The meltdown scenario is a common one among Internet companies. The executive summary goes something like this: Launch a great new service or feature. See usage surge. See the service fail.

That's more or less what TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington says happened with Google Voice following Google's integration of Google Voice with Gmail last week and the opening of Google Voice to the general public in June.

In a post published on Monday, Arrington reports that Google Voice's service in the past week has become "spotty at best, and unusable at times." He also says that based on conversations with multiple sources, Google hasn't invested enough in its core infrastructure to allow Google Voice to scale effectively.

Dozens of posts in the Google Voice help forum echo this view. A post by a Google employee acknowledges that the company has received a number of call quality complaints and asks users to report poor call quality.

The thread had 122 replies at the time this article was written, many of which present complaints similar to Arrington's.

"Things have definitely fallen off a cliff in the past 10 days when it comes to voice quality!" writes a user posting under the name "binxwalker." "This issue needs to fixed asap or [Google Voice] will be abandoned by most users. Most calls that I have made or received via [Google Voice] over the past 10 days have suffered from constant drop outs, garbled audio and one-way audio."

But the discontent is not universal. A significant number of people commenting on Arrington's post report having no trouble with Google Voice.

According to Google, the problem isn't as bad as critics suggest.

"Right now, there are no known widespread issues or outages with Google Voice," a company spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. "We are looking into reports of people experiencing some trouble with the service, but these are isolated problems and not related to the increase in usage we've seen recently."

By Thomas Claburn
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Microsoft is increasing subscription rates for its Xbox Live online gaming service by as much as 25% in some cases.

Effective Nov. 1, the price for a one-month Gold subscription in the U.S. increases from $7.99 to $9.99, a three-month Gold subscription will rise from $19.99 to $24.99, and a one-year Gold membership will jump from $49.99 to $59.99.

Microsoft offers basic Xbox Live access for free, but players need a Gold membership to access advanced services like multiplayer support and Netflix streaming videos. Microsoft officials said the rate increases are justified by the growing amount of content—from games to TV shows and movies—available over Xbox Live.

"Since launching Xbox Live in 2002 we have continually added more content and entertainment experiences for our members, while keeping the price the same," said Larry Hryb, director of programming for Xbox Live, in a blog post Monday.

"We're confident that when the new pricing takes effect, an Xbox Live Gold membership will continue to offer the best value in the industry," said Hryb, who goes by the handle "Major Nelson" on Xbox Live.

Skeptics, however, might suggest the move is simply a cash grab as Microsoft looks to capitalize on high-profile game launches timed for the 2010 back-to-school and holiday seasons. Most notably, Microsoft plans to release Halo Reach on Sept. 14. The latest installment in the smash hit Halo series, Halo Reach is an Xbox exclusive that offers multiplayer support over Xbox Live.

Leaked copies of the game have reportedly appeared on illicit file sharing sites, and Microsoft has threatened to permanently ban from Xbox Live any player caught using an illegally downloaded version.

Hryb also said Microsoft plans to increase Xbox Live Gold subscription rates by varying amounts in Canada, Mexico, and the U.K.

By Paul McDougall
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Small businesses have an almost alarming array of business continuity and disaster recovery options, from on-site tape to sometimes pricey disk-based appliances to managed services to fully in-the-cloud offerings. With the stakes--and costs--so high, making this call can be intimidating at best, paralyzing at worst. When companies don't have a BC/DR plan, complexity is the most-cited reason, finds our recent InformationWeek Analytics SMB Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Survey. Constrained resources runs a close second.

Small-business IT teams need to treat this rich choice of technologies as an asset, a way to meet their often unique needs despite scant resources to devote to business continuity and disaster recovery. We've worked with companies where backup systems languish without upkeep and disaster recovery plans sit on the shelf, untested and out of date. One answer: Integrated data protection plans that combine backup, system imaging, replication, and other features.

After all, SMB IT pros are all about multitasking.

Not only is it is easier to maintain a single system compared with multiple independent products, but Norm Davis, IT director for Chapel Hill, N.C., retirement community Carolina Meadows, sees data protection as a critical component of IT automation--another hot topic for small businesses, especially in healthcare. "We have made a commitment to automate our medical records as part of an overall IT modernization project," says Davis. And because Carolina Meadows is an accredited continuing care retirement community, it's subject to an audit that covers all aspects of running the facility, including data protection. There's little margin for error or downtime.

For Davis, the answer is an integrated backup and disaster recovery system from Zenith Infotech, a service provider that specializes in business continuity. The Zenith system includes server virtualization, data replication, and monitoring to ensure that everything is functioning properly, and it runs in a single server. Although the device doesn't have the horsepower of the community's primary systems, it would allow a vital system--Carolina Meadows' Answers On Demand integrated healthcare application--to be brought back up quickly and completely. As a bonus, Davis says he could pick up the Zenith server and transport it to a business continuity site in the event of disaster.

Many small businesses are similarly reliant on a few major, often highly specialized, applications. Todd Kenworthy, IT manager for the Phoenix Group, a supply chain services and construction logistics company, faced a "fickle application" that didn't tolerate conventional backups, so he got creative. Leveraging a disk imaging application from Acronis to create whole-system backups that could be saved and moved off site, Kenworthy built his own integrated backup and disaster recovery system. These disk images can serve many functions, from daily rebuilding of failed servers to site-wide disaster recovery.

The Phoenix Group is now evaluating service providers to handle the daily operation of the system. "I'm solely responsible to support over 100 users, so I expect a lot from outside services," says Kenworthy. "We experienced a communications outage previously and are adamant that it not happen again. We changed service providers, redesigned the network, and began investing in disaster recovery at that time."

In our survey, most--66%--of respondents have less than 10% of their storage capacity outside their main data centers. However, we expect increased adoption of fully cloud-based and hybrid storage systems to increase as more SMBs adopt technologies, such as deduplication and WAN optimization, that improve the bandwidth picture.

Flexible Fliers

Smaller companies have an edge over larger organizations, which are challenged by the inertia inherent in managing many terabytes and even petabytes of data, expensive deployed equipment, massive data center footprints, and rigid processes that restrict creativity. Small shops like Kenworthy's can improvise and adapt on the fly. Most SMB IT leaders we talk to enjoy having the freedom to work with innovative providers, or even create from scratch systems that precisely match their needs.

"We talked to a lot of vendors and looked at a lot of products," says Carolina Meadows' Davis. "We finally brainstormed ideas with a consultant and jointly came up with a plan. He had installed the product with other clients and was able to modify the solution to fit our needs."

In fact, seeking outside help was the top piece of advice from the small-shop IT managers we spoke with. "That's the only way to approach it for a small business," says Paul Ozburn of Colorado's Boulder Outlook Hotel, which markets itself as a zero-waste hotel. Ozburn's title--revenue ranger and Web wiz--reflects the many hats that SMB IT pros wear.

There are many places to look for advice, but make sure it's unbiased. Resellers often have product preferences of their own, and seemingly helpful voices sometimes have axes to grind. One survey respondent, a physician in a small practice struggling to protect e-medical record data on two servers, relates an all-too-typical experience. "The EMR company supplies the hardware and software, but they are not 'aggressive' on backup strategies," he says. "I suspect there are many small businesses in the same boat. I can't afford a dedicated IT staff. The EMR company is there to service what they sell to us, but are not my advocates."

The IT managers we spoke to also suggest seeking multiple viewpoints and ideas, including peers, resellers, and reviews. For more on the peer perspective, check out our InformationWeek Analytics SMB Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery research report. We first deployed this survey in January 2008, and followed up in May. While 62% of our 484 current respondents have disaster recovery plans, up from 55% of our 470 2008 respondents, most are based on tape backups. And, if their primary data centers were destroyed, just one in three could bring their mission-critical applications back on line in less than four hours. Even fewer, just 23%, say they could bring their overall IT operations to 95% of normal in that timeframe.

We blame that on one thing: We're still stuck on tape.

Now, we realize that pundits have been predicting tape's death for years, and yet backing up to tape that's then taken off site still clings stubbornly to the title of No. 1 data protection method for our survey respondents; 61% cite this as their primary (40%) or secondary (21%) strategy for data protection.

All we ask here is that you be open minded. While traditional tape-based daily backups are comfortable and familiar, so are sweatpants. Neither, however, is universally appropriate. Disk-based systems using snapshots and replication can provide vastly better levels of service and offer many advantages over tape, particularly in the case of small businesses. Tape drives have proved reliable, but breakdowns still occur, and while larger organizations may have spares on hand, small shops generally need to order expensive replacement drives and miss backups while they wait for delivery. Tape media, although fairly inexpensive, is rarely filled by weekly full backups of small-business data sets, much less the daily incremental backups commonly required. This negates many cost benefits.

Disk is an increasingly popular alternative. More than half of those surveyed report using backup-to-disk or virtual tape library (VTL) technology, up sharply from our 2008 survey. Disk-based backups also enable advanced concepts, such as continuous data protection (CDP), which is becoming more popular in sites with virtual server deployments. Data on disk is easier to replicate off site, and disk is the dominant mechanism for online backup systems.

Time To Leapfrog?

We asked SMB IT pros to rate adoption of 15 data protection methods, from plain-vanilla tape to CDP. The single biggest gainer is use of online services, which jumped to 24% from 14% in 2008. These services are generally not cost-effective for enterprises with huge data sets and multiple sites, but 43% of our SMB survey respondents have less than 500 GB of mission-critical data, and two-thirds have only one main location. Under that scenario, business-class off-site storage would cost just a few hundred dollars per month.

The key words there are "business class." Although that translates to higher costs than consumer-oriented services, the premium buys you a higher level of redundancy and security. These providers also offer enhancements such as multisite storage, encrypted tunnels, and even direct network connections for higher data volumes. But it's business-class support that's often the deciding factor: Consumer-grade options rarely include service-level agreements, phone support, integration services, or customization.

Boulder Outlook Hotel's Ozburn says shopping around can pay off. "We started out looking at personal online backup, but most don't deal with businesses, " he says. "When you say 'business,' suddenly the cost goes way up." But after some searching, the hotel was able to locate an affordable business-class service.

Online backup won't solve all your problems, though. Consider the time required for initial ingestion of data, a process that can strain shared Internet connections for days or weeks without careful management. Some online backup services mitigate this issue by physically transporting storage devices to the remote site initially for quicker local copying. Another problem, as Ozburn found with his online service, is that valuable data can be missed with any server-based backup system.

"If it's not on the server, then it's not going to get off site," he says. That's a policy, not an IT, problem. Phoenix Group's Kenworthy is also looking at online backup services, drawn by the ability to access data from anywhere. Like Davis and Ozburn, though, Kenworthy would still want an on-site copy on disk--just in case. "Online backup wouldn't be a standalone solution," he says. "It has to be part of a bigger picture." Phoenix Group is currently transporting these physical copies off site manually for added peace of mind.

Beyond reassurance, there are many reasons to keep data both on and off site. Most disasters aren't of the biblical seven-day flood variety. Rather, they're local in nature--say, a single server crashing or corrupting its data. There is no need to go to an off-site copy for this kind of operational recovery if a system image is available locally. And these local disks may prove valuable even in the event of a site-wide disaster if they happen to be accessible and transportable, as with Carolina Meadows' Zenith appliance.

Shake It Loose

Although fear of data loss is primal and universal, it can still be difficult to allocate sufficient budget dollars to BC/DR, especially for resource-constrained smaller businesses. Over one-third of our survey respondents without business continuity and disaster recovery plans cite high cost as the primary reason. Phoenix Group's Kenworthy advises being forthright with management about the risk. "Don't be afraid to ask for what you think is best for the organization," he says. A common theme among IT managers is to approach data protection as a business project, not an IT project. Investigate alternatives, and lay out the risks, costs, and benefits of each. And don't forget to include in your presentation the cost of doing nothing, calculated as the financial impact that various levels of data loss would have on the business.

Even among SMBs, government regulations and industry certifications can be big drivers of data protection programs. Nearly half of our survey respondents say they're subject to one or more regulations, with HIPAA called out most often, at 24%. Carolina Meadows' Davis justified the community's data protection investment on the basis of HIPAA and HITECH requirements. "There are many restrictions and regulations relating to medical records," he says. "To protect them, we needed a good disaster recovery system."

The results of an effective plan speak for themselves: After Carolina Meadows installed its Zenith system, it passed its continuing care retirement community certification with flying colors, says Davis. Uncovering such validation points is critical to the long-term success of a data protection project. If upper managers can see the value of continued investment, they're much more likely to support upkeep of the effort financially.

Small businesses are especially vulnerable to disaster: They often depend on a compact data set and a few vital applications, the loss of which would be catastrophic. Yet they also lack the human and financial resources to tackle difficult projects like data protection and disaster recovery. As our survey shows, although modernization is coming, not all businesses have appropriate systems in place.

If that sounds like you, begin by thinking in business terms. Ask trusted partners for advice, and consider paying for outside expertise. Look to server virtualization, data deduplication, and other newer technologies. Get creative in moving beyond tape by evaluating disk-based integrated systems, managed services, and online providers.

Waiting for a crisis and then hitting the panic button may seem like a slick plan to gain funding, but it's also a fast way to lose credibility.

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Cybersecurity certifications from organizations such as CompTIA, (ISC) 2, SANS Institute, CyberSecurity Institute, ISACA, Cisco, and the federal government provide important benchmarks that are often a requirement for government jobs. Still, they can also be overused and misunderstood.

"People think it means you're expert in everything, but we don't sell it that way," says Hord Tipton, executive director of (ISC)2, which manages the Certified Information Systems Security Professional certification.

A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies warns that cybersecurity certifications create "a false sense of security" and are used too often to demonstrate "expertise in documenting compliance" rather than real skills.

Some certification programs overemphasize how to do well on multiple-choice tests. "Some people are really good at taking an exam, but that's only one piece of it," says Vernon Ross, director of talent and organizational capability for IT with Lockheed Martin.

The CSIS report argues that mandated certification and licensing requirements aren't enough and recommends another approach: creation of an independent board of cybersecurity examiners akin to the National Board of Medical examiners.

Several of the CSIS report authors have created such an organization, the nonprofit National Board of Information Security Examiners, led by Mike Assante, former cybersecurity executive at Idaho National Labs and North American Electric Reliability Corp. However, some observers warn of a potential conflict of interest, given the CSIS tie.

Assante (who isn't one of the report authors) says the newly formed board doesn't aim to compete with existing certifications, but to employ more advanced "performance-based" testing than is used elsewhere. That might include hands-on tests and simulated environments.

By J. Nicholas Hoover
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Financier Carl Icahn, the biggest individual investor in Motorola, has reconfirmed his commitment to the firm by purchasing additional Motorola stock, according to a Securities and Exchange filing this week. Icahn bought another $86 million in Motorola stock, bringing his total to 10.4% as the firm moves toward its goal of breaking itself up early next year. Icahn gained a prominent role in guiding Motorola's future more than three years ago by arguing that the company is worth more broken up than it is as a single entity.

Earlier attempts to sell off pieces of the company failed, but after the company hired Sanjay Jha from Qualcomm, the company's long-troubled mobile phone operation has begun to gain traction in the marketplace, particularly by developing devices based on Google's Android platform.

Icahn is still losing money on his Motorola investment, but by averaging out his cost per share of the company's stock, he is hoping to cash in when the company splits its two main units provided its stock rises substantially.

Once among the proudest brands in global communications, Motorola practically invented the mobile phone only to see its market share wither away as foreign firms led by Nokia, Samsung and Sony-Ericsson captured the lion's share of the market. Motorola also jettisoned its wireless network infrastructure unit a few weeks ago, selling it to Nokia Siemens Networks for $1.2 billion.

And, in an example of what goes around comes around, Motorola's former Semiconductor Products Sector unit, which was spun off in an IPO as Freescale Semiconductor in 2004, was taken private but is now a candidate for an IPO again. Freescale CEO Rich Beyer has been trimming payrolls and closing plants in anticipation of floating a new IPO for the firm, according to investment banking analysts.

Motorola's earlier attempts to find a buyer for its mobile phone operation failed so the company decided to rebuild the operation from the ground up and include Motorola's set top box operation in the unit. While the mobile phone unit is the glamorous remaining piece of Motorola, its networking equipment operation continues as a more mundane but profitable operation.

By W. David Gardner
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RIM is holding last minute discussions with Indian authorities in an effort to avoid a ban on BlackBerry messaging services in the country that's scheduled to take effect Aug. 31.

Among other things, RIM has offered to create a mobile industry forum that could provide a framework for mobile security issues in the country.

"The industry forum would work closely with the Indian government and focus on developing recommendations for policies and processes aimed at preventing the misuse of strong encryption technologies while preserving its many societal benefits in India," Rim officials said in a statement Thursday, according to Dow Jones.

Indian officials say they need to be able to intercept BlackBerry messages in cases where they suspect the devices are being used to plot terror attacks or other crimes. RIM, for its part, insists that encryption is in its users' hands and that it does not have technology that would allow third-parties to monitor BlackBerry traffic.

The dispute echoes a similar set-to that occurred between RIM and Saudi Arabia. Officials in Riyadh previously threatened to cut off BlackBerry service in the kingdom unless RIM makes decryption technology available.

RIM has offered to give Indian officials the IP addresses of its BlackBerry Enterprise Servers and PIN and IMEI numbers of BlackBerry handsets. But the offer failed to satisfy security officials in India, which has seen a number of high-profile terrorist attacks in recent years.

RIM, which manages its own messaging traffic, is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to meeting national governments' security demands.

The BlackBerry's vaunted security and encryption tools have made it the device of choice for high-end business users. But, with mounting competition from Apple, Google, and others, RIM can ill afford to alienate authorities that represent some of the world's hottest growth markets.

By Paul McDougall
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Microsoft and Yahoo have thrown the switch on the main part of their search agreement, struck last year, under which Yahoo agreed to farm out search queries on its Web site to Microsoft's Bing engine.

The companies said Bing search results went live on Yahoo on Tuesday. "This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo and our customers," wrote Satya Nadella, senior VP for Microsoft's Online Services unit, in a blog post.

"We are happy to report the transition has gone smoothly and we feel great about the progress our search alliance has been making over the summer," said Nadella.

The integration is thus far complete only in the U.S. and Canada, with other countries to follow.

Yahoo also plans to adopt Microsoft's adCenter as its online advertising platform. Nadella said that work should be complete in the fall. "As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season," Nadella wrote.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced the deal on July 29, 2009. Under the ten-year pact, Microsoft will place its Bing search engine on all Yahoo sites and, initially, keep 12% of the revenue from Yahoo-driven searches. Yahoo will handle sales and marketing for premium search ads for both its own properties and Microsoft's.

Also, Microsoft agreed to hire a minimum of 400 Yahoo employees on a full-time basis as it extends Bing to Yahoo's Web sites. It also agreed to hire an additional 150 Yahoo workers to help with the transition.

Yahoo can terminate the arrangement if search traffic generated by the alliance falls below a specified percentage of rival Google's traffic. Yahoo also retains the right to expand the partnership by adding Microsoft's mapping and mobile search services to its Web properties.

Microsoft must submit to Yahoo copies of all data it collects from its sites while providing search services, according to SEC documents filed by the companies.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has said that, by in effect outsourcing search to Microsoft, her company can save $200 million in annual capital expenditures through reduced spending on search-related operations.

By Paul McDougall
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By Jason Lutz Jason Lutz – Sat Aug 21, 12:20 am ET

NEW YORK (Billboard) – "Double rainbow! Oh my God, it's a double rainbow all the way!"

Viral video fans can instantly trace these words to Paul "Yosemite Bear" Vasquez, who, while hiking in January, witnessed the unusual natural phenomenon known as a double rainbow and, wonderstruck by its beauty, broke out his camcorder and recorded his wide-eyed epiphany for posterity.

"Yosemite Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10," better known as the "Double Rainbow" video, can be viewed as poignantly innocent or ridiculously emotional -- Vasquez sobs between exclamations of joy -- but either way the clip has struck a chord with YouTube users during the last month and earned more than 7 million views.

Double rainbow mania reached a new level when "Double Rainbow Song," a "remix" of Vasquez's video by alt-rock quartet the Gregory Brothers, premiered in early July on YouTube. Mixing percussion, a gentle piano line and backing vocals with Vasquez's Auto-Tuned hosanna, the 90-second song has been heard 4.2 million times on YouTube and become a sensation in its own right.

The Brooklyn-based group started tinkering with YouTube last April and created "Auto-Tune the News," a 12-part video series that turned TV news broadcasts into T-Pain-esque jams and has earned more than 10 million views collectively. Although the Gregory Brothers also release straightforward rock albums, they see just as much artistic merit in their viral video work.

"A candid moment like 'Double Rainbow' can be more genuine and emotional than something manufactured by studio executives and producers," keyboardist Evan Gregory says. "It was totally real, and when it's turned into music you can feel that effect."

SHARING REVENUE

The group is gaining similar traction with "Bed Intruder Song," a darkly comical remix of a local TV news interview with Antoine Dodson about the attempted rape of his sister, Kelly, in Huntsville, Ala. The song's YouTube clip has been viewed nearly 14 million times.

Evan Gregory says, "Why I think people are latching onto it is frankly quite similar to why they latch onto a classic ballad or pop song that tops the charts -- because there's real emotion behind it that people identify with, even if, in this case, it was for unusual reasons."

During the clip, Dodson charismatically tells a reporter in rap-like fashion, "He's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up, trying to rape 'em, so y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband, 'cause they're raping everybody out here."

Drummer Michael Gregory admits that he questioned the appropriateness of turning a "bad situation" into a musical parody. But then he realized that "it's taking a terrible situation and making at least something positive out of it," he says.

Part of that positivity comes in the form of revenue for Antoine Dodson and his family, who will receive 50 percent of the track's sales profits, according to the act. Similarly, the Gregory Brothers credited Vasquez as a co-writer of "Double Rainbow Song" and split the proceeds.

"Bed Intruder Song" and "Double Rainbow Song" are the latest success stories for original tracks cut from the cloth of a viral video. Incorporating stylized production techniques with ubiquitous pieces of pop culture has proven an effective combination because it offers something both familiar and novel: videos that people know and love, but flipped into a new musical format.

With YouTube exceeding 2 billion views per day since May, the site's popularity and accessibility has prompted veteran artists to experiment with a new medium.

"I started remixing videos because I was hungry to do something different, and YouTube seemed like a fresh outlet for my music," Massachusetts DJ/producer Steve Porter says. After issuing standard dance remixes to little fanfare for a decade, Porter started remaking videos in 2008 and created "Slap Chop Rap," a techno take on the popular cooking infomercial with Vince Offer. The clip has received 10.7 million views on YouTube since its April 2009 premiere.

For DJs like Porter, the creative process of chopping a video into an original song comes as naturally as remixing a pop track, but it doesn't require a club-ready beat. Yet the biggest benefit for these artists is the instant identification that comes with retooling recognizable clips for mass consumption. And what better place to post the finished product than YouTube, the site that spawned the original video's success?

"I've been doing similar (video) remixes for years," says San Francisco producer Mike Relm, who has made songs out of dialogue from the film "Office Space" and a clip of President Barack Obama swatting a fly with his hand. "But there was never a great forum. Now, YouTube is the perfect avenue for what I do."

TURNING CLIPS INTO CAREERS

In concert, the YouTube mixes have quickly become fan favorites. The Gregory Brothers recently started incorporating "Double Rainbow Song" into their live show, and after "having shows where we know everyone in the crowd," they now see sizable audiences singing along to "Rainbow," according to Evan Gregory.

Meanwhile, Porter's DJ set at Coachella last April included a video screen and an inaugural live performance of "Slap Chop Rap" that capped the set.

"It was an unforgettable moment when Vince (Offer) appeared on the screen," Porter says. "This was an infomercial remix at a major festival, and the crowd went bonkers."

Porter has also turned his YouTube mixes into lucrative corporate partnerships. In June 2009, he released a clip called "Press Hop," which spliced together and Auto-Tuned the press conferences of professional athletes and coaches. The video, with upward of 2.6 million YouTube views, led to a call from the National Basketball Association, which commissioned Porter to create four TV promos using the same editing technique.

Although Porter won't reveal how much the NBA paid for the ads, he says that the deal was more profitable than anything else he has done in the music industry. "And it's still my music," Porter says. "With a slight tweak you're speaking the same language as corporate sponsors."

Similarly, Relm posted a musical remix of the "Iron Man 2" trailer on YouTube last March. Days after uploading it, film director Jon Favreau contacted Relm on Twitter and asked him to make an official TV spot for the film.

The opportunity helped refocus Relm's professional goals: Instead of only sending out press releases about his current projects, the producer now sends releases with video links to a long list of corporations. Relm recently remixed an Old Spice TV ad and is about to work on commissioned projects from Lionsgate Films and Fox.

As well, the actual YouTube videos also generate profits. An artist signed to a record label or publishing deal can use Content ID, a program that tracks the use of copyrighted material on YouTube and places an ad on an unauthorized video to generate revenue for the copyright holder. YouTube head of music partnerships Glenn Brown says that the site has more than 1,000 partners using Content ID, including every major record label.

If an unsigned artist wants to monetize a single YouTube clip, however, he or she can sign up for the Individual Video Partnership Program with the site. Although Brown says that the amount of advertising revenue a video can earn is "totally the function of the performance of the video," he points out that the creators of "David After Dentist," a two-minute clip that has 63 million views on the site, have made $30,000 from their original video.

PERMISSION REQUIRED

Of the hundreds of videos whose makers have asked that their footage be linked to the "Double Rainbow" clip on YouTube, the Gregory Brothers' "Double Rainbow Song" was one of only three or four videos that Vasquez approved. Although the group did not receive permission from Vasquez when it originally reworked his vocals into "Double Rainbow Song," Vasquez says that he "got a big kick out of (the song) ... it had a catchy tune and used my words in a nice way."

The Gregory Brothers did get Vasquez's consent before releasing the song as a single on iTunes. The band's splitting of proceeds with Vasquez, who they've credited as a co-writer, is a move Vasquez calls "incredibly generous." Generous, perhaps, and legally necessary: The group -- as well as other acts turning viral videos into songs -- needed the permission of the original YouTube clip's creator before putting a new spin on his work.

The Gregory Brothers believe that artists of their ilk will soon become more prominent, since the process of making music out of video clips isn't disappearing soon. In fact, guitarist Andrew Gregory can envision a world where songs like "Auto-Tune the News" are topping the charts.

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Microsoft Office 2010 In Pictures

With SharePoint 2010 in combination with Office 2010, you can control precisely what happens to documents within your organization well after someone hits "Save." In this article, we'll explain the key building blocks of SharePoint, drill down on key capabilities for growing businesses, and outline the business case.

A Brief Primer On Sharepoint

Suppose you've painstakingly compiled an Excel workbook containing a list of retail outlets worldwide that sell your brand-new product. If you're a sole proprietor, you might stop there. If you're a small business with a few employees, you might pass the Excel workbook around via email as needed, or better yet, put it on a shared folder on an Internet server so that employees can access the data at any time. To ensure data quality, you could use Excel's data validation features to confirm that each retail outlet had an employee assigned as the customer's main contact. Then, if you want to create a "Where to Buy" web page, you can export the data from the spreadsheet into a format that can be uploaded onto a basic website.

But what happens when your company grows? Before you know it, you're managing multiple workbooks for each product, the employee assignments fall out of sync, and the process of manually uploading information to your website becomes a much bigger task than you had anticipated. And as your company grows, you'll have other lists, data and documents to manage, with each business requirement spawning a separate project on the IT to-do list. Ultimately, you'll face a motley collection of point solutions that add up to an expensive and hard-to-manage IT infrastructure.

The SharePoint approach anticipates and supports the spread of data within a growing enterprise through a comprehensive approach to storing, managing and sharing information. As companies grow, they need to capture a wide variety of content; provide access to employees and partners through intranet sites; serve customers, suppliers and other stakeholders through external-facing websites; and manage the workflows associated with the content. While the specifics vary, the fundamental data requirements of an enterprise are reasonably predictable, and SharePoint implements a technology stack and methodology to deal with all but the most specialized business needs.

Let's revisit the aforementioned example with a deployment of SharePoint Foundation 2010, a free version of SharePoint that works with a licensed copy of Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server. You'll start by installing a server farm containing a database server and a web server. Within the web server, which will have its own URL for use only within the company intranet, you'll set up what's called a "Site Collection," with its first site containing one item, your original list of retail outlets. That's five levels of hierarchy if you're keeping track (server farm -> web server -> site collection -> site -> list), just to replicate information that used to reside within a single Excel file.

But now, you'd have a scalable infrastructure that could easily incorporate other sources of data -- both structured and unstructured -- into a comprehensive enterprise repository. In SharePoint 2010, a list can contain not just text and numbers, but also multimedia elements including audio and video, Office 2010 documents, and other binary objects.

Out of the box, a SharePoint installation includes blogs, wikis, team workspaces and document libraries. You can set item-level permissions, enable employees to check documents in or out, and have the ability to retrieve previous versions of documents for auditing and revision control. From within Office 2010, your users would be able to create their own lists and store their own documents online, your department managers could create their own sites, and your IT department can deploy new site collections as needed. Although moving that first list to SharePoint may take significant effort, building successive lists and sites gets easier and easier.

Furthermore, because the underlying data is being stored on the enterprise server farm instead of on an isolated PC, you can easily point external and mobile users to versions of shared data. You'd be able to create a parallel list containing just the data elements that you want to make public. That list would be contained within a site collection on an externally-facing web server, tapping into the shared database server on the enterprise server farm.

However, this transition from the private intranet to the public internet does require an upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010. There's only so far you can go with the free version of SharePoint, and if you're truly taking an ECM (enterprise content management) approach you'll hit the limits soon enough.

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Nokia has agreed to acquire Motally, a mobile analytics company that provides tools for tracking how people are using mobile Web sites and applications.

The Finnish mobile phone maker said Friday that it expected to complete the acquisition of the privately held, U.S. company in the third quarter. Nokia did not say how much it agreed to pay for Motally, which has just eight employees.

Motally currently offers its tools to developers building apps for the Apple iPad and iPhone, Research in Motion's BlackBerry and phones based on Google's Android operating system. In buying Motally, Nokia plans to add its phones to the mix, "enabling partners to better connect with their customers and optimize and monetize their offering," Marco Argenti, VP of media for Nokia, said in a statement.

Nokia offers mobile applications through its online store Ovi, much like Apple and manufacturers of Android phones offer applications through their respective stores. The availability of applications for smartphones has proven to be a major factor in hardware sales.

Nokia is the world's largest smartphone maker, accounting for 38% of the global market in the second quarter, according to research firm Canalys. However, in the United States, the world's largest market, Nokia's phones are far behind Android phones, the iPhone and BlackBerry.

With many mobile applications being built for the leading phones in the U.S., Nokia apparently decided to grab Motally in order to give it direct access to developers. At the same time, Nokia plans to continue serving Motally's existing customer base.

Motally's mobile Web site tools enable app developers and publishers to identify user visits, track searches and monitor how people are using the site. For mobile applications, Motally's products can also capture demographic data and let developers set up tracking for specific events.

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At its developer conference in May, Google announced plans to open a Chrome Web Store to sell Web apps to users of its Chrome Web browser and its forthcoming Chrome OS.

Google's online store is now accepting apps to sell. In a blog post on Thursday, Google advised developers that they can start uploading Web app metadata to a developer preview of the Chrome Web Store.

Turning a Web site into a Web app that can be sold in the Chrome Web Store is relatively easy. A Web app is simply a Web site with some descriptive data, a .crx file that contains information about app resources and how it functions.

"The idea for a Web Store grew out of an observation that the way the Web works has changed significantly in the past few years," said Google Chrome developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik in a YouTube video. "New standards such as HTML5 give developers more flexibility in the types of experience the Web can provide."

Giving credence to the deliberately provocative thesis that the Web is dead, an argument advanced in a recent Wired article, Roomann-Kurrik observes that "the idea of a Web site as a place to consume text-based content is out of date."

Web sites have moved beyond hypertext to become Web applications that act as real-time e-mail clients, stream music, and render multiplayer games, he argues.

Thus, apparently, finding Web apps the way one finds Web sites -- through a search engine -- has to change too.

Google sees the Chrome Web Store as a way to make the experience of dealing with Web apps more like desktop apps (presumably without the burden of keeping desktop software up-to-date). The Chrome Web Store will make Web apps easier to find, by placing them into an online store unpolluted by Internet information overload, and easier to use, by giving them a special browser tab in which to operate.

It will also make dealing with payment and authentication systems easier, for both users and developers, despite the fact that Web apps can be accessed through their designated URL without any payment to Google.

Google has just released new documentation on the Chrome Web Store Licensing API and integrating OpenID.

One of the main benefits of the Chrome Web Store is that it alters the permission process for applications. Whereas iPhone apps, for example, dutifully query users every time they want to access location data, Web apps installed through the Chrome Web Store ask for permission upon installation and retain this setting, which leads to a less disruptive experience.

The Google Chrome Web Store is scheduled to launch in October.

By Thomas Claburn
Read the Original Article at InformationWeek

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Image Gallery: 12 Worst Government Websites

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra acknowledged that the federal government has to "stop the madness" when it comes to wasting money on data centers and other IT resources that aren't working effectively. Speaking at the NASA IT Summit on Thursday, Kundra outlined some accomplishments the federal government has made to trim the fat of IT operations.

But he said that much more can be done to streamline IT at federal agencies, which should look to NASA projects like the Nebula cloud-computing platform -- launched last year at another NASA event -- as an example. "The Nebula platform is being leveraged across agencies across the government," he said.

Technology like this can help the federal government "find the path that moves us away from spending billions of dollars that frankly could be better spent," Kundra said.

Kundra cited progress the federal government has made on IT since his first day in office, when he was "handed a stack of PDF documents and … told, 'Congratulations, welcome to the federal government. Here are over $26 billion-worth of IT projects that are way over budget and way behind schedule.'"

A good number of those projects -- such as a Veterans Administration's financial-system overhaul that begun in 1998 and was finally cancelled last month, and the Department of Defense's plan to build an integrated human-resource system that wasted $1 billion -- have been cancelled. But there is more work to be done, and Kundra said in the last month alone he "sat down with every major agency" to review projects that are behind schedule, over budget or off course to come up with a way to get them back on track. "It's imperative that every dollar we invest in this fiscal environment, that the investments don't end up become wasteful," he said.

Project execution is not the only problem the government faces, Kundra acknowledged. He said federal procurements take "far too long" and cited lack of a common architecture -- even within departments -- also is a major problem. To the latter point, he cited an example at the Department of Interior where someone could not send an email department-wide because of siloed email systems. "That is why we're sitting down with every department to make sure that as we go into the 2012 budget process we look at the infrastructure," he said.

Situations like that also inspired the government's crackdown on data centers, something the Obama administration ordered in June. The federal government grew its data centers from 432 in 1998 to more than 1100 today, a number that the Obama administration hopes to cut considerably, Kundra said.

Still, while Kundra is optimistic about the federal government's ability to shape up IT operations, others - including some federal IT executives themselves -- are more skeptical, particularly when it comes to data-center consolidation.

A recent survey found that many federal IT executives don't think agencies will achieve data-center consolidation in the timeline the Obama administration is targeting. Moreover, some others think it may never happen at all.

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Image Gallery: 8 Online Storage Solutions

Moving deeper into IT services and cloud computing, Dell Inc. said Monday that it plans to buy 3PAR Inc., a high end data storage company, for $1.15 billion.

Best known for sales of PCs to enterprises and consumers, Dell has been muscling its way into IT services since it acquired Perot Systems for $3.9 billion last year. The 3PAR deal follows Dell's 2007 $1.4 billion acquisition of EqualLogic, which gave Dell a solid storage base, but on a lower end than 3PAR's.

Dell is betting that 3PAR's thin provisioning approach, which treats storage as a utility, will result in a big payoff for the firm and its customers. The combination of thin provisioning and virtualization, Dell indicated, can overcome the limitations of traditional modular and monolithic arrays.

"3PAR addresses the problem of costly, complex, and rigid IT environments and enables organizations to treat storage as a utility," said Dell in a release, adding that customers need to pay only for "the capacity and performance they need, and only when they use it."

3PAR's technology utilizes a multi-tenant clustered storage architecture, which helps IT organizations build virtualized infrastructures. 3PAR has long maintained that its thin provisioning approach enables customers to better predict performance as they face storage capacity requirements that always seem to be increasing.

It was not immediately clear what impact, if any, the deal with 3PAR will have on Dell's longtime partnership with EMC on storage, which represents about 25% of Dell's total storage business, according to industry research estimates. Dell said it plans to integrate 3PAR into its storage portfolio including its Dell/EMC products. Dell added: "With 3PAR. Dell will offer innovative systems and customer choice at every storage tier, from direct-attach to highly-virtualized clustered SANS."

Dell said it believes a 3PAR acquisition will help Dell reduce data management costs dramatically, creating additional space in customer budgets for other strategic investments.

"We have aligned our storage offerings over the last several years to provide our customers choice and value," said Dell's Brad Anderson, senior vice president of Dell's enterprise product group, in a statement. "3PAR brings the same values of performance, agility and ease-of-use to higher end, virtualized storage deployments as EqualLogic does for the entry-level an mid-range, rounding out our industry-leading solutions portfolio."

3PAR's chief executive David Scott said the acquisition is a good fit, because his firm's storage solutions will complement Dell's distribution network.

Dell paid dearly for 3PAR, offering $18 a share for the firm, whose stock was last traded at $9.65 a share on Friday. The purchase price represents an 87% premium. The firms said they expect the acquisition will be completed by the end of the year.

In explaining 3PAR's value to boost Dell's cloud computing offerings, Dell said the storage firm's acquisition will help Dell achieve its goal of reducing customer data management costs by 50%. 3PAR has valuable virtualization solutions that should help Dell's customers trim power and energy costs as they adopt cloud computing more aggressively.

The acquisition will help Dell as it competes more aggressively with Cisco, EMC, HP and IBM, all of which have strong positions in IT services and cloud computing.

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By Lisa Shumaker Lisa Shumaker – Sun Aug 15, 6:46 am ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A manager at Apple Inc has been charged in California with taking kickbacks he received after leaking corporate secrets to Asian companies that supplied iPhone and iPod accessories, court documents showed.

Paul Shin Devine, a global supply manager at technology company Apple since 2005, was accused by federal authorities of accepting kickbacks from six Asian companies. Authorities did not name the companies but said they were located in South Korea, China, Taiwan and Singapore.

Devine, 37, also faces a civil suit filed by Cupertino, California-based Apple, which accused him of receiving more than $1 million in payments and bribes over several years, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Devine appeared in court on Friday in San Jose but no bail was set, according to court documents. He is scheduled to return to court on Monday.

Devine was charged in a federal grand jury indictment on Wednesday with 23 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy and accepting kickbacks, court documents showed.

"Apple is committed to the highest ethical standards in the way we do business," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said in a statement, according to the Mercury News. "We have zero tolerance for dishonest behavior inside or outside the company."

Devine allegedly used his position at Apple to obtain confidential information that he shared with Apple suppliers to help them negotiate favorable contracts with the company, according to the indictment.

In return, the suppliers paid Devine kickbacks, which he allegedly shared with Andrew Ang of Singapore. Ang was charged with three counts of wire fraud and conspiracy.

The investigation was conducted jointly by the FBI and Internal Revenue Service.

Apple and prosecutors were not immediately available to comment on Saturday.

(Reporting by Lisa Shumaker; additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington)

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Once again showing that it's serious about transparency, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has begun posting reports about data breaches on its website.

The monthly reports, which the agency compiles for Congress, list different ways the VA has lost data, such as through lost hardware or misdirected emails.

For example, a report (PDF) from July 5 to Aug. 1 shows the agency lost two PCs, 13 BlackBerry devices and six laptops. It also reported 103 of so-called "mis-mailed" incidents, and 90 "mis-handling" incidents.

All of the lost laptops were encrypted, according to the report.

In the past the VA has had some major data breaches, including one in April that involved the loss of two unencrypted laptops that contained personal information about more than 600 veterans.

Another infamous data breach in 2006 involved the theft from a VA employee's home of a laptop that contained data on more than 26 million veterans. That incident spurred a Congressional review, as well as cost the agency $20 million to settle a class-action suit.

The VA is taking its data breaches seriously enough that VA CIO Roger Baker has begun monthly calls with members of the press to discuss them.

Since taking his position, Baker has made a concerted effort to improve IT operations at the VA, with data security being a major priority.

The posting of the reports also shows how far the agency has come in terms of transparency and accountability for its IT operations, which historically have been criticized for serious inefficiency.

Baker has put into effect an accountability program that flags IT projects behind schedule, over budget, or both. That program, which was recently expanded to all of the VA's IT projects, saved the agency $54 million in its fiscal-year 2010 budget.

By Elizabeth Montalbano
Read the Original Article at InformationWeek

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The company's next-generation web browser will be released at San Francisco event, James Pratt, a senior product manager at Microsoft, said on the IE blog Thursday. Invitations to the event were sent to a select group of web developers, designers, bloggers and press.

More than 2.5 million IE previews have been downloaded, according to Microsoft. The company introduced the latest release, Preview 4, last week.

With IE9, Microsoft is focused on delivering HTML5 support that runs web applications at a level that meets or exceeds the capabilities and user expectations of desktop applications. Microsoft's browser rivals, Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera, are pursuing the same goal.

HTML 5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard. The new standard incorporates features that were previously available only through third-party browser plug-ins. Such features include video playback and drag-and-drop.

Microsoft is particularly focused on having IE9 perform best on Windows, arguing that the only way to deliver optimum performance. If the company focused more delivering a cross-platform browser, like Mozilla's Firefox, that it would be forced to take a "least common denominator approach to implementing HTML 5," Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft general manager of IE, said in a recent blog post.

After years of dormancy, Microsoft jumpstarted its IE development with version 8, and is apparently keeping the momentum going with IE9.

To date, Microsoft has seen some progress in the browser market. In July, IE snatched market share from Mozilla's Firefox, the number two browser in the market, for the second consecutive month, according to web metrics firm NetApplications said. IE has the lion's share of the market with more than 60%.

By Antone Gonsalves
Read the Original Article at InformationWeek

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Google on Wednesday released Chrome 6.0.472.33 to its Beta Channel for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

The new beta version introduces a streamlined user interface, with a more refined upper toolbar and Omnibox, and options gathered into a single menu.

These changes have been available on the Developer Channel since June.

The updated Chrome beta also adds a capability seen in other browsers called Autofill, which fills in Web forms automatically with commonly entered data fields such as name, address, phone number, and credit card number.

"Autofill builds up and saves this information for you over time, so that you can fill in long Web forms with just a few clicks without typing in the same information over again," explained Google software engineer James Hawkins in a blog post. "For your security, any personal information stored in Chrome is safely stored and kept private until a user chooses to share the information with a Web site."

Hawkins says that Chrome won't save credit card information without permission.

The latest Chrome beta also features improved synchronization capabilities. Beyond bookmarks, preferences, and themes, users can now synchronize Chrome extensions and Autofill data, except for credit card numbers, through the user's Google Account.

And Chrome's most recent beta iteration is faster than its predecessor. Hawkins says it's 15% faster using the V8 benchmark and 15% faster using the SunSpider benchmark, both of which measure JavaScript performance.

Using Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests, Chrome Beta 6.0.472.33 showed a 64% improvement.

The most recent Stable Channel release is Google Chrome 5.0.375.126; the latest Developer Channel release is 6.0.472.25.

Last month, Google committed to accelerating its Chrome release cycle to make releases more predictable and to reduce pressure on engineers to complete features prior to relatively infrequent release dates.

By Thomas Claburn
Read the Original Article at InformationWeek

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Apple may have another serious design problem on its hands. The company is offering to replace iPod nano devices sold in Japan amid reports the portable music player's battery is prone to overheating to the point of causing burns.

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry reported that first-generation iPod nanos sold between September 2005 and December 2006 exhibit the problem, and that users suffered minor burns from the devices on four occasions. METI reported 60 incidents in total in which iPod nanos developed potentially dangerous overheating.

Apple said its offer to replace the music players comes after talks with Japanese officials.

"We've worked closely with METI to make sure first-generation iPod nano customers who are concerned with their battery have the latest information," an Apple spokesperson told the Reuters news agency.

Apple's troubles in Japan come on the heels of Antennagate, an embarrassing foul-up that ultimately led Steve Jobs to offer iPhone 4 buyers free cases. The cases, or "bumpers", are meant to insulate iPhone 4's finicky antenna from the so-called "grip of death" bug.

The antenna reportedly stops functioning if grasped in the lower left corner.

Apple on July 23rd released a downloadable app that allows iPhone 4 customers to get the free case. The company has said the program could cost it up to $175 million. Mark Papermaster, a top engineer who bolted from IBM last year to take over Apple's iPhone engineering unit, left Cupertino last week after just 15 months on the job in the wake of Antennagate.

The company did not state whether Papermaster's departure was related to the iPhone's problems. To top it all off, Apple was sued earlier this month by consumers who claim the iPad stops functioning if exposed to direct sunlight.

By Paul McDougall
Read the Original Article at InformationWeek

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Slideshow: Windows 7 Revealed

Microsoft has launched a marketing offensive that tries to turn the tables on the claims Apple made on its highly successful "Get a Mac" ads.

With the much-maligned Windows Vista behind it, Microsoft is taking advantage of the critical success of Windows 7 to make the case that new PCs are more fun, easier to use, more compatible with other consumer electronics and better at sharing content than the Mac. Microsoft has introduced the latest "PC versus Mac" campaign on the Windows 7 Website.

Apple harped on the same attributes in reverse in its "Get a Mac" ads that ran for three years and featured actors John Hodgman and Justin Long. In launching ads, the Mac maker took advantage of consumer and business discontent with Vista. The last three ads ran nine months ago.

Some PC-oriented websites lauded Microsoft for pointing out a Mac's most obvious limitations: no Blu-ray player, TV tuner, Memory Stick reader or built-in 3G wireless.

The success of Windows 7 has made it possible for Microsoft to get more aggressive in attacking the Mac. Launched last October, Microsoft sold 90 million copies by March, making the operating system the fastest selling OS in the history of PC industry.

There's little doubt that Windows 7 has given Microsoft some much-needed market momentum. According to market-research firm YouGovPlc the percentage of customers satisfied with Microsoft reached 73% at the end of last year, the highest level since the firm started surveying the company's customers.

However, Apple is not sitting on its laurels and has a PC-bashing site called "Why you'll love a Mac" and Apple sales show some people are listening. The company sold 3.47 million Macs in the second calendar quarter, a company record and a 33% increase over a year ago.

By Antone Gonsalves

Read the Original Article at InformationWeek

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Longtime antagonists Google and Verizon have come together to propose a new set of rules for how Internet traffic can be lawfully managed.

In a joint statement published on the Web sites of both companies, Alan Davidson, director of public policy at Google, and Tom Tauke, Verizon's EVP of public affairs, policy, and communications, declared their support for non-discriminatory treatment of wireline broadband Internet traffic.

"[T]his new nondiscrimination principle includes a presumption against prioritization of Internet traffic -- including paid prioritization," wrote Davidson and Tauke in a blog post. "So, in addition to not blocking or degrading of Internet content and applications, wireline broadband providers also could not favor particular Internet traffic over other traffic."

Google and Verizon hope legislators will use their framework as a guide to clarify the powers and responsibilities of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC's regulatory power has come into question following a court decision that found the FCC lacked the authority to impose network neutrality rules on Comcast.

But the proposed rules have critics crying foul because they do not cover wireless networks and they would remove the FCC's few remaining teeth by mandating enforcement on a case-by-case basis.

"We welcome all efforts to promote openness on the wireline Internet, but believe that any satisfactory agreement must also include protection for wireless Internet users to access Web sites and applications of their choice," said Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition -- which counts Google as a member -- in an e-mailed statement.

Free Press, a national media reform group, denounced the proposal as a way to transform the free, open Internet into a closed platform like cable television.

"If codified, this arrangement will lead to toll booths on the information superhighway," said Free Press Political Adviser Joel Kelsey in a statement. "It will lead to outright blocking of applications and content on increasingly popular wireless platforms."

The SavetheInternet.com Coalition -- a group that includes MoveOn.Org Civic Action, Credo Action, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, ColorofChange.org, and Free Press -- predicts that the rules will curtail investment in the open Internet by promoting investment in new services not governed by these rules -- what some are calling "private Internets" -- that allow discriminatory pricing.

In a conference call for the media on Monday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt scoffed at this idea, insisting that Google likes the public Internet. And he dismissed reports suggesting that Google and Verizon had entered into a business relationship to ensure priority delivery of Google network traffic.

A spokesperson for the FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By Thomas Claburn
Read the Original Article at InformationWeek

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Its supposed reversal on net neutrality isn't the only controversy dogging Google—now it's drawing heat for practices around campaign contributions.

New York City public advocate Bill de Blasio slammed the company on Thursday for using its treasury money to back candidates and for not fully disclosing direct and indirect contributions.

"You can find almost anything using Google, except for its own political spending," said de Blasio, who noted that most of the search giant's tech industry peers, including Dell, Microsoft, eBay, and Hewlett-Packard, have voluntarily adopted policies against using corporate treasury dollars for political purposes.

To promote his cause, de Blasio created an online video titled "Searching For Transparency," in which he slams Google's clandestine spending.

de Blasio's campaign comes in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in January that overturned previous restrictions on corporate contributions to political campaigns. In light of the ruling, de Blasio wants companies to be transparent about where their dollars are going. He noted that Google spent $4 million on lobbying in 2009, 50 times the amount it spent in 2003.

"This increased spending comes as investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and Attorneys General from several states are raising questions about how Google may have improperly collected people's private information through their unsecured wireless networks while collecting data for its Street View feature," de Blasio's office said.

de Blasio is urging Congress to pass the Disclose Act, which would require companies to disclose their involvement political ads while prohibiting them from funding certain types of candidate promotions.

Google, meanwhile, continues to fend off criticism that it's reversed its long-time advocacy of network neutrality following a series of closed-doors meetings with Verizon.

Network neutrality advocates say all Internet traffic should be equal, while opponents say carriers should have the right to charge more for bandwidth-hogging content like movies and games and faster delivery speeds.

Google officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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If you want to understand the challenges of the Big Data era, hang around Catalina Marketing, a global marketing firm that works with a who's who of consumer packaged goods companies and retailers.

Catalina's data warehousing environment shot past the petabyte mark seven years ago and today stands at 2.5 PB. Its single largest database contains three years' worth of purchase history for 195 million U.S. customer loyalty program members at supermarkets, pharmacies, and other retailers. With 600 billion rows of data in a single table, it's the largest loyalty database in the world, Catalina maintains.

At the cash registers of Catalina's retail customers, real-time analysis of that data triggers printouts of coupons that shoppers are handed with their receipt at checkout. Each coupon is unique--two shoppers checking out one after the other, with identical items in their carts, will get different coupons based on their buying histories, combined with third-party demographic data.

Few companies operate at Catalina's scale, but most every company is living in its own version of the Big Data era. Two forces define this era: size and speed. And those forces are driving companies to consider new choices for how they deal with data.

Size is relative--by some estimates, 90% of data warehouses hold less than 5 TB. But it's the pace of growth that has companies rethinking their options. Nearly half (46%) of organizations surveyed last year by the Data Warehousing Institute said they'll replace their primary data warehousing platform by 2012.

Speed is sometimes about pure performance, as in how quickly a system answers a query, but more important is the broad notion of "speed to insight." That's about how much time people--often statistician-analyst-type people--must spend loading data and tuning for performance. The pressure is on IT to get insights out of ever-larger data sets--faster.

This Big Data era got rolling way back in the dot-com days. Since then, a number of alternatives have emerged to challenge the conventional relational databases from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Those options fall into two camps: systems supporting massively parallel processing (MPP), and those harnessing column-store databases.

It's now almost a given that new deployments headed north of 10 TB will feature MPP, column-store architectures, or both. Oracle now delivers MPP through its Exadata V2 and IBM through its Smart Analytic System, both introduced last year. And Microsoft will join the MPP camp this fall with its Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse.

But the story doesn't end there. Practitioners handling complex analytics, really big data sets, real-time analysis, or all three will need much more. If you're using or expanding your use of advanced analytics such as predictive models, for example, you need to explore emerging options for in-database processing. The right choice could save your team countless hours of data extraction and prep work.

If swamped with truly massive data, consider powerful, Google-inspired query techniques such as MapReduce. Need to query huge stores of text and other nonrelational data? Open source options such as Hadoop might be the ticket to flexible-yet-affordable analysis. And if competition is driving your business toward real-time responses, in-memory analysis is without doubt in your future. As IT leaders from Catalina to Barnes & Noble to Cabela's show that standing still isn't an option in the Big Data era.

Catalina's data warehouse is accessed from more than 44,000 retail locations, and it collects data on more than 250 million transactions per week. So Big Data is its business. Catalina started building grid computers on its own, before it became the No. 3 customer of Netezza back in 2003. Since then, Netezza's MPP architecture and its proprietary data-filtering capabilities have helped Catalina keep pace with soaring data stores.

Why So Big?

Other companies have multiple warehouses that may not sound like Big Data individually, but they sure do when added up. Consolidating them can yield analytic insights and system management efficiencies as well as cut hardware and software costs.

Bookseller Barnes & Noble has "dozens and dozens" of terabytes, says Marc Parrish, VP of retention and loyalty marketing, and until recently that data was spread across nine Oracle data warehouses. One warehouse handled point-of-sale data from 730 retail stores. Another handled 630 college bookstores. Another handled the Web site. And so on.

Yet one of the single most important insights Barnes & Noble needs, as e-books and e-readers take off, is how readers interact across those channels. It's no accident that its new CEO, William Lynch, ran the retailer's Web site before taking the helm.

Shortly after Barnes & Noble entered the e-reader market last year, with the Nook device and iPhone and Android e-readers, its executives backed an investment in a consolidated enterprise data warehouse. The company finished migrating to an Aster Data nCluster database, running on commodity MPP hardware, this spring and started using it for analysis within the last month. Parrish says Barnes & Noble already is doing a better job of cross-channel analysis, which was next to impossible with silos.

"Before, when somebody visited us online, we only knew about their online purchases," he says. "Now that all our data is in one place, we can understand their interactions across our entire ecosystem." Barnes & Noble gets better understanding of customer reading interests, as well as insight into the dynamics among e-reading, online activity, use of in-store cafes, and store purchases.

Some companies end up with Big Data because of fast growth or a need to dig into historical information. Hutchison 3G, a British mobile network operator with 6 million subscribers, is dealing with both. Its customer ranks are growing, its call volumes are swelling as subscribers give up landlines, and mobile Web usage is soaring via smartphones.

Hutchison chose IBM's Smart Analytic System to take on both network performance optimization and customer behavior analysis. It cut dropped-call rates by spotting bad network interconnects and poor antenna performance. Hutchison is also looking at customer use of text, voice, and Web, plus calls to customer service. The usual business objectives apply: spotting cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, best customers, and customers likely to leave.

Hutchison's new warehouse holds 33 TB, including a full year of call detail records. The company expects to reach 60 TB within a year as it aggregates older data for historical trend analysis. With that, Hutchison expects to get "better detail on our subscriber segments and a clearer understanding of the complete life cycle of contracts," says Darren Silvester, Hutchison's information management architect.

Need For Speed

Companies increasingly expect to be able to do advanced analytics on Big Data, and they expect results fast.

Advanced analytics go hand-in-hand with data warehousing because you need lots of data to analyze customer behavior (for sales and marketing), understand risk (think finance), or optimize performance (think IT or IP networks). In many cases, massively parallel processing and column-store databases alone can't tackle those big analytic challenges.

The problem, until fairly recently, was that advanced analytic functions had to be handled outside the database, so MPP and columnar querying and compression couldn't speed things along. Procedures and models in SAS Institute's analytics software, for instance, are typically developed and scored on the SAS platform. In that approach, data must be copied and moved from the data warehouse. Between disk-reading and network-bandwidth constraints, it takes a long time to get Big Data out of a warehouse. You also have to wait for the comparatively slow (flat-file-based) SAS platform to process. In a final step, the derived result from SAS usually must be loaded back into the data warehouse.

That's all changing thanks to in-database analytics. Lots of data warehousing vendors have added it to their feature list. The crucial question is whether they support the types of analytics you need. Most vendors now support a range of analytic queries that can be written in or converted to SQL. But a few vendors have also added support for running SAS procedures and models, and for analytics written in C/C++, Java, Python, Perl, R, and other languages inside their database.

Cabela's, a sporting goods direct marketer and superstore retailer, was an early advocate of in-database processing. When it moved from a conventional IBM DB2 data warehouse to a Teradata one in 2005, Cabela's used every trick available to handle SAS procedures inside the Teradata database. It used various optimization approaches whereby SAS procedures were converted to SQL.

"We had to retrain our statisticians to think outside of standard SAS and be more SQL-based, but they were flexible and made that transition," says Dean Wynkoop, Cabela's senior manager of data management and a member of the SAS/Teradata advisory council.

Now, thanks to its in-database approach, a reporting process that took four days of extraction, data prep, and processing in SAS takes about an hour inside Teradata. Translation: Cabela's needs only 1.5 full-time equivalents to handle a direct-mail campaign that previously required seven full-time statisticians. "We wanted to make the most of these people as statisticians, not data management people handling data extracts and running jobs," Wynkoop says.

Rather than lay those people off, Cabela's has them doing analytics--not data handling--on sales forecasting, product allocation optimization, and even potential store locations. Next up: digging into Web clickstreams.

SAS and Teradata took the hint from Cabela's and other customers and co-developed tools, released in 2008 and since expanded, that offer a slightly different approach to in-database processing. Teradata adapted its database to run key SAS functions so statisticians can stick with the code they're accustomed to. A tool for building data sets lets statisticians build SAS models using sample data directly from Teradata. Statisticians use the SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata to score models within the database. Depending on the scale of the data, some procedures are said to run 40 to 50 times faster in Teradata than on the SAS platform.

Modeling On Steroids

There's a theme in that example: customers driving vendors into partnerships. Three years ago, Catalina was among the customers that got Netezza and SAS working together on in-database processing. Statisticians typically sample 10% to 15% of a customer base to build a model. With a loyalty database of 195 million consumers, Catalina in some cases needs hundreds of terabytes just to build a model--more data than most companies have in their entire data warehouse.

The two vendors collaborated on a Scoring Accelerator for Netezza, which they introduced early this year and which Catalina adopted. "Before, we were lucky if we could develop 50 to 60 models per year," says Eric Williams, CIO and executive VP at Catalina. "Because of the in-database technology, we believe we'll be able to do 600 models per year with the same staff."

Teradata, Netezza, and Aster Data appear to have the most advanced efforts to support SAS within their databases, but SAS is also working with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Greenplum (recently acquired by EMC). IBM says its SPSS analytics platform supports in-database analytics by way of a server that can push SQL versions of SPSS code into DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

SAS and SPSS are the analytics leaders, but practitioners need to run other forms of analytics more efficiently, such as open source R and applications written in other languages. Aster Data, Greenplum, Netezza, and others are making more non-SQL code understood and operable in their databases.

If you know what you need now or expect to use in the future, by all means call out those specifics in your RFP. Expect the list of in-database processing options to expand. If the data you're analyzing doesn't fit the SQL mold--often the case for text--consider options such as Hadoop (see story, p. 24).

In-Memory Is Your Future

One trend that will impact all data warehousing practitioners, sooner or later, is in-memory analysis. Disk drives will become extinct, replaced by solid-state memory. With solid-state drives (SSD) as much as 150 times faster than spinning disks on sheer data input and output, the speed-of-analysis advantages that in-memory will deliver will be impossible to resist.

BNP Paribas, the French financial services giant, recently deployed Oracle's Exadata V2 appliance as the foundation for an analytic trading floor application that formerly ran on an Oracle 10g RAC deployment. Exadata V2 is one of a handful of platforms now available with solid-state memory. IBM, Kognitio, and Teradata, among others, have added SSD options.

Exadata, with flash memory from the Sun F5100 array, supports the high-speed end of BNP Paribas' data access scheme, which stores data based on high-, medium-, and low-speed needs. The most recent week's trading floor data is on the flash cache, as is any data that can be directly accessed at the presentation layer, including a query-oriented internal Web site and data accessed by its BusinessObjects tools.

"The Web site is now, conservatively, five times faster than it used to be, and we also have staging tables in flash that give us real-time application performance statistics," says Jim Duffy, BNP Paribas' data warehouse architect.

SAP was among the first to demonstrate the potential of in-memory analysis, offering its SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator more than three years ago. The derivative SAP BusinessObjects Explorer appliance, introduced last year, can tap multiple data sources beyond data warehouses.

SAP rightfully caused a stir this spring when chairman Hasso Plattner and CTO Vishal Sikka outlined the company's long-term vision for handling transaction processing and data analysis with in-memory speeds on a single platform. That's different from Oracle Exadata V2; Exadata also supports both transaction processing and data warehousing but handles the two as distinct environments. The High-Performance Analytic Appliance that SAP is promising--perhaps by year's end--isn't expected to cross into transactions. If it delivers, it will be interesting to see just how much memory it brings to analytic processing.

SAS also is promising a product by year's end that could shake up this market. SAS plans to introduce in-memory applications for financial risk assessment, retail pricing, and product-mix applications, packaged to run on HP server blades. Such an app running on an in-memory platform would presumably outperform the same app supported by an MPP warehouse with in-database processing using old-fashioned spinning disks.

Catalina CIO Williams has tested a few of the latest in-memory options and found them four to eight times faster than platforms using fast-spinning disks. So why isn't everyone on in-memory? The cost, he says, is as much as 10 times higher than for conventional platforms.

Know Your Needs

We're years away from seeing large data warehouses routinely stored completely in memory. But for practitioners under pressure in this Big Data era--to handle huge scale, do advanced analytics, and deliver real-time insights--the good news is those demands are sparking new technologies, new strategies, and lower costs.

With lowball pricing from the likes of Netezza now in the $20,000-per-terabyte range, a deployment that would have busted budgets even five years ago might not even reach seven figures today. Among the few vendors that publicly reports such figures, Netezza's average deal size in the fourth quarter was $1.1 million, and smaller deployments land in the $300,000 range. Other vendors quote prices in the $70,000- to $100,000-per-terabyte range, and large data volumes are known to trigger steep discounts.

The most expensive deployment, though, is the one that doesn't meet your needs and has to be replaced. So know your requirements and long-range expectations. By all means, ask for a pilot test with your sample data and queries. Not all vendors will oblige. Others may charge fees applicable to a purchase. Another option might be testing the platform in the cloud or in a hosted environment.

The theme we keep hearing from leaders in this Big Data era is to explore new options. "My team goes out and takes a look at all new technologies and vendors," says Catalina's Williams. "We're going to stay where we're at for the next six to nine months, but we'll continue to make sure we have the best product for the price point."

Six to nine months. If you're not exploring your options that often, you're probably falling behind.

Write to Doug Henschen at dhenschen@techweb.com

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