I hate that mobile apps have taken the world by storm. I hate not being able to access something because I have an Android phone and all that the site has is an iPhone app. As a developer I hate having to build for a crap-ton of different platforms to make sure my users have access to my content. If only there was some global phenomenon that was accessible on a mobile device and was completely cross-platform. Oh wait, there is, it’s called THE WEB.

Why in the hell are we building native mobile applications when we can just build a web application to accomplish the same thing? Now, I understand that there are some requirements, like camera, that force us into the native realm. But if you aren’t using the camera or some other device-specific API, you should be building a web app.

This is why I love Untappd so much. Untappd is essentially Foursquare for beer. Instead of checking into a location, you can “check-in” what beer you’re drinking. Instead of doing the native app thing, they built a mobile site. I can access it from any device. It uses the browser-based GPS API to get my location so I can attach that to my beer, and there’s no stupid install needed. Just a wonderful web app with all of the functionality I need accessible from anywhere.

I realize there are some caveats beyond the device-specific APIs, but there has to be ways around them. One of the biggies is responsiveness. I think this one is kind of a cop-out because a great web-app will be able to create a UI in such a way that it feels just as responsive as a native app. jQuery mobile and Sencha Touch are great at this. The biggest thing is monetization. Currently it’s really hard to monetize web apps and it’s very easy to monetize native mobile applications. This is one of the reasons I’m so jazzed on the idea of the Chrome web store. Being able to make money on web apps could (I think) help change the tide and encourage more developers to go the web app route.

It’s a shame that we’re able to do such cool stuff on the web but that developers are jumping through hoops to lock down their content to specific devices. We’ve got technologies like Phonegap in the interim, but the sooner we get back to the web, the better.

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Birmingham’s Alexander Hleb turned down Liverpool and Tottenham
Alexander Hleb says he turned down Liverpool and Tottenham before clinching a loan move to Birmingham. The midfielder has joined on a season-long loan.

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Blogetery, a WordPress platform, has seen its entire community shut down by its host, BurstNET. Subsequent statements by BurstNET indicated that the service was suspended at the request of an unidentified law enforcement agency.

“(Blogetery) was terminated by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server. We are limited as to the details we can provide to you, but note that this was a critical matter and the only available option to us was to immediately deactivate the server.”

The gist of the conversation on the discussion board initially indicated that copyright infringement might have been the motivation. Torrent services, like Bittorrent, are the frequent target of legal actions as they are an efficient way to share large amounts of information, such as television shows or movies. This does not appear to be the case, however. The owner stated that the service dealt with copyright issues without prior problems.

“(I) got C&D letters from copyright owners to remove pages with links to torrent/rapidshare. I always handle such abuse reports within 24 hours and remove such material.”

BurstNET responded that “this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm.” A spokesperson for the company later told CNET that this case had nothing to do with copyright violations.

On the discussion board, a BurstNET representative subsequently said:

“Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot…This is the last post we will make on this subject.”

As things currently stand:

• 70,000 people have been cut off from their blogs
• The law enforcement agency involved has not been identified
• The alleged wrongdoing on the part of the platform has not been made public

That “something serious is afoot” is a description, not an explanation. Keeping this sort of thing private may be warranted, at least when it comes to the details. But the sensible thing for this unnamed agency to do, if in fact it exists and is an actor in this drama, would be for it to issue an official statement with at least some verifiable information in it.

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The move to virturalization leaves stone is being left unturned. It touched the public network via EC2 (and now a host of hosts) it formed the Cloud and fused a new generation of the Internet. Service orientated also hits the data centers and this means things like switches, servers, and disk. 

At the core of the movement of virtualization movement is freedom of the physical environment. Optimize hardware performance and set the workload free. In the process of doing this, a promise of cost savings has set a off a storm in re-factoring the data center. 

This is the first in a series of posts taking a look at areas of the data center and how an openness strategy become a driver for winning customers by bringing costs down. 

We took a look at the storage landscape from the eyes of Hitachi Data Systems, “HDS”. 

We spoke with Hu Yoshida, CTO of HDS. He gave us a practical overview on how the needle of enterprise costs are being reduced focusing on reducing operational costs. 

One thing the he mentioned was that Hitachi’s HDS division was able to grow in the storage business in this tough climate, which is amazing considering it is an industry that follows economic spending as a whole. 

Yoshida attributes part of this to HDS decision to deliberately disrupt their own “closed” box solution where storage and management are sold together. This allows IT shops to have more choice, and decouple vendors. He said that this was a big decision for the company, as it opened up more competition to a core business. 

Protocol vs. API

Yoshida said that the team at HDS decided it was inevitable for this protocol level standardization to exist. His team felt that HDS needed to be a leader in this opportunity. He cited a customer that uses an HDS head as a management function that had NetApp behind it as a pattern they supported that several years ago would have been done by partnership rather than protocol level support. 

Although in this scenario HDS didn’t win “all tiers” of this storage solution, it was able to be a fabric and join a customer that “loves NetApp” and loves HDS too. 

Mr. Yoshida said that his company decided to fully embrace the protocol level integration with the surrounding systems, instead of only releasing only APIs, as a means to allow more competition – and cooperation in the ecosystem through technology rather than selective partnerships. 

Considering the Tiers

An area of storage that is ripe for cost savings is supporting different types of solutions, e.g. production vs. development and classes of storage based on the application.In his blog post, New Considerations for Tiered Storage, Hu examines reduction of costs. 

Looking under the covers we see that there is a lot of questions to ask in the details of these strategies, and marketing matters in how solutions are perceived and how different types of hardware (for example Seagate vs. HDS) make a difference for buyers, and that to be a leader, it is key to have answers across the industry ecosystem. 

When we look at the decision being on moving the cost needle down for operations management instead of hardware savings, it becomes clear that playing nicely pays. HDS is a company that plays on both sides of the storage spectrum (management layer and disk) and it’s partnerships include relationships with HP (as OEM) and companies like Cisco and Brocade as go-to-market partners. It is tempting to “hardwire” solutions together, but it is a bigger win when instead these are loosely coupled and partner-ready. 

Looking at it from the angle of cost reduction for open standards gives the pivot point to consider this natural tension offered by virtualization has a promise binding vendors together to optimize their solutions for the plug-and-play data center. 

Does an open protocol powered data center reduce total costs? IBM, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Oracle…Hitachi thinks so, do you? 

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