CIOs have a tough problem to solve.  It is typically their responsibility to maintain all of the applications within their network, safely and securely.  This means CIOs have to say ‘no’ a lot.  Lately, however, CIOs have been using a secret weapon that can help them reduce risks, bounce back from downtime and manage several times more computer resources at once.  In essence, they are able to say ‘yes’ much more frequently.  This is a dream state for both businesses and consumers and it is enabled by a technology known as virtualization.

Virtualization decouples the operating system from the underlying machine, allowing you to spin-up any operating system on demand.  This makes competing operating systems more accessible than ever.  This capability fueled the growth of infrastructure as a service which revolutionized IT resource management.  This really is the foundation of cloud computing, which marked the beginning of the end for some software compatibility issues since many productivity applications that used to be [enter favorite OS here]-based are now appearing free, online and delivered through the browser.  Further, the ability to spin-up Windows from Mac made it easier for a consumer to decide to purchase a Mac without giving up desktop software that needed to run on Windows.  Consumers were liberated from vendor lock-in and had more choices.  Virtualization was therefore a big win for consumers but has made it much more competitive for desktop operating systems that can no longer monopolize your overall experience.

With the relevance of the desktop OS eroding, many platform strategies started looking to the cloud and mobile to capture the shift in demand.  The two forces combine to create a full spectrum of offerings beyond the benefits of a single device, which include specialized marketplaces, cloud storage, music synch, home entertainment device interop, lifestyle accessories etc…  This is where virtualization becomes an intriguing wildcard.

Enter BlueStacks.  BlueStacks uses an embedded virtualization approach that lets you run native Android applications within Windows.  This capability merges two very large user groups and merges the benefits on both platforms.  You can use BlueStacks on your Windows 7 computer to spare your mobile phone’s battery, save on mobile network data charges, or generally free yourself from device dependency.  Maybe you want to configure your Android applications with a proper keyboard, like adding routes to a transit tracker or typing a shopping list into Springpad to synch to your mobile device.   Maybe you need the Google Authenticator app to login to Google Docs on your laptop and you don’t have your mobile device handy.  Or maybe your phone’s battery is dead.  As the platform arms race heats up, this dual approach is compelling.  Why lock into one platform when you can consolidate two?

Windows 7 desktop view. My selected Android applications loaded into BlueStacks

Windows 7 desktop view. BlueStacks running the Android Chicago Transit Tracker

Going forward, the next logical step would be enabling the mobile device itself to swap between platforms. The iDroid project has demonstrated it can run Android on a jailbroken iPhone – in dual boot mode.   Microsoft’s approach in their ambitious Windows 8 vision is more usable by switching between desktop and tablet mode, albeit both running proprietary instances of windows.  Imagine that you would no longer need a specific device to get access to a specific application.  You could port your own user experience with any device you have adapted to any interface you encounter.  You just switch between virtual machine instances (VMs) on your device as needed.  Imagine never having to configure an application again – the VM will have restricted OS access so you can pre-load all the settings required.  Even still, you may ask why someone would really need to dynamically switch platforms (switching two instances of Android or switching Android with iOS).  It’s not so much that you, the consumer, really needs it as much as you, the corporate citizen does.

Consider this – you work for a small company that is paranoid about security and won’t allow iPads because malware was once introduced to the internal network from being used by carefree kids at home.  With virtualization on mobile devices, you can now purchase almost any device you want, but while at work, you get a pre-loaded virtualized, secured instance that allows IT to manage the safety of the devices on their network.  Further, the VM can be preloaded with all of the productivity tools you are standardized on (e.g. Exchange email/contacts, Dropbox, Yammer, Salesforce etc…).  Your iPad can now be used safely at home by the kids as designed, but your work assets are encrypted and physically inaccessible.  This is exactly the type of abstraction that can help thwart network intrusions, whether introduced from downloads or usb-connected devices.

iDroid project’s dual boot screen on a jail broken iPhone 3G

Legal issues will likely prevent virtualization from becoming ubiquitous across mobile devices in these early days.  After all, Mac OS X is not legally permitted to run inside of a virtualized instance on non-Mac computers (although you can run Windows from a Mac if you have a Windows license).  As our mobile lifestyles evolve, the context of our problems will change.  Within a single household, consumers will want platform independence and a consolidated way to manage all of their devices much like the CIOs of an enterprise today.  So while some applications of virtualization may not be endorsed, virtualization is proven and is mostly limited by licensing with proprietary platforms.

I was on a flight recently for a conference, striking up conversation, when asked, “… so what conference are you attending?” I reply, “… a cloud computing conference, have you heard of that type of thing?” The answer was the best guess so far. “You mean for meteorological studies?”

That’s exactly what it should mean.

The cloud buzzword is hopelessly abstract. In a previous post, I summarized the three top level categories of cloud computing (Iaas, Paas and Saas) and the opportunity from 50,000 feet. In this post, I hope to add some tangible examples to the broadly defined Essential Characteristics of cloud computing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Let’s begin by identifying a few types of conceptual patterns being applied in the cloud and how they relate to business strategies.

Part I: Types of Cloud Computing Patterns

• Grid Computing – [Commonly considered to be] distributed parallel processing across a network of loosely coupled computers (all serving the same purpose). The purpose is almost drone-like in concentration. Imagine one computer attempting to decode DNA. So much data, so many configurations, 97% of which may be irrelevant. That’s going to take a while. Now imagine how much less time it would take with several thousand computers processing chunks of this puzzle in concert.
• Synchronization / Backups – The process of bringing the state of two or more computers in synch. Microsoft’s Live Mesh is a beta service that synchronizes your cross-platform desktops from a virtual desktop in the cloud.
• Marketplace / Platform – The result of an ecosystem that supports a catalog of applications on a specific platform. The iPhone application store is a good example of a marketplace specific to a device (iPhone). VMForce.com and Google Apps Marketplace are examples of marketplaces that were built on top of a specific Saas platform. (The recent VMWare and Force.com union is compelling in that it now allows developers to use the more familiar Java language to write applications rather than the Force.com proprietary language- Apex Code).
• Online Collaboration – The process of merging ideas, contributions, approvals (aka workflow) sequentially or in parallel to meet a common goal. Wikis, document management systems or shared desktop presentation software (e.g. Goto Meeting) fall into this category.
• Periodic or Unpredictable Demand – The periodic or unpredictable usage of infrastructure. Sometimes you just don’t need all of that horse power, sometimes you do.
• Greenfield Platform – The visage of a virtual image of any development platform template you choose. Anytime, anywhere, no constraints, no limitations, nothing but green fields.

Part II: Identifying Opportunities

Consider a hypothetical business scenario. Assume you own a software firm providing financial statement-type products to stock market investors. Your best selling product is a stock analyzer that aggregates all of the SEC filings in an easy to read format. The latest release of your software includes a rich interface for data visualization. Your customers are thrilled; they are able to scan the visual summary of an SEC filing in just minutes. However, you know the market is fickle and is constantly changing. What are your options for the next few years? Remembering this is a hypothetical exercise, let’s apply some of the cloud patterns above.

• Opportunity 1: Grid Computing – Near time crowd sourcing
  Your company can enhance your stock analyzer software by offering a market sentiment feature. Imagine being able to put a rating on market sentiment. You may do this by processing statistically adjusted data from insider transactions, intra-day volume, newswires and social media networks as a factor in an artificial intelligence algorithm that measures risk. Grid computing can handle the heavy lifting of the neural network caching and comparative analysis in near real time.
• Opportunity 2: Synchronization – Extended experience on mobile devices
  You can synch parent website activity to your mobile device automatically, over the air. During idle time your customers can browse auto-queued summaries of their website activity, on their mobile device. They can discover new companies based on related searches and change their rankings on companies which would be reverse synched back to the website. Further, your customers can earn complimentary SEC reports by participating in forecasting surveys on their mobile device, further extending your brand awareness.
• Opportunity 3: Platform / Marketplace Add-on
  Marketplaces and platforms keep captive audiences. Consider creating an add-on component for an existing platform or create an application in a marketplace. You could create an application on the Google Apps Engine to be integrated with a suite of related App Engine programs. If you are feeling playful, you could create a Facebook game that extends your brand by allowing you to pick friends as executives in major firms, then rendering a forecast graph, in your brands style, based on user-driven feedback. In these early stages, in some marketplaces, you could be the dominant presence in your industry. One very nice feature of a platform is that add-ons/installations just work- there is no consideration of local system requirements.
• Opportunity 4: Platform / API
  Perhaps you would prefer that other platforms integrate with your service. In this case, you would simply expose an API, for a fee, for any other platform to take advantage of your offerings.
• Opportunity 5: Periodic Demand
  Over the years, you’ve noticed a trend. The traffic of the website peaks during the month ahead of earnings announcements. Therefore, you’ve got a datacenter of expensive servers that is only being used near capacity 4 months out of the year. Depending on usage, you can save big by not maintaining the under-utilized servers at all. Instead, you would simply manage a virtualization provider that fires up new virtualized servers on demand. Similarly, you could maintain a smaller set of servers and burst overflowing demand into the virtualization provider.

Part III: Summary

While the spectrum of definitions for the cloud may remain nebulous, the point of this post is to put some of the possibilities in context. Most of these architectural concepts have been around for a long time. However, the latest advent of cloud computing is enabling a different way of approaching them. The interdependency paradigm is more accessible now. Imagine not having to spend millions to integrate traditional software installations; in the cloud, in theory, you would plug into pre-existing adapters that do it for you (for much less). We are getting closer to a seamless way of architecting applications in environments whose differences are becoming less relevant, therefore reducing implementation and maintenance costs. In the same way an interpreter bridges the divide between foreign languages, cloud architectures can be built to bridge the incompatibilities of computer languages, platforms and protocols. As demand for distributed applications grows, cloud architectures are going to grow with it. We’re looking forward to it.

Related posts:

Nine Steps to Cloud Nine by Mark Ferry

Persistence, Processing and Presentation in the Cloud Based Applications by Brian Holmes

I’m sure several things come quickly to mind when someone mentions cloud computing or cloud applications. As Mark noted in his post about different emerging cloud services there are several layers of complexity that might flavor an application built on or with cloud services. I’m going to specifically talk about building applications that consume or consist of cloud services, Software as a Service ( SaaS ). These can be services you build yourself or they can be 3rd party services. At any rate your end goal would be to have an application that can be delivered to your users, built upon cloud services and my goal is to describe the different layers of how you can build that application based on my experience of designing/building cloud based applications.

I tend to think of the cloud just as I would a traditional computing solution with a few caveats: cloud computing should be highly scalable, on demand and more cost-effective than something I could get at my local web hosting company. At least in theory. In five years time, what we think of  as cloud computing will probably be the “traditional” computing solution,  indeed you will notice that the layers I’ll describe already follow how web applications are generally built today. The reality of the situation means that while cloud computing solutions offer more for less, the trade off is that no one service can be 100% trusted, no one network can always be relied upon, and therefore fault tolerance must be built into the system.

So let’s break down the anatomy of a typical web based cloud application. Generally speaking applications fall into 3 layers, 1) Persistence Layer, 2) Processing Layer and 3) Presentation Layer. These layers can consist of several different services, from several different cloud computing vendors or api’s. You should feel free to have all of these layers talk to each other as well.

So, for the Persistence Layer you might write to a EC2 hosted MySQL database for app specific data, while also relying on the the Persistent capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, or even Google to store user specific data. When I think of the the Persistence Layer I think of only reading and writing data to disk. There should be no (or as little as possible) logic associated with this layer because any logic you write will tend to be platform specific making it more difficult to port in the future event you have to switch providers. In most cloud computing solutions this layer is the layer that implements Eventual Consistency. Interactions with this layer should be quick and to the point. You write, you read. Period. It doesn’t happen often, but if you were to move your persistence layer from one vendor to another, it should be a simple as transferring files.

The Processing layer ( just like a traditional application ) is the layer that interacts with both the Presentation and Persistence layers. This could be a layer you write in  your favorite server scripting language. It could be a proxy layer that you write that takes input from your application and then routes data to other third party services, with some of it  going/coming from Amazon SimpleDB, some of it going to a legacy database from with your network, and perhaps it ferries analytical information to Google Analytics or Omniture. The point is that, the processing layer can be used for any type of processing that your application needs.  But keep this in mind, in my experience the more you proxy to third party services, the less code you’ll have to write and maintain. Or to look at this from the other side if you’re using a third party API and your application doesn’t need to augment the data before sending it over there should be no reason to build a processing layer. Mashups can be thought of a cloud application without the Processing Layer. Can your Presentation Layer talk directly to Omniture or Amazon S3? Absolutely, as long as you don’t have application logic that needs to run before you read or commit.

The Presentation Layer is where everything gets tied together. Above all it needs to always be responsive. I’d go so far as to say that it’s development specific limitations should drive all other development, when possible. I realize that might be a bit controversial, but remember in most use cases, the Presentation layer is running on a user’s machine, which can be thought of just another machine in the cloud. The user is allowing us to run the application on his/her processor for free with the implicit expectation that the application will give something back. The very least we can do as developers is to make sure the user knows what is going on. The need to pull data from multiple locations and present in a data rich interfaces is what makes technologies like Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight so appealing to developers.

So, as a quick summary about what to think about when building cloud based applications. Build the Presentation and the Persistence Layers first and only add the Processing Layer as needed. Never trust any one server or any one network. Practice failure to help build Fault Tolerance. And last but not least, the most important fault tolerance you can build is on the Presentation Layer.

In posts to follow I’ll take a deeper look at each of these layers, various options for these layers and talk about some the lessons learned and best practices for building applications upon cloud services.

From March 9-12 I attended the 2010 Gartner Portal, Content, and Collaboration (PCC) Summit held in Baltimore, MD.  The summit’s keynotes, track sessions, and vendor case studies covered many topics central to Roundarch’s business:  User-experience, Rich Internet Applications, Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architecture, Social Computing, Mobile Computing, and Cloud Computing.  Veteran Gartner Analysts such as Ray Valdes and David M. Smith offered a cohesive perspective on portal, content, and collaboration technologies, while dazzling the crowd with Gartner’s trademark techno-market-futurism, replete with Magic Quadrants, Hype Cycles, catchy phrases such as the “Consumerization of IT,” “Monday morning action plans” for anxious CIOs, sharp insights into industry giants such as Google and Apple, and bold predictions of what tomorrow has in store for business and consumers.

Since I work at a company immersed in the stream of ideas explored by Gartner, the dialogue at the PCC Summit did not surprise me significantly.  In fact, in most cases it merely re-affirmed observations of trends I’ve experienced in work with commercial and government clients.  I did not depart Baltimore unaffected by the conversation, however.  One concept Gartner mentioned at the PCC Summit managed to invade my brain like a selfish meme, hatching a few thoughts about the significance of Web 2.0 and how we might experience the internet once “the future is evenly distributed”– to paraphrase sci-fi novelist William Gibson.

Gartner Managing VP, Gene Phifer said repeatedly that “Context-Aware Computing” would be a major research thrust for Gartner in the months ahead.   While the format of the PCC Summit, meant treatment of big themes was constrained by time and PowerPoint, Phifer made it clear that “Context-Aware Computing” involved the following:

-          A richer user experience leveraging information about the end user and new context-sensitive human-computer interfaces to improve the quality of the interaction and overall user engagement

-          Context-enriched services that use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more-sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions

-          Deeper collaboration that integrates identity, location, task, and social relationships

-          Building on previous concepts of personalization and advances in established technologies such as RIA, networks, mobile hardware capabilities, social computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA)

-          Mobile devices and the Cloud that provide the ubiquitous sensors and the network that capture and propagate context exploited by computers to proactively react to user’s needs

-          The emergence of new software, infrastructure and architectural approaches that support “Context-Aware Computing: and “Context-Orientation”

At first I didn’t think much of the outline of “Context-Aware Computing.”  It sounded a lot like pervasive computing meets semantic web, meets One-to-One Marketing. Then I started thinking about it in light of another term with which I have a love-hate relationship: Web 2.0.  In that context, the concept helped me to resolve a pestering problem I’ve had with our industry’s lingo.

Most industry insiders – taking their cue from the seminal article “What is Web 2.0?” by Tim O’Reilly  – likely would accept a definition of Web 2.0 that synthesizes rich user interfaces, mashable software services, and the idea that the Web is a Social/Participatory platform.  Yet, bundling these three distinct concepts together and calling them “Web 2.0” always seemed arbitrary to me.  Since reading O’Reilly’s article, I have been looking for a unifying theme that made these ideas hang together cohesively.  Another way to say this is that I have been seeking a singular foundation that explains the key qualitative difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  I believe contemplation of Gartner’s material on Context-Aware Computing has allowed me to rest the distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 on the varying primacy of content and context in the two models of the Web.  I now think that the unspoken concept that glues together rich user interfaces, mashable services, and the social web is the increased importance of context over content.  In Web 1.0, content was king.  In Web 2.0 (and beyond?), CONTEXT is king.  Let me explain by posing and attempting to answer three questions…

What’s behind the explosion in RIAs, mobile applications, and other rich user experiences on the web associated with Web 2.0?

Physical and digital context — I believe it is the realization that existing technologies and approaches can be leveraged to keep the user in the context of what he or she is doing physically or digitally and to enhance the experience by adding the context of related information or alternative representations such as visualizations — all with increasingly natural gestures as input.  We want computers to work in a way that is more consistent with the context of our physical reality and technology is allowing us to close that gap.

What’s behind the excitement about mashups and software services associated with Web 2.0?

Semantic context — I believe it is the realization that technology and evolving approaches for describing our services are enabling every node on the network to create content that can be freed from a contributor’s original intent and used in infinite contexts — as long as we agree on a few core things (i.e. the interface, or service contract).  This leads to efficiencies flowing from re-use (which is just applying a component in a different context), but on a deeper level it creates a fabric for each of us to create meaning out of the digital world with the flexibility we employ in our mental world.  Services and service approaches lay the foundation for enriching semantic context.  This transcends human-authored hyperlinks; as standards and software agents improve, machines will be able to automatically combine information that is increasingly meaningful to humans as well.

What’s behind the buzz surrounding the social applications associated with Web 2.0?

Social context – I believe it is the realization that the Web is the most flexible medium for initiating, facilitating, expanding, and persisting our social interactions that has ever evolved.  Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook capture our species’ most valued form of context: social context.  The content we create, seek, and find is a function of our identity, memberships, and the power of our connections to other members of our species.  Web 1.0 enabled many of us to surf a sea of content and capabilities and then take separate steps to connect and share outside the context of our immediate web experience; content was primary.  Web 2.0 integrates social context seamlessly into the digital experience and allows more of us to participate – multiplying the social value of the web.  This social context will be interwoven to a greater degree in future evolutions of the web.

In my next post I will explore further this concept that “context is king” in Web 2.0.  I will also make some predictions about how Context-Aware Computing will impact the way we design and develop digital experiences at Roundarch.

With the introduction of Chrome OS, it’s tempting to criticize Google for what seems like a half-baked product. Compared to OS X, Windows 7, or even Google’s own Android, there is a lot lacking. But there are interesting ideas, even if they are not the first to propose them.

Where they’re not pushing the envelope enough is the interface. It’s a little disappointing that when they thought of making a web-based PC, they turned it into a web browser-based PC. There must be a better way to enable what they’re doing besides putting browser tabs at the top of the screen and an address bar underneath. It would be like Apple being unable to think outside their desktop OS and releasing the first iPhone with an interface that used a scaled down menubar.

Where Google is pushing the envelope too much is the entire rest of the OS. It’s interesting in theory, but not yet practical. It’s a good thing they are starting down this road so that hopefully in 5 years it will have developed into something that will be useful. Currently, there’s simply not enough infrastructure in place to make it a successful experience.

Where is your private file space in the cloud? When you buy a computer, included by default with any and all computers is space to store your stuff. You can share things if you want, but that’s something you opt-in to. If you buy a ChromeOS device, you had better be prepared to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the privacy controls of each service you use, because private spaces in the cloud are hard to come by. Or you better know about dropbox/sugarsync/whatever and be prepared to pay an annual subscription to rent some online space. Simply put, the vast majority of people are not yet at this point.

Internet access isn’t where it needs to be either. HTML5 is a great starting point for offline connectivity, but so far it’s only a starting point. Will ChromeOS store your entire Gmail archive in its offline database by default, so if you’re working at a cafe without internet, you can reference an email you sent 3 months ago? Not yet.

Thinking about how ChromeOS is being developed and presented, one of the striking differences between Google and Apple is that Apple almost never* releases something before all the pieces are in place that are required to make it completely useful. Apple didn’t make the iPod when MP3 technology first appeared, they waited until they had music management software with an interface that made it easy to fill up an MP3 player AND enough storage could be packed into a small enough space that people could put it in their pockets. Whether Apple will successfully compete in the cloud is to be seen, but you can bet that they won’t release something along the lines of ChromeOS until they can craft an experience that fits seamlessly with the way people live their lives.

And so this is the key to evaluating ChromeOS. It’s unfair to look at it as a finished product to be stacked up against whatever Apple and Microsoft have currently released. For all its flaws, it’s obvious that it isn’t a product built for now. It’s a starting point for the future. Google’s description of using it as a “companion PC” is another way of saying “this isn’t ready for prime-time”. It’s a prediction of where computing will be 5-10 years from now.

Does ChromeOS have more potential than the many other thin client projects that have come and gone every several years? Google’s deep pockets and long gaze are cause enough to pay attention. Watching its evolution will no doubt be informative.

* Apple TV = the reason for the “almost” in “almost never”

Dave Meeker, director of emerging technology at Roundarch, was interviewed on The Digital Scene Show during our participation in Adobe MAX 2009 in October. Dave discusses the innovative work we are doing with Tesla Motors and explains our prototyping process with Tesla. He expands on the development of the 17-inch touch screen panel to be incorporated into the console of the new all-electric Model S Sedan set for production in 2011. It is a compelling interview about our ongoing effort with Tesla to develop a first-of-its-kind infotainment system that will be the cornerstone of the user experience in the future vehicles.

The IT world is aflutter with discussions about cloud computing.  This amorphous concept has become the IT buzzword of the year.  But cloud computing should not be the domain of the geeks.  In fact, cloud computing should really be exciting marketing departments and product designers.   It has the power to change how organizations conduct marketing and how they design products.  What is Cloud Computing in Marketing Terms?

According to Wikipedia, Cloud computing “is the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet on a utility basis.”  In layman’s terms, this means that a whole bunch of applications are becoming available as services on the internet.  You can access them as an application (think salesforce.com) or better yet as an API where you can build the interface and use the service.

A few examples:
Varian, a manufacturer of electronic measurement devices, decided to forgo the annual industry conference and instead create an immersive web experience entitled The Varian Experience.   This is just the type of web application that IT departments hate.  Unpredictable volume with high spikes that needs to be deployed globally and immediately.  This is why so many of these applications end up on underpowered agency servers.  But instead, we hosted the application on Amazon’s EC2 cloud.  For a fee starting at $50 a month, we got more stability and scalability than most Fortune 500 web sites today.  Check out The Varian Experience later this month.

Nystrom, the industry leader in classroom maps, knew that they needed an electronic map offering to compete in the digital age.  The first reaction was to create their own mapping interface.  But after assessing the time and effort to create even a basic offering, we looked for a better way.  We ended up creating a application that sits on top of Google Earth utilizing their open API.  We use Google Earth for basic mapping functions and we have created an overlay application which displays Nystrom’s educational maps and content.  We brought the product to market in less than 6 months and Nystrom now focuses on content creation versus basic mapping.  Check out StrataLogica.

When Tesla Motors reinvented the automobile with the world’s first commercial electric car, they wanted to do more than just reinvent the engine and drive train.  They wanted to change how cars are conceived, designed and built.  Franz von Holzhausen, famed designer from VW, GM and Mazda has an ambitious vision to recreate the in-car experience as well.  In the Model S, Tesla’s breakthrough sedan, there are two LED screens where the instrument panel and center console are in most cars.  The center console itself is a 17-inch multi-touch display.  Sitting in the car, you immediately get the sense of how these screens define your experience, and that is exactly what Franz intends.  Whereas electronics in today’s automobiles are proprietary and out of date before they even leave the showroom, the Tesla experience will be constantly updated, heavily leveraging the cloud, and will be completely personalized.  To take one example,  in the current prototype we were able to add GPS navigation leveraging a $40 USB drive and Google maps.  We had the working application up in less than a week.  Ditto for internet radio.  Ditto again for HD radio.  Try that on your BMW iDrive.  Franz can redefine your driving experience constantly and by doing so keep the Tesla brand fresh in the eyes of its customers.  Check out the Tesla Model S .

If you are a marketer or a product designer, you should really consider how the cloud can help to accelerate, change or even redefine what you are trying to do.  And do it quick.  The IT community is already starting the backlash against the cloud.  In a recent Gartner conference, the IT dialogue has moved from the possibilities of the cloud to the risks.  Many of the risks are real but all are manageable but talk of risks will carry the day if marketers and products designers aren’t more imaginative in how they use the cloud to advance their causes.

During our participation in Adobe MAX in October Dave Meeker, director of emerging technology at Roundarch, was interviewed by Blaine Bradbury of The Flex Show about the innovative work we are doing with Tesla Motors. Dave explains our prototyping process and the ongoing effort to develop the first-of-its-kind infotainment system that will be the cornerstone of user experience in the future vehicles. He expands on the development of the 17-inch touch screen panel to be incorporated into the console of the new all-electric Model S Sedan set for production in 2011.

The Flex Show – Dave Meeker Interview from Roundarch on Vimeo.

If you consider yourself a Twitter-addict or happen to visit new media blogs regularly you’re probably aware of the buzz that was generated the relaunch of the Skittles.com corporate website a few weeks back.  If you haven’t heard about it or haven’t yet seen what all the talk is about you should take a look for yourself at www.skittles.com.

The site has generated a lot of discussion within the interactive community, and this includes the folks here at Roundarch.  The opinions expressed have been strong and varied, ranging from those who think this is the beginning of the end to those who think this is a publicity coup and harbinger of a very different web.

Given the level of discourse around the “Skittles Gambit” we decided to take a moment to discuss the topic and walk through some of the aspects we think are the most interesting.

What am I seeing?
In keeping with Skittles’ irreverent and somewhat quirky brand identity, their updated site blurs (some might say erases) the boundaries between brand and customer identity.  It does this through the wholesale integration of social media services and content.

Of course we’ve all seen social media incorporated into websites before, however, the difference here is that Skittles has replaced four out of six site areas with external social media pages; Wikipedia (Home), Facebook (Friends), Twitter (Chatter), and YouTube (Media/Video), Flickr (Photos).  To summarize, Skittles has virtually reduced their site to a navigational aid/overlay.

The concept is pretty simple; create an in-page frame that automatically resizes to fit the content, load a specific location on the social media site inside it, and position a transparent overlay with your “global navigation” on the page to tie it all together.  While Skittles technically owns or manages the look of some pages on those third-party sites, the nature of social media content means the messaging itself comes from customers.

Why is this important?
The idea of leveraging social media sources is nothing new; many brands monitor chatter to understand how their brand is perceived, and the last few years has seen a growing trend towards integrating third-party services and content into brand sites (e.g., Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.).  At the same time the basic interface concept behind the idea (using a global navigation element to unify disparate sites together under a common identity) is well established; major media companies like Lycos have been doing this since the ‘90s.

What’s different here is the degree to which Skittles has decided to decentralize and deregulate their brand.   Skittles has transformed their web site from an arm of their marketing group to a window on their market, nearly replacing “managed” brand messaging (most of the pages still belong to Skittles) with user generated content from third-party sources.  This has wide range of implications that are worth paying attention to.

What are some of these “implications”?
There are a lot of ideas to digest here, maybe more than you initially considered.  How do you manage content generated by customers on third party sites?  What’s your liability for comments on “your pages”?  How do you facilitate experiential continuity when using the disparate websites and applications?  What do you do if a critical third-party service is unavailable (e.g., Twitter.com’s problematic uptime numbers)?

All important questions that should be answered as part of an initial strategy.  However, aside from the operational concerns, a few of the more interesting implications involve strategic concepts around Brand Strategy and Cloud computing.  Yes, THAT Cloud computing… hang tight, we’ll come back to that in a minute.

Brand as a Mirror, or Is That a Window?
The feedback in the community and within our company has been fairly divided around the topic of brand strategy.  Some people feel that Skittles.com is a good example of everything not to do when managing your online brand identity.  Others feel that Skittles campaign has been effective in the near term and could be substantially so in the long term.  Who’s right?

Among the former group the feeling is that true brand strategy engages customers, keeps them involved, and provides compelling content and services to reinforce the identity the brand has fostered and marketed.  For this group a decentralized and laissez faire approach to content leads to a stale and uninspiring experience, subsequently undermining the brand’s effectiveness and inspirational capabilities.

On the other side of the aisle we have a slightly larger group who believe that the Skittles.com redesign, while poor in certain respects, hits or comes very close to the mark.   For this group the site is at least an effective viral campaign (look at the press), and at most the introduction of a nimble brand platform.

So where does this leave us.  Any decentralized model that leverages customer content to the degree that Skittles.com does runs the risk of become an outdated novelty.  However, this is as true of an owned corporate site as it is a fully deregulated one, perhaps even more so.  The main success of either approach lies in the brand’s ability to selectively introduce the content necessary to support and incite their community.

If we accept this commonality the big difference becomes one of reach; an owned corporate site relies on pulled traffic and unique visits, while a decentralized site pushes content into ancillary networks that can propagate and disseminate the material faster and more widely than virtually any corporate campaign.

Cloud Computing, The Early Years…
At the same time, the Skittles strategy provides a great example of something much larger than brand perception and marketing.  That is Cloud computing, a term you’ve probably heard bandied around by media pundits and technology gurus, but which you likely only have a fuzzy and general perception on.  Yeah, we know, wha?!?

Cloud computing is a lot like Web 2.0; the exact definition you get depends on who you ask.  For some folks Cloud computing conjures up ideas of dynamic data repositories accessible to an assortment of different applications across a variety of devices and mediums.  For others the “Cloud” is about bringing disparate services and applications together to form a larger experience.

The short answer is that both of these descriptions are correct.  The web as we know it is migrating towards a paradigm where content and services are decoupled and decentralized.  In this “web of the future,” online services will likely be both intelligent and portable, with content from one site sourceable to an application on another that is then integrated into a larger suite of services somewhere else.

Of course this isn’t going to happen overnight… not only does the technology and infrastructure not exist, but the basic interaction and behavioral patterns needed to support these kinds of services haven’t been adopted yet.  Instead it’s going to involve a progressive evolution, with a variety of different solutions appearing along the way.

Enter Skittles.com, which as lowly as it is, provides a protozoan example of this new paradigm in action.  Yes, it’s kind of ugly, and yes, it’s a little raw.  However, Skittles.com is forcibly assembling third party applications into a self-serving agglomeration, the site becoming a thin skin on a much broader set of distributed services.  The power of Skittles.com is thus its ability to provide a digestible “Cloud” example to people who have difficulty conceptualizing this far reaching future.

Bringing It Full Circle
So where does that leave us… Skittles.com, a canary of danger or a beacon of a compelling future?  The truth is that it’s probably too early to make a definitive call either way, and the success of the approach – both as a brand venue and as a harbinger of Web 3.0 – will depend in large part on how Skittles manages and uses their new toy.

However, what we can say is that this example is symptomatic of an accelerating trend towards an interactive medium in which there are fewer and less distinct boundaries between discreet digital applications and services.  Previously formal distinctions between brands and their customers are becoming increasingly less relevant, with companies looking to leverage the viral and associative aspects of social media networks to extend their message and increase the granularity of their touch points.

Scary and exciting all at the same time… now to wrap up and take a look at status alert I just received from my close friend, Jif.  Maybe you know him?

At Roundarch we often work behind the firewall – which for people not familiar with our terminology, means we work on projects we’re not allowed to discuss, much less show publicly. As designers, not having a public audience/forum for our work can be both liberating and frustrating. So when Sam Lessin and Chad Stoller from drop.io contacted us to assist them in redesigning their simple yet powerful service, our ears perked up. Not only would we have an opportunity to creatively contribute to a product we all believed in, but we could do so publicly without risking the ire of valued but secret clients.

I can’t stress enough how useful their tool really is. I use it all the time. I have used it for an internal Roundarch presentation on Cloud Computing as well as for other personal things like picture drops and quick file transfers (when my IM craps-out). The ways in which to use their service seem to grow with each user’s imagination.

Roundarch and drop.io
Roundarch was brought on board to work with drop.io for a few reasons.  As a company, we are focused exclusively on designing and building leading edge digital experiences.  We are known in the industry for tackling the toughest design challenges and for bringing both breakthrough design and enterprise scale technology.  We are also known for being a leader in the development of Rich Internet Applications.  This is really a long way of saying we understand design, user experience and technology and we know how to bring them all together seamlessly.  We also understood that drop.io has a long-term road map for the services it provides.  The old design was quite a bit confusing and not able to keep up with new technologies and service improvements.  They needed a design that would complement and grow with future services.  We understood this challenge and were able to collaborate on a design solution.

The Challange
Drop.io is “Simple, Private Sharing”, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy service to understand. Simplicity can sometimes be confusing. Retaining simplicity while providing a design that was easy to use and understand from day-1 was our primary focus. The real design challenge is that if a user is new to drop.io, and they’re given a URL to go to from someone, say, at a party who has just taken some photos among friends, when that user arrives at that URL they’re deposited right in the middle of a “drop”. No context. No on-boarding. The user just wakes up in a room and needs to figure out what it all means. So the nature of their service is simple: online storage space where files of any type can be dropped, viewed and shared, but partnering with Roundarch was critical to presenting their service to the novice user in an easy, understandable way.

At the core of the drop.io service is inputs, views and outputs – but their old UI and design strategy didn’t reflect this. Switching views was confusing, output controls and parameters were located in a few different places and their choice of using the color red (to be ironic) was amusing to only a few. Our task was to collectively figure out a UI template that met a few key criteria: input, view and output needed to be clearly defined and the design had to be extensible for co-branding and personalization. We also wanted to target Drop.io For Business (DFB) with a template design and information-page that showed the flexibility of their service for businesses.

The Process
We began by taking their existing logo and “growing it up” a bit. We chose a beautiful and clean typeface (Archer) and chose a simple typeset execution.

Our next task was to nail the header. This was critical because the header is really where the concept of the service is expressed in the navigation of the site. Input, view, output became Add, View & Share. By keeping that functionality hidden but handy we eliminated the need for users to hunt around the site to trigger functionality. The trick was that when the user is browsing their drop, we wanted to keep the maximum possible vertical space for their content. It’s only when the user wants to do something with the drop that we wanted to surface UI controls (while retaining the statefulness of the page).

From there we chose to execute the body elements, the actual content of the drop, in a clean and simple way that clearly separated drop-content from any customization the user might choose to perform and future-proofed the content-display area from any other view paradigms drop.io might choose to implement moving forward. At the forefront of our minds was scanability. We needed the user to quickly scan the page and understand where their drop content was located. Through the use of iconography and a change in type size we were able to accomplish this while adding to the aesthetics of the experience. Lastly, we addressed the home page. Like most of the rest of the strategic planning for this site, the home page had a trick to it we needed to get just right. Unlike most homepages, the drop.io home page was most likely not the first page a user new to the experience would see. This is because users most likely would encounter drop.io in the context of viewing someone else’s drop. And in that scenario, the user would be deposited in the middle of a drop as explained above. So their drop page is really their homepage and their homepage is really their drop-provisioning page. It was in this light that we wanted to streamline the process of beginning to use their service as much as possible. 4 steps vs. 3 steps is a big deal in the web 2.0 world of zero patience. We solved this by defaulting certain settings in a collapsed menu and brought the number of steps a user had to do in order to create a drop down to two. Name it and put files in it. Done.

The Results
Needless to say the project was a success and all sides were thrilled with the results. I encourage you to check out drop.io for yourself.  As I mentioned earlier, this is really an outstanding service that will continue to push the limits of what can be done with file sharing and beyond (geotagging, freedom to upload from many sources, collaborative sharing options, etc.).  Sam Lessin sums it up thusly, “Roundarch did a very nice job learning about our product and our future feature roadmap and then helping us conceptualize some of the design vocabulary necessary to meet our immediate users needs, while still leaving us open to future growth and extensibility.” Agreed.