Microsoft Live Mesh to bind them all : Yahoo rewires: Google goes for Ap Eng infrastructure

Live Mesh is seen as a significant strategic shift for Microsoft.  Ray Ozzie, one of the Microsoft’s two CTO's proposes that “The Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh,”  showing Microsoft to be refocusing  resources to catch up on cloud computing.

A "significant public statement that the battle is really a cloud battle,” says Mark Stahlman, a research VP at Gartner industry consulting group. “It’s not an ad search battle or a desktop operating system battle. Those are fought and won already. This is the one that’s wide open.”

Microsoft refers to its strategy as “software plus services.” The view is is built on Web-based software that will help deliver services to a variety of devices, both entertainment and business from the Xbox game console, through music players, to cellphones running Windows Mobile software including even Apple’s Mac product line. The Live Mesh system is to be a software platform in the data center for an evolving array of services, ranging from remote control of computers and electronic devices to data storage. Microsoft also hopes that software and service developers will create applications based on the service.

Initially the services is available only to some 10,000 test users and software developers. Microsoft has described 15 components of the new Live Mesh service, including a notification feature, a news feature and an information window displayed by the service, but only two user-oriented applications, synchronising files on multiple computers and enpowering users to control computers and other devices over the Internet.

A public test will be run by Microsoft later this year. The basic service, which will be available initially on devices running Windows XP and Mobile, will later support Mac computers and other mobile devices. Five gigabytes of free data storage will be included, but no mention has been made about the anticipated charges for features and services.

Yahoo aims to re-wire
"We're in the process of rewiring Yahoo from the inside out and will open up all the assets of Yahoo to developers across the Web in a way we've never done before,"  Ari Balogh, Yahoo's CTO, said in a keynote address at the Web 2 Expo.

Balogh said that one goal is to make use of the social-network data  on the company's servers. "We're going to make the consumer experience at Yahoo social throughout,"  so  instant-message capabilities could be incorporated with Flickr.

Yahoo has one of the most popular Web mail services, with close on 100m  people use Yahoo Messenger. Flickr is one of the top photo-sharing sites on the Web. Yahoo Answers, where people put questions that others answer, has also been a big hit.

According to Balogh, Yahoo claims 200,000 developers that already work on some of its services, some of which have been open for years.  Flickr is the second most popular Web service in the world to tinker around with (as measured by the number of times its application programming interface, or API, has been downloaded).

And as Yahoo and Microsoft walk away from the acquisition negotiations, and a reported differential of $4 or $37 sought and only $33 offered, Microsoft , which does not give up easily long-term, has interestingly opted against hostility. Yahoo's future "With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history so that we can maximise our potential," could get diverted or boosted. Keep watching for the catalyst.

Infrastructure cost dropping for Web developers
Google meantime has  launched its test version of App Engine, an infrastructure service aimed specifically at Web developers, one of several offering cheap infrastructure to Web businesses, so that they can rent storage and processing power and avoid expensive hardware purchases. Experts say that despite lower operating costs, venture capitalists aren't likely to change their funding strategy.

Tom Stocky, a product manager at Google, says that the company has given a great deal of thought to building an environment to help Web-based applications get off the ground quickly and grow easily.  "Even the most proficient developers can get benefit here, because they get access to the same infrastructure Google engineers use," Stocky says.

For example, in addition to being hosted on Google's servers, developers can use Google's software to authenticate customers. App Engine, Stocky explains, includes access to some of Google's own methods for managing data, including the company's load balancing algorithms and data storage systems that allow for faster access to data.

Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and CEO of hi5, says changes to infrastructure have made a big difference in terms of how startups operate. According to Yalamanchi, in 2003, when hi5 was founded, open-source software, such as the database system PostgreSQL and the Linux OS, along with cheap components, made it possible for the company to get by with only $250,000 in seed money - a feat that wouldn't have been possible just a few years previously.

"Today, we would have looked very closely at Amazon S3," Yalamanchi adds, noting that infrastructure costs are continuing to drop. Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, only charge companies for the storage and processing they use. Startups don't have to pay for servers that sit idle much of the time, waiting for a sudden surge in traffic says Adam Selipsky, Amazon Web Services' VP of product management and developer relations. That means you have to raise a lot less money from angels and VC, and the reduction of risk is very attractive to both startups and to the initial backers.

Edward Roberts, founder and chair of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says that given the lower initial costs of starting a business, people should "expect more startups." 
But  he doubts venture capitalists will change  investment size. They need to invest certain quantities in order to keep funds working to maximum capacity. "More startups may, however, get funded by angels or angel groups who have less money than the VCs," he adds.

Dharmesh Shah, a US investor and entrepreneur who runs a website for software entrepreneurs, says he thinks that many startups now use venture capital to build staff and increase research. He says that his own company, an Internet marketing system Hubspot, based in Cambridge, MA, raised $5m last July, but needed only about $150,000 for infrastructure. Much of the additional money has gone into human resources.

Shah adds that outsourcing infrastructure does free up funds, but there are potential problems. He notes that using infrastructure services puts startups at the mercy of  service company pricing structures and  could be a reason that larger companies have done better with these services, having a name brand to offer.

Footnote:

Colourful themes
And with little fanfare, but the help of some of the world’s leading artists, Google has launched a new collection of themes for iGoogle, its personalised homepage site. Google enlisted the help of almost 70 artists to design an assortment of themes from which users can select.

By selecting artists with diverse backgrounds, Google is aiming for users to find themes to reflect their own diverse styles and personalities. The artists taking part included Oscar de la Renta, Anne Geddes, Marc Ecko, Coldplay, Jeff Koons and Diane von Furstenberg, among many others. Additionally to help celebrate the occasion, Koons, a celebrated pop artist, created a special Google doodle which will appeared on Google’s homepage.

Sources: http://www.ap.org
http://www.technologyreview.com
http://www.google.com/help/ig/art/gallery.html