ReadWriteEnterprise

Amazon has added two new EC2 reserved instances, so that users now have the choice of four pricing models for EC2 instances. Seven, if you count choosing between one-year and three-year terms.

A quick refresher might be in order. Amazon started with a single price for its EC2 instances, then added reserved instances in 2009. The reserved instances give you a break on instance pricing in exchange for an up-front fee per-instance.

The discussion is already nearly five years old, and yet the vacancy in the public conscience persists as if something big had collapsed just last week. Microsoft is no longer the dominating, polarizing force that it was in the previous decade. The mindset of the company that once preached to its employees, "Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat," has exited out the back door and sneaked past the gaze of European regulators.

And boy, do we ever miss it. From the moment Ycombinator co-founder Paul Graham famously proclaimed "Microsoft is Dead," our casting couches have been warmed by the seats of would-be substitutes. Like it or not, Microsoft fulfilled a latent psychological need in many folks' minds: the need for a strongly polarizing force that made it easier to decide what to like and what to hate.

It's an IPv4 world today, but the days of IPv4 are numbered.

As of February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had allocated all remaining public IP address ranges to the five global regional Internet registries. A quick look at this IPv4 Exhaustion Counter below shows a total of 13.24 /8 (8-bit) IPv4 address ranges remaining, for a total of less than 3,400 remaining unallocated IPv4 addresses. Essentially, this means
IPv4 is played out.

I've written about Wistia before, an enterprise video hosting and analytics vendor. This week they have made big improvements to their embedded video player, including more customization of controls, a cleaner look, and some other small touches. What was once a solid player is now a great player. If you are looking around for a place to host your videos, this should be on your short list. They provide terrific customer service and analytics features too.

Google has been on a killing spree the last few months, whacking projects that are non-essential to the company strategy or that haven't caught on. Even though this has angered some users, Google is still stubbornly clinging to one of its biggest dogs to date: ChromeOS and the Chromebooks.

Google announced the ChromeOS in July 2009, and finally started shipping them to consumers in June of this year. (Not counting Cr-48s, which weren't commercially available.)

So what's the next step, I asked? Do people start wearing biometric tokens that send signals to devices in the neighborhood, letting you know when you're in their vicinity so they can respond by tweeting you to please buy them?

Sure, why not, comes the swift response from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Last August, as regular ReadWriteWeb readers will recall, Benioff astounded his audience at the Dreamforce conference with the mind-alteringly imminent notion that Coke machines should become aware of their customers' presence, and respond through their iPhones with bargains and loyalty points. Of course, Benioff's idea at that time relied upon the customer always having his iPhone with him. This time, at the Cloudforce conference in New York this morning, Benioff one-upped his own idea with the notion that a biometric bracelet could supply interested products and devices in the wearer's immediate vicinity with a kind of identity signal.

You have to admit, he's getting better at this. Four years ago, in response to numerous public complaints - many of them in court - about its plans to share aggregate user data with third parties, Facebook responded in a flat, dismissive tone that users were given every opportunity to opt out of behavior sharing. So what they don't opt out of is effectively their own problem.

Today's settlement between Facebook and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission effectively ensures that the company can no longer take this specific stance without facing intense U.S. government scrutiny. But in the intervening four years, Facebook has become a veteran of government scrutiny, including from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner and throughout Europe. And it has gained a lot more skill at adapting its semantics to strike the right political and often psychological tones.

Last Wednesday, ReadWriteWeb published a legal analysis of the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate Counterpart, the PROTECT-IP bill. Our story prompted a spirited, logical, and largely rational debate between e-novel author Rowena Cherry, who supports the legislation, and TechDirt founder Michael Masnick, who opposes it.

I've been on record as saying that we as a society have forgotten how to debate. These two have not. While they may not always have been as strictly civil with one another as Lincoln and Douglas, they both demonstrated some lessons that both opponents and supporters of the bill may perhaps put to good use:

It seems like only yesterday RWW's own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote the foreword to a book discussing the new ecosystem, business models and value chains in a hyper-connected world. In actuality, it was a little over a year ago when the book, The Shift, was released. It documented an 18-month primary research study commissioned by Alcatel-Lucent to assess the market potential of various network APIs - including presence, profiling and location, among others - across an ecosystem of developers, advertisers, consumers and enterprises.

Culling the inputs of over 10,000 respondents from the research, my co-author and I boldly predicted a $100 billion incremental market opportunity when telecom networks are leveraged as development platforms. The impressive figure is derived, in part, through the creation of new business models between developers, advertisers and service providers.

The Associated Press this afternoon quoted European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding as stating that the E.U. government should not only federalize its approach to granting safe harbor for social networks, but essentially should hold all Internet service providers on the continent, including social networks, responsible for informing Internet users when personal information is being collected from them.

The quote seemed a little fishy, so ReadWriteWeb this morning ran it past Comm. Reding's spokesperson, Matthew Newman. As it turns out, according to Newman's information, the AP quote was indeed taken out of context. Words from the misquote originally appeared in a September 10 interview with the BBC, in response to a speech by Comm. Reding from last March. In its native context, Comm. Reding does not call for a limitation on the European framework for Safe Harbor with respect to social networks - an issue for which Comm. Reding was an outspoken champion.