SmoothSpan Blog

For Executives, Entrepreneurs, and other Digerati who need to know about SaaS and Web 2.0.

Archive for June 24th, 2010

Android: The Long Term Bet

Posted by Bob Warfield on June 24, 2010

Fascinating news from a recent Appcelerator survey of 2700 mobile developers:

– The long term bet among these developers is Android

– Apple is a short term bet, mostly because it’s a hot platform now.

– The reason is open-ness and cross-platform portability

The really interesting thing is that a lot of Apple’s problems are self-inflicted.  They could be a lot more open and trustworthy, but they’re not acting like Switzerland

It isn’t too late for them to change, but it looks like they have a lot of trust to rebuild.  Is Jobs capable of listening?

Adobe, this is good news for you too.  Your Flash/Flex platform offers the best cross-platform compatibility out there, except that it doesn’t run on Apple’s platforms.  Follow my 7-step plan and prevail as Android comes into its own.

Posted in apple, strategy | 3 Comments »

What’s Hadoop Good For?

Posted by Bob Warfield on June 24, 2010

Hadoop, for those who haven’t heard of it, is an Open Source version of Google’s Map Reduce distributed computing algorithm.  After reading that Adobe has agreed to Open Source their Puppet modules for managing Hadoop, I got curious about what Adobe might be doing with it.  It didn’t take long on Google to find a cool Wiki page showing what a whole bunch of companies use Hadoop for.

I went in thinking (actually without too much thinking, LOL) that Hadoop implied some sort of search engine work.  I knew it was more versatile, but just hadn’t thought about it.  A quick read of the Wiki shows all sorts of companies using it, and it seems like one of the most common applications is log analysis.  The other quasi surprising thing is that it often seems to be used with relatively fewer nodes than I would have thought.  After all, it is a massively parallel algorithm.  However, it is apparently also pretty handy for 10-15 node problems.  Hence much smaller organizations and problems are benefiting.

My conclusion, if any, is that it must be a really handy toolkit for throwing together analysis of all sorts of things that take a little grid computing (that term is probably no longer popular) in an elastic Cloud world.

Cool beans!  I love the idea of scaling up a quick hadoop run to crank out a report of some kind and then scaling the servers back down so you don’t have to pay for them.  Makes sense.

Posted in cloud, grid | Leave a Comment »

 
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