VideoVoo: Online Video Marketing

Basically here are the first computer seminars offered by Google - thanks to a Googler guy called Bisciglia, who felt his cublicle of search algorithms a bit too suffocating, and wanted to put his 20% creative time to the best use, a software called MapReduce, which is the core of Google cloud computing (in open-source form Hadoop). And Bisciglia’s approach: better asking for forgiveness than permission, as well as Eric Schmidt’s & Google’s parental attitude that gives chance to employees to make failures and learn from them - or reach success at a high risk. And more.

The first Google 101 seminars were offered at the University of Washington or U-Dub. Now more and more institutes ask for Google 101. It is like a Trojan horse for helping out Google’s hard and fast recruitment program. Moreover, Bisciglia has just returned from China where he talked about Google 101. This is not simply a corporate sponsored talent search program, this means a lot more corporate involvement in computer studies, a lot more, a lot more practical.

From the Business Week article:

Students rushed to sign up for Google 101 as soon as it appeared in the winter-semester syllabus. In the beginning, Bisciglia and his Google colleagues tried teaching. But in time they handed over the job to professional educators at U-Dub. “Their delivery is a lot clearer,” Bisciglia says. Within weeks the students were learning how to configure their work for Google machines and designing ambitious Web-scale projects, from cataloguing the edits on Wikipedia to crawling the Internet to identify spam. Through the spring of 2007, as word about the course spread to other universities, departments elsewhere started asking for Google 101.

Many were dying for cloud knowhow and computing power—especially for scientific research. In practically every field, scientists were grappling with vast piles of new data issuing from a host of sensors, analytic equipment, and ever-finer measuring tools. Patterns in these troves could point to new medicines and therapies, new forms of clean energy. They could help predict earthquakes. But most scientists lacked the machinery to store and sift through these digital El Dorados. “We’re drowning in data,” said Jeannette Wing, assistant director of the National Science Foundation.

…It was no secret that IBM wanted to deploy clouds to provide data and services to business customers. … The Google 101 cloud got the green light. The plan was to spread cloud computing first to a handful of U.S. universities within a year and later to deploy it globally. The universities would develop the clouds, creating tools and applications while producing legions of computer scientists to continue building and managing them.

Scientists and financial institutions, online video services, small businesses, individuals: we all need better managed and more environmental friendly datacenters as well as an upcoming generation of programmers who are well-trained in cloud computing.
Here is Dennis Quan CTO of IBM talking about the Blue Cloud initiative.