Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format

Google will launch an e-book store called Google Editions with a "don't be evil" twist. This will allow content to be unchained from expensive devices such as Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. Unlike Google's biggest competitors Amazon and Barnes & Noble that rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google will not be device-specific - allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on a far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010. Google's e-books will be accessible through any Web-enabled computer, e-reader, or mobile phone instead of a dedicated device.

However, as democratizing as this sounds, it's still unclear how many people are ready to curl up with a Google Editions title on their laptop or smartphone, instead of the traditional paper format? Under Google's payment scheme, publishers will receive about 63 percent of the gross sales, and Google will keep the remaining 37 percent. Google Editions: The Basics The new e-book store will launch sometime during the first half of 2010, and will have about 500,000 titles at launch. Google also hopes to offer Editions titles through other online book retailers. Google may also create deals to sell Google Editions books directly through a book publisher's Website, but no details have been announced for how that scenario would work, according to Read Write Web.

In this scenario, online retailers would get 55 percent of revenues minus a small fee paid to Google, and publishers would get 45 percent. Google Editions as Web Apps? Unlike titles offered through e-readers, Google Editions books would not have to be accessed through a dedicated reader or special application. Google's e-books would reportedly be indexed and searchable like many books are now through Google's Book Search, according to Reuters. Instead, any device with a Web browser will be able to access a Google Editions book.

To me this sounds like Google wants to turn the e-book, or more accurately the e-reader, into a Web App. After you purchase and access your online book for the first time, it will be cached in your browser making the book available when you're offline. Considering Google's push with its yet-to-be-unveiled Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, turning books into Web Apps isn't a particularly surprising move. Whenever Google gets involved with any new business, the immediate assumption is that the company will be able to reshape the market. But is Google Editions a Game-Changer? From the sounds of it, Google's plans may do just that, since it will make reading and accessing e-books nearly universal on almost any device that can get to the Web.

Google's use of the Web browser as an e-reader may make it slightly easier to access an e-book than these other retailers since Google will essentially shun the ePub and PDF formats. However, Google is not the first company to deliver e-books to your PC. Companies like Buy Ebook and eBooks.com already do this, and the online social publishing site, Scribd started selling e-books earlier this year. But one hurdle Google can't overcome is the fact that you'll be reading your book on a computer screen. Part of the reason Amazon's Kindle gained so much attention when it launched was its attempt to overcome this deficiency by using E-Ink technology, which tries to emulate the look of the printed page. A common complaint about e-books is that reading them is much harder on a regular computer display. Sure, alternatives like the iPhone's Kindle application, and other e-reading apps for smartphones have met with some success.

NASA: Moon bombing provides 'the data we need'

Despite the disappointing lack of a visible debris plume, NASA scientists say they have the data they need to figure out if there's water on the moon after their space probe crashed into a lunar crater early this morning. Soon after that initial crash, the second half of the spacecraft, which had separated into two pieces last night, hurtled through the kicked up debris, grabbing data about the matter, and then it too crashed into the crater. At 7:31 a.m. EDT today, the first half of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite , known as LCROSS, slammed into a deep and permanently dark crater on the south pole of the moon. It's a double whammy that NASA hopes can help it determine whether there is water on the moon.

It would be far cheaper and easier to drill water on the moon than have to haul it up from Earth. "We have the data we needed to address the question of water," said Anthony Colaprete, the LCROSS principal investigator for NASA. "The science team will analyze the data this afternoon. NASA is still hopeful to one day create a viable human outpost on the moon, a goal that would benefit greatly from a discovery of water on the moon. We just have to sit back and be careful. We saw something and that's heartening. We don't want to make a false negative or a false positive claim. We're going to take our time and build up a case for water." While NASA "saw something," fans of space exploration didn't see what they had expected this morning.

Some have questioned whether the crashes even caused a debris plume and whether any helpful data will result from the experiment. NASA had been promising live images of the impact and resulting debris plume but images on NASA TV were live only until moments before impact when it turned to black. Colaprete noted that the images streamed out for video were not what the second half of the spacecraft would have detected as it flew its own path into the crater. "I knew we were going someplace where you expect the unexpected," he said, adding that scientists did record a spectra, or light waves, after the crash. "I'm not convinced we haven't seen ejecta. I certainly hope we can dig something out of there that will be telling." Faith Vilas, director of the MMT Observatory in Arizona, said the observatory's telescope was focused on the lunar crater during the crash and did not detect a debris plume. Stay tuned. She added, though, that the plume could have occurred nonetheless. "We didn't see a thing.

The orbiter is expected to send its own analysis of the debris plume back this morning. We didn't see any obvious sign of an impact," said Vilas. "In choosing this crater for impact, the spacecraft went 2 kilometers deep so a lot of the plume would have been shielded from view by crater walls." S. Pete Worden, center director at NASA's Ames Research Center, said it had been an exciting morning. "LCROSS showed that low-cost, innovative missions can excite the public and do good science," he added. "It expands and continues our exploration into the solar system." The LCROSS spacecraft, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on June 18, went aloft with its companion satellite, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter . As the Atlas V rocket that carried them lifted off, a NASA spokesman called it "NASA's first step in a lasting return to the moon." The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , which has been in orbit around the moon since late June, was 50 kilometers above the moon's surface during this morning's impact. The LCROSS spacecraft, aside from being a projectile, was a vehicle heavily loaded with scientific gear. The instruments were selected to provide mission scientists with multiple views of the debris created by the hull's initial impact. According to NASA, its payload consisted of two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer.

NEC reaches out with iSCSI midrange storage

NEC is expanding its midrange storage line with a new iSCSI array aimed at companies with midsized storage needs. NEC designs its products to offer enterprise capabilities at lower prices than big names such as Hewlett-Packard and EMC. That value proposition was just what Accutech, a digital media wholesaler in Ventura, California, was looking for. The company is not especially well known for storage in North America, though it supplies equipment that some other vendors sell under their own brands.

Accutech bought NEC's new D3i platform about a month ago in the process of virtualizing its data center, said systems administrator Chris Crawford. Accutech bought the NEC D3i as storage for all those virtual machines. The company is centralizing about 15 servers with local storage into four larger servers with virtual machines, using VMware ESXi. The aim is to reduce the data-center administrative burden, cut power consumption and ensure reliability. Accutech's needs aren't as big as for some larger enterprises. It bought two linked D3i storage platforms, one with 12TB of capacity and one with 2.4TB, and is only using about 20 percent of the total capacity now.

The company distributes items such as blank CDs, digital tapes and printer toner to stores and resellers around the country. Accutech rejected the faster Fibre Channel standard for iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) because the former would have cost about four times as much, Crawford said. "Fibre Channel is way faster, but iSCSI is more than fast enough for us," Crawford said. NEC's 30-day return policy was another selling point. The company's two-person IT department researched its options for about 18 months and found that only NEC fit its budget. After taking delivery of the D3i about a month ago, Accutech put it through its paces. "We threw everything at it at once," Crawford said.

With the data for all its virtual servers stored on the D3i, Accutech isn't susceptible to a single point of failure, Crawford said. The results met its expectations. The storage array itself has multiple built-in redundancies, including two RAID arrays, four power supplies and four network interface cards, he said. The D3i is an iSCSI counterpart to NEC's D3 Fibre Channel system and is designed for enterprises like Accutech that have medium-sized storage needs but don't need Fibre Channel. The storage platform is the heart of the centralized data center. "I can connect, disconnect and reconnect servers until I'm blue in the face" and the data center will keep running, he said.

It has been on sale since April but is being formally announced on Tuesday. For its next-generation storage platform, coming in early or mid-2010, NEC is looking at offering both types of interfaces in the same system, though it hasn't heard demand for that from customers, said Josh Eddy, product marketing manager for the Advanced Storage Products Group of NEC Corp. of America. A minimum configuration with three 500GB drives is priced starting at US$6,406. The system can scale up to 144TB of capacity, with a price of about $100,000. Although IP (Internet Protocol) storage network technologies such as iSCSI are gaining in popularity, Fibre Channel still dominates in large enterprises. Also on Tuesday, NEC will introduce thin provisioning capability for its D8 enterprise platform, the first of NEC's storage platform to get that capability. It is a software option for the D8 that costs about $8,300. NEC hasn't yet seen demand for thin provisioning in its other products, Eddy said.

Thin provisioning allows administrators to provision storage capacity for a particular purpose without having to buy and install the entire amount at once.

Three data storage start-ups buck trend, grab $28 million in venture capital

Three data storage start-ups have landed more than $28 million in first-round funding from venture capitalists, a rare feat in an economy that has punished new vendors looking to obtain financing. 10 biggest network venture capital deals from Q2 The multi-million dollar financing rounds went to Avere Systems, a Pittsburgh-based network-attached storage (NAS)  company; GreenBytes, a de-duplication vendor in Ashaway, R.I.; and Sonian of Needham, Mass., maker of a cloud-based e-mail archiving and disaster-recovery service. Early stage vendors have suffered as much as anyone, because a lack of successful IPOs and acquisitions has forced investors to put resources into existing companies longer than expected, leaving little left over for true start-ups. Venture capitalists have dramatically reduced spending on computer networking companies in the past couple years. There seems to be good reason to lower investments in storage companies: Storage software revenue is down worldwide compared to last year and storage hardware revenue is down 18%. But Avere, GreenBytes and Sonian were able to secure Series A financing in funding rounds announced this week: $15 million went to Avere, $8 million went to GreenBytes and $5.6 million went to Sonian. "In the current economy, the bar on new investments is extremely high," says John Jarve, Menlo Ventures managing director, in the Avere announcement.

Avere was founded in January 2008 and is led by CEO Ronald Bianchini, a former senior vice president at NetApp and co-founder of Spinnaker Networks, a storage grid company acquired by NetApp. All three start-ups are focused on making storage use more efficient, a key concern for enterprises grappling with expanding data volumes. Avere calls its technology "Demand-Driven Storage" and says it will consist of NAS products that let customers "scale storage network performance independently of capacity," reducing costs and space and power requirements. GreenBytes, featured in Network World's Companies to Watch series last year, makes de-duplication storage appliances designed for both primary and secondary storage tiers. Avere, which received its funding from Menlo and Norwest Venture Partners, says it will release its technology in the fall of this year.

The company, founded by CEO Robert Petrocelli in 2007, says its GB-X Series appliances allow "real-time, on-the-fly de-duplication of file blocks as they are stored, expanding the scope of applications into primary storage, as well as backup." GreenBytes' funding round was led by Battery Ventures. The company offers a 99.99% data retention service-level agreement. Sonian, founded in 2007 by CTO Greg Arnette, built its hosted e-mail archive platform with a grid computing architecture designed to eliminate single points of failure. Sonian, which received funding from Prism VentureWorks and Summerhill Venture Partners, was named a "cool vendor" in archiving by Gartner this year. Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin

Site offers Facebook account break-ins for $100

Security vendor PandaLabs has discovered an online service offering to help those so inclined to hack into any Facebook account they choose for a price: $100. However, those who sign up for the service could find themselves becoming the victims instead, PandaLabs warned today. Users of the service are required to first register with the site and then provide an ID of the Facebook account they want hacked, said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. The Facebook hacking service, which is delivered via a professional looking Web site, was discovered by PandaLabs earlier this week.

Users who enter the ID and click on a "Hack it" button are then presented with the username of the owner of the Facebook account. But to actually get the password, the user is then required to send $100 via Western Union to an individual in Kirovohrad, Ukraine. They then have the option to "Start Facebook hacking." Those who follow the instructions are eventually told that the hack was successful and a password for the account was retrieved. It's not clear whether sending the money will yield any login and passwords, Corrons said. The site contains an FAQ section, which claims the site has been in business for more than four years.

But the way the site has been designed and the ease with which a potential client can interact with it lends it a certain degree of credibility, he said. The site even provides a link to a Webmoney account that in fact does appear to be four years old, Corrons said. At least as of the last time PandaLabs inspected the site, it was not downloading or distributing any malware and seems to have been set up purely to scam those seeking to gain illegal access to Facebook accounts, Corrons said. However the domain itself appears to have been registered by someone in Moscow only a couple of days ago, he said. "We've been looking at it and we are 99.9% sure it is a ruse," to get people to pay up money in exchange for what they think will be legitimate Facebook credentials, he said. Those who do fall for the scam are unlikely to go to law enforcement to report it, he noted.