The intersection of cloud and mobile computing means the next generation of software will be available everywhere, but getting there won't be easy.
Although relatively new technology, cloud implementations have been quickly adopted on the Web, and spurred innovation by coinciding with the proliferation of mobile and tablet devices. We are moving away from software that exists on our hard drives to applications that exist both in the cloud and in our pockets. The future of software is in “everywhere apps” that aren’t tied to a single device, but rather to the end user - available on any platform the user prefers. We no longer expect to go to the software - we expect the software to come to us.
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Guest author Nicholas Thomas is the Director of Business Development at Docudesk Corporation. He writes on user experience, design, and innovation. You can follow him @nicholaswthomas
How will the shift in development from local and desktop to clouds and apps change the nature of what we consider software? The software we interact with on a daily basis will become deeply personalized to our needs. We will no longer have to bend “kitchen sink” enterprise applications and one-size-fits-all desktop software to fit our needs. If there is a need, there will be an app for it. Even if it is a corner case of usage requirements, it likely affects many individuals and there will be a developer or entrepreneur willing to make that bet.
Developers will be able to concentrate on solving the problems that are important to the end users and spend less time worrying about the back-end or the infrastructure. In 2011 it's possible to get a logo, a website, setup a store or billing system and spool up a cluster over a weekend. Even user authentication can be simply addressed by utilizing users’ existing identities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. By outsourcing solved problems the important development time can be spent on unique offerings and addressing the true needs of the user.
Car companies don’t make their own tires and airlines don’t make their own fuel. Every industry capitalizes on the core competencies of others to maximize their competitive advantage. Rather than trying to create more social networks, new communities like Quora and Hashable allow users to utilize their existing networks and are able to focus on their products.
The Age of the App
Although some aspects of developing for the cloud have become easier thanks to new tools and services, the proliferation of mobile computing has us expecting an app to be available on our desktops, phones, tablets, TVs, stereos and game consoles. Netflix itself is used on a whopping 400 devices. We no longer have to go to the software - we expect the software to come to us. In addition, the new relevance of user experience indicates that development cycles that would have formerly been spent on infrastructure, should now be shifted to the front end.
We no longer have to go to the software - we expect the software to come to us.
What does this mean for software development? Building a great product and user experience are more important now than ever. The barriers to entry are so few, and the available tools so plenty, that we can expect to see many competitors for every use case. Apps may only get a single chance to impress users. Users can evaluate and compare apps quickly, with very little time or money lost.
Software will spread virally more than ever before, but it will be increasingly done in person and off the Web. The fact that our phones are always with us means we are constantly talking to friends and coworkers about the apps that we actually find worth using. Neither first mover advantages nor inflated marketing budgets will be able to compensate for products that cannot stand on their own.
App Pricing Models
In addition to starting with a great product, apps will need to be where users are looking for them - everywhere. The software we will interact with on a daily basis will be expected to integrate wherever we already are. The competitive advantage of great software in the future will not just be in its utility, or UX, but in its pervasiveness. Selling points such as presence in web and mobile app stores, availability of browser and mail client plugins and integration with other 3rd party apps and devices will be important variables in purchasing decisions, and will increasingly make the difference between evaluations and sales.
The success of the iOS and Android app stores has proven that users are willing to purchase relatively cheap mobile apps that serve a single purpose. Although the apps are varied, there are a handful of pricing models which have become common for applications that are available for multiple devices:
The freemium subscription model: Free but limited versions of web and mobile apps, with options to upgrade to a paid version. Examples include Pandora, Evernote, Prey and Dropbox.
Free mobile apps which support a physical device, like Sonos, Boxee, or MiCommand.
Free mobile apps that are primarily content delivery vehicles which drive revenue elsewhere, like Kindle and Netflix
Free apps which are a “value add” for services like Salesforce or E*TRADE.
Apps which are free on the web, but require a paid subscription to access the mobile apps, such as Lastpass and Remember The Milk. A very interesting experiment on the question of what users value enough to pay for, this essentially makes the web apps loss leaders for the mobile apps. I believe this will become a successful and popular model for the balancing act of limiting functionality while still gaining traction. Last.fm recently announced its transition to this model.
Implications
The reluctance of software developers to adopt an “everywhere” strategy likely relates to not only the development time required, but also the support. If users come to rely on a Firefox plugin and iPhone app, even if they have not paid a dime they will expect updates and support. However, many companies are proving the profitability of the stickiness this philosophy provides. Its important to remember there is more at play here than stickiness - if an application isn’t where its market is, someone else will be.
One way in which software companies can bypass the laborious task of coding for different environments is in Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions such as Appcelerator and Particle Code. Although adoption is not widespread at the moment, solutions like these may soon be viable alternatives to dedicating developers to separate platforms. Another option is to simply bypass platforms completely and create app-like experiences using HTML5. Aside magazine and the startup OnSwipe are examples of the possibilities available for content publishers outside of app stores, which is attractive for variousreasons.
Closing
What users want and expect out of applications will shape the future of software development more by use case than by technological innovation.
The combination of advances in the cloud and in mobile computing have created entirely new ecosystems of software, with unseen before varieties of applications. What users want and expect out of applications will shape the future of software development more by use case than by technological innovation.
This crossroads of cloud and mobile computing still leaves many questions unanswered: how do users prefer to pay for an app that is not dependant on a physical device, but instead follows them everywhere? Does the user experience need to be familiar across platforms, or instead dependent on the device? Interaction designers and app developers forging this path will be watched closely for their resolutions to these and other questions. Software companies slow or unwilling to brave the web and mobile app space may become obsolete.
For the time being, Android users can tolerate the late arrival of Netflix and iPad users can make do with iPhone versions of some apps. In the future though, markets will be less forgiving. The new reality is that software companies focusing on one platform while neglecting others are missing the bigger picture - the users themselves.
Amazon announced that effective this Friday, they will no longer charge for data transfers into your cloud environments at Amazon's Web Services. (It was ten cents per GB.) Previously and still effective, the first gigabyte of data transferred out are also free. It is indicative of AWS that their price chart now goes to petabytes. Prices have been reduced about ten percent of what they were previously. Pricing for data transfer between Amazon hosting regions remains unchanged.
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For example, a customer transferring 10 TB in and 10 TB out of either US region or Europe in a month will save 52% on internet data transfer with the new pricing. A customer transferring 500 TB in and 500 TB out of one of these regions in a month will save 68% on Internet data transfer with the new pricing.
In addition to these price drops, Amazon has also decreased prices on CloudFront, its content delivery network. The top pricing tier now is two cents per GB when sending more than 5 PB of data per month.
A talk by Tom Raftery of GreenMonk at a conference earlier this month in Dublin, Ireland poses our title question. And the answer isn't as clear-cut, or as green, as you may think.
The problem is doing the math and figuring out exactly what you are replacing with any cloud-based provider, where that provider's data center is, and what kind of efficiency and fuels profile is being used by the provider - and your own data center - to make the calculation meaningful.
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"As Cloud Computing providers are not publishing any data around Cloud Computing's energy consumption, then it is impossible to say just how energy efficient Cloud Computing is," he said during his talk.
Just because you moved your apps from your data center to a cloud provider and turned off your old and creaky servers doesn't mean you saved the planet. Yes, you saved your energy bill - if indeed you actually turned off those servers. But your provider may not have any more efficient servers on their end. You assume they do, what with virtualization and running a bunch of VMs on a single machine, but still.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple have gone to great lengths to built very energy-efficient data centers all over the world. But they are located in places where they can get cheap electricity per kilowatt hour and, more often than not, these are places that are burning coal to produce the juice. Raftery concludes his talk by mentioning Jevon's paradox, which relates to the industrial revolution and how it created more of a demand for coal-fired industries, which were efficient but still consumed more fossil fuels.
N.B. Raftery was our most recent Cloud Contest judge, but this was a volunteer position.
A talk by Tom Raftery of GreenMonk at a conference earlier this month in Dublin, Ireland poses our title question. And the answer isn't as clear-cut, or as green, as you may think.
The problem is doing the math and figuring out exactly what you are replacing with any cloud-based provider, where that provider's data center is, and what kind of efficiency and fuels profile is being used by the provider - and your own data center - to make the calculation meaningful.
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"As Cloud Computing providers are not publishing any data around Cloud Computing's energy consumption, then it is impossible to say just how energy efficient Cloud Computing is," he said during his talk.
Just because you moved your apps from your data center to a cloud provider and turned off your old and creaky servers doesn't mean you saved the planet. Yes, you saved your energy bill - if indeed you actually turned off those servers. But your provider may not have any more efficient servers on their end. You assume they do, what with virtualization and running a bunch of VMs on a single machine, but still.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple have gone to great lengths to built very energy-efficient data centers all over the world. But they are located in places where they can get cheap electricity per kilowatt hour and, more often than not, these are places that are burning coal to produce the juice. Raftery concludes his talk by mentioning Jevon's paradox, which relates to the industrial revolution and how it created more of a demand for coal-fired industries, which were efficient but still consumed more fossil fuels.
N.B. Raftery was our most recent Cloud Contest judge, but this was a volunteer position.
The city of Chongqing will be the first in China to see the debut of a "cloud district," or, to give it its official name, an "International Offshore Cloud Computing Special Management District." This area in an industrial city in the southwest is primarily designed to "gain market share of cloud computing technology." But users within the district can access the Internet outside of the traditional Chinese censorship regime.
The special district in Chongqing is a reflection of a huge overall investment in cloud computing. According to the People's Daily, the government is making a $772 million investment in a 93,000-square mile "cloud computing industrial base."
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Because of China's censorship policies, China's market share of the burgeoning IT sector is zero,according to Epoch Times.
"The Cloud District's network will connect directly to the Internet, bypassing the Chinese regime's firewall; foreign investors will thus be able to carry out offshore data services unfettered by regime's censorship. But staff have to go through strict security checks to enter the district."
The fact that the special district will be solely for the use of foreigners, and foreign corporations in particular, is a sore spot for many Chinese.
Some seem angry at their exclusion from a free Internet. Others are outraged by what they see as a new "exclusion zone," mirroring the delegation of Chinese to servant status in their own country during the Opium Wars of the 19th Century. Still others, like independent journalist Michael Anti, believes the district is a scam.
"The Cloud Computing District is probably a trap," he said on his Twitter account. "Who dares to store information there?"
The restrictions on direct Internet access even in the cloud district remain draconian. Domestic subsidiaries and branches of international companies will have no access and even the international companies themselves will have to work within restrictions that are not clear. The semi-autonomy of regional bosses also make it difficult for international businesses to be confident of the future. Chongqing's mayor, Bo Xilai, is frequently described as a neo-Maoist, who has had accusations of corruption leveled at him.
Will Western individuals and companies show willing to upload their information into the "Chinese cloud"? Given the government's relationship to the Web, not just its censorship but its reputed official hacking, that seems an iffy proposition at best.
WatchDox is extending its services to the private cloud. We've written about them in the past. They have an iPad app for document control and tracking, and have added Android and soon Blackberry versions as well.
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The idea is whenever you share a document, you lose control over it - anyone can copy it or share it across the Internet. They restrict this and give you end-to-end control no matter where your documents end up. The company has a variety of customers, such as movie production companies who are using it to share scripts securely and the obvious financial institutions.
WatchDox is working with channel partners to now provide a private cloud option to give organizations their own dedicated server infrastructure that is not shared with any other customer. This takes the shape of a virtual appliance that can sit in a corporate data center, to provide the on-premises storage for those companies that want this kind of control. They have a variety of REST-based APIs to allow their service to be integrated into their CRM or Web portals, but you need to specifically request this information.
They have several individual pricing plans starting at $50 per month for a single user for 200 MB of storage. The virtual appliance pricing starts at 500 users and $30,000 annually. That is a big difference between versions, but if you need absolute control over your documents, it is probably less than the cost of one potential security breach.
Yes, social and mobile networking has more buzz, and more business practice and applications these days. But hasn't the cloud enabled all these social apps to begin with? And isn't it ironic that Salesforce.com, which got its start even before the words "cloud computing" were first applied to its use of Web-based CRM applications, is now saying that the cloud revolution is over? Hardly.
Benioff cited Gatorade using various social media monitoring tools to stay current with what its customers are saying about their products, and how they realize their brand value can change in a moment. "They realize their brand has become a series of real-time conversations," he was quoted as saying during his speech, not memories of past advertisements that may or may not have run on television. Many companies have similar "listening rooms" to track Twitter, Facebook and YouTube postings that mention their names or that of their competitors, and respond quickly to what has been posted. I've been to a similar room at Dell's headquarters outside of Austin, Texas that is a a sexy cross between an air traffic control tower and a TV production studio (see the photo below).
"The biggest misnomer is that you have to be physically present in the room to listen to the social Web," says Manish Mehta, Dell's vice president for social media and community. "We have others located around the company and indeed, around the world who are monitoring and participating in these conversations."
The social media listening and command center may or may not be appropriate for how marketing is done in other companies. It depends how they are organized or want to organize for social media, as well as the volume of conversation about their business, products and services. Dell, for example, sees tens of thousands of mentions world-wide each day.
Back to Benioff, he outlined three steps for businesses to become a more socially-oriented enterprise. First is making full use of social networks like Facebook, You Tube and Twitter. Second is creating private social networks for employees, partners and customers using software like Salesforce Chatter or any number of other microblogging tools such as Yammer or Socialtext. And third is developing social networking capabilities for enterprise applications using Salesforce development tools such as Heroku, the platform-as-a-service provider they acquired last year.
Yes, social and mobile networking has more buzz, and more business practice and applications these days. But hasn't the cloud enabled all these social apps to begin with? And isn't it ironic that Salesforce.com, which got its start even before the words "cloud computing" were first applied to its use of Web-based CRM applications, is now saying that the cloud revolution is over? Hardly.
Benioff cited Gatorade using various social media monitoring tools to stay current with what its customers are saying about their products, and how they realize their brand value can change in a moment. "They realize their brand has become a series of real-time conversations," he was quoted as saying during his speech, not memories of past advertisements that may or may not have run on television. Many companies have similar "listening rooms" to track Twitter, Facebook and YouTube postings that mention their names or that of their competitors, and respond quickly to what has been posted. I've been to a similar room at Dell's headquarters outside of Austin, Texas that is a a sexy cross between an air traffic control tower and a TV production studio (see the photo below).
"The biggest misnomer is that you have to be physically present in the room to listen to the social Web," says Manish Mehta, Dell's vice president for social media and community. "We have others located around the company and indeed, around the world who are monitoring and participating in these conversations."
The social media listening and command center may or may not be appropriate for how marketing is done in other companies. It depends how they are organized or want to organize for social media, as well as the volume of conversation about their business, products and services. Dell, for example, sees tens of thousands of mentions world-wide each day.
Back to Benioff, he outlined three steps for businesses to become a more socially-oriented enterprise. First is making full use of social networks like Facebook, You Tube and Twitter. Second is creating private social networks for employees, partners and customers using software like Salesforce Chatter or any number of other microblogging tools such as Yammer or Socialtext. And third is developing social networking capabilities for enterprise applications using Salesforce development tools such as Heroku, the platform-as-a-service provider they acquired last year.
Pogoplug, from a company called Cloud Engines, is the name of the external USB drive that makes all your files available on the Internet. But now, Cloud Engines is moving into the software space with a new personal cloud product that comes hardware-free. Like the previous service, Pogoplug will let you stream your photo, video and music libraries from any computer connected to the Internet. But in this case, the libraries are stored on your own computer, not an external drive.
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Why Pogoplug?
There are no storage limits or long upload times, explains the company, differentiating its offering from similar cloud services, like Google Music or Amazon's Cloud Player. Both of those services require you to move your MP3s from your computer's drive to the companies' servers and they're only for music.
With Pogoplug, your computer is the server and more file types are supported.
Pogoplug Now Offering Freemium Software - And Free Invites for You!
There are two levels of service with the new software. For free, you can download the client and stream your media to any other device, including iOS devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch), on your same local network. To make your files available online, however, there's a $29 fee. This allows you to install the software on all your machines, too, which means you can make every single file you own available "in the cloud," whether they're stored on a Windows PC or on your Mac.
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The Web interface offers three new apps for accessing your files: an online jukebox for streaming music, a cinema app for videos or movies and a gallery app for viewing photos, already organized using their own metadata.
While the idea of "cloud drive" isn't all that unique, the company is offering a unique spin on the concept - a cloud drive you own and control, instead of one run by a major corporation like Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple.
Of course, another big company had the same idea not too long ago - Opera Software, makers of the Web browser of the same name. With Opera Unite, the organization proclaimed it would "reinvent the Web" by turning any computer into both a client and server. The concept itself, as a standalone entity, didn't take off with users, and the technology is now baked into the Web browser instead. Opera may have just been a bit ahead of the time with the cloud streaming concept, or it could be that people don't want the hassle of managing their own cloud. (Did I leave my computer on? Is my home Wi-Fi down?) Still, for only $29, users with larger collections of media might find the small hassle worth price, as it's far cheaper than using a third-party cloud storage service.
Amazon has added Red Hat Linux to its collection of virtual machine images now available in its EC2 cloud computing service.
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EC2 has many different operating systems available, including Windows Server and several different Linux versions including SUSE, Oracle and OpenSolaris. (On the horizon are support for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo.)
Instances of Red Hat start at 14.5 cents per hour, depending on the size of the VM deployed. There are a variety of Red Hat versions 5 and 6 for both 32-bit and 64-bit instances available.
For those of you that haven't ever touched Amazon's EC2 and are itching to get started, as a new AWS customer, you can receive for free up to 750 hours per month of EC2 running Linux along with 750 hours per month of Elastic Load Balancing, plus 10 GB of storage for up to a year. A great tutorial by Matt Heusser over at Techtarget shows you how to get started.
Amazon announced that effective this Friday, they will no longer charge for data transfers into your cloud environments at Amazon's Web Services. (It was ten cents per GB.) Previously and still effective, the first gigabyte of data transferred out are also free. It is indicative of AWS that their price chart now goes to petabytes. Prices have been reduced about ten percent of what they were previously. Pricing for data transfer between Amazon hosting regions remains unchanged.
The city of Chongqing will be the first in China to see the debut of a "cloud district," or, to give it its official name, an "International Offshore Cloud Computing Special Management District." This area in an industrial city in the southwest is primarily designed to "
WatchDox is extending its services to the private cloud. We've written about them in the past. 
Last week at Salesforce's Boston Cloudforce event, CEO 
Amazon has