Intel, Oracle Head For 'The Cloud'

CEO Paul Otellini discusses plans for the public and private cloud at OpenWorld 2008.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel and Oracle, which have partnered for 15 years, are heading for the cloud, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Tuesday.

"Today Intel and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) are announcing that they're taking the enterprise aspect of cloud computing and driving it outwards," Otellini said. The two will work on security and flexibility for migration between private and public clouds, and on industry standards for this migration.

Earlier in the week at OpenWorld, Oracle announced that it has partnered with Amazon to let customers deploy and back up its applications in the cloud.

Otellini also unveiled some of Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) other plans, bringing other Intel executives on stage to elaborate. These include a new toolset to help C++ developers learn about parallel programming, and details of when products based on forthcoming Nehalem chip will ship.

By tackling the migration between private and public clouds, Intel and Oracle are going head to head with VMware, whose vCloud initiative, announced last week at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, will do the same thing. Oracle has its own hypervisor, (define) based on the Xen open source hypervisor.

Enterprises can now license Oracle's Database 11g, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager over Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It also introduced a secure backup module for Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3).

Oracle is itself leveraging virtualization heavily within its own infrastructure, and recently announced its VM Templates suite, which combines Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Manager 10g, Siebel CRM 8 and Enterprise Linux, with all the applications preinstalled and preconfigured.


To elaborate on his announcement about working with Oracle, Otellini brought out Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel's software solutions group. "Most of our datacenter customers are already using virtualization in their infrastructure behind the firewall; we want to help them take it out into the public cloud," James said.

She added that Intel has added several features in its CPU and chipsets to ensure the best performance for virtualization, and "we're delighted to see Oracle's getting a 17 percent performance improvement on the Oracle virtual machine using the hardware features we've put in."

The move to multicore
Turning to parallel computing, James said that, within the next couple of years, all Intel's processors will be multicore, and, to help C++ developers prepare for this, Intel has come up with a new set of tools for C++ developers called Intel Parallel Studio.

Intel will run a beta trial for most components of Intel Parallel Studio from November through May 2009.

Intel's Otellini also announced that Intel will go into production in the fourth quarter with the Nehalem chip for desktops and workstations. It will offer a product for database servers which will be available from its hardware partners in the first quarter of 2009, he added.

Nehalem was the code name for the processor when it was in development, but it's official name is the Core i7.

Amazon hooks up with bands site

Source: Guardian Unlimited.

Web retail giant Amazon is partnering with music community site SellaBand from today to offer aspiring bands and new musicians a high-profile launchpad.

SellaBand will have a dedicated store on Amazon as well as an affiliate sales deal and promotion to the 50 most active reviewers on The Vine, retail website's reviewers' programme.

Albums by SellaBand acts will retail for £8.99 on Amazon in the UK and revenues will be shared equally between the artists, Sellaband and the fans.

Amsterdam-based Sellaband is home to 6,000 new bands and operates as a user-determined record label.

Fans can listen to tracks for free, but support bands by pledging money and once a band reaches $50,000 (£24,830) in investment, Sellaband helps them record an album.

To date, 11 bands have reached the $50,000 threshold and three have released albums.

Sellaband makes its money through advertising, sponsorship and through the interest on money invested in the site's bands, with more than $1.5m (£745m) invested so far.

Johan Vosmeijer, the SellaBand managing director, said the bands have a broad appeal, from heavy metal to jazz and hip hop, and that the site thinks of itself as "the record label of the future".

"The advantage for fans is that they feel part of the activity. There are direct friendships between the bands and their fans, and they even organise their own festivals," he added.

"Record companies are afraid to embrace new technologies and new opportunities because they don't know what to do with the web. SellaBand discovers and nurtures new bands - it's a new economic model."

Partnering with Amazon gives Sellaband's artists a more high--profile platform, and also fits with the user-generated ethos of the retail site, which features extensive reviews and discussion about its products.

Amazon will be offering further incentives for bands as they build their audience and investment, adding credits to a band's account once they reach $30,000 and offering extra promotion for the band once they reach $35,000.

SellaBand works with digital distributor The Orchard, one of the suppliers for the iTunes Store, and, under the new deal, through Amazon.

Vosmeijer, who previously worked as general manager for Sony Music, said the site had 150,000 unique users each month but that its priority was the develop its artists, not "global domination".

He added that SellaBand was aiming to bring another 20 artists up to the $50,000 threshold by the end of 2008, and that the site would be holding a showcase in London in February.

A very real future for virtual worlds

Source: BBC

Many people spend a long time getting their avatar right for Second Life

Second Life has long been seen as the bell-wether for the growing interest in virtual spaces. Here, founder Philip Rosedale talks to the BBC News website about the past and future of the parallel world he is helping to create.

These are interesting times for Second Life. In the four short years it has existed, it has seen media coverage go from hysterical to hectoring. It has been hailed as both a harbinger of the next big thing and a brake on the burgeoning development of virtual worlds.

Speculation about its future has intensified as news emerged that chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka, who helped design and build Second Life, has left the company.

But said Philip Rosedale, one of the founders of Linden Lab which oversees the running of Second Life, the departure will not dent the vision all the original engineers had for their creation.

"Cory is a fantastic guy, he's fantastically capable and we will miss him a lot," said Mr Rosedale.

Philip Rosedale and his Second Life avatar Philip Linden
"Our differences are more about how to run the company and how best we organise ourselves as a company going forward," he said. "We really do not have any differences in strategic direction."

"There's not a shift in direction in the company that I wanted to make or Cory wanted to make that was incompatible," he told the BBC News website.

"We are a core of technologists in our heart," he said. "The first 10 people that joined, there are only two that have left, they are all engineers."

For the near future, Linden Lab is looking at ways of making the technology behind Second Life much more open and easy to use.

Web worlds
"We are still in the early days so the things that are wrong are still wrong," he said, "It is still hard to figure out how to use Second Life and how to find things."

In many respects, he said, online virtual worlds are at the point now that the web reached in the early 1990s.

"We have often had fun in the office finding quotes from the early 90s that map exactly to what they say about Second Life now, " he said, "that it's disorganised, you cannot find anything and there is a lot of crap."

We are at the very early stages of something very big

Despite the scepticism from many quarters he is fervently convinced that virtual worlds are the future of online life.

"Virtual worlds are inherently comprehensible to us in a way that the web is not," said Mr Rosedale. "They look like the world we already know and take advantage of our ability to remember and organise."

"Information is presented there in a way that matches our memories and experiences," he said. "Your and my ability to remember the words we use and the information we talk about is much higher if it's presented as a room or space around us."

Equally important, he said, was the visibility or presence that being in a virtual world bestows on its users.

By contrast, he said, when visiting a website people are anonymous and invisible.

Shopping on Amazon might be much easier and enjoyable if you could turn to one of the other 10,000 or so people on the site at the same time as you and ask about what they were buying, get recommendations and swap good or bad experiences.

Many firms are using Second Life to collaborate
Many firms and educators were starting to use Second Life as an online collaboration space that helps them work together like they do in the real world but to which is added the malleability of a wholly digital space.

For virtual worlds to be able to extend this usefulness to the mass of people a lot of work has yet to be done, said Mr Rosedale.

What it might take, he said, was software that would let people browse virtual worlds like they do webpages. Built in to that software would be an identity management system that re-drew yourself to match those different spaces.

"I think it is going to happen, that kind of portability of identity is important but I could not hazard a guess right now about how quickly it will happen," he said.

"But," he said, "with a sufficiently open platform then people will move into it quite rapidly."

It might, he speculated, one day outstrip the web as a means for people to communicate and work together.

"Because virtual worlds like Second Life do not impose language barriers like the web does - that almost certainly means their ultimate utility range is larger," he said. "We are at the very early stages of something very big."