Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

This is a guest blog from our featured Technology Partners Marketplace company, Cloudant. Cloudant enables you to build next-generation data-driven applications without having to worry about developing, managing, and scaling your data layer.

Cloudant: Data Layer for the Big Data Era

The recipe for big data app success: Start small. Iterate fast. Grow to epic proportions.

Unfortunately, most developers’ databases come up short when they try to simultaneously “iterate fast” and “grow to epic proportions” — those two steps are most often at odds. I know … I’ve been there. In a recent past life, I attacked petabyte-per-second data problems as a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider together with my colleagues and Cloudant co-founders, Alan Hoffman and Adam Kocoloski. Here are some lessons we learned the hard way:

1. Scaling a database yourself is brutally hard (both application level sharding and the master-slave model). It is harder with SQL than it is with NoSQL databases, but either way, the “scale it yourself” approach is loaded with unknowns, complications and operational expense.
2. Horizontal scaling on commodity hardware is a must. We got very good at this and ended up embedding Apache CouchDB behind a horizontal scaling framework to scale arbitrarily and stay running 24×7 with a minimal operational load.
3. The data layer must scale. It should be something that applications grow into, not out of.

That last point inspired Alan, Adam and me to co-found Cloudant.

What is Cloudant?
Cloudant is a scalable data layer (as a service) for Big Data apps. Built on CouchDB, JSON, and MapReduce, it lets developers focus on new features instead of the drudgery of growing or migrating databases. The Cloudant Data Layer is already big: It collects, stores, analyzes and distributes application data across a global network of secure, high-performance data centers, delivering low-latency and non-stop data access to users no matter where they’re located. You get to focus on your code; we’ve got data scalability and availability covered for you.

Scaling Your App on Cloudant
Cloudant is designed to support fast app iteration by developers. It’s based on the CouchDB NoSQL database where data is encapsulated and transferred as JSON documents. You don’t need to design and redesign SQL data models or migrate databases in order to create new app features. You don’t need to write object-relational mapping code either. The database resides behind an HTTP layer and provides a rich permission model, so you can access, secure and share your data via a RESTful API.

Your app is a tenant within a multi-tenant data layer that is already big and scalable. You get a URL end point for your data layer, get data in and out of it via HTTP, and we scale and secure it around the globe. Global data distribution and intelligent routing minimizes latency between your users and the data, which can add 100s of milliseconds per request (we’ve measured!). Additionally, Cloudant has an advanced system for prioritizing requests so that apps aren’t affected by ‘noisy neighbors’ in a multi-tenant system. We also offer a single-tenant data layer to companies who want it — your very own white-labeled data cloud. As your data volume and IO requests rise (or fall), Cloudant scales automatically, and because your data is replicated to multiple locations, it’s always available. Start small and grow to epic proportions? Check.

Other Data Management Gymnastics
The Cloudant Data Layer also makes it easy to add advanced functionality to your apps:

• Replicate data (all of it or sub-sets) to data centers, computers or even mobile devices for local processing (great for analytics) or off-line access (great for mobile users). Re-synching is automatic.
• Perform advanced analytics with built-in MapReduce and full-text indexing and search.
• Distribute your code with data — Cloudant can distribute and serve any kind of document, even HTML5 and other browser-based code, which makes it easy to scale your app and move processing from your back-end to the browser.

Why We Run on SoftLayer
Given the nature of our service, people always ask us where we have our infrastructure, and we’re quick to tell them we chose SoftLayer because we’re fanatical about performance. We measured latencies for different data centers run by other cloud providers, and it’s no contest: SoftLayer provides the lowest and most predictable latencies. Data centers that are thousands of miles apart perform almost as if they are on the same local area network. SoftLayer’s rapidly expanding global presence allows Cloudant to replicate data globally throughout North America, Europe and Asia (with plans to continue that expansion as quickly as SoftLayer can build new facilities).

The other major draw to SoftLayer was the transparency they provide about our infrastructure. If you run a data layer, IO matters! SoftLayer provisions dedicated hardware for us (rather than just virtual machines), and they actually tell us exactly what hardware we are running on, so we can tweak our systems to get the most bang for our buck.

Get Started with Cloudant for Free
If you’re interested to see what the Cloudant Data Layer could do for your app, sign up at cloudant.com to get your FREE global data presence created in an instant.

-Michael Miller, Cloudant

Our customers are not concerned with technology for technology’s sake. Information technology should serve a purpose; it should function as an integral means to a desired end. Understandably, our customers are focused, first and foremost, on their application architecture and infrastructure. They want, and need, the freedom and flexibility to design their applications to their specifications.

Many companies leverage the cloud to take advantage of core features that enable robust, agile architectures. Elasticity (ability to quickly increase or decrease compute capacity) and flexibility (choice such as cores, memory and storage) combine to provide solutions that scale to meet the demands of modern applications.

Another widely used feature of cloud computing is image-based provisioning. Rapid provisioning of cloud resources is accomplished, in part, through the use of images. Imaging capability extends beyond the use of base images, allowing users to create customized images that preserve their software installs and configurations. The images persist in an image library, allowing users to launch new cloud instances based their images.

But why should images only be applicable to virtualized cloud resources?

Toward that end, we’re excited to introduce SoftLayer Flex Images, a new capability that allows us to capture images of physical and virtual servers, store them all in one library, and rapidly deploy those images on either platform.

Physical servers now share the core features of virtual servers—elasticity and flexibility. With Flex Images, you can move seamlessly between and environments as your needs change.

Let’s say you’re running into resource limits in a cloud server environment—your data-intensive server is I/O bound—and you want to move the instance to a more powerful dedicated server. Using Flex Images, you can create an image of your cloud server and, extending our I/O bound example, deploy it to a custom dedicated server with SSD drives.

Conversely, a dedicated environment can be quickly replicated on multiple cloud instances if you want the scaling capability of the cloud to meet increased demand. Maybe your web heads run on dedicated servers, but you’re starting to see periods of usage that stress your servers. Create a Flex Image from your dedicated server and use it to deploy cloud instances to meet demand.

Flex Image technology blurs the distinctions—and breaks down the walls—between virtual and physical computing environments.

We don’t think of Flex Images as new product. Instead—like our network, our portal, our automated platform, and our globe-spanning geographic diversity—Flex Image capability is a free resource for our customers (with the exception of standard nominal costs in storing the Flex Images).

We think Flex Images represents not only great value, but also provides a further example of how SoftLayer innovates continually to bring new capabilities and the highest possible level of customer control to our automated services platform.

To sum up, here are some of the key features and benefits of SoftLayer Flex Images:

• Universal images that can be used interchangeably on dedicated or cloud systems
• Unified image library for archiving, managing, sharing, and publishing images
• Greater flexibility and higher scalability
• Rapid provisioning of new dedicated and cloud environments
• Available via SoftLayer’s management portal and API

In public beta, Flex Images are available now. We invite you to try them out, and, as always, we want to hear what you think.

-Marc

On Tuesday, the Internet Society announced “World IPv6 Launch Day”, a huge step in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Scheduled for June 6, 2012, this “launch day” comes almost one year after the similarly noteworthy World IPv6 Day, during which many prominent Internet businesses enabled IPv6 AAAA record resolution for their primary websites for a 24-hour period.

With IPv6 Day serving as a “test run,” we confirmed a lot of what we know about IPv6 compatibility and interoperability with deployed systems throughout the Internet, and we even learned about a few areas that needed a little additional attention. Access troubles for end-users was measured in fractions of a percentage, and while some sites left IPv6 running, many of them ended up disabling the AAAA IPv6 records at the end of the event, resuming their legacy IPv4-only configuration.

We’re past the “testing” phase now. Many of the IPv6-related issues observed in desktop operating systems (think: your PCs, phones, and tablets) and consumer network equipment (think: your home router) have been resolved. In response – and in an effort to kick IPv6 deployment in the butt – the same businesses which ran the 24-hour field test last year have committed to turning on IPv6 for their content and keeping it on as of 6/6/2012.

But that’s not all, folks!

In the past, IPv6 availability would have simply impacted customers connecting to the Internet from a few universities, international providers and smaller technology-forward ISPs. What’s great about this event is that a significant number of major broadband ISPs (think: your home and business Internet connection) have committed to enabling IPv6 to their subscribers. June 6, 2012, marks a day where at least 1% of the participating ISPs’ downstream customers will be receiving IPv6 addresses.

While 1% may not seem all that impressive at first, in order to survive the change, these ISPs must slowly roll out IPv6 availability to ensure that they can handle the potential volume of resulting customer support issues. There will be new training and technical challenges that I suspect all of these ISPs will face, and this type of approach is a good way to ensure success. Again, we must appreciate that the ISPs are turning it on for good now.

What does this mean for SoftLayer customers? Well the good news is that our network is already IPv6-enabled … In fact, it has been so for a few years now. Those of you who have taken advantage of running a dual-stack of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses may have noticed surprisingly low IPv6 traffic volume. When 6/6/2012 comes around, you should see that volume rise (and continue to rise consistently from there). For those of you without IPv6 addresses, now’s the time to get started and get your feet wet. You need to be prepared for the day when new “eyeballs” are coming online with IPv6-only addresses. If you don’t know where to start, go back through this article and click on a few of the hyperlinks, and if you want more information, ARIN has a great informational IPv6 wiki that has been enjoying community input for a couple years now.

The long term benefit of this June 6th milestone is that with some of the “big guys” playing in this space, the visibility of IPv6 should improve. This will help motivate the “little guys” who otherwise couldn’t get motivated – or more often couldn’t justify the budgetary requirements – to start implementing IPv6 throughout their organizations. The Internet is growing rapidly, and as our collective attentions are focused on how current legislation (SOPA/PIPA) could impede that growth, we should be intentional about fortifying the Internet’s underlying architecture.

-Dani

The Internet is unnervingly quiet today. In response to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, some of the most popular sites on the web have gone dark today – demonstrating the danger (and the potential unchecked power) of these two bills.

Late Friday afternoon, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith announced that the DNS-blocking provisions would be removed from SOPA, and on Saturday, The White House responded to in opposition to the the bills as they stand today. Shortly thereafter, SOPA was “shelved.”

The Internet was abuzz … but the Champagne wasn’t getting popped yet. After digging into the details, it was revealed that SOPA being “shelved” just meant that it is being temporarily put to sleep. Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith stood explained:

“To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy.

Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February.”

I only mention this because it’s important not to forget that SOPA isn’t dead, and it’s still very dangerous. If you visit sites like reddit, Wikipedia, Mozilla and Boing Boing today (January 18, 2012), you experience the potential impact of the legislation.

The Internet’s outrage against SOPA has brought about real change in our nation’s capital: The House is reconsidering the bill, and they’ll hopefully dismiss it. With our collective momentum, we need to look at the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA, or Senate Bill 968) – a similar bill with similarly harmful implications that’s been sneaking around in SOPA’s shadow.

As it is defined today, PIPA has a stated goal of providing the US Government and copyright holders an additional arsenal of tools to aide in taking down ‘rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods.’ The Senate bill details that an “information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order.” In addition, it must delete all hyperlinks to the offending “Internet site.”

Our opposition to PIPA is nearly identical to our opposition to SOPA. Both require a form of essentially breaking a core aspect of how the Internet functions – whether that breakage happens in DNS (as detailed in my last blog post) or in the required rearchitecture of the way any site that accepts user-generated content has to respond to PIPA-related complaints.

PIPA is scheduled for Senate vote on January 24, 2012. It is important that you voice your opinion with your government representatives and let them know about your opposition to both SOPA and PIPA. We want to help you get started down that path. Find your local representatives’ contact information:

[SOPA Concerns]: Contact your congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives
[PIPA Concerns]: Contact your Senator in the U.S. Senate

Keep spreading the word, and make sure your voice is heard.

-@toddmitchell

Last week, I explained SoftLayer’s stance against SOPA and mentioned that SOPA would essentially require service providers like SoftLayer to “break the Internet” in response to reports of “infringing sites.” The technical readers in our audience probably acknowledged the point and moved on, but our non-technical readers (and some representatives in Congress) might have gotten a little confused by the references to DNS, domains and IP addresses.

Given how pervasive the Internet is in our daily lives, you shouldn’t need to be “a techie” to understand the basics of what makes the Internet work … And given the significance of the SOPA legislation, you should understand where the bill would “break” the process. Let’s take a high level look at how the Internet works, and from there, we can contrast how it would work if SOPA were to pass.

The Internet: How Sites Are Delivered

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. This device can be a cell phone, a computer or even a refrigerator. You are connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which recognizes that you will be accessing various sites and services hosted remotely. Your ISP manages a network connected to the other networks around the globe (“inter” “network” … “Internet”).
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site).

3. Your ISP will see that you want to access “www.softlayer.com” and will immediately try to find someone/something that knows what “www.softlayer.com” means … This search is known as an NS (name server) lookup. In this case, it will find that “www.softlayer.com” is associated with several name servers.

4. The first of these four name servers to respond with additional information about “softlayer.com” will be used. Domains are typically required to be associated with two or three name servers to ensure if one is unreachable, requests for that domain name can be processed by another.
5. The name server has Domain Name System (DNS) information that maps “www.softlayer.com” to an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When a domain name is purchased and provisioned, the owner will associate that domain name with an authoritative DNS name server, and a DNS record will be created with that name server linking the domain to a specific IP address. Think of DNS as a phone book that translates a name into a phone number for you.

6. When the IP address you reach sees that you requested “www.softlayer.com,” it will find the files/content associated with that request. Multiple domains can be hosted on the same IP address, just as multiple people can live at the same street address and answer the phone. Each IP address only exists in a single place at a given time. (There are some complex network tricks that can negate that statement, but in the interest of simplicity, we’ll ignore them.)
7. When the requested content is located (and generated by other servers if necessary), it is returned to your browser. Depending on what content you are accessing, the response from the server can be very simple or very complex. In some cases, the request will return a single HTML document. In other cases, the content you access may require additional information from other servers (database servers, storage servers, etc.) before the request can be completely fulfilled. In this case, we get HTML code in return.

8. Your browser takes that code and translates the formatting and content to be displayed on your screen. Often, formatting and styling of pages will be generated from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) referenced in the HTML code. The purpose of the style sheet is to streamline a given page’s code and consolidate the formatting to be used and referenced by multiple pages of a given website.

9. The HTML code will reference sources for media that may be hosted on other servers, so the browser will perform the necessary additional requests to get all of the media the website is trying to show. In this case, the most noticeable image that will get pulled is the SoftLayer logo from this location: http://static2.softlayer.com/images/layout/logo.jpg

10. When the HTML is rendered and the media is loaded, your browser will probably note that it is “Done,” and you will have successfully navigated to SoftLayer’s homepage.

If SOPA were to pass, the process would look like this:

The Internet: Post-SOPA

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet.
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site).

*The Change*

3. Before your ISP runs an NS lookup, it would have to determine whether the site you’re trying to access has been reported as an “infringing site.” If http://www.softlayer.com was reported (either legitimately or illegitimately) as an infringing site, your ISP would not process your request, and you’d proceed to an error page. If your ISP can’t find any reference to the domain an infringing site, it would start looking for the name server to deliver the IP address.
4. SOPA would also enforce filtering from all authoritative DNS provider. If an ISP sends a request for an infringing site to the name server for that site, the provider of that name server would be forced to prevent the IP address from being returned.
5. One additional method of screening domains would happen at the level of the operator of the domain’s gTLD. gTLDs (generic top-level domains) are the “.____” at the end of the domain (.com, .net, .biz, etc.). Each gTLD is managed by a large registry organization, and a gTLD’s operator would be required to prevent an infringing site’s domain from functioning properly.
6. If the gTLD registry operator, your ISP and the domain’s authoritative name server provider agree that the site you’re accessing has not been reported as an infringing site, the process would resume the pre-SOPA process.

*Back to the Pre-SOPA Process*

7. The domain’s name server responds.
8. The domain’s IP address is returned.
9. The IP address is reached to get the content for http://www.softlayer.com.
10. HTML is returned.
11. Your browser translates the HTML into a visual format.
12. External file references from the HTML are returned.
13. The site is loaded.

The proponents of SOPA are basically saying, “It’s difficult for us to keep up with and shut down all of the instances of counterfeiting and copyright infringement online, but it would be much easier to target the larger sites/providers ‘enabling’ users to access that (possible) infringement.” Right now, the DMCA process requires a formal copyright complaint to be filed for every instance of infringement, and the providers who are hosting the content on their network are responsible for having that content removed. That’s what our abuse team does full-time. It’s a relatively complex process, but it’s a process that guarantees us the ability to investigate claims for legitimacy and to hear from our customers (who hear from their customers) in response to the claims.

SOPA does not allow for due process to investigate concerns. If a site is reported to be an infringing site, service providers have to do everything in their power to prevent users from getting there.

-@toddmitchell

This is a guest blog from blue dog NETWORK about Hosted Sharepoint. blue dog NETWORK customers are realizing the results that every business wants from their information technology: intelligence, simplicity, and security. They get peace of mind and the agility to add or subtract users or services with just a click 24/7 at a cost savings of 30-50% over current IT services. blue dog NETWORK makes IT an operating expense, and from a financial and business management perspective, the implications are powerful.

EMPOWER your organization with Hosted SharePoint

SharePoint is the next generation of mobility and collaboration. Having access to a calendar or mailbox is one thing, empowering your organization to have all the content, communication, process management and flexibility needed to rapidly respond to business or customer needs is a goldmine … One that is a simple click away.

Managing documents, calendars and inter-office information can be difficult. Documents get lost, version control is virtually non-existent and daily business functions that can be easily managed often get out of control. The capabilities of SharePoint 2010 work together to help your company quickly respond to changing business needs on an organizational rather than user level.

Using SharePoint 2010, your people can share ideas and expertise, create custom solutions for specific needs, and find the right business information to make better decisions without the requirement of costly technical expertise. SharePoint 2010 helps save time and effort, and focus on higher business priorities.

At blue dog NETWORK, we’ve found that our least technical clients quickly and with ease adopted Sharepoint as a mainstay for their diverse organizations. It really is the next generation of collaboration that has finally matured enough and is presented in a web interface whose simplicity meets end users’ needs without training and learning curves. The two biggest Sharepoint benefits for them: An incredible productivity experience and the flexibility (and visibility) to respond to business needs.

Delivering the Best Productivity Experience
SharePoint 2010 helps your people be more productive. It offers a familiar Microsoft Office experience so your team can quickly and easily access the business information they need to get their jobs done. With blue dog NETWORK, this is available on any device with Internet connectivity (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphones, etc.) on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix operating systems.

Rapidly Responding to Business Needs
SharePoint 2010 gives you out-of-the-box applications and a platform for customized solutions. You can use the features of SharePoint 2010 just as they are or quickly create secure and easy-to-use solutions for specific business needs. Because all of your information is consolidated in Sharepoint, you also have a one-stop place to track the progress of your projects, and if there are any problems, you’ll see them quickly (so you can respond quickly).

Given the success many of our customers have seen with Sharepoint, I could go on and on about the business benefits of the platform. If you want to learn more, check out the details on our listing in the Tech Partners Marketplace. If you want to see a demo of Sharepoint 2010, visit our blue dog NETWORK Sharepoint feature and click “view demo” toward the bottom of the page on the right-hand side.

As Kevin and I talked about in the video interview above, blue dog NETWORK does a lot more than Hosted Sharepoint … We offer all flavors of hosting for the end users, MSP and ISVs with White Labeling for resale. Given the demand for Sharepoint, we wanted to use this space to share a little of our expertise and experience with that platform.

Woof!

-Dana Viznea, blue dog NETWORK

SoftLayer manages more than 100,000 servers in thirteen data centers around the world. We have more than 23,000 customers, and those customers are responsible for millions of websites (which get billions of pageviews every month). We’re one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and we want to talk a little about the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261 or “SOPA”).

Many in our industry have already commented (and in some cases, “changed their minds”) on SOPA and its equally evil twin, the PROTECT IP Act (“PIPA”) in the Senate, but we wanted to share our perspective on the legislation. Even with these Dudley-Do-Right, Goody-Two-Shoes titles and their ambitious goals, SoftLayer opposes these bills in their current forms because they expose innocent and law-abiding hosting companies to uncertain liabilities.

Because this legislation has gotten quite a bit of attention in the past few months, you’re probably already familiar with it, but if you haven’t paid much attention, we can give you a quick summary: As you can read in the name of the bill, SOPA is being proposed to “Stop Online Piracy.” SOPA is under consideration by the House Judiciary Committee, and its intent is to provide additional enforcement tools to combat foreign ‘rogue’ websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting. That’s a great goal, and SoftLayer does not oppose the intent of the Act … As you saw from Kevin Hazard’s blog post a few weeks ago, we have a team of people working all the time to track down and immediately address any violations of our terms of service (including copyright infringement), so we wholeheartedly agree that copyright infringement and counterfeiting are bad.

The way SOPA tries to address the problem is where we disagree with the bill, so let’s talk about the most pertinent part of the bill for a service provider like SoftLayer. If SOPA were to pass, when a case of infringement is reported, we would have to “take such measures as [we determine] to be the least burdensome, technically feasible, and reasonable means designed to prevent access by [our] subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site that is subject to the order.”

What that means: We would be forced to turn off our customers’ access to a small piece of the Internet.

How are we to do that? Well the “least burdensome, technically feasible, and reasonable means designed to prevent access” are not made clear, but most of the discussions about the bill have focused on changing the way the Doman Name System (DNS) resolves to an “infringing site.” We’d be more or less ordered to break DNS … DNS was designed to simply, accurately and quickly match a domain name with the IP address that domain’s owner provides, and if SOPA were to pass, we’d have to tell DNS to behave correctly for every site EXCEPT the reported infringing sites. Again, that’s not spelled out in the legislation, so it’s like being given a job by someone who has no idea how to do the job nor whether the job is even possible to successfully complete.

And that’s all assuming that the order to suspend access to an “infringing site” is legitimate. Many of the organizations that oppose SOPA have explained possible scenarios where orders could be filed under the guise of preventing copyright infringement. A competing site/business could claim:

“the operator of the site operates the site with the object of promoting, or has promoted, its use to carry out acts that constitute a violation of section 501 or 1201 of title 17, United States Code, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster such violation.”

In another scenario, a copyright holder could pull the trigger on an order simply at the thought that a user could infringe on a copyright on/via the “infringing site.”

When the United States House of Representatives reconvenes after its winter recess, we will be watching intently with hopes that the Internet’s response to the bill has effectively derailed it in its current form. As SoftLayer General Council Suzy Fulton mentioned in her post about Texas House Bill 1841, we’ve been working with an industry group called TechAmerica which submitted a letter to Congress about SOPA and many of the issues that could negatively affect our industry. Additionally, we’ve gotten involved with SaveHosting.org to speak out against laws that can hurt our customers.

As discussions continue about SOPA, we’ll look for opportunities to share more of our insight with you here on our blog. Please let us know your thoughts about the legislation below.

-@toddmitchell

Let’s say there are 2495 miles separating me and the world’s foremost authority on orthopedics who lives in Vancouver, Canada. If I needed some medical advice for how to remove a screwdriver from the palm of my hand that was the result of a a Christmas toy with “some assembly required,” I’d be pretty happy I live in the year 2011. Here are a few of the communication methods that I may have settled with in years past:

I started thinking about the amazing speed with which we access information when I met with CTO Duke Skarda. He gave a few examples of our customers that piqued his interested, given to the innovative nature of their business, and one in particular made me realize how far we’ve come when I considered the availability and speed of our access to information:

The company facilitated advertisements on the Internet by customizing the advertising experience to each visitor by auctioning off ad space to companies that fit that particular visitor’s profile. In the simplest sense, a website has a blank area for an advertisment, the site sends non-sensitive information about the visitor to an advertising network. The advertising network then distributes that information to multiple advertisers who process it, generate targeted ads and place a bid to “purchase” the space for that visitor. The winner of the auction is determined, and the winner’s ad would be populated on the website.

All of this is done in under a second, before the visitor even knows the process took place.

We live in a time of instant access. We are only limited by the speed of light, a blazing 186,282.4 miles/second. That means you could, theoretically, send a message around the world in .03 milliseconds. Businesses use this speed to create and market products and services to the global market, I can’t wait to see what tomorrow holds … Maybe some kind of technology that prevents screwdrivers from piercing hands?

-Clayton

This is a guest blog from the PeopleBrowsr team about Kred. Kred is the first social scoring system to provide people with a comprehensive, contextual score for their Influence and Outreach within interest-based communities.

We All Have Influence Somewhere

The social networking revolution provides the unprecedented opportunity to observe, filter and analyze conversations in real time. For marketers and anyone interested in human behavior, it’s now possible to examine the collective consciousness for insights into consumer behavior and detection and engagement with the most influential people.

Increasingly, we find that the elements that determine “influence” in online networks are the same as they are in “real life” relationships: Trust and Generosity within small close networks of friends and subject matter experts. These in turn have become the foundations for Kred, a brand new way to understand anyone’s Influence and Outreach across social media and within Communities formed around interests and affinities.

‘We All Have Influence Somewhere,’ so Kred sifts through billions of social posts from over 110 million people in real time to uncover who is most influential on any subject, keyword or hashtag. This all summarized in Kredentials, which displays anyone’s history on Twitter over the last three years with a single click, including their top communities, most used words, most clicked links and much more.

Here are just a few of the other ways Kred is an evolution of influence measurement:

Dual Scores for Influence and Outreach
Influence – scored on a 1-1000 scale – shows the likelihood that your posts provoke actions from others. Outreach demonstrates your generosity in ReTweeting and replying to others.

Community
Real influence comes from expertise and passion. Kred is calculated for everyone in Communities that naturally form around interests and affinities.

Complete Transparency
Visitors to Kred.ly can see how all of their social actions count towards their scores – and how their connections’ actions affect them as well. Those who want a more thorough accounting of their score can take advantage of our Score Audit feature.

Offline Kred
Kred is the only influence measure to integrate offline achievements with online identity. Visitors can add their accomplishments – anything from academic honors to club memberships – by sending us a PDF from the ‘Get More Kred‘ menu tab inside the Kred site. We will then hand score it and manually add points.

Kred is free for everyone at http://kred.ly and deeply integrated into Playground, PeopleBrowsr’s social analytics platform. For those who wish to build custom applications off of our datamine of 1,000 days of social data, Kred can be accessed via our Playground API, Kredentials API and through a standalone API.

Many key unique features of Kred – including score audits, privacy controls and real-time activity statements – are based on feedback from our community of friends and colleagues. What would you like to see in its next evolution?

Give Kred a try and let us know what you think via email: kred@peoplebrowsr.com or on Twitter: @kred.

- Shawn Roberts, PeopleBrowsr

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome Eli Feldblum, CTO and Founder of RankAbove. RankAbove is a leader in search engine optimization (SEO) technologies and data management that helps solve complex SEO challenges for enterprise-sized organizations’ websites via a combination of proprietary technology, innovation and creativity.

The New Number One Spot: Planning for the Future of SEO

You run a successful business, or at least the IT for a successful business — that’s why you’re on SoftLayer. And, chances are, you’ve already spent lots of time and effort optimizing your site for search engines. You’ve built backlinks; you’ve ensured the structure of your site allows the search engine spiders to see every page of the site and prevents the creation of duplicate content; you’ve carefully written titles, friendly URLs and header tags; and you’ve continuously tweaked your on-page content to get to the number one spot in Google, Bing and other search engines.

Unfortunately, that apical spot is quickly becoming an apocryphal one; being number one isn’t what is used to be. The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has undergone dramatic changes in the past few years, and even if you optimize perfectly and grab the top spot, you might be pushed down (even below the fold) by a variety of other Google products:

• Ads & Comparison Ads
• Local Results
• Image Results
• Video Results
• Shopping Results

In today’s SEO market, you need to optimize not only for regular web results, but for every other Google product too. Luckily, there are a few tips you can use to make sure you appear in those products, and get the new and improved global number one spot—and lots of traffic too.

Read RankAbove’s Tips for Local, Images and Video! »