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12.21.2012What Can Rendering Service Market Get From Cloud Computing?
12.20.2012Penetrating the Japanese Social Gaming World With the Help of Japanese Social Gaming Companies
12.19.2012Cloud-Based Rendering – the Logical Next Step for Render Farms
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11.12.2012
Small businesses have been identified as the most unwilling adopters of cloud technology. This is due in part to the confusion the term “cloud computing” evokes in many managers of small businesses. Some think cloud technology represents another complex process that may be time-demanding and expensive; others simply do not want to spend their time and hard-earned resources on a supposedly new computing method of which efficiency they have no opportunity of confirming.
Here are some interesting discoveries: a large number of small businesses have Gmail, which means that they had already, unknowingly transferred their email service to the cloud through Google; some also utilize third-party storage facilities which are hosted in the cloud but which the business owners have no knowledge of. So, what is then the fuss about adopting cloud computing or not?
Small businesses have a lot to gain from using cloud computing. One of the great benefits of this is that they can be sure of continuous access by their clients or customers. When a business moves its operations from one physical location to another, its clients/customers will be required to wait for a certain of period of time until the business is set up at another physical location. However, cloud computing bridges this moment of transition and helps businesses keep their operations on-going even though they change office locations.
Business continuity, in this way, guarantees regular generation of revenues in the sense that client relationship will be unaffected by the move and they can enjoy the services that such a business renders.
Whether small business owners pay $50 a month or more to keep their IT infrastructure, data, email service etc in the cloud, they can still enjoy the rare advantage of gradually upgrading or scaling down their IT requirements with regard to storage capacity and other needs. This flexibility reveals that they can save on their IT expenses when compared to the cost of hiring IT personnel and maintaining in-house IT structure which are not scalable or flexible.
Most small business owners are yet unconvinced that cloud computing can offer the much needed protection for their data/information. This may have been the main fear that kept many small businesses from moving their entire IT systems to cloud. However, some recent developments in IT security and protection should be considered as positive signs that cloud computing is not as bad as managers of small businesses think it is—these latest developments point to the fact that cloud computing service providers also worry about satisfying their clients in this regard.
Hence, they constantly look for ways to make their clients’ IT systems secure, accessible and maintained in a fashion that business continuity will be possible. As a matter of fact, providing constant security to clients’ IT infrastructures does not only help cloud computing service providers to keep their customers, but it also helps their own businesses to grow. So, this is virtually a mutually beneficial relationship.
If small businesses are not expected to worry about the cost of maintaining in-house IT systems, hiring, training and maintaining IT personnel and securing their IT structures from time to time, it is clear that the excesses that would have been spent on the processes outlined above can be put to a more productive use.
This entails that small businesses can enjoy the opportunity of cost-efficiency as they divert unused funds to other areas of their business activities. This is why, specifically, cloud computing has been regarded as a tool for business innovation. Cloud technology helps businesses identify new areas of operations as well as maintaining the status quo in their current business activities.
Therefore, if there is anyone that must first consider using cloud computing, it should be managers of small businesses because of the benefits this approach will bring to their businesses.
One of the unique characteristics of GMO Cloud is its capability to adjust instantly on the demand of the user – on top of the base plan. This allows the users to maximize whatever resources they subscribe to without worrying about wastage. Visit the suggested configuration page to see which one is the likely fit for your organization and see the pricing for further details.
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:
Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/
11.9.2012
The Japanese cell phone market has always been known to be a tough market to crack. Even at the height of Nokia’s worldwide market domination, it was not able to get even 10 percent of the Japanese cellphone market. The reason for this is that Japan has a large number of feature phone manufacturers and a phone feature set which is unique to the country.
The use of feature phones is also the reason that the Japanese mobile phone app market landscape is completely different from the rest of the world. This has led to very hard market penetration for foreign-made phone apps. With the recent success of iOS and Android phones, the social game market seems to be opening up on its own accord. In dollar terms, the size of the Japanese market for social games on the PC and mobile devices was $3.6 billion in 2011.
For social game developers this is both good news and bad news. The good news is that, it is an opportunity for social game developers to enter the lucrative Japanese social games market. With Apple’s iOS mobile devices, selling via the Apple Store is a relatively easy point of entry for crashing into the Japanese market. The same is true for Android devices with Google Play. The downside is that the app and the website needs to be accessible to Japanese who do not speak the language. This would entail revising the program interface to enable Japanese characters.
The Japanese passion for games goes very deep. Some of the social games played in Japan are endemic to the country and its people. Besides the language and graphics reflecting Japanese landmarks and street scenes, Japanese pop culture is another heavy influence on game design.
There are some game genres which are unique to Japan. These include:
These genres are practically non-existent outside of Japan. Software and gaming companies outside of Japan wanting to get a slice of the market would do well to take a look at the possibilities of creating for these types of games. With iOS and Android devices having a high penetration rate into the market, major players would be getting into the market as well. Foreign software developers need to have a good and stable infrastructure to host the social services.
An alternative to penetrating the market would be to partner with a social network application provider. The top three social network application providers (MIXI, DeNA and GREE) have at least 15 million users. In contrast, Facebook Japan has only 1 million gamers. Partnering with a Japanese game service provider gives the developer a leg up. With this setup, the service provider will serve as the billing and collection agent. The service provider’s internal synergies would also promote the new game. On top of that, the monetization model of Japanese social game service providers yield better gains than comparable Western companies.
Getting into the Japanese social game market is hard but not impossible. There are some necessary changes or revisions to make the program more culturally acceptable. Choosing the right hosting partner and game translation service are also necessary. Partnering with an established social game service provider is important to make use of their existing infrastructure. In lieu of an established game, creating a social game within a niche Japanese genre, from scratch, might be a better option rather than simply migrating an already successful game based on Western models.
The Japanese market for social games is big but different. The opportunities are there for big rewards. However, as a lot of Western companies have found out, doing business is not that easy. In order to be successful, foreign game developers have to be truly immersed in the culture and use that to their advantage.
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:
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.
11.8.2012
Any large cloud vendor would have several data centers located in many different parts of the world. Between all of these data centers, there would be tens of thousands of disks, CPUs, RAM chips and networking devices. All of this equipment would be of differing vintage. Even if all data centers started off with identical equipment (which is seldom the case since they do not get built all together), over time, they would be subject to differing schedules of hardware maintenance and replacement of unserviceable components. Therefore, with the passage of time, even the most strictly managed data centers will tend to become heterogeneous in nature.
The end result of this variation in equipment is that differences in performances begin to appear for different cloud instances. Since cloud usage is typically charged over the hour (per minute charging is also emerging now), if you are able to move your application to a cluster with higher performance, you can achieve significant savings. The question is how to find clusters that are faster and more efficient.
Recent research at Aalto University Finland and Deutsch Telekom Laboratories, Germany focused on understanding hardware variations between data centers of the same vendor and studied the performance variation between various instances. While they studied a global vendor offering PaaS services, the results would be applicable to all large vendors. (It is possible that small cloud computing vendors may be able to have a greater degree of similarity of hardware).
The researchers used standard operating system commands to obtain the CPU details of their clusters and verified the output using other system calls. After considerable effort, they determined that the vendor had the following different types of CPUs –
|
S No |
CPU Name |
% availability in 2011 |
% availability in 2012 |
| 1 |
E5507 |
58% |
40% |
| 2 |
E5430 |
29% |
17% |
| 3 |
E5645 |
5% |
42% |
| 4 |
2218HE |
4% |
1% |
| 5 |
270 |
4% |
0% |
The trend is very clearly visible – the vendor is slowly phasing out the processors at serial numbers 1,2,4 and 5 of the table above and is switching over to E5645 (serial number 3).
When the list of CPUs was broken down by availability zones, there were some zones where the newer E5645 processor was barely present (<10%) and in some others, the numbers had risen to nearly 90%. Obviously, new data centers had the most modern processors. When the output of the different processors was compared, it was seen that there were differences amongst all and that the new ones were delivering 1.25 times the throughput of the next best ones. Compared with the earliest CPUs, there was a performance difference of more than 1.6 times.
Armed with these results, the research team began to calculate costs. After a fair amount of calculations, liberally laced with probability and calculus, some very interesting answers emerged.
If a large task took 100 server instances and took a year to complete, then by switching the instances from old processors to new ones (with a 1.6 times performance advantage), there was a net saving of $40,664 (the per hour rate of the original instance was $0.34). If you are a small business hoping to make a major impact in your domain, this kind of saving is very significant.
If users take some care to select those data centers where the infrastructure is new, they would be automatically getting the better processors and other hardware. Users who are aware of these issues can select instances where they getter better performance.
In times such as this, where every dollar needs to be squeezed for maximum value, this research offers companies a simple way to further reduce expenditure.
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:
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.
11.7.2012
In May of 2012, the Japanese government banned kompu gacha dealing a huge blow to Japan’s biggest social gaming companies. Gacha is a game mechanic in which players test their luck for their chance to win a mystery item paying real world money for each of these transactions. Since the transactions are absolutely random, there are many documented cases of players spending exorbitant amounts in an attempt to win a specific virtual item. However, a lack of regulation meant that some companies could set the chances of winning an item at practically zero, meaning that players would be paying repeatedly in an addictive, and useless pursuit of a virtual item.
Why kompu gacha was banned in the first place
In the case of kompu gacha, translated roughly as “complete gacha”, players would have to collect several items in order to get a chance of winning a larger, rarer prize. Essentially, kompu gacha was a game of bingo with no way for players to know the chances of drawing a particular “number.” Adding to this, the potentially addictive mechanic of collecting items led to the government banning these practices. Kompu gacha played a huge part in the record profits that had been posted by Japanese social gaming giants like DeNA and GREE.
The main problem here was that players enjoyed the kompu gacha mechanics, something that was viewed gleefully by gaming developers as a win-win situation. However, kompu gacha makes winning the prize so random that it essentially becomes a gambling mechanic. Since underage children often had access to games using the kompu gacha mechanic, this was an inexcusable situation for Japanese lawmakers. The two cases that made headlines included a child in middle school that spent more than five thousand dollars in a month on kompu gacha games and an even younger child that spent more than a thousand dollars in only a couple of days. After the scandal that followed, the government was forced to start regulating the game industry and ban these kinds of game mechanics.
Although kompu gacha was banned, gacha remains alive today
Paying for a chance to win a virtual prize is still a core game mechanic. In fact, at least 80% of the most popular social games still include gacha machines and, for many game developers, the revenue from gacha’s micro transactions contributes more than half of their games’ revenue. However, the industry has taken some measures to reduce uncertainty in gacha and allow players to predict what is going to happen and how much they are willing to spend on winning a particular prize. Most gacha machines allow players to “spin the wheel” for one hundred Yen. There are also gacha machines with a higher chance of a better payout that offer spins for three hundred Yen.
Replacing kompu gacha with box gacha
As soon as gaming companies caught wind of the possible banning of kompu gacha, they started trying out different gaming mechanics that satisfy their customers’ need for betting real world money for the chance of winning a virtual prize. However, these new methods would necessarily need to be more predictable and less addictive than their predecessors.
A mechanic known as package gacha or box gacha has started to gain popularity as an alternative to abusive kompu gacha mechanics of the past, allowing players to have the same thrill of potentially winning a rare item after spinning. Basically, box gacha involves “filling” a gacha machine with a set number of game items or cards, fully disclosing the number of cards in the machine, how many of them are common, less common, rare, super rare, and even super special rare.
In normal gacha, each spin’s odds would be reset, meaning that every spin would have the same odds of hitting a rare prize. However, with box gacha each time a prize is won it is “removed” from the box, letting players know that they can win the prize they want if they play a certain number of times. Each spin increases the probabilities of winning a particular super rare or super special rare prize. This is definitely an improvement over kompu gacha, where there are cases of players that paid millions of Yen without every hitting the rare prize they were seeking.
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:
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.
