All Things Digital

In a stunning ruling that has huge implications for the cable industry, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York has cleared the way for Cablevision (CVC) to offer so-called “network DVRs,” in which consumers would be able to record video programming for future viewing “in the cloud” rather than relying on the hard-drives in their set-top boxes.

The Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling which concluded that network DVRs were a violation of content copyrights.

Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett notes this morning that the Court concurred with Cablevision’s view that by ceding control of what’s recorded to the customer, Cablevision’s network DVR model avoids direct liability for copyright infringement. “In Cablevision’s view, a network DVR is, in essence, simply a DVR with a very long cord,” he writes.

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Many entrepreneurs today have their heads in the clouds. They’re either outsourcing most of their network infrastructure to a provider such as Amazon Web Services or are building out such infrastructures to capitalize on the incredible momentum around cloud computing. I have no doubt that this is The Next Big Thing in computing, but sometimes I get a little tired of the noise.

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The rise of cloud computing raises a lot of legal issues, and one of the thorniest involves the variations in national laws governing the storage and use of personal and other information. Controls on data threaten, for instance, to prevent certain information from being stored in data centers outside a user’s home country, hence eroding some of the efficiencies promised by a global cloud.

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There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a cloud computing service is core to its business in a way that it isn’t for, say, IBM, Sun or HP.

In a brief but illuminating video interview with Om Malik, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos underscores this point in describing the origins of Amazon Web Services. “Four years ago is when it started,” he says, “and we had enough complexity inside Amazon that we were finding we were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups. Basically what we decided to do is build a [set of APIs] between those two layers so that you could just do coarse-grained coordination between those two groups. Amazon is, you know, just a web-scale application.”

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My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job-search service, and it seems to be going very well.

One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had “outsourced his memory” to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.

Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to cloud computing, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.

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Sun Microsystems is getting ready to talk about its cloud computing efforts, including some kind of a deal with Amazon for its Amazon Web Services, according to CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who delivered a short keynote at Startup Camp in San Francisco. Startup Camp is an adjunct event to the JavaOne Conference that kicks off later this week.

Following his keynote, I got onstage with Schwartz and asked him a few questions. I queried him about Sun and its cloud computing efforts, given that it was nearly a decade ago that then-Sun CEO Scott McNealy started talking about how “the network is the computer.” In response, Schwartz said they have some interesting news coming out later this week. He refused to give the details, but he seemed pretty excited.

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Live Mesh is so messy to explain, I can’t cover everything in this post. But simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft’s attempt to turn operating-system and proprietary-services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It’s the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It’s bold, brilliant and downright scary.

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I’ve received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week. One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I’ve heard, will be an aggressive acceleration of the company’s investment in its data-center network. The construction program will be “totally over the top,” said a person briefed on the plan.

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There are an estimated half of a billion people in the world who surf the Net every day yet don’t own a computer. They depend on the public PCs available in cybercafes, which in many cities and countries remain the centers of personal computing. Cloud computing is ideally suited to these so-called cybernomads, as it can provide them with, in essence, a computer to call their own–a virtual desktop, or “Webtop,” that exists entirely in an online data center and hence can be accessed from any PC. Cybernomads can use their password-protected Webtops to run applications, store data, and share files with others. Webtops can provide an attractive alternative to the cheap laptops, like OLPC’s XO and Intel’s Classmate, in helping close the digital divide. Virtual PCs are more energy efficient than real PCs, they don’t wear out or require physical maintenance, and they can often be provided free, through ad-supported or other subsidized programs.

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