cloud computing, Software, startups Gregory T. Huang wrote: EMC, the software and data-storage giant based in Hopkinton, MA, is announcing today it has formed a new company called Decho. The new organization is composed of two formerly separate EMC businesses—American Fork, UT-based Mozy and Seattle-based Pi. The merged operation will focus on cloud computing services having to do with managing people’s digital information, including the online backup and storage of personal data. Xconomy is very familiar with EMC (NYSE: EMC) and Mozy. Back in October 2007, we wrote about the story behind EMC’s acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems, which developed Mozy, the online backup service. The Mozy desktop application automatically uploads copies of key files and folders to Mozy’s servers, and is best known for its popularity among consumers rather than companies. As for Pi, the software startup was acquired by EMC last February, and has always been pretty stealthy about what it’s doing. (Its name stands for “personal information,” not the transcendental number we know from geometry class.) The firm was originally founded by ex-Microsoft exec Paul Maritz, who became CEO of VMware (also part of EMC) in July. Maritz will remain at VMware, and is on the board of Decho. The new company has more than 100 employees based in four cities: Seattle; American Fork, Utah; Montreal, Canada; and Bangalore, India. Charles Fitzgerald, Decho’s vice president of product management (also an ex-Microsoftie), sat down with Xconomy last week to tell us more about the direction of the company. First of all, its name stands for “digital echo,” referring to the data bouncing around between a user’s devices—phone, laptop, desktop—and the Internet cloud. “If you look at the new Decho entity, we are a cloud-based service provider focused on personal information. We’re beyond the startup stage,” says Fitzgerald. “We have eight figures of revenue now and are growing nicely…The revenue is all coming from Mozy.” Why focus on personal information management? Fitzgerald cited four catalysts: the sheer volume of data out there (70 percent is from individuals—things like photos and documents); redundant information scattered across many devices; the desire of customers to save data for decades; and the need to categorize and tag our information in an automated way. “Today’s world is very device-centric,” Fitzgerald says. “Instead of a device-centric world. we’d like to have an information-centric world where the core information is something I can act on and protect and manage and enrich very explicitly.” To that end, Decho will be combining Mozy’s technology—cheap disk storage with advanced software algorithms—with Pi’s “metadata” platform. “Pi provides some very sophisticated metadata management—finding, tagging, and indexing stuff and having a more semantic understanding of the data in these clouds,” says Fitzgerald. “We have a bunch of data centers like other people, but the magic is at the software layer…Mozy will continue to be the brand for online backup going forward, but you will see us also provide some additional applications to take advantage of that back end.” Fitzgerald isn’t saying much about what those applications will be just yet. “You can think of multiple propositions,” he says. “We certainly will go back to somebody who has done backup and say, ‘Hey, would you like to do more with your backup? You have a critical mass of data in the cloud, and there are other things you can do with it.’” Fitzgerald adds that the main challenges going forward are on the business side rather than technical, and they include “getting customers comfortable with the platform.” So, will Decho be primarily a consumer brand, and how will EMC run it? Fitzgerald hinted that the new venture will be a fairly autonomous entity. “We are a cloud service provider who sells all the way up to GE—but part of the reason for making it a new company is that it is a very different space from the traditional EMC space,” he says. “Catering to consumers among other customers is very different from anything EMC has done traditionally. In recent years, they’ve been pretty good at making things more or less loosely coupled depending on what they need to do from a business perspective. VMware and RSA are more or less autonomous.” We’ll have to wait and see what new products Decho has in store for its users, and what its impact will be on EMC’s business. But all signs point to it being a formidable competitor in the race to cash in on people’s need to organize their stockpiles of personal data online. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Add to iTunes | Add to YouTube | Add to Google | RSS Feed Just how big is your hard drive? How much space do you have? What if I told you that you have access to a hard drive with unlimited space… and it won’t cost you a single thing to store and share your files? With MyBloop, you can upload, store, and share an unlimited number of files for absolutely zero dollars. MyBloop is a place where you can store all of your files for free. There are no limits on storage, bandwidth or the number of files you can store. Anyone can join MyBloop. The BloopLoader is a great new application that allows you to upload files to MyBloop directly from your desktop. You can drag and drop files and control them from a Windows-like interface, which is familiar to all users and doesn’t require you to learn anything new to use. The BloopLoader works on Windows and Intel Macs. The current maximum size per file is 1GB. There are no limited to the number of files you can upload. There are also no limits on bandwidth. You can store an unlimited number of files in your account. Just make sure to organize your files into folders because when someone views your profile it could take their computer some time to display everything. Your files will never be deleted or moved. Once you upload them to MyBloop, they’re there forever… unless YOU remove them. You can organize files within your account into folders and such, to keep them sorted out and make it easier for you (and others!) to find what you need in an instant. It’s so simple, it’s hard to believe it’s free! What more could you possibly want? You get unlimited storage for free. It really doesn’t get better than that. Royalty Free Music Clips & Software. Master Mind Power In 9 Weeks. PLRSiteBuilder. Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video: <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4_JTvpAhHvs"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4_JTvpAhHvs" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a> Dealing with Hard Drives NAS, eSATA, and ZFS How Can You Connect SATA Hard Drives without an Enclosure? How Would You Like 1TB of Free Storage Space? Windows Vista and SATA Drives How to Install a Hard Drive in an Apple Mac Pro Hard Drive Problems How to Buy a Hard Drive The Best Hard Drive Enclosure Chkdsk and Defrag Do You Have a Second Hard Drive? Join the Geeks Community World’s Biggest Hard Drive: Unlimited Storage Less

http://geeks.pirillo.com - http://live.pirillo.com - Just how big is your hard drive? How much space do you have? What if I told you that you have access to a hard drive with unlimited space... and it won't cost you a single thing to store and share your files? http://chris.pirillo.com Distributed by Tubemogul. Less

Roundup, deals, VC Gregory T. Huang wrote: It was a pretty slow week for tech deals in the Northwest—chalk it up to the election and the Veteran’s Day holiday. Nevertheless, there was a trickle of activity in software, digital media, and energy. —Seattle-based Voyager Capital has led an investment in Keystream, a Mountain View, CA-based online video advertising startup. The deal closed earlier this year, and the financial terms were not announced. Keystream’s software allows Web publishers to insert ads into blank spaces in their video content. —Entrance Controls, a Tukwila, WA-based security company, acquired Portland, OR-based 1Pointe, a startup that delivers secure networking, storage, and wireless technologies to businesses. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. —Puget Sound Energy, the Bellevue, WA-based utility company, purchased 22 wind turbine generators from Vestas, a leading turbine manufacturer with U.S. headquarters in Portland, OR. The turbines will be used to expand the Wild Horse Wind and Solar Facility in eastern Kittitas County, WA, and they make up most of the project’s $100 million budget. —Apptio, a Bellevue, WA-based startup that helps companies manage and optimize their IT costs, signed up a new batch of customers, including Alaska Airlines, SkyTap, and SumTotal. A year ago, the company raised $7 million from Madrona Venture Group, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, and other investors. —Not a deal, but a list of dealbreakers: Seattle angel investor Geoff Entress, formerly a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, gave his Top 10 list of why startups fail. (The list goes to 11, like a Spinal Tap amp.) —Also not a deal per se, but Luke reported on how Portland, OR-based Wellpartner, a mail-order pharmacy, is helping clinics that serve the poor gain access to drugs at half the average wholesale price that private insurers get charged. Wellpartner does it by cutting through the red tape of a federal program known as 340B. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

deals, acquisitions, Security Gregory T. Huang wrote: Tukwila, WA-based Entrance Controls, a technology firm that manages electronic security for businesses, announced today it has acquired Portland, OR-based 1Pointe. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2005, 1Pointe delivers secure networking, wireless, and storage technologies to businesses in the Northwest. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Warren and Hugh talk about how to care for your cheese once you get it home from the store? should you be worried about that blue mould around the edges? For more like this visit: www.legourmet.tv Less

In today's podcast: Intel's mobile Nehalem coming next year; Intel to include HSPA on Moorestown; Toshiba to partially buy out SanDisk state in venture; Panasonic improves fuel cell prototype; and RedHat CEO thinks open-source will do better than proprietary software in recession. read more ... Tags: toshiba, panasonic, redhat, storage, sandisk Less

innovation, R&D, EMC Wade Roush wrote: How does a giant company like EMC build an image as an innovator when it employs only a handful of full-time researchers, has a reputation for acquiring rather than inventing new technologies, and sells some of the unsexiest boxes in the IT back room—file servers, disk arrays, and other backup systems that, if they’re working properly, no one ever has to think about? Holding a two-day innovation conference open to all 42,000 employees, and getting 1,000 of them to attend either physically or virtually, might be a good start. And that’s exactly what EMC (NYSE: EMC) did in Franklin, MA, last week. It was the second time the company has hosted such an event, and it attracted more than twice as many participants as the 2007 inaugural version (which Bob chronicled here). I attended the first day of talks and discussions, which culminated in a science-fair-like “Innovation Showcase” where 30 teams of EMC employees—winnowed down from nearly a thousand entrants—gave poster presentations to a panel of judges. They were competing for trophies, cash prizes, and, more importantly, the resources and attention that could help their ideas blossom into new products. The winning poster: a concept for bringing cloud computing into consumers’ homes, developed by EMC employee Manu Fontaine, a senior director of marketing and business development in EMC’s Washington, DC, offices. Fontaine proposes selling inexpensive, networked storage devices that make creative use of peer-to-peer networking to store users’ data for life. Of course, you aren’t likely to see EMC selling these devices right away. (Although one of last year’s winning ideas, for a sort of automated bibliography service for business documents stored in EMC’s object-based Centera archiving system, is already being piloted with customers.) The point of the innovation conference and the showcase, according to Jeff Nick, the Hopkinton, MA-based company’s chief technology officer, is to get EMC employees thinking about products or services that might cut across existing business units, and to highlight ideas that deserve to be nurtured further by his office or by EMC’s Centers of Excellence, a cluster of advanced technology development groups in Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Israel, and Russia. “There isn’t enough money to take all of these ideas and turn them into major, funded programs,” Nick told me in an interview between presentations. “We don’t have the capacity to do that, and it would be irresponsible. But if you can seed these ideas with just enough water and nutrients and light, with the joint support of the Centers of Excellence and the corporate CTO office, you can incubate them to the point where we can take [and develop] the ones that appear to be the most fertile.” The message seems to be that EMC can make do with a grassroots approach to creating attractive new products that help customers manage digital information, carving out resources here and there when needed. (The way Nick sees it, by the way, EMC is in the business of “not just storing and optimizing and managing and protecting information, but enabling the derivation of value from information…technology can be commoditized, but information cannot.”) Nick calls this bottom-up strategy “targeted idea incubation.” But he admits that the model is “still in its formative stages.” And given EMC’s recent history, incubating any kind of innovation has got to feel like an uphill battle. In 1999—the year Joe Tucci was appointed president and COO–EMC was named as the New York Stock Exchange’s “Stock of The Decade,” in recognition the company’s phenomenal growth in the 1990s as it pioneered a series of new storage systems for minicomputers, mainframes, and corporate data centers. But under Tucci’s leadership, EMC has been far more aggressive about acquiring smaller companies—including Data General, Documentum, Legato, VMware, SMARTS, Rainfinity, Captiva, nLayers, RSA, Infoscape, Avamar, Berkeley Data Systems, Voyence, Pi Corporation, Conchango, Iomega, and more than a dozen others—than about building new products inside its own walls. Its biggest seller, the Symmetrix line of storage servers, dates to 1990 (the first version stored a then-massive 24 gigabytes). As the company has diversified into software and services in recent years, nearly all of its major new product releases have hailed from acquired subsidiaries. Unlike Microsoft or IBM, moreover, the company has no dedicated research and development organization charged with scoping out the future and making sure EMC has products customers will want five or 10 years down the road. The closest analogs with EMC are the …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

This November 2008 survey is a critical component of the EDUCAUSE Center on Applied Research (ECAR) study of IT services sourcing in higher education. The historically binary decision to self-operate or completely outsource IT is being replaced by an a la carte menu that enables institutions to pick and choose which services to outsource, to whom, and for how long. Web 2.0 technologies and business models have expanded the scope of technology services that an institution can potentially source. This ECAR study seeks to evaluate the state of current and planned adoption of various sourcing strategies for IT services. Citation for this work : EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research. “IT Services Sourcing Survey” (Survey Instrument). Boulder, CO: ECAR, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar. Less

Storage, Software, Virtualization Wade Roush wrote: If you’ve ever had to replace your home computer, you know what a hassle it can be to copy your most important software and data from the old computer’s hard drive to the new one. The IT-industry term for this process is “data migration”—and it’s even more of a headache for system administrators at big companies than it is for average PC owners. But AutoVirt, a Nashua, NH, startup that’s expected to come out of stealth mode next week, has a solution for the problem—at least for companies that use Windows-based computer networks. In a nutshell, the company’s technology uses a form of virtualization to trick an organization’s client computers into thinking that they are communicating with the same old storage system, even if it’s brand new. Investors seem to think the idea is a good one: AutoVirt will also announce next week that it has collected $4.5 million in Series A funding from Boston and Menlo Park, CA-based Sigma Partners and Waltham, MA-based Kepha Partners. AutoVirt CEO Klavs Landberg, a veteran of Sun Microsystems and Data General, says he sees an opportunity for his company to outmaneuver Microsoft, which he says created the data migration problem in the first place by setting up such a convoluted system for naming the various devices on a network. The problem, as Landberg describes it, is that when a company buys the equivalent of a new hard drive for its office network (they’re usually called “network-attached storage” or NAS devices), putting it into production is far more than just a matter of replicating the old data Every machine that communicates with the device must be reprogrammed with its new address and with the locations of the exact “shares” or sections of that device’s drives where it’s allowed to store data. It’s an exhausting, error-prone, entirely manual process,  Landberg says. Weekend migration projects often spill over into the work week, causing disruptive downtime. In fact, IT administrators so despise data migration that they often overspend on storage devices that are bigger than they really need so that they never have to move anything. “Because data migration is too hard and too risky, they end up with 25 percent utilization of their NAS devices,” Landberg says. “The problem is getting worse and worse. But we are going to make it go away in its entirety.” AutoVirt’s software is designed to be installed on a network at the same time that an organization is adding a new storage device. It functions as a virtual replica of the old device, intercepting data addressed to the old drives and sending it to the appropriate shares on the new device. It’s as if you submitted a change-of-address form to the post office, and they agreed to forward all of your mail forever; that way, you’d never have to let your friends and family know about your new address. It sounds simple enough—but it will save so much labor that IT departments will gladly fork over $25,000 to $50,000 per installation, according to AutoVirt’s surveys of prospective customers. Landberg says that’s within the price range of the thousands of medium-sized businesses that added NAS devices to their networks over the last decade without much thought to how they’d upgrade. “Everybody, without much foresight or planning, has started buying NAS devices, which are easy to use as long as you only buy one or two,” says Landberg. “But as soon as you buy more than that, and as soon as they start getting old, it gets hard. We are the only solution built specifically for the mid-market, the part of the market that has been ignored by the industry.” AutoVirt’s software isn’t quite ready for mass distribution: Landberg says the company will start out with an “early adopter program” in which a handful of customers will be asked to validate the system’s effectiveness in real-world environments. General availability will come sometime next year. If Microsoft is to blame for data-migration woes, I asked Landberg what’s stopping the software giant from stepping in to solve the problem—perhaps crushing AutoVirt in the process. “All of my investors ask that question,” he said. “The answer is that, of course, over time, Microsoft can do any dang thing they want—they have and they will.” But in the area of virtualization, Landberg believes, Microsoft is “totally focused on putting VMware out of its misery. They are putting their entire virtualization budget into reclaiming lost ground in server virtualization, and taking back control of that technology. From my perspective, that leaves them no attention span to pay attention to us.” Even if Microsoft decided to address the data migration problem today, Landberg says, “It would take them two years to put a program together—such is the decision-making process inside Microsoft post-Bill Gates.” And AutoVirt plans to achieve a commanding lead before then—big enough that Microsoft might decide to negotiate rather than fight. “By the time Microsoft comes back from the VMware wars,” predicts Landberg, “they will discover that AutoVirt has invaded their space and taken the position they should have—which will lead to a very interesting set of discussions and possibilities.” Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

http://www.insidegeek.ca - In this video we are unboxing an OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual-Drive RAID FireWire 800 external hard drive. This is a 1TB hard drive running in RAID 0, featuring two drives sitting inside a well-designed and sturdy enclosure. Distributed by Tubemogul. Less

Some 69% of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the web. Online users who take advantage of cloud applications say they like the convenience of having access to data and applications from any Web-connected device. However, their message to providers of such services is: Let's keep the data between us. Less

Storage, cloud computing, VC Wade Roush wrote: Automatic Internet-based backup services—the first form of “cloud computing” to hit the mainstream market—have been making news lately. Last Wednesday, the Mozy division of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced that its software will power an online backup service available to buyers of Thinkpad SL notebook computers, the newest line of business laptops from Lenovo. Not to be outdone, Boston-based Carbonite is expected to announce soon that it has formed an even broader partnership with the Chinese computer maker: All Lenovo IdeaPad and IdeaCentre computers—the company’s lines of home and home-office laptops and desktops, respectively—will now come with Carbonite’s online backup software pre-installed. If IdeaPad and IdeaCentre owners give Carbonite an e-mail address and password, they’ll get 30 days of free backup service on Carbonite’s servers, after which they can elect to continue the service at $49.95 per year. The arrangement is a coup that could bring Carbonite tens of thousands of new users at a time when the competition for customers of online backup services is all about exposure, branding, and name recognition. At the same time, Carbonite is about to announce formally that it has closed a $20 million financing round, the third since the company’s founding in 2005. (It raised $2.5 million in Series A funding in February, 2006, and completed a $15 million Series B round in May, 2007.) Carbonite co-founder and CEO David Friend, a veteran of the Boston technology scene with five previous startups to his name, calls the new financing round “a real achievement for the company,” given the general sense of caution prevailing in investment markets. All of the company’s existing investors—including Menlo Ventures, 3i Group, and CommonAngels—came back for the latest round, but it also included a new institutional investor, Performance Equity of Stamford, CT. For the Series C round, “We were looking for somebody with their feet more in Wall Street than in Sand Hill Road, to show that we have a working business model,” Friend says. “This is no longer venture capital that we’re raising—it’s expansion capital, and the people who gave us term sheets did so because they looked at Carbonite and saw that we have a marketing engine where we can put a dollar in the top, turn the crank, and get four or five dollars out the bottom over the next two or three years.” Whether online backup services really turn into that kind of money machine—and who ends up with the profits—will depend to a large extent on how quickly consumer awareness of the technology spreads and which company can get its name in front of computer users first. Most computer users are aware of the possibility of losing the data on their local hard drives, whether through theft, hardware failure, or some other disaster. And most make at least desultory efforts to back up crucial business or personal data, often on DVD-RW discs or on a second, external hard drive. But relatively few people so far are aware of services like those from Carbonite and Mozy, which copy the data on PC hard drives to far-away data centers over broadband Internet connections. These backups occur automatically whenever there is new data to be duplicated. In the event that local data is lost, it can be restored by …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Add to iTunes | Add to YouTube | Add to Google | RSS Feed If I offered you a full TeraByte of storage right now with no strings attached, would you take it? Of course you would! We could all use more storage, right? Heck, you may not even have that much storage in your home, so you could be doubling your capacity. Well then in that case, head over to Ossah, and take advantage of their free storage! Oosah is a Web-based digital media content hosting and management system. Oosah provides individuals and businesses with an all-in-one service for uploading, hosting, managing and sharing their digital media assets. Members can also use Oosah to create new media assets in the form of multimedia presentations that we call “oosahs.” First, Oosah is very intuitive and easy to use. Oosah features are accessed using the same drag-and-drop, and keyboard commands that you are familiar with from desktop applications. Second, Oosah gives you a full Web-based File Manager. The Oosah File Manager gives you the ability to organize your content better than any other Web 2.0 content hosting site. Third we give you more sharing options than any other site. Not only can you share content by emailing, or by linking/embedding in other sites, but you can also podcast your content, or you can download it and burn it to CD/DVD for off-line distribution. We even let you print your photos at full resolution on your local printer. There are other features unique to Oosah as well, which you will find as you use it, and more are coming. Store your videos, photos and audio on Oosah. You can even connect your Oosah account to your Flickr and YouTube profiles, to easily share between them. Also, support is coming for MySpace and Photobucket soon. You can’t beat 1TB of storage for free. There’s even an iPhone interface available now! This is certainly worth a shot. Heck, for free what more could you ever ask for? Survey Storage - Online Surveys Database. Featured On Entrepreneur Magazine Radio. Free Password Storage. Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video: <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rzdOHu60rXg"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rzdOHu60rXg" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a> Installing the Time Capsule for Time Machine Apple Time Capsule Unboxing Time Machine Bug Time Capsule for OS X Time Machine Computer Backup Dealing with Hard Drives NAS, eSATA, and ZFS Backup and File Management Data Recovery Software How Not to Recover Data from a Vista Backup Internet Hard Drive a How Would You Like 1TB of Free Storage Space? Less

http://live.pirillo.com - If I offered you a full TeraByte of storage right now with no strings attached, would you take it? Of course you would! We could all use more storage, right? Heck, you may not even have that much storage in your home, so you could be doubling your capacity. Less

[Cory Doctorow] obtained access to a few data centers that deal in petabyte storage. The demand for data storage and processing doesn’t show any sign of stopping. It’s especially relevant when people need the resources to manage not only things like Google searches, but also email, customer transactions, and in the case of CERN, physics calculations. [Doctorow] drew an interesting conclusion from his experiences with the data centers; any innovation that the petabyte centers work on will eventually drift on down to the ordinary user, in laptop or desktop innovation. The petabyte center is easily duplicated with materials that are available for purchase to the average computer user; the only obstacles are price and space. [via Boing Boing] Less

Just looking at how easy it is to produce reports electronically or digitally for distribution through a website or via email should tell you why this is one of the greatest ways of earning online. The online entrepreneur need not incur heavy costs associated with the production of the report or the storage of printed copies of it. And it also means that the report can never be out of stock, unlike many unfortunate books that are available in local book stores. Also, the people that form the market have less time on their hands nowadays, and having to read an entire e-Book is a huge turn-off for them. They wouldn’t, however, mind reading up a brief, precise report that will quickly reveal to them all the secrets so that they can be implemented as soon as the readers want to. It is very easy to understand why this lucrative avenue is virtually everybody’s cup of tea.  To start with, everybody has some or the other special skill that others are bound to find useful. Other people can, in many ways, use the information thus gained to earn money. This, then, is the secret of creating a best-selling report. Give people something they can make money with, and they will not think twice about paying you for it, in their turn. “How-To” reports, secret revealing reports really do well. You also have to pay special attention to marketing skills. So ready to write your first report and make some money? Less

energy, investing, cleantech Gregory T. Huang wrote: There’s a revolution coming in electric power. Passive, one-way power distribution will become a marketplace with real-time transactions. Centralized will become networked. Demand will become supply. And large-scale energy storage will finally become a reality. So what does all this mean for companies and investors? That’s the topic of a 55-page white paper prepared by Jesse Berst and his team at GlobalSmartEnergy, a Redmond, WA-based research consultancy focusing on business opportunities in the emerging “smart energy” sector. The report was published last Friday by the Global Environment Fund, an international firm based in Chevy Chase, MD, that invests in cleantech and emerging markets. Berst, an Xconomist, sat down with me a few weeks ago to discuss smart energy and the local state of cleantech companies. In his current report, entitled “The Electricity Economy,” Berst lays out an argument that goes something like this. First, the developed world is becoming more and more addicted to electricity without fully realizing it. Berst describes the phenomenon as “more people, more devices, more desire.” Because of this “accidental addiction,” he adds, we are highly vulnerable to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and massive ripple effects from small problems (such as the Northeast blackout of 2003). Consider a few stats: —The Energy Information Administration predicts that worldwide power generation will nearly double from 2004 to 2030. That is the equivalent of 25,000 additional 500-Megawatt coal-fired plants. —In developed nations, demand for electrical appliances rose 48 percent in the 1990s. —By the end of 2007, more than half of all U.S. households had at least one high-definition TV. A plasma TV uses two to three times as much energy as a standard TV. —A 2002 study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that power outages and disturbances cost the U.S. a minimum of $119 billion annually. At the same time, Berst writes, the electric power infrastructure is being rebuilt gradually, with distributed digital equipment replacing centralized electromechanical machinery. Berst is a strong proponent of the “smart grid,” an emerging set of technologies such as intelligent monitoring and communications devices whose goal is to make electricity distribution more efficient and reliable. His report goes into a lot of detail about the capabilities of these devices, comparing the evolution of the energy infrastructure to that of telecommunications and the Internet. But what I found most intriguing was what Berst calls “electronomics”—the emerging business opportunities …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Storage, Hardware, Software Wade Roush wrote: As Bob observed in a March story, EMC (NYSE: EMC), the Hopkinton, MA-based networked storage giant, is very good at acquiring companies whose technologies fit with its existing offerings. But isn’t so well known for actually melding those technologies into new products. VMware (NYSE: VMW), for example, was acquired almost five years ago, in December 2003, but still functions as an almost completely separate company with its own line of software for virtualizing data centers. Today, however, three EMC subsidiaries announced that they’re throwing their lots together—at least when it comes to data backup products for consumer and small businesses. The three units are Walnut Creek, CA-based Dantz Development Corporation (acquired by EMC in 2004), makers of Retrospect backup software for Windows and Macintosh computers; Utah-based Mozy (acquired last September), which offers online backup services for consumers and businesses; and San Diego-based Iomega (acquired in April), which makes external hard drives. The organizations said that starting this summer, new portable and desktop hard drives from Iomega will come with instructions on how to download a free version of Retrospect Express that also helps buyers sign up for the free or premium versions of Mozy’s online service. All of which means that PC users who buy Iomega external drives will be able to arrange cloud-based data backup at the same time that they’re setting up automatic local backups of their PCs’ primary hard drives. According to EMC, it’s the first time local and remote data backup have been integrated in a single product offering. “It’s a seamless customer experience at this point,” says Steve Fairbanks, director of product management for Mozy. “When a customer goes to install Retrospect Express, they’re given the option to back up online using Mozy, and we’ve done the integration work to pass information from the Retrospect setup screens to Mozy.” That means, in effect, that PC owners can specify in one step which parts of their hard drives should be backed up regularly; the Retrospect and Mozy software will then make local and off-site copies automatically.  Mozy provides up to 2 gigabytes of online storage free, and charges $4.95 per month for unlimited storage. Fairbanks says the project to combine the Iomega, Retrospect, and Mozy products became a high priority for EMC as soon as the Iomega acquisition was completed. “This was a very strategic decision made by senior executives, involving working teams who identified great synergies between the products,” says Fairbanks. “If you think about it, the target audiences are very well aligned.” EMC reasoned, in other words, that anyone who cares enough about their data to buy an external hard drive from Iomega is probably also cautious enough to spring for a second level of off-site protection from Mozy. “Mozy has about 750,000 customers, and many of them also have USB hard drives protecting their data—but they recognize that if their external hard drive failed or if, heaven forbid, their house or their business were to burn down or have some natural disaster, they would completely lose that data,” says Fairbanks. “The cost and efficiency [of online backup] has become such that customers are taking a look at both options now.” Among the first products to include the new software bundle will be Iomega’s bestselling 500-gigabyte and 1-terabyte desktop hard drives, which are available from online retailers now and are expected to be on shelves at Best Buy before the end of July. The bundle will be rolled out with the full line of Iomega external hard drives over the next two months, according to EMC. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

VC, funding, video Wade Roush wrote: Even before events like 9/11, the Madrid train bombings, and the London Underground bombings, governments and corporations were busy blanketing outdoor and indoor spaces with networked cameras, reasoning that video surveillance can help security professionals spot criminal activity in progress, or at least get it on tape. But there’s one big problem with the blanket approach: the more cameras an organization installs, the more people it takes to watch them, and the more recorded video there is to review if an incident occurs. It’s a classic case of information overload. Many analysts have predicted that this problem will eventually be solved by moving some of the intelligence in a video surveillance network to its edges: that is, by building “smart” cameras that can determine on their own whether the events they’re observing are suspicious, then alert human operators in real time, or store the video stream differently, so that there’s more information to help investigators later. And now a Bedford, MA, company called VideoIQ—a 2007 spinout of General Electric’s security division—is taking the first steps in that direction. The company is set to release its first smart digital surveillance cameras in August, and it announced today that it has more than doubled its venture financing pot, raising $10 million in a Series B round led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. (Existing investors Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture, both headquartered in Waltham, MA, were also in on the round.) VideoIQ’s new camera, the Intelligent IP Surveillance Camera with Video Recording, or iCVR, has a built-in Linux computer with video analytics software that can identify events of interest—for example, a person approaching the perimeter of a power plant—and notify a security guard. It also has a hard drive that’s smart enough to save digital video data at full resolution when there’s something interesting going on within the camera’s field of view, but compress it when there’s nothing happening, meaning that it can store up to two months’ worth of data, compared to the week or two stored by many older systems. “This is the first generation of a very powerful technology that we believe will revolutionize surveillance, because the vast majority of all video systems are not monitored at all,” says VideoIQ president and CEO Scott Schnell, a former Atlas entrepreneur-in-residence who is a veteran of RSA Security, Photonics, Apple, McKinsey, and Chevron. “The primary purpose is to enable the delivery of forensic information quickly and efficiently, if something does happen.” The iCVR isn’t the first surveillance camera with built-in hard drive and video compression software, but it’s one of the first to add video analytics software to the mix. Currently, adding motion-detection or object-tracking capability to an existing surveillance network can cost $1,000 to $2,000 per camera, according to Schnell. But because VideoIQ’s analytics software runs on the same built-in processor used for compression and storage management, customers essentially get it for free. And if an organization replaces or upgrades its existing surveillance systems with VideoIQ cameras—a project that will cost about $1,800 per camera, Schnell says—it also gets a distributed storage system that doesn’t rely on a central recording device (a collection of VideoIQ cameras functions, in essence, as one big networked DVR), as well as cameras with state-of-the-art sensors from Mountain View, CA-based Pixim that are capable of seeing in both bright sunlight and low-light, nighttime conditions. The biggest initial customers for the system, Schnell believes, will be large facilities with extensive outdoor perimeters that need protecting. “The larger the perimeter, the more costly it is to have manned patrols, and the more monotonous it is” to monitor video cameras visually, Schnell points out. But if the cameras themselves are tuned to …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less