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Cloud Computing and the Digital Arts Renaissance

Computer-generated animations, like their paper counterparts, are not easy to create; a lot of computing power is necessary to render the images in a typical studio-quality animation. This computing power used to only within reach of studios with deep pockets and infrastructure. Fortunately, thanks to cloud computing technology, more digital artists have the computing power necessary to give life to their animated creations.

On-demand processing power of render farms

Many of the most important animation studios have started to move their rendering needs to the cloud, and many recent blockbusters have helped cut costs by using a render farm for animations. Smaller studios are following suit, putting themselves within reach of Pixar or Dreamworks like never before.

Thanks to the cloud, these smaller studios can now lease out this processing power, only using what they need and without having to pay for thousands of computers. More digital artists are unencumbered with arbitrary limits, finally able to unleash the full creativity of their imaginations.

How cloud computing has helped the little guy

A typical smaller digital studio will have, at most, a dozen high-end computer systems. In an industry so driven by deadlines, this is nowhere near enough. Using the cloud, though, a smaller studio can access hundreds or even thousands of computers that can render an animated sequence in a fraction of the erstwhile time. Computer animations also require a lot of storage space which can be dialed up or down thanks to the elasticity of the cloud.

In animation, being able to adjust the amount of processing power is paramount since computers may only be used for a few hours. The traditional answer has been building in-house render farms, which mean an astronomical expense – ongoing due to the need for cooling, maintenance and power.

Conversely, a single high-end machine will take about a year to carry out 9,000 rendering hours (a typical project). This often meant that smaller studios would have to compromise on quality or tie up their own machines for weeks. Today, they can simply access their supercomputer on the cloud and have their project rendered in hours.

The huge demand for render farms in the Asian market explodes after Life of Pi 

In Asia, firms are building data centers specifically for cloud services related to visual effects – unsurprising considering the size and scope of the Asian visual effects and animation industry. Some major locations for these centers include Taiwan, Malaysia, and India.

While this trend has steadily advanced since 2011, the success of Life of Pi, produced by Ang Lee, has led to a radical increase in the demand for these kinds of services in this area. This film’s impressive visual effects were created by Rhythm &amp. Initially with studios in the United States and Canada, this company’s expansion into India, Malaysia, and Taiwan is a good case study of what this market has to offer. Robust pipelines, cutting- edge technology, and a high demand for render farms and cloud computing makes these markets ideal for these kinds of services.
 

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About the Guest Author:

Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.

Top Industries To Gain From Cloud Adoption

Here’s something interesting: have a look at the number of searches for “cloud computing” at Google. This new technology is influencing business models, lifestyle and the way people learn and think. From Silicon Valley to Bangalore and Beijing, the cloud-computing IT models are touching several economic and social fields.

Online Education:

This is the fastest-growing industry in the world and there are plenty of good reasons for schools and educational institutes to adopt cloud computing. Cloud allows mentors, learners and institutions to access real-time information from anywhere in the world, offering access to global internet resources for data analysis and storage.

Marketing Services:

Cloud also allows fast, easy access to complementary marketing services. More marketers are adopting cloud because buyers are spending more time online searching for information and interacting with like-minded people over cloud-based social networks. They are using new cloud-optimized marketing strategies like paid search, social media, and search engine optimization – and very effectively!

Media and Entertainment Sector:

Media and entertainment companies are using cloud computing and service oriented architecture (SOA) to take benefit of the most agile and cost-effective cloud platform. Cloud based entertainment can be accessed by any device, of course.
It will also allow the broadcast and entertainment industry to offer high-quality, inexpensive content quickly to their clients. Many film and animation studios are looking at GPU computing to reduce the time spent in turning digital content into a finished product (motion picture, commercial or other visual media).

Telecommunication:

Cloud computing is the future of telecom. As traditional land-line phone systems are disappearing, companies are using both private and public cloud networks to communicate for domestic and commercial purposes.

Start-ups:

Cloud computing can be the perfect companion of budding entrepreneurs, especially when you have excellent business ideas but not enough funds to invest in IT infrastructure. You can start your business on cloud computing services with little investment. Cloud computing also offers “supercomputing capability” at little upfront cost to any startup, big company or individual researcher.
 

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About the Guest Author:

Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.

Hosting Telephony in the Cloud

Whenever cloud and enterprise-class applications are mentioned together, the popular perception is of complex software. Various models such as PaaS, IaaS and SaaS may be used to describe the service being used, but cloud-hosted telephony is another service with rich dividends.

When cloud-based telephony began, many questions were raised. Legacy telephone equipment had served companies well for decades. Why was there a need to change?

Doing Better than Legacy Systems

Cloud-hosted VoIP telephony makes a number of improvements to traditional telephony. A business forced to change locations can really appreciate cloud-based telephony. Simply plug your IP phones into a LAN port and get back the entire range of communication capabilities – no matter how many times or how frequently you shift base.

There are obvious cost benefits as well, especially if your work makes you talk to clients and coworkers overseas. Many users of cloud based telephony have discovered that the service is far more robust compared to traditional phone systems. If there is a natural calamity, land line phones go down. However, cloud-based IP telephones will work so long as they get a connection to the Internet (Ethernet, fiber, wireless or cellular-phone based).

In most cases, enterprise phone systems grow as the company grows. There are ad hoc fixes, multiple vendors and multiple carriers. This makes the system more complex and difficult to manage. There are different billing cycles and maintenance issues. With a cloud-based telephony system, growth is simple and easy. There is no requirement for ad hoc systems and the entire telephone system continues to be managed better with a single bill to clear.

Going Beyond Legacy Systems

Besides, simply doing the same things better, cloud-based telephony carries additional benefits. Telephones do not exist in a silo. Cloud based VoIP has now begun to integrate business processes with business communication. Since voice is packaged, you can interface it with voice-to-text, text-to-voice, email, chat, presentations and video. Hosted telephony service providers provide information about your telephone usage that legacy equipment is simply not capable of. You can generate business intelligence and connect to functions like sales and CRM to get value that legacy phones would simply not provide.

VoIP systems, particularly cloud-based ones, can also provide better security to every connection without any additional effort or equipment.

Is it your core competency?

Most companies do not have core competency in managing telephone systems. However, it is the chief business of cloud-based telephone service providers. Therefore, there is no doubt that these companies would be able to give you far better service and capabilities.

Is cost the primary consideration?

Most experts say that if cost is the primary consideration, hosted telephony is not the best option. There are a number of free VoIP solutions possible, but these do not provide you carrier-grade quality. If your business is going to rely on cloud-based telephony, you need to factor in quality of service issues and build your network accordingly. Based on the service level agreement with your service provider, there will be requirements of network optimization, last mile connectivity and bandwidth. These will determine how good your experience with cloud based telephony is.
 

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About the Guest Author:

Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.

Why Cloud-Based Rendering Could Be a Milestone in the Gaming Industry

Rendering via cloud services for high-end gaming is becoming more of a common sight, under the banner of accessibility to the masses.

Cloud-based animation tools allow game developers and animators to develop realistic graphics suited for very powerful games from a home PC, without need of expensive hardware. They design and develop the image or visual file from a cloud-based interface, and seamlessly render on powerful servers equipped with high-end graphic processors.

It is nearly impossible for people with limited financial resources to buy expensive graphic rendering machines, hence the cloud can help them collaborate with other developers and produce quality graphical game content. Experts believe such rendering capability paves the way for a future where consoles are modeled on cloud-based rendering services easily accessible by internet.

We might already be starting to witness evolution of Games as a Service (GaaS) platforms where a developer can run powerful games that require extensive graphic rendering capabilities on remote servers via a cloud service stream. The games rendering would have enough capability to stream the basic gaming platform to user devices and provide an operational platform for developers.

Such a system of using cloud computing for game rendering would result in significant cost reductions for gaming consoles thanks to a gaming cloud present exclusively for the required games.

Developers, meanwhile, need not make apps for multiple platforms nor test for adaptation in multiple platforms. They need simply create a single game file and submit to the remote server for rendering. The Games as a Service system would stream a compatible version of the game to every user device and realize multi-device portability for different stages of the games. Hence game rendering via the cloud facilitates game portability.

When game developers get cheap access to high-end gaming tools, they can concentrate more on developing more realistic and intense games without worrying about the possible resources needed to play the game.

Portable gaming solutions are almost here. Thanks to cloud.
 

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the Guest Author:

Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.

Rise of Western Social Games Good for Japanese Platforms

Social networking is exploding – and we’ll all be feeling the heat for years to come.

Social networking is not new. Before Twitter, Facebook and Google+, there was MySpace and Friendster. In terms of membership and daily traffic, these older sites have been left behind. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest have grown due to ease of sharing media.

Social Gaming on Social Networks

The growth of social networking sites has been hand-in-hand with that of social gaming companies like Kabam and Zynga.
Western developers have a lot to learn from the Japanese as the latter have monetized social gaming better. Japanese social gamers are more dependent on their mobile phones with 80% to 90% paying through phone bills.

Japanese Social Gaming on Social Networking Platforms

The Japanese social game market, like the social networking landscape is very insular. That said, Japan-based firms such as GREE and DeNA have been slow to export social games. GREE has teamed up with OpenFeint DeNA has also only recently launched games for the iPhone and iPad in the United States.

A recent trend has seen GREE and DeNA add social games from outside Japan into their domestic offerings. Their expansion strategy seems to be one of consolidation and saturation of the local market with their current war chests. It is almost as if they are preparing for a foreign invasion led by Android and iOS mobile phones and devices.

Even if foreign developers can take good advantage of Android and iOS in Japan, they will still need considerable help to succeed there. This might be achieved via partnership with GREE and DeNA’s, making use of their existing infrastructure to market and monetize games.
 

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About the Guest Author:

Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.