Kaiyzen Group

Haven’t posted here in a while.  It’s been a hectic last couple of months.

Back in February I put in my notice at my job of 4+ years and finished up at the end of the month.  The main goal of this life change is to work on my own projects and step up my coverage and involvement in the technology scene.

I have joined the Silicon Angle group and will be pushing the majority of my tech coverage out through their property, I am also looking into a couple other ops for my coverage as well.  Silicon Angle is a great org covering social media, intrastruture 2.0 and startup/company news.  Things are off to a great start and I have been able to cover some good cloud computing related events as well as the big Cable industry show in D.C. and recently Ad Tech-Sf.

The projects I have been putting together and will be pushing out a bit later are still under wraps but I will be dropping all updates on those here on the site…, some exciting stuff that has been brewing for quite some time, it will be awesome to finally get to talk more about them.

Not from a design perspective, but from an end to end solution perspective.

Lost of noise today around Cisco entering the server market, some here and here.

Just as Apple loves to own the end to end experience by making specific hardware to fit their design needs while powering their software they pride themselves on writing and bundling with their devices.

This approach is a tough one, but very fruitful if you can pull it off.  By entering the server market Cisco moves closer to owning the end to end “experience” of data, services and applications moving around the worlds pipes and datacenters.

Cisco dominates the high end router/switch market.  By optimizing their network gear to run extra efficient with their server gear that is a pretty nice value proposition for groups looking for plug-and-play capabilities.  You basically end up with a bunch of hubs and pipes that move the data and apps around to virtualized containers sitting in the servers/nodes.

My big question is how will all of this fit into their living room strategy?

Bit of a delay on this one.., still nursing my CES hangover and haven’t been writing too much.

I covered some MS stuff while at the show and posted a write up over at GigaOm’s NewTeeVee site.

The title is a bit dramatic after going through one of their editors, but basically Microsoft is really kind of silently mounting a solid standing in the living room by battling on two fronts, one direct to consumers with Xbox, the other via the service providers and Mediaroom.

More cloud computing news involving Microsoft today via The Register.

At a partner event in London Mr. Ballmer mentioned that at the Professional Developers Conference Microsoft will announce a new OS dubbed “Windows Cloud”.

Ballmer metioned that this is just a working title and that the OS will have an actual name, hopefully one that doesnt have the word cloud in it.  Ballmer hints at geographic based replication and edge style computing will be built into the OS and that it will be one of the unique features that the new OS will provide developers.

This news is on the heals of the announcement from Amazon earlier today announcing that AWS will support Windows images and SQL Server on EC2.  This is all definite evidence that Microsoft’s software + services vision driven by Mr Ozzie will be taking shape over the next 12 months.  Be on the look out also for some big announcements from Microsofts data center team as they have been working away for the past couple years on building out ~$4/5 billion dollars worth of new facilities world wide.

Netflix with two big announcements and launches today.., first they are going to start streaming video from Starz.  This is a pretty significant deal as if it is successfull Netflix could be a few strategic moves away from becoming the ultimate ondemand provider.  They already have other providers in CBS and Disney and cut a deal with LG to support Netflix streaming to a new up and coming LG Blu Ray player.

Second, and a piece of news I am enjoying more is that they have opened up their system with a new API and the launch of their developer site.  This is great for any service based around entertainment whether it be TV or movies.  This should provide for some nice passive traffic and audience gains and in the longrun make it a good datasource competitor to IMDB.

Apple makes great designed products and people love them for it.  Does this mean that Jobs and co should be able to just boss whomever they want around when it comes to digital media sales?

TimeOnline is running a story about Apple threatening to close down iTunes if the royalty rates are increased for digital download from 9 cents a piece to 15 cents.

This is quite a large percentage increase but if Apple wants to complain about things and threaten closure they should disclose exactly what the cost/profit structure is on their side.

If all is said and done Apple is only making 7/8 cents per song and this royalty hike is going to kill pretty much 100% of their margin, then yes, they should be complaining and trying to nock a couple cents off it.

If Apples expenses are 60/70 or even 80 cents all said done.., or god forbid less.., they should shut the hell up and eat it.  7 cents time the next billion downloads is a chunck of change to could go to more iPod billboards around the world but threatening to close down b/c of it is just them throwing another temper tantrim.

CBS has been running into some issues regarding their CBSEyeMobile site.

This is a user generated news content site driven by an iPhone application that they released.

AdMob who was running the ads for the mobile app released a statement (from AdAge):


Jason Spero, VP-Marketing, AdMob, in a statement said: “CBS notified AdMob of an inappropriate piece of content on this application and we worked with CBS to immediately remove all ads from this application until it is fixed. AdMob has a clear and consistent policy against running ads on mobile sites or applications with inappropriate content. CBS has clear guidelines around user generated content and immediately removed the content and banned the user that uploaded it from any future use of the application.”


Also mentioned in the story is another sighting of Google using AdMob to push its services.., mostly mobile search.

This is a perfect example of why user generated content can be dangerous and all users in the general public cannot fully be trusted especially when you have a time trusted news brand of CBS.