Robert Scoble

Last year at VMworld, VMware previewed Project Horizon, its cloud-based management service, which is part of an effort to help companies embrace the cloud and the wealth of cloud applications currently available on the market. Today, VMware is announcing the first product release associated with that vision, the Horizon App Manager. "We're seeing all these iPads and tablets coming into the enterprise, and we're also seeing a lot of SaaS adoption," explains Noah Wasmer, Director of Product Management and Advanced Development at VMware. "I was asked to [launch] an initiative in advanced development to look at the next generation of computing." A big part of computing's next generation is the phenomenon of users accessing an ever-growing number of applications from a myriad of devices, which is quickly making the days of device-centric computing a thing of the past. This presents a host of new challenges for administrators. "[With] Salesforce and Trovix and SuccessFactors and Box.net coming into the enterprise, administrators are saying, 'How do I secure this? How do I control them?'" says Wasmer. The Horizon App Manager helps administrators address these challenges with a tool that allows them to synchronize their existing users and groups from on-premises directory services into the cloud. "[This] will basically allow you to keep all your security and passwords behind the firewall but now be able to add app entitlement in the cloud." The service is priced at $30 per user per year, and it is intended to be extremely simple and intuitive to install. It also provides significant benefit for users by providing a single sign-on experience, eliminating the requirement to remember a slew of different passwords for each application. "On the user portal, one of the things that we saw is that once users start using the service, they actually fall in love with it," explains Wasmer. "Many of us have sticky notes or some way of trailing all these different passwords. Once you start using this, you start saying, 'Wow. This is really how I want to work.'" Horizon is a hosted service, and VMware expects to release new features and applications for it on a monthly basis. "We just really see cloud applications being the future..." says Wasmer. "VMware has been in the business of helping companies move from the private cloud into the public cloud, and we think this is an important step infrastructurally for us to help move them along." More info: VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/ VMware Horizon on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/VMware-Horizon Noah Wasmer on Twitter: http://twitter.com/noahsw

Most of us will require the expertise of a lawyer at some point in our lives, and traditionally that expertise has been relatively expensive to obtain. Rocket Lawyer is changing that by providing affordable access to legal assistance over the Internet. "Rocket Lawyer is created to give people a really simple, easy and most importantly affordable, and often free, way to do those basic [legal endeavors]" explains Charley Moore, Founder and Chairman of Rocket Lawyer. "Whether it's to do their own estate plan, get married, get divorced, start a company and hire the first few people, you could do all that on Rocket Lawyer either free or at a fraction of the traditional cost." The range of legal services for which Rocket Lawyer can provide assistance is limitless, and there are essentially four broad options for accessing the service: — Do it Yourself: You answer a series of questions, and the site provides the proper provisions to include in a legal document based on your answers. — Do it With Me: You prepare the document and submit it for review by one of the attorneys in the Rocket Lawyer network. — Do it For Me: You select an attorney from within the network to complete the work, and that attorney will often do so at a discounted price. — Learn More: You can access the vast library of help articles, videos, podcasts and blogs to get better informed about the law. The site will walk you through the steps necessary to make your documents legal in all 50 states, and often times the entire process can be completed paperlessly online. "By taking this to the cloud," says Moore, "we've really helped take law into the next generation. Everything here is in the cloud, so all you need is a browser. You can use Rocket Lawyer on your phone, you can use Rocket Lawyer on your iPad or anywhere you can access the Internet, and everything you do is there, because it's all browser technology." Rocket Lawyer must be onto something, as this four-year-old company typically has between 1.5 and 2 million visitors per month. "There's a search box on every page making it really simple," explains Moore. "What we want you to be able to do is tell us your situation, and we help you find a resource or solution for it." More info: Rocket Lawyer web site: http://www.rocketlawyer.com/ Rocket Lawyer profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/rocketlawyer Charley Moore podcast and blog site: http://legallyeasy.rocketlawyer.com/ Rocket Lawyer on Twitter: http://twitter.com/RocketLawyer Rocket Lawyer on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RocketLawyer

http://www.silberstudios.tv We're photowalking with photographer Thomas Hawk on today's Marc Silber Show Advancing Your Photography. Thomas is a San Francisco Bay Area-based photographer and his goal in life is simple—to photograph and publish a huge library of photographs covering a wide range of subjects, in fact he plans to hit one million images. To do this, he shoots, processes, publishes photos every day. He shares his photography tips as he adds new pictures to his library on today's photowalk. Thomas Hawk approaches each scene from different angles and can shoot up to 50 different images of the same subject until he feels he got the right shot. He demonstrates this on our photowalk as he switches lenses and tells us his approach while photographing the "Big Building" on the Peninsula School campus. FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/marcsilbershow GOOGLE +: http://bit.ly/Y95TGT TWITTER: https://twitter.com/marcsilbershow RSS SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/Z39VVl

Adobe helped spark the desktop publishing revolution in the mid 1980s with its PostScript page description language used in Apple LaserWriter printers. Today, publishing is vastly different than it was 25 years ago, as consumers are accessing content in more ways than ever, and Adobe's Dreamweaver CS5 team is hard at work creating the tools that allow developers to work in this new environment. "You kind of have to be under a really big rock to have not noticed the change in devices people are using to access the Internet today," explains Scott Fegette, Senior Product Manager at Adobe. "It's not just desktop browsers on two platforms anymore. It's a variety of devices from tablets to smart phones to connected set-top boxes on HDTVs, including the desktop browsers that we all became used to. So, this presents a number of issues for developers." A developer must be aware of several factors starting with how the user is going to interact with the app, whether it's with a trackpad, a keyboard, joystick or trackball. The wide variations in screen sizes present additional challenges. Simple links on a desktop may not work so well on a phone. On an HDTV, you're typically sitting away from the device, so you can't fill a small space with a lot of text, and buttons on the screen have to be large enough for you to see and access. Much the opposite holds true for a tablet or phone. Dreamweaver CS5.5 has added features that help developers deliver content to this wide array of devices. "CS5.5 is going to be a big step forward starting first with just existing content," says Fegette. "Any publisher that really wants to become relevant immediately needs to start thinking about how they can make the interface to their site, their application, relevant on a number of different form factors. First up, CSS3 media query is a great way of managing this. We've got this feature in CS5.5 called Multiscreen Preview panel and media query management where you can very quickly set up a number of default resolutions for a phone, a tablet and just a desktop browser and then custom define them as well. It's really mostly keyed around the dimensions of the screen right now, but the gist of it is, you can quickly target a CSS file to a specific resolution class—say max 400 pixels—and then go from 401 pixels to maybe 800 or 900 for a tablet and then anything above that deliver a specific style sheet just for the desktop. But the efficiency you get there is that you can really quickly build out these very targeted interfaces on top of the same HTML source, which lets you immediately repurpose your existing site." The latest version of Dreamweaver also makes it easier for developers to work with HTML5. "Some of the coolest things about Dreamweaver 5.5," explains Fegette, "[are] quite frankly that we've just put support for HTML5 CSS3 right into the app in ways that just feel natural. We wanted to make sure that the HTML5 revolution wasn't this big slap in the face to people, but it was something they could progress into really naturally and holistically. You'll see things like CSS3 support in the CSS panel. You can do things like add border radius and opacity using RGBA colors to really take away some of the dependency of jumping back and forth to an image editor like Photoshop, baking these into an image and placing it into your file. Again, that's another real power of HTML5 is that cuts down these round trips and these dependencies that a real standards-based developer would have." More change is sure to come, which makes familiarity with all of the hardware options even more important. "The modern content publisher really needs to understand these devices," says Fegette, "what they're capable of and how to become effective with them quickly, because it's certainly not slowing down." More info: Adobe Dreamweaver web site: http://tinyurl.com/3j4thpp

Cloud technologies power some of Internet's most well-known sites—Picasa, Gmail, Facebook and Zynga, just to name a few—and cloud companies are striving to make the computer processing behind these sites as energy efficient as possible. With that in mind, Facebook, Dell, HP, Rackspace, Skype, Zynga and others have teamed together to form the Open Compute Project to share best practices for making more energy efficient and economical data centers. To kick-start the project, Facebook unveiled its innovative new data center and contributed the specifications and designs to Open Compute. "Cloud companies are working hard to become more and more energy efficient...[and] this is a big step forward today in having computing be more and more green," explains Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace. A small team of Facebook engineers has been working on the project for two years. They custom designed the software, servers and data center from the ground up. One of the most significant features of the facility was that Facebook eliminated the centralized UPS system found in most data centers. "In a typical data center, you're taking utility voltage, you're transforming it, you're bringing it into the data center and you're distributing it to your servers," explains Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations at Facebook. "There are some intermediary steps there with a UPS system and with energy transformations that occur that cost you money and energy—between about 11% and 17%. In our case, you do the same thing from the utility, but you distribute it straight to the rack, and you do not have that energy transformation at a UPS or at a PDU level. You get very efficient energy to the actual server. The server itself is then taking that energy and making useful work out of it." To regulate temperature in the facility, Facebook utilizes an evaporative cooling system. Outside air comes into the facility through a set of dampers and proceeds into a succession of stages where the air is mixed, filtered and cooled before being sent down into the data center itself. "The system is always looking at [the conditions] coming in", says Furlong, "and then it's trying to decide, 'what is it that I want to present to the servers? Do I need to add moisture to [the air]? How much of the warm air do I add back into it?'" The upper temperature threshold for the center is set for 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but it will likely be raised to 85 degrees, as the servers have proven capable of tolerating higher temperatures than had originally been thought. The servers used in the data center are unique as well. They are "vanity free"—no extra plastic and significantly fewer parts than traditional servers. And, by thoughtful placing of the memory, CPU and other parts, they are engineered to be easier to cool. Now that these plans and specifications have been released as part of the Open Compute Project, the goal is for other companies to benefit from and contribute to them. "Open source, crowd sourcing, Wikipedia—these are all capitalizing on, or enabled by, the same force," explains Weston, "which is that when things are open, there's more innovation around them." More info: Facebook announcement: http://tinyurl.com/4x67au9 Open Compute Project web site: http://opencompute.org/

Keynote Robert Scoble - TNW 2011