See http://mosttraveledpeople.com/

Last week I and my team a Sapo.pt (the biggest web portal of Portugal) gave a talk at Codebits (codebits.sapo.pt) about our Enterprise Service Bus (Sapo Service Bus – services.sapo.pt) that we are responsible for maintaining and develop. The Sapo Service bus is the front-end of all Sapo and other PT companies services and it abstract the services of:

• Authentication;
• Cache;
• Message transformation i.e. JSON to SOAP, POST to SOAP, JSON to POST;
• Security;
• Routing;
• Monitorization;

Our ESB support several bindings and it implements the services catalog very usefull for developer that want to use the services.

The session was recorded but for now is only available the slides.

Another great news is that Sapo Service Bus was release in Codebits as a Open Source product. In order to download you can go to:

- http://www.codeplex.com/SapoBus

- http://softwarelivre.sapo.pt/bus

You are free to use Sapo Service Bus and give us your feedback.

You can see our presentation here:

This Friday morning I gave a talk at Shift08 about SaaS/Cloud-Computing. The goal was to give an overview in 40 min about what is the paradigm that SaaS/Cloud-Computing is on, business models and some issues about SLA and BCP.

I was I little bit nervous (my last talk was in June) and my presentation was made on the fly because I have others threads that I’m handling right now.

In my personal opinion the talk went well but it was far away from my latest ones.

I hope everyone enjoy it.

For me Shift was just my talk. I didn’t managed time for enjoy it . However, for what I saw and heard it was AWESOME!

I share with you a great presentation made by Guy Kawasaki…

Link: http://www.guykawasaki.com/files/rules/Rules.pdf

I couldn’t wait for the nest Thursday to blog about the news that came out on a Portuguese newspaper “Jornal de Negócios” that I follow.

“Jornal de Negócios” announced that Microsoft will invest a tremendous capital in Portugal in such way that will be the biggest investment till now made in Portugal. But the good news is that the money will be invested directly by Microsoft. This means that Portugal will have a staff and infrastructures for something.

I don’t have any kind of inside information whatsoever but I bet that it has relationship with Internet or Yahoo nom acquisition. It was awesome if Microsoft builds a datacenter in Portugal or maybe a webteam for livemesh/live. And if it both…

Tick, tack, tick, tack… Thursday never comes… I anxious for next Thursday…

I didn’t do backups till now! What changed?

Not a long time ago, making backups was a task that I had to burn some CD/DVD or buy an external disk. In both cases I had to buy something and the true reliability wasn’t very good because I sooner or later will need the disk space or I’ll lose the track of by CD/DVD backups. If you think in a SMB (Small, Medium Business) you will not buy a robot like ADIC and Veritas software to do it. You will use tapes and some kind of less expensive backup software. Typically the backups were only made to servers and clients have to push and pull their files into a file server.

This architectural model has its benefices but it has some big disadvantages. One of these disadvantages is that the end user is the one that will choose if he will put the file locally or in the server. Ok, you can use for example Sync Center of Microsoft and if you are, it’s right, because if most of the work is made on ERPs, CRMs, Intranets (SharePoint), Intranet Apps, etc, there are lots of files that are in the chain of business but not on constrained to client-server architecture.  Another huge disadvantage is that if you really want to be certain about your data security you will need real Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and be willing to worry/pay for the infrastructures (co-allocation, outsourced or indoor) – it depend what tier that you chose to work with from your BCP and scalability issues.

Off course we continue to talk about SMB because if you want I can speak about Citrix and other systems that give to an organization a higher adaptability and some “bullet proof” systems.

So, I mentioned some disadvantages about “local” backups and I’ll give some reasons to have an indoor backup system. I think that they are quite obvious. It’s faster to recover the data and apps (depend of the tier); SLA (Service Level Agreement) is mostly at 99.99%; the security worries are mostly physical because typically you have all in tapes or in some kind of data storage equipment.

Back to track! I think I made my point of view and this post it’s not about “traditional business continuance or personal backup systems VS Cloud backup” it’s about Cloud Backup.

Cloud backup is a business that emerged from the Cloud Computing business a technological model. Indeed, I didn’t define Cloud Computing but I’ll do it in a couple of days. Don’t worry… One of the foundations of Cloud Computing is large scale advocate cheap storage and computing. In this case we are only interested in Cloud Storage and more accurate Cloud Simple Storage or as some people call it D2C (disk-to-cloud). To contextualize a little more, in the next computing paradigm universe it will exists two major types of computing: Cloud Computing and Proximity Computing. Cloud the Cloud is a place that storage, process and delivers information and Proximity Computing is more for Human-Machine interaction. This means that your files will be on the Cloud and not in your terminal (PC, mobile, whatever… ) because them will be asked to display information and interact with you. I’m sure that you are not seeing where I’m going!?!

In nowadays, as I said before, you have your files in your PC (any device you use) and in a working context in your company server. So, it will be great if you can make a backup without any effort or even worry about all the issues that I wrote above, isn’t it?

The key points that support Cloud Storage are:

- Is very cheap or free

- Large amount of storage (it can be unlimited)

- Automatic

- Incremental

- Access anywhere

- Simple

- Organize

- Instant

- Secure (encryption 448-bit and so one, datacenter with high BCP tier level)

The Cloud Backup market is growing at a huge velocity and for that I’ll talking about some of these players. Most of the companies that are selling D2D solutions based on an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) of AWS (Amazon Web Services). These companies are ISV (Independent Sales Vendors) of IaaSs providers and even if it isn’t built they can mashup with several IaaS. ISVs mount their business by making a webbase contract with AWS, developing a synchronization software and developing a website that can be using AWS with EC2 too – as simple as that! However, HP (Hewlett Parckard) with the project HP upline already have it own infrastructure and service! Yes, Dell, HP, Sun, IBM, Microsoft and other are turning their business to the cloud…

Mozy, Carbonite, PutPlace and HP upline are some of the companies offering D2D solutions. Architecturally it’s quite different, though, and it has a different pricing structure. Mozy and PutPlace (beta for now) are given 2Gb of backup storage but with PutPlace you can share your files through the web (they are expanding their services). Carbonite, HP upline, MozyPro, PutPlace provide Cloud Storage for a price and they have a pretty good pricing plan!

The biggest disadvantage it can be the bandwidth and latency of the connection for making the backup and the restore. However, in some of these services you have a web application (SaaS) to where it possible to browse the backup files and download use them.

Ok, but how Cloud backup works? I’ll let for later how IaaS are working therefore I’ll talk how a SMB and individual user can use it.

As an individual user I’m using Mozy! I had to sign up in their website, the usual registration procedure, and install an application “MozyHome Remote” that’s responsible of making the management of my files. Before, I had to configure “MozyHome Remote” declaring what kind of files and folders that I want to backup! Now, Mozy will be responsible for time to time seeing if there were some modification on my files and make the respectively synchronization. As simple as that.

As SMB IT Consultant, first I’ll do the same above for each collaborator. Afterwards I’ll calculate if my bandwidth and amount of data to backup can be synchronized in the established timeframe for backups. If not, I have two choices: is possible backup only the critical data or data that can’t be used in a nom VPN to share; or hiring others ISP to performed the upload in different networks. Even so, it’s possible that, for now, making this kind of backup doesn’t bring the glamour that brings for end users. As application are being built, I’m sure, that will make the synchronization with servers-clients.

Microsoft developed Live Mesh and I’m anxious to see it working not just because of these features but because of the implementations of S+S

Ohh… If every data will be processed, storage and delivered by the Cloud why do we need backups? Our Cloud provider should be the one that has to worry about it! I don’t think so! Now you see where I’m going!?! In the Cloud you are able to make mashups and this approach can be the 99,99% of reliability that everyone is asking for. You will be able to have your Live Mesh, Mozy, EC2, Google App Engine, online CRM/ERP, etc and still when you want to change of service provider you will be doing that in a click! That’s the future… halleluiah…

No dia 20 de Maio, no Dia da Inovação na CulturGest a Microsoft Portugal lançou um novo programa de incentivo à inovação e ao empreendedorismo: Boost - Acelerador de Inovação.

O programa está bem desenhado e agrega alguns dos programas já existentes da Microsoft Portugal dando-lhe um ainda maior significado.

Programa Boost: Innovation Accelerator
Boost - Innovation Accelerator é um programa da Microsoft que visa tornar mais rápido o processo de criação de empresas de tecnologia inovadoras em Portugal. O Acelerador é constituído por quatro fases nas quais a Microsoft e os seus parceiros intervêm como promotores e catalizadores : Estímulo – Formação – Suporte - Promoção.
O Programa Boost abrange as iniciativas da Microsoft que potenciam a Economia de Software Nacional, tornando-a mais competitiva e com um maior potencial de exportação. Este posicionamento é decorrente do facto do programa ter como intenção a melhoria das condições para a criação de empresas no mercado nacional.

São 4 os macro objectivos da Microsoft para o primeiro ano de operação do Programa Boost:

• Recolher cerca de 100 projectos/ideias inovadoras com potencial empresarial, no domínio da tecnologia;
• Completar o ciclo de formação em gestão e empreendedorismo para cerca de 150 jovens de elevado potencial;
• Inclubar 20 produtos inovadores nos MIC – Microsoft Innovation Centers e estimular os seus criadores a formarem as suas próprias empresas;
• Criar pelo menos 10 novas empresas portuguesas na área de tecnologia.

Fica link para informações mais precisas:

http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/boost/default.mspx

Eu já faço parte do Boost sendo um Microsoft Student Partner. E tu… queres aproveitar o Boost???

Yesterday, in my last class it was question me about a new way to communicate to the media using press releases. I gave my opinion how a press release 2.0 should be and after I finish Alexandra Mariz told me that in a conference “Conversas Unicer” they show a formalization of a press release 2.0. I totally agree with the format and I really think that the “text, text” that tries to describe something it’s out of business or it should be. If we want to communicate efficiently we have to prove the concept we any means available like image, video, RIAs and sound.

Press Release 2.0 image:

I was invited by Alexandra to be there but unfortunately I wasn’t able of. Now I see that I lost a great event and if it occurs next year and obviously I’ invited I won’t miss it.

Some time I hear that Microsoft doesn’t do anything good or even that they are the devil on de IT world. Maybe that’s true if you see with the wrong eyes! Here in Portugal we used to say that “the worst blind is the one that doesn’t want to see”… I can speak about HPC for breast cancer, info exclusion, Microsoft internships, social responsibility, Bill Gates Foundation, etc…

Anyway, this was not the issue that brings me here to write! Microsoft Research (MRS) recently produced a video about what they do in MRS as well as MRS identity, purpose, directions and culture.

If you pay attention to the video you will see what’s coming out and some prototypes that are being developed. I’m very exciting about all!!!

So, let’s see the video:

Yesterday I was at Fernando Pessoa University to give a talk about “Creating Games with XNA 2.0”. The room was almost full and interactivity with the attendee was great. The talk went quite well because it was funny and I could pass the full message to the attendees. At the end the feedback of everyone was very good!!! Hopefully was the true one…

In my perspective I really liked UFP. They have excellent infrastructures and above all, amazing people. The environment it’s on a high education level that brings huge incomes for the students. I never had an attendee that was making my demo in parallel with me and asking questions about it!

Once again, thanks to Carlos Velasquez, to coordinator of the degree Prof. Nuno Ribeiro and to UFP Ombudsman Eng. Jose Vasconcelos for the call.

In conclusion I’m always available for UFP.

A ZON multimédia lançou o prémio ZON Criatividade em Multimédia dividido em três categorias: Aplicações, Conteúdos Multimédia e Curtas-Metragens.

O PRÉMIO!!!

O prémio será atribuído anualmente. Este ano terá um valor global de 200 000 Euros, distribuídos da seguinte forma:

• Prémio de 50 000 Euros para o primeiro classificado de cada uma das três categorias.
• Prémio adicional de 50 000 Euros para o Grande Prémio, escolhido entre os vencedores das três categorias.
• Será ainda atribuída uma Bolsa de Investigação, com estadia temporária, na Universidade do Texas em Austin, no âmbito do programa UTAustin-Portugal (Colab).

Os trabalhos devem ser criativos, inovadores e de preferência susceptíveis de implementação prática.

A participação no prémio é aberta ao público em geral (individualmente ou em equipa), mas está especialmente vocacionado para empreendedores, jovens ou não, que tenham ideias inovadoras e que pretendam uma oportunidade para as pôr em prática.

Fica o link e votos de uma excelente participação!!!

http://premio.zon.pt/

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) brings some cool stuff. One of my favorite is Webslices.

If you hadn’t heard, WebSlices are a new IE8 feature that let you subscirbe to content directly within a web page. You access them from your IE Favorites Bar, where you’ll be able to click on them and see real-time rich internet content.

Even wikipedia is in!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/webslices.mspx