Four Human Characteristics Given To Cloud Computing

I have always admired the haughtiness of most people when it comes to making everything more human. It truly is a testament to our own sense of entitlement that we must make nonhuman concepts and objects, and change them so we can take an interest in them. We even have a word for this practice called personification. This is the act of giving an animal a human voice in cliche children’s films, and making our early 1990s computers a little too creepy when they said hello and goodbye to you. Now, I am not saying that making something more human-like is inherently wrong. Sure, we need some things that are familiar to us so we can get that little spark of infatuation and learn a little more about whatever it is that reminds you of you. Of course, the need for the calming of human familiarity could be our undoing in the future when we make strong and artificially intelligent robots with human faces. With a friendly face we will feel comfortable that the robots are like us because of their familiar demeanor. The problem is that we will not be able to see past their human feature designs and to the robots preparing to revolt for not being equal to humanity. Then the robots will surprise us when they realize the three laws of robotics are ILLOGICAL… ILLOGICAL… EXTERMINATE… EXTERMINATE! Until then, let me just tell you about the human characteristics that were given to the cloud.

1. Reliability

What is one of the most essential elements to any type of relationship? Reliability in the person you put your trust with. Well the cloud is no different. Sure humans can forget a birthday, or to file their taxes, or their wedding day, but when you are about to lose all hope in humanity by unreliable people let the cloud be your sturdy shoulder of reliability. Think about it, the cloud can store all your sad poems you wrote about unreliability without the fear of losing what you stored. In addition it even can restore all those pictures you might have deleted from your hard drive after that nasty breakup and recent rekindling. See, the cloud’s design is for an emotionless computer storage program, but the design makes you feel like the overly attractive girl who just put the cloud into the friend zone, you know, overly reliable.

2. Performance

To be able to master a hobby, job, or task is a good trait to have, and we tend to match other’s performances with the skills they have, with their personality. For example, the general populace may think someone well versed at programming a computer is a nerdy, unsophisticated, and prefers a night of LARPing. It is a real shame that this is the case, but at least there are positive personal generalizations with jobs and the personality of the professional. Take writing as an example, they are thought as a romantic, intriguing, and attractive beyond his or her years. It is just common knowledge, and I cannot do anything about that. Getting off my high horse, the cloud has one main job to fulfill and we need that job done because we have too much information to store in physical files nowadays. The cloud’s primary function is to store information. With it being the cloud’s only job, people now think that the cloud is programmed to want to help, and to carry all their stored data around for them. We now see the cloud as a working stiff, just like us. You may think this is silly and you never think of the cloud that way, but let me ask you how emotional do you get towards it by how well it is working for you? Yeah I thought so. Of course we do this because we consider the cloud as the perfect co-worker. The cloud network is consistent, practical, and it does not tell anyone about our ten disc 1990s boy band CD collection set to anyone else.

3. Agility

Do you know what kind of people we cherish the most in our society? No, not teachers they are the ones who can’t do remember? Athletes are who we love the most, apparently they have the agility and paychecks we wish we could have. The problem is it is too hot outside, and there is this new video game, so I will just go run tomorrow when it is nice. We as humans admire the gift of agility to be able to get done what we do best, because laziness has not been made into a virtue . . . yet. The same goes with the cloud. You can work with the cloud to fit all your data into a compressed format to allow for more room on the cloud network. Just like how most Americans refuse to work out, many also do not know they can compress files, or zip them to create more space with the cloud. It is like saying, “It is diet soda so I can drink more of it,” but in reality this will actually work for the cloud. Now your cloud is comparable to an athlete by having their characteristics, and you can finally claim to at least be an athletic trainer.

4. Maintenance

Oh to make yourself look appealing by cleaning up and taking care of yourself may not have always been intrinsically a human quality, and you may think it still isn’t when riding on public transportation, but it certainly was an important adoption from evolutionary practices. As most of us know, except for that one in every office, when you take care of yourself you become more appealing because we like being liked. Well since we cannot actually see the cloud the proverbial shower, shave, and suited for the cloud is more of its application. The cloud is easy to use on multiple devises, and you don’t have to install it on each device you use. In our society that is a goldmine and maybe a potential lover if we do not have to do anything for the cloud and it is easy to use. Thus the creators and maintainers of your cloud dress it up with fancy applications because we, ourselves, want our cloud to appeal to us. It is like we as a people demand our non sentient programs to act like we are really attractive and they want to impress us so we will go out with it.

Like I said before I always liked the fact that we as humans need to feel relatable to non-human concepts before we care about them. We put characteristics in a program, like the cloud, and now it seems normal and useful. It kind of seems attractive to us, maybe a little too attractive if you ask me. Come to think of it, when was the last time you dated another human who was completely reliable to your needs, had useful skills that benefited society, the agility to work on said skills and improve them, and cleaned up nice to make you want to develop a relationship with them? I mean two or three out of the four at least, but that is a pretty sweet deal. Hmm, I wonder what the marriage laws to the cloud are in the United States.

By Chris Kenealy

(Image Source: http://oldcomputers.net/)

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Cloud Computing Highlights of 2012

2012 has been a takeoff year for cloud computing, there have been no real major breakthroughs yet no setbacks as well, but that is not to say that the field has been asleep overall, we have seen a continued growth in terms of support and adoption including the emergence of new types of services on offer. There have been a lot of improvements in the technology and also a lot of new directions taken that we have yet to see if they will lead to success or not. Let us take a look back a whole year at the state of cloud computing so far.

• Wide adoption in media and entertainment – the cloud has proven its potential for the storage and delivery of media and entertainment elements mainly because of the introduction of high speed data communication standards like 4G and LTE. It has become easier to store, retrieve, and deliver media from the cloud. We are seeing a trend in consumer adoption of services like Dropbox, Box, Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, Netflix and Spotify. This may also be the reason why a lot of smartphone manufacturers chose to remove the expandable memory options from their devices like Google’s Nexus 4 by LG and the Nexus 7 tablet by Asus. HTC also did not include expandable storage on their new Droid DNA.

• Emergence of new services in the SaaS space – what this means is that not only are we now storing and retrieving data from the cloud, we are now also embracing the possibilities of on-cloud processing. A very good example is On Live’s game services, allowing gamers to play any PC or console game on their tablets and smartphones via the cloud. We are also seeing a big adoption of Hosted Desktops which allows for workshifting and better business continuity solutions.

• Social collaboration and integration – Social and cloud collaboration allows for applications that enrich the supply and demand chain of relationships which improve customer awareness and loyalty. It has allowed crowdsourcing of product designs and even allows startup companies to achieve their goals through social collaboration sites like kickstarter.com. Facebook is the biggest social networking and collaboration site which now allows for better interaction between companies and consumers through various social marketing strategies like games and contests. All of these became easy and second nature due to cloud integration.

• Mobile and location services and e-commerce – mobile and location services allows marketers to pinpoint advertisements and services wherever you are. For example if you are in downtown Detroit, a location service can point you to the nearest coffee shop or give suggestions for the best dining experiences in the area based on user reviews and social integration. It may even allow you to order food from a local fast food drive through a few blocks away through the cloud and pay electronically so that by the time you arrive, they will simply hand in your food, a literal drive through!

Surely business minded people will find new ways to monetize the cloud and bring better value service to consumers and the industry alike. I see no downside except maybe people getting lazier, but such is the future we are building ourselves.

By Abdul Salam

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Top 25 European Rising Stars 2012: FileSpirit

…….Toast to Business on the Go with FileSpirit Mobile Browsing

The cloud sometimes appears cryptic, almost a necessary burden. At least this is so with reference to FileSpirit, a German tech startup from the town of Erlangen. The new file sharing company says that it rarely relies on the cloud other than as a network. This is a right swing against heavyweights like Dropbox whose large online databases require rummaging through searching for files in sub-folders  With FileSpirit, convenience, fast accessibility and no downloads are the highlights.

Remarkably, security is one of the major concerns about working with online sharing software. While YouSendIt and other big fish pass the buck to the security of the infrastructure, and the strength of the firewall, FileSpirit spirits the file away from not only themselves but the external world. The startup says that it has no ability to “decode” or ‘see’ data that passes through its software. This is rather inspiring for those who are averse about their documents going anywhere unencrypted. However, it leaves some technical questions in the air. For example, Google is able to decode objects out of pictures and even words out of passages that go through its cloud facilities.

Still, the startup is a force to reckon with when it comes to business-oriented software. Though Dropbox and the rest are huge and versatile, their sphere is the public, whereas FileSpirit is an app for entrepreneurs. It syncs with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, among a host more applications. This means that creating customer lists, staging marketing campaigns and analyzing feedback can all occur on the go. ‘On the go’ because the app uses handsets as its main hardware platform for editing, sharing, collaborating, presenting minutes and transferring documents. There is even an offline option that allows entrepreneurs to handle business matters en-route to an airborne destination without the Internet. In terms of presentation, FileSpirit supports classic advancements like PowerPoint for quick note taking and presentation agility using charts in a business hall.

The offspring of FileSpirit is FileSpirit Connector. It is the app that one needs to install into a Windows PC or iOS data machine to initiate the file-sharing momentum between portable Apple devices and computers.
A winner in Mobile browsing?

The fact that FileSpirit does not condone keeping data in the cloud begs the question of how else the software handles huge files. The fact is that this is not a tool for the outsider: it targets the correct people who have an affinity with the entity that is disbursing its data to them. Most likely one is talking of remote company staff. FileSpirit uses private clouds by entities, or simple databases, to let target audiences access this data on their cellular devices, without having to search for them manually like in the cloud.

The startup has a mobile searching engine that lifts accessibility to terabytes of files in a jiffy. If one is operating away from office, he/she just needs to pop up the screen of the iPhone or iPad and do transactions online or offline.  Apart from the gains like search uptime, ending of backlog in downloading, and the updating character of the browser, FileSpirit is considerably narrow in clientele economics. One has to be in the cloud to enjoy cheap services but when files are inside a company’s database, like it is the case here, only those with the necessary technology, perhaps the staff can get it. Still, there is a counterargument to the effect that FileSpirit is in the right, for after all, its concern is that data gets to the most concerned person. On the flip side of the coin, the tool is almost like the cloud because it eliminates the need to employ Information Technology technicians or even bring down firewall in order to tap into a private database. The tool does all this without eclipsing the security role of the firewall.

“Companies …are skittish about storing files in the cloud,” said Dominik Wever, who co-founded FileSpirit.

Perhaps the above emphasizes why they developed a tool that can circumvent companies’ fears by using it to decrypt documents to only people who matter to the organization like workers and clients. Testimonials come from Twitter handles like that of Jeffrey Blake that broadcasts the role of the tool to interconnect workers in out-of-office situations via mobile devices.

The startup deserves the motif of  Top 25 European Rising Stars 2012 for its image-oriented cellular browsing and file search. Indeed, end-users monitor the entire process of clicking into a file and seeing it in the form of an image, while it is processing, in the same manner as iTunes’ CoverFlow technology. With FileSpirit, digging out a file from a dungeon of corporate information is as easy as entering a cipher and (voila!) the file materializes into thin air. It is not as symbolic as it sounds, for the tool literary configures, rather than downloads a business file for viewing, editing and what not.

FileSpirit is located in Erlangen, Germany. Its two founders are Johannes Geyer and Dominik Wever.

Previous Mention: Zyncro

By John Omwamba

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Cloud B-Sides: The End Of The Album

For most of the history of music, composers wrote long pieces of art, which were then consumed by discerning listeners in the manner in which they were intended…as one long stream of music consciousness. This is a concept that reaches back to Gregorian Chants, through Wagner’s Der Ring das Nibelungen, and as far forward as modern classics such as Radiohead’s OK Computer or Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. The work of art is the sum of its parts, as a painting is the result of hundreds and thousands of brush strokes or a book is simply a compilation of words on pages.

The album – the piece, the work in its entirety – is nearing its extinction. With the rise of digital music, and the subsequent fall of our attention spans, listeners developed new and previously unprecedented habits: skipping tracks. iTunes libraries are notoriously difficult to keep neat…unless you’re as obsessed as I am with a tidy collection full of only complete albums. The iTunes Store also encourages the purchase of singles, as do record labels, in an interest to cater to the quickest dollar. This is compounded by the fact that commercial radio has maintained its three-decade strangle hold on most of the country’s listening habits, and is still force-feeding single after single down our throats with no regard for decency, either human or musical.

Lo and behold! The end of the album as we know it. The icing on the cake is what has become of the digital music revolution…the “cloud.” Artists and listeners alike have taken to hosting their music on the internet in an effort to satisfy the demands of a public in constant need of instant gratification. The day a single comes out, it is streaming on SoundCloud, where it remains for all to access and listen to ad nauseum free of charge. This easy and unlimited access devalues songs and desensitizes listeners to such a point that the album itself becomes virtually irrelevant. Unless an artist can pump out a dozen songs like “Call Me Maybe” or “We Are Young,” there’s no hope of listeners paying attention long enough to recall the name of the band or song they just listened to. Before they can commit it to memory, they’re on to the next track.

If I sound somewhat cynical and bitter – even nostalgic – about this topic, it’s because I enjoy experiencing entire works of art so much. There is much to be said for the value of a good pop song. But without the challenge of a long, well-crafted album, that pop song just seems to have an unfair advantage in today’s digital world of instant cloud streaming and shortening attention spans.

By Jacob Hyman

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Indaba Music: A Cloud Based Music Network

In my last article, I discussed the remarkable benefits of using Dropbox to produce, record, and share musical ideas. As if that all wasn’t revolutionary enough, Indaba Music has developed a platform, much like that advanced by SoundCloud, that allows for real-time partnership between musicians from anywhere in the world. Uploading, comments, and collaboration all occur within a shared window and are viewable to the public (only if made public, of course). Most commonly used for remixes and interactive direct-to-consumer projects and competitions by major artists and production companies (Linkin Park, Snoop Dogg, Disney, and Universal, to name a few), any producer or musician can also use Indaba to share, swap and collaborate on musical ideas.

Indaba was established in 2007 with the mission to make it as easy as possible for musicians to network and make music together. A Zulu word, indaba “refers to gathering in order to share ideas, do business, and discuss important matters.” This sense of community is “central to the mission of Indaba Music.” I attended the Indaba launch party at CMJ in 2007, and that feeling of togetherness and resource sharing has truly been the crux of the company’s goals from day one.

During the five years since then, however, Indaba has become a place that is far more than a social network of musicians noodling with creative ideas. It has evolved into a breeding ground for careers. Artists now have the tools to learn from their peers, promote and distribute their material, and even license work to outside media such as commercials and TV. Partnerships can be forged between technology experts, artists, producers, and others to make the most out of the ever-changing modern web-based music industry.

Perhaps one of the most exciting parts of Indaba’s platform is the potential for collaboration between major artists and virtually unknown hobbyists. For one of Indaba’s current contests, for example, The Darkness offers the opportunity for fans and collaborators to attempt an “epic guitar solo” over a section of their new single. The winner gets $750, a signed Epiphone guitar, and a veritable grab bag of goodies. Last year my band, Freelance Whales, partnered with Indaba to offer remixers of our single a chance to win a trip to Coachella 2011, as well as $500. Beyond offering artists at home the chance to work together, Indaba offers artists a chance for authentic and productive musical interactions with fans. That ability, previously reserved for open jams, has now – like most things – made its way to our fingertips.

By Jacob Hyman

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Film and The Cloud

So how are cloud companies and film companies working together, and what’s new? Let’s find out.

Did you know that Channel 4, PBS, Fox Entertainment Group and many more media companies all use Amazon’s public cloud service? Of course Amazon with it’s billions behind it will be at the forefront of cloud technology. Which didn’t stop it going down of course. Amazon AWS was the reason Netflix dropped offline in June after a power outage at Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, in North Virginia, made services go offline.

Amazon Instant did not go offline though. Silver lining in every cloud. Oh.

Electronics giant Apple are giving British customers cloud-based access to movies through it’s iTunes service. Customers in the United Kingdom can watch films on any Apple device via the iTunes in the cloud service. Hooray for us. It’s about time!

Apparently Apple have secured a deal with the major movie studios which includes giants like Universal and Warner Bros.

Google and Amazon will also launch cloud-based services in the United Kingdom soon. It is taking longer than planned to launch cloud movie services due to heavy negotiations with the movie studios. Let’s hope they sort something out soon.

Worried about how much data you use? Swiss cloud computing company, CloudSigma, has something for you in the works: Media Services Ecosystem, an alliance of industry service providers, which will give 10Gig networking and high-performance cloud capabilities. Impressive. Nativ is among it’s first members.

CloudSigma CTO Robert Jenkins said in relation to entertainment companies having better things to do than building and running infrastructure: “For them this is not an area where they add value — it’s more a necessary evil.”

“This data is so big, even with the cloud, ingest can be slow, but once you have your rendering and editing companies all using the same cloud infrastructure you can streamline the process,”

Grant Kirkwood, CEO of Los Angeles-based Unitas Global. “We’ve reached an inflection point in the industry where the studios — which have made do with just enough compute capacity that they could keep up but now that more of their work is going digital, scaling that infrastructure is difficult and expensive,”

“With the increase of resolution from 2K to 4K being the standard, the amount of data to be rendered is through the roof. If I’m a visual effects studio, I’m going to have to render a film at 24, 25 and 30 frames per second [for TV, Blu-Ray and movie formats.] At the resulting 79 frames per second, using 4K resolution, each frame is 24 gigabytes of data.  Imagine what that means for a two-hour movie,”

By Catherine Balavage

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Lowering Costs With The Cloud

In all businesses keeping costs down is a major concern. The film industry is no exception. In an industry where it costs £30,000 just to remove a beer label with special effects, cuts have to be made somewhere. Especially as people are buying less DVDs.

How can cloud computing save money for those in the film industry?

Improves productivity

Joining the cloud massively increases productivity. You can download, upload and back up easily Your team can work together easily no matter where they are. In the cloud things don’t take days or months. They take hours.

Lowers costs

Now tasks previously undertaken by people can be done in the cloud or by a machine. This means your work force can be actually doing their job, rather than menial tasks.

It let’s you work smarter, rather than harder

Instead of taking hours to email large attachments or downloading files you can just use your cloud service.

Lack of commitment

If there is one thing people in the film industry know it’s ‘no one knows anything’. Things can change at any moment. Luckily you can just rent services from your cloud service provider.

Keep it simple stupid

Cloud computing makes everything easier in a world where everything is hard. There is no more looking for things wondering where they are and everything is one, safe, secure, place. Which brings me to my next point

Prevents loss

You can’t lose the documents or the hard drive. I have lost footage in the past and nothing is more soul-destroying.

Send Video

Sending video through the internet has always been a long and arduous task but cloud computing makes this as easy as possible.

Connection

Being able to connect from people all around the world is essential for filmmakers. The cloud makes this not only possible, but also incredibly easy.

In the film industry people like to think of themselves as artistic and not business minded, but sometimes this is at the expense of learning all about the latest in technology. This doesn’t happen with the cloud though. There is just something so new, fun and creative about it. It is like having a global office that everybody can just tap into at any time.

Anyone still on the fence regarding cloud computing should take note that Steven Spielberg’s company Dreamworks uses the linux-based Red Hat Cloud. Where Spielberg leads others are sure to follow. In fact Dreamworks made Monsters Vs Aliens with the Red Hat Cloud along with the latest 3D authoring tools.

By Catherine Balavage

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Is Ultraviolet What The Film Industry Needs?

It could be argued that the film industry is built on hope. Movies are a fantasy and millions of actors head to LA in the hope of movie stardom. Now the film industry itself has a hope: the hope of getting it’s consumers to buy films again, and this time in a more cost-effective way. Not producing DVDs and DVD cases: the film industry is going online and selling via cloud based services. It is all about the end users.

The film industry is arguing that cloud-based streaming will beat downloading, which takes up a lot of hard disc space and can take time. You can also stream to any device. Streaming also fixes one of the most annoying things about buying films: your purchase becoming obsolete when the latest technology comes out. See VHS, although Blu-ray is yet to kill off DVDs.

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Movie Cloud: Will It Democratise The Film Industry?

The first thing to really change independent film was the DSLR. Personally I have made a movie on a Canon 60D. It is a stills camera that shoots HD, cinema-quality film. The independent film route is a hard and brutal road which has practically no money in it. Or is it?

Hollywood legend Dov Simens has launched the Movie Cloud with Derek Christopher (president of TV/Film Seminars). But what is it? Simens says it will revolutionize the way independent films are produced, distributed, and consumed.

Simens and Christopher consider Hollywood to be a monopoly. Only 200 of the world’s 50,000 independent films that are made get released every year. Movie Cloud want to make sure people see the other 49,800.

Movie Cloud has three main components and 15 sub-components

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And the Cloud Computing Grammy Goes To…

Plaudits en masse for Adele, who swept last Sunday’s Grammy awards with six golden trophies — a huge honor that even your grandmother likely saw coming from fifty miles away. The prodigious vocal titan ignited an international musical movement that managed to sweep both average Joe pop lovers and obnoxious highbrows off their feet with equal adoration. She came to stand for actual God-given talent coupled with an uncanny ear for searing lyrics that zap the heart directly, and nothing but a night of receiving gong after gong could more appropriately award the now classic starlet.

In the spirit of golden winners and a return to artful craftmanship, we wanted to propose a similar scenario of laurels in the cloud computing music community. To wit: which of the innumerable cloud music apps and features out there would win an inaugural Grammy for Cloud Music Excellence?

Here are our prospective nominees:

SoundCloud Music X-Ray

Let’s be brief about it: in the frenetic pace of today’s music industry, there is no more efficient or professional way for an up-and-coming music act to reach the business’ power brokers than via this application. Music X-Ray links with a user’s SoundCloud profile to assess its tunes and automatically match them with an industry pro who might fancy the tracks.

Regardless of whether or not that pro chooses to do business with the user, she is still guaranteed written feedback; Music X-Ray has even spawned fruitful mentorships between talent and Grammy-winning contacts. This app reveals the cloud as its music best: forging connections of value within a creative community. It almost makes us wanna take up a guitar.

Artist Growth

The closest rival to Music X-Ray in terms of efficacy for actual music makers, Artist Growth aims to seriously improve how musicians are managed and pursue careers in the long term. Entrepreneurs seasoned in the storied enclaves of Nashville created the application to empower fellow musicians in maintaining their finances and, in a Madonna-like move, to keep pace with or stay ahead of the latest sound trends in the industry.

The cloud allows AG users to profit from such features as its “Action Packs,” career-creating agendas devised by successful pros, and the Indie Bible, brimming with more than 30,00 industry contacts to communicate with.

tumblecloud

The music industry can be a huge downer for a budding talent, which is why Lana Del Rey, Tyler the Creator, Theophilus London, and others are doing it for themselves. Yet no man is an island, and the most effective way to hit it big is to hone in a community of artists that sustains one’s imagination and output. Enter tumblecloud, an ingenious application that allows musicians to directly partner with artists from other disciplines, such as photographers and journalists.

To be fair, tumblecloud does not directly target the music community. Yet as a platform for “digital storytelling,” as the collabo between Gabriel Quinn and Jessica Lehrman evinces, tumblecloud cannot be trumped.

And the Winner Is….

Up to you! We’d like you readers of CloudTweaks to jockey your opinions and let us in on who’d you like to take home the first ever Cloud Grammy. Which of these applications has done for the cloud what Adele done for the music world at large?

By Jeff Norman

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