Isn't it a bit ironic that Cleantech is a dirty word? Analysis of 60 Minutes piece

It wasn’t too long ago that people would proudly say they worked in Cleantech.  Now Cleantech is a dirty word associated with failure.

60 minutes had a piece on Cleantech which focused on the failure part.  I couldn’t put my finger on what bothered me about the 60 minutes video.

Then GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher wrote her analysis of what 60 minutes got right and wrong in their story. 

What 60 Minutes got right and wrong in its story on the “cleantech crash”

by Katie Fehrenbacher

JAN. 5, 2014 - 6:50 PM PST

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SUMMARY:

60 Minutes just aired one of the more mainstream looks yet at the Silicon Valley cleantech rise and fall. While they got some things right they also got some wrong. My take here.

Katie had the benefit of months of knowing the 60 minutes broadcast was coming out.

Full disclosure, I spoke with the producers of the 60 Minutes piece on background a few times over the past few months as they were putting it together, just to try to help them go in the right direction.

Katie presents her view of what 60 minutes got right and wrong.

Contrary to the reaction of many of my Twitter friends, I think 60 Minutes got some key things right in the story, but they also got a couple of things wrong in there, too — most importantly they’re overlapping the Valley story with the government funding story. Here’s my take on their piece, which — to their credit — is one of the more comprehensive mainstream media looks at what was the VC cleantech phenomenon:

Do you think of Trust as a Design Pattern? It changes many things

Sitting around thinking about how to be different than the rest I realized focusing on creating a service where Trust is a design priority changes many things.  Trust is one of those things that is valuable yet hard to develop.

GigaOm has a post on the problem of perceiving trust.

Is it safe to buy that new gadget? Why trust is perceptual computing’s biggest problem

by David Meyer

4 HOURS AGO

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This year’s CES is a frustrating affair — so many cool new context-aware toys to play with, and so little reassurance from the manufacturers that their use will stay secure or private.

Thanks to Eric Snowden the issue of trust is a hot topic.

I am really frustrated right now. I look at the slew of awesome announcements coming in from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and I keep thinking the same thing: “Nope, because surveillance.” Damn you, Snowden!

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Security and privacy can no longer be afterthoughts or nice-to-haves — difficult as they are to implement in this age of embedded systems. We the consumers now know the dark flipside to these innovations, and that, manufacturers and app providers, is your problem.

So many free services are built on users not thinking about the trust of watch is being done with the events in your life.

Trust is one of those things that is hard to do and with all the latest technology is more and more valuable.

Who do you trust?  Do you focus on developing more trust?

What would change in your data center with more trust?  What changes in your data center with less trust?

AWS first outage of 2014, Jan 3 12:50a

I was disconnected from the internet this weekend and one of my developer friends said AWS was out in the East Coast and I couldn’t find much on the outage.

Here is one post.

Amazon Cloud Services Down, Netflix, Other Sites Unreachable

January 3, 2014 

By Paul Thomson :: 1:16 AM

Update: As of 2:45 AM, it appears that Amazon’s cloud services are coming online again.

With the northeast in the grips of a deep freeze and blizzard, many people are stuck indoors tonight, hunkered down in front of the glowing screens of laptops and televisions. What they’re likely not doing, is watching Netflix and surfing on some parts of the social web, however.

Around 12:30 AM, an outage occurred with Amazon’s cloud storage service, throwing many databases and applications offline. Some of the affected sites include Netflix, Amazon streaming media, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Steam, Tumblr, and various blogs and websites that depend on Amazon’s services to host and deliver their data.

The outage appears to be centered in one of Amazon’s East Coast data centers, according to Tweets from various sources trying to pinpoint the problem, but no official status update has been given from Amazon yet.

Given the amount of outages in East Coast AWS we have chosen to try and use AWS West and our clients are more on the west coast. 

We’ll see what AWS outages look like in 2014 vs. 2013.  Here is an slideshare analyzing past AWS outages.  And the conclusion is most outage are caused by process issues.

Apple and Facebook make the 13 biggest cleantech moments of 2013

GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher has a post on Dec 31, 2013 on the top 13 cleantech moments of 2013 which includes Apple at #2 and Facebook at #9.

2). Apple’s ground-breaking bet on solar: This year Apple finished building the largest privately-owned solar panel farms in the U.S. in North Carolina to power a large data center. The move was disruptive because Apple threw down the gauntlet in a state where the local utility, Duke Energy, was taking its sweet time offering some of the giant data center customers in the area access to clean power. Following Apple’s decision, this year Duke Energy launched a new program to sell clean power to customers that are willing to pay for it. Apple also hired former chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, to help the company grow its energy efficiency and clean power plans next year.

Apple’s solar farm in North Carolina

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9). Facebook plans to power a data center entirely with wind: Facebook hit a milestone in 2013 with its declaration that it plans to build a data center in Iowa partly in order to take advantage of the powerful wind corridor there. When the data center is built it will be run entirely off wind turbines. Facebook is working with a local utility there and the move shows how Internet companies can negotiate with utilities to get the clean power they want.

Oracle gets ready to compete against AWS

I had a nice Holiday break with no landline, cell coverage, internet access, or broadcast TV from Dec 26 - Dec 31.  I was sick with a bad cold for 3 days of bed rest and I only had a kindle and saved movies to pass the time.  It was a forced withdrawal which actually was good medicine in itself. 

One of the things I missed is this post by my GigaOm friend Barb Darrow on Oracle’s intent to make 2014 a year to compete against AWS.

“Down at the infrastructure level, we intend to be price competitive with Amazon and Microsoft Azure and Rackspace. So we intend to compete aggressively in, what I will call — commodity not being a bad word — the commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service marketplace,” Ellison told analysts on the company’s second quarter earnings call last week.

That Oracle IaaS is envisioned as a platform to run all that higher-end Oracle software goodness. The idea, Ellison continued “is to sell our customers infrastructure as a service and the same customer a highly differentiated platform as a service will let us get better margins and highly differentiated suite of enterprise applications for the cloud.”

I was chatting with an Oracle data center executive at 7x24 Exchange and we joked about how the Sun acquisition slowed Oracle’s data center expansion and how Oracle has learned the Sun data centers were not that great, and they were now expanding their existing facilities and building more.

In a research note, Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund, pointed to Oracle opening up its 17th data center worldwide as proof that its building out infrastructure for this cloud push.