Sawickipedia

Online Business Trend: The Ad-Supported Computing Cloud

I am of course biased by my experience - which has been at the intersection of consumer oriented services around data, ad-supported content and digital media.  One of the areas that is interesting to see emerge is the Computer in the Sky or as some refer to it as the Computing Cloud.  This has long been an area of interest to me going back to my early days at Loudeye.  One of the visions we had there was to build a digital music jukebox in the sky.  We started tinkering with the idea in the winter of 1998 (I still have a copy of the original pitch presentation I put together for Martin and the board).  The idea was to build something along the lines of Amazon.com’s Web Services but for music - allow any business to plug into the Loudeye Media Platform and create their online music service.  Unfortunately the inability to get blanket distribution rights from the labels combined with infrastructure costs it just didn’t pan out.  For instance back in the day a 1TB online storage solution would have cost a couple of million dollars.  And what’s amazing is that today you can buy a 1TB 3.5 disk drive for $500.  Now today, with the rise of Amazon’s very cool S3 and Ec2 offerings you are finally beginning to see a true Computer in the Sky.  It’s easy now to imagine a jukebox in the sky or a library in the sky, you think of it you name it. 

Now the infrastructure side of the cloud is out there, others are rushing in to add services and utility.  The whole webware movement is a natural extension of the movement - add value to the utility infrastructure.  We are in the early stages with online versions of office apps from Google and Zoho for instance to vertical apps like CRM from Salesforce.com or accounting from Intuit with online versions of Quicken, TurboTax and Quickbooks easily available.

From a consumer perspective, the next movement will be free-ad suppoted computing in the sky.  There’s still work to be done as I have learned from experience monetizing content can be tricky.  Personal content often doesn’t work well with targeting engines like contextual engines (Google AdSense for instance).  And at the same time, users tolerance for ads in an application environment can be tricky.  Fortunately there are startups looking to solve this project.  And the day they do and a computing cloud service offers compelling utility with that ad-model built in is a day when I think this market truly explodes.  Imagine the ability for users to create personalized versions of services.  Point and click your way through a function and feature list to offer a service for you and your friends to enjoy.  OK I am getting a little dreamy but I think you get the point.