@vilpponen You need Carat carat.cs.berkeley.edu unless you already use it :)

— Jani Turunen (@randommman) April 13, 2013

The app is awesome. It’s not as finely designed as your regular consumer app, but it does the job. It pinpoints the applications and processes that are draining battery life. For example, in my case Audible is horrendous in using the iPhone battery. This is even when I have specifically closed the app from the “task manager” (or whatever you call the list of apps you have open). It still somehow leaves itself open and can drain 50% of my battery in about 3 hours.

If you’re having battery issues with iPhone – download Carat, it’s an awesome app and there’s pretty cool big data behind it too.

I don’t quite understand what the point of the article was, except to somewhat put a questionable light on all those operating from OFCs. I’m sure there is a ton of illegal money, but also a lot of legally obtained money that wants to be kept safe from domestic politics.

The argument on how quickly one can set up a company in one of the OFCs is also slightly off. It highlights how effectively OFCs work and how ineffective our own society is. Companies setup in many of the OFCs need to abide to a lot more regulatory red-tape than in traditional western societies. This is the result of international regulation putting pressure on OFCs – which is a good thing, but picking speed and hinting that the only reason to setup a company quickly is to avoid taxes is opinionated and far from objective.

The reason why the article got my blood boiling is that it constantly used the term veroparatiisi (“tax paradise” in Finnish), clearly pointing how everyone operating from those countries do it to avoid taxes. This might be the obvious reason to do so, but Helsingin Sanomat misses half of the potential of a great article in only promoting one side of the debate.

The Economist wrote an excellent Special Report on OFCs this February. In one of their articles titled The good, the bad and the Ugland, the newspaper argued that many companies also use OFCs to create a neutral ground for international joint ventures. The reason for this is that organisations from separate countries are treated equally in terms of profits on their investment and are only taxed when they repatriate the money back home.

I don’t approve avoiding taxes by businesses or individuals, but the truth is – we operate in an open market economy where money will always seek the best home for it. We need to build our economies and countries in such a way that the money voluntarily wants to stay there without trying to evade into OFCs. This is far from easy, but it’s the only way to create a sustainable ecosystem where nations aren’t required to establish extensive jurisdiction to prevent money from leaving.

Instead of asking, how we can prevent companies and individuals from moving their money to OFCs – we should be asking how do we need to build our societies so that companies and individuals voluntarily want to keep more of their money in the reach of our jurisdiction?

Calendar
This is a tough one. I’m working on a MacBook Air at home and with an iMac at work. These two machines sync each other through various file sync programs such as SugarSync. In addition to these, the computers naturally use the same Apple account info, so it syncs my calendars and todo-items on Reminders.

When taking the WP8 into use, I first ran into the problem of setting up a system to use the two ecosystems together. My current setup is that my iCloud calendars (synced between my Macs) are subscribed to my WP8 calendar that I can update on the road. Then again, my WP8 is subscribed to my iCloud calendars. Seems like a great solution, until you get to syncing.

When I change a calendar event on my iCloud calendars, it doesn’t sync / change to my WP8 phone at all. It seems like WP8 pulls in the calendar detail and then confirms it synced, without ever asking for updates on that specific calendar entry. One issue with this might be that it’s Microsoft’s Live.com service that does the syncing in between and that doesn’t understand the changed entry settings.

Surfing
The browser is of course Internet Explorer and I’ve noticed that it is perhaps the biggest difference in the way I use the phone. Firstly I had some challenges with setting up tabs and using them properly, but I then noticed that you can configure this quick button next to the address bar to specific tasks.

For some reason my phone also tries to reserve bandwidth by not loading images on some websites. I feel that there might be a setting for this, but haven’t bothered to find out.

Other than that, the browser is fast and renders websites as they should be.

Missing apps
Couple of apps I’m missing in the WP8 ecosystem are definitely Dropbox and The Economist. Not a huge showstopper, given how great the Nokia HERE application suite is. They provide everything from maps to city lenses to local public transport information (which is probably the new application for me).

In conclusion
I can still say that it’s an awesome phone despite the shortcomings, but clear improvements in other – when compared to the iPhone 4. Sound quality is definitely a big issue and I have not suffered from bad call quality since using the device, which has been quite a bit more of an issue on the iPhone. It does show Nokia has a lot of experience in designing antennas and producing world class quality solutions in the core functionalities, which some of us still forget, of the phone.

I have to say, I had pretty high expectations for the device as I’ve been following Windows Phone as a platform somewhat and also had some good discussions with friends about it (see my blog post here). Having used the device (it’s yellow by the way) for a couple of hours tonight, getting it setup, etc. – I have to say, I’m already impressed. It really is a breath of fresh air.

Oh and I should probably say what phone I’m currently using – iPhone 4 (been using it for 2.5 years now).

Contacts and Calendar
Right off the bat my biggest worry was not understanding how to use the phone, but getting all my data synced. I had not looked anything up in advance and decided to play along. Nokia is famous for having this “Data Transfer” feature in their phones since sliced bread. It worked so and so in the past and I definitely saw it in the application list, but immediately thought that it was meant for data sharing between Nokia phones.

I looked around for a solution to export my contacts from my MacBook Air to a file and then try to have them imported. It seemed like a lot of work so I decided to give Data Transfer a try. I paired up the devices and Lumia 920 immediately started pulling in my 850 or so contacts from the iPhone. In about 2 minutes everything was done and the basic setup for the phone (I still consider it one) was done.

Setting up my calendar wasn’t as easy, but not too difficult either. I’ve been using iCloud’s calendar due to the syncing functionality working so much better in an Apple only environment. Nokia of course relies a lot on Microsoft’s tools, being on Windows Phone, so I had to sign into my Live account and from there go to calendars. From there, I imported my iCloud exported calendar file (.ics format) to get it first working in the web based system (which is super smart of Microsoft – to keep all strings at their end and not allow device manufacturers to connect data for clients).

After the import had succeeded, the phone automatically pulled in my calendar data as I had also signed in to my Live account on the phone. Simple enough and definitely a very positive surprise for the on-boarding experience.

Apps
A lot of people have told me that WP8 doesn’t have that great of a catalogue for apps. I agree, a lot of the new innovative apps are still created for the iOS first. However, I found the most basic apps for myself very quickly; Spotify, Evernote and a couple of others. I’ve also realised that while I use a certain selection of apps I’m pretty used to a standard set of some 10-15 apps at any given time.

Some applications I was missing though are a good podcast player (I’m pretty certain there is one, but I couldn’t settle on anything yet) as well as the Economist. I listen to the audio articles of The Economist during my morning and evening commute quite a lot and it’s a great way to “read” the content when you really don’t have time to sit down in front of a magazine or newspaper as they call themselves.

I’m sure there are a couple of other apps I still need to find to get my daily routines working, but so far I’m really impressed with the initial experience.

And finally – the social networks
My first two applications I installed were Facebook and Twitter. Even without the network specific apps, you are able to follow what’s going on in your circles as the platform ties really nicely the social actions into the user experience. You have this People tile, which shows streams of notifications aggregated into one from all your social networks. You’re even able to see the latest updates from people when you view their profile. Very simple, but still so much different to how the iPhone works.

I remember hearing many talks by Marko Ahtisaari about things working in silos and how it really isn’t the best way to use the phone by always going back to the home screen to start things off. It really isn’t and one thing I really liked is that you are able to pull individual items from inside the applications to the home screen and pin them there. I was already playing around with pinning a few important Evernote notes to the home screen to keep them constantly there for quick access.

That’s about everything so far – lots more to write about (and photograph) in the coming two weeks for sure.

“There’s more to life than money,” said Leif Borge, chief financial officer at Aker Solutions (AKSO.OL), Norway’s biggest oil services company, who made about $862,000 in 2011.

“I’m happy with my salary, it covers my needs. I have a cabin in the mountains and that is a quality of life I wouldn’t have in Houston.”

Total pay for top executives in Sweden and Denmark is about 75 percent of the European average, and lower in Norway and Finland, data from management consultancy Hay Group show, a gap compounded by some of the world’s highest taxes.

If you’re wondering why I’m excited – check out my recent post on it.

I’ve been using an iPhone for the last 2,5 years. The phone has worked super well. I can’t remember the previous time when I had a phone for this long. The software updates have kept up the feeling of new, but the whole UI and way things work is becoming a little outdated for my taste.

Something I also begin to dislike is the camera quality on the iPhone 4. I know iPhone 5 has a better camera, but Nokia’s phones have always been known for excellent camera quality (even in the Symbian days!).

Will definitely have to pop by the Nokia flagship store here in Helsinki some day for a sneak peak on some of the Lumia phones and how they actually work.

First of all, one of the first things I learned is that all sorts of companies who have something online (to exaggerate a little) call themselves a cloud business. Wikipedia for example, has all sorts of ?aaS acronyms listed for cloud computing. There isn’e even a clear definition on what cloud computing really is. Mostly it circles around the fact instead of investing upfront for resources as fixed costs in accounting terms, you are paying for the actual benefit delivered as a service in variable costs. Usually, these services are paid for on a pay-as-you-go, on-demand basis. However, most of the software-as-a-service products out there charge users on a monthly basis (which isn’t really on demand, as opposed to the common hourly based or shorter billing cycles).

Trying to attach cloud to many things that really isn’t cloud has created a definition for all this: cloudwashing.

Cloud washing (also spelled cloudwashing) is the purposeful and sometimes deceptive attempt by a vendor to rebrand an old product or service by associating the buzzword “cloud” with it.

Sometimes it is tempting for providers with longer histories to slightly change their offering and call it cloud hosting. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace are the largest players in the infrastructure game, but I’m willing to argue that they aren’t taking cloud computing as far as they could. This is because, despite claiming flexibility, both companies offer set packages of server resources. AWS has 4 standard instances and some other instances built for compute intensive tasks and memory intensive tasks.

However, these instances come with a set amount of CPU performance, memory and storage capacity. In essence you’re still buying (in a more flexible way) a set of VPS products that you’re able to shuffle around. AWS’ offering of cloud computing on the infrastructure level (especially their EC2 offering) extends to only the pricing of their instances where clients are able to pay in an pay-as-you-go style. It’s not on-demand, because you are given a certain set of resources whatever your more specific demand might be.

Again, I can only talk for UpCloud, but we’ve put in a lot of effort (and to be honest, it’s the team before I joined the company) in building a service where customers are almost freely able to choose their CPU, memory and storage capacity based on their actual demand.

Overall though, there are tremendous changes going on in how services are built and offered in the cloud. Almost always this change is better for the client making the using of these services more flexible. In the points below, I will be talking more about my findings and thoughts on the offering on the infrastructure level.

Secondly, towards the bottom of the infrastructure stack – something where UpCloud is working, the offering can be very hard to understand. One of the key terms in cloud hosting is virtualisation, which means that instead of bound by physical limits – the client is built a virtualised set of server resources.

In this process, service providers are usually able to build their margins for their business. This is because when the clients are given resources, they might not be dedicated as in the case of buying an actual, physical server. In plain English this means that clients are sharing the same resources allocated to multiple clients. When you’re able to charge more money for the same amount of absolute resources, be it per month or per hour, your margins go up. On the losing side are the customers who pay for services that might not perform as well as expected.

Thirdly, when you offer clients a service related to server resources – you want to do it in such a way that they can run enterprise grade applications and solutions on your offering. This also means that you take redundancy seriously. Redundancy is essence are the measures you take to keep your services up and running if individual resources begin to break down. At UpCloud for example, our infrastructure is basically redundant from the network connections all the way to the software level.

Building a redundant stack isn’t cheap, but it is more effective in those cases when things break down. In environments with multiple software level solutions and physical devices, almost always something will break down at some point in time. This means that you are either willing to pay for the redundancy in slightly higher prices or then go for the lowest of the prices which might not pay that much attention to redundancy.

SLA, or the Service Level Agreement, is usually considered legal jargon for the end client. However, when you buy your infrastructure resources as a service – the terms on which the capacity is delivered, is very much part of the package. I’ve even seen SLAs that sum up as “best attempt”, meaning they give no guarantee on how much their services will be up and running. In a case like that, no amount of resources can justify a service that can’t be used.

Marketing and selling these services is of course something I’ve put a lot of focus on. In some senses the cloud infrastructure industry (if we can call it that) is still selling its offering with specifications. In many ways it is at the same point in its lifecycle where the mobile phone industry was in the early 2000s. Touch screens are still a long way off. However, services offering simplicity and ease-of-use are arising. One of the most interesting ones is perhaps DigitalOcean from the US. They’re a startup that joined TechStars last summer and they’ve put immense effort on keeping the service simple.

Also, when everyone is shouting with the same arguments of how much RAM, storage or CPU power you’re offering – it becomes very dull for the end customer buying the offering. Apple obviously changed this in the mobile phone and personal computer space with design. They didn’t completely let go of specifications in their marketing, but they are not the key selling points. Performance is more important than the resources you have.

Marketing has strongly affected the terminology of the industry as well, making it even harder for the client to understand what they are buying. Take for example the CPU resource – central processing unit. The core of the system. Many providers have their own terminology for this or then simply coin it as vCPU (virtual CPU) meaning it’s not a dedicated resource. Some providers even ask you to determine how much priority you want in terms of percentage of that CPU, affecting the pricing of that resource. This all makes it extremely hard for the client to compare what is the best offering for their requirements.

This is where comparison sites such as Serverbear come in. They run a set of tests that try to put different types of offering on the same line. Serverbear has come up with their own BearScore which takes the resources and their price into account and tries to simplify the best bang for the buck. I’m certain these kinds of services will become an essential way for buyers to evaluate the offering available.

In many ways, at least the cloud infrastructure offering is still very early in its infancy despite the market being multiple billions in size. Some studies have shown that Amazon Web Services’ revenue in 2012 was around $2 billion. This makes it the obvious gorilla in the room. For me, it makes the game ever more interesting.

There is money to be made for sure. Linode for example – which is extremely popular among developers, has grown from $1.9 million in revenue in 2009 to $22.3 million in 2011. They generated their 2011 revenue with just 20 employees.

Many have doubted our attempt in building a cloud infrastructure (IaaS) company that can honestly and profitably compete head on with the likes of AWS. After a little more than a month at the job, I can say this couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re extremely well positioned at UpCloud to compete in the game for the long term. The technology is super well built, the team is the best in Finland and we’re only beginning our international sales in the upcoming weeks.

It’s a super interesting industry and I’m very much excited to be part of such a talented group of individuals that UpCloud is made of. Keep your eyes open for our announcements in the coming weeks!

Even cooler – mom bought the shirt!

Mickos went on the offensive, comparing OpenStack to the Soviet Union – a collective farm ostensibly run for the good of its members, but where nothing is actually accomplished.

The potential? Immense:

Another big agenda item is assimilating the massive amounts of data generated by third-party applications. (For instance, imagine using Spotify to see who among your extended cohort has been obsessively listening to Laura Nyro. Or tapping into fitness apps to find a jogging partner who runs at the same track and same pace as you do.)

Definitely worth your time.

Some cool data:

• 9512 commits to the app and site (that’s 26 for each day of the year!)
• 3.5 hours of planned and unplanned downtime for the year
• 1.4 million new users signed up
• 281 servers running in total from 6 data centres
• 132 employees (only, considering they get about 1100 support tickets daily)
• 29800 shirts mailed (unfortunately I never got mine :( )

Love the transparency.

Thank you Crashplan – your excellency just won extra advertising for your service in the form of this blog post. If you need a good backup service, sign-up with Crashplan. Awesome product.

Dear Antti,

At the beginning of the year, Code 42 implemented new 2013 pricing for CrashPlan+. It is our policy to inform customers prior to billing changes. However, due to an oversight, you were not sent that notification. Therefore, you will be receiving a credit in the amount of the difference between our 2012 price and the 2013 price.

You will see this adjustment as a separate item on your next credit card statement.

We apologize for any inconvenience,
The CrashPlan Team