Author Archives: Diwaker Gupta

Some thoughts on iCloud

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Sorry, all the sensationalist headlines were taken, so I had to pick something boring.

As we all know by now (read: probably 1% of the world’s population), at WWDC earlier this week, Apple spilled the beans on the upcoming iCloud, among other things. In this post, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the much hyped iCloud (not that there is any dearth of opinions and articles on the subject, thanks to the echo-chamber that is Twitterverse and Blogosphere)

iCloud

First off, some quick bullets summarizing what it is:

  • iCloud aims to make cloud storage painless, the idea being that your data should be available to you from all your devices, all the time.
  • It’s automatic and transparent. Apple is baking iCloud support deep into 9 different applications: iTunes, Photo Stream, Apps, Books, Documents, Backup, Contacts, Calendar and Mail. And that’s just the beginning.
  • It’s free. Upto 5GB — excluding purchased music, books, apps and photo stream.
  • Sync over the air: iCloud can sync across devices over wireless. As a concrete example, you’ll no longer need a cable to sync and backup your iPhone with your laptop.

Here are some cool things about iCloud:

  • Scan and skip upload (iTunes only): when dealing with large data sets (such as your movies and music collection), one of the main impediments to using cloud storage is the overhead of doing the initial import. With a 1Mbps uplink, a 10GB music collection will take a full day to upload. Of course, if the file you are trying to upload already exists somewhere in the cloud, you don’t need to upload it and this is exactly what iCloud does. Because of the iTunes store, Apple already has a library of 18 million songs (and counting) and detecting if two files are for the same song is a lot easier than for many other media types (say images or movies).
  • Storage APIs for developers: APIs are all the rage these days. By exposing the right set of APIs, Apple could attract developers to build iCloud functionality on other platforms (Android, for example). Unfortunately, the API is fairly limited at this point (key-value store or documents).
  • HP, Teradata, maybe EMC are rumored to have supplied bulk of the hardware in the spanking new datacenter that will be the backbone for iCloud.
  • Despite all the hoopla around “cloud” recently, it was still grounded firmly within the tech circles. Apple has the ability, experience and motivation to take cloud computing truly mainstream with iCloud.

What is NOT so cool:

  • Apple has a habit of exaggerating the novelty and efficacy of their features (remember Spaces?) Scan and skip upload is nothing new: it is just deduplication under the wraps — a well known technique in storage systems. Videos and photos will still have to be uploaded though — there’s no real shortcut for those. Of course, there are techniques to dedup arbitrary data and I hope Apple is leveraging them.
  • In the same vein, syncing of Mail, Calendar and Contacts is just catch up. Ever used Google? Likewise for Docs and Books. The delivery model is different — Apple apps work with the local data and sync when there’s connectivity. They haven’t touched upon conflict resolution, disconnected clients etc.
  • Implications for Dropbox: transparent, automatic sync across multiple devices is a phenomenally hard problem. Apple makes it sound like they’ve nailed it. It took Dropbox several years to address all the performance and security concerns. I’d wager Apple will run into its share of snags along the way.
  • Apples all the way: despite their claims, iCloud is designed to lock you in. Sure you may be able to leverage some of the features by installing additional software on a PC. But unless you are using an Apple device, you won’t get the full experience or service. Want your “reading list” available on Android (or Chome, for that matter)? Tough luck. Want your music available to other music players (open source players like Banshee and Amarok, god forbid)? How about your photo stream in Picasa?

Finally, there’s no doubt that iCloud will drastically alter the cloud landscape. However, Apple is focused mainly on the personal cloud — which is a good thing, they are playing to their strengths. It is also a great opportunity because the enterprise cloud market is still wide open. The requirements, challenges and “killer apps” in that market are very very different than the personal/consumer cloud market. Should be fun!

Indian Sweets in the Kitchen

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JohnC wrote a cute post over on his blog that filled me with nostalgia. I figured I’d respond with a counter-point and shamelessly stole the title from the original post :) So go read his post first.

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Welcome back. I’ve been meaning to write a series of posts about my startup experience(s) and John’s post is good inspiration. If nothing else, I’ll try to post something to supplement or respond to his posts.

Back to Kaju Barfi (also known as Kaju Katli by many). First, a picture:

Kaju Barfi

Image Courtesy: slimwithyoga.com

John makes a good point about being in a diverse environment surrounded by people who come from different cultures and backgrounds. I have seen myself grow personally and intellectually in similar situations. While I agree that US immigration law needs serious reform, let there be no doubt that there are very few countries that are as immigrant-friendly as the United States. Countless people from all over the world have come to the US, made it their home and contributed to all walks of society. I can not imagine Americans having the same kind of success in India as Indians have had in the US.

Another experience probably most Indians in the US would share is this: only when you are outside India do you realize how little you know about your country. Over the years I’ve been asked all sorts of questions about India — from naive ones about elephants and snake-charmers to hard-hitting ones about religion, freedom and corruption.

While we are on the subject of Kaju Barfi, do you see the silver material coating the surface of the barfi’s in the picture above? Here’s an advice — do NOT microwave that thing! Or any other Indian sweet that has the silver foil. It is a question that comes up often: what is it? what is it’s purpose? The silver foil is commonly called “vark” in India and yes, traditionally it is meant to be a super-thin silver foil. It servers no particular purpose other than to give a grandiose look to the sweets — it is edible and does not modify the taste of the sweets.

You may worry about consuming metal with your sweets and if you think that many people likely don’t use silver anymore, you’d probably be right. But relative to the challenges our world faces, I’d say its a minor concern. Hundreds of millions who are eating the silver foiled sweets daily are doing just fine.

John, I’ll bring you a box next time I’m in India!

The silent victories of open source

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Tux, the Linux penguin

Image via Wikipedia

For years, free/libre/open source software (henceforth referred to as FLOSS) have proclaimed, year after year, how that year is the year of Linux, or the year that open source will become mainstream, or the year that open source will finally take off etc. But it never has, at least traditionally speaking. Linux based desktops haven’t penetrated either the enterprise or consumer markets; with a few notable exceptions (Apache httpd, for instance), most FLOSS products — be it office software like OpenOffice, multimedia software such as Gimp or Inkscape — remain popular with economically insignificant niches. And yet, this year, more than ever before, open source forges ahead with its silent victories.

Consider the following shifts:

  • all the top brands of the day — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon — they ALLstand tall on the shoulders of FLOSS giants.
  • Contributing software back to the open source community is becoming increasingly common, even expected. Take a look at the GitHub repositories of Twitter and Facebook, or the various Google projects. In fact, when screening engineering candidates, I often look for and encourage people to talk about their open source contributions.
  • Most of the activity around “big data” and “cloud computing” is being driven in large part by FLOSS, whether it is the Hadoop-powered ecosystem or the Xen/Linux powered Amazon Web Services.
  • Given the current smartphone landscape, it is highly likely that Android will become ubiquitous on tablet devices and a variety of consumer smart phones. Already, Android has more search mindshare than Linux, despite the fact that Linux is part of the Android stack.
  • If you start a software company today, I would bet that you will find yourself bootstrapping almost entirely using open source software. The entire development process — from the GCC compiler toolchain, to the build systems, to the scripting languages, to the version control systems, to the code review systems, to the continuous integration systems — everything is dominated by FLOSS products. Good bug trackers and enterprise Wikis are the last bastions but it is just a matter of time.

I’ve had a chance to see the enterprise software market up close and increasingly find more and more open source everywhere I look. FLOSS has not arrived, it has taken over.

Disposable Film Festival

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What is the Disposable Film Festival? From the horse’s mouth:

Selected by MovieMaker Magazine as one America’s “coolest film festivals,” the Disposable Film Festival was created in 2007 by Eric Slatkin and Carlton Evans to celebrate the creative potential of disposable video: short films made on everyday equipment like cell phones, pocket cameras, and other inexpensive video capture devices.

DFF

Surabhi is one of the finalists in the Competitive Shorts Program. The opening night event is going to take place at the historic Castro Theater in San Francisco on March 24th. The theater can seat close to 1,500 people, but the groupon is already sold out (thats 700 seats gone) and the show is likely to sell out very soon. You can still get your tickets over at Brown Paper Tickets. The exciting line-up consists of 25 super-short films from all over the world.

Finally, here’s the promo video to pique your interest:

How do you use Twitter/Buzz/Facebook?

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No no, I’m not late to the party and I’m not asking literally how does one use the above mentioned services. Rather, I’m asking how does one put these various services to use. When do you post something on Twitter but not on Buzz, Facebook but not on Twitter; or do you post everything everywhere (ping.fm style)? I’m not a heavy hitter by any means and my usage of social networks is mediocre at best. Yet I myself confounded with all of the various services and their accompanying warts and virtues. Don’t you?

To help sort out my thoughts, I drew a picture (don’t you dare judge me for my lack of creativity!):

Twitter/Facebook/Buzz

Below I elaborate more on how I currently use each of the services.

Twitter

  • I tend to use it for technical and/or non-personal content. Things that I would want to publicize.
  • Unlike Buzz/Facebook, I don’t pay too much attention to who is following me. Most tweets are public anyways.
  • The 140 character limit is sometimes amusing, but often irritating. Are people still using regular SMS with Twitter?
  • Multiple startups devoted to managing Twitter “noise” is not encouraging.
  • @ replies are bandaid. Twitter is a broadcast-and-forget medium — I can’t have (or follow) a conversation on it.

Facebook

  • Use it for sharing random, personal updates (or things I find interesting :p)
  • Mostly on because of network effect (read: don’t want to be left off the social bandwagon).
  • Like that I can “Like” most things and actually follow the conversation via comments.
  • Always worried if my privacy settings are working and if there’s a new “default” I need to worry about.
  • Pay more attention to who I friend. The noise level is still quite high despite that.

Buzz

  • Usage domain similar to that of Facebook. Unlike Facebook, can choose to make posts Public.
  • Love the email integration. Conversely, API/clients still have to catch up to Twitter.
  • Supports likes, comments and “resharing”.
  • Privacy is modeled around my contacts (chat or otherwise), which seems natural.

I’m fine with using Twitter for all of my public posts. The main confusion lies between Buzz and Facebook. Facebook obviously has more social traction. That said, Buzz is just more convenient to use (because of the email integration mostly). Of course, all of the various connectors available (Twitter <-> Buzz, Twitter <-> Facebook, multicast via ping.fm or Chromedeck etc) make the whole thing even more confusing. At the end of the day, I might just go back to not using anything on a regular basis.

How are you using Twitter, Buzz and Facebook?