This just crossed my inbox – a very big announcement that may take a while to really demonstrate its impact. By teaming up, Red Hat and Amazon Web Services have staked out an early and very big chunk of territory in the emerging cloud computing utility space. When I think about the applications and services migration this has the potential to generate it makes my head spin. I hear the sounds of IT managers, CTOs, and other charged with responsibility for infrastructure expenditures in the mid-market and enterprise space sharpening their pencils already.

I don’t generally copy-and-paste a press release but this one says everything there is to be said at this juncture.

Red Hat Announces Red Hat Enterprise Linux Available On Demand on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Raleigh, NC, November 7, 2007 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, world-class technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters.

The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 enables customers to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with integrated virtualization, provides a seamless deployment solution bridging both on-premise and cloud computing. As part of this solution, Red Hat Network offers a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

“In collaboration with Amazon Web Services, we are now able to offer customers yet another choice in how they deploy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. This offering will be appealing to developers, customers looking to quickly and cost-effectively deploy web-scale services and businesses that require rapidly scaled compute resources,” said Donald Fischer, vice president of Online Services at Red Hat. “The marriage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Amazon’s EC2 service makes the promise of professional web scale computing a reality.”

“We are pleased to collaborate with Red Hat in making more choices available for Amazon EC2 users,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president, Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services. “This offering will further help customers to avoid the heavy lifting of deploying and managing their own infrastructure, while paying as they go for Red Hat’s proven Enterprise Linux solution.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is available as a private beta today, with public beta availability planned for the fourth calendar quarter of 2007. Base prices are $19 per month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon’s EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees.

More official information on the offering here. Some excellent insights by Stephen Shankland at Webware here.

There have been a number of explorations of how blogging can, should, or might work in the corporate world. Early entrants in the field included Blog Marketing, Naked Conversations, and The Corporate Blogging Book. And while all of these books, and the dozens of newer titles that have been added to the canon have documented how a handful of companies have attempted to integrate blogging into their communications mix, outlined policies, and dispensed some very good advice and suggestions, there’s nothing like hearing it straight from the source.

Adam Metz sent me a note yesterday that he had invited Tac Anderson, H-P’s Web 2.0 Strategic Lead for their Laserjet group, to guest post on his MetzMash blog about how blogging is being employed in that business unit. It’s a fascinating look into process and policy and provides a real sense of the logistics involved in corporate blogging.All of the texts I cited above as well as countless articles and blog posts have discussed, often with some serious hand-wringing, how the vetting processes usied by brand managers and other corporate communications folks “kills” the spontaneity and authenticity of blogging. That what results is not, in truth, blogging in the “true” sense of the word.

That may well be in the purest, most abstract sense of the medium from a personal perspective. But blogs have matured into a fully realized medium over the years and there are different rules of engagement for solo blogs compared to group blogs compared to corporate blogs. It sounds, from Anderson’s description, that there’s an admirable amount of internal conversation and give-and-take related to the topic generation and review and approval processes. Having worked in similar environments myself, I can tell you that this is evolution at work. Such discussions simply did not exist in the pre-blogcorporate world.

Metz also told me that in about two weeks, the blog will announce the release of a multi-part eBook entitled “There Is No Secret Sauce” – a tactical handbook for brand managers and CMOs who want to start social media within their small-to-medium companies.

Subscribed.

One of the bastions forcing Net users to pay for content has bowed to the obvious, they were losing out big time and have opened their content to the Net free and clear.  The New York Times has finally seen the light and is allowing all if its content published on line to be free and open to all.  From their announcement post:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

[snip]

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said. Source: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times

As many of us thought, the NYT figured out that they were missing out on serious traffic.  And traffic means eyeballs for ads, which means revenue.  I know that I would eschew linking to an article on the NYT or WSJ websites because I knew it wouldn’t be around for long.  And the times I clicked on a link and got to one of those teaser pages (asking me to pay for the privilege of their grand and glorious wisdom), I would just close the tab or hit back and move on.  Sorry, I’m not paying…that that was exactly what the NYT found.  People coming to those pages were, by and large, not paying to subscribe.  Opening up the NYT might also encourage me to download their cool web reader, in addition to linking to articles.

Mathew Ingram (who works for Canada’s Globe and Mail–another walled garden), addresses the concern of writers that their best stuff shouldn’t be free:

I happen to think Mark is wrong. In any case, I think allowing bloggers and other sites to link freely to columnists and other writers at the Times will help increase the discussion around the issues the paper writes about, and that will benefit the Times in the long run. It may be hard to prove that case to the CFO with hard numbers, but I still believe it to be true. Source: The time has come — NYT goes free » mathewingram.com/work

I agree with Mathew, of course, one of the things I enjoy most about writing now is when people do link to me, write a post, and extend the discussion and conversation.  It’s powerful and often whole new tangents and ideas spring from those extensions.  What writer wouldn’t like the kind of acknowledgement?

So, kudos to the NYT and let the linking and the countdown until the WSJ does the same begin!

Powerset – www.powerset.com
Powerset is a natural language search engine, that can take the contents of an entire page, and parsing it to a semantic database. This allows the relationships within a page to be broken down and used to search on, rather than keywords.

Beta’s of the technology are up on the Powerlabs, using the restricted page set of Wikipedia, so while it is a small target, there is enough to really work the bugs out the system.

Cognitive Code – www.cognitivecode.com
Probably the most ‘visually’ wow demo of the first five companies, Cognitive Code were showing of ‘Sylvia,’ a computer A.I. that can parse, understand and react to human speech. Asking an AI to explain herself as a demo is a pretty ballsy demo in my opinion, especially as the gaps between parsing and acting on an input is just long enough to make you think it had crashed. Moore’s law over the next few years should take care of that.

This is probably the furthest along with getting embedded in the real world – their first target are the toy companies and an example given was an AI Teddy Bear that could determine which bedtime story a child wanted.

Cast.TV – www.casttv.com
Looking to index the videos appearing all over the internet, Cast.TV is taking on the challenges of indexing and finding relevant video over the wide range of media sites, rank them, and present them to the user. What I liked especially was similar videos (eg a TV episode) is collapsed to one entry, with multiple click throughs (rather like “related articles” on news aggregation engines). Its a clean look, but the challenge for Cast.TV and any niche search engine, is to let peopel know that (a) there is a choice beyond Google and then (b) get them to move to you for a specific search.

Faroo – www.faroo.com
The P2P search engine, which takes all the pages that the users are browsing through, and taking these real time results and leveraging them for ranking and results. The idea is simple – why should the entire internet be index by one system (such as Google) when everyone on the internet could provide the results?

Applying point to point principles to search is going to reduce the costs to this start-up, but it’s going to need a lot of people using the system, and are happy to leave their connection running and providing data to the cloud. Without a central index, building this mesh of computers is going to be the big challenge while expanding.

Viewdle – www.viewdle.com
Searching inside videos for approporate results is Viewdle’s aim. Using facial recognition, the people inside a video can be indexed and searched on, and the relationships of people who appear in the same video are presented to the user.

They have paired up with Reuters Labs as their “Face Search” (http://reuters.viewdle.com/) so a search on Britney Spears for example presents a number of videos of the starlet, and provides links to the videos of the people appearing in the same video). This is probably the company that is furthest along the monetization path and in the game of getting established (something all the companies here at the event are looking for), having solid income from clients is a good thing.

PS: Using Britney Spears as a search time by every search tool on the stage is already a running joke. I hope later companies doing a presentation are paying attention and modifying what they have.