Update: The FCC has sent letters regarding early termination fees to Google, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. In its letter to Google, it says:

…where new options may subject consumers to substantial ETFs, potentially from more than one entity, the Commission has a special interest in ensuring that consumers have a clear and complete understanding of the rates, terms, and conditions on which the communications services are being offered and the rationale for those rates, terms, and conditions. The combination of ETFs from Google and T-Mobile for the Nexus One is also unique among the four major national carriers. Consumers have been surprised by this policy and by its financial impact. Please let us know your rationale(s) for these combined fees, and whether you have coordinated or will coordinate on these fees and on the disclosure of their combined effect.

Original Article: Google made big waves in the mobile industry early in the year, and the effects of those waves are being felt quite hard by some users. The Nexus One’s release has gotten off to kind of a rocky start.

The issues plaguing customers of the much-anticipated Google phone have been widely publicized. Most of the gripes have dealt with Google’s customer service (or lack thereof) for the device, and trouble with 3G connections. More recently, however, complaints of outrageous early termination fees have popped up.

The trouble for users is that if they got the Nexus One with a two-year contract from T-Mobile, they end up having to pay about $550 to terminate early. The thing is, they have to pay T-Mobile’s regular fee, but they also have to pay Google a fee. Needless to say, that has caught some people off guard.

Google’s fee is a $350 "Equipment Recovery Fee". It applies to customers who cancel their contracts within the first 120 days.

According to Niraj Sheth with the Wall Street Journal’s Digits Blog, "A Google spokeswoman said in a statement that the fee is "a way for the company to recoup the subsidy it gives to contract customers."

"’This is standard practice for third-party resellers of T-Mobile and other operators,’ she said. A T-Mobile spokesman said that the carrier’s early termination fee is standard for its customers on contract."

While the combination of the aforementioned problems may not bode well for Google’s reputation in the mobile industry at the moment, the good news for the company is that they are projected to come out on top in the smartphone race eventually. Crunchgear says Google and Android will "own the smartphone market" eventually. Time will tell if that is an accurate depiction of things to come, but for now, people just seem upset.

Related Articles:

> Google Unveils Nexus One "Super Phone"

> Nexus One Sales Of 5-6 Million Units Forecast

> Google Tries to Carve Out its Place in Mobile

As I’ve written about a number of times, Google is really one big social network with a bunch of features, and integration is the key to harnessing that social power. A product like this could be just the ticket, because according to these same sources, it would integrate content shared through YouTube and Picasa. Who knows what else could be worked in?

Gmail currently has status updates of a sort. In the chat section, it has a menu of your contacts who also use Google, and shows their current status of they have one set. You can set one easily at any time.

Google has not yet responded to requests for comments, but if we learn more, we will keep you updated.

If Gmail offers its own Facebook/Twitter-style timeline, would you use it? Should Facebook and Twitter be worried? Share your thoughts.
 

Related Articles:

> Google Luring More Account Users with New News Feature?

> Is Google Bad at Social Media or Really, Really Good at it?

> Is Gmail Google’s Real Social Network?

Last summer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that display ads would be Google’s next big billion-dollar business. According to BusinessWeek, a Barclays Capital analyst says display ads will account for about 4% of Google’s total sales in 2010. This would be a 40% increase from their contribution in 2009. BW’s Douglas MacMillan reports:

Sales of video and banner ads on YouTube, the world’s most popular video site, are expected by analysts at Barclays to contribute the bulk of Google’s display revenue this year, about $700 million. And with DoubleClick, Google acquired a technology that handles the placement of display ads on sites across the Web. "Display is now a key business for us," says Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice-president of product management and one of the company’s earliest employees.

Neal Mohan, the executive in charge of Google’s display business, says Google will draw on its strength in search-related advertising to expand in display. It became the leader in search by using algorithms to help it know which ads to place where. "Our goal is to bring the science of search to the art of display," Mohan says.

Advertisers will probably not be shy about getting on board with that. "Research has shown that exposure to both search and display ads from the same advertiser results in a 22 percent increase for conversion rates over search alone," Rich Kahn, CEO of display ad provider eZanga told WebProNews last year.

Back in November, Google announced its acquisition of Teracent, a provider of "intelligent dynamic display advertising". It provides machine-learning algorithms, which can create customized display ads based on thousands of different creative elements.

Google says the one on the right was created with Teracent’s technology.

"Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors," Google said. "These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."

Before that announcement, Google launched a tool to measure the impact of display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network called Campaign Insights, which Google says can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness or active user interest in a particular product or service. Google has also repeatedly added new templates  for advertisers to use when constructing their creative.
 

Related Articles:

> Does Size Matter in Display Advertising?

> Google Launches New Display Ad Measurement Tool

> Google Launches New Templates for Display Ads

They determined that Doritos was the most effective brand to advertise during the Super Bowl, and that Budweiser Select55 was the least effective. The results were determined from 98,656 Tweets collected. The results from BrandBowl2010 were as follows:

The Top Ten Most Effective Brands on BrandBowl2010

1. Doritos
2. Google
3. Focus On Family
4. Snickers
5. Budweiser
6. Bud Light
7. Hyundai
8. Kia
9. GoDaddy
10. Coca-Cola

The Five Least Effective Brands on BrandBowl2010

1. Diamond Foods’ – Pop Secret
2. Honda
3. Teleflora
4. Michelob Ultra
5. Budweiser Select55

The top brands were judged on volume of tweets, and after the top three, the firms say there was a sharp drop-off. "Doritos won the title by virtue of dominating the sheer volume of tweets," the firms say. "That was enough to keep them ahead of Google, which had a higher percentage of positive tweets."

The BrandBowl site provided an overall ranking of the brands advertising on the game based on a composite score that takes into consideration both volume of tweets and sentiment (positive or negative).
 

Related Articles:

> [WATCH] Super Bowl 2010 Commercials

> Google Runs First Super Bowl Commercial

> View Twitter Reaction Of Super Bowl Ads

According to George Chen and Melanie Lee, Disney is leading a consortium that includes Google, and said consortium would like to buy a 30 or 40 percent stake in Bus Media for about $100 million.  Negotiations are supposed to be in progress right now.

Such an investment could be a smart move, considering that notable entities like CCB International, China Renaissance Capital Investment, IDG, and the Yangtze Fund have all put some money behind Bus Media.

Bus Media apparently enjoys the support of China’s government, too, as it’s "the exclusive partner of state broadcaster CCTV and the official Xinhua news agency for in-bus media content and advertising."

But that brings us back to the touchy issue of Google, China, and censorship.  Whether Google’s changing its attitude or has found some solution that complements its moral stand remains to be seen.

Related Articles:

> Google Partners With NSA On Cyber Attack Analysis

> China Won’t Stand In The Way Of Google’s Android Business

> Bill Gates Sides With Ballmer, MSFT On China

This isn’t some poorly sourced rumor or random conspiracy theory.  Chris Gourlay interviewed Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, and Och said, "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time."

Incredible as that might seem, the building blocks are already in place.  Android allows users to perform searches by just saying terms out loud.  Google Translate deals in 52 languages at the moment.  Google only needs to integrate everything in order to be in business.  Maybe.

The sentence "I am going to eat lunch at 12:30" becomes "I’m going to lunch at 12:30" after Google Translate takes it from English to Spanish and back.  That’s enough of a difference to create confusion (suppose someone’s trying to distinguish between stuffing his face and stepping out to run errands), and it’s not like Spanish is a rare dialect or the original phrase represents a curveball.

Toss in imperfect speech recognition, and it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to conduct important business or even chat for fun.

Nonetheless, it should be very interesting to see how this project works out for Google.

Related Articles:

> Google Analytics, Chromium Receive Language Upgrades

> Google Announces Unicode Progress

> Google Launches New Transliteration Tool

What did you think of the commercial? Tell us.

Did you think you’d ever see a Google Super Bowl Commercial? Let us know.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, tweeted yesterday…"Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said "Hell has indeed frozen over.")"

Well, it appears as though Hell has frozen over.

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird’s-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That’s what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It’s a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that’s been complicated by Facebook’s recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It’s a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he’s still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn’t going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple’s eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. “I can’t think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company,” he says. “It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies.” And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We’ve written here a number of times about Mailana’s tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana’s Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he’s been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he’s removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That’s one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? “God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren’t that popular either,” Warden writes. “Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot.” In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden’s posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what’s possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook’s own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook’s racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

“I’m mostly thinking ‘What do I try first?’,” Warden says. “There’s so many interesting ways to slice the data – especially as I’m starting to get changes over time. I’m also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are – so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God.”

Warden says he hasn’t talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he’d posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples’ email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. “I’d love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there,” Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? “I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we’re just littering the Internet with,” Warden says.

“Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they’re generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It’s like we’re constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I’m a starry-eyed believer that we’ll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It’s like an x-ray for the whole country – we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we’re friends with, where we live, what we like.”

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he’s not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he’s now focused on “working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay.” His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week’s public release of all this Facebook data? “Hopefully I’ll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I’d like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this.”

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden’s work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

Discuss

Sponsor

As pointed out in a recent blog post by university professor Scott Shane, “ham and egging” was first coined by Columbia’s professor Amar Bhide and Harvard Business School’s Howard Stevenson. The term refers to the technique of convincing multiple stakeholders that others are working with you despite the fact that you’re only in talks. The only problem is that most early partners only want to work with you if other reputable partners have already signed on.

Explains Bhide and Stevenson,”the ultimate ham and egging solution is for the entrepreneur to simultaneously convince each participant that everyone else is on board, or almost on board.”

However, when ReadWriteWeb spoke to MobiTV CEO Paul Scanlan about forging deals between telecom and television companies, he suggested a different tact. Although Scanlan found himself caught between partners who were skittish to sign on without the initial validation of others, he decided that rather than ham and egging, he’d build contingency clauses into contracts. Scanlan’s contracts stated that all partnerships were contingent on a set number of large-scale partners to launch. While this may not be the ideal method of closing deals, it seems like an ethical alternative to engaging in deals that begin with dishonesty.

Have you ever engaged in ham and egging and if so, was your deal a success?

Discuss

Update: The FCC has sent letters regarding early termination fees to Google, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. In its letter to Google, it says:

…where new options may subject consumers to substantial ETFs, potentially from more than one entity, the Commission has a special interest in ensuring that consumers have a clear and complete understanding of the rates, terms, and conditions on which the communications services are being offered and the rationale for those rates, terms, and conditions. The combination of ETFs from Google and T-Mobile for the Nexus One is also unique among the four major national carriers. Consumers have been surprised by this policy and by its financial impact. Please let us know your rationale(s) for these combined fees, and whether you have coordinated or will coordinate on these fees and on the disclosure of their combined effect.

Original Article: Google made big waves in the mobile industry early in the year, and the effects of those waves are being felt quite hard by some users. The Nexus One’s release has gotten off to kind of a rocky start.

The issues plaguing customers of the much-anticipated Google phone have been widely publicized. Most of the gripes have dealt with Google’s customer service (or lack thereof) for the device, and trouble with 3G connections. More recently, however, complaints of outrageous early termination fees have popped up.

The trouble for users is that if they got the Nexus One with a two-year contract from T-Mobile, they end up having to pay about $550 to terminate early. The thing is, they have to pay T-Mobile’s regular fee, but they also have to pay Google a fee. Needless to say, that has caught some people off guard.

Google’s fee is a $350 "Equipment Recovery Fee". It applies to customers who cancel their contracts within the first 120 days.

According to Niraj Sheth with the Wall Street Journal’s Digits Blog, "A Google spokeswoman said in a statement that the fee is "a way for the company to recoup the subsidy it gives to contract customers."

"’This is standard practice for third-party resellers of T-Mobile and other operators,’ she said. A T-Mobile spokesman said that the carrier’s early termination fee is standard for its customers on contract."

While the combination of the aforementioned problems may not bode well for Google’s reputation in the mobile industry at the moment, the good news for the company is that they are projected to come out on top in the smartphone race eventually. Crunchgear says Google and Android will "own the smartphone market" eventually. Time will tell if that is an accurate depiction of things to come, but for now, people just seem upset.

Related Articles:

> Google Unveils Nexus One "Super Phone"

> Nexus One Sales Of 5-6 Million Units Forecast

> Google Tries to Carve Out its Place in Mobile

What’s interesting though is that the savings are calculated based on the actions measured by small battery-powered, wireless sensors. You stick these sensors on your bike, thermostat, showerhead "and even your keychain."

Sponsor

Green Goose is a web-based service, along with "a very low-cost set of Savings sensors." – these are literally green eggs (see picture to the right). The web site tracks specific actions and behaviors from users – then computes that into dollars saved.

Co-Founder Brian Krejcarek told ReadWriteWeb that’s "like a Twitter feed of personal green savings."

Here’s how the sensor part works: the sensors communicate with a "Green Gateway" that then sends messages to the web site. The Green Gateway – which is also "egg-like" – has an Ethernet port that connects to your network hub via a router. The bike sensor measures miles ridden. Green Goose also plans to offer sensors for your automobile, shower (hot water), and thermostat (heating and cooling).

In the future, Green Goose might also be able to pull savings data in "from open APIs like that proposed by Google Power Meter for savings earned by using less electricity." It also plans to eventually move beyond energy to capture savings earned from making "other lifestyle decisions."

You can get started today with a "Green Goose Bike Sensor Kit," which retails for $49 plus $10 for postage. The Portland and San Francisco-based company is currently in talks with the BTA (Bicycle Transportation Alliance) in Portland and they’re already installed "in a number of coffee shops."

As well as consumers, the service is targeting employers with a "a unique sustainable savings benefit" offering for their staff. One of the features for employers is managing and auditing details for the IRS bike commute tax credit.

Green Goose is currently in pre-production and running beta trials. Right now it’s offering 100 Savings Kits for bicycle owners.

Eventually this type of connection, between sensors and mainstream services like banking, will be commonplace and probably won’t need to rely on gimmicks such as green eggs. But for now, Green Goose seems like a cute, interesting Internet of Things service for green conscious early adopters to try out.

Discuss

Sponsor

Ravikant suggests that incubators and accelerators like YCombinator and Techstars are the new grad school.

He writes, “In some ways, it’s better,” and that unlike business schools, YCombinator pays entrepreneurs, which allows founders to be their own boss and encourages original work.

In addition to Ravikant’s points, the fact that every incubator participant is connected to advisors through a financial agreement means the group may be motivated to maintain their network and share contacts. Nevertheless, before dismissing the idea of grad school altogether, it’s good to remember many of the top entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley are MIT, Harvard and CalTech grads (including some of the Venture Hacks team). Perhaps the argument here is not so much about incubators over traditional institutions, but in the value of good mentors that have a stake in your success and do not rest on the laurels of a tenured position.

As a startup entrepreneur, what is the best lesson you’ve ever been taught and who taught it to you?

Photo Credit: Duncan Hull

Discuss

While Gowalla has secured a large amount of funding, some $8.5 million, and My Town claims more check-ins than the other services, Foursquare is happily ticking along on the seed money provided by its founders (after they sold their original effort, Dodgeball, to Google), and creating a community of developers who are eager to build secondary applications. There are two reasons Foursquare is gaining so much ground over its competitors.

Sponsor

This is a guest post by Simon Salt, the founder and CEO of IncSlingers. He is a writer and blogger whose work has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Chris Brogan’s Dad-O-Matic.com, American Marketing Association News and the Austin Realtor. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal on social media and is a recognized national speaker on that topic as well.

Firstly, it is available on all phone platforms. While this is also true of Loopt, the game play element of Foursquare makes it more attractive to many users. Secondly, it took the very sensible step of opening its API early on. This has generated a wave of new secondary applications.

In addition to this, it set up a developer community forum and is extremely active there, providing support, information and assistance to developers that are creating these secondary apps. Just as with Twitter, it is not just the service itself that will create demand, but the applications that run from that service.

There are hundreds of applications that run on the Twitter API now (most of which are listed at oneforty.com). It is very likely that by the end of 2010 we will see similar numbers of applications for Foursquare, and, should Gowalla and the rest open their APIs, for those services too.

The reason geolocation social networking is so popular is quite simply its ease of use. Arrive at a destination, be that your work, the gym, a coffee shop or even the grocery store, fire up the application on your phone, “check-in”, and get points, badges and even increased status in the game for doing so.

As with Twitter, early adopters are the ones using the sites the most at the moment, but the services are rapidly spreading beyond the hard core. Unlike micro-blogging, you need no talent to be entertaining, informative or stylish – you simply check-in as you go about your day. You attract “friends” by doing this, or by connecting with people you already know, either online or in real life.

The Next Step: User- and Location-Focused

As with so many other early-stage social network platforms, extending the service with secondary applications is what makes the service truly useful.

At present, the secondary applications that are being developed fall into two main categories: user-focused and location-focused. A good example of a user-focused app is wheredoyougo. This service provides a heat map visual of all of a user’s check-ins. Another, foursqpic allows users to upload pictures as part of the Foursquare Venue Tips section, supplementing simple text tips with visuals as well. These are great apps and certainly add to the fun and extend the functionality of the service. However, the real gains are coming in the location-focused apps.

So far, the most developed of these is placewidget, which allows owners of a location to promote, via a website widget, the “Mayor” of their location on their website. Until now, any real marketing revolving around Foursquare was offline, and had to be location-specific. By bringing the ability to market both their involvement in the Foursquare community and promote a loyal customer, this widget gives a lot more power to businesses looking to leverage this type of social networking.

Foursquare recently announced it had signed two deals with media outlets. The first is an agreement with Metro, Canada’s number one free daily newspaper, to have content for venues provided by the newspaper. The second is with Bravo TV, which will include Bravo Celebrity Tips and Bravo-branded badges for over 500 locations. A game is great, but a content-rich social network is something a lot more valuable.

Photo credit: Agata Urbaniak
Discuss

We’ve found that the virtualization layer is becoming a key place to launch enterprise products. All of this momentum is being translated in how to more effectively sell virtualization into the enterprise – and VMware isn’t holding back in building the relationships to sell into the channel.

Sponsor

So, we ask, is the virtual layer the new platform for delivering value to the enterprise? If so, what tangible benefits are being offered today?

First an analysis of the momentum. According to this release from VMware , despite the down economy there has been 60% increase in participants this week from counties all around the world. What happens when we crunch the language in that release? We find that “partners”, “exchange”, “customers”, “network”, “cloud”, and “desktop” are the most important subjects.

Using those ideas, let’s condense that statement into our own words: Virtualization partners are exchanging information on how to win customers by leveraging the network and cloud to reach the desktop.

At the partner exchange, there are early previews of next-generation products and programs as well as in-depth technical training. The conference agenda is packed with sessions including practical training and a host of supported discussions from over 50 sponsors, including HP, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Netapp and EMC.

Looking through the sessions, several things stand out. First, networking and storage are merging together. Second, security is catching up – quickly – to support and define how virtualization and cloud applications are deployed and managed for business-critical applications. VMware is being baked into partner go-to-market strategies and product releases. There is more partner surface area and more angles for sales. All of this bodes well for virtualization.

Are VMware partners building an ecosystem that makes you want to move faster with your deployment of business-critical applications? What is missing?

Discuss