure would not have had a serious impact on them.

Now, that's not to absolve Amazon from what was a major failure last week in their North Virginia AWS data center. A multi-day failure at a major cloud data center is not acceptable. Yet neither is absolving yourself from the responsibility to build an operations plan that can withstand major outages.

Even after the major failure at Amazon last week, the Cloud offers the same benefits that it did previously in terms of scalability, hardware and software management, physical (hardware) redundancy and more. For almost any web-centric business, the Cloud is the most effective way to deploy. But that doesn't get us off the hook for avoiding failure. It's still up to all companies to understand the various levels of redundancy offered by the host and choose accordingly.

Barry Graubart on April 25, 2011 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Amazon, AWS, cloud computing, EC2

April 21, 2011

News.me: a more personalized social news app

News.me launched today, from the Bit.ly and Betaworks team.

Social Relevance

Before you say "not another iPad news reader", News.me is different. First, it uses the data exhaust from the bit.ly service. In other words, News.me can filter your stream by applying a "page-rank-like" score (called "bit-rank", naturally) applying social relevance to your reading.

Bit-rank alone would separate News.me from Flipboard, Pulse and Zite, but they've added a few other really cool features that make it even more compelling.

See what others are reading

Key to News.me is the ability to follow individuals and see what they are reading. When you first login to News.me it surfaces other News.me users among the people you follow on Twitter. It allows you to then follow them (and other suggested users) on News.me. Unlike Twitter, where you're following only what they choose to share, with News.me you can follow what they're reading. If I want to see what Fred Wilson has read today, I can instantly see it (glad to see that Fred was reading the same Onion article that I was this morning).

News.me has a nice clean interface and makes it easy to quickly navigate through lots of content.

In order to read what a specific user has read, you'll need to select their Twitter icon from the top menu. This may suggest that users will want to pick easily identifiable icons and not change them frequently. Those in the tech community will easily identify at least 10 of the dozen images below, but might have a tough time with the one on the far right (it's Clay Shirky).

What came as a surprise to me was how News.me was born. It sprung from a partnership between the New York Times and Bitly, as described in this John Borthwick post. It's great to see the NYT team being so creative AND realizing that they were not the best ones to actually build the app, eventually selling the concept to Betaworks for a stake in Bitly.

News.me is a paid service ($0.99 per week with a free 7-day trial) and licenses content from more than two dozen news providers. Since bit-rank is computed by clicks on bitly links, News.me serves as an inducement for these publishers to embrace bitly for link shortening on their core news sites. It's a smart way to increase adoption of the core product.

It will take a few weeks for me to see how News.me fits into my news flow, but at first glance it seems likely to take a key spot. Download your copy at the app store.

Barry Graubart on April 21, 2011 in Content Business, Mobile, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: bit-rank, Bitly, data exhaust, News.me, social relevance

April 19, 2011

Rating the Tablet Readers: Flipboard, Pulse News and Zite

The tablet news market has been heating up in recent months.

Flipboard has become the market leader, moving ahead of its rival Pulse News, while upstart Zite has gained some initial traction. Of course, this is a nascent market – market estimates suggest Flipboard may have seen 1 – 1.5m downloads, with Pulse probably slightly fewer.

While all three apps have many things in common, I’ve found they are useful for different purposes. I will describe below how each may best be used and how the market may evolve.

Pulse News, from Alphonso Labs, was the first of its type and gained huge exposure when Steve Jobs demoed the app as part of the initial iPad 1 launch event. Of course that was followed by a C&D from the NY Times, which probably brought them even more attention. The Pulse UI is clean and takes advantage of the swipe and the visual nature of the iPad. At its core, it’s very much an improved Google Reader. Pulse also spotlights “featured” sources such as the Wall Street Journal, Salon, CNN and others to help newbies get up and running. They also offer a set of “top X” lists where they curate the top stories in categories like business, technology, music, sports and more. Pulse also allows its users to integrate their Facebook and Twitter feeds. As with all of the new readers, Pulse offers a number of social tools to make it easy to share a story via email, post it to Twitter or Facebook or save it to Instapaper.

Flipboard, which recently raised a $50m venture round at a $200m valuation and struck a deal to feature content from Oprah's OWN, launched in July, 2010, a few months after Pulse News. Positioning itself as a “social magazine”, Flipboard initially was focused on providing access to the stories that were linked to in your Twitter or Facebook stream. They subsequently have added integration of other content – featured categories (similar to Pulse), Google Reader, Instagram, Flickr, and the ability to add any blog or twitter user.

The Flipboard UI is among the best I’ve seen for the iPad. They have one-upped Pulse in creating a compelling swipeable interface that makes it a pleasure to browse content.

I read Flipboard on a daily basis. I use it in two key ways:

First, I’ve created a number of Twitter lists, focused by industry, which I feed into Flipboard. So, when I want to see the latest articles on Big Data, I simply open the Big Data page in Flipboard and I find the articles linked to in the tweets of the people on my Big Data list. I have similar lists where I can easily track the pharma/biotech and digital media space. I get an intelligently curated magazine of the latest news in any given sector. Of course, it requires you to build and maintain these Twitter lists, but for information junkies, it’s a great tool.
Second, I use Flipboard as a “read later” bookmark for Twitter. Any time I want to read a link from a tweet later, I simply favorite the tweet. I have a “Twitter Favorites” panel in Flipboard, where I can then read those stories. Sure, I could use Instapaper for that purpose (and I do use Instapaper for longer and offline reads) but there’s no quicker way to “bookmark” a link in Twitter for later reading.

The latest entry into the tablet readers category is Zite.

Zite takes a very different approach than Pulse and Flipboard and comes closest to the “serendipity” model of browsing. Rather than having you punch in a bunch of feeds to read, Zite asks for your initial preferences, by category and/or by providing your Twitter and Facebook Ids, then pulls content from thousands of sources which it feels might be relevant. Zite learns from your personal usage – from every story you read. And each story allows you to indicate whether you like or dislike it, and whether you want more stories from that source or about that topic. I was skeptical at first, but have found the relevance of Zite content went up significantly for me after just a few days of usage.

Zite, like Flipboard, has become a key part of my daily routine.

While these three are clearly the key apps to watch for tablet-based news, there’s a recently launched company which is sure to gain traction this year.

OnSwipe is a platform to enable publishers to easily make their content tablet-friendly. Its UI will be familiar to Flipboard, Pulse or Zite users, but OnSwipe is built in HTML5, meaning there’s no need for an app. In fact, publishers can have a site that looks like any other website through a desktop browser, but then has the swipe interface when viewed on any tablet. With a hyper-competitive market for mobile developers, this should be particularly attractive to publishers, who’ve often struggled to build compelling products.

OnSwipe did a preliminary launch of a WordPress plugin, to allow any WordPress blog to be “swipe-able” when viewed through an iPad browser, but their full product is a few weeks from release.

While each of these apps are slightly different, there are many commonalities which provide guidance for content companies looking to develop tablet apps. First, the swipe-centric user interface is here to stay and it’s being widely adopted. There’s no need to come up with your own navigational methods – these are quickly becoming the standard and all publishers should adopt them in their mobile devices. The second key element is that they are all very visual. It’s time to get rid of the text-heavy page. That’s evident even on the web, where companies like Newser and Huffington Post have succeeded with more graphics and less text. Third, and perhaps most important, is that social sharing and discovery of content has arrived.

In my estimation, the battle ground for the coming year will be between Flipboard and OnSwipe to see which can gain the most market share among publishers. Their models are different, with Flipboard aiming to draw publishers into its environment, while OnSwipe allows publishers to have their content accessible via the browser. The latter seems a more attractive model for publishers and I wouldn't be surprised to see Flipboard providing white-label versions of their product to publishers.

There’s still plenty of room for improvement in each of these products. For enterprise and publisher adoption, they will need to create stronger authentication capabilities, as well as better personalization tools. But these readers have already made a huge impact in the way that content will be consumed on mobile devices and every publisher should be paying close attention.

Barry Graubart on April 19, 2011 in Mobile, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Android, Flipboard, iPad, OnSwipe, Pulse News, tablet, Zite

April 12, 2011

Cisco Kills Flip: There's an App for That

The Flip camera came on the scene with a bang a few years ago, but now is disappearing with barely a whimper. The easy answer might be that it's been pushed aside by iPhones and iPods, but I think that's only part of the reason.

The Flip was always destined to be a niche product. It's core strength was it's simple interface - while traditional camcorders were feature-packed, Flip was designed for simplicity. Initially conceived as a disposable video camera to be sold at drug and convenience stores, the Flip was the perfect choice for kids, moms or grandparents, not the gadget-focused crowd. With two buttons, limited zoom, and a pop-out USB connector, it was the easiest way to capture video and post it to YouTube.

Cisco acquired Flip creator Pure Digital two years ago for nearly $600m, a deal that didn't make sense to me at the time. It was positioned as a way for Cisco to penetrate the consumer market, but was never something they could integrate with the rest of their business. In theory, anything that drove more consumption of video would be good for the core router business, but that seemed a stretch.

So what happened?

Cisco added little value to the Flip, post-acquisition. Sure, there were deeper pockets funding advertising and distribution, but little else. It would seem that a consumer product company might have been able to drive adoption more effectively.

Any cheap digicam can now produce video comparable to that of the Flip. More importantly, so can many phones. While kids were an attractive target in 2009, today the iPod Touch has become ubiquitous, so there is less need for a dedicated video camera. Gaming devices like the Nintendo DSi have cameras as well, further eroding the market. Meanwhile, the consumer products companies joined the fray. For her 12th birthday, my daughter wanted not a Flip (though she had used mine many times), but rather the Kodak PlaySport. She has an iPod Touch but wanted this as well. The PlaySport is waterproof and comes in purple. What more could a 12-year-old want?

The sad thing is that the Flip could have survived, albeit as a niche offering. Cisco never effectively communicated the value proposition very well. My Panasonic Lumix uses MTS format, requiring conversion to mpg format before posting. The iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch offer video, of course, but the interface remains limited. By focusing on users, Flip could have provided a diferentiated offering.

The Flip was an innovative product and filled a niche when it first launched. But Cisco was never the right home for it, and with so many products offering video as a feature, it's demise should come as little surprise.

Barry Graubart on April 12, 2011 in General Business, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 07, 2011

The Folly of Trading on Twitter Sentiment

One sign of the bubble (or, perhaps the pending apocalypse) could be the fact that the so-called Twitter Hedge Fund is oversubscribed by 250%. The Derwent Absolute Return Fund sought to raise $40m, but apparently has commitments of over $100m.

This fact should not come as a huge surprise. The Derwent fund capitalizes on three hot trends:

Social media, specifically Twitter
Big Data
Algorithmic trading

Yet I am convinced that we will later look back at this fund as a prime example of a frothy market and nothing more.

Perhaps the simplest way to see that this fund is selling hype more than anything else is to look at the relative size of the Twitter logo vs. their own branding on their home page.

In fact, the Twitter logo on the Derwent page is more than twice the size of the logo on Twitter's own home page. That's no accident. Clearly, they are appealing to investors who want to get "in on Twitter" whatever that may mean.

Anyone who has done any extensive text analytics can tell you how sentiment analysis remains far from an exact science.

At its best, using professionally authored content, the best statistical models for sentiment generate results in the 70-80% range. But even those are questionable. As an example, let's look at a NYT article announcing the recent news that AT&T would acquire T-Mobile.

What's the sentiment of that story?

Well, as I read it, it's largely positive for AT&T and for Deutsche Telekom (parent of T-Mobile), neutral for Verizon, negative for Sprint, positive for Wall Street investment banks and largely negative, though with some positives, for mobile consumers.Of course, a sentiment engine will assign it a somewhat meaningless score - perhaps it's 0.5777234 positive.

Now, that's with "professionally authored" content. So let's take a look at some tweets around the deal. Using Topsy (which searches the Twitter archive), I looked at tweets from March 20-21 that mention both AT&T and T-Mobile.

The results were mostly just news headlines, rewritten or retweeted, like these:

There were a few ironic or humorous comments, of course, like this one:

I'd rate that as a negative sentiment about AT&T, but not specifically about this deal. Regardless, I doubt that the sentiment engine would parse the irony well.

Beyond the difficulty of assigning sentiment to tweets, there's a much bigger issue at play. If you look at the patterns of tweets what you find is that most are reactive rather than proactive. An event occurs, the news media puts out a story, then many others RT that story. That may be an effective way to share news and information among the masses, but from an algo standpoint I'm less convinced. Traders trade the story when it first hits (or, as the axiom goes, they buy the rumor then sell the news). Twitter sentiment is likely to be a lagging indicator, at least in the real-time world of algo trading.

I understand that the investment strategies are based on research, like this paper by researchers at Indiana University, but it's not that difficult to draw correlations when backtesting with almost any set of data. I'm pretty sure that we will look back at this as one more data point for the tech bubble.

Barry Graubart on April 07, 2011 in Finance, General Business, Social Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Derwent Capital Markets, twitter

April 03, 2011

Openness and Flexibility: the Future of Book Publishing

Last Thursday I participated in BISG Next, a one-day workshop/conference by the Book Industry Study Group. Since I’ve spent most of my career on the digital media side, I found it a fascinating look at the changes facing the traditional book publishing industry.

The BISG represent many of the more forward-thinking people in the book industry. If the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem, then BISG participants were well on their way through that step. That said, I also saw that many of the participants felt that the way to solve the problem was by using the same tools and skills they’d used in the past, which I don’t think is a realistic option.

The program was a set up as a one-day problem-solving workshop. Teams were created to assist a theoretical publisher in setting their strategy to take them through the year 2020 in four areas:

Identifying the customer & core business
Mobile strategy
Content strategy
Making content discoverable

What was most promising about the process was that the participants seemed to embrace things that may have been anathema to them just a few years ago. Some of the key themes that emerged were community, new business models (including free), increased verticalization, a customer-centric approach (including a focus on analytics and data exhaust), open, extensible platforms and a need to become agile.

I was on one of the two teams looking at mobile strategy. Our team took a broad-based view of mobile, first deciding that a flexible and open platform would be required. We started with a few core assumptions:

Success in mobile meant that we would need to open up our content to others; it would be arrogant to assume that we alone would build the most compelling apps for our content;
We should embrace the idea of writable APIs. The publisher in our exercise had books on musicians and technology, as well as textbooks; any of these could be augmented by allowing others to add content (concert video or audio, author presentations, teacher lesson plans);
We would seek to partner with market leaders wherever feasible. Today that might include apps like Instagram or a wiki like setlist.fm;
A major role for the publisher going forward would be in the curation and organization of other people's content;
Especially in those segments where we served an enthusiast audience (particularly music) we would look to engage with a community, both by building social features into the platform and through participation in existing external platforms (e.g. Facebook, MySpace and whatever may follow).

I think our team put forth a compelling vision and plan, but we were far from unanimity. Openness and ceding control are not values that come easily to an industry where editors have often had total control over their product.

And therein lay the biggest challenge. While most of the people in the room acknowledged the need for rapid change, there was near unanimity that the existing staff would be best-positioned to fill these new roles. In our group, there was much talk of how a book Editor would be able to curate community content and how those with the existing domain knowledge would be best positioned to build great new apps. While I’ve no doubt that people in those roles could make significant contributions as part of a team, the centralized editorial power that led to success in traditional book publishing is a very different approach than the team-based, user-centric sharing model which they will need to embrace going forward.

That said, I was most pleased in the ending discussion, where many people in the group raised the issue of whether these plans were being too conservative. Of course, it’s easier to rip apart someone else’s (theoretical) publishing business than to jettison or revamp parts of your own, but this was a promising discussion.

I’d like to thank the BISG for inviting me to participate in this event.

Barry Graubart on April 03, 2011 in Books, Content Business, General Business, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)