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Google Glasses was announced and demo'd yesterday.
It will be interesting to see if Google's Reality style demo changes product launches in the future.
Below is Sergey giving a walk through of some of the behind the scenes.
He has sun glass lens inserts in the Google Project Glasses. There are multiple antennas on different frequencies pointing at the blimp.
Sergey welcomes the jumpers landing on the roof.
Shot of camera crew following the action.
This year was my second time attending GigaOm Structure. There were some very famiiar faces I see at GigaOm Structure - Rich Miller from DCK, Kevin Timmons from Cyrus One, and Frank Frankovsky from Facebook are a few I had a chance to talk to.
One of the things that struck me in the presentations is how much data centers are discussed. Then, it hit me that the folks data center folks who attend are part of the thought leaders. Amazon Web Services Werner Vogel has spoke for the full 5 years of Structure.
Here are some of the companies that have booths. There are many more that I didn't take pictures of.
Dell with DCS servers, modular data centers, and cloud Boomi.
Verizon/Terramark with a bit of IBM in the background.
Intel is in force with cloud solutions.
Equinix and Seamicro is the background.
Calxeda and Duport Fabros
Last year was my first 7x24 Exchange conference. I had been going to data center conferences for years and was sticking to that ones I knew my friends were at. Some friends and I decided to give 7x24 Exchange a try and now I have switched to going to 7x24 Exchange twice a year.
i am going to write a few more posts about my observations of 7x24 Exchange. One that helps me get a different perspective is 7x24 Exchange has a sponsored student program. I was able to get my nephew in this year. Justin just finished his sophomore year in mechanical engineering at U of Colorado-Boulder. His Dad works at Oracle, not in data centers. His aunt works at Intuit in the data center group. And, I do all kinds of fun stuff in data centers.
The one thing I told Justin is where else do you tell me people you are getting your degree in mechanical engineering, and people say "that's cool." I told Justin when he goes back to school he needs to go talk to the facility operations team, not the data center team to understand mechanical infrastructure on campus for data centers. The industry terminology can be a bit overwhelming, but getting the context at a place like 7x24 Exchange helps a lot to digest the industry news.
I would like to thank the folks at 7x24 Exchange for accepting Justin Ohara in their sponsored student program.
Last year I attended GigaOm Structure for the first time as a blogger. This year I am attending as a GigaOm Analyst.
The following are some of the sponsors there that are interesting to the data center user.
I'll be bouncing from data center discussions to Cloud and Big Data. Looking forward to a great event to network and stimulate new ideas.
Harvard Business Review has a post on how cool XBox is.
Xbox Live is easy to miss. It's a $2 billion revenue business embedded within the $9 billion revenue entertainment/devices business of the $73 billion revenue of Microsoft overall. If Xbox Live was a standalone business, its 40 million members would be dwarfed by user base of Linkedin, Twitter, Zynga and Facebook. But while Xbox Live's membership is less than 20% of the size of Zynga (a comparable gaming company), it likely has nearly double the gross profit that Zynga generates. Not bad for the old guy.
I discovered Xbox Live first via my brother-in-law Joel, a technology executive and gaming enthusiast from Seattle, and my junior high buddies, Emmett and Reid, from Hawaii. I hadn't played video games in years, but Xbox Live was a game changer. We were able to play each other and talk to one another despite living thousands of miles apart. It was a way to compete with one another as we caught up. We could also compete as a team against others, much like playing pick up sports at the park or having poker night. I positioned it to my wife (who was less than enthusiastic) as a way of keeping up with my friends from home. This worked at first, although the jig was up when she would ask how Emmett's family was doing and I'd respond with, "Um...I forgot to ask, but his sniper skills are just fine."
This got me thinking. How cool would it be to have the XBox Live guys to give a talk at a data center conference. Being ex-Microsoft, I have some friends over there, I could give it a try.
I wonder which data center conference I would try to get them in. Huh, the one that says I don't have media status and cannot attend as media and has a focus on its analyst services and vendor sponsorship. Nah. To be clear there are two data center conferences I think of when I eliminate the media status issue.
What conference would be supportive and give a good spot for a presentation and have a large attendance? The list is short.
Part of the HBR story is how the XBox live story is an inspiration for old established companies. I think I just thought of some other people who I could contact at Microsoft.
