Archive for the ‘make’ Category
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Three tech giants — Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo — said on Tuesday they are teaming up on a research project to help turn Web services into reliable, everyday utilities.
The companies are joining forces with academic researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States to create an experimental network that lets researchers test “cloud-computing” projects — Web-wide services that can reach billions of users at once.
Their goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects.
Founding members of the consortium said they aim to create a level playing field for individual researchers and organizations of all sizes to conduct research on software, network management and the hardware needed to deliver Web-wide services as billions of computer and phone users come online.
“No one institution or company is going to figure this out,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at nearby Stanford University.
Cloud computing has become the industry’s biggest buzzword. It is a catch-all term to describe how Internet-connected hardware and software once delivered as discreet products can be managed as Web-based, utility-like services.
“Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity,” Raghavan said, referring to the push to make everything from daily communications to shopping to entertainment into always-available, on-demand Web services.
“We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon,” Raghavan said of the need to let computers manage millions of small jobs, adding that the available capacity on the Web would vary widely. “The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next.” Continued…
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As the need for security on the internet continues to grow, one of the the guardians of the networked world lays claim to an enviable record.
In its 13 years in business, VeriSign says it has maintained a “100% up time” service in operating the infrastructure that controls the internet.
The firm has a crucial role in the day-to-day operation of the internet – it manages two of the world’s 13 root servers, which direct global internet traffic; it routes every web address ending in .com or .net; and it issues secure digital certificates to protect more than 900,000 web servers on the net.
In a rare insight into just how VeriSign works, the company invited the BBC into one of the main data centres where security is at the heart of everything.
The building itself is one of hundreds that dot Silicon Valley’s landscape; bland and unremarkable on the outside.
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 This is our most secure room. VeriSign has more than 4,000 employees worldwide and there are only six people in the whole company who have access to this space  Ralph Claar, Verisign, on the inner sanctum
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There is no fancy corporate sign on the manicured strip of lawn to hint that it is owned or operated by VeriSign. Steps up to the entrance were deliberately built to ensure nobody would try to ram the building. Cameras and motion detectors are everywhere to be seen. The reflecting windows on the outside are fake.
Inside is altogether more of what you would expect.
At each stage, at least two forms of authentication are required to enter various parts of the building, including door passes and fingerprint or handprint scanners.
“We are a regulated industry with the biggest banks in the world as our customers, so everything we do here has to be secure,” says Mike Kirwan, vice president of production services.
Memo to Jerry Yang: How to make Yahoo great again | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 6, 2008
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Re: Getting your company back on track
Now that Yahoo appears to be on its own path, it’s time for the company to find in its past what could again make it great.
Contrary to popular opinion, the key to the future isn’t becoming a technological marvel to rival Google. Instead, Yahoo should home in on what it made it special before the dot-com bust: The Yahoooooo! (cowboy twang inserted) of yesteryear.
Yahoo was an Internet media pioneer. The company built or bought every massively popular feature on the Web today–think Broadcast.com (video), Launch (music) and Groups (social networks). It also developed an advertising engine that could deliver on the dream campaign of any marketer with the data to back up that promise. You could argue Yahoo failed to take advantage of many of those assets in recent years, but the shortcomings haven’t been in vision, they’ve been in execution.
So how does Yahoo move forward? It needs to rebrand itself an Internet media company, quit chasing Google on Web search, and get damn good at selling brand advertising to Madison Avenue once again. And it has to get it done before Google figures out how to turn the creative ad process over to robots. Does technology play a role in that future? Of course. But the emphasis should be on technology that makes ad sales possible, not ad sales that make the technology possible.
“Yahoo was basically built for brand advertisers before brand advertisers came online in a big way. Now that they have come online, Yahoo has to have better technology to allow for better targeting and scale,” said Rishad Tobaccowalo, CEO of the futures-consulting company Denuo, a unit of advertising agency holding company Publicis.
Yahoo certainly has been selling technology, but not in the way Tobaccowalo is talking about. Earlier this year, executives started beating the drum about getting back to the technology roots with new products like advanced e-mail, mobile-search technology, and a universal log-on for Yahoo members across services like Flickr, Mail and Address Book.
Those initiatives are worthwhile, but Yahoo should be selling a bigger story to Madison Avenue, particularly as Google tries to build a division for selling brand advertising alongside search. Sure, Yahoo has advertising platforms like Panama, but the company still isn’t reaping the full value of its media network. Quite simply, it isn’t showing the swagger of its younger years among advertisers. (Note: avoid the cockiness that turned some advertisers off in the early years.)
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