Have you recently taken the New York subway, let’s say, to 23rd, 66th, 86th, or 103rd street?

If you exit at any of these stops you’ll notice some of your favorite entertainment stores vanished. Shut down. Closed for good.

At 23rd and 6th Avenue Barnes&Noble, gone! At Lincoln Center Tower Records‘ flagship store, gone! Over at 86th and 2nd Avenue Circuit City, vanished. And at 102rd and Broadway Blockbuster Video closed its doors, too.

Be it for books, music, movies, or consumer electronics (for anyone 30 years or older), those were among the brands you would likely turn to first – to discover, buy and play your entertainment retail. 

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One of the most daunting technological challenges we face today is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the burgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive real-time applications such as telecommuting, cloud computing, and streaming media.

And as internet video continues to trend from short-form/long-tail/low quality content towards long-form/short-tail/high quality (premium) content (i.e. from YouTube to hulu to TV/films on embedded hardware), exploding consumer demand could bring things to a head even more quickly than currently anticipated.
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Panda Security, a well known security  software company based in Madrid, has recently begun beta testing a new Windows anti-virus solution based on cloud computing.  We’re big on cloud computing and thin clients here at digitalmissive, so this warrants a few words…

Perhaps due to their Madrid location and the warm/fuzzy Panda-themed user interface, the company has had more of a US presence in the consumer space than in the enterprise – where Mcafee, Symantec, and Trend Micro rule.   However, I’ve used Panda anti-virus solutions in the past and been happy with the software – in fact, with the amount of malware coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe, I viewed their European location as an advantage.
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