On Sunday, AT&T is reconfiguring its mobile data plans in a way that will anger many customers but may actually please others. It’s raising its smartphone and tablet data plan rates, while simultaneously offering customers a better deal on the data they do consume. Its 200 MB and 2 GB are plans are going away for new subscribers, replaced by a plan with 300 MB and a plan with 3 GB. The bottom line is all new customers will pay more every month for data, but they will also pay less per megabyte.

AT&T will also offer an additional 5 GB high-volume smartphone plan for a month, which includes tethering and mobile hotspot use. For tablets AT&T will offer the same and tiers as it does for smartphones, though without tethering, and it will keep its 250 MB plan in place. The same per gigabyte overage fee will remain in effect for all of the higher tier plans, though its rather discriminatory policy toward data excess on its lowest tier plans will persist. Customers with the 300 GB will have to pay another to get another mere 30 GB. All existing unlimited customers on the old capped and unlimited plans are grandfathered in (though throttling will remain in effect for unlimited), but existing customers can switch to the new pricing tiers if they wish.

There’s a way to look at this as a positive. AT&T is actually lower the per-MB cost of data as mobile Internet and app use skyrockets. That’s a trend that needed – and still needs – to occur if operators are to keep ahead of the increasing bandwidth demands of smartphones and tablets. AT&T still isn’t as cheap as Sprint, which is still clinging to unlimited, and T-Mobile, which offers gobs of data for dirt cheap prices, but it is definitely undercutting its primary competitor, Verizon Wireless which offers 1 GB less for the same price on the most popular plan. Unless operators want mobile broadband innovation to go stagnant pricing-per-megabyte will have to fall further.

But make no mistake about it: AT&T may be smoothing over the edges but this is most definitely a price hike. Some of AT&T’s current customers may switch over the plans by choice, particularly customers that often go just over their 200 MB or 2 GB caps each month. But AT&T will be collecting more month from all new customers. That’s going add up to a hefty pile in AT&T’s coffers, and most customers won’t be happy about it.

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Continue reading Coda lowers price of electric sedan, sends it into production ahead of 2012 launch

Coda lowers price of electric sedan, sends it into production ahead of 2012 launch originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 07:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Servers? We don't need no stinkin' servers!

Both mobile and high-performance computing are placing huge power efficiency and performance demands on chips, but the ,000-question is how long until such extreme computing use cases hit the server mainstream. Asked another way, the question becomes, how long until AmazonWeb Services adopts ARM-basedservers?

Or perhaps it isn’t ARM-based servers, but a variation on an Intelchip that takes its architecture from some of the more innovative and energy-efficient silicon out today. For example, Adapteva, a startup I profiled back in May, on Monday released a 64-core chip that can deliver 70 gigaflops of performance per watt. If you don’t speak gigaflops, that’s okay: It basically has done what Intel and certain countries have deemed impossible with the current generation of silicon.

The government of the European Union, in its quest for an exascale supercomputer has targeted a goal of getting 50 gigaflops per watt (Intel also thinks this would work). In conversations with folks that design supercomputers, the thinking is that a conventional x86-based machine would require the equivalent of a power plant or two to run. That includes all the networking and other trimmings, but the bottom line is Adapteva’s chips deliver more flops per watt, and that’s a good thing.

It’s not just supercomputers though. Adapteva’s CEO Andreas Olofsson told me the company is only targeting computing extremes such as supercomputing and mobile phones because that’s where the power efficiency pain point is today. Because mobile phones run on batteries, and no one wants a smartphone that dies after 2 hours, vendors using ARM’s power efficient architecture have dominated the mobile sector. when Microsoft, adapted Windows to run on ARM, it spoke volumes about the need for power efficiency. Windows, is one of the most x86-oriented peices of software out there.

These shifts in usage profiles and the high demand for compute are creating opportunities for companies like Adapteva, so it’s not too far-fetched to wonder how long until that pain point hits conventional servers.

I often cover companies that are hoping that the combination of monolithic applications and a desire to reduce power consumption means that webscale and cloud vendors will embrace a new architecture. Companies such as Tilera, SeaMicro, Adapteva, Calxeda and others are all betting that the next gear Facebook or Amazon buys will be their hardware or contain their chips.

However, even in its state-of-the-art data center that’s optimized at the very server level to be energy-efficient, Facebook challenged the way servers and data centers are built but didn’t touch the silicon itself. So, clearly, the webscale world isn’t champing at the bit to replace the x86-based servers their applications are running on. SeaMicro even has shown charts showing that the CPU is only a third of the power associated with running a server, which means there’s still plenty of fat to trim. Of course, Seamicro is building a server that trims that non-CPU fat and runs Intel’s Atom chips.

However, the global demand for energy and the supply we currently have are reaching a point where it’s safe to conclude that power consumption will become a greater cost and constraint associated with operating data centers. And at some point building in cooler climates, hot and cold aisle containment, and even newly designed servers won’t be enough if the silicon itself is too hot.

So the question isn’t if, but when, server companies abandon the PC-style architecture. Perhaps Intel, AMD or Via will continue to tweak x86 silicon until it can perform more calculations using less power, or perhaps it will be time for Amazon or Microsoft Azure to go with ARM, Tilera — or even Adapteva.

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Two weeks ago, Google announced a significant price increase for use of its App Engine Platform-as-a-Service. The increase itself was not a huge surprise. Google had been making noises that something like this was in the offing for a number of months. But the size of the increase shocked the Web development and cloud applications community. For most users, the cost of using the Google runtime environment effectively increased by 100% or more.

A huge online backlash ensued. For its part, Google put off the increase by a month and moderated some of the increases. But the whole incident brought many nagging doubts about the cloud to the surface. Said one poster on one of the many threads that lit up the Google Groups forums after the increase:

I like so many of us have spent a lot of time learning app engine – i have been worried like so many that using app engine is a mistake because any app you invest/build can only be run on… app engine.

Because the Google PaaS requires that developers customize code specifically to run in that environment and nowhere else, rewriting that code takes a lot of time, effort and money. With salaries for programmers hitting record highs in the Bay Area and recent CS graduates pulling in 0,000 or more to code, any big move that forced major code rewrites would ultimately wallop the bottom line. Ironically, these increases disproportionately affected numerous hobbyists and small developers running interesting applications – the creators of the next proverbial Google. Certainly corporate IT departments took notice, as well.

Vendor lock-in will make you vulnerable

Unquestionably, Google App Engine price increase revealed a key fundamental weakness of many cloud businesses.  Namely, vendor lock-in does exist in the cloud. This seems odd because one of the benefits of the cloud specifically was to obviate the advantage of vendor lock-in and make applications more portable. In that worldview, no cloud rules them all (not even Amazon) and companies operating applications in the cloud can quickly and easily port their applications to other PaaS offerings or to other IaaS providers.

With vendor lock-in comes vulnerability to price increases. In all likelihood, Google – a data-driven business if there ever was one – was rebalancing pricing to reflect its own need for profitability. But for developers and app makers, this drastic shift effectively turned their decision to go with Google App Engine into what may have been a “bet-the-company” decision without ever realizing it.  For the PaaS industry in general, the move raises significant uncertainty. If Google has to raise its prices this much, who’s next?

Start thinking defensively before you choose a platform

In a similar vein, developers who put their applications up on Heroku may not have realized that their business fate depended on the fidelity of the Amazon EC2 cloud. If a company had been planning a big sales event or promotion during the extended EC2 outage, those three days of hard downtime may have had an outsized impact.

So clearly the rules of the game have changed for anyone who wants to put an app in the cloud and run a real business. Defensive thinking is in order. Here are five key rules to avoid getting gouged by Google App Engine or eviscerated by an EC2 outage:

1. Avoid vendor lock-in at all costs. This is now a no-brainer. Make sure that your app can be easily ported to other clouds if you need to move due to service outages. If you must write apps that require serious customization, make sure you have a back-up plan and, if you can swing the cost, an alternative cloud running your code as a backup.
2.  Know thy PaaS. Spreading the risk among multiple PaaS providers makes a lot of sense – unless they are all totally dependent on one big cloud to deliver your applications and cloud business. Explore installable PaaS options that you yourself control. So ask pointed questions about where your PaaS is running and how they are managing their risks of failure of a big cloud.
3.  Ask hard questions about redundancy and system architecture. Deep under the covers of most clouds are core system architectures that may replicate single-points-of-failure. That’s because, at its core, the cloud infrastructure ecosystem is not a terribly diverse environment. Only a few hardware and software companies rule the roost. Similarly, ask your cloud provider to completely open their architecture and software kimono and let you examine everything. If they won’t, then you caveat emptor. If they will, you can judge their redundancy steps for yourself. So ask for specific architecture diagrams if you are going to be dependent on a cloud environment and its reliability. And get a network engineer or system architect buddy to review the diagrams. Think this is overkill? Ask FourSquare, Reddit and the other huge sites that have corporate backing or VC money and went down hard in the EC2 outages.
4. Pick code that’s easier and faster to modify. Not all runtime environments and frameworks are alike. Certain flavors and types of frameworks and Web scripting environments are more difficult to change in a pinch due to the core architecture of the way the scripting language works. Until recently, PHP was far harder to clean up than RoR, and Python, pre-Django, was more unwieldy.
5. The most popular code may not be the cheapest code. Think about the availability of coders. Many applications companies have a horror story about how their iOS app needed modifications and they either had to pay a high-end dev shop 0 per hour or had to wait for weeks to make the mods. At the same time, some runtime environments like Node.js can be built with Javascript code throughout the application stack. (We’re biased as we are strong backers of Node.js). That means you eliminate the need for differentiated front- and back-end coding teams, in a best case scenario. When building your cloud app, think hard about the code selection before you start filling up your GitHub repository.

By no means are these five steps comprehensive. And for the most part they are obvious. But in the cloud things move pretty quickly and sometimes slowing down to think about what your cloud application will be in six, 12 or 24 months is hard to do. So put on your crash helmet, watch your wallet, and be careful out there, people.

Alex Salkever is Director of Product Marketing at Joyent Cloud (@Joyent). He was formerly a technology editor at BusinessWeek.com.

Image courtesy of Flickr user kreg.steppe.

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There have been plenty of obituaries written for the newspaper business, most of which have a kernel of truth to them — but is journalism as we know it at risk as well? Dave Winer, a programming guru and visiting scholar at the New York University school of journalism, says it is. In a blog post on Friday, Winer argued that “journalism itself is becoming obsolete” because now anyone can do it. Is he right? In some ways, yes. One thing is for sure: Journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing networks and what Om calls the “democracy of distribution.” Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view.

Winer’s post was actually about the recent kerfuffle over TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington’s launch of a venture-capital fund, a topic that has received more than enough coverage already elsewhere. But in the process of talking about that issue — and how Arrington has never made any claims to be a journalist — Winer said that as far as he is concerned, journalism as we know it is becoming obsolete, in part because non-journalists can do it just as easily as journalists can. The bottom line, he says, is that journalism itself was “a response to publishing being expensive.”

It cost a lot of money to push bits around the net before there was a net. They had to have huge capital-intensive printing plants, fleets of trucks and delivery boys with paper routes. Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks. It’s still early days for this… but in a generation or two we won’t be employing people to gather news for us. It’ll work differently.

If it’s important, the news will find me

Winer is certainly right about the fact that the way we consume “news,” and even where that news comes from, has changed dramatically in just the last few years. For many people, as we’ve described before at GigaOM, news now comes from their social graph via Facebook, or through a Twitter stream — possibly read in a news-curation app like Flipboard or Zite, or through an aggregator like Techmeme or Memeorandum, which collects news hits published on blogs by people who may or may not even see themselves as journalists.

But is it right to say that journalism was a response to the fact that publishing was expensive? Not really. Newspapers and their whole business model, which involved becoming a mass medium in order to aggregate eyeballs and then sell them to advertisers, was a response to publishing being expensive. And many of the things that are most criticized about the newspaper approach to journalism — including what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” and the omniscient tone that many journalists take — are definitely an outgrowth of that model.

But none of those things are really journalism, which is why media theorist Clay Shirky says that rather than focus on saving newspapers, he would prefer to focus on saving journalism. And what is journalism? Everyone has their own definition, but I think it’s fundamentally about a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things. It’s something like the spirit of scientific inquiry, as Matt Thompson noted recently in a post at the Poynter Institute. It has very little to do with specific tools or specific methods of publishing.

Random acts of journalism

Winer is right about journalism changing because anyone can do it, however, as we’ve also described a number of times. That trend, which has turned sources of news into publishers (allowing them to “go direct” as Winer likes to say) began with blogs and has continued with Twitter and Facebook and other tools. Andy Carvin, who has become a one-man newswire by curating news about the Arab Spring on Twitter, says he prefers to think of journalism as an act rather than a profession. So people like Sohaib Athar, a Pakistan resident who live-tweeted the raid on Osama bin Laden as it was happening, engaged in what Carvin calls a “random act of journalism.”

Instead of saying journalism is obsolete, I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing. What does it consist of now? Most of the things it used to, as well as some new ones: building connections with your reader community is a journalistic skill, and curation of the type Carvin does (and the NYT is experimenting with via its @NYTlive Twitter account) certainly is. And we still need people to confirm facts and ferret out misinformation when news is breaking, which is what makes Snopes one of my favorite non-journalistic journalism sites.

We need people who can interview other people and make sense of what they say — which is why Reddit has some aspects of journalism to it, and Quora does too (Winer recently asked why a newspaper like the New York Times hasn’t adopted an approach like Quora). All these skills and more are required — and the ability to aggregate things in a smart way, and the ability to understand and make sense of large amounts of data.

Will journalism as a whole suffer because some people engage in conflicts of interest or abuse anonymous sources or break any of the other so-called rules of journalism? Not really. Most of the popular newspapers and media outlets of the last 50 years have done all that and worse (yes, even worse than News Corp.’s phone hacking). Newspapers may come and go and bloggers may rise and fall, but journalism continues — not so much as an institution, but as a state of mind and a series of beliefs, and a way of behaving. There are just more ways to do it now, rightly or wrongly.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users ShironekoEuro and Zarko Drincic

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Pssssst… wanna buy some Kodak patents? The venerable photography firm has decided to unload a fair chunk of its IP — 1,100 patents, give or take — to boost its bottom line. You see, Kodak’s got cash flow problems, and it thinks selling a portion of its portfolio is part of the solution. The company must’ve seen dollar signs after Nortel made a mint selling its patents, as Kodak’s now marketing its IP merchandise using the same firm that helped Nortel do its record deal. Strong move Kodak, now if you can just settle up with Apple and RIM, you’ll really be in the money.

Kodak shopping its IP wares, looks to cash in on the patent buying craze originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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