It sur­prises me how many peo­ple don’t know about the fab­u­lous work being done by the Aspen Insti­tute, the 59-year-old inter­na­tional non­profit orga­ni­za­tion that works on envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic con­cerns. It’s a sort of con­stantly evolv­ing think tank per­fectly suited for the new econ­omy: The Aspen Insti­tute con­venes round­ta­bles — in Aspen, Colo., Wash­ing­ton, DC, India, Israel, all around the globe — and gen­er­ally gath­ers 25 to 30 experts and thought lead­ers to tackle impor­tant pub­lic pol­icy issues. Dur­ing my last two trips to Aspen I met and spoke with Al Gore and for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Madeleine Albright.

I’ve been lucky enough to par­tic­i­pate in three such round­ta­bles and to write the fol­low­ing reports, which the insti­tute turns into print books (avail­able for pur­chase) and makes avail­able as free ebook down­loads in the PDF format:

• The Mobile Gen­er­a­tion: Global Trans­for­ma­tions at the Cel­lu­lar Level, 72 pages, Feb­ru­ary 2007: a look at the pro­found changes ahead as a result of the con­ver­gence of wire­less tech­nolo­gies and the Inter­net, with an empha­sis on how youths use mobile tech­nol­ogy (down­load ebook as PDF).

• Civic Engage­ment on the Move: How Mobile Media Can Serve the Pub­lic Good, 110 pages, July 2008: a look at the star­tling growth in the use of cell phones and other mobile devices and the ways mobile tech­nol­ogy can be used to advance the social good (down­load ebook as PDF).

• And now the just-released Iden­tity in the Age of Cloud Com­put­ing: The next-generation Internet’s impact on busi­ness, gov­er­nance and social inter­ac­tion (image above), 110 pages, May 2009: a look at the next-generation Inter­net and how it will impact all facets of society.

Down­load the free ebook (as a PDF). Or see the land­ing page. (If you came here from Twit­ter and are inter­ested in the sub­ject, my ID is @jdlasica.)

Aspen Reports now using Cre­ative Com­mons licenses

I’m happy to report that Char­lie Fire­stone, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the institute’s Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Soci­ety Pro­gram, took up my sug­ges­tion and has agreed to release the new report under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Non­com­mer­cial license, the same license I’ve been using for all of my blog posts for years. That means any­one is free to repub­lish excerpts of the report, or the report in its entirely, for non­com­mer­cial pur­poses. (See excerpt below.)

Not only that, but Char­lie has agreed:

• to retroac­tively release my still-timely two ear­lier reports, Civic Engage­ment on the Move and The Mobile Gen­er­a­tion, under the same CC BY NC license.

• to pub­lish all upcom­ing Round­table on Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy reports with the CC BY NC license.

• to rec­om­mend that all of the institute’s Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Soci­ety Pro­gram pub­li­ca­tions be pub­lished the same way. “I will take it up with the Aspen Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and per­haps other reports at the Insti­tute could be pub­lished with that license as well,” he tells me.

This, to my mind, is a coup for Cre­ative Com­mons, given the world-class schol­ar­ship and pol­icy pro­pos­als that the Aspen Insti­tute is now mak­ing freely avail­able for redis­tri­b­u­tion and remixing.

I espe­cially enjoyed the four days in Aspen I spent with extra­or­di­nar­ily bright and friendly peo­ple like John Seely Brown, Esther Dyson, Ann Win­blad, Marc Roten­berg, Pad­mas­ree War­rior (Cisco CTO), Rod A. Beck­strom (co-author of The Starfish and the Spi­der), Arjun Gupta, Jeff Dachis, Bill Cole­man, Mark Breg­man and Chris­tine Var­ney, whom the Obama admin­is­tra­tion recently tapped to become assis­tant attor­ney general.

I haven’t pub­lished excerpts of my pre­vi­ous Aspen reports, and because they’re in PDF for­mat the search engines can’t index them. So here is an extended excerpt from the report’s Intro­duc­tion, which should give you a hint about why cloud com­put­ing will affect all of our lives:

Excerpt: Why the Cloud Matters

Accord­ing to Newsweek: “At the end of August [2008], as Hur­ri­cane Gus­tav threat­ened the coast of Texas, the Obama cam­paign called the Red Cross to say it would be rout­ing dona­tions to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, what­ever, the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Kat­rina, we can han­dle it. The surge of Obama dol­lars crashed the Red Cross web­site in less than 15 minutes.”

The New York-based tech start-up Ani­moto, which lets users cre­ate professional-quality, MTV-style videos using their own images and licensed music, was aver­ag­ing 5,000 users a day until it sud­denly received a burst of new users who dis­cov­ered it through Face­book. Its traf­fic surged to 750,000 vis­i­tors over three days. The num­ber of servers Ani­moto was run­ning on jumped from 50 to 3,500 dur­ing that span of time. “It was just num­bers we never imag­ined we would ever see,” chief
tech­nol­ogy offi­cer Ste­vie Clifton told a Seat­tle news­pa­per. “It was fun and scary and pretty cool.” Thanks to Ama­zon­Web Ser­vices, Animoto’s servers did not crash, because Ani­moto does not have any servers. It out­sources its com­put­ing power to Amazon.comand pays only for what it uses. The ten-employee com­pany is now expand­ing. Ama­zon CEO Jeff Bezos touts Ani­moto as the poster com­pany for cloud computing.

The tales of the Red Cross and Ani­moto neatly sum up the con­trast between the for­mer econ­omy and the emerg­ing cloud econ­omy. If the Inter­net econ­omy is an apt descrip­tor of the changes tak­ing place around us today, then the term cloud econ­omy could justly be ascribed to the still larger global dis­rup­tions ahead. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has called this “the cloud com­put­ing age.”

What is the cloud?

What is the cloud, where did it come from, and what does it portend?

The com­put­ing indus­try has evolved rapidly over the years. Main­frame com­put­ers, which began it all, were cen­tral­ized with a pro­fes­sional class access­ing infor­ma­tion from ter­mi­nals with lit­tle com­put­ing power; data trans­fer often took place on foot, as peo­ple car­ried floppy disks from one machine to another. Main­frames gave way to mini­com­put­ers (chiefly used in labs and fac­to­ries in the 1970s), which begat per­sonal com­put­ers, which brought pro­cess­ing power to the individual’s
desk­top with basic appli­ca­tions like­Word doc­u­ments and spreadsheets.

The per­sonal com­put­ing rev­o­lu­tion became portable with lap­tops, hand­held devices and smart­phones. With every evo­lu­tion­ary step, computing’s under­ly­ing archi­tec­ture became more dis­trib­uted. As the Inter­net became widely adopted in the 1990s, per­sonal com­put­ers not only stored data locally but down­loaded and exchanged data all over the Web.

We are now in the mid­dle of another shift. As the Pew Inter­net & Amer­i­can Life Project put it in a Sep­tem­ber 2008 study:
Recent evo­lu­tions in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy have led to a more dis­trib­uted com­put­ing envi­ron­ment, while also
reviv­ing the util­ity of cen­tral­ized stor­age. The growth in high-speed data lines, the falling cost of stor­age, the advent of wire­less high-speed net­works, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of hand­held devices that can access the Web—together, these fac­tors mean that users now can store data on a server that likely resides in a remote data cen­ter. Users can then access the data fromtheir own com­puter, some­one else’s desk­top com­puter, a lap­top that wire­lessly con­nects to the inter­net, or a hand­held device.

This is where cloud com­put­ing enters the pic­ture, as users at home and in the work­place have begun to man­age their data, run appli­ca­tions, crunch num­bers and oper­ate entire enter­prises on a vir­tual plat­form in the sky.While the actual com­put­ing may be tak­ing place on the next block or on the other side of the world, to the user it looks as if it is hap­pen­ing on the screen in front of you.

The leap to the cloud echoes what occurred more than a cen­tury ago, author Nicholas Carr said in his keynote talk at the 2008 Xcon­omy con­fer­ence. In the 19th cen­tury, com­pa­nies often gen­er­ated their own power with steam engines and dynamos. But with the rise of reli­able elec­tric util­i­ties, com­pa­nies stopped gen­er­at­ing their own power and plugged into a shared elec­tri­cal grid. Infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy is under­go­ing a sim­i­lar evo­lu­tion today.

The pub­lic may not be famil­iar with the term, but many are already doing cloud com­put­ing. We have been using Web appli­ca­tions for years with­out any con­cern about where the appli­ca­tions actu­ally run. The Pew study found that 69 per­cent of Amer­i­cans con­nected to the Web—and espe­cially younger users—already use some kind of cloud ser­vice, such as Web email (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hot­mail), online data stor­age (IDrive, Mozy, Box.net) or online soft­ware. For exam­ple, Google Docs
offers Web-based office tools such as word pro­cess­ing and spread­sheets. Zoho, a start-up in Pleasan­ton, Cal­i­for­nia, offers an even more robust suite of office pro­duc­tiv­ity tools. Del.icio.us offers an easy way to access book­marks online. Blog­lines and Google Reader are Web-based RSS read­ers. Tens of mil­lions of us have uploaded videos to YouTube and sent pho­tos to Flickr, Smug­Mug, Pho­to­bucket and other host­ing sites.

The cloud has become our enter­tain­ment net­work: we are spend­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of hours on sites like YouTube, Hulu and Flickr. The cloud has become our social net­work: Face­book, MySpace, Bebo, hi5 and sim­i­lar sites now claim hun­dreds of mil­lions of mem­bers. The cloud has become our vir­tual library: when we do a Google search we are fin­ger­ing the cloud. The cloud has become our work­bench: we man­age projects in Base­camp, share large files with Pando, tweak pho­tos in online photo edi­tors like Adobe Pho­to­shop Express and Pic­nik, and edit videos online with Jay­Cut and Jump­cut (now closed). The cloud has become our devel­op­ment net­work: open source pro­gram­mers trade code on sites like SourceForge.net and Drupal.org.

The term cloud com­put­ing, which came into wide use in tech cir­cles only in early 2007, does have a spe­cific, tech­ni­cal mean­ing. It refers to a col­lec­tion of resources—applications, plat­forms, raw com­put­ing power and stor­age, and man­aged ser­vices (like antivirus detection)—delivered over the Internet.One For­rester Research ana­lyst defined it as “a pool of abstracted, highly scal­able, and man­aged com­pute infra­struc­ture capa­ble of host­ing end-customer appli­ca­tions and billed by consumption.”

Gart­ner Group defined cloud com­put­ing as “a style of com­put­ing where mas­sively scal­able, IT-enabled capa­bil­i­ties are pro­vided ‘as a ser­vice’ to exter­nal cus­tomers using Inter­net technologies.” …

A broader meaning

But many peo­ple now accept a broader mean­ing for the cloud, and this is the con­text in which the round­table tack­led the sub­ject. More than a decade ago Ora­cle CEO Larry Elli­son declared that the net­work would become the com­puter, and many peo­ple now refer to the emerg­ing next-generation Inter­net as “the cloud.”One should think of the cloud not just lit­er­ally, as an infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy infra­struc­ture, but as a metaphor for this new fron­tier of democ­ra­tiz­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties that these dis­rup­tive new com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies herald.

An SAP white paper released in Sep­tem­ber 2008 warned that pol­i­cy­mak­ers are not aware of the dra­matic eco­nomic impact of the “Future Inter­net,” as the paper calls the cloud. The report con­cluded: “The next gen­er­a­tion of the Inter­net enabled by soft­ware will lead to the most sig­nif­i­cant changes in the econ­omy in the next decade. It will drive pro­duc­tiv­ity gains in many indus­tries and shape the future of the ser­vices sec­tor in all knowledge-based economies.”

At the Stan­ford Sum­mit in July 2008, Anna Ewing, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent and chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer of Nas­daq, invited peo­ple to think of the cloud as putting high-powered enter­prise tech­nol­ogy in the hands of the masses via the Inter­net. Russ Daniels of Hewlett-Packard sug­gested the key ingre­di­ent is virtualization—using some­one else’s com­puter to do the heavy lift­ing for you. Polly Sum­ner of Salesforce.com said the small­est retail store can now use soft­ware as a ser­vice to run its finan­cials and man­age cus­tomer rela­tion­ships in the cloud, while entre­pre­neurs will build processes and a new gen­er­a­tion of
appli­ca­tions we can­not even guess at yet.

In other words, what the cloud is may be less inter­est­ing than what the cloud does—or could do.

The New York Times wanted to con­vert 11 mil­lion arti­cles dat­ing from the newspaper’s found­ing in 1851 through 1989 to make them avail­able through its web­site search engine. The Times scanned in the sto­ries, con­verted them to TIFF files, then uploaded the files to Amazon’s S3, tak­ing up four ter­abytes of space. “The Times didn’t coor­di­nate the job with Amazon—someone in IT just signed up for the ser­vice on theWeb using a credit card,” IDG News Ser­vice reported. Then, using Amazon’s EC2 com­put­ing plat­form, the Times ran a PDF con­ver­sion appli­ca­tion that con­verted the 4TB of TIFF data into 1.5TB of PDF files. Using Amazon’s com­put­ers, the job took about 24 hours.

When Nas­daq wanted to launch a new ser­vice called­Mar­ket Replay to sell his­toric data for stocks and funds, it turned to S3 to host the data and cre­ated a small reader appli­ca­tion using Adobe’s AIR tech­nol­ogy that let users pull in the required data. The expense of stor­ing all that data on Nasdaq’s own servers would have been pro­hib­i­tive. Instead, by offload­ing the data to the cloud, Nas­daq now has a mod­est new rev­enue stream.

Other exam­ples abound. Med­ical robot­ics firmIn­tu­itive Sur­gi­cal and recruit­ment ser­vices provider Job­science use Salesforce.com’s cloud envi­ron­ment to cre­ate new appli­ca­tions. Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies tap into Ama­zon­Web Ser­vices to cal­cu­late sim­u­la­tions; the U.S.Marine Corps is using it to reduce its IT sites from 175 to about 100, and The Wash­ing­ton Post used it to turn Hillary Clinton’s White House sched­ule dur­ing her husband’s presidency,more than 17,000 pages, into a search­able data­base within twenty-four hours. The Euro­pean con­sul­tancy Sogeti has used a cloud built by IBM to test new ideas and cob­ble together an IT sys­tem for a company-wide brain­storm­ing event.

To han­dle this bur­geon­ing demand for the cloud by busi­nesses and con­sumers, big­ger and more energy-efficient data centers—7,000 in the United States alone so far—are being built. Besides Ama­zon, Google report­edly has two mil­lion servers run­ning around the world. Yahoo! is busy build­ing huge server farms, and Microsoft is adding up to 35,000 servers a month in places like its data cen­ter out­side of Chicago, which cov­ers 500,000 square feet at a cost of $500 mil­lion, with plans to hold 400,000 servers.

[end excerpt]

I’m fas­ci­nated by the cloud and the kinds of things the new tech­nolo­gies is enabling in soci­ety — espe­cially entre­pre­neur­ship. I may write a book on the sub­ject, if I can find the right co-author.

You can find cita­tions for the exam­ples men­tioned above in the report itself. This and other reports can be ordered online at www.aspeninstitute.org or by send­ing an email request to publications@aspeninstitute.org.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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