Don’t think cloud computing is a wonderful thing? Wait until everyone and their mother has a netbook in hand.

Yeah, you know, those small Wi-Fi-happy machines sporting 8-13” screens, flash-based storage drives, Intel Atom central processors, etcetera, etcetera.

For a large portion of the global population, even those in well-developed regions, this might seem like really loose premise. Netbooks for everyone? Why not get an full-on laptop? You can do more with your dollar! And any simple tasks on the Web can be done with some of the smartphones making the rounds on hardware review sites, right? Well, I’m not so sure.

Here’s the thing. Web apps aren’t meant to be simple. At least not in a utilitarian sense. Yes, developers serious about the craftmaking of such services go to considerable lengths to ensure greater sense of intuitiveness and ease of use than might ordinarily be the case with any equivalent desktop-based program design. Things at the backend need to be “thinner and lighter” in size and weight, too.

But to think we can rely on our iPhones and T-Mobile G1s and BlackBerry Bolds and Storms and whathaveyou to fully engage with office and social media applications seems a tad impractical. Mobile software designs are good and are getting better by the month, but the kind of pixelated real estate you can comfortably stuff in your pant pocket can only provide for so much interactivity. Of course, the outlook for power for the mobile phone market is as rosy as can be right now. But for the foreseeable future, there remains a place for bigger things.

Not so much bigger, though. We recently shared a few notes on the netbook space and how things are progressing in the field, both in hardware and software. It’s safe to say that in recent months, apart from the requisite dotage on Apple’s lineup of philosophically conventional MacBook and MacBook Pro products, the market of netbooks has transferred to a semi-front burner position in terms of attention grabbed and attention earned.

And its quite clear why that is. The class of gadgets led by the Asus EEE PC has performed in ways that would not be the case two or three years ago, and it’s mark as something of a phenomenon largely comes down to price. Consumers can grab a fairly well-equipped netbook from the current crop of options for an average of $300-500. (According to recent news, Asus may launch a $200 offering next year.)

What’s more, users are no longer hindered by absurdly small screen sizes, as was the case for the first run of 7” designs from Asus.

Now…for the credit crisis trick!

It’s said time and time again that in times of economic distress, the consumer doesn’t cease to be a consumer. This is true. He/she only becomes more aware of expenses, paying careful attention to comparisons between products and giving greater voice to his/her needs than his/her wants. Thus, in the present environment, it’s not hard to imagine that the performance of netbooks relative to larger PCs will be strong. Surprisingly strong, perhaps.

Renewed focus and development by manufacturers has brought the budding netbook market from something strictly meant to be an accessory to consumers’ computational lives - and a fantastically high-cost accessory, at that - to something that may very well replace a good amount of activity in the PC arena simply due to its convenient arrival at a near perfect ratio of power and price. The evolution of Web apps, both for productivity and entertainment purposes, into engines that, given a solid broadband connection from server to client and back around, can all but negate traditional norms insofar as “getting things done.”

Yes, there are exceptions to be made. The most outstanding one being reliability of routers and so forth. But methods to diminish the impact of disruptions are becoming more and more commonplace. This goes as much for document editing as data storage and media strangers - both upstream and downstream.

“In the spirit of onward and upward,” wrote Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, on the official Google Code Blog at the end of last week, “we have decided to shut down the Mashup Editor, currently in limited private beta, in favor of the more powerful App Engine infrastructure.” Google is also “discontinuing” Dodgeball.com, Gundotra revealed - a mobile social networking service that lets users share their location with friends via text message.

“Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months,” Gundotra noted, “and we hope you will join our team in making the exciting transition to App Engine.”

By way of eating in its own kitchen Google is in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine.

By way of explaining this move, Gundotra wrote:

“After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers.”

The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we’re excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.”

After the migration is complete, Gundotra added, Google will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License.

“While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers,” he noted.

There is that urban myth about a programmer who wrote a program for a bank, where every transaction it would deposit one cent, I think it was US cents, into his own account. Eventually he had millions and caught. However the point of the story is that he used a minimal and large scale to make millions in a short time period.

The other day a random surf around on the Internet landed me up on a new concept of Crowd Funding. Apparently politicians do it, Charities do it and even entrepreneurs. All these units are using it, with the assistance of the Internet, to get small amounts of money from lots and lots of supporters.

Cloud computing has been “the next cool thing” for at least the past 18 months. The current economic climate, however, may be the thing that accelerates the maturity of the technology and drives mainstream adoption in 2009.

This economic crisis is very different from the normal ebbs of the business cycle we have grown accustomed to. The difference lies in how rapidly sources of capital have dried up—whether that capital is coming from venture capitalists, angel investors, or banks. Capital markets are frozen, and companies needing to make capital investments to continue operations or grow are facing a daunting challenge.

A lack of capital creates a lack of flexibility in leveraging technology to operate and grow a business. If you can’t get access to a bank loan, you have to use your company revenues to buy new servers. Using company revenues can damage cash flow, harm valuations, and put otherwise healthy businesses at risk.

Typically, when a company wants to grow its IT infrastructure, it has two options:

• Build it in house and own or lease the equipment.
• Outsource the infrastructure to a managed services provider.

In both scenarios, a company must purchase the infrastructure to support peak usage regardless of the normal system usage. One Valtira client, for example, has fairly low usage for most of the year, but sees usage equalling millions of page views/month for about 15 minutes each quarter. For both of the above options, they are faced with paying for an infrastructure necessary for only about 1 hour each year when something much more minimalist will support the rest of the year.

Let’s assume for this customer that two application servers backed by two database servers and balanced by a load balancer will solve the problem. The options look something like this:

For this calculation, I assume fairly baseline, server-class systems with a good amount of RAM and on-board RAID5 such as a Dell 2950 and a good load balancer. The 3-year cost assumes a 10% cost of capital. I also assume a very cost-efficient managed services provider. Most of the big names will be at least three times more expensive than the numbers I am providing here.

Under this scenario, managed services saves you a nice 13.5% over the do it yourself approach (assuming you don’t get taken to the cleaners by one of the big managed services companies). Of course, it does not consider at all the impact of a server outage at 3am, which is where managed services will shine.

What is particularly appealing about managed services, however, is the lack of capital investment. The $40,000 up-front for an internal IT approach is a terrible burden in the current economic environment. Even if you can get credit, the cost of the loan makes that $40,000 much more expensive over three years than $40,000.

Good argument for managed services? Yes, but a better argument for the cloud.

The cloud enters the picture looking like this:

Cloud savings over internal IT jump to 29% without getting into the discussion of buy for capacity versus buy what you use!

Between managed services and the cloud, the cloud provides 18% savings.

While 18% and 29% savings are nothing to sneeze at, they are just the start of the financial benefits of the cloud. It goes on.

• No matter what your needs, your up-front cost is always $0
• As the discrepancy between peak usage and standard usage grows, the cost difference between the cloud and other options becomes overwhelming.
• The cloud option essentially includes a built-in SAN in the form of the Amazon Elastic Block Storage. The internal IT and managed services options would go up significantly if we added the cost of a SAN into the infrastructure.
• Cheap redundancy! While the above environment is not quite a “high availability” environment, it is very highly redundant with systems spread across multiple data centers. The managed services and internal IT options, on the other hand, have single physical points of failure as the application servers and database servers are likely located in the same rack.

Let’s say, however, that you need 10 servers to handle peak usage for 1 hour each year and just 2 to operate the rest of the year. Ignoring the impact of the cost of capital:

• Internal IT adds another $40,000 in total costs over 3 years.
• Managed services adds another $144,000 in total costs over 3 years.
• The Amazon Cloud adds about $24 in total costs over 3 years.

No, that was not a typo. That’s forty THOUSAND dollars against one hundred forty-four THOUSAND dollars against 24 dollars. And as I mentioned earlier, this setup is based on an actual Valtira client that was considering a dedicated managed services option before Valtira began deploying customers in the Amazon cloud. It is not some contrived example.

Obviously, most organizations have either seasonal peaks or daily peaks (or both) with a less dramatic cost differential; but the cost differential is still quite dramatic and quite impactful to the bottom line. In addition, the ability to pay for what you use makes it easy to engage in “proofs of concept” and other R&D that requires dedicated hardware.

The current enthusiasm we see everywhere for crowdsourcing and peer production—encouraging each person to bring his individual expertise and viewpoint to a common cause—seems ripe for application to pedagogy. Although “It takes a village to raise a child” is a cliché, all the elements for success seem to be present:

Each child is unique, and only by trying a variety of approaches can we can find out what motivates and stimulates her to learn.

“Learning by doing” has been the educational mantra in the U.S. for a century, and no one knows how to “do” better than practitioners in the field. (More on this in a moment.)

Variety (to roll out another cliché) is the spice of life, and nothing could keep a child’s attention better than not knowing what he’ll encounter when he comes to school each day.

Everybody cares about children and wants them to get a good education.

Every neighborhood contains people with skills to impart.

Most educational reform efforts focus rightfully on the direct point of contact between teacher and child. Many of these reformers suggest that we could create better teaching by turning subject-matter experts into teachers with minimal background in the field of education. But this course is risky, because it takes training to maintain the focus of twenty or thirty children—modern, easily distracted, and gregarious, many with learning disabilities—while delivering information at a level they can understand.

I don’t subscribe to George Bernard Shaw’s notorious maxim: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Let’s put this insult in context: Shaw had a low opinion of just about all the professions (except for musicians, whose value to society was incontrovertible). Many teachers have a lot to impart, and most non-teachers would not want to be full-time teachers even if pay were hiked substantially.

But many practitioners would enjoy spending a few hours a week in a classroom, especially if they can prepare and deliver a module that is based on their own work and expresses their own passion. Here’s what a crowdsourcing approach to childhood education could look like:

Employers provide a day or two per week of time off, covering four or six consecutive weeks, for employers volunteering in the schools. This could be supported by tax breaks or other incentives. Employers may also be persuaded of benefits to letting employees teach a project, because they may come to understand their own work at a deeper level.

Volunteers prepare a stripped-down version of some project at work, or some other project of interest to kids, and divide it into lessons that fit the four-to-six-week schedule. Trainers can help them prepare the materials. As the practice of volunteer teachers spreads, such preparations will become as well understood as writing a paper for a journal or creating a presentation for one’s manager.

Volunteers lead classes in this hands-on project, with specific practical and educational goals.

Teachers become facilitators. They help students work on the projects between volunteer visits and help students find supplementary learning materials. During volunteer visits, the teachers give extra support to children with disabilities or special needs, and keep order generally.

Volunteers can be drawn from a huge range of professions—and they don’t have to hold PhD’s. Children can learn a lot of math from laying out plans for a construction project and a lot of physics and chemistry from car repair. There may, however, be a certain age range where children are old enough to concentrate on a large-scale project while young enough to learn basic concepts and skills from hands-on work.

I’m aware that this kind of project imposes huge logistical requirements, ranging from scheduling to criminal background checks. Technology can help with some of these problems, which arise naturally when a formal organization like a school system tries to reap the benefits of an open culture.

It’s also important to note that, although hands-on projects have become the rage in schools, colleges, and even graduate programs, “learning by doing” is not enough. When John Dewey suggested the concept, he saw learning as a synthesis between external materials and the understanding a learner has within. The more you have within, the more you can learn by doing. But such learning can also motivate the student to make the most of what a traditional teacher can offer.

Shelton stressed to me that VMware could have taken the route of setting up its own physical data centers and offering cloud computing itself, as many other services have done. But they chose instead to continue working with their partners and add value to what cloud computing services offer.

Technically, the vCloud promise of giving you interoperability and the chance to switch cloud vendors follows the path pioneered by Cleversafe, a company  profiled in 2006. Our data is less subject to arbitrary legal and privacy risks if we spread it around.

vCloud is intended to let VMware insert itself as the intermediator between vendors and customers alike, thus keeping its relevance in the cloud computing age. Shelton, however, claims that “We are entirely focused on enablement, not intermediation. VMware will operate entirely ‘out of band’ in relation to transactions, migrations, and other arrangements enterprises and service providers who are part of vCloud ecosystem.”

Economically, vCloud represents a familiar activity found in many industries. Every company would like to introduce some regularity and predictability into its relationships with suppliers. But Shelton said VMware is trying to be careful not to introduce too much standardization. They don’t want to cut off innovation or leave their partners without a way to differentiate themselves. But if vCloud is successful, it will make clouds more responsive to user needs, as well as keeping VMware relevant.

In a recent survey conducted online among the members of MENG (Marketing Executive Networking Group), an interesting result surfaced. Infact, all 1,800+ active members of MENG were emailed on November 15, 2008 and asked to complete an online survey. The Survey was closed on December 2, 2008 with a total of 643 responses (representing a 36% response rate) via Paul Dunay.

One of the more interesting highlights was when MENG executives were asked what industry buzz words, if any, they were most tired of hearing Web 2.0 was cited most frequently.

In addition, many terms related to Web 2.0 were also frequently mentioned (Social networking, social media, blogging, etc.).

So does this mean, the aura around Web 2.0 and related terms is slowly and steadily making its exit from Marketer’s mind? What do you think….?

In classrooms all around the world, the teacher is the boss. The professor holds the key to the students’ learning. The professor also holds the students’ sanity. If the students are lucky, they might get a great professor and get something meaningful from the class. If they are unlucky, the students have little choice but to endure the teacher’s quirk, or wrath.

There are usually evaluation forms that schools provide in order to keep a professor in check. Administration-initiated evaluation is good in theory, but it is doubtful if the instructor really takes the result to heart. Moreover, the evaluations most often are not revealed to the students. For students to want to know more about their professor, they have to rely on sketchy and incomplete information from the grapevine.

RateMyProfessors.com is a website which gives a voice to the students by having professors evaluated in the site, and to have the results for everyone to see.

The purpose of RateMyProfessors is for the site to be a resource for students. It gives them a forum to voice their opinion. They also get to find out what others think of an instructor through the site. In other words, it gives them a place to make a difference in their school experience. A member should follow the website’s guidelines, though, when rating an instructor.

A student/member can rate a professor in the website by selecting his school and picking the school’s location from the drop-down list on the front page. He can then click on your school’s name to bring up the list of professors in that school. If the professor is listed on your school’s page, a member can click on the name and rate them. If the professor is not listed, there is a link to where a member can add and rate them.

RateMyProfessors’ detractors (and disgruntled teachers) may think that the website is just a portal to rant about teachers and to get even with them. But this is not the case. The site offers a statistic which says that over 65% of the ratings given to teachers are positive. In fact the website highlights the professors on the top ten list and the hottest list, and the school with the top faculty.

Rate My Professor has been successful with its crowdsourcing model.  It is the internet’s largest listing of collegiate professor ratings, with more than 6.8 million student-generated ratings of over 1 million professors. Each year, millions of college students use the site to help plan their class schedules and rate current and past professors on attributes such as helpfulness and clarity. More importatntly, teachers have taken notice, and have posted videos of them striking back.

Preeti Somal of VMware discussed the challenge of bridging the interoperability gap between on- and off-premise cloud computing, as this is emerging as a key requirement for enterprise adoption. This session at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo 2008 West revealed how VMware and others are addressing this challenge to make seamless enterprise cloud computing a reality. View technology offerings that deliver smart applications for on- and off-premise clouds. Whether you’re a business building a cloud, considering cloud services, or developing for the cloud, this session revealed how applications will traverse the clouds and why it will change the game.

Preeti Somal is Vice President of R&D at VMware with responsibility for vCloud - VMware’s Cloud Computing solutions. She has an extensive background in applications and systems management.

Why “Cloud” computing?

There may be a vast array of reasons as to why an individual or business might use cloud computing. Some reasons include:

It’s simple:

• Scalable
• Flexible
• Reliable
• Fast Setup
• Affordable Enterprise Solution
• Environmentally More Efficient

Cloud computing increases capacity or adds capabilities on the fly without having to purchase and maintain physical hardware as well as the space to store it reduces overhead costs, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Connectivity costs are falling and hardware is becoming more efficient at scaling. It also allows for scaling up/down easily to provide reliable services to customers.

Those are just a few possible reasons why cloud computing may be a viable option, but one thing is certain, making a decision as to which cloud service to use is not an easy task.