Follow the money!

Hey Startups! In case you want to follow the VC money here is the list of the Top 20 locations in the US. BTW: Silicon Valley dominance is over, now San Francisco is on top. And: the east coast comes closer, which is a good thing for european startups (at least the flight is much shorter;).

Ever heard of Provo-Orem? It's a small city in Utah, a bit more than 500,000 people live there. And guess what? They generate 168m/year VC capital. How much does  Berlin? I think there is no correlation of being a Partytown/Hip Place and the money which is raised. Sorry for that, Berlin, but you better focus on being an event park. The race is over, dont start to run now.

Top 20 Locations for Venture Capital Investment (taken from from theatlantic)
		Investments		Deals
Rank	Metropolitan Area (listed by core city)	Dollars (Millions)	Share of Total	Number	Share of Total
1	San Francisco-Oakland, CA	$6,896	25.6%	744	19.7%
2	San Jose-Sunnyvale, CA	$3,985	14.8%	415	11.0%
3	Boston, MA	$3,101	11.5%	408	10.8%
4	New York, NY	$2,269	8.4%	379	10.0%
5	Los Angeles, CA	$1,677	6.2%	232	6.1%
6	San Diego, CA	$1,134	4.2%	103	2.7%
7	Seattle, WA	$886	3.3%	112	3.0%
8	Austin, TX	$626	2.3%	87	2.3%
9	Chicago, IL	$547	2.0%	71	1.9%
10	Washington, DC	$484	1.8%	117	3.1%
11	Philadelphia, PA	$347	1.3%	105	2.8%
12	Denver, CO	$264	1.0%	53	1.4%
13	Atlanta, GA	$262	1.0%	53	1.4%
14	Boulder, CO	$256	1.0%	40	1.1%
15	Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN	$256	0.9%	29	0.8%
16	Santa Barbara, CA	$251	0.9%	14	0.4%
17	Phoenix, AZ	$214	0.8%	15	0.4%
18	Raleigh-Cary, NC	$184	0.7%	28	0.7%
19	Pittsburgh, PA	$167	0.6%	76	2.0%
20	Provo-Orem, UT	$162	0.6%	14	0.4%

The power of community - in realtime

It is an astonishing impression to watch how free knowledge grows. Wikipedia edits (by anonymous, thus covering only 15% of all) on a realtime map. The message is clear: Community matters. It generates value - on Wikipedia, Open Streetmap and countless other projects.. Shared knowledge everywhere, thanks to millions of contributors. GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, Debian, Cyagenmod, Vlc, Python so many others to name. Today I just want to say:
Many thanks to all of you! We need you! Keep Contributing! May the source be with you!

How prism fosters free software

2 days ago I was participating at the google atmosphere event. Goal of the event is marketing for google's enterprise offers. No matter what the presentation was about, questions from the audience were always the same:

Do you offer a place for our data, where it is really save? 

The answer was, no surprise, always  the same too: " we always respect the law".

Being asked: which law? US law? EU law. Or even german law?, the answer was:

We respect all laws.

Funny, isn't it? No offence to google sales, that's the way they are briefed to deal with acceptance problems. Netherless this answer is, as we all know, absurd.
I personally thought that privacy issues would really not block enterprise adoption of cloud services. I thought, people will complain (like they do about facebook sometimes) but in the end they will accept and join. I have to admit I was wrong. They do not.

Is this the chance for european, national, regional clouds? As long they are hosted by non US companies it might be a little bit better. But this is academic as we dont see the real offers out there, which have the ability to compete with Google, Amazon. Microsoft.

The only chance, again, lies in Free Software. As soon as we have alternative software, we will have alternative solutions. Therefore it is a good idea for IT enterprises to invest in projects Open Stack, Cloud Stack and others. Let us gain knowledge and expertise, make them relieable, integrate the important features and robustness we need!

This will happen. Let it take years until it is really there and competitive (Yes, I know its there, but it's not competitive by now), but it will. In the end every single vendor stack will die. Prism speeds this up.