Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it’s measured in weeks or months. If you were to focus on information technology specifically you could even argue that change can occur in days — and that cycle will continue to accelerate.

But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.

The technology ecosystem has always been important. Even in the days when a minority of companies had a single mainframe, you still needed parts, skills, power, data centers, tools, and ideas, etc. But that ecosystem was smaller and moved more slowly. The technology ecosystems of the 60s through the 90s tended to change over months or years, and our systems from then were more likely to be from a small handful of vendors. This simplified provider environment reduced dependence on an ecosystem of otherwise unrelated partners and vendors, but guaranteed your dependence on the one.

That was then, this is now.

The difference today, and going forward, is that technology is rapidly moving to a much more agile adoption, development, operating and use model. Buyers today can identify and use cloud-based infrastructure or obtain a few licenses of a Software-as-a-Service delivered application in a matter of hours. Aside from cloud-based services, there are virtual platforms, appliances, internally developed applications and myriad customer devices that all need to interact, but can change almost overnight.

Some would argue that the sheer complexity of the ecosystem today screams for CIOs to try to create homogenous infrastructure environments. However, the very fact that we’re making IT solutions more portable and readily adaptable means that we must plan for the ability to support multi-vendor solutions at any layer of the technical infrastructure, from the CPU, through to platform as a service.

The rapid delivery of new solutions means that companies will no longer wait patiently for “their” provider to catch up to major innovation leaps. The only way to stay in front of your competition is to grease the technical infrastructure skids with strong management platforms and clear adoption, ownership, and orchestration strategies.

Many software, cloud, and hardware providers in today’s market would argue that they offer a strong ecosystem of partners, but I think the future ecosystem will be as open as possible and also offer the customer access to a wide variety of cloud, network and other services within the confines of a single data center. Think of your IT ecosystem as the local shops near your downtown flat, easy to access and well understood. However, if you’re downtown ecosystem was like the technology ecosystem you would have five coffee shops, three butchers, six shoe stores and so on from which to select goods and services. .

The open ecosystem

An open ecosystem allows for you to select the technology or service provider you like when the opportunity presents itself. It’s an environment where the customer has broad access to vendors and services related to any portion of the infrastructure stack, including wide area networking services and the data center capacity.

Under the old way of building IT, managers built it once, built it to last, and then got fired when it didn’t last. The new IT calls for managers to build it fast, possibly fail fast, and then build it again.

An open ecosystem means that in most cases you shouldn’t be spending years putting in a new technology architecture or solution. If it’s that complex or limited in its ability to adapt new technology you should be using a partner’s infrastructure such as an IaaS or PaaS provider solution.

There are also many options for building private cloud infrastructure, especially for larger businesses, but the focus should be on making it as open as possible. If you can’t taste test an application or new platform environment in a matter of days or weeks, you’re doing something wrong. Openness also helps if you need to move your work, because you want to have as many destinations to choose from as you can.

Many providers under one roof.

But even among open ecosystems there are important differences to be aware of. Ideally you will find an open ecosystem with a large number of different network, cloud, software and hardware providers under one umbrella. This allows the customer to make decisions around adoption of new technology quickly and efficiently. So instead of providing access to one or two bandwidth providers, the ideal ecosystem provides access to big and small players, and can play them against each other to get the best price and services for customers. In reality bringing together the combined customer and supplier community creates greater opportunities for both sides, in effect, a win-win.

It shouldn’t stop with bandwidth, either. An ecosystem should have not only the option of different hardware, and support services, but also different cloud service providers. If a customer wants to get cloud computing from a vendor, the ecosystem provider should invite that provider in. And if someone wants to build their own cloud, the ecosystem provider and data center provider should have an array of choices available for a customer to choose from.

The ideal delivery platform for this ecosystem is a data center provider who can create an environment that supports the needs of enterprise computing, while also lowering the costs and barriers to entry for ecosystem partners. This is an environment that removes all your risks associated with disaster avoidance, regulatory concerns, capacity and security. That location should have access to national freeways and airports as well as local government support that will help facilitate worker relocation and education, while also providing considerations for your hardware taxation risks.

It’s tough to find one place where all the above are available to the customer, but they are out there. Having these resources readily available is like having a Home Depot and a Lowes move in next to your house the day before you start a big home project. No matter what tool or resource you need, it’s all right there, immediately available, with competition, quantity and variety.

In this environment building a business that requires IT – or rethinking your existing IT doesn’t seem so daunting: With all these resources available, you virtually eliminate the risk of being forced into a “pragmatic” (read: bad but necessary) decision. You are free to experiment once, twice, three times, and then put it into production, without most of the historical baggage like “high network costs”, “no skilled staff” or a data center that is “out of capacity,” which have traditionally driven IT decisions.

So the increasing complexity and speed at which IT is moving doesn’t have to be something to worry about, instead look at it as an opportunity to roll with the technological changes without becoming too invested in a closed ecosystem.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. .He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Image courtesy of Flickr user john-norris.

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Garmin trotted out its latest line of nüvi navigation devices at CES this morning, including the 3590LMT. This ultra-thin device was on display at Pepcom this evening, sporting sleek curves and a commodious five-inch display. With the 3590LMT, users get access to Garmin’s Digital 3D Traffic feature, giving them access to both real-time traffic updates and historical data. Joining the 3590LMT is Garmin’s dedicated Smartphone Link app for Android, which provides users with the latest fuel prices, allowing them to plot out the most fuel efficient and cost-effective routes. The app is available for free, but the 3590LMT, unfortunately, is not. It’ll hit the market next month, for about 0. For more details, check out our gallery below, and head past the break to peep our hands-on video.

Continue reading Garmin nüvi 3590LMT hands-on (video)

Garmin nüvi 3590LMT hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apps are, at the end of the day, very personal pieces of software. And your favorite mobile app isn’t mine. So we decided to poll the staff here at GigaOM to see what apps changed our lives in 2011. It could be apps that just launched this year, or it could be programs that really came of age or matured greatly through updates. Or it could just be an app we missed before.

Some are very familiar but others may be new to you, but all have played a big part in our lives this year. Take a look and then tell us your favorite app in the comments.

Colleen Taylor: Hipmunk for Android

Android typically takes a backseat to iOS when it comes to getting slick apps. That’s why it’s so refreshing that Hipmunk, the travel search engine, put real time and effort into making its Android app just as awesome as its web and iOS offerings. Shopping for plane tickets in general can be a real headache, and doing it on a mobile device is usually impossible. But I’ve priced out and purchased plane tickets with this app, and it’s a pleasure to use.

Darrell Etherington: Path for iPhone

Path is great because it’s a beautiful-looking tool for people who might not share a lot of content, but like to keep on top of what their friends are doing without feeling overwhelmed. It feels like Facebook did before apps, games and the need to monetize made it a noisy, privacy nightmare. Path’s relatively pristine environment probably can’t last, but for now, that’s what makes it great.

Erica Ogg: Hotel Tonight for iPhone

This is the best if you’re regularly passing through cities on short notice. It does what it says: finds you a hotel for tonight only. But they don’t bombard you with options. Hotel Tonight helpfully curates the lodging choices for you: there’s usually just a couple to pick from among the categories basic, hip and luxury. They have relationships with the hotels so using it is a snap. I used this to locate the best local hotel deals night-to-night when we were between apartments in our new city. And it’s especially helpful if you want to make a last-minute trip to pricey cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Kevin C. Tofel: WiFi File Transfer for Android

This free app is a must have for transferring files from an Android device to any other device on the same Wi-Fi network. Works as a small web server on your Android and shows up as a nicely formatted file directory on other devices: great for shooting files, photos, or videos off of Android device instead of e-mailing them. For .40, the Pro version allows you to add files to the phone or tablet.
Kevin C. Tofel: TED Air for Android

I didn’t find this app until late in the year, but I try to hit it daily now for a new TED talks. It’s great for mobile use because you can download the videos while on a home Wi-Fi connection and view it later on the phone and not use up any mobile broadband.

Mathew Ingram: Instagram for iPhone

I started using Instagram mostly because it gave me an easy way to upload photos from my iPhone to a bunch of different services at once, including Flickr — where I archive photos — and Twitter and Facebook, where I share them with others. Other apps from Flickr, Facebook and Twitter make it easy to share with that specific network, but don’t make it easy to distribute them to multiple places at once. I liked Instagram’s filters, but that isn’t what kept me using the service — what kept me coming back was the social aspects, the ability to see and comment on friends’ photos and have them see and comment on mine. This is something Flickr should have owned, but it failed to capitalize on it and Instagram swooped in and seized the market.

Kevin Fitchard: Paprika for iPad, iPhone and Mac

Though this iPad recipe management app has been around more than a year, Paprika made the service infinitely more useful with the launch of its Mac version this year. The iPad’s big screen but compact size is great for propping on the kitchen counter, but if you’re like me, you would rather research and annotate your recipes on a computer. The iPhone app completes the triumverate, allowing you to ship shopping lists directly to your phone. You have to pay for all of these apps separately of course, and there’s no Android support. Paprika also does have some limitations on the recipes it can import, but no more than any of the other recipe saving apps on the market, and of those its definitely the most streamlined.

Ryan Kim: Foursquare for iPhone

This is an app that’s been around for a while, but this year, it got a lot more useful for me. The specials have been greatly improved including new deals with American Express. And features like Explore have been a big help in finding recommendations for new places to try out. I’m also becoming heavily dependent on Foursquare Tips in the past year to know what to order in new restaurants. The updated list feature is turning Foursquare data into a lasting resource you can share with others. I never got into the race for Mayorships and even the point standings among my friends really don’t mean much to me. But all the new features and updates really make the app powerful for me in ways that wasn’t the case before.

Om Malik: Camera+ for iPhone

Camera+ is the only app I use to take photos just as iPhone is the only camera I use to take photos. It is an app that can turn rank amateurs into photo-artists. Add filters and effects and you have photo magic in the form of an app.

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The Pulitzer board, which administers the journalism awards named after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, has changed the terms of submission to require digital entries only, and has also changed the description of the “breaking news” category to stress that real-time reporting will be the main criteria for that award. That has led some — including the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard — to speculate that we could see a Pulitzer Prize for live-tweeting of the news. Whether that ever comes to pass or not, there is a case to be made that Twitter is the best tool for breaking news that the world of journalism has seen in a long time.

Although the Pulitzer board didn’t say why it made the changes to the criteria for the breaking-news award, it may have done so in part because the award went without a winner in 2011 — although there were three finalists nominated by the judges, including the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald, none were chosen.

Reporting that captures news “as quickly as possible”

The old version of the criteria said that the award would be given “with special emphasis on the speed and accuracy of the initial coverage, using any available journalistic tool, including text reporting, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or any combination of those formats, in print or online or both.” The new version of the criteria is substantially shorter, and doesn’t mention anything about the format that it is supposed to appear in or what kinds of tools the reporting should use. It simply refers to:

[R]eporting of breaking news that, as quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as times passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage.

In a news release about the changes, the Pulitzer board also said that it was moving away from looking at print submissions for the category because “it would be disappointing if an event occurred at 8 a.m. and the first item in an entry was drawn from the next day’s newspaper.” Although recent winners have included online elements, most have focused on news packages that appeared in print.

If reporting that occurs “as quickly as possible” is the main criteria, then I think Twitter definitely fits the bill — or is at least a leading contender. Videos uploaded to YouTube or streamed from a news event like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests (as my colleague Janko described in his recent post on videographers becoming citizen journalists) are also clearly real-time, but nothing matches the speed that is possible with 140 character text messages and links on Twitter, and videos and photos often spread this way as well.

An obvious candidate: NPR’s Andy Carvin

As for who has demonstrated the kind of reporting prowess on Twitter that might justify a Pulitzer, many of those who have followed the events of the “Arab Spring” through his Twitter stream would probably nominate National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin, who has turned the network into a kind of real-time newswire. Although many criticize Twitter for broadcasting un-verified information, Carvin has shown that a rigorous approach to fact-checking and a knowledge of the players involved can make it a reporting tool as good as — if not better than — any other we have known.

There are other good examples as well, including New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s use of Twitter (and his Tumblr blog) to cover the tornado in Missouri earlier this year, which also gave readers a look behind the scenes at his reaction to the events he was witnessing — another thing Twitter excels at. And other reporters have also made use of the network while on the ground in Tahrir Square in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab World, as well as during the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan earlier this year.

One of the things that might make Carvin and some of these other examples ineligible for a breaking-news Pulitzer is that the criteria specifically mentions “local reporting,” which means posting to Twitter about events in Egypt might not fit the bill — although some of the reporting that news organizations have done using Storify and other tools during the Occupy protests in Los Angeles and New York might qualify.

If nothing else, the Pulitzer board seems to have upped the ante for newspapers and other traditional media outlets who want to compete for the breaking-news award: if you are planning to just publish something the next day — or even post traditional stories to your website — and you’re not thinking about video or Twitter or Storify or some combination of those tools to cover the event, you can kiss your Pulitzer goodbye.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and

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We liked Logitech’s Alert Video Security System when we took it for a week-long spin last year, which at that point allowed remote access to live HD camera footage, and video stored on your PC. But a new partnership with Dropbox adds cloud storage to the equation, letting you boot video directly to the web to supplement the PC- and microSD-based options already in place. Packages are available today, and come with 2GB of storage for free, 50GB for per month or 100GB for per month — Logitech isn’t exactly giving away the service, but when you consider that a bare-bones Alert system costs 0, those virtual add-ons sound a bit more reasonable. Jump past the break for the full rundown from Logitech, and get ready to beef up those passwords — having your email account hacked is one thing, but you certainly don’t want anyone watching you at home, in real-time or the past.

Continue reading Logitech Alert Video Security System gets Dropbox support, lets you park 100GB of footage in the cloud

Logitech Alert Video Security System gets Dropbox support, lets you park 100GB of footage in the cloud originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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