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.