Cloud

I expect most of you know the fable of the scorpion and the frog , but if you don’t, it goes like this (quoted from Wikipedia): “A scorpion asks a frog to carry him over a river. The frog is afraid of being stung during the trip, but the scorpion argues that if it stung the frog, both would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog agrees and begins carrying the scorpion, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature. The fable is used to illustrate the position that no change can be made in the behaviour of the fundamentally vicious.” ...

Our portfolio company JumpCloud is running a survey to dig deeper into the professional lives of IT folks and their move to DevOps. If you are open to sharing your thoughts and experiences, please take their survey . It’s only about five minutes long and they are sharing all of the raw data (anonymized, of course). The survey ends at the end of June. The IT sector is undergoing some interesting transformations as a result of the cloud, DevOps, and mobile. I’m interested to see what the data tells us. ...

This is the second year that TechStars is running a thematic accelerator in Texas focused just on cloud computing. At Foundry Group , we believe in thematic investing both as a way to organize and filter the massive number of opportunities to look at, but also as a way to build a set of muscles around a sphere of knowledge. It’s been fun to experiment with this approach at TechStars. ...

The first cycle of The Microsoft Accelerator, powered by TechStars , is in its final run up to demo day. The first program has focused on Kinect applications and has some super teams, such as Gestsure (they control operating rooms with motion control) and Ubi (they turn any surface into a touch screen.) Demo Day is in Seattle on June 28th. If you are an investor (angel or VC), send me an email and I’ll get you an invitation. ...

I’m now officially in the cloud business, courtesy of my friends at Standing Cloud (we are investors.) Standing Cloud delivers cloud application management solutions for cloud service providers, technology solution providers, and their customers. Their application management layer, automated managed services and Application Storefront make it easy to build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. Back in November, I wrote that “If you are a hosting, managed service provider, or building a cloud service (public or private), you have three choices. The first is to ignore this stuff (dumb). The second is to try to build it all yourself and keep pace with Amazon (good luck). The third is to use Standing Cloud .” And that’s exactly what I’m doing. Basically, Brad’s Amazing Cloud makes me a cloud provider. ...

Are you building a cloud startup? If so, apply to TechStars Cloud today ! Earlier this month TechStars announced its newest accelerator program, TechStars Cloud, and we are looking for the best cloud startups we can find to go through the inaugural program. We’ve gotten a lot of questions about what constitutes a “cloud startup”, so here is a discussion of what we think are cloud startups. We think we can do something special with this program and have big expectations for the results we’ll see when we connect early stage cloud startups to the best cloud mentors and companies. ...

StillSecure has been nailing it in the service provider segment with deals with XO , ViaWest, CoreSite, and others recently. StillSecure fundamentally believes that service providers – telcos, datacenter, cloud providers – will be the channel to market for security solutions and I agree. They have built an amazing set of solutions for colocation and dedicated server environments and have solutions that can apply to some higher-end cloud users. Today they are announcing a new host-based firewall management solution in conjunction with SoftLayer – a leader in the cloud market. Aimed at all cloud users, StillSecure’s new solution is the start of a major initiative for the company and is also a new category of solutions. ...

Before we invested in MakerBot , we bought and assembled a Thing-O-Matic. When I say we, I mean me, Jason, and Ross. It took us about 20 hours (Jason and I did the first half; Jason and Ross did the second half) and was a blast – think of it as an adult lego project. Our Thing-O-Matic has been steadily printing stuff – you can play a game of chess with our Thing-O-Matic pieces. the next time you are in my office. ...

I find it endlessly entertaining that people say things like “I don’t need to back up my data anymore because it’s in the cloud.” These people have never experienced a cloud failure, accidentally deleted a specific contact record, or authenticated an app that messed up their account. They will. And it will be painful. I became a believer in backing up my data when I was 17 years old and had my first data calamity. I wrote about the story on my post What Should You Do When Your Web Service Blows Up . I’ve been involved in a few other data tragedies over the past 28 years which always reinforce (sometimes dramatically) the importance of backups. ...

As most nerds know, Skynet gained self-awareness last week and decided as its first act to mess with Amazon Web Services, creating havoc for anyone that wanted to check-in on the Internet to their current physical location. In hindsight Skynet eventually figured out this was a bad call on its part as it actually wants to know where every human is at any given time. However, Skynet is still trying to get broader adoption of Xbox Live machines, so the Sony Playstation Network appears to still be down . ...