Monthly Archive for December, 2006

VMware User Group & The Next VMworld

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on December 19, 2006
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

I attended the second VMware User Group meeting here in the Bay Area last week.

The VMware User Group meets quarterly with monthly "Chalk Talk" sessions that include a much smaller (about 20) and more interactive audience. Check out the Forums as well.

Mehrdad Amir, Sr. Systems engineer for VMware, kicked things off with a quick overview of the VMware DRS, VMware HA, and VMware Lab Manager products:

  • This stuff, when combined with VMotion, is IT candy. So sweet.
  • Certainly makes me wonder why the vast majority of organizations are still running their data center on non-virtualized infrastructures.
  • So, the good news here is that this will all change in the next 5 years, as the underlying virtualization infrastructure becomes commoditized, and even starts coming "in the box".
  • I especially appreciated hearing about the success of the VMware Lab Manager product. I was/am an advisor and an investor in Akimbi, the company that was acquired by VMware, and it is their Slingshot application that is now branded as VMware Lab Manager.
  • Finally, the VMware Consolidated Backup product was discussed, which allows for server-less backups to be done, directly within the SAN, and without the need for SAN-based snapshots. Very cool.

It was also announced that the next VMworld conference will be in September 2007 and will be held somewhere in San Francisco, likely at the Moscone Center.

Faan DeSwardt, Director of Enterprise Architecture for Wyse Technology, talked about their success with server consolidation using these VMware products:

  • Getting a 15:1 ratio: 15 physical servers consolidate down to 1 physical server
  • The server reduction allowed for fewer network switches, reduced cooling, fewer UPS, reduced power consumption
  • Also achieved greater reliability, availability, and load balancing using VMotion
  • Reduced complexity achieved by using just 3 standard VM images instead of 30+ Ghost images, which greatly reduced the amount of time it takes to keep these reference builds up-to-date with Microsoft security patches
  • Estimated a direct $265K reduction in CAPEX and $20K/year saving in OPEX

Frank Arroyo, Account Services Account Manager for PG&E, presented an overview of the PG&E Virtualization Incentive Program:

  • Basically, if you can show a reduction in servers through the use of virtualization technologies, PG&E will give you a one-time CASH incentive to put the virtualization in-place within your data center
  • You will need to decommission the old servers (this is about power reduction, after all)
  • Example cited: One customer consolidated 92 server down to 8 and received a $22,586 check as their incentive
  • Based on typical power use of servers, incentives can range from $150 to $300 per server removed through a virtualization project. Incentives are capped at 50% of the total project cost, or $4.0M, whichever is less.
  • Not really appropriate for startups, as the incentives only work if you are removing servers.
  • This is unfortunate, as startups should receive an incentive to put a virtualized infrastructure in-place before they get big! Is VMware (or their competitors) listening?

I hope to see you all at the next VMware User Group meeting!

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Photo Sharing Sites Go Unlimited

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on December 19, 2006
in Personal, Photography and Startups
. 2 Comments

Say "Cheese"!

I’ve been watching the digital media sharing market pretty closely of late. In today’s post, we look at a few photo sharing sites. I’m currently building a business plan about serving the user base of the major photo sharing sites. There, I’ve said it! And, hence, the reason for fewer and fewer posts to this blog.

What has been catching my eye is the plethora of photo sharing sites that are now starting to offer free (or nearly free) photo storage, sharing, and serving. Even for your highest-resolution pictures. Digital photography has taken the world by storm, and digital video is right behind it. These markets are growing quickly.

The Flickr Blog recently announced the new unlimited uploads being offered to Flickr Pro customers (Pro accounts cost a mere $24.95/year):

And it’s even better to give the gift of Flickr since now your recipients will get unlimited uploads — the two gigabyte monthly limit is no more (yep, pro users have no limits on how many photos they can upload)! At the same time, we’ve upped the limit for free account members as well, from 20MB per month up to 100MB (yep, five times more)!

Flickr is a great site for photographers. I gladly pay the $25/year to subscribe. They are my preferred photo sharing site right now.

Yahoo! Photos is a 100% FREE service that allows you to upload an unlimited number of photos to the site. There are some constraints, like that you can only have 300 photos in a single "album", and the do ask you to use their photo printing service once in a while. But, they don’t force you to do so.

Note that Yahoo! also owns Flickr. So, if you’re looking for FREE or very cheap photo sharing, you should be looking to Yahoo!

The Kodak EasyShare Gallery is also a FREE photo sharing site that allows for unlimited, high-resolutionn photo storage. There is one catch, however. Unlike Yahoo! Photos, Kodak EasyShare Gallery does require you to use their photo printing service, else they will start deleting your precious memories. Not a big deal, really. They just ask that you make a purchase once every 12 months. Seems reasonable. And, a single 4×6 photo is currently just $0.15, so it’s not going to break the bank to order a print each year. Basically FREE.

Are there other services that are FREE, or less than $36/year, which allow you to store an unlimited number of photos (or videos!) in their full and original high-resolution format?

 Please add to the comments!

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More VC Support for User Reviews 2.0

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on December 16, 2006
in Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

Back in August, I wrote an article (Entrepreneurs Need To Drink…) about how painful and time consuming it was to find a coffee maker that matched my needs. I ended that article with this note:

Venture Capital Note: The process of finding and reading user-generated product reviews is really painful and time consuming. Nobody has found a way to build a great social networking site around reviews which attract, rate, build a reviewer’s reputation, and rewards them for their contributions. Or, a site that aggregates the reviews of the hundreds of shopping sites with proprietary review engines.

I noticed today that Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital has come to the same conclusion, with examples around planning travel or finding the right Italian restaurant that is kid-appropriate:

For example, I’m planning a vacation in March. This morning I spent a bunch of time going through TripAdvisor. But I’m not sure that the people on the site have the same requirements as I do. Does John Doe want to spend as much or as little as I’m prepared to spend. Does John Doe have three young kids? etc etc. So when they say a resort is "wonderful" there isn’t any context for me.

Bijan’s article, User Reviews 2.0, does a nice job expanding on my points. We feel each other’s pain.

So, where’s that next great review site?

The company that can figure out how to do this right and make it 10x easier than it is today will have enormous opportunities for revenue generation and value creation. They will have my business and the business of millions of other consumers.

Also, be sure to read BijanBlog. High quality and entertaining posts put it in the list of feeds that I read daily. I like that he talks about his kids (who are off-the-charts cute) on his blog.

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Are You The Pack Leader?

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on December 14, 2006
in Books, Personal and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

If you have a dog in your house, or if you have friends or family members that have dogs, or if you come across dogs in your work, then you should know about Cesar Millan.

Cesar is a true entrepreneur.

He was born and raised in Mexico, came to America and bootstrapped his own business for training and rehabilitating dogs in Los Angeles at his Dog Psychology Center. His clientele grew to include celebrities with troubled canines (or was it really troubled celebrities?), and he eventually caught the attention of the folks in TV (we are talking about Hollywood, after all, very near the place that I grew up!).

The National Geographic Channel picked him up in 2004 and ran a series of Cesar doing what he does best. Cesar rehabilitates dogs and trains people. He is The Dog Whisperer.

I only learned about the show a couple months ago. And… The show is great!

I’ve had dogs in my home for most of my life. I learned a ton of what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong by watching the show. You should watch it too! Here’s the blog.

Malcolm Gladwell, of Tipping Point and Blink fame, wrote a great piece for New Yorker magazine on Cesar titled What the Dog Saw. Then followed up with this blog article, which got a lot of great discussion.

The New York Times follows up with an Op-Ed piece written by Mark Derr. Apparently, Mr. Derr is not a fan of Cesar’s approach of being the Pack Leader (being "calm and assertive" with your pet; treating it as a dog expects to be treated and not like it is a human baby) and closes with the following point:

Veterinary behaviorists, having found that many aggressive dogs suffer from low levels of serotonin, have had success in treating such dogs with fluoxetine (the drug better known as Prozac).

Yeah. Drugs will solve the problem! Give me a break. I don’t think Mr. Derr has actually watched the show. I’m amazed that the New York Times even ran this. Well, if you read the bio for Mr. Derr, you see that he is pushing a book and chooses to do it by creating conflict-generated buzz. Thanks, but I’ll pass on the book, Mr. Derr.

However, if you want to check out Cesar’s stuff on Amazon, try:

       

Being the Pack Leader of your startup is a whole different matter. Do not try these techniques on your software developers.

Happy Holidays!

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Body Worlds 2

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on December 14, 2006
in Personal and Technology
. 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Boston and had the good fortune of attending the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science. I would have to say that it was perhaps the most fascinating science museum exhibit that I have ever enjoyed. Highly recommended. If it comes to your town - go see it!

From the Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds 2: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies Press Release: "BODY WORLDS 2 features more than 200 real human body specimens, including 20 whole body specimens, which effectively demonstrate the relationship between healthy lifestyles and healthy bodies. Guests can compare smokers’ and non-smokers’ lungs as well as healthy and diseased hearts. Close-up studies of health ailments, depicted in the exhibition, provide viewers an opportunity to reevaluate their lifestyles and consider more healthful habits."

The plastination process allows for these actual human body donations to be preserved in a way that is simply magical.

The exhibit combines the best of Art, Science, and Learning.

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Kernel-based Virtual Machine hits Linux

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on December 14, 2006
in Mac OS X, Open Source, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 2 Comments

Many congratulations to my good friend Moshe Bar and his team over at (stealth-mode startup) Qumranet. Techworld reports that the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project has been accepted into the 2.6.20 version of the Linux kernel distribution.

KVM is an Open Source kernel driver that basically allows a Linux kernel to host virtual machines, as plain old Linux processes, that can run Linux or Windows (or other x86-based operating systems). It runs only on hardware that support Intel’s VT instruction set (which is fine) and will soon support the AMD-V instruction set as well.

This is cool for a number of reasons.

  • It’s Open Source, released under the GPL.
  • It basically turns the Linux that we all know and love into a "hypervisor".
  • Linux-as-hypervisor makes sense because Linux already knows how to manage devices, memory, processes, multi-cores, etc.
  • VMware ESX is, essentially, a "hypervisor" - a small kernel, built on Linux as it turns out, that boots to load other guest operating systems in protected space. Could Linux + KVM be a credible threat to VMware ESX? Perhaps, someday. But the KVM team has a ton of work to do to get there.
  • Yet another confirmation that out-of-the-box virtualization is being completely commoditized.
  • Xen is an external hypervisor which lives outside of (below) the Linux kernel. At present, I am a bigger fan of hypervisors that live within a commercial operating system (like Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X), rather than below it (like Xen).

For more information, check out the KVM Whitepaper. It is well written and explains the differences between the Xen approach and theirs. Also check out the KVM Sourceforge Project page.

The KVM team has done a very nice job, and I really like the architectural approach, but they have a long way to go:

  • Fraser Campbell reports that KVM was "decided slow" when he tried it.
  • Currently only supports uniprocessor guest operating systems.
  • The Linux commit of the project included the following comment: "Performance currently is non-stellar due to the naive implementation of the mmu virtualization, which throws away most of the shadow page table entries every context switch." Not good. Workarounds for this included waiting for new releases of Intel and AMD processors that supported nested page tables. That would be a 3+ year wait for a new processor spin to end up in the hands of paying customers.
  • Of course, none of this matters in the enterprise if you cannot manage it… Hmm. I wonder where Qumranet will fit?

Unfortunately, the "KVM" acronym is a horrible one. It makes me, and likely every other datacenter person, think of "Keyboard Video Mouse".

Qumranet has received VC funding from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

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Adobe Contribute 4 Review

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on December 7, 2006
in Blogging, Mac OS X and Software
. 5 Comments

I completed my free 30-day trial of Adobe Contribute 4 in November.

I’m a blogger, not a serious web designer.

For me, as a blogger, I found Adobe Contribute to not quite be there yet. I will not be spending $149 to buy this as a blog editor (way over-priced for the blogging marketplace). I would like to see Adobe come up with a special edition which is really focused on being the best blog editor on the planet, at a very low price point. I think they would find a large and growing market for such a piece of software. Adobe Contribute can do it, but not in its present form. The blogging support felt more like an add-on to an already-existing product. I would be happy to be a beta customer for a true blogger-focused offering.

Here are the rough notes I took while kicking the tires on Adobe Contribute:

  • Crash == Lose Article!
    While writing my first large article, Adobe Contribute 4 crashed on me (I’m on a Mac), losing all of my hard work. Not nice. As a result, I’ve learned to save the document after every paragraph. I don’t want that to happen again. I would expect a publishing tool priced at $149 to save my document while I type and not lose data during an application or operating system crash.
  • The WYSIWYG editing is both too good and not good enough.
    The editing window is designed to look like how the article will look when it is actually on the blog. As a result, you get a giant screen filled with static blog junk all around it, which limits the working area for the article itself. That’s not really how writers want to write. Why can’t I turn off that part of the WYSIWYG and just have a box for the article that is WYSIWYG?
  • Formatting is unnecessarily restricted.
    I can’t center a paragraph, for example, so it makes it impossible to center a picture on the page. I think this is some limitation or bug with how Contribute interprets the CSS of my blog template (I use Wordpress). Still, it’s pretty annoying.
  • Where’s my cursor?
    At least on the Mac, I frequently cannot find my cursor, or the cursor is shown as being one space away from a character, but pressing Delete will erase the character instead of the space that was shown. Very annoying.
  • Multiple categories not supported for an article.
    I’m not sure that Contribute has full support for the MetaWebLog API. You could only specify a single category for a post. What? So, I had to edit each article in Wordpress after submitting it. Also, there’s no way to enter in Trackbacks to ping. What?
  • Bullets don’t look right.
    Could be another CSS interpretation problem, but my bullets have bad formatting while entering text, but appear correctly on the blog.
  • Spell-check is not performed automatically while I type.
    I have to ask for the spell-check to happen before I publish. That’s just another step in the workflow that I shouldn’t have to remember to do (and would often forget). Make it automatic with the squiggly red line under misspelled words, please. For $149, I completely expect this.
  • Insert Link or Image often fails with nasty error message.
    I start every article by inserting an image. After inserting the image, I would no longer be able to enter in a Link (anchor). I would receive a nasty "region" error message, implying that I was tring to edit something in the static part of the page. The workaround was to save the article and reload it.
  • Trackback support weak or completely absent.
    Trackbacks should be figured out automatically in the background, based on the links that I enter into my article. This would be a killer addition to the product for bloggers. The tool should determine the trackback address to use for each article that I link to.
  • Safari integration lacking.
    On the Mac, Contribute only support Firefox 1.5. I couldn’t get the toolbar support to work on Firefox 2.0 or on Safari.
  • Problems connecting with one of my wordpress.com blogs.
    I’ve got a test blog on wordpress.com that is separate from this blog. Contribute could not connect to it because I use a different user-id to edit that blog. Contribute expectes the user-id to match the name of the blog, or something silly like that.
  • Wrong installation path.
    Contribute installed into "/", rather than "/Applications" folder. I think I figured out that the Contribute installer application was different enough from the typical installer applications that, strictly speaking, this was my fault. However, I think Contribute should follow installer prompts in a way that follows the norm.
  • Adding an Image by dragging?
    I was never able to add an image by dragging it directly into the article. Furthermore, I could not add an image to an article by browsing to the page and selecting it. Contribute only allowed me to add images from my local hard disk. I.e., it was not nearly as helpful as it could have been for image management.
  • Setting publish date for the blog article?
    I found no way to set or change the date of an article.
  • Publish from Microsoft Office capability is Windows only.
    Why? I’ve got Microsoft Office on my Mac, too…
  • Integrates with NetNewsWire!
    I was pleased to find that Contribute integrates with NetNewsWire. However, the integration was pretty simple and I didn’t like the format of the articles/links that were chosen.
  • ##TITLE## with ##CONTENT## added as an entry to my RSS feed
    When i did my first post, there was a phantom entry made that ended up in my RSS feed, but not on the website itself. I have no idea why.
  • Can’t insert a bitmap "bmp" image?
    Contribute does not appear to be able to handl .bmp images. That’s unfortunate, and required me to convert the images manually.
  • Not a Mac Universal application at present
    That didn’t bother me, since I’m on a Power Mac, but for $149, it should be Universal by this time.
  • Firefox extension did not work with FireFox 2, and crashed Firefox 1.5.
  • How do I edit raw HTML?
    I could not find any way to edit the raw HTML that was being generated. I sometimes need to do that to properly embed videos or other media.
  • Trackback URL is NOT a list of Trackback URLs that you should notify of your post!
    Apparently, their use of Trackback URL is just to specify where other should trackback to this particular article. I leave that up to the Wordpress application, so I’m not sure why they exposed that field, but neglected to expose the list of trackbacks that you’d like this article to ping.

On the plus side, I did like the auto-resizing of images.

Contribute is a nice piece of software, but I just don’t see it being a match for the blogger community yet. Hopefully Adobe will take another crack at it, and fully embrae the Mac audience, which sorely needs a professional-grade blogging tool.

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