Wuala Launches P2P Online Storage Cloud

Wuala has launched a hybrid P2P social online file sharing service.

Wuala provides secure online storage and backup for all kinds of files (including photos and large videos). Accessible from anywhere at any time and easy sharing with friends, family, and co-workers. 1 GB is free of charge and additional capacity is available either by trading in your local storage of buying more from Wuala at a reasonable starting price of $25 for 10GB.

The Wuala client supports Windows, Mac and Linux. I look forward to downloading a client for the Apple iPhone on the iTunes App Store. Is this the way to the TeraPod?

On the technical side the Wuala has an interesting P2P architecture. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage.

Dominik Grolimund, the founder of the Swiss startup Caleido, discusses interesting details in this Google Tech Talk video.

Liveplace - Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered by OTOY Cloud

Mobile phones and devices can already access virtual worlds such as Second Life on 3G networks. Vollee delivers Second Life to more than 70 handhelds by rendering it on the server side. Their Second Life iPhone client is in beta.

LivePlace plans to take cloud rendering of 3D virtual worlds to a new level. TechCrunch has posted a very impressive video of LivePlace's City Space which is a Photo-Realistic 3D virtual world. The beautiful ray tracing is done on the server side or "in the cloud" and delivered to the clients via OTOY. OTOY is a 800k web plug-in that enables cinematic quality 3D rendering in a browser with compressed content streaming.

The City Space demo shows beautiful and highly realistic rendering of different environments. It looks and feels more real and immersive than Earthmine, Everyscape or Google Maps Street View.

The demo video shows real time rendering using an ATI RX 1900 GPU and live streaming to a Treo 700 at 240 kpbs. The final product is said to be even more impressive! The first comment on the demo: "this is the pinnacle of what has been dreamed of since computer modeling and rendering was begun."

TechCrunch has more details on OTOY and LightStage here including interesting interviews with Jules Urbach, the founder and CEO of OTOY.

Exaflood - Internet Video Traffic - Zettabyte by 2015

From YouTube, IPTV, and HD video, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras–to 3D games, virtual worlds – the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. The Discovery Institute estimates that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1024 bytes), or one million million billion bytes.

Video and rich media is expected to dominate IP traffic. TDP's IP Traffic Projection in the U.S. by 2015 shows:

• video calling and "virtual windows" could generate 400 exabytes
• Internet video, gaming, and virtual worlds could produce 200 exabytes
• movie downloads and P2P file sharing could be 100 exabytes
• non-Internet “IPTV” could reach 100 exabytes, and possibly much more
• business IP traffic will generate some 100 exabytes
• cloud computing and remote backup could total 50 exabytes
• other applications (phone, Web, e-mail, photos, music) could be 50 exabytes

Will this huge data traffic increase drown the Internet? No, it won't - argues Nate Anderson of ars technica.

IT in 2018: From Turing’s Machine to the Computing Cloud

How will the IT landscape look like in 2018? This is the question asked by Nicholas Carr, the author of "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google". He takes readers of this free Internet.com eBook on a trip one decade into the future to see how IT as we know it will change and what those changes mean for IT professionals, hardware and software vendors, and corporations of all sizes.

This interesting journey starts at 1936 in Cambridge where Alan Turing has invented the idea of the universal computing machine.

"With enough memory and enough speed, Turing’s work implies, a single computer could be programmed, with software code, to do all the work that is today done by all the other physical computers in the world.

And that is why the modern corporate data center, with all its complex and expensive stacks of machinery, is on the path to obsolescence."

Carr clearly explains the current hot virtualization and consolidation trend:

"Turing’s discovery that “software can always be substituted for hardware” lies at the heart of “virtualization,” which is the technology underpinning the great consolidation wave now reshaping big-company IT. As the cost of computing power and storage capacity has continued its decades-long freefall, it’s become possible to turn more and more hardware into software code – to use a single powerful computer to run many virtual machines.

All the pieces of hardware stuffed into corporate data centers – not just servers but storage drives, load balancers, firewalls, switches, and even the cables connecting the gear – exist, after all, to carry out instructions. Virtualization simply turns the hardwired instructions into code and gets rid of the physical machinery. That not only saves a lot of cash, it makes the radical automation of formerly manual IT processes possible. Once IT infrastructure turns into software, it can be programmed, easily and from afar. Code, as always, replaces labor. "

Check out his eBook to take the journey to the conclusion:

"Just as the last century’s electric utilities spurred the development of thousands of new consumer appliances and services, so the new computing utilities will shake up many markets and open myriad opportunities for innovation. Harnessing the power of the computing grid may be the great enterprise of the twenty-first century."

Inexpensive 3D Camera to Control Second Life

Mitch Kapor and Philippe Bossut are developing body language mirroring with 3D cameras. The exciting Handsfree 3D demos use a 3D camera to navigate and work in Second Life. They plan to use the camera so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression. Kapor expects that 2009 will see mass availability of inexpensive 3D cameras which could be used to control virtual worlds.

Check out the impressive innovation on the video.



The Hands Free 3D blog features more info such as:

• Price of the camera, time to market
• Applications Beyond Games
• “Hands Free” Object Editing

Facebook Leads Top Tech Startups List

Silicon Alley Insider has published the list of the World's most valuable digital startups. In the SAI 25, they value and rank some of the world's leading private digital companies.

So far, the SAI 25 ranks the world's 25 most valuable digital companies and 25 additional "Contenders." More companies are expected to be added to the list.

The current list of the most valuable technology startups and their estimated valuations:

1. Facebook - $9 billion
2. Wikipedia - $7 billion
3. Craigslist - $5 billion
4. Betfair - $5 billion
5. Mozilla Corp - $4 billion
6. Yandex - $3 billion
7. Webkinz - $2 billion
8. LinkedIn - $1.3 billion
9. Habbo - $1.25 billion
10. Oanda - $1.2 billion
11. Linden Lab - $1.1 billion
12. Kayak - $1 billion
13. QlikTech - $850 million
14. Ning - $560 million
15. Slide - $550 million
16. TheLadders - $500 million
17. Stardoll - $450 million
18. Ozon - $450 million
19. Thumbplay - $400 million
20. Glam Media - $400 million
21. Rock You - $325 million
22. Tudou - $300 million
23. Efficient Frontier - $275 million
24. Zazzle - $250 million
25. Spot Runner - $250 million

Contenders

Federated Media - $245 million
Yelp - $225 million
Meebo - $220 million
Indeed - $200 million
Zillow - $200 million
LoveFilm - $200 million
Metacafe - $200 million
Adconion - $200 million
4INFO - $175 million
Photobox - $150 million
Vibrant Media - $150 million
Gawker Media - $150 million
Mahalo - $150 million
56.com - $150 million
Youku - $125 million
Digg - $125 million
Etsy - $115 million
LinkExperts - $100 million
Powerset - $80 million
Trialpay - $80 million
Huffington Post - $75 million
Associated Content - $65 million
Live Gamer - $60 million
Twitter - $75 million
Mint - $50 million
Prosper - <$50 million

Who would you add to the list?

Google App Engine + Opensocial = Web 3.0?

Web 3.0 has been defined earlier by Eric Schmidt as applications living in the cloud that are pieced together. It is a fundamentally different application model that we have ever seen in computing before. Google App Engine is a big step towards this cloud computing vision. It lets developers run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. How does App Engine fits into the Web 3.0 world? Let us review the definition by the CEO of Google:



Take Google App Engine and OpenSocial and a couple of other APIs to get to Web 2.5. It is the beginning of The Big Switch - the coming age of information utility. They let developers focus on innovation rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT operations, such as setting up and maintaining scalable servers, databases, storage, and networks.

Google is not the first big company to offer utility computing or platform as a service (PaaS). Amazon leads the space with its successful Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). There are very interesting analysis and comparison of Google App Engine and Amazon AWS on the SmoothSpan Blog.

App Engine costs nothing to get started and there are dozens of examples to check out in the Applications Gallery.

App Engine applications are easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. The open source Scalr aims to offer similar Auto-scalability on the Amazon AWS platform.

Welcome to the cloud computing age! Let clouds do the dirty work of operations and let developers innovate.