CodeBaby hosts our first Social Media Idea Share event on Thursday, July 9th at the Colorado Springs office. The event is geared for people who are involved in social media for marketing, customer care, or for other business objectives. We are gathering people from businesses and organizations along the front range to share ideas about emerging trends and social media tools. We hope to spark great conversation and create a stronger social media business community. To get started, we will share our own social media strategy and tactics with you as a conversational starting point. We know we don’t have all the answers…we just want to stimulate conversation and exchange ideas. Limited to the first 150 people. Registration is free, but required.

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How do you get an instant virtual desktop for testing, storage, or research? Just add software.

Like all software companies, CodeBaby constantly has requirements for additional computers. Sometimes the requirement is for a new employee but more often then not, the requirement is for temporary usage. Examples include testing, research, special projects, supporting old environments, internships and so on. On a daily basis we need clean, standard Windows and Linux machines to test out CodeBaby deployments or to play with new 3rd party software. We have legally licensed, clean virtual images already created and ready to go. So, if we need to test on Windows XP with Internet Explorer (IE) version 6, we instantiate a new virtual computer and we’re testing within minutes.

Many folks don’t use virtual desktop computing because they don’t know which tool to use and they are constantly bombarded with messages and advice telling they them how hard and grandiose their virtualization setup must be. The truth is, creating reusable and recreate-able virtual images is extremely easy. Today the three most prevalent virtual desktop technologies are:

1. VMWare Workstation from VMWare Inc. (an EMC Corporation) 2. Virtual PC from Microsoft Corporation 3. VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems Inc.

By far, VMWare has the most history, stability, adoption and overall functionality. Checkout Mike DiPetrillo’s blog for an interesting, and animated, view of how VMWare fits in the virtualization space. Mike describes virtual images with installed applications as appliances, which can be hosted, reused and shared.

“Virtual Appliances are pre-built virtual machines with an operating system and application stack ready to go. Appliances vary greatly in what they’re used for and how “pretty” they are. There’s everything from IBM software stacks to pre-built virtual storage nodes to something as simple as a web browser. All you have to do to use one is download it and open it.”

- VMWare, SaaS, and the Virtual Appliance Marketplace

VMWare has consistently owned more than ½ of the desktop virtualization space. Microsoft, naturally, claims they are gaining ground in virtualization. In fact, they claim they’ve grabbed over 20% market share. However, unraveling Microsoft numbers is like deciphering the human genome. And try and learn what they have, how they price and where you can try some software and you find yourself with 50 URLs, 4 white papers and 15 Microsoft partners calling you. On the Open Software front, VirtualBox has emerged as a very interesting free virtualization option. We have some folks using it and it seems to work pretty well. As with all new virtualization products it has issues with peripheral devices but seems pretty stable and continues to improve. We’ll keep using it and see how it pans out over the next few months. However, in the back of my mind, with Sun, I always ask myself, “How do they make money?”

For me, VMWare is my favorite; always has been. The pricing is reasonable and VMWare computer images work on every platform every time. Currently I’m running VMWare Fusion on my Mac and EVERY old VMWare image of Windows and Linux is working like a champ. I’ve loaded Windows 98 through Windows Vista, NT, Windows 2003 server, as well as some really old versions of Linux, Core 5 and Core 6. Everything has worked without a single issue.

For more on virtualization, let Kevin Kettler, Dell CTO, walk you through the fundamentals of what virtualization is and the ways you can make it work for you.

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CodeBaby Production Studio Version 3.1 Release Builds In Captioning for Federal Section 508 eLearning andMultimedia Compliance

  CodeBaby announces the release of Production Studio Version 3.1. The latest version of CodeBaby Corporation’s complete digital animation software solution increases ease of use and promotes compliance with Federal Section 508 eLearning accessibility requirements.   Colorado Springs, CO June 17, 2009 — CodeBaby announces the release of Production Studio version 3.1, a program that lets users create and integrate fully animated, digital CodeBaby characters into websites or eLearning courseware. Version 3.1 includes new features such as captioning, collaboration, and character model swapping. These new features add to ease of use and promote compliance with Federal Section 508 eLearning and multimedia accessibility requirements.   The new version of CodeBaby Production Studio is the company’s latest software development to support user engagement on websites and in eLearning courseware. Said CodeBaby CEO, Patrick Bultema, “With the Production Studio Version 3.1 release, we demonstrate our commitment to engineering engaging and interactive solutions that are easy to use and provide rapid time to value for our customers.” Production Studio 3.1 new features include:   *Captioning: Provides compliance with Federal Section 508 requirements to make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities   *Collaboration: Allows for project sharing with improved asset management   *Drag-and-Drop Importing: Users can import any asset by dragging and dropping assets onto your project timeline   *Swap Models: Users can change characters in existing projects with thumbnail previews   *Automatic Updates: Automatically notifies users if new updates or assets are available for Production Studio   For a demo of Production Studio 3.1 new features, click here. For additional information about Production Studio and CodeBaby, click here.   About Section 508 Standards for Electronic and Information Technology: Section 508 requires equal access to electronic and information technology provided by the Federal government on the Internet or World Wide Web and through multi-media presentations and web-based eLearning. Standards include text transcripts or captioning, and flexible delivery for seeing or hearing impaired individuals. More information on Section 508 technology requirements is available here.

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I’m two minutes into telling a story about some new technology endeavor and someone interrupts me to ask, “What do you mean by ‘in the cloud?’” or “How do you simply ‘virtualize’ a data center?” These questions draw me back to the realization that many people consider the terms “cloud computing” and “virtualization” as magical abstraction layers that don’t really exist. I get the impression that they’ve thought these terms were conjured up by computer nerds to make hard problems go away.

I tell them that these capabilities really do exist and I go on further to describe ‘web services’ and ‘data mashups’ through a countless number of vendors and scalable open source technologies such as MySQL, PHP, Ruby on Rails (aka LAMP stacks).

Then, the light bulb goes off. And if I’ve described the value of cloud computing properly, the next and final question is, “Why doesn’t everyone do it this way?” Good question.

The cloud is real. The cloud is affordable. The cloud is fast. Most cloud vendors do not charge any upfront costs and bill on a month-to-month basis. Pulling together a completely hosted environment through tier-1 vendors such as Network Solutions, Verio, Amazon’s EC2 and S3 is near effortless and can be operational within hours. These vendors do the backups, upgrades, monitoring and provisioning so you don’t have to. They all come with some form of a SAS70 audit, backup power and failover air conditioning systems. They maintain the demands of “five nines” system availability standards and Service Level Agreements … not you and your team! All of these vendors provide a host of options such as creating fully loaded computer instances (also know as images) within minutes. You can have your choice of operating systems, databases and application frameworks, all pre-loaded.

Some companies such as Engine Yard offer boutique-style services matched specifically to an application framework such as Ruby on Rails. With Engine Yard you rent something known as a “slice.” The slice contains a portion of everything needed on a server, so you don’t have to provision a whole server. You get disk space, CPU utilization, a piece of a database, an application server, and a web server all with guaranteed service levels.

Naturally, there are situations where cloud computing may not work for you. Two main objections come to mind:

1. Unique security requirements: Of course financial or security sensitive disciplines can require complete control over every aspect of computing. So, letting someone else do the cooking probably won’t work with your board of directors.

2. System level access: I have noticed that applications requiring deeper control of system level resources such as shared memory or network drivers and configuration can have issues with some virtualization software.

Still, most of us are perfect candidates for cloud computing. So why not get your head in the cloud?

Added July 2, 2009: Found this cool video that does a great job of explaining cloud computing.

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