We’re not exactly lacking in ways to interact with a screen from afar, but the folks at Teehan+Lax have now put an augmented reality-enhanced spin on things with their so-called Touch Vision Interface. While the “how” behind it is no doubt complicated (and being kept largely under wraps at the moment), the end result is fairly simple: you just point your smartphone at a screen (or two) and start manipulating it from the point of view provided by the phone’s camera. Of course, it’s all still in the early stages right now, but group sees a wide range of applications for the system — even including large outdoor billboards. Check it out in action in the video after the break.

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Touch Vision Interface employs AR to control screens from afar originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 11 Sep 2011 08:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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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Since the concept of “private cloud” was introduced, there have been efforts by certain people to prove it “wrong” or show that it doesn’t make sense when compared with the public cloud. This seems like a silly crusade, not because I’m a supporter of private cloud (which I am), but because both provide tremendous value if you actually understand the value that “cloud” has delivered to the industry.

“But Sinclair, cloud delivers value because of the economies of scale it brings through aggregation, etc., etc., and so on,” you say? Perhaps, but the value of cloud computing has much more to do with its definition in the abstract and less so to do with its availability in a public form factor.  James Urquhart recently wrote “Why definitions of cloud are creating ‘false’ debates,” where he hypothesizes (accurately so) that the difference of opinion is that some characterize “cloud” as a business model, while others as an operations model.

Clearly, when looked at from the business model point of view, the concept of cloud makes significant sense in a public fashion. But as an operations model — a model where resources are pooled together behind abstractions that dynamically manage applications and resources — it has significant positive implications in the enterprise. This might be easier to explain through an analogy of sorts.

Let’s suppose, for the purposes of this thought experiment, that the bus (the big automobile that carries lots of people) has yet to be invented. A politician notices the inefficiency of always using a car that fits no more than four people, particularly in the case where lots of people are going back and forth between two cities — the politician’s home city and a neighboring city. This politician decided that the cities should operate a municipal (or public) mass transit service to transport a significant number of people per trip between the two cities, for some small fee per person. The politician commissions the invention of the bus to transport 50-100 people at a time. The idea of offering this as a public service is powerful, and as the number of passengers grows, it starts to experience significant economies of scale.

All is well, until some suggest that the bus itself is useful in contexts outside of public transit. Schools want their own buses to pick up and drop off children; prisons determine buses are a good way to transport large numbers of prisoners; someone wants to start a luxury tour service via bus; and movie stars that hate to fly feel buying a bus is an effective way to travel along with their friends, family and staff.

The politician becomes angry, stating that all of those use cases are best satisfied via the public transport system she developed, and these “private” uses are “false mass transit services” because they could never reach the economies that the public service offers. Furthermore, she argues, these proponents of “private mass transit” are getting in their own way because the public transit system is not only cost effective, but safe and generally on time, and all of the constraints that these other use cases point to in usage of public transit are merely “excuses.” The fact of the matter is, to a bus-rider, riding in a bus provides the same end utility regardless of how the bus is provided – they get where they want without having to drive a car.

Does this seem awkward and familiar at the same time? It does to me. The problem is that the politician is lumping the invention of the bus — the technology necessary for public mass transit to work – and the public mass transit system itself into a single cohesive model, and taking the stance that the real marginal savings of public mass transit is the only economic output to take into consideration. Others have decoupled the bus from the public transit service, saying that although there is huge value in public transit, the bus itself adds so much value to a huge number of use cases (such as prisoner transport) that are ill suited for public mass transit because of constraints.

Without the bus, those “private” use cases are still using four-passenger cars for all their transport needs. However, the bus solves a significant number of problems relating to moving large numbers of people relatively efficiently without having to adopt public mass transit. Similar to Urquhart’s assessment, the problem in this bus analogy is that someone is focused on the public-transit business model while others are focusing on the operations-model efficiencies that the bus can bring to other use cases.

Confounding cloud computing from a service point of view with the technology that enables cloud services is terribly misguided. The fact of the matter is that tge technology behind cloud services is extremely valuable on its own, just like a bus is extremely value outside of the public mass transit context. Take Platform as a Service, for instance. PaaS provides a tremendous amount of agility through…

1. The pooling of resources (servers, load balancers, etc.) into a single abstract pool of resources
2. Automation of devops workflows, thereby increasing time to market
3. Utilization boosts (in multitenant environments)
4. Simplified management around previously complex topics (e.g., scaling out, etc.)

This value has nothing to do with economies of scale or outsourced IT, but has everything to do with a paradigm shift in the deployment and management of applications. If an organization chooses to layer a PaaS tier – a private PaaS - atop its own infrastructure, whether it be dozens, hundreds or thousands of servers, it will experience genuine value. The technology developed to supply PaaS is much more useful than just the fact that it’s offered as a service — it can drive a whole new era of efficiency as a layer in the private cloud stack, on top of an enterprise’s existing infrastructure.

This is why “false cloud” articles, like one by Phil Wainewright titled “Private cloud discredited, part 2,” disturb me. They are too myopic in terms of debate basis, focusing on economies of scale and not much else, and fail to separate the invention of cloud enabling software layers like PaaS (the bus) from their first use in the public cloud context (public mass transit). Just as throwing away the bus in any context other than public mass transit system makes little sense, dismissing the massive efficiencies achievable by deploying technologies like private PaaS would be crazy. As David Linthicum put it in a recent post: ”[M]any fail to accept there may be times when the architectural patterns of public clouds best serve the requirements of the business when implemented locally — in a private cloud.”

Sinclair Schuller is co-founder and CEO of Apprenda.

Image courtesy of Flickr user KB35.

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Why I Hunt for Antiques and Artifacts from Colorado Antiques

Treasure hunting has been my life for decades now. Clearly, I do not mean treasure hunting like Indiana Jones or some pirate’s hidden chest of gold. I seek out antiques and artifacts and while my search does not take me to faraway exotic lands, I do find myself in some remarkable spots. And even though I have not found the end of the rainbow, I have turned up many priceless items.

At the start, my treasure hunting started at area antique shops. One {point I soon|aspect I rapidly|thing I quickly found out is that antiquing is a world all to itself. First off, I quickly learned that I needed a lot of experience to know what was an actual antique and what was just rusty garbage. Many online sources can help you identify the most collected items and make you able to distinguish what is honestly collectible. Certainly, no one is going to suddenly be an authority on all of the innumerable categories and individual items that people collect, but good sites will give you at least a broad idea of where to start when exploring for antiques and artifacts.

Next I found out is that antique dealers do not like to be treated as though they are running a big yard sale. Brokers put in a lot of effort filling their shops with what they believe to be unique and appealing items. If you go into a store and propose a few bucks for something that is clearly worth a lot, you may get asked to leave. Antique sellers are serious about their things and do not like to be insulted. Bargaining is frequent and completely appropriate, but one should approach it from a win-win point of view.

Antiquing is very pleasurable for me, but it certainly does require a lot of experience to have real success. So I do some hunting for actual buried treasure as much as I can. As I previously stated, I do not lead expeditions to the desert or ancient ruins hunting for valuables – I just head to my toolshed, grab my metal detector, and find a promising area to search. I have found old Civil War artifacts like bullets and buttons and of course all kinds of change and jewelry. Sometimes I use nothing but my eyes to find artifacts like arrowheads, terracotta shards, and uniform badges. You just need some research on historical areas and obviously, a good dose of patience. You may be shocked at how valuable something as simple as a shard of Native American earthenware can be to a artifact enthusiast.

Additional Aspen Primitives links: http://www.nooriscollection.com/

Despite a lot of speculation lately about who’s winning the private-cloud race and what companies might be on the way out, it’s far too early to call the game in anyone’s favor. Private-cloud adoption is picking up, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous yet, and there’s plenty of time for everyone still standing to make the moves they need to in order to keep competing.

Is Eucalyptus Dead in the Water?

There was a great debate last week on GigaOM Pro about the state of Eucalyptus Systems and whether its days as a purveyor of private-cloud software are numbered. Our Infrastructure curator, Paul Miller, suggested in his Weekly Update (sub req’d) that, after a few previous setbacks, Ubuntu’s decision to forgo further Eucalyptus support in favor of OpenStack in future versions of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Linux operating system might be the death knell for Eucalyptus Systems’ private-cloud software.

Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos responded, stating that his company has had more than 25,000 downloads clouds based on its free version, and that, from his perspective, it’s stronger than ever. He also mentioned a number of big-name customers presently running production clouds based on Eucalyptus.

So did Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, who noted that his company is a very happy Eucalyptus customer. This is in part because of its Amazon Web Services API compatibility, and in part because of the qualities of the product and support for paid enterprise version of the Eucalyptus software. Olson’s most poignant comment might have been that “it’s way too early to nominate a single winner among the cloud abstraction layers. We need more years of experience before that happens.”

I’ve been critical of Eucalyptus chances, too — even suggesting at one point (sub req’d) that an acquisition might be all that could save it — but I’m starting to come around to Mickos’s point of view. His statements about Eucalyptus’s prospects are, of course, self-serving, but there’s no denying the numbers. Even if a majority of those 25,000 downloads clouds never amounted to anything substantial, some certainly did and will in the future. Yesterday, it announced European social-gaming company Plinga as a customer. And having large, publicly referenceable customers puts Eucalyptus ahead of many other private-cloud startups. Further, the company has continued to add personnel and expand globally, which probably aren’t signs of impending doom.

It’s a Broad — and Young — Market

But this isn’t just a discussion about Eucalyptus, it’s a discussion about the expectations for private clouds, in general. OpenStack has a lot of believers — and for good reason — but with the exceptions of Rackspace and Internap, there are no service providers that are known to be using the software for customer-facing services, and most private-cloud use cases appear only experimental at this point. As Mickos pointed out in his response to Miller’s analysis, Eucalyptus most commonly runs into VMware, Cloud.com, Abiquo and CA (with its 3Tera product, I presume) during customer engagements.

What this tells us is that, as Olson suggested, it’s too early to tell who (aside from VMware) will win in the private-cloud contest, even if some projects or companies have greater name recognition than do others. VMware is a household name and OpenStack is approaching that status, but Cloud.com, Abiquo and 3Tera are not. Yet, 3Tera was an early innovator in provisioning private clouds before CA bought it, Cloud.com is killing it with several very large customers under NDA, and even the relatively unknown Abiquo has a growing list of customers. Still under the radar, but not to be ignored, are startups such as Cloupia and Nimbula (which just became generally available in April), and large vendors with new cloud strategies, such as Red Hat, HP and Microsoft.

In fact, Nimbula Co-Founder and CEO Chris Pinkham insightfully mentioned to me during a recent conversation that the whole discussion about public clouds versus private clouds is just a debate over who owns the hardware. What customers really care about — or what they ultimately will really care about — he explained, is which product can best deliver a company’s services, regardless where the servers reside.

What he’s describing is the oft-mentioned but as of yet rarely implemented hybrid cloud. And despite some noteworthy efforts by pretty much everyone pitching private-cloud software, no one has this mastered yet. However, if you’ve looked at any cloud-adoption surveys lately, such as this one from the Open Group, you’ll find that hybrid clouds are all the rage among CIOs.

Yes, OpenStack has all the momentum right now, but it doesn’t obviate the need for other products, nor is it even a completed project. It’s a worthwhile exercise to handicap the private-cloud field, but with adoption still relatively low and looking to remain that way until enterprise-ready hybrid clouds become a reality, all we really have right now are actual customer wins and product roadmaps to determine who has the best chances. At this very-early point, a lot of products look promising, but there’s plenty of time for private-cloud pushers to distinguish themselves.

Image courtesy of Flickr user superwebdeveloper.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• What Ubuntu’s Move to OpenStack Means for Eucalyptus
• Infrastructure 2011: The Real Cloud Computing Picture Will Emerge
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Even though I’m not a massive fan of many television shows, there have been a number of great comedy programmes in recent times which are still as hilarious now as the first time I watched them and definitely stand up to repeated viewing. Thinking about it my absolute favourites are generally those which take place in a different era from now. I’ve formed the theory that the reason for this is that a series based in the present will look old fashioned in a few years time – the references which are current now will no longer be, fashions and hairstyles will have altered and the whole concept will appear to be a bit jaded.

Of course for those programmes which are not set in current times, that issue doesn’t exist. Those which are set in the past are already dated, but in a such a way that we don’t object as we know it’s meant to be. So it’s more like reading a history book as opposed to today’s newspapers. Programmes which take place in the future, of course, only need to appeal to our imagination. It’s impossible to know if their depiction of life many years from now is even a little accurate, but it’s not a problem because it’s realistic enough to keep us interested and at the same time, it’s strange enough to make us curious.

I guess my three favourite comedy programmes (though not necessarily in this order) would be Dad’s Army, Blackadder and Red Dwarf. Having parents who were alive during World War II, albeit as children, I suppose it was inevitable that they would relate to some of the situations that the gentlemen of the Home Guard got themselves into, and the gentle humour with little more than subtle innuendo once in a while would have appealed to their sensibilities.

From my point of view, looking at it from a child’s viewpoint, I loved the two younger characters, Walker and Pike. I guess it’s natural for a child to warm to the people you stand the most chance of being able to relate to. Having seen countless episodes as an adult, I now see how spot on the casting was for every character, and it’s fair to say that, maybe apart from Ian Lavender, all of those actors will always be best remembered for their Dad’s Army character. Every part within the programme was just perfectly written, from Wilson’s middle class politeness, to Fraser’s typical Scottish characteristics, Walker’s ‘wide boy’ behaviour and Captain Mainwaring’s pompous leadership style. (And I’m sure he would have been ordered to have Laser eye surgery if it was these days? It would have been a drag to be constantly fiddling with those glasses in a combat situation!)

The creation of the Blackadder character was a great TV moment. The medieval prince, who starts to name himself The Black Adder, and his descendents wreak havoc throughout history throughout the four series, and the viewer witnesses a more and more devious Blackadder character, together with a progressively intellectually challenged Baldrick in the time of Elizabeth I, during the Regency and taking part in the First World War. Again, the casting was outstanding, especially the main characters. I’d be hard pushed to choose a favourite series, much less a favourite character, and the presence of so many renowned actors in most episodes makes the task even more unachievable.

Red Dwarf, at the opposite extreme, is set way in the future on a mining ship on which nearly all of the crew perished three million years earlier after a radiation leak. One human survived having been in suspended animation when the accident took place. For any folk not familiar with the programme, the the events that follow are possibly not what you want to read here. To those who are fans, I expect you’re already quoting pieces of the script as you read this! Again, the cast is extremely important to the programme, a fact which was more than proven after two US efforts at pilots for the show flopped disasterously. The four leading actors really made the characters their own, and I really can’t imagine liking an episode of the show with anyone else playing Lister, Rimmer, Kryten or The Cat. The incompetence of the crew only serves to make their adventures more amusing, though I’ve always wondered why a comparatively sophisticated spaceship doesn’t actually possess the Laser eye weapons that The Cat kept saying that they should use. But all the same, they always come out on top in the end.

There are other comedy shows which I also love watching – The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd are both close to the top of the list. And although they don’t exactly fall into the categories of past or future, The Mighty Boosh most definitely takes place in some type of nearby universe – a planet where a talking ape and a man who consists solely of a pink head are considered quite normal members of the community and where almost anything might happen. The imaginations of writers Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt must be exceptionally creative. I await the next series with interest and am totally expecting more strange and wonderful characters to appear – perhaps one with Laser eye sight, or another with roller blades instead of feet. In the land of The Mighty Boosh anything is possible! I think that The IT Crowd also partly exists in an alternate dimension – a place in which someone blurs the line between what could really happen and what has to happen to make the show a success.

I suppose, ultimately, that the fact that all of these shows exist in places beyond my reality probably explains why they appeal to me so much – maybe I wish to be somewhere else too. (Most logically in an opticians finding out about Laser eye surgery if I don’t stop playing so many DVDs!)