Prime-time TV moves to the web!
Just read this article on TelephonyOnline. The new news here is that people watch streaming video on the web between 7 - 10 PM. That is very significant for TV. I believe that the access to broadband and improvements in quality and availability of content has finally tipped users to viewing video the web. Some interesting data the article quotes from the Sandvine report, the key source for this article:

Real-time entertainment traffic – including video and audio streaming and Flash media mainly – accounted for 26.6 percent of total traffic, up from 12.6 percent the previous year. That percentage grew to 32.8 percent during peak evening hours. WOW!

Meanwhile, peer-to-peer traffic fell from a 32% share of all aggregate traffic in Sandvine’s 2008 survey, to 20 percent in 2009.

Another industry being re-invented by the internet!

Units of Measurement for Storage in the Cloud
I strongly believe that a key ingredient in our effort to achieve true utility computing is the adoption of simple and standard units of measurement. In general, all commodities are bought and sold in easy to measure units - kilograms (or pounds), liters (or gallons) of milk, barrels of oil, etc. A unit of any commodity is easily understood and measured. We must develop simple units for all cloud computing services. I will try and propose units of measurement for the various cloud services.

A good place to start is Storage as, I believe, it is one of the simplest to measure. Most of the pricing for cloud storage is in the GB of storage used by data at rest and a few other metrics. For example, one of the most popular service, Amazon S3, is measured and sold in GB of storage, amount data transfer and number of requests. At the face of it, these seem reasonable. However, it is very hard to budget for storage if you have to estimate the number of requests you will make. The number of requests is determined by the application you develop, and applications change with time. The units for S3 storage are not application agnostic and thus their service is not that of a real commodity. We do not expect the price of flour to change based on the fact that it is used to make muffins instead of bread!

I believe that better and simpler measures would be:
- Size of storage used at rest (GB)
- Amount of data transferred - read and write - (GB)

The definition of the service should specify: Security, Availability and Minimum Transfer Rate (GB/s) that the vendor will guarantee. The S3 SLA includes nothing on Transfer Rate or Security.

Further, the industry must develop a standard interface for storage. This will allow customers to easily move applications from one provider to another.

I will love to get your feedback on what I am proposing. Please take a moment to leave a comment.

Interesting Stats ...

How do Innovators Think?
Interesting blog-post on HBR. Key takeaway:

You might summarize all of the skills we've noted in one word: "inquisitiveness." I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. It's the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children.

In addition, makes life interesting!