US election pulls attention to Twitter but fails to help bring in cash

  28 Oct 2016 , 11:50

This year’s presidential election might be the perfect microcosm of Twitter’s woes. While some of the most memorable moments of the campaign for the White House have played out on the platform, Twitter has been unable to turn the attention and activity into ad dollars or user growth.

Well suited to quick updates on a noisy and unpredictable campaign, Twitter has been the dominant social media platform in 2016 for candidates, pundits and journalists. Republican nominee Donald Trump’s frequent tweeting of tirades against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, fellow Republicans and the media have been a mainstay of the campaign, setting off furious online debate.

But Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto acknowledged when the company reported its quarterly earnings Thursday that the election has had “no noticeable impact” on Twitter’s user growth, which analysts say is essential for boosting revenue. Campaigns and political organizations told Reuters that Twitter is simply not a great medium for political advertising.

It is not as effective as rival Facebook at targeting crucial independent voters, and high-profile Twitter users like Trump and Clinton can use it as a megaphone without buying any advertising. “We haven’t really used Twitter, largely because our core mission is to reach those undecided voters,” said Alixandria Lapp, executive director of the House Majority PAC, which supports Democratic U.S. House of Representatives candidates.

A flood of hate speech and misinformation, which Twitter has done little to tamp down, can also be a barrier to ad buys, campaign digital strategists said. Facebook has emerged as the social media ad platform of

Long time rivals VMware and AWS recently partnered to offer VMware's SDDC platform within the AWS data center, but questions remain.

Image: iStockphoto/peangdao

By Keith Townsend | October 14, 2016, 5:13 AM PST


VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and AWS senior vice president Andy Jassy announced a significant partnership between the two companies on Thursday when the pair appeared on stage together to introduce VMware Cloud on AWS. According to VMware's press release, the VMware Cloud on AWS is an expansion of VMware's Cloud Foundation Program. VMware also announced a similar partnership with IBM's Softlayer. The VMware Cloud on AWS solution is now in preview with full availability expected mid 2017. VMware will manage, sell, and support the service directly.
The technology

It's helpful to understand the technology architecture associated with VMware Cloud on AWS and how it differs from existing solutions. Oracle's Ravello Systems offers a solution that runs VMware-based virtualization images on top. Oracle is essentially reselling AWS instances with a proprietary hypervisor that translates the VMware instructions. Ravello Systems' solution comes with a significant performance cost and is positioned for non-production workloads. Ravello Systems also doesn't support full integration with VMware's management interface or software-defined data center (SDDC) concept.


AWS has an existing vCenter plugin that allows for simple migration of VMware workloads to AWS. The AWS solution is production-class use cases. Similar to Ravello Systems, the AWS vCenter plugin is limited in the integration with extensions of the VMware SDDC platform.

Coming from the other side, VMware had an ill-fated attempt to build a large-scale public cloud. VMware's vCloud Air public cloud service leverages the vCloud Director (vCD) orchestration platform. VMware Cloud on AWS is a completely re-engineered cloud offering. VMware and AWS have teamed to run the entire SDDC portfolio on bare metal servers within AWS data centers. VMware Cloud on AWS supports vSphere, NSX, VSAN, and vRealize. Unlike vCloud Air, which required a vCD plugin, a VMware Cloud on AWS data center is managed directly from a customer's existing vCenter Plugin.
No mention of hybrid cloud


I found it curious neither VMware nor AWS called the solution hybrid cloud. Integration of operations between public cloud and traditional on-premises data centers has proven an elusive goal. The partnership highlights the business challenges of each vendor. VMware experienced many stops and starts with gaining traction as a public cloud provider. Likewise, AWS found it difficult to entice enterprises to move VMware-based workloads to EC2.

The theory of this partnership is that customers wanting to use their existing VMware software and operations strategy can leverage VMware Cloud on AWS. Customers seamlessly move workloads from their on-premises data center to vSphere servers running on AWS infrastructure. The use case is a similar value proposition as VMware's vCloud Air public cloud, but with the important distinction that the infrastructure is AWS.
More questions than answers

I walked away from this announcement with more questions than answers. VMware and AWS essentially presented hosted VMware in AWS. Today, the primary advantage over other hosted vSphere implementations is the proximity to AWS solutions. It's as close to co-location as VMware customers get into an AWS data center.


However, it doesn't solve the problem of building a hybrid infrastructure. Missing in the announcement were advanced tools for integration of the VMware Cloud on AWS with other AWS products. While possible for a customer to run NSX in the VMware Cloud on AWS, there isn't integration between AWS VPC and NSX. There's also the inverse challenge. VMware Cloud on AWS doesn't bring a private version of AWS to VMware infrastructure. Customers wanting a serverless computing option that leverages private data center resources still have to look toward solutions such as AzureStack.

I'm expecting more meat on the bone from both VMware and AWS. While an attractive technical solution, both companies have to fill in some blanks on what business challenges the solution solves. I'm looking forward to seeing further integration from products such as VMware Cross-Cloud and AWS Lambda.
What are your thoughts?

Is VMware Cloud on AWS a game-changing announcement? What use cases come to mind? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Facebook is relatively new to live streaming, but here’s why it seems to have caught publishers’ fancy

#FACEBOOK LIVE

By Anirudh Regidi /  30 Sep 2016 , 08:15

Everyone’s agreed on one thing, video is the future of web and live streaming will form a significant chunk of that.

The current contenders are Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Twitch and Periscope. Twitch was among the first to establish itself as a streaming hub, but it did so by carving a niche for itself in gaming. YouTube Live came later and has found a fair amount of success. A great many events and even sports are streamed live on YouTube.

Facebook Live is a relatively new entrant but it seems to have picked up more steam than the rest of the services combined. In fact, it seems to be the platform of choice for advertisers and publishers alike.

Looking closer at the services, it’s easy to see why.

Twitch: It’s all about gaming

We’ll start with Twitch. As mentioned earlier, Twitch established a niche for itself as a source of all things gaming. If there’s a game you want to see streamed, you’ll find it on Twitch.

Streamers earn money when people subscribe to their stream, via ads and through donations. Twitch is a great place for streamers, but by definition, it’s niche makes it less suited to a larger audience.

Periscope: Limited audience

Periscope is in an odd spot. It’s not really carved a niche for itself yet, but it doesn’t have much going for it other than the vague association with Twitter. Publishers have found success with Periscope, which is why it can’t be dismissed outright, but compared to the likes of Facebook and YouTube, it’s among the also-rans.

The main problem with Periscope is reach. Twitter has 313 million active users, a number that pales in comparison to Facebook and YouTube’s billion strong user base. Further diminishing Periscope’s reach is the fact that only a fraction of Twitter users actually uses it. As of 2015, the total number of users stands at 10 million, with 2 million daily broadcasts. These numbers are huge, but insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

YouTube Live: Who’s my audience again?

YouTube Live is an extension of YouTube’s video platform and so far, is Facebook Live’s only real competitor. Its main advantage over others is reach, but it’s still not in the same league as Facebook. It’s estimated that YouTube has about a billion monthly active users(around 60-70 percent of Facebook’s total) and about 800 million users watch videos daily.

YouTube is a great platform for watching and streaming video to be sure, but it lacks the cohesion that a social networking platform like Facebook offers. You can watch a live stream, but that’s all you’re there for. Sharing with other users isn’t so easy, you can’t tag your friends or share it to your favourite group as easily and so on.

YouTube limits your interaction to that video. You can share it after the fact, but it’s still not as personal as Facebook’s offering.

Another major issue with YouTube Live is targeting. For advertises and publishers, targeting users is very hard, while Facebook works as a news feed of sorts and can push content as they see fit (they prioritise live videos in people’s news feeds). YouTube can’t do that. On YouTube, people will only see what they’re subscribed to or what they stumble across on their home page.

Anyone who’s had their eyes open will be aware of the fact that everything is shifting to mobile. Unfortunately for YouTube, only about 50 percent of their videos are seen on mobile devices. Facebook, again, has a lead on this front, with 75 percent of videos watched, including Live video, on mobile devices.

YouTube also doesn’t have as much data about its users as Facebook. They use cookies, so they can guess at who you are, but Facebook, which requires a login to use, knows who you are. It’s an important distinction that fine tunes targeting and advertisement like nothing else.

To add to all of these above problems, publishers and advertisers claim that YouTube’s charges are higher than Facebook’s.

Facebook Live is new to live-streaming, but it has the ability to leverage the information it’s collected on users to provide the most compelling live-streaming platform for publishers and advertisers. Coupled with a more focused approach to the medium, and a social network that encompasses the entirety of the online world, it does seem like Facebook will simply waltz away with the live-streaming audience.