Articles in “February 2010” from Datamation Blog

destigmatize girls doing this. Barbie is a great first step.

This recent article about emerging virtualization companies reveals that there are scads of deep-pocketed equity groups eager to invest. Clearly, VMWare's rocketship success demonstrated that there's gold in them virtual hills.  

Find the right company, invest when they're needy, and turn that slender dollar in your pocket into a whole fist full of dollars. It's magic. (Or, it is when you pick the right startup...) 

As reported by Jeff Vance for Datamation, some of the biggest harvesters of VC bucks among the 10 virtualization startups are: 

Crossbeam Systems: approximately $100 million from Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Tudor Ventures. 

ScaleMP: $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, TL Ventures and ABS Ventures.

Zenoss: $20 million from Grotech Ventures, Intersouth Partners, Boulder Ventures, Amplifier and Silicon Valley Bank.

RingCube Technologies: $16 million from New Enterprise Associates and Mohr-Davidow Ventures.

The investments appear spread across a number of sub-sectors within virtualization. Crossbeam, Synscort and HyTrust, for instance, focus on security, while RingCube targets the expanding world of desktop virtualization. ScaleMP aggregates groups of x86 systems into one pool -- sometimes called a 'private cloud,' while Virsto is eyeing the virtual storage market. 

Which one will turn into the next VMware? 

Obviously hard to say, but two tactics will probably distinguish the winners: 1) They'll go after the SMB market, which is vast and has been slow to hop on the virtualization train, so there are still easy pickings, and 2) They'll make their services as clear and understandable as possible. Yes, they're selling to a sophisticated IT staff, but I've read and heard from more than one source that the complexity in the cloud/virtualization concept really slows down the sales pitch. 

Good luck, and may the hungriest startup win. 

Since it's 2010, the future was supposed to be here by now. Years ago, we were promised jet packs and moon colonies by now (Look Ma, no gravity). Instead, most people still use landline phones. We get around town thanks to old fashioned petroleum products.

There is, however, one area that's living up to the Future Shock hype: the ever-expanding capabilities of smartphones. Still in their infancy, it doesn't take much imagination to see them as all-powerful tiny supercomputers. 

How long will it be before IT managers and other techies are running datacenters using their pocket device? 

I've already heard talk of tech managers doing this to a very limited extent. I've also heard the idea dismissed as a minor form of lunacy. Granted, the problems start with security and get hairier from there. 

Yet Citrix, in partnership with mobile virtualization software vendor Open Kernel Labs, is pushing the Nirvana Phone. The futuristically named phone aims to make your lowly handheld into a full-fledged thin client. (Here's a YouTube video demo of the thin client idea.) 

Extend the idea far enough -- and add more competition from more vendors, which is surely coming -- and it's clear that smartphones are just about ready to rule the world. 

Citrix imagines the Nirvana Phone as extending the enterprise virtualization platform out to mobile devices. As smartphones continue to bulk up, your muscular Blackberry (or iPhone or Andriod) could tap into virtualized apps or virtual desktops. Plug it into a full-sized monitor and -- voila! -- you'll see your data infrastructure in vivid color. 

At this point, Citrix Reciever, which is mobile client software, streams apps and virtual PCs to smart phones via its ICA or HDX protocols. The effort is to be platform agnostic. So don't get concerned that some staffers run Andriod and some run Windows Mobile. 

Citrix brags: "As long as employees have Citrix Receiver installed, IT no longer has to worry about whether they are delivering to a PC in the office, a Mac at home, or an iPhone on the road." 

An iPhone on the road? I thought enterprise IT departments were horrified at the thought of iPhones interacting with corporate firewalls. 

But that worry is so 2009. Now in 2010, the future is here. Your data center is (almost) in your pocket.  

Interesting story in the New York Times about a Chinese hacker who really knows what he's doing. Code-named Majia, he's a solitary fellow in his early 20s who lives with his parents. Working out of his tiny bedroom, armed with just a PC and a high speed connection in his tiny bedroom, he's dangerous:  

"As he explains it, an online "trapdoor" he created just over a week ago has already lured 2,000 people from China and overseas -- people who clicked on something they should not have, inadvertently spreading a virus that allows him to take control of their computers and steal bank account passwords." 

He wouldn't say how much he's pocketed, but it's likely a substantial amount. He's part of a larger community of Chinese hackers that have earned major bragging rights in the underworld. 

Here's the chilling part: 

"Three weeks ago, Google blamed hackers that it connected to China for a series of sophisticated attacks that led to the theft of the company's valuable source code." 

Huh? A bunch of freelancer hackers...penetrated Google? Yes, in fact, they not only hacked in, they actually stole the crown jewels -- company source code. 

That's disconcerting because Google knows Web security better than anyone, don't they? Google, for goodness sake, is Google -- it's the galaxy's leading Internet company. 

I mean, c'mon, if you had a choice of being protected by a Web security team from one of the following entities, which would you pick? 

1) The U.S. Government

2) The average large corporation

3) Google

Personally, I'd pick Google. (Which brings up another worry. If Google was hacked, and its engineers are savvier than the government's, what about the safety of federal agencies?) 

So big 'ol Google, the Web's 500-pound gorilla, was humiliated by a bunch of self-funded black hatters, some of whom might have been operating from their parents' apartments. Amazing. 

(I guess if you were a conspiracy theorist you'd say they weren't self-funded - they had major help from the Chinese government. And the fact that the Gmail accounts of human rights activists were also hacked supports this - what garden variety hacker huffs and puffs to break into the the email of human right activists?) 

Majia and those like him are hackers but they're not slackers. He constantly studies cyber techniques, trades information, and -- here's the key part -- he can write code. 

"Most hackers are lazy," he says..."Only a few of us can actually write code. That's the hard part." In sum, this guy is a pro. A pro for the dark side, but a pro nonetheless. 

How many thousands (or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of talented hackers are there like Majia? Ultimately, who's going to win the war of Internet security, us or them? I'm hoping for us. In the mean time, please check your firewall. 

Yes, Bill Gates is on Twitter. The planet's richest man, the iconic software mogul who so powerfully shaped modern computing, is posting his thoughts in 140-character chunks. 

Twitter users are likely expecting some trenchant quips about tech from Gates. But in fact he posts mainly about his extensive charitable work. Indeed, technology is a subject he apparently wants to avoid on Twitter. 

For instance, on January 27, as the technorati breathlessly awaited Apple's iPad announcement -- clearly the biggest tech news that day -- Gate was otherwise occupied: 

"Great meeting w German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Again encouraged by what a stong and enlightened leader she is on intl development." 

(iPad, Schmi-Pad, who needs a puny tablet when you're chatting with world leaders?)  

What's most interesting about what is ultimately a rather bland Twitter presence is who Gates follows. Although he has 400,000 followers (growing by the hour) he deigns to follow a mere 43 Tweet streams. 

Being followed by BIll Gates is like being the ultimate Cool Kid in Technology High School. Actually, it's better than that. Given that he's a gold-plated power player, a historical figure of hefty proportion, earning "following" status is akin to semi-immortality. It's like a gaze from the Pharoh, a nod from the Sun King. You're a serious somebody. 

Few -- very few -- individuals earn this honor. The majority of his followees are groups or organizations; MalariaNoMore, fighthunger, UNICEF, Rotary International. Probably the hippest name is the Sundance Festival. Is the Windows mogul an indie film fan?

Then there's a range of high profile publications: the Economist, the New York Times, Time. Nothing too surprising there. 

Interestingly, he follows the decidedly left-leaning Huffington Post. And there's no corresponding right-leaning publication, no Fox News. Hmmm...Is Bill a leftie? 

Okay, what about the people? Out of the 43 followees only 15 are individuals, and one of them is Barack Obama, which is actually a PR outlet for the president. (I'm assuming Obama never plucks out a Tweet himself -- I sure hope not, with everything he has on his plate.) 

Among the very few individuals on Gates's list: Ryan Seacrest. Odd, isn't it? In the annals of pop culture, the pairing of the sofware titan and the hair-gelled emcee is clearly one of the strangest. (Typical Seacrest post: "britney just ran by with an entourage of 100...") But Gates reached out to Seacrest due to his charity work for Haiti. 

Even odder celebrity choices: Ashton Kutcher, who's most famous for having 4.4 million followers; and Ashley Tisdale, the lightweight pop star of the Disney channel, who's famous for, well, whatever tween-set stars are famous for. (Sample Tweet: "making a yummy breakfast!!!"). It's unclear why Gates would follow her. At the very least I hope she's a Windows 7 user. 

There's a fellow mogul, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, an envivonmental entreprenuer, Vinod Khosla, and a professor of global health, Hans Rosling. Impressively, Gates follows Nick Kistof, the New York Times columnist who so eloquently chronicles global humanitarian issues. 

Yet here's the intriguing part. Who in the world of technology is Gates following? That's what counts. His charity picks are well meaning, his celebs choices are -- sorry Mr. Gates -- pretty dorky. 

But which tech pundits does this visionary use his invaluable time to follow? The hallowed list is a scant three names long: 

Steven Levy, Ina Fried, and Kara Swisher. 

Interesting picks. Steven Levy, in Wired, turns out some of the most insightful tech journalism, and does it with a literary flair; Ina Fried, on CNET and NPR, covers Microsoft exhaustively, and arguably with a more positive bent than renowned Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley; and Kara Swisher, of the Wall Street Journal, whose lively BoomTown blog monitors -- and holds sway in -- the very vortex of tech. 

To each of you, congratulations. I suggest you ask for a raise, or at the very least add your status to your resume. 

Oh, and you are running Windows 7, aren't you?