Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Large Portion’

Weekly Poll: Why Is Apple Building a Massive, $1 Billion Data Center

In last week’s poll, we asked if one company will come to dominate cloud computing. We had 115 responses.

Today we posted about the massive data center that Apple is building in Maiden, NC. We know so little about what Apple plans to do with the 500,000 square foot data center. So, we want to ask you: Why is Apple building a massive, $ billion data center?

Sponsor

Why is Apple building a massive, $1 billion data center?(answers)

Speculation runs the gamut.

Is it to give Apple the ability to deliver its own content?

From Dan Rayburn:

“…it does indicate that over time, third party CDNs like Akamai and Limelight could very well lose a large portion of Apple’s business. While it’s way to early to speculate what kind of content Apple will deliver and in what volume, this strategy is nearly identical to what we’ve seen Microsoft do over the years.”

People point to Apple’s Lala acqusition as a case in point that Apple wants to offer iTunes in the cloud.

Michael Robertson, the founder of MP3.com gives this scenario:

“What is of value is the personal music storage service which was an often overlooked component of Lala’s business. As Apple did with the original iPods, Lala realized that any music solution must include music already possessed by the user. The Lala setup process provides software to store a personal music library online and then play it from any web browser alongside web songs they vend. This technology plus the engineering and management team is the true value of Lala to Apple.”

Will One Company Come To Dominate Cloud Computing?

We asked that question last week. We had 115 people respond. About 45 percent of you said, no, there is too much diversity in the market for it to be dominated by one company:

So, what do you think? Why is Apple building this massive data center?

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Bringing telemedicine to the ICU gives mixed results

Electronic medical records aren’t the only high-tech solution that many hope will revolutionize medicine. Telemedicine has been promoted as a way of letting patients receive care from specialists they might otherwise not have access to, and some studies have produced data suggesting it can live up to its promise, at least in some contexts. The latest specialty to go under the microscope is intensive care medicine (practitioners are apparently called “intensivists”). A study released by the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that telemedicine may bring some small benefits to the ICU, but the impact is very subtle.

At first glance, an ICU might not be the obvious choice for telemedicine, given its focus on intensive care, which implies lots of hands-on intervention for a wide range of ailments. But a large portion of the work involved in an ICU is a matter of monitoring patients for changes, which doesn’t necessarily require direct intervention.

Read the whole story…

DeepDyve launches rental service for scientific research

A startup called DeepDyve has already unveiled a search engine that it says beats Google’s for finding research information. But its plans go further than search — chief executive Bill Park says the company also wants to reach a new audience for academic research, today launching what he calls “an iTunes or Netflix for research”

The business model for an scientific, medical, or technical journal is all about selling your product to a big academic institution, like Harvard or Stanford, Park said. That means they’re not selling to a huge potential audience, the 50 million “knowledge workers,” a large portion of whom need to read a few technical articles every week as part of their job, or to stay on top of their field. But these technical websites charge around $30 for a single article, often not providing anything more than a short abstract before you make a decision, so most of these workers either give up or ask for a copy from someone they know with a subscription.

As evidence that this is happening, Park says that only 0.2. percent of visitors to these journal websites actually make a purchase, which is a pretty dismal conversion rate.

With the DeepDyve’s rental service, on the other hand, you can use DeepDyve search (whose main strength is searching for entire phrases or large chunks of text) to find the article you want, preview the article, then you get access to it for a limited period of time. Pricing starts at 99 cents per article, which lets you read the article for 24 hours, and goes up to a “gold plan” of $19.99 per month, which lets you read unlimited articles for an unlimited period of time.

The Menlo Park, Calif. company has already made deals many academic publishers, leading to a database of 30 million articles at launch. These publishers realize that this is something that expands, rather than competes with, their business model, Park says.

DeepDyve has raised $9 million from angel investors, and is looking to raise $5 million in its first institutional funding round.

Read the whole story…

Netflix Had Me At “We’re Sorry”

I do my fair share of complaining about poor service. And if you follow me on Twitter, you might say that I do more than my fair share. Here’s my issue: It’s not so much that your service sucks, it’s that you refuse to be held accountable for it sucking, and rarely, if ever, do anything about it. I’m looking at you, Comcast and AT&T. That’s why it’s so perplexingly wonderful when a company does the right thing, like Netflix.

Tonight, Netflix emailed a large number of its subscribers to apologize for a Xbox Live streaming outage that occurred yesterday. They’re offering to refund 2% of users’ monthly bills back to them, if they simply click on the link that was emailed. It’s not a lot of money, but what’s remarkable is that Netflix did this for most of us completely unprompted.

Now, I’m sure someone somewhere complained, but rather than either arguing with that person or just quietly giving them some sort of discount, it looks like Netflix just emailed everyone that could have possibly seen this hiccup in service, and offered a refund — including users who didn’t suffer through it at all.

Refunding 2% of a monthly bill to all of these users will probably add up to a decent sized chunk of change (assuming a large portion of users click on the link), but the positive reaction they’re getting for the move on places like Twitter (and yes, this blog), has got to be worth more than whatever they’re paying. In a time of poor tech customer care, Netflix is the sterling example of how do it the right way.

Last month, we covered a Netflix internal presentation on how the company is run. It is simply an awesome guide that not nearly enough companies are anywhere close to following. It’s baffling how Netflix could be doing things so right, while there are so many companies out there doing things so wrong. It’d be one thing if Netflix wasn’t successful, but it’s extremely successful.

I’ve had basically no service from AT&T for large portions of my day in various parts of San Francisco for two months now. Do you think I’ll ever see a dime back from them? And before I just recently quit Comcast, my service would go out almost everyday without fail. Did I get an email apology and a refund? Nope. Maybe if I bitched loud enough for long enough, I could get something back from those two companies, but the point is that maybe I shouldn’t have to.

Netflix emails me from time to time to see about my movie streaming quality, and also to see if movies I’ve rented through the mail appear on time. If they don’t or the quality of my movies is poor, they apologize. That’s all I want. The refund is just icing on the cake. Too many other companies not only give you no icing, and no cake, but they steal your cake, punch you in the face, and then blame you for the whole ordeal.

But when it comes time to renew my plans with those companies, guess which one I’m going to stick with? Netflix. Companies often seem curious how other companies get “fanboys” — this is how.

[photo: TriStar Pictures]

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Read the whole story…