Apple's massive North Carolina data center

I guess this not a secret anymore that Apple will soon launch its own iTunes streaming service and the Steve Jobs is just waiting for the right moment to unveil its latest offerings to the media and the general public. Well in the recent Apple’s share holder meeting (which I missed due to some prior commitments) that took place on 23rd Feb 2011, Apple told the share holders about bringing its massive data center online.

The gargantuan data center located in Maiden, North Carolina is one of its kind. The data center which is 500,000 sq feet is around 5 times the size of the Apple’s current data center in Newark, California. According to the media and the speculations this data center will be used for iTunes streaming in the cloud and the MobileMe services. It is just the matter of time when Apple decide to open this data center and bring it online. The total cost associated with the creation of this massive computing facility will be around $1 billion.

Whatever Apple does attracts the attention of the media and the market. Hope the data center comes online this spring as that might make the cloud competition more interesting than before. Amazon has introduced the cloud drive/player, Apple is all set with this data center to jump into the cloud. Time for Google to make a move and something is telling me that move is around the corner.

Amazon wants you....up in the Cloud

It is not Apple or as a matter of fact Google who actually introduces the so called and much hyped Cloud technology and deliver it to the masses. Amazon became the first company to launch Cloud Drive & Cloud Player for the consumers. I’ve tested this myself (from my Amazon account) and so far it looks good. Am I going to use it? Not yet, as I am very happy with my 8gb portable flash drive which I put in my pocket and go anywhere. So for me cloud is still up there and far to reach. May be in future I might give it a try.

So what exactly Amazon’s cloud drive do? Well it is just a kind of hard drive in the cloud (cloud is the new name for the internet). You can upload your pics, videos & documents into that drive and can access it from any where. The good part is this stuff which you upload can be accessed not only by your PC or MAC but by your Android phone as well. Amazon cloud player on the other hand is a browser based application and it is capable of playing music from the Amazon cloud drive. Currenlty apart from PC & MAC, cloud player is supported for Android platform and comes as an integrated part of Amazon’s MP3 app for Android. There has been some sort of protest by primary music companies (Sony Entertainment) against this locker service of Amazon, but as per the latest news, Amazon execs will seek the license from several media & entertainment companies sometime this week and hopefully this will settle the dust.

Here are the current plans which Amazon will charge for the cloud drive. 5gb of space for Amazon account holders with valid US address is free. Amazon will charge 20gb for $20 per year, 50gb for $50 year and so on. To uderstand the pricing and cost associated with the cloud drive, please see this link for more details.

With the slashing prices of flash drives and portable storage device this deal sounds a bit expensive, but if you are someone who is always connected to the cloud via your laptop or Android phone then you must give it a try. All in all Amazon did a good job in inititating the cloud competition and bringing it to the consumer level. Hope Apple will soon launch its iTunes in the cloud and from the reports it seems Google is working on its in house application for sharing music in the cloud.

Amazon has taken the very first step to send our digital belongings in the cloud, will that make the flash drive and other solid state devices obsolute, will cloud become our new PC or MAC? The answers are on the way. Still a long road for all of us to start living among the clouds, but the tech giants are trying very hard way too hard.

Yuri Milner and the new era of Venture Capitalism

The new era of Venture Capitalism (VC) is upon us. Like many other fields going through the various stages of changes and innovation the field of VC is not different. Recently there has been a buzz about Russian VC firms and investors making large investments in some of the major software firms of the silicon valley. One such name is Yuri Milner the russian venture capitalist who is rewriting the rules of venture capitalism in the all new font and that to in his very own style.

Born and brought up in Russia Yuri is sharp, agile and a workaholic. During 1989 Yuri was working towards getting a Phd in particle physics from the university of Moscow. During the same time period Russia was going through the challenging times and the Soviet Union was falling apart. Yuri decided to leave his Phd program in between and got inclined towards getting a degree in business. He was lucky enough to utilize the scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He became the first non immigrated person from the Soviet Union to attend the elite business program. Yuri worked hard towards getting an MBA and ended up doing a job in Washington DC for World Bank’s financial sector. Later he moved back to Moscow and worked for investment brokerage firm Alliance Menatep. The 1999 report of Goldman Sach’s Internet analyst Mary Meeker changed the vision of Yuri from the banking sector to the internet and Yuri decided to bankroll the internet revolution.

Yuri practised VC not as a profession but as an asset class and this is what makes him different from other VC of these times. During 2005, Yuri created Digital Sky Technologies (DST) as an investment holding company and their first target was the russian web. Slowly and gradually Yuri allowed foreign investements to be the part of Digital Sky. During the financial crisis of 2008 Yuri decided to invest in the biggest social networking portal Facebook but was short of funds. Backed by Russia’s 5th richest man Alisher Usamov Digital Sky was successfully able to bought 2% stake in Facebook. With that deal in the West, Yuri was all set to invest in some of the promsing startups of the silicon valley. So far Yuri has invested around $180 million in Zynga (social network mobile game developer firm) and the much talked about Chicago based Groupon (deal of the day website). Yuri is also a big fan of Paul Graham the master mind behind Y-Combinator (seed stage startup funding firm) and have invested around $150,000 in each of the starups registered with Y-Combinator. Amazing times for anyone who have a great idea for a startup.

As per the reports today, Yuri bought a $70 million estate in California and possibly having a plan to shift over to the US. It seems Yuri is getting proliferated and riding high with his ambitious web investments. Yuri’s 2% ($200 million) stake in Facebook has now swollen upto 10% and worth around $5 billion (one of the best profitable bets made in recent times) and if things go well, Yuri’s name will be among the elite VC coterie of the silicon valley.

All these years West is having a significant impact on the countries of the Eastern part of the World and I guess Yuri and other influential people from the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India & China) region are now leading the squad to answer back.

Inside Job - Financial Crisis 101

I got the chance to watch “Inside Job” last weekend and I must say it is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Academy made no mistake in giving it the best documentary Oscar this year. Charles Ferguson derserves the recognition and honor for creating this master piece. The best part is that the whole documentary stick to the topic i.e the Financial Crisis of 2007-2010. Inside Job can be a perfect source for anyone who wants to learn what happened during the financial crisis and what were the reasons for all of us to end up in a mess like this. Charles Ferguson is an eloquent film maker and this documentary reflects the true shades of his film making. Watch it and see how various politicians, bankers, world class financial institutions and even ivy league professionals design these crisis and orchestrate the worst financial meltdown of recent times.

During the course of this documentary Charles Ferguson interviewed various important personalities but I like this quote from Andrew Sheng which I will remember for a very long time.
"Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the real engineer?
A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build dreams.
And when those dream turn out to be nightmares,other people pay for it."


The reason why I watched Inside Job in first place is the acceptance speech of Charles Ferguson which he gave during the recent Oscars ceremony and every word of this speech was true, crisp and somewhat shocking, just like the documentary.
"Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong”.


Hope Wall Street is listening, I bet not.

AT&T - T-Mobile merger update

The market as we all know reacts in a very positive manner to this mega merger. All major indices were positive and gained significantly.

DOW - 12036.53 (%Change +1.5%)
NASDAQ - 2692.09 (%Change +1.83%)
S&P 500 - 1298.38 (%Change +1.5%)

As per the experts the merger could take upto 12 months from now. Another interesting thing which came into limelight is the $20 billion loan which JP Morgan is giving to AT&T to complete the proceedings of this deal. This has been the largest commitment any bank has shown towards its client. If the deal fall through then the penalty is heavy and AT&T will give $3 billion in cash to JP Morgan. So by the looks of it JP Morgan is in a win win situtation no matter what.

The game changer - Marc Andreessen

I try to avoid writing this in my blog and don’t want to be a showoff but the place where I live is having some pretty exciting history. UIUC and NCSA are both pretty solid institutions and the inventions that took place in them have changed the World. One such invention was MOSAIC (later became Netscape Navigator) – the World’s first high end graphical internet browser. That is correct Netscape got conceived and written in NCSA and is the predecessor of the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Marc Andreessen was the brain behind the creation of Netscape. He is a true visionary and one of the leaders of the internet revolution. Marc studied at UIUC and developed MOSAIC at the NCSA along with Eric Bina. Marc’s life is full of ups and downs specially when Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and Netscape was history. Now Marc is one of the primary venture capatilist (VC) in the silicon valley and the owner of the top VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. He sits on the board of Facebook, ebay, HP and his company is one of the primary investors in many promising startups of the silicon valley.

Recently there was this small doc about the life of Marc on Bloomberg and I must say it is pretty informative. Check it out.

8 years for Code Theft

Sometime back I blogged about this Russian programmer who stole high frequency code from Goldman Sachs and was awaiting the trial. Well the trial is now over and Sergey Aleynikov will serve 8 years in prison for his actions. At the time of this conviction, Sergey used to make $400,000 annually in Goldman and has been offered a salary of $1.2 million by Teza technologies. Another case where greed precedes the moral values.

Anyway it was a good story and well mentioning on this blog. The details of the trial and can be found here.

AT&T + T-Mobile = US #1 Wireless Company

In one of the very unusual mergers, AT&T is all set to buy T-Mobile and will become US #1 wireless provider. AT&T is all set to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion and will topple Verizon from the #1 position. This leaves a big question for the current T-mobile users if they want to switch over to the iPhone. So far this news brings in mixed views. We need to wait till 9:30 am EST tomorrow to see the market reaction.

Details for the merger can be checked here and here.

The World's crisis: Japan and the middle east

These are the trying times for most of the countries and the situation is deteriorating day by day. Economical, political and now natural forces are responsible to bring the World on its knees.

What started out from Egypt is now spreading to the other middle-east countries. Libya, Bahrain and now even Saudi Arabia are among the countries starting to initiate political revolution. With effects of globalization, problems of all these individual countries and the unrest they are producing is now the problem of the whole World and the resolution to these problems should be efficient enough to have the minimum impact. US along with other countries where the consumption of oil is ever increasing are getting impacted the most.

With oil problems in the background the quake of Japan and its related aftermaths are now producing the waves of nuclear catastrophe. The news coming out of Japan is not good, according to the Japanese media all the measure to contain nuclear radiations are failing, and now there are concerns with reactors 5 & 6 at the Fukushima power plant. It is very ironic that this year is the 25th anniversary of the tragic events of nuclear disaster of Chernobyl and now Japan is on the brink of another nuclear tragedy. The 40 year old nuclear reactors of the Fukushima power plant were designed by General Electric and were due to decommission this month end.

Japan is the 3rd largest economy of the World (US is 1st and China is 2nd) and with current nuclear threats looming over Japan the impacts of this disaster got compounded. Major stock indices lost over 1% (currently here in the US Dow Jones is down 1.5%) of their value and prediction is they will keep coming down till the nuclear crises in Japan is averted. Technology sector is among the hardest hit sectors as Japan is the among the primary suppliers to the electronic and automobile industry.

Japan has the history of facing such crisis (the crisis of Hiroshima & Nagasaki) and rising from the same, the only difference is todays World is well connected and this is what globalization is all about. What currently seems to be the problem of Japan is now the problem for the whole World and we all have to face it together.

Queue up for the ipad 2 (interesting story)

In the next 1 hour or so Apple stores will open (5PM EST) and iPad2 will be in the hands of many. We all know how Apple fans line up for these new gadgets. Long queues and hundreds of people anxiously wait to get their hands on these super cool devices. Well I just read this interesting story on the internet about things that happen in these queues.

This story comes straight from the downtown Manhattan Apple store. When Amanda Foote (20 years old and originally from Florida) left her house on Wednesday afternoon (that is correct people wait 2 days before the launch outside the store) she thought she might end up in the 4th or 5th place in the queue for the iPad2. To her surprise she was the 1st one in the line. When media asked her whether she is excited to be the first person to get an iPad 2, she told them she is not there for the iPad. Amanda was having no intentions to buy the iPad, she was there to sell her number one spot in the queue to somebody who want to pay for that spot (amazing strategy). Amanda told the media that she is having offers till $650 but she will hold the spot till someone offers her $700. She is planning to spend these $700 by visiting her family back in Florida and going to see Lady Gaga in concert (Lady Gaga beats iPad2, I know Lady Gaga got the potential but this is something different).

Amanda spent 2 full nights outside the Apple store and it seems last night it rained as well in NYC. This morning good news came to Amanda when she sold her spot to this gentleman and to the surprise of many the number one spot in queue for the iPad 2 sold for $900. Amanda made around $22 per hour took $900 and left. Good deal to make money.

Now who is crazy enough to spend $900 to be first in line for iPad? Hazem Sayed (born in Kuwait and now lives in NYC) is not crazy but smart enough to buy the spot for $900. Hazem is an iPhone App developer and the owner of the company Zami. Hazem’s company Zami develops iPhone apps and is having around 10 apps available in App store. When media asked Hazem what he will get (apart from the iPad) after spending $900? His simple reply was publicity, publicity for himself and of course for his company. Very smart move.

Amanda got her 900$. Hazem who is now first in line got all the publicity he wants. Media got the new iPad 2 story and hopefully if all goes well iPad 2 will be a bigger hit, bigger than the original iPad (at least this is what Apple and us the Apple investors are expecting).

Prayers for the People of Japan

My prayers and best wishes are for the people of Japan who are facing one of the worst earthquakes in the history of mankind. 8.9 magnitude earthquakes hit Japan and the neighboring countries and the aftermaths are now reaching the west coast here in the US. It is 10:00 AM (CST) and the tsunami is hitting the islands of Hawaii as I write this blog. 8.9 magnitude earthquakes is one of the 5th worst earthquakes since 1900. Here is the link to check where this quake stands among other worst quakes. I have seen some footage on CNN this morning and it looks scary.

Unfortunately we as human beings have limitations in fighting against natural disasters of such massive magnitude. My heart, love and prayers go out to the people of Japan and all the affected individuals around the World. Hope things will go back to normal soon, but looking at the current scenario it seems there is a long recovery ahead. Mother Nature is angry with us humans, very angry.

Khan Academy - TED 2011 (Presentation)

I was looking for this video when I blogged about the Khan Academy and the presentation of Sal Khan in TED 2011. Sal along with Bill Gates talked about the future of education. This is totally worth watching and spending your precious 20 minutes.

Without any further ado here is Sal's presentation.

Corning - Dreams of Glass

This was forwarded to me sometime back by my brother and it looks stunning. I mean with all the things we can do we touch display these days this should be our ultimate goal. Corning did an excellent job by letting us peek into the future the rest is just the marketing pitch.

Good watch. Take a look.

TED 2011: Deb Roy - What robots can learn from babies?

I came to know about Deb Roy and his research work at MIT about 3 years back and that time as well I admired his dream and what he is doing for the future of technology. Deb made another interesting presentation at TED 2011 and his research work revolve around making robots learn from babies or children. To accomplish this project Deb along with his wife has wired their complete house so that they can record each and every waking second of their baby. Deb decided to record his baby’s speech, movement and cognitive activities for the next 3 years and the data collected over that period of time will then be used to educate robots about human behavior and make robots more human like. Quiet interesting.

Deb works as a cognitive scientist at MIT in the department of Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines Group. 11 cameras, 14 microphones, 10 hours per day of recording (90,000 hours of video) and 200 terabyte of data – these are some of the major number which comes out of his massive research project. Deb along with some of his fellow team members will now try to mine the relevant data from his recordings and if all goes well robots can learn as well like children. It all depends how long robots can take to understand and say dada or mama. Details of Debs contribution to this project and his TED presentation can be found here.

My younger one took around 11 months to say his first complete word –“Daddy”, hopefully machines will learn much faster.

TED 2011: Khan Academy

One of the major highlights for TED 2011 was the presentation by Salman Khan (known as Sal Khan, founder Khan Academy). Khan was speaking during the TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) special session on education where the main speaker was Bill Gates. To learn more about the TED session please check here. Salman Khan shares the same name with the popular Bollywood actor who goes by the same name and sometime people got confused, but I am pretty sure what Sal is doing is much better as compared to the Bollywood actor. Khan academy is an awesome site which has helped millions of kids and education seekers (around 70,000 students benefit from the contents posted each day). This site is the science and math grail for students having trouble grasping the fundamentals. I myself use the site to get the basics of Finance, Economics, Valuation Investing and Venture Capital.

Sal was a academic start and did his MBA from Harvard, BS in Math and BS & MS in Electrical Engineering all 3 degrees from MIT. Sal was a successful analyst at one of the Hedge funds and has the potential to earn millions but instead he decided to turn to social giving. In 2004, Sal decided to help one of his cousins who was having difficulty in learning math and science and to help her Sal started posting math and science lessons on youtube and those 8-12 minutes mini lectures became major hit and Khan Academy was born. Sal left his lucrative job and started posting science and math videos online. Bill Gates used the same site to help educate his 11 year old son Rory and is a big fan of Sal’s work.

If you have a kid who is having problem understanding the basics of science and math then Khan Academy is the site you should refer. It’s all free and you will be amazed by the contents and the efforts put in by Sal and his team. As of today 2,100 videos are there in the library of Khan Academy and they are growing. Finally someone has taken the ownership to make education free and this someone only want kids or as matter of fact anyone who wants to learn and change the World.
Who is in?

Craigslist: A scam story

The great 21st century, where everything is possible just with the click of a button, meeting people, sending emails, chit chat, marriages, buying & selling stuff, cheating, frauds, scams and what not. Cheating, frauds and scams, well that sounds interesting. I am sure we all have read a lot about all these things happening over the internet. There are myriads of such scams all around us, we know it exists, even the law officials are very well aware about such schemes but nothing has been done to stop it, or let me put it like that, the master mind behind such frauds are so smart that they design the plan of escape before they plan how to cheat people of their money. In olden days some 20-30 years back, robbers and thieves are suppose to came of their hideouts and they need to go to the bank in person to rob it, they need to frighten the people with guns and knives to steal things, not anymore. Thanks to the internet, these robbers and thieves are not supposed to come out of their homes to steal something from you and me. They are in control of robbing you, me or anybody over the internet. Moreover there are certain sophisticated scam tricks where you will go to your bank, take out the cash and then send it to these guys. Your hard earned money is gone, just like that. It is not like someone is trying to take it from you on gunpoint you yourself with a smile on your face will send it to them. This sounds impossible, right. Well read on.

Craig Newman launched Craigslist sometime in 1995 to spread the awareness among his friends about the social events in the San Francisco Bay area. Slowly and gradually Craigslist become a web based service and spread all over the US and the World. People use Craigslist to posts everything from jobs listings to the stuff they want to buy or sell. Craigslist is now having a major footprint covering around 570 cities across 50 countries in the World.

I came to know about Craigslist about 4 years back and thought someday I might use this site to buy or sell some stuff. It just happened in January (2011) when for the very first time my wife posted the ad on the Craigslist to sell the Cradle Swing. We bought the swing when my 2nd son was born and it was very new (not much used). We got some replies over the email and people have shown their interest in buying it. One such reply came from Pamela Bruce. She not only showed the interest in buying the swing but she emailed my wife that she will pay $20 extra over the list price just because she liked it and want us to hold it for her. In her next email she told my wife that as she is leaving the country and going to the UK, her assistance will send us the money and pick up the swing. In another email she says that her assistance made a mistake and has overpaid us and told us that the money will come in the form of a money order via FedEx. She told us that she had complete trust in us and that she will send the details to send the overpaid money back to her. Within the next couple of days we got the FedEx containing the money order (Money Gram). When we opened the FedEx packet both me and my wife were shocked to see the money order the value of which was more than 10 times the price we put for the swing (we put the selling price of the swing for $70 and got the money order for $900). Now who would pay up more than 10 times the listed price? That was a bloody scam and now we would like to make sure it is.

The very next morning we went to our bank and gave the money order to the cashier. To our surprise all she did was asked how much money I have in my savings account verified the same and gave me $900 (without going into the details about the money order). Now there is a catch, before giving you the money against any money order the bank will check your account and make sure you have sufficient funds in case the money order is fake. If the money order is not genuine the bank will then deduct that amount from your account and you cannot do anything about it. We took the cash and came to the nearest western union as per the instructions given to us in the email from Pamela Bruce. She requested us to deduct our $90 ($70 + $20 extra) and send the remaining $810 to some location in UK (remember I told you Pamela is off to UK for her vacation). Once we reached the western union and discussed about the options of sending the money to the UK the customer rep behind the counter told me whether I know Pamela Bruce and we told her no we did not. After listening to our whole story she told me same thing happened to her when she was selling some of her stuff over the internet and some person asked to send the money using western union and that was a scam. Me and my wife were now 100% sure it is a scam but we actually wanted to know what happen at our bank. We came back to our bank and gave them all the $900 and asked them to verify the money order. This girl behind the counter told me the same story I heard from the western union customer rep and told me how she ended up losing money in one such scam. After my bank made some calls we came to know the money order send by the assistance of Pamela Bruce was already used in April 2010 for $35. Both me and my wife were shocked to hear this.

I guess we were fortunate enough to figure out we are in the middle of a scam. Most of the people do not understand this and end up losing money to these spineless morons. The victims of these nefarious schemes end up sending their own money to these faceless criminals. There is a hole in the system which needs to be fixed. We should have come to know at the bank itself (when we were there for the first time) about the fake money order. The cashier experienced this scam herself and she kept quiet till we told her what exactly happened. Sure Craigslist & the internet have made it a whole lot easy for you and me to buy & sell stuff online but we all should be very careful when dealing on the internet. Craigslist have posted the detailed information about such incidents and how to report the same. Please check it before making any such transactions.

These are some of the actual emails which Pamela Bruce wrote. With such innocuous emails who would suspect Pamela to be a scam artist?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: pamela bruce
To:
Sent: Fri, January 21, 2011 10:18:19 AM
Subject:


Hi,
I'm glad it's still for sale. I'm going on a vacation to London but I
will instruct my assistant to prepare and mail you your payment which
I'm sure you will get it in about 4-6 business days. I'll add $20
extra for the delay. Money Order is the means I can pay you with. If
this is acceptable by you, Send me your info i.e full name, mailing
address and your phone number so payment can be mail out immediately.I
will also make arrangement for pick-up which will be after you must
have received and cashed the Money Order.


Awaiting your info
Thanks


From: pamela bruce
To:
Sent: Sun, January 23, 2011 12:26:55 AM
Subject: Re:


Hi,
I urgently have bring something to your notice. I just found out that
my Assistant overpaid you. The payment meant for another transaction
was made out in your name and sent to you. However I want to believe I
wont have a problem with you on this. Once you receive the payment,
Please proceed to the bank and cash the Money order, deduct your money
and send back the balance to me. So I can proceed with arrangement for
pick-up. Once more, I hope I can fully trust you with this? I will
await your response on this so my mind can be at rest.


Thanks



From: pamela bruce
To:
Sent: Wed, January 26, 2011 7:25:50 AM
Subject: Re:

Hi,
I just confirmed that you will receive payment today via FedEx. Once you do, Please proceed to your bank to deposit and cash the MoneyGram Money Order. After cashing, Please deduct your money and take the rest money to the nearest Western Union Outlet and send the balance money to me on the following details:


Name : Pamela Bruce
Address : 60 Hyde Park Gate
City : London
Country : United kingdom


After sending the money, please email me the following western union transfer details


1. MTCN (10 digit numbers)
2. SENDER'S NAME AND ADDRESS
3. TOTAL AMOUNT SENT AFTER DEDUCTING TRANSFER CHARGES
(please pay the transfer charges from my balance money)


I will really appreciate if you can get this done as soon as you receive the payment today so that arrangement for pick-up can commence.
Thanks

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

On a funnier note, what is the similarity between Pamela Anderson & Pamela Bruce (except they share the same first name)? One is using silicon to steal the hearts of many while the other is stealing the money from many by utilizing the resources offered by the silicon valley based Craigslist.

If you are someone who has been the victim of such scams and lost your money then my sympathies goes out to you and your family, be careful in the future. If you are someone who is about to trade your stuff on Craigslist or any such site then please make sure you did not end up in any such situation. If you are someone who is planning to cheat others of their money then I along with other victims would like to give you something special – our middle finger and lots of kicks where it hurts the most. I know it’s been more than a decade now, but welcome to the 21st century everybody, where kisses & kicks can be delivered to anyone, just with a click of the button.

iPad 2 is here

As per the speculations Apple has launced the new iPad - iPad 2 and the product is capable to beat the expecation of the masses. The product was introduced by Steve Jobs.

Checkout the cool features as listed below.

Faster A5 chip -- dual-core
2x times faster processing speed
9x faster graphics
Front and rear-facing cameras
Built-in gyroscope
1/3 thinner
AVailable in 2 colors - black and white (White will be sold from day 1)
Same 10 hour battery life, 30 day standby
1.3 lbs, down from 1.5 lbs.
HDMI mirrored video output
Two models, one for AT&T (T), one for Verizon (VZ)
Same prices and configurations, starting price $499
To beat the competition the new iPad 2 will be start shipping from March 11 in U.S., March 25 to 26 more countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K.


What else:
iOS 4.3 will be available as a free download - supports iPad, GSM iPhone 4, and iPhone 3GS, and 3rd & 4th generation iPod touch (not Verizon phone)

My favorite quotes from the presentation:
Jobs said rivals were just "flummoxed" by the iPad
One of the slides during the presentation says - 2011: Year of the copycats ?

Will the iPad 2 able to beat the earnings for Apple? We need to wait and watch but as of now all the odds are in the favour of Apple.