The Cloud and The Consumer

Have questions about the actual importance of this “cloud” everybody has been talking about it? Well, Jérôme Lecat stopped by VentureBeat for a guest post to delve into just what is so important about the cloud. In his words, “who’s driving the real cloud revolution? It’s the consumers, stupid.”

He continues, “a few years ago, when someone would store his photos on Picasa, he would say, ‘I am using this website to store my photos,’ or ‘I put my photos on the Internet.’ Now he would say, ‘I store my photos in the cloud.’ What’s the difference ? In most cases, none. In consumer language, the word ‘cloud’ has replaced ‘Internet’ or ‘web’ — it is just more trendy!”

Lecat goes on to make some rather cogent points about our relationship with the cloud, beyond the tech speak, and his guest post is well worth the read. See the rest here.

Tags: Cloud, Cloud computing, Jérôme Lecat, United States, VentureBeat

Fif-TECH-teen: Skateboarding Is All In The Details

This week’s column is about one of my favorite activities, skateboarding! Yes, skateboarding. There is technology there too!

Standard skateboard decks are constructed with six to seven-ply cross-laminated Canadian maple wood. However, recent high tech decks have completely revolutionized the skateboarding industry with their innovative construction. For example, P2 (Pro-2 technology) is now used in four of the industry’s main companies: Plan B, Zero, Flip and Creature. The P2 construction consists of  six-ply maple wood, plus the introduction of a thin layer of Kevlar, which enhances the deck’s natural performance, improving its pop (pop off the ground, to jump higher). This also strengthens the construction, adding to the board’s life, as it is less likely to snap on more advanced tricks. P2 decks are also thinner and lighter than the more “traditional” 7-ply wood decks, which as Apple has shown us, makes all things better.

Meanwhile, Almost, another American company, came up with their very own high tech skateboard deck called Über Light. This construction was created by Rodney Mullen, Almost team rider and skateboarding legend. Über Light is a 7-ply Resin deck that contains a carbon fiber layer with a foam inner core, which gives the board more strength, lightness and rigidness compared to a regular wooden deck. When Almost first started making the decks, they only made 500, which were called Über Experimental and given to team riders. The decks were a huge success and now are one of the most popular and most demanded decks on the market.

There are now a lot of decks made of diverse material on the market, from bamboo (a stronger, quicker growing, more sustainable wood source) to other man-made materials such as Kevlar and Carbon Fiber. Most companies have there own deck technology and always try to outsmart each other with new innovations.

Moving from the deck to the trucks (see figure), companies have been innovating with the goal of creating lighter skateboards. Standard skateboard trucks are made of aluminium alloy, but recently Theeve Truck Co. released three pairs of trucks called  “TiAx,”  “TiH,” and “TiKing,” where the Ti in each stand for Titanium and the latter part of each for a piece of the truck (again, see figure). Thus, “TiAx” means the two axles are titanium, “TiKing” means the kingpin is titanium, and “TiH” means the hanger is titanium. These titanium pieces make these trucks the most durable, lightest and most expensive trucks on the market.

Now to wheels and bearings. Most skateboard wheels are made from polyurethane and come in different sizes to suite your style of skateboarding. Skateboard wheel companies have found different formulas to suit different styles of skateboarding. For example, Bones Wheels has different formulas for both street skating and transition skateboarding (skate parks). For street skating, most people prefer a smaller wheel made from a harder compound, and for skate park skating, most people prefer a bigger wheel made from a softer compound to grip to the surface. All of these styles are designed to resist flat spotting (where one side of a wheel gets a flat spot, from sliding). The coolest wheel is made by Pig, and has air pockets inside to reduce weight.

Traditionally wheel bearings were made from steel, but now we have a few more options available to us such as Swiss steel (higher grade of steel), Titanium or Ceramic, all of which dissipate heat better and are more durable. In theory, these should last a lot longer compared to standard steel bearings.

So, as  you can see, there is innovation even in the smallest nuts and bolts of the skateboarding industry. These question then is, if there is so much innovation in something that seems so simple (a piece of wood with wheels), why then do so many other industries ignore the benefits of sweating the details? That, perhaps, is a question for another time…

You can read Fif-TECH-teen weekly right here on Tattletech. You can also follow Sean on Twitter @sean_edwards1.

Tags: Boarding, Business, Fingerboard, Kevlar, Rodney Mullen, Skateboard, Sport, United States

Le Web, Meet Le Foodie

Foodie.fm, the website and application that presents you with tailored recommendations for tasty recipes and groceries, and helps you shop for them locally, yesterday announced Le Foodie, a new service specifically for attendants of Le Web Paris 11. Le Web, which takes place this December and boasts the title of Europe’s #1 Tech Event, may now be Europe’s #1 Food Event.

Le Foodie will function as an online concierge service on Twitter, providing real-time answers for all questions related to localculinary interests. Attendees of Le Web will be able to get recommendations for culinary venues and adventures tailored to their specific needs and experience. Local insight will be provided by current Parisian Lindsey Tramuta, of the food blog, Lost in Cheeseland.

Le Foodie is live now, so you Le Webers can plan your trip beforehand or get acquainted with the service before your trip. Just tweet your culinary query @Foodie_fm with #lefoodie hashtag, and see what they come up with!

Tags: December, Food, Foodie, LeWeb, Paris, Social network, Twitter

The Importance of Networking

The front page story of this month’s edition of Olivia Magazine, is all about the importance of networking. Olivia, a Finnish monthly for women striving for a well-rounded life, decided to focus on networking, and specifically why it is important for women. For expertise in this area, they turned to friend and contributor for Tattletech, Hanna Manninen, who dropped some knowledge.

In the article, Hanna shares some advice on networking and its real life application. In one anecdote, she talks about meeting with a young woman who sent her an application, not to hire her but rather to mentor her entrance into the PR industry. Hanna stresses the importance of sharing, urges that we should not be afraid of it, and suggests that with less fear of idea theft and more outstretched hands of support, one can succeed in business while simultaneously paying success forward.

Putting forth another example of this spirit of mutual success, the article also includes a story about Future Female, a network for women working in ICT or interested in technology, co-founded be Hanna, Krista Järvinen and Annikki Laine in October 2009.

Hanna concludes that younger generations of women are less jealous of each other and embrace change more than older generations, which is good because women are still a minority when it comes to power and authority do each other a disservice getting mired in competition.

It’s often easy to lose sight of the fundamentals behind networking since it has (1) become so much more immediate and transparent in the social media age (2) remained a business buzz-word for decades. However, networking is at its core the promise of mutually-implied success, a partnership of convenience perhaps, but still a partnership. We would all do well to focus less on competition and remember that people are involved at all levels of business, and therefor the most important part of networking is helping people and being open to help from others.

The November issue of Olivia is now available from kiosks, book and grocery stores across Finland.

Tags: Finland, Finnish language, Hanna, Networking, Olivia, Public relations, social media, women in business

Fif-TECH-teen: Google Documents

I was recently introduced to Google Docs by Tattletech’s own Jason and Jennifer, as we use the service to edit my column. That got me thinking about data storage. I did some research and found some really interesting facts.

For those of you that do not know, Google Docs is a Web-based office suite like Microsoft Word or Apple’s iWork. It allows you to create, edit and store documents. Documents can then be shared with other users who can read and edit in real-time. For my introduction to the service, I sat in my living-room working on my first column while both Jason and Jennifer gave me notes live. Pretty cool… I know.

Now that I am initiated, there are many things I really like about Google Docs, but what has most impressed me so far is that it has the intelligence to save all your work instantaneously without the need of a save button. Unless there is a major glitch in the system, you should never lose anything. And I’m sure we can all agree that writing a document, losing it and having to restart is probably the worst thing ever! Ironically, I lost an early draft of my first column in Microsoft Word before moving it into Google Docs.

Thinking about the joys of worrying less about lost data, I started to wonder where all the data is being saved. The answer I soon found was ”in The Cloud.” This didn’t help me, so my next question was, what is “The Cloud”? Apparently, The Cloud is basically acres of underground servers whose purpose is to store my column and other such data. Google and Amazon own over 100 acres of these servers, organized into data centers, to manage all the data for their sites and to move content and data back and forth to you. Google has 19 locations in the US where they operate data centers, 12 in Europe, one in Russia, one in South America, and three in Asia.

How does Google choose where to put data centers? The main things Google looks for when finding locations for their servers are:

• A large area of land that offers security and privacy
• Proximity to lakes and rivers for cooling
• A lot of cheap electricity, often green energy to focus on renewable power sources
• Proximity to other Google data centers for fast connections between centers

So this is where the data is being stored. And it is a lot of data. By the end of 2011, we will see 1200 exabytes of exchanged data, and it has been reported that five exabytes equals every word spoken by mankind! Mind blowing. Also, according to Moore’s Law, every two years more transistors can be fit in a integrated circuit (IC) chip, which lets us lets us double computer power and speed, so the stores of data will only continue to grow.

After learning about this, I’m happy to add my weekly column to The Cloud.

You can read Fif-TECH-teen weekly right here on Tattletech. You can also follow Sean on Twitter @sean_edwards1.

Tags: Apple, Cloud computing, data, Google, Google Doc, Microsoft, Microsoft Word, Searching, Tattletech

New column: Fif-TECH-teen

We here at Tattletech are all about what “the kids” are into, with their dubstep and ironic glasses and whatnot, so we decided to bring another perspective on board, a fresh perspective from the next generation of tech users – teens. So we found a teen willing to write for us! In his first post, our newest contributing writer, Sean Edwards, (with an assist from his father) will tell us what technology he uses to stay connected and how this affects his relationships.

You can read Fif-TECH-teen weekly right here on Tattletech. You can also follow Sean on Twitter @sean_edwards1.

Hey!

My name is Sean Edwards, but you guys will soon know me as Fif-TECH-teen. I’m 15 and I live in a very rural community (and by rural I mean a village of 600 or so) in Brittany, France. In my column, I’m going to address the subject of technology from a teen’s point of view, with possible comments from my dad, who claims to be “just a builder” but might be a closet tech writer. My first subject is BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Yes, I am a teen and I don’t have an iPhone.

Most of you know that BBM is an instant messenger application that’s on all BlackBerry phones. It lets other BB users chat with each other for free, a feature my dad really likes because I have a lot of friends back in the UK and the plan only covers 66 text messages a month, which clearly won’t cut it.

TATTLETECH NOTE: Mashable reported in 2010 that teens send an average of 3,339 texts per month, with teen females sending a whopping 4,050 a month and teen males 2,539 texts.

Because I live in such an isolated place and my friends live so far away (my closest friend lives about five miles away) I use BBM a lot to organize meet ups like going to the cinema or the skate park or even arranging a meal at a restaurant, which I do quite often with my friends from school. I rely on this piece of technology because it lets me keep in touch with all my family and friends near and far, from here to Birmingham, England.

The reason I use this app constantly is because it is so instant, therefore I find it is the next best thing to having a real face-to-face conversation. It is a very effective social tool. It doesn’t have to end since it is an unlimited service, and is tailored to the BlackBerry. BBM was created strictly for the use of BlackBerrys, which makes it more effective than Windows Live Messenger, for example, which was created for PC’s and then transferred to mobile phones..

The only problem I’ve had with BBMing was recently, when BlackBerry had problems at their headquarters in Slough that caused BBM to stop working for around a whole week. I honestly thought my life had come to an end — no organising meals, no speaking to family and friends, nothing! BBM also received a lot of negative press with its connection to the organization of riots throughout England this past August. Regardless of all of this, I still feel that BBM is the best way for me to keep in contact with everybody that I need too.

BlackBerry messenger is a free download to your phone from BlackBerry app world.

Tags: BBM, BlackBerry, BlackBerry Messenger, IPhone, Slough, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger