WCDMA 3G Wireless: Huawei e1750 
Service Provider: China Unicom
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The Smallthought staff has become part of Twitter’s analytics team, where they will integrate Trendly features and technology into Twitter’s existing systems, as well as help develop new products.
In April, Twitter launched with a limited number of partners like Starbucks and Best Buy the Promoted Tweets program, which is designed to let companies market their products and services on the popular microblogging and social-networking site.
As with all advertising services, a key to the success of Promoted Tweets will be Twitter’s capacity to analyze the popularity and effectiveness of these ads so that campaigns can be evaluated and optimized.
The analytics for Promoted Tweets may be more challenging than for other online advertising programs for a few reasons, including the fact that the ad format for Promoted Tweets will be the same as the format for regular “tweets” and that Twitter’s usage is going through the roof, with 2 billion “tweets” posted in May, according to Web monitoring company Pingdom.
“Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service,” reads Twitter’s announcement of its Smallthought acquisition.
Credit & Resource: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/061010-twitter-buys-analytics.html
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Google Analytics does a great job of collecting your data, but it does a bad job of helping you understand it. For example, at Dabble DB, we are very interested in how many people come to us after searching for online database. Here’s what that keyword’s traffic looks like for the first few months of 2009:
It’s definitely going up and down a lot, but we don’t really care about daily fluctuation, we care about the trend. On average, how many people should we expect each day? And is that changing?
Trendly uses a statistical model to answer that question for us. It assumes that our traffic is going to stay the same for days, weeks, or even months at a time, but every once in a while something is going to change — like our ranking for “online database” improving, sending more people our way. The red line shows how Trendly sees this keyword over the same time period:
According to Trendly, our daily visitors from “online database” went up from 24 to 40 in early January, and then again up to 50 in early February. It reports these changes as items in a news feed:
By boiling several months of data down to a couple of items in a news feed, Trendly helps us keep on top of many different things at once. For example, this same feed actually tracks all of our search keywords:
You can see that our traffic from searches for co-founder Avi Bryant had a bump at the end of January (around the time he gave a talk at CUSEC), but went back down again. The sparklines beside each news item show those patterns concisely.
The news feed is continuous, and shows up to three years of history. If we want to see the earlier change to “online database”, we just scroll down a few weeks:
The news feed does a great job of showing what’s changed, but it’s nice to put those individual keywords into a wider context. A chart running down the left provides the big picture:
The chart is locked to the same timescale as the news feed — and so, unlike most charts, time runs vertically. Each colored layer in the chart represents a single keyword. For example, the big green layer represents visits from “online database”. If I click on either the chart or the news item, the layer will pop out:
You can see how the green layer gets wider at the same time as the news item appears. The wider the layer, the more visits we get each day. The wider the chart as a whole — the sum of all the layers — the more visits we get in total from search. You can also see that Trendly tries to make things more meaningful by clustering similar keyword phrases together: The popup for “online database” shows that, while most (86%) of the searches in this cluster are for exactly “online database”, there are less frequent similar phrases that are also being included here, like “make an online database”.
Trendly isn’t just for tracking keywords. It has feeds for many of the reports you’re used to from Google Analytics: referrals, content, ad campaigns, and more. If you use goal tracking or ecommerce, Trendly also helps you track those:
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http://news.techworld.com/data-centre/3228389/windows-azure-versus-amazon-ec2/
By Jon Brodkin | Network World US | Published: 10:36 GMT, 28 June 10
Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud tackle two very different cloud computing technology problems today, but are destined to emulate each other over time, Microsoft cloud official Tim O’Brien says.
Whereas Windows Azure is a platform-as-a-service cloud, giving developers the tools they need to build and deploy web applications, Amazon EC2 is primarily an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud, offering on-demand access to customisable virtual machine instances.
Azure simplifies the building of web applications in a way that Amazon does not, but Amazon’s cloud-based virtual machines have the benefit of working with multiple programming models, O’Brien says, predicting that over time Microsoft will move more into infrastructure-as-a-service and Amazon will cross over into platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
O’Brien, senior director of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, discussed his take on the cloud market in an interview with Network World, as well as a public presentation at the recent Cloud Leadership Forum, hosted by IDC and IDG Enterprise.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” O’Brien said in the interview. “The reason people like infrastructure-as-a-service is because it’s programming model agnostic. The bare metal VM doesn’t care what language you wrote the application in, it doesn’t matter what tools you use and what run times you’ve targeted. If it runs on Windows or Linux, give it a virtual machine and it will run just fine. The problem is it’s a lot of extra work. You’re responsible for that virtual machine the same way you’re responsible for a server sitting under your desk. You’re responsible for turning it on. You’re responsible for turning it off. You’re responsible for applying a patch or an update. If Red Hat applies a Linux patch, and you have a Linux VM running on Amazon, you have to apply that patch yourself. They won’t do that for you.”
But there are shortcomings in the platform-as-a-service model as well, O’Brien acknowledges. The biggest problem with PaaS may be difficulty migrating existing applications from the internal data centre to the cloud.
“Platform-as-a-service has a different set of trade-offs,” O’Brien says. “All of that stuff is completely abstracted away, it’s a friction-free development, you basically code up an application, you hit deploy and it’ll go run on the platform that’s supplied by those run times. So in our case its PHP, C Sharp, in the case of Google App Engine it’s Python and Java.” While building new applications is easy, and removes the need for owning internal hardware and software, other than a Web browser, “part of the challenge there is it’s not necessarily optimal for migrating existing applications.”
Microsoft has already announced that “at some point [in the next 12 months] we will be offering the ability to provision a bare-metal VM, and run your application on that,” O’Brien says. While Amazon provides a variety of Windows and Linux virtual machine images through EC2, the company’s Web Services business offers a variety of other tools that might be useful to developers, including databases, storage services and load balancing.
O’Brien predicts that just as Microsoft moves into IaaS, Amazon will build a PaaS offering that more closely resembles Azure than anything Amazon offers today. Amazon’s public relations department could not be reached for comment Friday.
“It’s not a matter of one is better than the other; they accomplish different things,” O’Brien says. “But I think what you’ll see happen in the marketplace is a convergence of those two, where infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Amazon will move up the stack toward platform-as-a-service. You’ll also see PaaS providers like Microsoft provide some of that infrastructure-like capability, just so we can handle those migration scenarios much easier, and the lines will get blurred.”
In his speech at the Cloud Leadership Forum, O’Brien said public cloud services are generally not providing as much customization as customers want, but the cloud model is gaining popularity both among users who want to sidestep their companies’ IT departments, and from small businesses that want to get out of the IT business.
Many small businesses “don’t want to be in the IT business,” O’Brien said. “Private cloud is not in their vocabulary. They want to run their businesses on PCs and mobile phones and get out of the IT business entirely.”
Private clouds simply don’t offer the same economies of scale as public clouds do, he said, claiming that per-server TCO in a 100,000-server data centre is less than half the per-server TCO in a 1,000-server data centre.
Microsoft’s goal in the cloud is to offer customers the same functionality they would expect if they install the software themselves, he said. “If you can write an app for Windows Server you should be able to write an app for Windows Azure,” O’Brien said.
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View of Avi Kivity By Irfan Habib, http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9764?page=0,1
…
In many ways, VMware is a ground-breaking technology. VMware manages to fully virtualize the notoriously complex x86 architecture using software techniques only, and to achieve very good performance and stability. As a result, VMware is a very large and complex piece of software. KVM, on the other hand, relies on the new hardware virtualization technologies that have appeared recently. As such, it is very small (about 10,000 lines) and relatively simple. Another big difference is that VMware is proprietary, while KVM is open source.
Xen is a fairly large project, providing both paravirtualization and full virtualization. It is designed as a standalone kernel, which only requires Linux to perform I/O. This makes it rather large, as it has its own scheduler, memory manager, timer handling and machine initialization.
KVM, in contrast, uses the standard Linux scheduler, memory management and other services. This allows the KVM developers to concentrate on virtualization, building on the core kernel instead of replacing it.
QEMU is a user-space emulator. It is a fairly amazing project, emulating a variety of guest processors on several host processors, with fairly decent performance. However, the user-space architecture does not allow it to approach native speeds without a kernel accelerator. KVM recognizes the utility of QEMU by using it for I/O hardware emulation. Although KVM is not tied to any particular user space, the QEMU code was too good not to use—so we used it.
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Choosing a hypervisor in #Cloud projects always costs me time, between Xen & Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). After an interesting discussion with one of Cloud Computing architect @ IBM, we get a deal – use KVM for future #Cloud implement. My considerations:
More resources:
KVM vs Xen, dates back in 2006, but telling some basic > http://www.gridvm.org/xen-vs-kvm.html
Xen vs KVM by Xen > http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/05/07/..kvm-linux-..community/
KVM @ IBM InfoCenter > http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/../kvminstall/liaaikvminstallstart.htm
Securing KVM @ IBM InfoCenter > http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/../kvmsec/kvmsecguest.htm
Benchmark by Xen > http://wiki.xensource.com/..Quantitative+Comparison+of+Xen+and+KVM.pdf
KVM vs VMware > http://www.workswithu.com/2009/04/27/kvm-vs-vmware-a-case-study/
They’re all @ http://delicious.com/j3ffyang/kvm
Notice: since I only consider #OpenSource virtualization solution @ my #Cloud projects on Intel, there is #proprietary #VMware in my solution design. But integration with VMware is always available.
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One of my customer asked me how to reuse the old fashioned PC in their Cloud. The question leads to “How to enable VT @ BIOS?”. I wrote the following message to my customer:
Go to BIOS setting, then “Enable” or “Turn On” “Virtualization Technology” like
Source & Credit: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/../kvminstall/kvmadvancedsetup.jpg
In Linux, here are steps to enable VT
(source: http://www.redhat.com/..VT_in_BIOS.html)
Verify the virtualization extensions are enabled in BIOS. The BIOS settings for Intel® VT or AMD-V are usually in the Chipset or Processor menus. The menu names may vary from this guide, the virtualization extension settings may be found in Security Settings or other non standard menu names.
Procedure 34.1. Enabling virtualization extensions in BIOS
Reboot the computer and open the system’s BIOS menu. This can usually be done by pressing the delete key, the F1 key or Alt and F4 keys depending on the system.
Select Restore Defaults or Restore Optimized Defaults, and then select Save & Exit.
Power off the machine and disconnect the power supply.
Enabling the virtualization extensions in BIOS
Note: BIOS steps
Many of the steps below may vary depending on your motherboard, processor type, chipset and OEM. Refer to your system’s accompanying documentation for the correct information on configuring your system.
Power on the machine and open the BIOS (as per Step 1).
Open the Processor submenu The processor settings menu may be hidden in the Chipset, Advanced CPU Configuration or Northbridge.
Enable Intel Virtualization Technology (also known as Intel VT) or AMD-V depending on the brand of the processor. The virtualization extensions may be labeled Virtualization Extensions, Vanderpool or various other names depending on the OEM and system BIOS.
Enable Intel VTd or AMD IOMMU, if the options are available. Intel VTd and AMD IOMMU are used for PCI passthrough.
Select Save & Exit.
Power off the machine and disconnect the power supply.
Run cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep vmx svm. If the command outputs, the virtualization extensions are now enabled. If there is no output your system may not have the virtualization extensions or the correct BIOS setting enabled.
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IBM announced new offering in Cloud http://www.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/hadoop/
The comments from CNet:
tags: linux bi opensource hadoop cloud big apache infosphere data biginsights
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