Lydia Leong

I’m on vacation, and I’ve been playing World of Goo (possibly the single-best construction puzzle game since 1991’s Lemmings by Psygnosis). I was reading the company’s blog (2D Boy), when I came across an entry about BlueHost’s no-notice termination of 2D Boy’s hosting.
And that got me thinking about “unlimited” hosting plans, throttling, limits, and the [...]

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The New Scientist has an interesting article commenting that the long tail may be less potent than previously postulated — and that peer pressure creates a winner-take-all situation.
I was jotting this blog post about Gartner clients and the target audience for the Magic Quadrant, and that article got me thinking about the social context for [...]

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It is possible that I am going to turn out to be mildly wrong about something. I predicted that neither Amazon’s CloudFront CDN nor the comparable Rackspace/Limelight offering (Mosso Cloud Files) would really impact the mainstream CDN market. I am no longer as certain that’s going to be the case, as it appears that behavioral [...]

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Google made a number of App Engine-related announcements earlier this week. The most notable of these was a preview of the future paid service, which allows you to extend App Engine’s quotas. Google has previously hinted at pricing, and at their developer conference this past May, they asserted that effectively, the first 5 MPV (million [...]

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Aflexi has announced its launch, which is slated for January of 2009.
Aflexi is a CDN aggregator, targeting small Web hosters much in the same way that Velocix’s Metro product targets broadband providers. (What’s old is new again: remember Content Bridge and CDN peering, a hot idea back in 2001?)
Here’s how it works: Aflexi operates a [...]

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It has been a remarkably busy December, with my client inquiries dominated by colocation calls, and it looks like the last bit of the year’s inquiries will be rounded out with last-minute year-end deals for CDN services. I’ve published what I’m going to publish this year, so I’m focusing on my first-quarter 2009 agenda, and [...]

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Datahounds might be interested in the Renesys ISP rankings for 2008.
Renesys is a company that specializes in collecting data about the Internet, focused upon the peering ecosystem. Its rankings are essentially a matter of size — how much IP address space ends up transiting each provider?
Among the interesting data points: Level 3 has overtaken Sprint [...]

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Analysts travel a lot. As I think over the year, here are the cities where I’ve visited clients during 2008…
Northeast: Baltimore, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Stamford, Washington DC
South: Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Memphis, Miami, Nashville, Richmond
Midwest: Austin, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, San Antonio, St. Louis
West: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Portland, San [...]

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An article in the Wall Street Journal today describes Google’s OpenEdge initiative (along with a lot of spin around net neutrality, resulting in a Google reply on its public policy blog).
Basically, Google is trying to convince broadband providers to let it place caches within their networks — effectively, pursuing the same architecture that a deep-footprint [...]

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Anti-virus vendor Authentium is now offering its AV-scanning SDK to cloud providers.
Authentium, unlike most other AV vendors, has traditionally been focused at the gateway; they offer an SDK designed to be embedded in applications and appliances. (Notably, Authentium is the scanning engine used by Google’s Postini service.) So courting cloud providers is logical for them.
Anti-virus [...]

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