Tim Negris

Multi-party file sharing and document management is a useful and increasingly popular business application in the public cloud domain.  Such solutions include vertical enterprise solutions like M&A; "deal rooms" from Intralinks and Brainloop, general purpose "office" applications suites from Zoho and Google, collaboration/communications platforms from Central Desktop and Akiva, web-based document management systems from KnowledgeTree and Confidela, and file utilities from Box.net and SugarSync. Never Use an Application to Do Middleware's Job Regardless of their purpose or features, virtually all such cloud-based document sharing solutions suffer from the same general drawbacks and consequences. Don't leverage existing storage infrastructure, e.g. EMC, SharePoint, FTP, WebDAV, etc. No preservation of skills, processes, and investment Facilitate sharing by forcing mas... (more)

P2P Web Promises Many Freedoms - Part 2/3

Author's Note:  In Part 1 we examined the events leading up to the creation of Dot-P2P, the planned alternative peer-to-peer Domain Name System.  Here we will take a look at the existing Internet DNS and how Dot-P2P aims to compete with it. The current Domain Name System (DNS) is overseen by the US Government-sanctioned Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and operated by a handful of designated companies.  One of the most important of these is VeriSign, which manages the all-important .com, and .net top level domains, operates two of the Internet's thirt... (more)

Amazon Vets Social Mobile Cloud Apps

Amazon Web Services has announced the beta availability of new mobile software development kits for the Android and iOS platforms.   It was previously possible to write apps for those devices that could work with the Amazon cloud, but it wasn't easy.  As the announcement on the AWS blog points out: "Previously, developers either wrote their own libraries to handle the HTTP connection, request retries, and error handling, or built additional infrastructure to proxy the API requests through a server fleet." Now, though, developers can call AWS web service application programming ... (more)

P2P Web Promises Many Freedoms - Part 1/3

In a lightning-fast response to recent and pending actions by the US Government cracking down on several different kinds of Internet activity by seizing perpetrators' Internet domains, a group calling itself Dot-P2P has formed to develop and promulgate an alternative domain name system (DNS) that will be immune to action by the US or other governments.  In this, the first of three parts, we examine what led up to the creation of Dot-P2P and the technology that might make it possible. About a week ago, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit of the US Department of Homeland ... (more)

Adobe Puts Flash Server in Amazon Cloud

This week, stalwart packaged applications software vendor Adobe announced the availability of its Flash Media Server on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.  It's a move that should be good for both companies but one that also raises a few questions. Adobe's Flash brand is worn by a number of different parts and products, including the media player client much maligned recently by His Hipness, Steve Jobs, the graphical authoring application for animation and interactive media and web sites, and the server discussed here.  The Amazon incarnation of the Flash server joins a f... (more)