The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Google plans to make use of white spaces, the spectrum between TV transmissions that many governments are allocating for wireless broadband use, as well as satellites and aerial transmitters located on balloons or blimps. Finally, Google is developing low-cost devices and processors that will allow even the most resource-limited populace to take advantage of those networks.

The Journal states Google aims to connect a billion or more people to the internet through the effort. That strikes me as a big exaggeration. If Google is working with the types of technologies the Journal listed, it would be working with very limited capacities. Satellite broadband provides a finite bandwidth at extremely high cost, and aerial platforms would be constrained by their backhaul – you can’t run fiber to a tower suspended in the sky.

White spaces definitely show promise, and Google has already begun trials of the technology in South Africa. Google may even be weighing the use of white spaces in its U.S. broadband strategy. But in most countries there’s a limited amount of spectrum available for white space transmission, and in general its use is limited to rural areas where there’s less chance of it interfering with TV signals. The Journal stated that Google is focusing its efforts primarily in rural areas, but if Google really plans to connect a billion unconnected people, it would also need to hit urban centers.

Still, even if Google’s plans is a quarter as ambitious as the Journal claims, it could have an enormous impact on the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3G and 4G cellular is practically non-existent, which has led carriers like Airtel to invest heavily in cheaper unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi, and wireline broadband available only commercial centers.

Using these technologies, Google won’t be able to provide the broadband connections we in the U.S. accustomed to at home, work or on wireless networks, but for millions of people Google could provide their first internet connections.

White space image courtesy of Flickr user Cillian Storm.

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The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Google plans to make use of white spaces, the spectrum between TV transmissions that many governments are allocating for wireless broadband use, as well as satellites and aerial transmitters located on balloons or blimps. Finally, Google is developing low-cost devices and processors that will allow even the most resource-limited populace to take advantage of those networks.

The Journal states Google aims to connect a billion or more people to the internet through the effort. That strikes me as a big exaggeration. If Google is working with the types of technologies the Journal listed, it would be working with very limited capacities. Satellite broadband provides a finite bandwidth at extremely high cost, and aerial platforms would be constrained by their backhaul – you can’t run fiber to a tower suspended in the sky.

White spaces definitely show promise, and Google has already begun trials of the technology in South Africa. Google may even be weighing the use of white spaces in its U.S. broadband strategy. But in most countries there’s a limited amount of spectrum available for white space transmission, and in general its use is limited to rural areas where there’s less chance of it interfering with TV signals. The Journal stated that Google is focusing its efforts primarily in rural areas, but if Google really plans to connect a billion unconnected people, it would also need to hit urban centers.

Still, even if Google’s plans is a quarter as ambitious as the Journal claims, it could have an enormous impact on the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3G and 4G cellular is practically non-existent, which has led carriers like Airtel to invest heavily in cheaper unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi, and wireline broadband available only commercial centers.

Using these technologies, Google won’t be able to provide the broadband connections we in the U.S. accustomed to at home, work or on wireless networks, but for millions of people Google could provide their first internet connections.

White space image courtesy of Flickr user Cillian Storm.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why retailers should forget showrooming and turn to in-store Wi-Fi
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Google plans to make use of white spaces, the spectrum between TV transmissions that many governments are allocating for wireless broadband use, as well as satellites and aerial transmitters located on balloons or blimps. Finally, Google is developing low-cost devices and processors that will allow even the most resource-limited populace to take advantage of those networks.

The Journal states Google aims to connect a billion or more people to the internet through the effort. That strikes me as a big exaggeration. If Google is working with the types of technologies the Journal listed, it would be working with very limited capacities. Satellite broadband provides a finite bandwidth at extremely high cost, and aerial platforms would be constrained by their backhaul – you can’t run fiber to a tower suspended in the sky.

White spaces definitely show promise, and Google has already begun trials of the technology in South Africa. Google may even be weighing the use of white spaces in its U.S. broadband strategy. But in most countries there’s a limited amount of spectrum available for white space transmission, and in general its use is limited to rural areas where there’s less chance of it interfering with TV signals. The Journal stated that Google is focusing its efforts primarily in rural areas, but if Google really plans to connect a billion unconnected people, it would also need to hit urban centers.

Still, even if Google’s plans is a quarter as ambitious as the Journal claims, it could have an enormous impact on the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3G and 4G cellular is practically non-existent, which has led carriers like Airtel to invest heavily in cheaper unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi, and wireline broadband available only commercial centers.

Using these technologies, Google won’t be able to provide the broadband connections we in the U.S. accustomed to at home, work or on wireless networks, but for millions of people Google could provide their first internet connections.

White space image courtesy of Flickr user Cillian Storm.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why retailers should forget showrooming and turn to in-store Wi-Fi
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

Both execs, Javier Soltero and Kevin Henrikson, joined VC company Redpoint Ventures as entrepreneurs in residence.

Soltero joined VMware by virtue of its acquisition of SpringSource in 2009 — after having joined SpringSource by virtue of that company’s acquisition of Hyperic. At VMware he was the CTO of SaaS and application services.

Henrickson was senior director of R&D for Zimbra, the open-source email product VMware acquired from Yahoo also in 2009. The dual departures were first reported by TechCrunch.

It was clear last year that VMware was scaling back on applications — which had been a key part of former CEO Paul Maritz’s strategy. It subsequently spun off the Java-based Spring framework along with Cloud Foundry and other assets to Pivotal where they will be part of that company’s universal PaaS push.

Selling off the non-essentials

It’s fairly clear that VMware would like to divest itself of Zimbra, which doesn’t fit into its new IaaS worldview, just as it sold off SlideRocket to Clearslide and Wavemaker Java technology to Pramati, both in March. (Pramati just announced Cloudjee a new company pushing a cloud development platform incorporating Wavemaker technology.)

Early this month, Patrick Chanezon, who led developer relationships for both Spring and Cloud Foundry efforts at VMware, joined Microsoft as director of enterprise evangelism.

We can’t say that VMware didn’t warn us. In January, CEO Pat Gelsinger clearly stated the company’s need to focus and eliminate distractions. At about that same time CTO Stephen Herrod left the company for General Catalyst. Oh, and by the way, Gelsinger will be on hand at Structure 2013 to discuss VMware’s IaaS plans.

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VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

Both execs, Javier Soltero and Kevin Henrikson  joined VC company Redpoint Ventures as entrepreneurs in residence.

Soltero joined VMware by virtue of its acquisition of SpringSource  in  2009 — after having joined SpringSource by virtue of that company’s acquisition of Hyperic. At VMware he was the CTO of SaaS and application services.

Henrickson was senior director of R&D for Zimbra, the open-source email product VMware acquired from Yahoo also in 2009. The dual departures were first reported by TechCrunch.

It was clear last year that VMware was scaling back on applications  – which had been a key part of former CEO Paul Maritz’s strategy. It subsequently spun off the Java-based Spring framework along with Cloud Foundry and other assets to Pivotal where they will be part of that company’s universal PaaS push.

Selling off the non-essentials

It’s fairly clear that VMware would like to divest itself of Zimbra, which doesn’t fit into its new IaaS worldview, just as it sold off SlideRocket to Clearslide and Wavemaker Java technology to Pramati, both in March. (Pramati just announced Cloudjee a new company pushing a cloud development platform incorporating Wavemaker technology.)

Early this month, Patrick Chanezon, who led developer relationships for both Spring and Cloud Foundry efforts at VMware, joined Microsoft as director of enterprise evangelism.

We can’t say that VMware didn’t warn us. In January, CEO Pat Gelsinger  clearly stated the company’s need to focus and eliminate distractions. At about that same time CTO Stephen Herrod left the company for General Catalyst. Oh, and by the way, Gelsinger will be on hand at Structure 2013 to discuss VMware’s IaaS plans.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Microsoft Azure: What It Is, What It Costs and Who Should Care
• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

The idea of a operating a quantum computer with a quantum bit — or qubit — based on a phosphorous atom harks back to a vision articulated by Australian Bruce Kane in research published in Nature in 1998. “The realization of such a computer is dependent on future refinements of conventional silicon electronics,” Kane explained in the abstract to his paper. Researchers in Australia have been striving to put Kane’s concept into practice for more than 10 years, the MIT Technology Review article notes, and their latest step is to get information from an agitated electron:

These guys implanted a single phosphorous atom in a silicon nanostructure and placed it in a powerful magnetic field at a temperature close to absolute zero. They were then able to flip the state of an electron orbiting the phosphorous atom by zapping it with microwaves.

The final step, a significant challenge in itself, was to read out the state of the electron using a process known as spin-to-change conversion.

The end result is a device that can store and manipulate a qubit and has the potential to perform two-qubit logic operations with atoms nearby; in other words the fundamental building block of a scalable quantum computer.

Still, the Australians have work to do, according to their paper, which they submitted on Monday:

Future experiments will focus on the coupling of two donor electron spin qubits through the exchange interaction, a key requirement in proposals for scalable quantum computing architectures in this system. Taken together with the single-atom doping technologies now demonstrated in silicon, the advances reported here open the way for a spin-based quantum computer utilising single atoms, as first envisaged by Kane more than a decade ago.

Meanwhile, researchers in England have done work of their own on quantum entanglement involving phosphorus atoms.

Quantum computers from Canada have seen some commercial adoption, with Lockheed Martin and a Google-initiated lab signing up for D-Wave Systems quantum computers. If competitors from England and Australia come onto the scene, further innovation could follow and cause prices to fall.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user isoga.

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The idea of a operating a quantum computer with a quantum bit — or qubit — based on a phosphorous atom harks back to a vision articulated by Australian Bruce Kane in research published in Nature in 1998. “The realization of such a computer is dependent on future refinements of conventional silicon electronics,” Kane explained in the abstract to his paper. Researchers in Australia have been striving to put Kane’s concept into practice for more than 10 years, the MIT Technology Review article notes, and their latest step is to get information from an agitated electron:

These guys implanted a single phosphorous atom in a silicon nanostructure and placed it in a powerful magnetic field at a temperature close to absolute zero. They were then able to flip the state of an electron orbiting the phosphorous atom by zapping it with microwaves.

The final step, a significant challenge in itself, was to read out the state of the electron using a process known as spin-to-change conversion.

The end result is a device that can store and manipulate a qubit and has the potential to perform two-qubit logic operations with atoms nearby; in other words the fundamental building block of a scalable quantum computer.

Still, the Australians have work to do, according to their paper, which they submitted on Monday:

Future experiments will focus on the coupling of two donor electron spin qubits through the exchange interaction, a key requirement in proposals for scalable quantum computing architectures in this system. Taken together with the single-atom doping technologies now demonstrated in silicon, the advances reported here open the way for a spin-based quantum computer utilising single atoms, as first envisaged by Kane more than a decade ago.

Meanwhile, researchers in England have done work of their own on quantum entanglement involving phosphorus atoms.

Quantum computers from Canada have seen some commercial adoption, with Lockheed Martin and a Google-initiated lab signing up for D-Wave Systems quantum computers. If competitors from England and Australia come onto the scene, further innovation could follow and cause prices to fall.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user isoga.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization
• Pervasive Software retools for cloud, big data: will it be heard?
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem

In the eight years since John Ioannidis dropped the bomb that “most published research findings are false,” pockets of activist scientists from both academia and industry have been forming to address this problem, and it seems this year that some of those efforts are finally bearing fruit.

The research auditors

One interesting development is that a group of scientists is threatening to topple the impact factor, which ranks studies based on the journals in which they appear. This filter for quality research is based on journal prestige, but some scientists and startups are beginning to use alternative metrics in an effort to refocus on the science itself (rather than the publishing journal).

Taking a cue from the internet, they are citing the number of clicks, downloads, and page views that the research gets as better measures of “impact.” One group leading that charge is the Reproducibility Initiative, an alliance that includes an open-access journal (the Public Library of Science’s PLOS ONE) and three startups (data repository Figshare, experiment marketplace Science Exchange, and reference manager Mendeley). The Initiative isn’t trying to solve fraud, says Mendeley’s head of academic outreach William Gunn. Rather, it wants to address the rest of the dodgy data iceberg: the selective reporting of data, the vague methods for performing experiments, and the culture that contributes to so many scientific studies being irreproducible.

The Initiative will leverage Science Exchange’s network of outside labs and contract research organizations to do what its name says: try to reproduce published scientific studies. They have 50 studies lined up for their first batch. The authors of these studies have opted in for the additional scrutiny, so there is a good chance much of their research will turn out to be solid.

Whatever the outcome, though, the Initiative wants to use this first test batch to show the scientific community and funders that this kind of exercise is value-adding despite the costs, which are estimated to be $20,000 per study (about 10% of the original research price tag, depending on the study).

Gunn likens the process to a tax audit: not all studies can or should be tested for reproducibility, but the likely offenders may be among those that have high “impact factors,” much like high-income earners with many deductions warrant suspicion.

A stumbling block may be the researchers themselves, who like many successful people have egos to protect; no one wants to be branded “irreproducible.” The Initiative stresses that the replication effort is about setting a standard for what counts as a good method, and finding predictors of research quality that supersede journal, institution or individual.

The plumbers and librarians of big data

While the Reproducibility Initiative is trying to accelerate science’s natural self-correction process, another nascent group is working on improving the plumbing that serves data. The Research Data Alliance (RDA), which is partially funded by the National Science Foundation, is barely a few months old, but it is already uniting global researchers who are passionate about improving infrastructure for data-driven innovation. “The superwoman of supercomputing” Francine Berman, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, heads up the U.S. division of RDA.

The RDA is structured like the World Wide Web Consortium, with working groups that produce code, policies for data interoperability, and data infrastructure solutions. As of yet there is no working group for data integrity, but it is within RDA’s scope, says Berman. While the effort is still in its infancy, the broad goals would be to come up with a way to make sure that the data contained in a study is more accessible to more people, and also that it doesn’t simply disappear at a certain point because of, say, storage issues.  She says with data it’s like we’re back in the  Industrial Revolution, when we had to create a new social contract to guide how we do research and commerce.

The men who stare at data

You can build places for data to live and spot-check it once it’s published, but there are also things researchers can do earlier, while they’re “interrogating” the data. After all, says Berman, you’re careful around strangers in real life, so why jump into bed with your data before you’re familiar with it?

Visualization is one of the most effective ways of inspecting the quality of your data, and getting different views of its potential. Automated processing is fast, but it can also produce spurious results if you don’t sanity-check your data first with visual and statistical techniques.

Stanford University computer scientist Jeff Heer, who also co-founded the data munging startup Trifacta, says visualization can help spot errors or extreme values. It can also test the user’s domain expertise (do you know what you’re doing and can you tell what a complete or faulty data set looks like?) and prior hypotheses about the data. “Skilled people are at the heart of the process of making sense of data,” says Heer. Someone with domain expertise who brings their memories and skills to the data can spot new insights, and in this way combat the determinism of blindly collected and reported data sets. Context, in the form of metadata, is rich and omni-present, Heer argues, as long as we’ve collected the right data the right way. Context can aid in interpretation and combat the determinism of blindly collected and reported data sets.

The three-pronged approach — better auditing, preservation and visualization — will help steer science away from the iceberg of unreliable data.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• How big data analytics drives competitive advantage
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In the eight years since John Ioannidis dropped the bomb that “most published research findings are false,” pockets of activist scientists from both academia and industry have been forming to address this problem, and it seems this year that some of those efforts are finally bearing fruit.

The research auditors

One interesting development is that a group of scientists is threatening to topple the impact factor, which ranks studies based on the journals in which they appear. This filter for quality research is based on journal prestige, but some scientists and startups are beginning to use alternative metrics in an effort to refocus on the science itself (rather than the publishing journal).

Taking a cue from the internet, they are citing the number of clicks, downloads, and page views that the research gets as better measures of “impact.” One group leading that charge is the Reproducibility Initiative, an alliance that includes an open-access journal (the Public Library of Science’s PLOS ONE) and three startups (data repository Figshare, experiment marketplace Science Exchange, and reference manager Mendeley). The Initiative isn’t trying to solve fraud, says Mendeley’s head of academic outreach William Gunn. Rather, it wants to address the rest of the dodgy data iceberg: the selective reporting of data, the vague methods for performing experiments, and the culture that contributes to so many scientific studies being irreproducible.

The Initiative will leverage Science Exchange’s network of outside labs and contract research organizations to do what its name says: try to reproduce published scientific studies. They have 50 studies lined up for their first batch. The authors of these studies have opted in for the additional scrutiny, so there is a good chance much of their research will turn out to be solid.

Whatever the outcome, though, the Initiative wants to use this first test batch to show the scientific community and funders that this kind of exercise is value-adding despite the costs, which are estimated to be $20,000 per study (about 10% of the original research price tag, depending on the study).

Gunn likens the process to a tax audit: not all studies can or should be tested for reproducibility, but the likely offenders may be among those that have high “impact factors,” much like high-income earners with many deductions warrant suspicion.

A stumbling block may be the researchers themselves, who like many successful people have egos to protect; no one wants to be branded “irreproducible.” The Initiative stresses that the replication effort is about setting a standard for what counts as a good method, and finding predictors of research quality that supersede journal, institution or individual.

The plumbers and librarians of big data

While the Reproducibility Initiative is trying to accelerate science’s natural self-correction process, another nascent group is working on improving the plumbing that serves data. The Research Data Alliance (RDA), which is partially funded by the National Science Foundation, is barely a few months old, but it is already uniting global researchers who are passionate about improving infrastructure for data-driven innovation. “The superwoman of supercomputing” Francine Berman, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, heads up the U.S. division of RDA.

The RDA is structured like the World Wide Web Consortium, with working groups that produce code, policies for data interoperability, and data infrastructure solutions. As of yet there is no working group for data integrity, but it is within RDA’s scope, says Berman. While the effort is still in its infancy, the broad goals would be to come up with a way to make sure that the data contained in a study is more accessible to more people, and also that it doesn’t simply disappear at a certain point because of, say, storage issues.  She says with data it’s like we’re back in the  Industrial Revolution, when we had to create a new social contract to guide how we do research and commerce.

The men who stare at data

You can build places for data to live and spot-check it once it’s published, but there are also things researchers can do earlier, while they’re “interrogating” the data. After all, says Berman, you’re careful around strangers in real life, so why jump into bed with your data before you’re familiar with it?

Visualization is one of the most effective ways of inspecting the quality of your data, and getting different views of its potential. Automated processing is fast, but it can also produce spurious results if you don’t sanity-check your data first with visual and statistical techniques.

Stanford University computer scientist Jeff Heer, who also co-founded the data munging startup Trifacta, says visualization can help spot errors or extreme values. It can also test the user’s domain expertise (do you know what you’re doing and can you tell what a complete or faulty data set looks like?) and prior hypotheses about the data. “Skilled people are at the heart of the process of making sense of data,” says Heer. Someone with domain expertise who brings their memories and skills to the data can spot new insights, and in this way combat the determinism of blindly collected and reported data sets. Context, in the form of metadata, is rich and omni-present, Heer argues, as long as we’ve collected the right data the right way. Context can aid in interpretation and combat the determinism of blindly collected and reported data sets.

The three-pronged approach — better auditing, preservation and visualization — will help steer science away from the iceberg of unreliable data.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How big data analytics drives competitive advantage
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The Globes piece estimated that Better Place would need another four years and $500 million to reach break even. Better Place just raised $100 million back in November 2012, with much of it coming from Israel Corporation. Before that deal, Israel Corp owned about a third of the company and held a $160 million loss.

If Better Place files for bankruptcy, it will be a sober end for a startup that was founded by the charismatic Shai Agassi in an attempt to get the world’s drivers off of gas-powered cars. Better Place’s business model was built around an electric car with a swappable battery, and the installation of both battery swap stations and battery chargers around a designated area. Customers pay for the electricity to charge the car via a subscription service (like cell phone minutes) and the electric cars themselves were supposed to be highly subsidized.

However, the plan took more money and more time than originally expected. The company aimed too broadly, and when it finally decided to highlight its flagship roll out in Israel, sales to Israeli customers were slow going. Better Place ousted its founder and CEO Agassi late last year, and shortly after that Agassi left the company. The company’s following CEO also left after three months.

Along with Israel Corp, Better Place has raised money from GE, UBS, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lazard Asset Management, Morgan Stanley, Agassi himself, and others. Agassi told me in February of this year that he still believed in the business model of swappable batteries and subscriptions for electrons.

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The Globes piece estimated that Better Place would need another four years and $500 million to reach break even. Better Place just raised $100 million back in November 2012, with much of it coming from Israel Corporation. Before that deal, Israel Corp owned about a third of the company and held a $160 million loss.

If Better Place files for bankruptcy, it will be a sober end for a startup that was founded by the charismatic Shai Agassi in an attempt to get the world’s drivers off of gas-powered cars. Better Place’s business model was built around an electric car with a swappable battery, and the installation of both battery swap stations and battery chargers around a designated area. Customers pay for the electricity to charge the car via a subscription service (like cell phone minutes) and the electric cars themselves were supposed to be highly subsidized.

However, the plan took more money and more time than originally expected. The company aimed too broadly, and when it finally decided to highlight its flagship roll out in Israel, sales to Israeli customers were slow going. Better Place ousted its founder and CEO Agassi late last year, and shortly after that Agassi left the company. The company’s following CEO also left after three months.

Along with Israel Corp, Better Place has raised money from GE, UBS, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lazard Asset Management, Morgan Stanley, Agassi himself, and others. Agassi told me in February of this year that he still believed in the business model of swappable batteries and subscriptions for electrons.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
• California Rules Show Opportunities in EV Charging
• Electric Vehicles Give “Mobility as a Service” a Jumpstart

The Globes piece estimated that Better Place would need another four years and $500 million to reach break even. Better Place just raised $100 million back in November 2012, with much of it coming from Israel Corporation. Before that deal, Israel Corp owned about a third of the company and held a $160 million loss.

If Better Place files for bankruptcy, it will be a sober end for a startup that was founded by the charismatic Shai Agassi in an attempt to get the world’s drivers off of gas-powered cars. Better Place’s business model was built around an electric car with a swappable battery, and the installation of both battery swap stations and battery chargers around a designated area. Customers pay for the electricity to charge the car via a subscription service (like cell phone minutes) and the electric cars themselves were supposed to be highly subsidized.

However, the plan took more money and more time than originally expected. The company aimed too broadly, and when it finally decided to highlight its flagship roll out in Israel, sales to Israeli customers were slow going. Better Place ousted its founder and CEO Agassi late last year, and shortly after that Agassi left the company. The company’s following CEO also left after three months.

Along with Israel Corp, Better Place has raised money from GE, UBS, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lazard Asset Management, Morgan Stanley, Agassi himself, and others. Agassi told me in February of this year that he still believed in the business model of swappable batteries and subscriptions for electrons.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
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Here’s why: As Amazon Web Services keeps churning out services, support offerings and certifications to appeal to corporate and government users (the latest being FedRAMP accreditation), other cloud vendors need to show that they offer value above and beyond AWS. Hybrid cloud, which pairs local processing power with outside cloud resources as needed, is one area that they see as a weakness for Amazon.

AWS versus everyone else

While none of these rivals refer to themselves as AWS killers (smart move), they all see Amazon as the #1 cloud player and the top threat to their own cloud ambitions. When pressed, VMwarez senior vice president Matthew Lodge acknowledged that “everyone is competing for the same IaaS dollars.” Everyone meaning Amazon and the rest of the cloud contenders.

VMware, which saw, um, limited uptake of the vCloud Director that it pushed service providers to use as the basis for their own clouds, said its new vCloud Hybrid Cloud Services will compete with AWS on price, at least in some cases, but offer other enterprise-worthy goodies.

Said Lodge: when you factor in “hidden costs” in Amazon’s dedicated instances, the playing field levels out. “They charge for I/O and we don’t. They charge for VPN endpoints, load balancers and firewalls and we don’t,” he said.

Rackspace president Lew Moorman has a similar message. “Now that public cloud is 3 to 4 years old in reality, applications are bigger and more complex and people are starting to see tradeoffs to using public cloud only,” Moorman told me Thursday.

Structure 2012: Lew Moorman – IT Cloud Lead, Intel Corporation

“When public cloud came out and you could suddenly provision a server in a minute when it used to take 3 months, those were intoxicating advances … you get drunk on them but when things settle in there are tradeoffs,” he said.

For examle, what’s great for test-and-dev environments is not always optimal for production workloads, where public cloud costs quickly add up.

Once someone hits the $25,000-a-month milestone, “it’s time to rethink all-public-cloud deployment,” he said.

Joyent trumpeted a similar message this week when it announced a raft of new compute instances it says will be  competitive with AWS.  Joyent, like Rackspace, offers public, private and hybrid cloud options.

Corporate cloud purchases are about more than price and technology

Having said all that, almost every cloud vendor alive will also add that price isn’t the compelling reason to move to cloud. Face it: when it comes to IT-sanctioned technology purchases, it’s not just about the price or the technology. IT departments have established procedures and guidelines for deployment and cloud providers will have to accommodate them.

“Most public clouds — AWS etc. — don’t offer enterprise-class security, compliance or performance SLAs to users,” said Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, which positions itself as an enterprise cloud provider. ”Some public clouds offer supplemental services that dedicate equipment to enterprises/government, but they are generally not multi-tenant  and so deliver less efficiency.”

That means they remain suited for test and dev, for backup, SaaS apps and apps with no performance criteria, Rogers said via email.

Is Amazon’s head start insurmountable?

Granted all of this is self serving talk, but having sat through a raft of CIO panels this week, it is clear to me that some of these points ring true with this constituency.  But, if we’ve learned anything from the past 6 years of its existence, AWS won’t stand still. It now offers several services of its own and through an alliance with Eucalyptus that break down some barriers between a customer data center and its cloud. But until you can run AWS instances on your own infrastructure, AWS will remain a public cloud provider in a world where more workloads could flow to a hybrid model.

Structure 2010: Werner Vogels – CTO and Vice President, Amazon

AWS has a huge head start and lots of customers. But we’re early in the cloud era. IDC says less than 5 percent of the world’s total IT budget is now devoted to public or private cloud. That leaves a lot of upside for Amazon and its competitors.

There’s time for Amazon to offer more hybrid options and for rivals to catch up. It’ll nothing if not an interesting market over the next few years.

Who wants to bet that this topic of hybrid vs. public cloud deployment will come up at Structure 2013 next month where both Moorman and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will take the stage?

Pretty safe money, I’d say.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Microsoft Azure: What It Is, What It Costs and Who Should Care
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Federated clouds: for when one cloud isn’t good enough

Here’s why: As Amazon Web Services keeps churning out services, support offerings and certifications to appeal to corporate and government users (the latest being FedRAMP accreditation), other cloud vendors need to show that they offer value above and beyond AWS. Hybrid cloud, which pairs local processing power with outside cloud resources as needed, is one area that they see as a weakness for Amazon.

AWS versus everyone else

While none of these rivals refer to themselves as AWS killers (smart move), they all see Amazon as the #1 cloud player and the top threat to their own cloud ambitions. When pressed, VMwarez senior vice president Matthew Lodge acknowledged that “everyone is competing for the same IaaS dollars.” Everyone meaning Amazon and the rest of the cloud contenders.

VMware, which saw, um, limited uptake of the vCloud Director that it pushed service providers to use as the basis for their own clouds, said its new vCloud Hybrid Cloud Services will compete with AWS on price, at least in some cases, but offer other enterprise-worthy goodies.

Said Lodge: when you factor in “hidden costs” in Amazon’s dedicated instances, the playing field levels out. “They charge for I/O and we don’t. They charge for VPN endpoints, load balancers and firewalls and we don’t,” he said.

Rackspace president Lew Moorman has a similar message. “Now that public cloud is 3 to 4 years old in reality, applications are bigger and more complex and people are starting to see tradeoffs to using public cloud only,” Moorman told me Thursday.

Structure 2012: Lew Moorman – IT Cloud Lead, Intel Corporation

“When public cloud came out and you could suddenly provision a server in a minute when it used to take 3 months, those were intoxicating advances … you get drunk on them but when things settle in there are tradeoffs,” he said.

For examle, what’s great for test-and-dev environments is not always optimal for production workloads, where public cloud costs quickly add up.

Once someone hits the $25,000-a-month milestone, “it’s time to rethink all-public-cloud deployment,” he said.

Joyent trumpeted a similar message this week when it announced a raft of new compute instances it says will be  competitive with AWS.  Joyent, like Rackspace, offers public, private and hybrid cloud options.

Corporate cloud purchases are about more than price and technology

Having said all that, almost every cloud vendor alive will also add that price isn’t the compelling reason to move to cloud. Face it: when it comes to IT-sanctioned technology purchases, it’s not just about the price or the technology. IT departments have established procedures and guidelines for deployment and cloud providers will have to accommodate them.

“Most public clouds — AWS etc. — don’t offer enterprise-class security, compliance or performance SLAs to users,” said Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, which positions itself as an enterprise cloud provider. ”Some public clouds offer supplemental services that dedicate equipment to enterprises/government, but they are generally not multi-tenant  and so deliver less efficiency.”

That means they remain suited for test and dev, for backup, SaaS apps and apps with no performance criteria, Rogers said via email.

Is Amazon’s head start insurmountable?

Granted all of this is self serving talk, but having sat through a raft of CIO panels this week, it is clear to me that some of these points ring true with this constituency.  But, if we’ve learned anything from the past 6 years of its existence, AWS won’t stand still. It now offers several services of its own and through an alliance with Eucalyptus that break down some barriers between a customer data center and its cloud. But until you can run AWS instances on your own infrastructure, AWS will remain a public cloud provider in a world where more workloads could flow to a hybrid model.

Structure 2010: Werner Vogels – CTO and Vice President, Amazon

AWS has a huge head start and lots of customers. But we’re early in the cloud era. IDC says less than 5 percent of the world’s total IT budget is now devoted to public or private cloud. That leaves a lot of upside for Amazon and its competitors.

There’s time for Amazon to offer more hybrid options and for rivals to catch up. It’ll nothing if not an interesting market over the next few years.

Who wants to bet that this topic of hybrid vs. public cloud deployment will come up at Structure 2013 next month where both Moorman and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will take the stage?

Pretty safe money, I’d say.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Microsoft Azure: What It Is, What It Costs and Who Should Care
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Federated clouds: for when one cloud isn’t good enough

Those high-capacity connections are only available to customers who buy a compatible device (many phones in GoPhone’s portfolio are either 2G-only or can only access slower HSPA speeds) or to customers who bring their own compatible devices to the network. And yes, that includes new high-end smartphones like the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S 4.

AT&T sells data add-ons to GoPhone plans, ranging from $25 a month for 1 GB to $5 a month for 50 MB. New customers will get immediate LTE and HSPA+ access, but current customers will have to wait a bit. An AT&T spokesman said the carrier is working on ways to extend these new network capabilities to its existing customers with compatible devices, but it’s still working out the details.

AT&T’s archrival Verizon Wireless has restricted access to its LTE network to only its contract smartphone customers, and it looked like Ma Bell was going to do the same. Earlier this month AT&T launched a new prepaid brand called AIO Wireless, targeting more data savvy smartphone users who didn’t want to deal with contracts. The AIO service, however, doesn’t include access to LTE.

I suspect we’ll see LTE on AIO as it rolls out to new markets, though. Of its two prepaid brands, GoPhone is definitely the lower-end service. If AT&T is finding that its GoPhone customers are asking and willing to pay for LTE, then AIO customers most certainly would do the same.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network

Those high-capacity connections are only available to customers who buy a compatible device (many phones in GoPhone’s portfolio are either 2G-only or can only access slower HSPA speeds) or to customers who bring their own compatible devices to the network. And yes, that includes new high-end smartphones like the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S 4.

AT&T sells data add-ons to GoPhone plans, ranging from $25 a month for 1 GB to $5 a month for 50 MB. New customers will get immediate LTE and HSPA+ access, but current customers will have to wait a bit. An AT&T spokesman said the carrier is working on ways to extend these new network capabilities to its existing customers with compatible devices, but it’s still working out the details.

AT&T’s archrival Verizon Wireless has restricted access to its LTE network to only its contract smartphone customers, and it looked like Ma Bell was going to do the same. Earlier this month AT&T launched a new prepaid brand called AIO Wireless, targeting more data savvy smartphone users who didn’t want to deal with contracts. The AIO service, however, doesn’t include access to LTE.

I suspect we’ll see LTE on AIO as it rolls out to new markets, though. Of its two prepaid brands, GoPhone is definitely the lower-end service. If AT&T is finding that its GoPhone customers are asking and willing to pay for LTE, then AIO customers most certainly would do the same.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network

Those high-capacity connections are only available to customers who buy a compatible device (many phones in GoPhone’s portfolio are either 2G-only or can only access slower HSPA speeds) or to customers who bring their own compatible devices to the network. And yes, that includes new high-end smartphones like the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S 4.

AT&T sells data add-ons to GoPhone plans, ranging from $25 a month for 1 GB to $5 a month for 50 MB. New customers will get immediate LTE and HSPA+ access, but current customers will have to wait a bit. An AT&T spokesman said the carrier is working on ways to extend these new network capabilities to its existing customers with compatible devices, but it’s still working out the details.

AT&T’s archrival Verizon Wireless has restricted access to its LTE network to only its contract smartphone customers, and it looked like Ma Bell was going to do the same. Earlier this month AT&T launched a new prepaid brand called AIO Wireless, targeting more data savvy smartphone users who didn’t want to deal with contracts. The AIO service, however, doesn’t include access to LTE.

I suspect we’ll see LTE on AIO as it rolls out to new markets, though. Of its two prepaid brands, GoPhone is definitely the lower-end service. If AT&T is finding that its GoPhone customers are asking and willing to pay for LTE, then AIO customers most certainly would do the same.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network

Dude Perfect ($0.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad) is a sports game of sorts. There is a basketball, there is a net, and the goal is to get the basketball through the net. The difference here is that rather than scoring points for getting the ball through the net, you score points for hitting everything else on the screen except the net.

The dynamics of throwing the ball are as simple as choosing a direction and deciding how hard to throw. Anywhere you tap on the screen will engage the throwing mechanics of the game. Drag your finger in the opposite direction you want to throw as if you are pulling back a slingshot. Lift your finger from the screen and the ball is off.  The important thing to remember is that you don’t have to start the shot by touching the ball on the screen.  Tapping anywhere on the screen will start the shot.  This is good to know as many times the player is situated near the edge of the screen.

Clouds, buildings, trucks, balloons, fences and even flying saucers. There are all sorts of obstacles you can use to rack up your score as you make one amazing shot after another. The game was inspired by the real world YouTube sensation of the same name. A series of videos depicting amazing shots that include outrageous bank shots and bouncing the ball off all sorts of objects.  Watching the videos you get a sense that the game is not too far removed from reality.  Except perhaps shots involving bouncing the ball off of alien spacecraft.

There are over 80 different levels to play in seven different themed settings. Basics, Backyard, Ranch, Camp, Amusement Park, City and Space. Each theme has different obstacles that you can use to make your shot earn higher scores. You can also choose which of five different players to use to make your shot with. Each player has their own style and abilities. The twins, as an example, can be used to pass the ball before making a shot.  Keeping things interesting, you can also choose between a basketball, bowling ball or beach ball to throw. As you can guess, neither the bowling ball nor the beach ball have the same aerodynamic characteristics as the basketball. While you may get lucky with a power throw using the basketball and hoping it will eventually bounce in, the bowling ball in particular is not as forgiving.

Multiplayer has two different modes. The first multiplayer mode is for challenges between you and a friend with only one device.  This requires you to pass the one device back and forth between you and your friend.  You each then take turns making shots to see who ends up with the highest score. The second multiplayer game mode is a wireless mode where you can challenge your online GameCenter friends.  You can even let the game set up a quick auto match for you.

Through in-app purchases you can acquire additional payers, unlock all of the levels, and even enable a feature that allows you to create your own custom levels. While skill can keep you advancing in the game, and the included characters have the skills necessary to play any of the levels, the one in-app purchase you have to buy is the level editor.  Like the actual Dude Perfect Team, this is where you can plan and set up your own crazy shots.  You create your own custom levels on any one of the themed settings. You simply go through a series of edit modes where you choose where to place the basket, how to position the player and ultimately the number of objects you want to place on the screen to bounce your shots off of.

The cartoon-styled graphics of this game are well drawn and colorful.  While some of the challenges seem impossible at first, it is the rush of actually completing a difficult shot that keeps you coming back for more.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How do developers ride the Siri wave?
• Connectivity means making the machine disappear
• Access vs. ownership: Why UltraViolet has already lost

Dude Perfect ($0.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad) is a sports game of sorts. There is a basketball, there is a net, and the goal is to get the basketball through the net. The difference here is that rather than scoring points for getting the ball through the net, you score points for hitting everything else on the screen except the net.

The dynamics of throwing the ball are as simple as choosing a direction and deciding how hard to throw. Anywhere you tap on the screen will engage the throwing mechanics of the game. Drag your finger in the opposite direction you want to throw as if you are pulling back a slingshot. Lift your finger from the screen and the ball is off.  The important thing to remember is that you don’t have to start the shot by touching the ball on the screen.  Tapping anywhere on the screen will start the shot.  This is good to know as many times the player is situated near the edge of the screen.

Clouds, buildings, trucks, balloons, fences and even flying saucers. There are all sorts of obstacles you can use to rack up your score as you make one amazing shot after another. The game was inspired by the real world YouTube sensation of the same name. A series of videos depicting amazing shots that include outrageous bank shots and bouncing the ball off all sorts of objects.  Watching the videos you get a sense that the game is not too far removed from reality.  Except perhaps shots involving bouncing the ball off of alien spacecraft.

There are over 80 different levels to play in seven different themed settings. Basics, Backyard, Ranch, Camp, Amusement Park, City and Space. Each theme has different obstacles that you can use to make your shot earn higher scores. You can also choose which of five different players to use to make your shot with. Each player has their own style and abilities. The twins, as an example, can be used to pass the ball before making a shot.  Keeping things interesting, you can also choose between a basketball, bowling ball or beach ball to throw. As you can guess, neither the bowling ball nor the beach ball have the same aerodynamic characteristics as the basketball. While you may get lucky with a power throw using the basketball and hoping it will eventually bounce in, the bowling ball in particular is not as forgiving.

Multiplayer has two different modes. The first multiplayer mode is for challenges between you and a friend with only one device.  This requires you to pass the one device back and forth between you and your friend.  You each then take turns making shots to see who ends up with the highest score. The second multiplayer game mode is a wireless mode where you can challenge your online GameCenter friends.  You can even let the game set up a quick auto match for you.

Through in-app purchases you can acquire additional payers, unlock all of the levels, and even enable a feature that allows you to create your own custom levels. While skill can keep you advancing in the game, and the included characters have the skills necessary to play any of the levels, the one in-app purchase you have to buy is the level editor.  Like the actual Dude Perfect Team, this is where you can plan and set up your own crazy shots.  You create your own custom levels on any one of the themed settings. You simply go through a series of edit modes where you choose where to place the basket, how to position the player and ultimately the number of objects you want to place on the screen to bounce your shots off of.

The cartoon-styled graphics of this game are well drawn and colorful.  While some of the challenges seem impossible at first, it is the rush of actually completing a difficult shot that keeps you coming back for more.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How do developers ride the Siri wave?
• Connectivity means making the machine disappear
• Access vs. ownership: Why UltraViolet has already lost

Dude Perfect ($0.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad) is a sports game of sorts. There is a basketball, there is a net, and the goal is to get the basketball through the net. The difference here is that rather than scoring points for getting the ball through the net, you score points for hitting everything else on the screen except the net.

The dynamics of throwing the ball are as simple as choosing a direction and deciding how hard to throw. Anywhere you tap on the screen will engage the throwing mechanics of the game. Drag your finger in the opposite direction you want to throw as if you are pulling back a slingshot. Lift your finger from the screen and the ball is off.  The important thing to remember is that you don’t have to start the shot by touching the ball on the screen.  Tapping anywhere on the screen will start the shot.  This is good to know as many times the player is situated near the edge of the screen.

Clouds, buildings, trucks, balloons, fences and even flying saucers. There are all sorts of obstacles you can use to rack up your score as you make one amazing shot after another. The game was inspired by the real world YouTube sensation of the same name. A series of videos depicting amazing shots that include outrageous bank shots and bouncing the ball off all sorts of objects.  Watching the videos you get a sense that the game is not too far removed from reality.  Except perhaps shots involving bouncing the ball off of alien spacecraft.

There are over 80 different levels to play in seven different themed settings. Basics, Backyard, Ranch, Camp, Amusement Park, City and Space. Each theme has different obstacles that you can use to make your shot earn higher scores. You can also choose which of five different players to use to make your shot with. Each player has their own style and abilities. The twins, as an example, can be used to pass the ball before making a shot.  Keeping things interesting, you can also choose between a basketball, bowling ball or beach ball to throw. As you can guess, neither the bowling ball nor the beach ball have the same aerodynamic characteristics as the basketball. While you may get lucky with a power throw using the basketball and hoping it will eventually bounce in, the bowling ball in particular is not as forgiving.

Multiplayer has two different modes. The first multiplayer mode is for challenges between you and a friend with only one device.  This requires you to pass the one device back and forth between you and your friend.  You each then take turns making shots to see who ends up with the highest score. The second multiplayer game mode is a wireless mode where you can challenge your online GameCenter friends.  You can even let the game set up a quick auto match for you.

Through in-app purchases you can acquire additional payers, unlock all of the levels, and even enable a feature that allows you to create your own custom levels. While skill can keep you advancing in the game, and the included characters have the skills necessary to play any of the levels, the one in-app purchase you have to buy is the level editor.  Like the actual Dude Perfect Team, this is where you can plan and set up your own crazy shots.  You create your own custom levels on any one of the themed settings. You simply go through a series of edit modes where you choose where to place the basket, how to position the player and ultimately the number of objects you want to place on the screen to bounce your shots off of.

The cartoon-styled graphics of this game are well drawn and colorful.  While some of the challenges seem impossible at first, it is the rush of actually completing a difficult shot that keeps you coming back for more.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How do developers ride the Siri wave?
• Connectivity means making the machine disappear
• Access vs. ownership: Why UltraViolet has already lost

Most notably, Reuters reported Friday that Fisker founder and former CEO Henrik Fisker has teamed up with Hong Kong mogul Richard Li in an effort to buy Fisker’s remaining $171 million in loans from the Department of Energy, so that Fisker won’t have to go bankrupt. The duo are offering between $25 million and $30 million for the loan, which would represent a discount of 17.5 cents on the dollar.

That isn’t the only low-priced bid for Fisker. A competing bid is a pre-packaged bankruptcy deal of $20 million from Chinese auto giant Wanxiang and Bob Lutz’s VL Automotive.

The other new project comes from Fisker’s former CEO Tom LaSorda, who only led Fisker for about 6 months. LaSorda has teamed up with racing investor Roger Penske to create a VC fund called IncWell, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

LaSorda told the publication that they probably wouldn’t invest in electric cars unless “unless I can get a good deal with Tesla,” and also said that they would not invest in another company founded by Henrik Fisker. LaSorda put his own money into Fisker.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Flash analysis: the Fisker debacle and its implications on investing, innovation, and government incentives
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Cleantech first-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook

Most notably, Reuters reported Friday that Fisker founder and former CEO Henrik Fisker has teamed up with Hong Kong mogul Richard Li in an effort to buy Fisker’s remaining $171 million in loans from the Department of Energy, so that Fisker won’t have to go bankrupt. The duo are offering between $25 million and $30 million for the loan, which would represent a discount of 17.5 cents on the dollar.

That isn’t the only low-priced bid for Fisker. A competing bid is a pre-packaged bankruptcy deal of $20 million from Chinese auto giant Wanxiang and Bob Lutz’s VL Automotive.

The other new project comes from Fisker’s former CEO Tom LaSorda, who only led Fisker for about 6 months. LaSorda has teamed up with racing investor Roger Penske to create a VC fund called IncWell, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

LaSorda told the publication that they probably wouldn’t invest in electric cars unless “unless I can get a good deal with Tesla,” and also said that they would not invest in another company founded by Henrik Fisker. LaSorda put his own money into Fisker.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: the Fisker debacle and its implications on investing, innovation, and government incentives
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Cleantech first-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook

Most notably, Reuters reported Friday that Fisker founder and former CEO Henrik Fisker has teamed up with Hong Kong mogul Richard Li in an effort to buy Fisker’s remaining $171 million in loans from the Department of Energy, so that Fisker won’t have to go bankrupt. The duo are offering between $25 million and $30 million for the loan, which would represent a discount of 17.5 cents on the dollar.

That isn’t the only low-priced bid for Fisker. A competing bid is a pre-packaged bankruptcy deal of $20 million from Chinese auto giant Wanxiang and Bob Lutz’s VL Automotive.

The other new project comes from Fisker’s former CEO Tom LaSorda, who only led Fisker for about 6 months. LaSorda has teamed up with racing investor Roger Penske to create a VC fund called IncWell, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

LaSorda told the publication that they probably wouldn’t invest in electric cars unless “unless I can get a good deal with Tesla,” and also said that they would not invest in another company founded by Henrik Fisker. LaSorda put his own money into Fisker.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: the Fisker debacle and its implications on investing, innovation, and government incentives
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Cleantech first-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook

Paul O’Brien of MoDaCo reported the change in strategy on Friday, with multiple sources saying the phone would be announced next week. Like Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 “Google Edition”, announced last week at Google I/O, the HTC One would lose HTC’s Sense software and run a plain, or stock, version of Android. This would be akin to the Nexus 4 phone, which Google sells directly through Google Play.

According to O’Brian:

“It seems as though the very existence of the Google Edition device has created considerable internal turmoil at HTC. There is a deep seated belief within HTC that Sense provides the best possible Android experience and there’s no reason to offer anything different – unifying behind a consistent message. HTC has always been a company however that is driven from the top and it appears as though the new device has been sanctioned by none other than Peter Chou himself, no doubt influenced by arch-rival Samsung’s recent announcement.”

It’s possible that turmoil is related to the key executives and resources that have left HTC as recently as this week, but that could be coincidental. There’s little, however, that HTC knows it needs to make major changes in product and vision if it wants to stay relevant in the Android marketplace.

A “Google Edition” HTC One could actually bring multiple benefits to help the situation. The current HTC One on sale now is an outstanding piece of hardware; possibly the best designed and built Android phone on the market today. But some have shied away from buying the phone because of HTC’s Sense user interface. A “pure” HTC One with nothing but Android on it could generate additional sales.

Another benefit could be found in marketing; an area where HTC greatly lags its peers. A “Google Edition” phone would likely be sold directly by Google in the Play store, meaning Google can help market the phone. It would also remove carriers from the equation and give HTC a little more control over the phone, pricing and software updates.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Tablets wars: Apple is from Venus, Amazon is from Mars
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry

Paul O’Brien of MoDaCo reported the change in strategy on Friday, with multiple sources saying the phone would be announced next week. Like Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 “Google Edition”, announced last week at Google I/O, the HTC One would lose HTC’s Sense software and run a plain, or stock, version of Android. This would be akin to the Nexus 4 phone, which Google sells directly through Google Play.

According to O’Brian:

“It seems as though the very existence of the Google Edition device has created considerable internal turmoil at HTC. There is a deep seated belief within HTC that Sense provides the best possible Android experience and there’s no reason to offer anything different – unifying behind a consistent message. HTC has always been a company however that is driven from the top and it appears as though the new device has been sanctioned by none other than Peter Chou himself, no doubt influenced by arch-rival Samsung’s recent announcement.”

It’s possible that turmoil is related to the key executives and resources that have left HTC as recently as this week, but that could be coincidental. There’s little, however, that HTC knows it needs to make major changes in product and vision if it wants to stay relevant in the Android marketplace.

A “Google Edition” HTC One could actually bring multiple benefits to help the situation. The current HTC One on sale now is an outstanding piece of hardware; possibly the best designed and built Android phone on the market today. But some have shied away from buying the phone because of HTC’s Sense user interface. A “pure” HTC One with nothing but Android on it could generate additional sales.

Another benefit could be found in marketing; an area where HTC greatly lags its peers. A “Google Edition” phone would likely be sold directly by Google in the Play store, meaning Google can help market the phone. It would also remove carriers from the equation and give HTC a little more control over the phone, pricing and software updates.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Tablets wars: Apple is from Venus, Amazon is from Mars
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry

Paul O’Brien of MoDaCo reported the change in strategy on Friday, with multiple sources saying the phone would be announced next week. Like Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 “Google Edition”, announced last week at Google I/O, the HTC One would lose HTC’s Sense software and run a plain, or stock, version of Android. This would be akin to the Nexus 4 phone, which Google sells directly through Google Play.

According to O’Brian:

“It seems as though the very existence of the Google Edition device has created considerable internal turmoil at HTC. There is a deep seated belief within HTC that Sense provides the best possible Android experience and there’s no reason to offer anything different – unifying behind a consistent message. HTC has always been a company however that is driven from the top and it appears as though the new device has been sanctioned by none other than Peter Chou himself, no doubt influenced by arch-rival Samsung’s recent announcement.”

It’s possible that turmoil is related to the key executives and resources that have left HTC as recently as this week, but that could be coincidental. There’s little, however, that HTC knows it needs to make major changes in product and vision if it wants to stay relevant in the Android marketplace.

A “Google Edition” HTC One could actually bring multiple benefits to help the situation. The current HTC One on sale now is an outstanding piece of hardware; possibly the best designed and built Android phone on the market today. But some have shied away from buying the phone because of HTC’s Sense user interface. A “pure” HTC One with nothing but Android on it could generate additional sales.

Another benefit could be found in marketing; an area where HTC greatly lags its peers. A “Google Edition” phone would likely be sold directly by Google in the Play store, meaning Google can help market the phone. It would also remove carriers from the equation and give HTC a little more control over the phone, pricing and software updates.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Tablets wars: Apple is from Venus, Amazon is from Mars
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry

In a complaint filed Thursday, the broadcasters — ABC, Fox, NBC, Allbritton Communications and Telemundo — asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to issue an injunction to stop the service known as Aereokiller from streaming their shows.

Aereokiller, which is available from the website FilmOn, is operated by Alki David, a billionaire who chose the name to tweak Aereo, thehigh profile streaming service backed by media mogul Barry Diller. Here’s a closer look at Aereokiller streaming a live show on NBC:

“It’s nonsense,” David said by phone of the lawsuit. “Since 2010, we’ve been arguing that Filmoon is a virtual cable platform and that we want to pay retransmission fees.”

The new lawsuit is important because it’s part of a great game between the broadcast TV industry and Diller over how and when consumers can watch TV. Aereo won a major victory in April when an appeals court in New York ruled that the service did not infringe copyright because its tiny antenna technology delivers a private stream — rather than a public broadcast — to each subscriber.

Aereo’s victory, however, only carries force in New York, Connecticut and Vermont. And its prospects for expansion have been seriously undercut as a result of a California judge’s decision to shut down Aereokiller on the entire west coast.

The latest lawsuit, then, is part of the TV industry’s effort to gain more ammunition ahead of a likely Supreme Court challenge. The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the story, suggests that the broadcasters likely chose to go after Aereokiller because it is an easier target than Aereo.

Aereo, meanwhile, is going live in Boston this month. CBS has threatened to sue it there too but has yet to make good on the promise. You can read the DC complaint for yourself here:

DC complaint against Aereokiller

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In a complaint filed Thursday, the broadcasters — ABC, Fox, NBC, Allbritton Communications and Telemundo — asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to issue an injunction to stop the service known as Aereokiller from streaming their shows.

Aereokiller, which is available from the website FilmOn, is operated by Alki David, a billionaire who chose the name to tweak Aereo, thehigh profile streaming service backed by media mogul Barry Diller. Here’s a closer look at Aereokiller streaming a live show on NBC:

“It’s nonsense,” David said by phone of the lawsuit. “Since 2010, we’ve been arguing that Filmoon is a virtual cable platform and that we want to pay retransmission fees.”

The new lawsuit is important because it’s part of a great game between the broadcast TV industry and Diller over how and when consumers can watch TV. Aereo won a major victory in April when an appeals court in New York ruled that the service did not infringe copyright because its tiny antenna technology delivers a private stream — rather than a public broadcast — to each subscriber.

Aereo’s victory, however, only carries force in New York, Connecticut and Vermont. And its prospects for expansion have been seriously undercut as a result of a California judge’s decision to shut down Aereokiller on the entire west coast.

The latest lawsuit, then, is part of the TV industry’s effort to gain more ammunition ahead of a likely Supreme Court challenge. The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the story, suggests that the broadcasters likely chose to go after Aereokiller because it is an easier target than Aereo.

Aereo, meanwhile, is going live in Boston this month. CBS has threatened to sue it there too but has yet to make good on the promise. You can read the DC complaint for yourself here:

DC complaint against Aereokiller

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Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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At CTIA Wireless this week, Ericsson Networked Society Evangelist Mats Guldbrand gave me a demo of the technology at the equipment maker’s booth. Basically, a small antenna element is embedded into a pane of shielded glass. That antenna can pick up Wi-Fi or cellular signals from nearby phones, tablets and laptops and then aggregate those connections, sending them as a combined transmission to the nearest LTE cell tower.

Guldbrand gave an example of a bus containing 50 people all surfing the internet on their smartphones. Each device is trying to connect separately to the same tower, and you wind up with a big mess. Not only are all of those signals interfering with one another, the network is trying to manage 50 simultaneous hand-overs between cell towers. The network might be able to pull it off, but everyone’s experience suffers, Guldbrand said.

If those 50 devices, however, were all connecting to localized antennas embedded in the vehicle’s windows, the bus could then link to the cellular network through a single transmitter mounted on the roof. It’s much easier for the cellular base station to handle a single high-capacity connection than a bunch of smaller connections. Everyone in the bus experiences greater speeds and more resilient links, and since each device isn’t reaching out to a distant tower, their device battery life is spared.

This might sound a bit like the repeater or range-booster kits you can buy to enhance your cellphone’s signal at home, but this technology is designed to integrate closely with the network. Normally a repeater would create all kinds of interference in a crowded network, but by using shielded glass Ericsson can limit the number of competing transmissions bouncing around the cell. The treated windows (and the steel frame) block signals trying to escape the bus, turning it into a kind of Faraday Cage on wheels.

Forthcoming LTE-Advanced technologies will introduce network relay points mounted on bus rooftops and utility poles, which would route signals within the cell. The principle is simple: if you can narrow the distance between network hops you get more resilient and higher-capacity connections.

Ericsson has other plans for connected glass. Guldbrand said that as long as the windows are networked, you could embed all kinds of technology into their surfaces. As part of the demo, Guldbrand showed me a pane of plain glass with an infrared field on its surface. When you interrupted the field with your hand at specific points, you triggered actions like turning on and off the lights or skipping between songs on the stereo. So not only the windows in your future home access the internet, they could replace your light switches and remote controls.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user irabel8

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But thanks to smarter connected devices, crowdsourcing trends and better medical data analytics and algorithms such clinical trials may become a thing of the past — or at least less of a burden. The launch this week of a crowdfunding campaign for the Scout, a home monitoring device that tracks, pulse, respiratory rate, blood pressure, temperature and other vitals, offers a perfect example of how clinical trials may change. As part of the company’s Indiegogo campaign for the Scout it’s inviting participants to opt into a what will become the usability study it submits to the U.S. Food and drug Administration for approval.

From the campaign web site:

Before Scanadu Scout™ can become a medical device it will have to go through the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval process and this is where your help comes in. With the Scanadu Scout™ you will help us by Scouting yourself and giving us feedback to refine the Scanadu Scout™.

This will happen in the framework of official clinical studies in which you will be invited to partake, ONLY IF YOU OPT-IN. For each study, some of you will be contacted and will have to sign an Informed Consent form. With your help we can put Scanadu Scout™ through FDA to become an over-the-counter consumer-grade diagnostic tool.

Scanadu, the company behind the Scout, isn’t the first or only company to recognize the power of connected devices, crowds and data, Transparency Life Sciences, a New York company started by a refugee from the pharmaceutical industry is also tackling the problem of slow, large and expensive clinical trials with crowdsourced data. TLS has built an online tool to collect information from researchers, physicians and patients that will then take their input to design an FDA-approved protocol for a drug study.

The FDA in December approved the first TLS protocol for a study on the effectiveness of a drug for Multiple Sclerosis patients. An industry consultant wrote that TLS took a process that takes 6 months and completed it in 6 weeks thanks to its ability to gather data from multiple sources into its tool that then formats the data properly. The study relies on remote patient monitoring to cut down on office visits, something that the Scout may one day be able to help with.

Remote monitoring cuts costs but also increases compliance and participation in the study, because it reduces doctor visits. Patients in the study still have access to a nurse or doctor and regular check ins, but they no longer have to spend a chunk of their day traveling to an office and waiting. While TLS and Scanadu are using the web to help speed up the FDA trial process, other doctors are thinking about using crowdsourced data to eliminate some of them, instead relying on crowdsourced data to monitor the efficacy of certain drugs and medical devices after their initial approval. And there are tons of startups out there thinking about finding and cataloguing patient data outside of formal trials, such as PatientsLikeMe, Medify and others in this story.

Much as mobile connectivity has changed the way people hail cabs, book tables at restaurants and share photos, the internet of things and the resulting data from consumer devices may soon change the way we test the efficacy and safety of our drugs. Figuring out the right balance of oversight and self-reporting in this new paradigm will be crucial, but it’s something that should happen.

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So what makes Dresden-based AoTerra such hot property? The fact that it does just that: heats properties. And these are no ordinary heaters. These are heating systems with servers inside them.

AoTerra’s system comprises a server unit connected to a heat exchanger or heat pump, which is in turn connected to the property’s ventilation system, and a hot water tank. It’s intended for new-build and renovated properties that meet modern energy efficiency standards and, according to the company, efficiency is nearly 100 percent (the company also only uses “green” energy for its devices).

Each system has a broadband connection and forms part of a distributed, OpenStack-based data center. The result is AoCloud, which offers compute, block storage and object storage (all are currently in beta). Customers can be pretty sure their cloud is as green as it gets, but there are other benefits too – the distributed nature of the cloud could mean low latency, and AoTerra is touting security as a plus, too.

AoTerra is also involved with a couple of Europe-funded projects, namely LEADS (trying to create a “data-as-a-service” model on top of geographically distributed micro-clouds) and ParaDIME (trying to making computing more energy-efficient).

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the idea of using waste heat from data centers to heat homes — London’s Telehouse West data center was going to do that, although the local council never set up the distribution network and the housing development never got built due to the recession. Telus is planning something similar in Vancouver. But those were about data centers heating nearby developments; what AoTerra has come up with is a step beyond.

Property owners or developers pay €12,000 for the system (about the same as a normal heating system), but they don’t have any ongoing operating costs – from that point on, they get free heating and hot water. And AoTerra gets out of having to pay for air conditioning, which is a pretty major chunk of the cost of running a traditional data center.

Overall, AoTerra claims, its distributed data center costs the company about a tenth of the normal set-up costs for a data center, with its running costs being less than half and CO2 emissions around a third. The company has only been going for a year, and it already has 20 AoHeat devices with over 200 servers installed. It had a turnover last year of €100,000, and has already signed contracts worth €400,000 this year.

AoTerra says it’s negotiating €1.6 million worth of contracts at the moment, and has another €3.1 million worth in the pipeline. This year it wants to sell 100 AoHeat devices, and next year 500 – at that point, it would be one of Germany’s biggest cloud providers. They need the crowdfunding investment to grow the team to match demand, they say.

I’ve yet to see one of these units in action, but the pitch is intriguing to say the least.

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On the surface the Sero looks just like the Nexus 7 and it shares many of the same hardware specifications: a 7-inch 1280 x 800 IPS touchscreen, a quad-core 1.3 GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, 10 hours of battery life and 1 GB of memory. The device also runs Android 4.2 out of the box, so the software is up to date. The Sero has a few extras though, when compared to the higher priced Nexus 7.

Hisense’s new tablet includes a mini-HDMI port and a microSD expansion slot; neither of which exist on Google’s tablet. The latter port may come in handy, mainly because the Sero only has 8 GB of internal storage. In this area, the Nexus comes out on top with the $199 tablet offering double the capacity. But the Nexus doesn’t have expandable storage, so that 16 GB is all you get.

If you want to output the Nexus 7 display to an external monitor you’re out of luck as it has no HDMI output nor does it support MHL adapters for that purpose.

The Sero 7 Pro has a front-facing camera like the Nexus 7 but it uses a 2 megapixel sensor as compared the 1.2 megapixels on the Nexus 7 camera. Hisense also added a rear camera — not found on the Nexus 7 — with a 5 megapixel sensor.

I may sneak over to my local WalMart to get a quick hands on with the new Hisense slate. If it’s essentially as good as the Nexus 7 with a few extra features included, I think it will be a hot seller at the large retailer. Of course, when Google eventually does give the Nexus 7 an overhaul, it could offer the current model for $149 or less.

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The campaign reached its goal of $100,000 in two hours (and doubled the goal within five hours), making it the fastest campaign to reach its goal on Indiegogo (of campaigns with a goal size greater than $20,000). Through Indiegogo, supporters could contribute at various levels for a range of perks, including early access to features and visits to NASA for a space medicine workshop. Early funders were able to pre-order a device for $149, while the amount went up to $199 for subsequent contributors. As of Friday, the campaign has raised more than $350,000 from funders in 65 countries.

While Indiegogo declined to share the average funding velocity of campaigns on its site or the last campaign to set a record of this type, back in August, The Oatmeal’s campaign for a Tesla museum grabbed headlines for raising $27,000 an hour.

Scanadu, which is participating in the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE competition, first revealed a prototype of its device six months ago. By holding the small hockey puck-shaped device to a person’s head, this slightly updated version can determine a user’s heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate and oxygen levels in the blood. It can then send the information to an iOS or Android smartphone, via Bluetooth.

Scanadu founder and CEO Walter de Brouwer said he believes interest in the device stems from a desire know more about our own health and the health of the people we care about.

“It’s the sense of empowerment and the sense that we are data and some how we have to measure that data,” he told me. “And if we are data, we can change because we can set goals to improve that data.”

In addition to providing market validation for the Scanadu, Indiegogo supporters will be able to offer feedback on the devices through usability studies, which the company will use as part of its submission for FDA clearance.

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News of the Facebook bid emerged earlier this month via reports in the Israeli media, which said that the social network had offered up to $1 billion to acquire Waze, which adds a real-time social element to traffic maps and claims to have close to 50 million active users. More recently, however, the Facebook talks have apparently bogged down over issues involving whether Waze will have transfer most of its staff from Israel to Facebook’s home base in California.

As with many such reports, the Bloomberg news is couched in all sorts of qualified terms, quoting anonymous sources “familiar with the matter” who say the company “may be considering” an offer, and it’s not uncommon for companies to float such rumors when they are looking for more money — or when they want to convince their acquirer to drop certain conditions, such as the requirement that Waze move its operations to San Francisco.

Some Israeli news outlets have also reported that Facebook has locked down its offer with a clause that prevents Waze from negotiating with other companies. And Google may have decided that making a bid for Waze simply isn’t worth the hassle that it might generate from antitrust authorities, who are already said to be looking at the company on other matters.

Google needs Waze more than Facebook does

All that said, however, there are some compelling reasons for Google to make a bid for Waze, as I tried to outline in a recent post. While it would make sense for Facebook to acquire the company — if only because it would help cement the social network’s move into mobile, and broaden the range of behavior and location data it could use to target users — it makes far more sense for Google.

Google Maps is one of the core offerings the company has when it comes to mobile, arguably almost as important as search and email. And it’s clear that Google cares about evolving the service, since it continues to pour resources into redesigns and added features like the ones that Om wrote about recently. There’s also no question that the social data provided by users is a crucial element of maps — and that is what Waze specializes in, and has managed to build right under Google’s nose.

I would argue that Google can’t afford to let Facebook (or Apple, although it reportedly isn’t part of the current negotiations) get its hands on Waze — in much the same way that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came to the swift conclusion that he couldn’t afford to let Twitter acquire Instagram, and made a surprise $1-billion offer without even consulting his board of directors. If Google hasn’t already made a bid for Waze, I think it needs to get busy working on one.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser and Eva Blue

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9to5Mac, which earlier reported that iOS 7 would get a new look with “very, very flat design” and see some default iOS apps get a refresh, has a report with far more detail about the coming changes. The sources are anonymous and obviously final decisions are still yet to be made. Still, the report is a good indication that we’re not going to get the same old iOS this year.

It’s a long piece filled with many details, but a few of the more interesting slated changes include:

• User interface functions, like the slide-to-unlock bar, the textured background of the drop-down Notifications menu, and the tappable app icons will all be subtly upgraded visually.
• Basic Apple apps, like Calendar, Notes, GameCenter, Mail will get a unified black and white look and be differentiated mostly by a third color.
• The Weather app is getting an upgrade with more features.
• Over-the-top real-world animations, like the shredder that animates when a Passbook ticket is deleted, will go away.

In all, it’s about what we’ve been expecting. Nothing too drastic, but a thorough refresh that will be the first major visual upgrade to the operating system in its six years of existence.

It’s also been reported that in order to do this, the iOS team has been scrambling to finish the project and has pulled members of the OS X software team over to help it meet its deadline. It’s not clear what effect that may have on the timely release of the desktop OS, which is expected to be released later this summer or fall.

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