“We see the change as good news for some, not so good for others,” says David Bodnick, founder and chief technologist, WebINTENSIVE Software. “Corporations and major organizations will be able to better extend their brands online. Watch for .coke and .electRomney in the near future. Some smaller owners of existing .com’s will see their value increase, as they will continue to stand out in a growing crowd. However, this change will have a significant downside for untrademarked brands, especially smaller companies: they could be forced to depend on larger organizations for access to extensions they need, such as .pizza for a pizzeria.”

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

But to paraphrase a famous old skit, Flash isn’t quite dead yet. Flash’s wide user base and consistency across browsers, its advanced video features, and its ability to protect your proprietary materials still make it the best choice for many situations:

• For desktop users, Flash isn’t going anywhere; in the meantime, HTML5 is still gaining traction. Even if Adobe stops producing new versions of Flash, existing versions of Flash will be available to almost all desktop users for many, many years. Meanwhile, HTML5 is supported by maybe half of desktop browsers; many of its multimedia features are unavailable in Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009 and still widely used. This makes HTML5 problematic if you want a broad user base, though less so if your users are highly sophisticated and use the most modern browsers.

• Flash has tricks up its sleeve that HTML5 can’t match yet. The most prominent of these tricks is 3-D rendering, introduced in Flash 11; HTML5’s 3-D abilities are in a lesser state. Webcam interactions, live video streaming, fullscreen videos, and echo reduction are also in Flash but not yet possible in HTML5.

• Flash protects your copyrighted content; HTML5 doesn’t. It’s possible to apply DRM to Flash videos so that users cannot download and share them at will (at least not without a degree of effort that will deter casual users). HTML5, in contrast, does not currently support DRM in any meaningful way; it’s easy to download an HTML5 video, at least for now. This is a big reason why copyrighted materials are almost never shown in HTML5.

• Flash code is hidden; HTML5 code is open source. Anyone with a browser can review the source code of an HTML5 application simply by clicking “View Source.” This is a plus for members of design and programming communities who want to share their techniques publicly, but it’s a disaster for anyone who wants to keep their code proprietary.

However, there are also situations in which HTML5 is a better choice than Flash:

• The same HTML5 code can run on desktop and mobile devices… if that’s what you want. Because mobile devices such as smartphones have much smaller screens than do PC’s, a different interface will be appropriate for them to a greater or lesser degree. There may even be situations in which a different feature set would serve mobile devices better. In such cases the cross-platform nature of HTML5 is reduced in value, although it will still offer efficiencies.

• Because HTML5 is an extension of HTML, it’s better than Flash for jazzing up interfaces. For example, HTML5 can provide small animations and validation tools that make forms easier to use. Flash is completely unsuited to such a task, because it must have total control of a region of the screen that is independent of the rest.

• With HTML5, you join a community of cutting-edge developers and leading designers. Sharing drafts and ideas can lead to creative collaborations and new features and interfaces—but be sure to protect your proprietary techniques and content!

The Bottom Line

Flash is still the better choice in many cases—for its advanced video capabilities and for its ability to protect proprietary materials, but most of all for its wider user base. But HTML5 shows promise for the future, and is a good choice now for exploring ideas and for adding enhancements to non-Flash websites.

Dr. Chopra, whom Time magazine called “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine” and one of the top 100 influencers of the century, is the founder of the Chopra Foundation and the author of more than 60 books.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

For more than 35 years, JonesTrading has drawn on a unique block liquidity approach to serve a diverse mix of institutional traders.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

Published in 147 separate metropolitan areas, The Little Blue Book is continuously updated by professionals to ensure the most accurate and complete information in the industry. Each Little Blue Book contains all the contact information needed to efficiently keep a practice in touch with its local medical community.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

Spot Instances offer a useful alternative to the other options offered by Amazon:

• On Demand Instances give you the ability to ramp your capacity rapidly up and down, paying only for the amount you use.

• Reserved Instances allow you to reserve a given amount of computing capacity with an initial up-front payment, paying a discounted rate from then on.

With On Demand and Reserved Instances, you know exactly how much you will pay for a given amount of usage—but predictability does not necessarily lead to savings. If used correctly, Spot Instances can help you eliminate a large chunk of your hosting costs.

The Magic of Spot Instances

With Spot Instances, you place a bid to make use of Amazon’s unused capacity. But you won’t necessarily pay that amount. You pay Amazon’s Spot price, which can change from minute to minute with supply and demand.

The main condition is that your bid has to stay above the Spot price, or your instances will be terminated. In order to make sure you keep your service at all times, you should place your bid several times higher than the price for On Demand Instances—just in case the Spot price leaps upward.

The good news is that this will rarely happen! The vast majority of the time, the Spot price hangs well below the price for On Demand, as you can see on websites such as www.spothistory.com, a website that tracks historical trends in Spot pricing. Most price spikes last an hour or two at most.

Crunching the Numbers

The use of Spot Instances can result massive savings. Just to pick an example, if you are running a database on a High CPU Extra Large instance in Virginia, the On Demand price is $0.68 per hour. As these words are being written, the Spot price is $0.24 per hour—less than half the cost of On Demand.

If you launch Spot Instances with a bid of $3.00 per hour, that should virtually guarantee your ability to meet any plausible spikes in the Spot price. Yet your average cost in the long run is likely to stay under $.30.

For each Virginia standard instance, the costs over three years break down this way:

• On Demand: $2,234

• Reserved: $1,138

• Spot (at average 3.5c per day): $920

Viewed from this perspective, Spot Instances look like an excellent bargain.

What About Reserved Instances?

Although On Demand is clearly more expensive than Spot Instances, Reserved Instances might turn out to be slightly cheaper in some cases. Even so, consider the other advantages of Spot Instances:

• You don’t have to pay the up-front three-year fee for Reserved Instances, which can become substantial for larger instance types.

• If you outgrow your current instance type, you can upgrade to a new one without sacrificing a three-year sunk cost, as you would with Reserved pricing.

• You will benefit from further price drops over time, instead of being possibly locked in at the Reserved pricing.

• If you don’t use the machine some of the time, you save only a fraction of your costs with Reserved Instances—but 100 percent with Spot pricing.

Remember, you can drop Spot Instances and change your service at any time. If the price structure changes so that Reserved Instances become more attractive, you can switch over then.

Using Spot Instances Wisely

The greatest risk with Spot Instances is the possibility that the Spot price will rise above your bid, and you will lose the instance. If you set your initial bid high enough, the chance of that occurring is extremely small. Even so, when Spot Instances are terminated, they are terminated suddenly and without any notice—so it’s smart to take certain precautions.

For example, the strategic use of EBS volumes and other cloud architecture techniques can lower the chance that your data will be lost or corrupted if you lose the instance. In addition, your application should be configured to restart automatically, so you don’t have to waste time and money restarting a terminated instance manually.

Are Spot Instances guaranteed to be the best solution for your hosting needs? Under certain circumstances, possibly not:

• If even a brief interruption in service, however improbable, would have major costs for your organization—as in the case of some database servers.

• If an instance is handling a large amount of rapidly changing data.

• If you need to accommodate sudden bursts in usage (since Spot Instances take slightly longer to start than Amazon’s On Demand instances).

For most purposes, however, Spot Instances are likely to be just as effective as the alternatives, at a potentially far lower cost. Whether you are a newcomer to the Amazon cloud or a long-time user, Spot pricing is an option worth exploring.

5. Mobile Websites Avoid the App Store

Why release an app on iTunes, competing with thousands and thousands of other apps for the honor of Apple taking a slice of your revenue? This makes sense if you want to sell copies of a ninja zombie bird game to the mass market, but not if your goal is to distribute a business-oriented, database-backed product to your target audience.

4. Mobile Websites Use the Power of Tablets

Tablets have healthy-sized screens that can show more than just puny mobile-app interfaces. They’re also able to handle JavaScript and other useful Web 2.0 functions, like pop-up alerts. (New tablets even support Adobe Flash.) And as tablets’ market share grows, so will powerful, emerging HTML5 technologies—spurring more tablet purchases, and so on.

3. Wi-Fi Is Everywhere

One of the big selling points of mobile apps is that they can work without access to the Web. But as online access becomes ever more prolific, through both Wi-Fi and cellular access, this becomes less and less of an advantage.

2. One Mobile Website Covers Three Platforms

If you want to reach an iPad user, an Android user, and a Blackberry user with mobile apps—well, that’s three mobile apps. While there are products that make cross-platform app development possible, they leave a lot to be desired in the consistency and speed of the results. In contrast, one HTML5 site lets you give all three users a fast, elegant product.

1. Mobile Websites are Faster and Less Expensive to Create

Mobile apps have their place. There are many advanced functions for which they are superior to anything HTML5 can do. But for the many tasks that play to HTML5’s strengths, HTML5 saves a considerable amount of time and development cost. Faster, less expensive development means that you can add more features, spend more time on user testing, and still beat your competitors to the punch.

By giving HTML5 due consideration, you can make the best, most economical choice for your project—whether that turns out to be a HTML5 mobile website or a mobile app.

Professional paper cutting and handling equipment is used to produce nearly all printed material. The Cutter Doctor offers expert knowledge and best practices for using, maintaining, and repairing this sensitive, often idiosyncratic equipment. With The Cutter Doctor, Colter & Peterson’s specialists are expanding their service to their clients and highlighting their average of 38 years of experience in their field.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

“‘The risks of the cloud have been particularly salient for a few of our clients,’ says Bodnick, president of WebINTENSIVE Software, a New York company that develops online applications for dozens of customers such as LexisNexis, the United Nations, and Columbia University. One WebINTENSIVE client, a search engine called Startpage, didn’t want to use a cloud service because it feared its data might remain on remote servers, and Startpage promises customers that it won’t store their Web-search history. A health-care information company let WebINTENSIVE incorporate cloud storage into its application, but only if patient information were encrypted, which boosted the cost by 15 percent. ‘We are now getting questions that we didn’t before about the safety of hosting applications in the cloud,’ says Bodnick.”

You can read the full article here.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

According to a survey by the Ponemon Institute, many U.S. cloud providers put security low on their list of priorities. For example, only 25 percent of those surveyed said their IT leaders were concerned about the level of security they offer to customers. A large majority said cloud users, not providers, bear most of the responsibility for security.

If you assume your provider is looking out for the security of your data and systems, you may be setting yourself up for trouble. You can’t eliminate every threat, but there are many steps you can take to insulate yourself from the worst.

Know the Risks

When cloud security goes spectacularly wrong, it tends to make the news. Such incidents can help teach you what to look out for and how to shield your valuable data and systems. A few recent examples:

For almost four hours in June 2011, a bug in Dropbox’s authentication software allowed users to access any of its 25 million online storage accounts using any password. An unauthorized user reportedly took advantage of the error to log in to about a hundred user accounts. The damage could have been far worse.

What you can do:

• Build in multiple layers of protection, so that no single problem can lead to catastrophe. For instance, you can set up separate databases for each account, and have the login process connect to just one database, so a mistake that exposes one client’s data won’t expose that of others.

An intruder recently broke into the systems of Epsilon, a leading email marketing firm, and stole customer data from over two dozen corporations. Epsilon’s servers may have fallen victim to a SQL injection attack—a common tactic in which a hacker smuggles in malicious database commands through a vulnerable Web application. The use of a single large database to store information may have compounded the problem, by allowing a hacker who could see one customer’s data to access the data of other users as well.

What you can do:

• Verify that your programming team employs code reviews and test protocols to detect such specific vulnerabilities. The programming team can also force all attempts to access the database to go through just a few carefully vetted classes.

• Distribute portions of your data and your application among separate databases and even separate servers. Beware of placing all your data in a single place or system.

A TV production company is suing its former cloud provider, CyberLynk, for the loss of 14 episodes of an animated children’s show. According to the lawsuit, a fired employee regained access to CyberLynk’s systems and wiped out enough data to destroy almost an entire season of “Zodiac Island.” Even worse, CyberLynk’s backup procedures allegedly failed, making it impossible to reconstruct the lost programs.

What you can do:

• Take charge of disaster recovery. Implement your own strategy, using more than one provider to back up your systems and data.

• Minimize access to backup systems, and harden your backup servers to prevent intrusion attempts.

• Run periodic data recovery tests to make sure your backups are actually in place and can be recovered.

Last year, criminals broke into the system of a cloud provider used by Honda and stole information on 2.2 million customers, including vehicle identification numbers. It’s not clear how and why VINs ended up in an email marketing database. That gave the thieves access to even more sensitive data than they already had.

What you can do:

• Review your own organization’s procedures for handling and transferring data to the cloud. Make sure you’re not transferring any more than you have to.

• Encrypt sensitive data, and architect your systems so that especially sensitive data can only be decrypted by a separate machine. That way, a compromised server won’t endanger your information.

A huge proportion of Amazon cloud customers, a security research group has found, are leaving themselves open to attack by ignoring Amazon’s security guidelines. The researchers were able to infiltrate almost one-third of the virtual machines they tested, allowing them to extract passwords and other vital data.

What you can do:

• Be sure your organization understands and follows all of your provider’s security recommendations.

Better Safe Than Sorry

These are just some of the specific steps you can take to bolster your security in the cloud. Meanwhile, a few general principles always hold true:

• Understand and vet your provider’s security procedures and capabilities, and insist on transparency.

• Assume your providers are fallible, and use techniques such as encryption and data segregation accordingly.

• Make sure you have personnel who understand cloud security and know which questions to ask. The more internal resources you can draw on, the better.

Of course, you can’t control everything that happens. But as a cloud user, you do have the power to influence events. It is up to you to be vigilant, and do all you can to manage your risks.

Some organizations—especially larger ones—may have difficulty adapting all aspects of this approach to their needs. Fortunately, it’s entirely possible to borrow Agile’s insights and join them with other techniques for a flexible, yet orderly process of development.

What It Means to Be Agile

True to its name, Agile development takes place in a series of short, fast sprints, rather than the extended timeline of older approaches. Project members have the chance to start using pieces of the software early on. They can immediately incorporate the resulting insights, rather than wait for a larger system to come together.

In addition, many Agile developers dispense with extensive initial planning. They believe the most effective way to design a feature is to wait until they can see how other parts of the system work and how the different pieces need to fit together.

The Benefits of Structure

Despite Agile’s allure, there are also advantages to a more structured approach.

Vision. Careful initial planning can help establish how your target market will receive the final product, and whether the software will succeed in gaining customers and market share.

Budgeting and approval. Most large organizations will only contract for a project if they have a clear idea of what it will achieve, how much it will cost and how it will meet stakeholders’ needs. A solid initial plan can give them confidence that they will receive what their contractor has promised.

Architectural complexity. Developers can spare themselves frustration by tackling the hardest architectural challenges at the outset. That includes understanding how specific features will interact with the architecture and whether this will cause problems for the software.

The Best of Both Worlds

A hybrid process can provide many of the benefits of Agile development, while enhancing a developer’s ability to plan ahead and to preempt difficult challenges. WebINTENSIVE has had considerable success with its own version of this approach.

Planning Ahead. The development team begins by working with the client to produce a detailed set of business requirements. This document defines the project’s scope, without dictating every step of the development process.

Visualization. The next step is to develop wireframes, then create picture-perfect design mockups of the key interfaces. This allows the team to simulate the experience of using the product, think through the details and flesh out a vision for the software.

System Architecture. Team members focus on the project’s toughest architectural challenges before anything else. They make sure the architecture is solid and fulfills the system’s performance requirements, such as speed, hosting and the ability to scale.

Demonstration of Features. In tandem with initial work on the architecture, team members create a proof of concept for the core features of the software. They assess whether those features will require a particular architecture for the system as a whole—or even result in tradeoffs that make the project unworkable.

Development Sprints. Each 2- to 4-week sprint aims to produce a handful of useable features. As a result, developers have the chance to try out the software early and often, drawing on that experience to make improvements and correct course as they go.

Milestones. When possible, the team breaks a larger project into multiple phases and deployment. Once again, this method allows developers to learn from actual usage and make adjustments. It also makes it easier to meet deadlines, and it puts the most value-producing features in real use sooner, so that the system can be deployed even if some less crucial capabilities are still missing.

Documentation. Clear, comprehensive documentation, reviewed by expert programmers, ensures that new users and developers will have reliable guidance in the future.

An Adaptable Approach

Think of Agile development as one set of tools in a developer’s toolbox. Some tools are well suited to many projects and organizations, others less so. A smart strategy is to pick and choose, combining the best of these techniques with other methods that have shown their worth.

In light of these risks, it may help to bring in an outside party to vet the code of software you’ve internally developed. An independent team can make an evaluation free of bias. It may also have expertise in security threats and coding problems that your organization hasn’t seen before.

Your auditor should have proven expertise in developing, testing and reviewing code for the type of software in question. Be sure to rule out any conflicts of interest.

What Goes Into a Software Code Audit?

Programmers use a combination of automated testing and manual review to check for problems, document their findings and recommend fixes. A single audit could involve several different kinds of review, depending on the nature of the software and the needs of its users. For example:

Code security review. Hackers, using manual and automated attacks, try to exploit holes in software code. A well-conducted review will examine your code for vulnerabilities, then suggest ways to seal the gaps.

Functionality testing. In this phase of an audit, a programmer tries to break the code and documents his or her findings. The goal is to identify scenarios where users’ activities could cause the system to fail or malfunction.

Performance analysis. Programmers test the software and review its code to find any bottlenecks that will appear with high usage, as well as problems that may turn up when the system is used in certain ways. This information can help you optimize the system’s speed and efficiency.

Elegance and maintainability review. As your organization’s needs change, so do the demands you make on your software. An auditor can assess how simple or complex it is to alter a system and add new features or functionality, and what changes to the code could make the process easier.

Inline comments. The creators of a piece of code often insert text to explain its nuances to future programmers. By making sure these comments are meaningful and cogent, a skilled reviewer can prevent confusion later on.

Documentation review. An auditor can review all documentation of the source code and make sure it is accurate. This is crucial when an application has complex programming or an expected life of three years or more—when the original programmers may not be around to interpret the text.

An Investment in Your Business

To be sure, an audit takes time, and it adds to the expense of development in the short run. But it may save you far more time, money and trouble down the road.

When you’ve invested in developing a piece of software, it only makes sense to ensure it is solid from top to bottom. By adding an extra layer of quality control, you are buying confidence that vital systems will work when you need them.

With roots reaching back almost 40 years in its community, Callen-Lorde provides a sensitive, non-judgmental environment where patients receive personalized attention, including assistance with referrals, insurance, and housing. They also specialize in mobile medical outreach for homeless youth and other patients who are unable to visit their facility.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

For example, cloud-savvy developers prioritize minimizing the use of CPU and, to a lesser extent, bandwidth. Inappropriately implemented, rich front-end technologies like JavaScript with AJAX, Silverlight, HTML5, or Flash gobble CPU and bandwidth, driving cloud costs sky high. But with the right architecture, even these technologies can be efficient and cost-effective.

The firm, a B2B supplier of big-ticket equipment, had an online directory of used and rebuilt items. Despite being the best directory of its kind in the business, it was producing only a small number of leads.

We created a PPC campaign for the firm that brings in large numbers of fresh visitors daily. The firm’s own earlier PPC efforts had been stuck at an under 1% clickthrough rate (CTR). But our campaign built up to a 7% CTR – with important keywords having much higher CTR’s.

At the same time, we guided several conversion strategies to turn these fresh visitors into sales leads:

• The site’s home page was rewritten to directly and in detail describe the unique value the firm provides its customers.
• Clear pathways through the site, with large buttons, lead visitors through each step on the way to the contact page.
• The contact form automatically inserts a description of each user’s interest, based on how they reached the form

The upsurge in leads goes to show the benefits of thinking of website and PPC campaign as an organic whole.

PPTshuffle is an enterprise-level PowerPoint library management tool, used by Fortune-level companies such as John Deere, Hertz, DHL Global Forwarding, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Dell.

It enables organizations to save time and money in managing thousands of slides, including those with video, audio and animation, and to share and create new PowerPoint files through a browser window—all while ensuring compliance and collecting business intelligence on the back end.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

WebINTENSIVE client Yackit recently presented this exciting service to more than 1,200 technologists and industry leaders at the prestigious New York Tech Meet Up.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

The workshop was held to provide the U.S. Army with information and industry best practices for its efforts to conform with the federal government’s Cloud First initiative.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

“Almost every day we experience or learn of occurrences that can be quite important to businesses or particular projects. WebINTENSIVELY Speaking is a way we can share these developments with folks who can benefit from them,” said Ned Boyajian, Vice President, IT Initiatives.

New York-based WebINTENSIVE provides custom software, mobile apps, system integration, and hosting configuration for leading organizations in the U.S. and globally.

The short answer is “yes, but…” Here’s the long answer.

Leveraging the Old, Embracing the New

Software. Your agency can probably move all or most of its current software as well as data storage and processing to the cloud, with major benefits for your IT and business operations. In fact, a cloud-based approach makes excellent economic sense for most government organizations that want to keep their existing software.

Hosting software on the cloud removes the need for specialized hardware, which tends to cut costs in the long term. Not only that, but improving the system and implementing changes becomes cheaper and easier.

Operating Systems. It’s possible to install most types of operating systems on a cloud infrastructure, including recent versions of some mainframe operating systems, as long as they can run on commodity hardware. Your cloud provider doesn’t have to use the same hardware you do now; software emulation can enable the operating system to run on other cloud hardware.

Still, older operating systems and some operating systems that need to run on large, expensive mainframes may not be a good fit for the cloud. It’s often more cost effective to give up those operating systems and migrate your applications to a Web services infrastructure using a widespread language such as Java.

The initial migration comes with a price. But you’ll benefit afterward from lower maintenance costs, and the code will be much easier to maintain.

But Don’t Forget Licensing Fees

Licensing fees can complicate this picture. For instance, a mainframe operating system and its licensed modules may cost a hefty sum per server instance to run on a cloud infrastructure. If you’re running many low-powered instances, such expenditures can cancel out the economic gains of moving to the cloud.

In short, the real barriers to moving your legacy systems to the cloud may not be technical, but practical and financial.

All else being equal, the chances are good that cloud computing will work for your organization, even if you want to keep the software systems you have now.

For answers to your particular cloud-related questions, just call 212-447-1100 or email info@webintensive.com.