We found Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform interesting enough to write about two years ago when it first went live – now, as the platform matures and it becomes clear just how central Azure is to the company’s future, it’s getting even more interesting.

And when one considers recent cloud-related new items such as the Amazon EC2 outage of a few months ago and the (still unsubstantiated) rumors that Apple might be using Azure to support at least part of its new iCloud service – well, the Microsoft cloud computing story gets more interesting still.

With that in in mind, we thought we’d pose a few questions about Azure to Jim O’Neil of Microsoft.

Fair warning: this is going to be a bit more technical than the typical digitalmissive post.  Hang in there, though, because we believe Azure is A Big Deal, and the opportunity to hear about it from someone at Microsoft – especially at this early stage of its evolution – makes for a worthwhile read.

Thanks to Jim for taking the time…

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When you live and work in the abstract world of zeros and ones, it’s nice every now and then to spend some time thinking about and looking at physical objects – so a few weeks ago, I went to the Berlin International Design Festival.  The venue for the festival was the now-closed Tempelhof airport’s terminal/hangar complex.

Speaking of physical objects – these massive buildings date from the 1930′s, and were intended by the 3rd Reich to serve as the showpiece gateway to their empire.  Happily, of course, that never came to pass – and after the war, this was the airport used for the Berlin Airlift.  In short, there’s a lot of history at Tempelhof, and I was happy to finally get to see the buildings from the inside.

The festival took up two full hangars, and was full of interesting and well-designed objects – the perfect tonic for the day-to-day digitally obsessed.  One particular exhibit that stood out was the Akkuschrauber Rennon 2011 Cordless Drill Race as presented by the Hildesheim College for Applied Science and Art: 16 teams of design students from universities across Germany and Switzerland were tasked with designing, building, and racing lightweight 1-person vehicles, each powered by identical Bosch Akku-Bohrschrauber PSR 18 LI-2 cordless electric hand drills.

The exhibit worked for me on several levels:

• First off, it was just plain fun – I’ve still got enough of the ‘little boy’ left in me that the sight of a modern, cutting-edge vehicle powered by a hand drill protruding out from its side just brings a smile to my face, I’ll admit it.
• Beyond the initial cleverness of the premise, it was clear that from a pure design and engineering perspective, the work was uniformly strong – and that the approaches taken by the competing teams were remarkably varied.
• Then there was the green technology angle: the project provided a great opportunity for the student teams to work with lightweight materials, and since, after all, it was a race, the emphasis was on performance and efficiency.
• On perhaps a somewhat more cynical level, the program served as an affordable yet effective marketing device, both for the schools involved and for corporate sponsor Bosch.

In short,  a win-win-win situation – and a good model for other industry/academia collaborations, I might add.

Here are a few of the Akkuschrauber Rennon entries on display:

P.S. And here, by the way, are a few of the other cool objects from the festival that caught my eye…

a couch…                                                                     an extension cord…

build your own pen…                                                     resistor-LED art…

The Problem: Video content owners are comfortable making their programming available over the internet only if the delivery device is a computer hitting a website (i.e. hulu.com or the thedailyshow.com).  More compelling platforms such as tablets (and, um, televisions) are denied access to this premium content – precisely because they are more compelling platforms  (and would be too disruptive to incumbent business models).  For example, note hulu’s cat-and-mouse maneuvering to fend off access by boxee television software for almost two years now – or Viacom’s threats to sue various cable providers over their new internet-based on-demand mobile device apps.

The Solution (for now, at least): If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  Until internet television really ‘happens’, the best solution (for me and many others) is to get video and audio from the computer over to the television, so I can appear to the internet to be someone sitting in front of their computer – when in fact I’m a guy sitting on his couch in front of his television.  This way, I have access to all that web-only content (take that, hulu!).

It does involve solving the technical problem of getting audio and video (in at least 720p resolution) over to the television, though.  That’s a lot of data to move, and an HDMI cable running across the floor is not an option – what’s required instead is a  ‘short fat pipe’ capable of moving a lot of data over a short distance wirelessly.  I’ve written about the various options available (and what I’ve been using for the past few months) here.

Is my solution a bit clunky?  Sure – I have to go to the computer, enter full-screen mode, and then control the video transport from there.  But the fact remains that until the business-side issues preventing true internet television get resolved, the web will continue to offer a richer video selection than dedicated systems such as Apple TV or Google TV – and for all its lack of elegance, my low-cost solution makes that problem just go away.

In fact, it has been working so well for me, I wonder if there’s a business opportunity being missed…

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“(Their) whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism. “

OK. No wonder it’s been such slow going.

A year in Berlin, and my progress mit der deutschen Sprache ist leider nicht schnell genug für mich – but according to a recent piece in the New York Times, maybe it’s due not to a lack of time and/or discipline (my two most often-used excuses), but to all those years of ‘monolingualism’ having left my brain less able to handle a second language.

The article claims numerous advantages to having a multilingual brain: increased multitasking ability, reduced risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and increased problem-solving ability, to name just a few.  So although I could get by here in cosmopolitan Berlin without speaking any German at all, I’m not giving up – I’d like to have me one of them multilingual brains.

According to the New York Times, it’s good for me (and I have to admit, it’s a challenging and interesting process to go through).

Andreas and Christoph are both bilingual.  My wife speaks three languages – fluently.  I’m as smart as these guys, right?   I hope so, because I now find myself in a race against time, a race against my 9 month old German-born niece: will I speak German as well as a 2 year old by next year?

It’s on, my ruthless, diapered rival.  OK, so you’ve got something on me in the cuteness department, that doesn’t scare me.  I’ve got a few tricks of my own up my sleeve, “baby”: I’ve got technology on my side: apps, audio books, google translate,  deutsche welle, and any number of the countless message boards out there.  In the brutal competition to come, I will show you no mercy.

Still, I’ve been trying to transfer all this data, this German language, onto my ‘system’ for about 12 months now – and I can’t help but notice that the transfer rate, the data throughput, has been a bit disappointing.

If the New York Times article is correct, maybe what I really need is a firmware update.

P.S.  Mark Twain (who, it turns out, is a lot funnier than I remember) went through a similar experience over a century ago.   For an idea of just what I’m up against, read his short essay “The Awful German Language“.

We’ve recently written about National Teacher Appreciation Day in the US – in many other parts of the world, though, the big holiday of the month is May 1st, or ‘May Day‘ (aka Labor Day).

In the US, Labor Day happens in early September and is primarily about getting that one last long weekend in before the unofficial end of summer.  Elsewhere in the world, though, the concept of ‘Labor Day’ is a bit more politicized: also known as International Worker’s Day, the holiday has had a particularly rich history here in Berlin dating all the way back to the bad old GDR days (the still grandiose Karl Marx Allee boulevard was in fact built for the sole purpose of providing as impressive a backdrop as possible for the yearly parade).

As Berlin has gradually became more westernized in the years after the fall of the wall, the holiday has evolved into more of a day of protest – in fact, just last year, 10,000 protestors clashed with police on the streets.

With May Day all over the local news here for a couple of days last week, I thought it might be interesting to see whether the same was true out there on the internet as well: was May Day (or, rather, Tag der Arbeit) a ‘trending topic’ online over the weekend?

The fastest/easiest/best/cheapest (i.e. free) way to graph the frequency with which a given keyword or phrase is searched for on Google within a specified time window is Google Insights. (Google Trends, another Google site, offers much the same service – but the date and geographic region filtering is less powerful) .

Here’s what Google Trends shows for ‘Tag der Arbeit’ over the past few years:

A few things to note:  if Google’s data is correct, there was roughly 5 times the amount of interest in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ this year than in either of the previous two years (vertical values are scaled such that the number “100″ represents the maximum value returned, much as Google’s financial charts are scaled).   That’s a little hard to accept, and begs the question of whether what we’re looking at is being affected by some differences in Google’s methodology over the past few years.  Secondly, thanks to the site’s geographic functionality, it would appear that the German states of Nordrhein-Westfalen and Hessen are for more interested in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ than we are in Berlin – although, again, this assumes a normalized data  methodology across the whole of Germany.

Google Insights is a very useful service.  It understands the Google search operators (‘OR’, ‘+’, etc.), and it’s possible to compare (overlay) multiple results by keyword/phrase, location, or time span – which can lead to some pretty interesting graphs.  However, as noted above (and as is always the case), any results are only as good as the underlying data – in computer science/IT vernacular, it’s the ‘garbage in, garbage out‘ effect.

In any event, I’m happy to report ‘Tag der Arbiet’ 2011 was largely violence- and vandalism-free here in Berlin.

PS The Saturday before May 1, I read about a protest parade coming through my Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, so I decided to check it out (and as one of the area’s invading gentrifiers, to film it with my iPhone).  As protest marches go, it was relatively cozy neighborhood event:

…evidently der Polizei had heard about it too, and after last year’s troubles, they were not taking any chances – so immediately on the heels of the protest parade came the ‘Polizei parade’…

This Tuesday (May 3rd) is “National Teacher Appreciation Day” in the US.

I know, it’s easy to feel a little cynical about these ‘National <insert your cause here> Week’ proclamations – it can sometimes seem that they’re primarily about safe uncontroversial camera time for the politicians proposing them.  On the other hand, “National Teacher Appreciation Day” has me taking a minute or two to reflect back on two of the best teachers I’ve had: one from my master’s degree studies, one from back in high school.

Here, by way of a belated ‘thank you’, is a little about them…

Navin Chopra, Economics My master’s degree curriculum was made up of equal parts Stern School of Business MBA courses and NYU graduate-level computer science courses.  At NYU, computer science is part the mathematics department, and although math is a  big deal there, the fact remains that computer science has less to do with mathematics than you’d think – so I always had the impression it was given short shrift at NYU.  Not so the Stern MBA courses I was spending the other half of my time in – while I was there, Financial Times had the school ranked 10th worldwide and 3rd worldwide in finance.  So as I sat surrounded by MBA students for Professor Chopra’s first ‘Foundations of Finance’ lecture, I was eager to see what all the fuss was about.

‘Foundations of Finance’ was part of the MBA core curriculum, and was viewed at Stern as something akin to ‘economics boot camp’.  The material was challenging, and the course moved quickly: NPV, IRR, PVIFA, yield curves, bond pricing, correlation coefficients…  I’ll be honest, I’ve half-forgotten many of those formulas, and I haven’t touched the scientific calculator I had to buy for the course since minutes after finishing my final exam.  To this day, though, I’m still struck by how rewarding (and enjoyable) Professor Chopra made the experience.  Granted, it was a self-selected, highly motivated room to begin with – but he had most of us wanting to learn this difficult material for its own sake - we were  into it.  And let’s be honest, that’s not often the case in business school (it appears Prof. Chopra has since moved on to Columbia Business School – NYU’s loss).

Given that half my courses met in the Institute of Mathematics building, it’s a little ironic that the math I was exposed to while at NYU happened down the street at the b-school, but that’s what ‘Foundations of Finance’ was – essentially, a math class.  What I particularly appreciated were the fleeting glimpses into the beauty of the math that Prof. Chopra seemed to get a kick out of showing us: more than once, we’d be taken up to a certain point with some new formula or chart, and then with a trace of a dry smile, he’d reveal it as another way of approaching the same concept expressed by an entirely different formula or chart we had covered a month and a half ago.  During those ‘eureka’ moments, I suddenly  understood (for the first time!) how a young person could become fascinated enough with math and/or economics to choose a career based upon it, as Prof. Chopra had clearly done (and as has I had done with music, back in high school).

Which brings me to…

Arthur Simeone Mr. Simeone was one of my high school’s three music teachers (I’m pretty confident that’s not so common anymore).   He taught chorus and music theory, and although chorus was not my thing, I did take his music theory classes – and in that laser-like way teenagers can become fascinated by things, I became fascinated by the harmonic architecture of music.

In addition to his teaching, Mr. Simeone was also a jazz piano player of some local renown.  To have a professional musician in my midst, the first I’d ever met – well, that made a big impression on me.  It wasn’t jazz harmony that he was teaching us, though – Mr. Simeone’s theory classes were based around the study of “figured bass” (“generalbass” in German), a type of chord notation used 350 years ago during the Baroque period.  As it happens, the study of this archaic notation makes for a great introduction to music theory, because it introduces into the relatively ‘vertical’ study of harmony some basic counterpoint (which deals with the relative ‘horizontal’ movement of notes) – but I digress.  The point is, although he was the ‘cool’ teacher with a mysterious and (to me, at least) glamorous musical life outside school, Arthur Simeone’s music theory classes were pretty rigorous.  Baroque music is all about structural and logical soundness, and so working with figured bass involves following some hard and fast rules – the teaching of which he took very seriously.  Like Prof. Chopra, he had great respect for the subject matter, which proved infectious in the classroom.

He also managed to approach the subject matter with a curiosity (and even a playfulness) students could identify with, and that proved infectious too.  Granted, by then I had just resolved to pursue music seriously, had little use for high school other than my music courses, and was about to graduate six months early to study music for a semester at a local state university – maybe it’s not surprising, then, that I was so impressed by a music teacher – maybe it was the subject matter itself.  Alas, for my own sake, I wish that was true: in my undergraduate studies I found it was possible, quite possible, in fact, to have some astoundingly bad music teachers – even at a ‘prestigious’ conservatory.

No, Mr. Simeone would have been a great teacher regardless of the subject.  He also would have had an equally great effect on his students regardless of whether he taught at a local high school or at a major conservatory – and since “National Teacher Appreciation Day” is primarily about the same public school teachers who are being made such political scapegoats of these days (cue Jon Stewart), this a point worth using the bold font for.

What makes a good teacher?  I think you’ve first got to have some innate talent for the simple ‘public speaking’ aspect of it, there’s no way around that (I’ve given just enough workshops to suspect that this might be a talent that, unlike my university professor brother, I might lack).  The more crucial quality, though, is intellectual generosity.  Although one taught at an internationally ranked business school and one taught in a suburban New York high school, both Prof. Chopra and Mr. Simeone both ‘got it’ – they both approached the job of teaching without bringing any ego-related baggage of their own to the table, and maybe that in itself was a lesson.

So, thanks Professor Chopra.

Thanks, Mr. Simeone.

And to our readers, I hope you’ve been lucky enough to have a teacher as good as either of these guys – happy National Teacher Appreciation Day.

On internet use at work… There was an interesting article in last week’s New Yorker magazine by James Surowiecki.  Citing a University of Copenhagen study on the effects of willpower and deprivation, Surowiecki raises the possibility that although many companies routinely restrict access to websites such as YouTube and facebook in an effort to increase productivity, overly restricting employees’ personal access to the internet from the workplace could also adversely affect productivity.

The cloud is falling, the cloud is falling… From Lydia Leong at Gartner comes the best explanation we’ve come across yet as to what actually happened last week to cause Amazon’s Web Services/EC2 outage – and what it means to users of its cloud computing services.

As it turns out, it’s both less scary and more scary than you might think: the failure was limited to database access (the actual EC2 server instances were unaffected) in the Northeast US, and was caused by an automated self-induced storm of backups.

That’s the less scary part – the scarier part is there appears to be surprisingly little transparency and consensus regarding Amazon’s EC2 resiliency structure and fail-over options (and consequently, little understanding of them on the part of their customers).

On the economics of the internet… “How much more than the actual cost of your computer and your mobile devices (and the electricity and internet services they require) would someone have to pay you never to use them again?”

“What makes the internet a fundamentally less relevant invention than the railroads of a century ago?”

These are just a few of the questions addressed recently in two interesting articles by Slate‘s Annie Lowrey on the economics of the internet.  You can find them here and here.

P.S. Lastly – for those of you who’ve gotten an iPhone and/or an iPad, but haven’t quite gotten around to getting a life to go with them yet, here’s a list of the 10 best Prince William royal wedding apps.

Another month, another European trade show.  This time it’s musikmesse, the world’s largest musical instrument and accessory trade event.  Held in Frankfurt every April, musikmesse covers everything from musical instruments to DJ equipment to audio software (which is why I was there).
Think of the largest music store on the planet, spread across 6 or 7 huge convention halls – in other words, heaven, hell, or a bit of both, depending on your point of view.

Last month I wrote about my trip to CeBIT – musikmesse is, as you might imagine, quite a different kind of trade show experience.  One thing both shows have in common, though, is their own iPhone app.  Driven by an app store model that’s made applications safe, easy to install/uninstall, and often free, the use of such disposable event-specific apps is on the rise.  In fact, a dedicated mobile app – complete with exhibitor lists, floor plans, GPS, and some degree of social networking functionality (usually twitter) – has become ‘de rigeuer’ for any self-respecting trade show these days.

So I decided to try musikmesse’s iPhone app out.

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American football is big money.  Surprisingly, though, one team – the Green Bay Packers, who play in the smallest NFL market (ever been to Green Bay, Wisconsin?) and who are still named for their first sponsor (a local meat-packing company that paid for their uniforms) have managed to remain a non-profit, community-owned company.

Mozilla – the Green Bay Packers of browser companies.  They’re the only non-profit corporation in the increasingly big money browser-building game, and like Green Bay, they have a storied and proud past – Mozilla’s history traces all the way back to Marc Andreeson and the ground-breaking Netscape browser of over 15 years ago.

With a market share over twice that of Google’s Chrome (the nearest competitor that doesn’t enjoy the advantage of coming bundled as part of an operating system), Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been quite a success.  As of late, though, Firefox has been facing some challenges: Chrome is now the fastest-growing browser out there, and Microsoft, having ‘gotten religion’ on the open standards issue, can now boast of having the most HTML5-compliant browser out there, as rated by the WC3.

So Mozilla needs the just-released Firefox 4 to be a hit – and it looks like it is, having racked up good reviews and almost 16 million downloads in the first 48 hours of its release.  As one of those 16 million, I’ve used Firefox 4 for a few days now on both Windows 7 and OS X machines (I’m using it right now, as a matter of fact).  I have to say, I like it very much – but rather than attempt a detailed review, though (there are enough FF4 reviews out there already), I’ll share just a few impressions:

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It’s not often we outright endorse a product here at digitalmissive (ok, we’ve never done it).  Well, I’m going to have to make an exception in the case of Logitech’s Squeezebox internet radio.  I’ve been loving this < $200 device for a few months now.  Even if you’re not an expat in a far-off land suffering from the occasional spontaneous craving to listen to radio from places you used to live (say, KCRW in Los Angeles, or Jersey City’s very own WFMU) without having to go turn on your  computer, this little guy is well worth it.  Turn it on, put it on your home wireless network, and you’re good to go: the radio connects to Logitech’s servers and features a pretty well-optimized interface for searching and accessing an surprisingly extensive range of radio stations from around the world.  So extensive, in fact, that you soon might find yourself playing with it, listening to Jamaican news reports or Polish pop music.  Strangely, it’s more satisfying surfing for global internet radio using a device like the Squeezebox than it is using a web browser: the fact that it’s not “a computer” makes it feel somehow more special, like the internet-age incarnation of old-fashioned ham radio.

How does it sound?  Really pretty good for the price.  There’s also an accessory pack available with a remote and an internal battery pack, but although the prospect of being able to pick up my Squeezbox and take it with me to the kitchen or the bedroom is appealing, at $50, I haven’t quite sprung for the battery yet (besides, for remote control, there’s always the obligatory iPad app). Yep, this little thing is pretty cute – and the Logitech folks in charge of aggregating radio stations over on the server side have done a really impressive job (I’m not alone in my admiration – on Amazon US, the Squeezebox averages 4.5 stars across almost 450 reviews). Now if only someone could manage to do such a good job with internet television….