She was in New York yesterday for a lunch with a few journalists, primarily to talk about Intel’s latest generation of Xeon processors for servers. Before they were officially released, these chips were known primarily by their code name, Romley, and often still are when analysts and others talk about them, because the code names are easier to remember than the product names, which, for the record in this case, is Xeon Processor E5-2600.

The Romley generation of chips builds on the foundation of Intel’s previous generation of server chips, known by its code name, Nehalem. The main benefit, which Bryant and other Intel execs and customers explain in lengthy detail in this video from the product’s launch in San Francisco three weeks ago, is that the chip is 80 percent faster at certain computing jobs, according to independent tests. At the same time, it is 50 percent more energy efficient.

Executives who operate data centers generally worry about two things: The raw number-crunching power they can squeeze out of the chips in their densely packed racks of servers, and the cost of the power required to keep them running and also keep them cool. So the introduction of a chip that can get more work done in a shorter amount of time while using half as much power is, at first glance, a pretty compelling moment to consider an upgrade.

And yet, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In a survey of 100 CIOs of large enterprises conducted by the investment bank J.P. Morgan, 91 said that they didn’t see Intel’s Romley chips as much of a catalyst for upgrades in their data center. Most seemed happy with the Nehalem-generation chips they had just purchased in servers during the past two to four years.

I was eager to share this result with Bryant to see what she said, and was too rude to wait until the salad course had arrived. For a moment, she was surprised — 91 percent is a pretty large percentage, after all. But the surprise didn’t last more than a few seconds.

Off the top of her head, Bryant rattled off the following, which I’m paraphrasing. On a recent visit with a customer who happens to be one of the 100 largest companies in the world — she wasn’t at liberty to identify it — Intel found an interesting result.

A check of the company’s data centers found that 36 percent — a little more than a third — of its servers were using chips that were more than four years old, meaning that they dated back to the dim mists of the days before Nehalem.

Those servers, it turned out, were responsible for consuming 65 percent — nearly two thirds — of its power supply. And how much computing muscle was the company getting for all this power? Precious little: The servers in question provided only 4 percent of the computing power of its infrastructure. To sum up: A third of the data center footprint was eating up two-thirds of the power budget, but providing less than one-twentieth of the overall computing capacity. Those older chips just aren’t pulling their weight.

“This is is extremely typical of what we’re seeing,” Bryant told me. Even so, she conceded that a customer running a larger percentage of more-recent chips — Nehalem and its newer variants — in its infrastructure might not see the sufficient bang for the buck of an upgrade that anyone running a lot of servers with older chips probably would.

I have to admit it was a pretty good answer.

AT&T already offers its clients services in China, including virtual private networks, which enable secure connections between different geographies, by partnering with China Telecom to use its local network infrastructure, made up of fibers and switches. But the new deal deepens ties between the two companies, which have had a joint venture with Shanghai Information Investment Co. called Shanghai Symphony Telecommunications Co. since 2000, giving AT&T more access to China Telecom’s infrastructure, and vice versa.

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Maybe get something cooking in the whole what-will-Yahoo-do stakes, now that one of Yahoo’s more active board members is back.

And by “back,” I mean that Kenny — no longer a candidate for CEO — has no further need to recuse himself from the strategic process in which the Silicon Valley Internet company finds itself.

In an interview with Advertising Age last week, Kenny — the well-regarded online ad exec who recently stepped down as president of network infrastructure giant Akamai — released an unusual statement:

As a matter of policy, I do not comment on matters related to Yahoo as a Yahoo director. However, as a personal matter, I want to clarify that I believe Yahoo is a great company with enormous potential, but I am not — and will not be — a candidate for the CEO position. I look forward to my continued service on the Yahoo Board of Directors.”

By removing himself from the fray, that means, according to several sources, that Kenny will be diving back into sleeve-rolling duties at Yahoo, as one of its — how can I put this? — less comatose board members.

In fact — until he was sidelined by the obvious conflict of interest inherent in wanting to be CEO, while also directing the fate of Yahoo for shareholder value — Kenny had been deeply involved in a lot of the changes that had taken place of late, after a long period of board inaction.

That included the ouster of CEO Carol Bartz, who was fired for a number of reasons, including lack of strategic vision. It was relatively new board member Kenny — he became a director in February — who led the strategy committee that had asked Bartz for her road map, which she did not deliver to their liking. Obviously.

Because of the swirl around his possible CEO candidacy — Kenny was a noticeable inside candidate, since he is well known in the Internet advertising world for running and then selling Digitas to the Publicis Groupe for $1.3 billion in 2006 — he gave up leadership of the committee to Intuit President Brad Smith.

Sources said it is unlikely Kenny will get that top job back, but he remains a member of the transactions committee, which is leading the strategic review of the company.

That’s the key slot for the independent board members of Yahoo, who must ultimately be the ones to determine what path or offer the company will take.

One plus: Kenny has close relationships with most of the bidders — largely private equity firms — looking at Yahoo, and also is well known among the media and tech companies poking around, too. He also has advertising — and now tech — experience, which will be much needed as Yahoo explores its options.

Most importantly, Kenny is an independent director, which will be very important to the process going forward, especially since a lot of the spotlight has fallen on Yahoo co-founder and director Jerry Yang.

Yang — who has been a bit of a Yahoo lightning rod at times — has been involved in some of the meetings with those interested, along with interim CEO Tim Morse. The company recently noted that this was at the behest of the board.

While these were only informational meetings so far — and not negotiations, as some reports have surmised — Yang’s involvement will likely have to be more curtailed, at least publicly, especially if any of the deals include using his own large stake in Yahoo.

“This process has to be above board, since it is so easy for those wanting a better deal to try to cause all kinds of trouble,” said one source. “The company is already under attack in that regard.”

That’s a reference to a recent salvo by hedge fund activist Dan Loeb, a major Yahoo shareholder who has taken aim at the board and, last week, at Yang. Loeb essentially accused Yang of double-dealing in the process.

Enter Kenny, along with Smith and — to an increasingly lesser extent, of late — Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock. While there are other independent board members involved, these are the three to watch most closely now.

While some think Kenny still would like to be CEO of Yahoo — he was also on the short list several years ago when Bartz was hired — sources said he is more likely to take a job at another consumer Internet company.

While he certainly could slot into a large advertising firm or into the digital division of a big media concern, sources said Kenny is looking to be a CEO.

Just not at Yahoo.

At least for now, since down the road it is unclear what will become of Yahoo and who will run it in years to come.

In fact, it might even be Kenny in the end.

Among the hot and hyped Web 2.0 scene, not many would pick out 13-year-old digital promotions site, Coupons.com.

But, on the heels of a recent $200 million funding — which valued the quiet Mountain View, Calif., company at $1 billion — and a surging online discounting market, it has nabbed another $30 million from Greylock Partners.

Greylock has already invested half that amount, via a secondary market transaction, and is Coupons.com’s first venture investor. Its previous funders have been institutional investors.

“Coupons.com have been quietly building all the key infrastructure in this area,” said Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. “We think they are poised for the massive shift that is coming.”

The new funds, said its CEO and co-founder Steven Boal, will be used for a variety of things, including an aggressive mobile and social push for the longtime site.

“We are now focusing on hypergrowth,” said Boal, who noted that coupon clipping is perhaps the original social media. “Saving is kind of hip these days, even if we have been around for a long time with this exact focus.”

Coupons.com had already moved in the mobile/social direction with the 2009 acquisition of Grocery iQ, a mobile app that lets users manage shopping lists and discounts on phones.

There will be more to come, said Boal, who said the growth of the category is inevitable as consumers use these devices to manage their spending habits.

Coupons.com will also use the funds to expand its staff from 288 employees now to more than 450 by the end of the year, operating in about 13 countries. While Coupons.com has been profitable on a cash-flow basis, all the new initiatives will be costly.

And, while that kind of expansion could remind you of the explosive daily deals sector — and it is easy to put Coupons.com in the same highly competitive arena as Groupon — the company operates more as a platform and a white-label provider of discounting services to manufacturers and retailers, especially supermarkets and chain stores.

In fact, Coupons.com provides a lot of such services for them, garnering $100 million in revenue this year, up from $60 million last year and $40 million the year before. Much of that money is made when a customer uses its site or sites it powers and downloads a coupon for redemption.

One area of promising growth, said Boal, is managing discounts on Facebook’s social networking site, which is increasingly being used by consumer goods companies to test promotions and increase loyalty.

“It’s a really interesting area as product companies can be really nimble in managing their promotions,” he said. “And the ability to really drill down on the response of a certain sector of consumer is very powerful.”

It goes without saying that newspapers that previously dominated this industry have been on the wane.

The massive funding also sets up Coupons.com for a possible 2012 IPO, especially given its dominance — it serves nine out of 10 big grocery chains, four out of four pharmacy giants and such — in the digital couponing sector.

Presumably, there would be no discounts for that stock.

Here’s the official press release:

COUPONS.COM ANNOUNCES GREYLOCK PARTNERS INVESTMENT

Company’s Rapid Growth Including Mobile and Social Couponing Solutions to Benefit from Greylock’s Expertise

Mountain View, Calif. — October 3, 2011 — Coupons.com Incorporated, the recognized leader in digital coupons, including online printable, social, mobile and loyalty card promotions, today announced an investment by Greylock Partners. Coupons.com, which recently raised $200 million from institutional investors, is transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry and accelerating the shift from the newspaper to digital. The investment, a secondary market transaction, will enable the company to tap into Greylock’s expertise as it continues to produce market-transforming couponing solutions, including its mobile- and social-based products and services.

“We are very excited to work with Reid Hoffman and James Slavet and the entire Greylock team,” said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com. “Greylock’s expertise and relationships will prove invaluable as we continue connecting brands with consumers via money-saving offers at every touch-point across the digital landscape — including web, social and mobile — and along the consumer’s entire path to purchase.”

“We’re very pleased with our investment in Coupons.com and are excited about working with the team as they continue to build a substantial, market-defining company,” said Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock Partners. “Coupons.com is almost single handedly transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry by ushering the newspaper-dominated business to digital. The market opportunity the company faces is immense, and we look forward to contributing in any way to their continued success, particularly in the context of social and mobile solutions.”

Coupons.com powers the vast majority of coupons printed online via a network of tens of thousands of sites in addition to their flagship site, Coupons.com, which is the 39th most trafficked site in the country. Coupons.com Incorporated is also the go-to resource for manufacturers wanting to coupon-enable their digital marketing initiatives, and virtually every major consumer packaged goods manufacturer resides on the company’s client roster. The company is aggressively building its team, expanding its full time staff from 288 employees in June to more than 450 expected by the end of the year, a growth of over 50 percent during the six-month period.

In addition to capturing a growing share of the multi-billion dollar newspaper-dominated coupon industry, Coupons.com is also expanding the couponing market by lowering the barriers to entry for companies to offer coupons, enabling smaller manufacturers — which could not place offers in the newspaper insert because of budget requirements or category exclusivity restrictions — to utilize coupons to engage with consumers. In addition, Coupons.com attracts a new demographic of coupon users, who engage with new couponing methods like digital, social and mobile coupons, but typically would not engage with traditional paper coupons.

There are no reports of damage as yet, but it appears that cellular networks are affected by one of two things: Either they’re being overwhelmed by people making calls to talk about the quake and let loved ones know they’re okay, or because of some other disruption.

Californians accustomed to this sort of thing will likely roll their eyes at all the drama for a paltry 5.9, but for New Yorkers this is something new.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a nuclear power plant in central Virginia has lost offsite power. However, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the reactors are safe.

Reports and tweets say that various aspects of wireless service are up or down. One minute voice calls are down, but texting and data still works, and then only data works. Here are a few, all only a few minutes old:

I really wish my phone would start to work already, @ATT. If you can’t handle a minor earthquake, how’re you gonna handle a real emergency?

August 23, 2011 11:35 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@jjburnett82

Josh Burnett

RT @cfohlin: There goes the ATT network. *sigh* #earthquake

August 23, 2011 11:35 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@robertfpeterson

Robert Peterson

#earthquake — didn’t feel a thing thankfully, but Verizon calls are going nowhere at the moment

August 23, 2011 11:17 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@nourishnyc

Marissa Lippert

#EarthQuake: T-Mobile Cell coverage is down in Tysons Corner, VA

August 23, 2011 11:37 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@PerryInDC

PerryA

Its gonna be a major earthquake in sprint in about 15 min if my phone still aint workn

August 23, 2011 11:57 am via UberSocial for BlackBerryReplyRetweetFavorite

@NYCDEE

Skateboard Dee

Heard that mobile service was impacted from #earthquake. @att users: is this quake related or just Tuesday?

August 23, 2011 11:38 am via TweetCaster for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@TWSS37

Tim K

Web traffic doesn’t seem to be spiking in any significant way based on this Akamai realtime Web monitor. There’s a small area glowing red in the northeast, but its hard to know if that’s above normal.

I just heard on the local NBC affiliate that some of the airports in the region are closing temporarily, including New York’s JFK and Reagan National in DC.

Here’s a Tweet from Verizon spokesman John O’Malley:

No reports of damage to #Verizon Wireless network. Was some network congestion in the East after tremors. Continuing to monitor. #earthquake

August 23, 2011 11:52 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@VZWjohno

John O’Malley

Here’s a statement from Sprint:

Customers in East may experience intermittent delay making/receiving calls after recent earthquake. This is a temporary mass calling event.

August 23, 2011 11:35 am via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@sprint

Sprint

And one from T-Mobile:

T-Mobile’s network is operational but is experiencing higher call volumes in areas affected by the earthquake. SMS & E-Mail are advised.

August 23, 2011 12:29 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@TMobile

T-Mobile USA

I’m seeing reports of various places that were evacuated: The Associated Press reported that the Pentagon was evacuated. I heard on local media reports that New York’s City Hall was evacuated. I heard the Town Hall in Huntington, Long Island was evacuated. The AP just sent two alerts saying that the National Weather says no tsunami is expected following the quake. Additionally, it reports that the National Park Service has closed all monuments and memorials on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

I happen to be out on the East End of Long Island, and I can tell you that we felt it slightly here. I was sitting at my desk working on a post when I felt my chair sway slightly for what seemed like a good 30 seconds or so.

The U.S. Geological Survey just sent an updated report. You can subscribe to them via email here.

== PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE REPORT ==

Region: VIRGINIA
Geographic coordinates: 37.881N, 77.952W
Magnitude: 5.9 Mw
Depth: 0 km
Universal Time (UTC): 23 Aug 2011 17:51:04
Time near the Epicenter: 23 Aug 2011 13:51:04
Local standard time in your area: 23 Aug 2011 12:51:04

Location with respect to nearby cities:
14 km (9 miles) SSW (195 degrees) of Mineral, VA
17 km (10 miles) SSE (165 degrees) of Louisa, VA
23 km (14 miles) NE (52 degrees) of Columbia, VA
58 km (36 miles) NW (312 degrees) of Richmond, VA
141 km (88 miles) SW (216 degrees) of Washington, DC

And if all that weren’t enough, there’s Hurricane Irene, which is making its way up the East Coast and expected to affect the Washington DC and New York areas by Sunday.

The New York Times is quoting Dr. Arthur Lener-Lam of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Division of Seismology, saying the area of Virginia where the quake was centered is known for what he calls “geologically old faults,” and is known for frequent small quakes.

UPDATE: In a statement, wireless industry group CTIA reported: “The industry’s infrastructure appears to be intact, but because many wireless consumers are using the networks, we are experiencing higher than normal traffic. In these high volume instances, there can be delays. We encourage people to send text messages and emails to contact their loved ones until volume returns to normal.”

That’s how the late British writer Douglas Adams tried to quantify the size of the universe. Once a year, networking giant Cisco Systems tries to do the same thing regarding the Internet. Its measurements, given Cisco’s insight into the amount of networking gear being sold to service providers, are a tad more precise.

Cisco, which released its annual Visual Networking Index forecast today, says that the total amount of Internet traffic will quadruple by 2015 to reach a level of 966 exabytes consumed over networks annually. That’s nearly a fully zettabyte. (For those keeping score, the next unit of measure is the yottabyte, and beyond that there is no name yet chosen.) On an hourly basis, the amount of data consumed will equal the contents of 28 million DVDs. The increase of 200 exabytes between 2014 and 2015 is by itself more than all the data consumed in 2010.

I talked with Suraj Shetty, Vice President of Global Service Provider Marketing at Cisco’s service provider unit, who told me that what’s driving all this data consumption is the explosion of wireless devices joining the network, but then you knew that already. Video is also a big driver–Cisco certainly has staked a lot of its strategic future on video–and will by its reckoning account for more than 61 percent of total traffic on the Internet by 2015 versus 40 percent today.

Consumers are responsible for most of that growth, Shetty says, accounting for about 87 percent of the increase. Households will be consuming on average about 62 gigabytes per month on a global basis, though that will vary greatly by region, he says. In the U.S., for example, your average household will consume more than 100 gigabytes per month.

Since we’re talking about big things that are hard to comprehend, I thought I’d include the image above, which is the very latest map showing all of the known universe, courtesy of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Today and tomorrow, Yahoo’s directors are gathering here in Silicon Valley for one of their regular meetings that take place over the course of the year.

While board meetings in general are usually pretty dull affairs–and Yahoo’s, in particular, are typically glacial ones–there is a lot on the plates of those with purview over the machinations of the long-struggling Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Here’s a primer of what might (and might not) be happening, according to sources, of course, as Yahoo continues on its quest to reinvigorate itself–a journey that is beginning to make Siddhartha’s transformation into Buddha enlightenment look speedy.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment on anything below, although I did run it all by them.

The U-Shaped Turnaround

At Yahoo’s recent sales meeting in San Antonio, CEO Carol Bartz went all Sesame Street on the troops, using the letter “U” as an illustration to indicate where in the cycle the company was in its turnaround.

Apparently, just on the other side of the very bottom of the letter, heading inevitably upward.

Her argument was that the company has finally cleaned up its platform mess and its confusing corporate structure, and that its display and search advertising business is now recovering nicely.

All true, except there are some other key issues, such as the slowness of the search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft to make some serious hay.

In fact, although its display business will show a definite strong recovery in Yahoo’s quarterly results next week, its search business–both in market share and revenue per search (RPS)–has, as one person close to the situation put it succintly, “fallen off the cliff.”

That’s due, in part, to getting the new system with Microsoft delivering better results, which is not happening yet (if ever!).

In this quarter, Microsoft has honored its contractual guarantees and will make up the difference–which will result in masking the magnitude of the RPS loss. It’s a worrisome trend to watch.

The Asia Situation

Yahoo and its Asian partners are still mulling over various options regarding the company’s large ownership stakes there.

What is happening with its share in China’s Alibaba Group, according to sources, is precisely nothing right now, as has been made clear in recent comments by its CEO and co-founder Jack Ma.

“If you cannot make the business cool, you have no right to be angry with me,” said Ma in an article in Forbes published this week, referring to Yahoo. “I just don’t trust them…I’ve been working with them for years, and I’m disappointed.”

Relations between Ma and Bartz, sources said, remain as bad as ever, and even the normally close one between Ma and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is strained.

Plus, Ma told Forbes, as he has said before, Alibaba is not taking its auction site, Taobao, public–leaving Yahoo in possession of an appreciating but decidedly private asset.

Japan is a different story, with the disposition of Yahoo’s stake in Yahoo! Japan the subject of long and continuing negotiations for a while now.

While the earthquake and tsunami crisis there did slow discussions down, there is still active recent movement about a variety of cashing-out scenarios, all of which have massive tax and regulatory issues.

Without boring you with the specifics, one option is to create a tracking stock, another a spin-off of the asset and still another some sort of stock trade.

But no matter what happens, Yahoo will have to pay some sort of taxes on its 35 percent stake in Yahoo! Japan, now worth $8 billion.

But if its CFO Tim Morse–the key figure working on the deal–can pull it off, what will Yahoo do with all that money?

Acquisition Guns Blazing? Or Sputtering?

In a recent forum in Silicon Valley, one of its M&A minions said Yahoo had its “guns blazing” with regard to acquisition activity in 2011, as deliciously reported in The Wall Street Journal, despite the company’s lackluster acquisition record.

Sources said the exec had his ears soundly boxed by his managers for the dopey remarks, since Yahoo has had such a lackluster record in the arena–especially compared to others.

And, oh yes, Yahoo’s M&A head just decamped to gaming phenom Zynga.

That aside, Yahoo should be deep in the market for hot start-ups to help revive its innovative spirit, but it remains hindered by a continued reluctance by new start-ups to join it and by its reputation for being a place where entrepreneurs go to die.

That certainly could change at any time with the right execs in place, but Yahoo is competing with a plethora of more exciting companies and also a seemingly endless venture capital gusher of cash of late.

While it is the board’s job to approve acquisitions and not source them, perhaps it is its job to pressure Bartz and other execs to get off the stick and hit at least one of the targets Yahoo aims at.

Targets are plentiful in advertising, content and even social, with many start-ups playing right into a lot of arenas Yahoo needs some help.

And help it does need as talent keeps walking out the door daily, mostly to hotter prospects such as Zynga and social buying sites Groupon and LivingSocial.

There is no question it is hard for any large company to hold onto top staff when there are so many enticing bonbons out there as options, but it can be done.

One good thing: Its newish head of product Blake Irving and head of U.S. media and advertising Ross Levinsohn seem to be playing well together and are setting a tone of stability that is much needed.

Enter the Kenny

That said, there remains endless swirl, especially with key investors, about the performance of its CEO.

While she started off as a publicly in-your-face exec, Bartz has definitely stepped out of the limelight of late, as her pugnacious manner started to irritate Wall Street and others.

It was a good idea, since it has taken the focus off the lack of stock and revenue progress she had loudly promised.

Still, Yahoo shares have continued to stay locked in the mid-teens, as investors wait for some sign that Bartz’s turnaround has worked.

The entrance of its spanking new director, Akamai President David Kenny, has further increased speculation about management and board changes at Yahoo.

This is Kenny’s first board meeting, but this well-connected newbie is someone who is clearly going to rise quickly to the top of decision-making at Yahoo.

That’s because the smooth and well-liked Kenny, who also has deep advertising experience as founder of the Digitas agency, has a long relationship with Yahoo and also with Yang.

He also now has much more tech cred as a leader of one of the Internet’s most important infrastructure companies, with a ton of regular contacts with media giants, ad networks and video providers that are Akamai’s clients.

In other words, Kenny (pictured here) is the full package of ad and tech experience that would make him an obvious Yahoo CEO candidate when Bartz’s contract is up in early 2013, if not before.

He’s also the person most likely to take over for longtime BoomTown punching bag Roy Bostock as chairman of the board at some point.

None of this is happening soon, but it is clearly an interesting development.

There are other machinations, of course, from continued interest from private equity players in Yahoo, as well as a variety of takeover scenarios, each more complex than the next.

While often derided as yesterday’s news by the elite of Silicon Valley as on an inevitable downward path, those plots are there because Yahoo remains a stellar brand with consumers worldwide and an Internet property with huge traffic and a big ad business.

In other words, it’s a U that someday maybe could be a V.

NetworkEffect will be at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. on Thursday morning for a press conference that promises “a behind-the-scenes look at the latest technology powering Facebook.”

Asked for detail, a Facebook spokesperson said the event would cover “Facebook’s hardware and software technology.”

With that as a hint, there are some infrastructure and operations deadlines on the horizon for the company: first, the planned opening of its Oregon data center this spring. And second, the Earth Day deadline Greenpeace has proactively declared for Facebook to stop depending on coal to power its service.

Facebook, in fact, told a local TV news reporter the Oregon data center has been built to be especially green, with recycled and local materials, and a system where one out of every 1.15 watts in the system actually powering computer infrastructure, rather than the typical one out of 1.8.

Will that be tomorrow’s main news topic? We’ll have to see. Tune in to NetworkEffect around 10 a.m. PT for coverage, or watch the press conference on Facebook’s live channel.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Combined, AT&T and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA spent roughly $11 billion in 2010 on wireless capital expenditures–that is, the plumbing that keeps their networks flowing freely. If the merger is approved, big changes may be made to how those billions are spent, creating winners and losers among infrastructure suppliers.

In the early going, AT&T expects to boost its own capex by $2 billion in order to integrate T-Mobile’s network. One winner could be tiny Tekelec, said analyst George Notter of Jefferies. AT&T accounts for a fifth of its revenue and might use more of the company’s technology to unclog its network by shifting traffic to T-Mobile’s.

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Caryn Marooney (pictured here), the co-founder of one of Silicon Valley’s premier tech communications firms, OutCast Agency, is joining Facebook to lead its tech public relations strategy.

Facebook said Marooney is joining the social networking giant in a newly created position as director of technology communications.

That means she will be in charge of outreach to the technical community, Facebook said, including “our product, platform, infrastructure, and technical recruiting communications–to reach developers, engineers, technology influencers and bloggers who write about our products and technology strategy.”

“Caryn’s experience extends beyond technology communications and I’m delighted that we’ll all have the opportunity to draw on her wisdom and insight,” said Facebook global communications chieftain Elliot Schrage.

Marooney has actually led the Facebook account for OutCast, which she and Margit Wennmachers built and sold to Next Fifteen Communications Group in 2005 for over $10 million.

Marooney said in an interview today that she felt the firm was in good hands with its current team of top managers.

“The opportunity at Facebook was too good to pass up,” she said. “It’s an exciting new challenge.”

Indeed, the social networking giant is preparing to go public within the next year and will need an even stronger PR team for that task.

Marooney follows Wennmachers to a company they served as outside communications advisers. Wennmachers joined the high-profile Andreessen Horowitz venture firm last year to work on marketing strategies with companies in which it invested.

The folks at Internet research firm Renesys, who first gained attention for tracking Egypt’s disconnection from the Internet, and then similar events in Libya, say they’re surprised by how little the quakes have affected the undersea Internet cables that keep Japan connected to the rest of the world. Only a small fraction of Japanese connections went down and many of those have come back up since. This is good news because the Internet is providing a badly needed communication link both within Japan and between it and the rest of the world.

It’s a much different story from the Taiwan earthquake in 2006 that broke several undersea cables and knocked several carriers out of service.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been damage. There have been breaks in two segments of Pacnet’s EAC cable system. And the Pacific Crossing system has also gone down since the earthquake. This is the cable once featured in a Wired photo essay “Tracing the Journey of a Single Bit.” The Pacific Crossing site currently displays a message that reads: “The Japanese cable landing station in Ajigaura has been evacuated due to the tsunami on the east coast of Japan and currently information on restoration activities and timing is unavailable. Further updates will be posted as additional information becomes available.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping track of all the aftershocks — and there have an alarming number of them — via the Earthquake Notification Service operated by the US Geological Survey. Subscribe and you get an automated email alert any time there’s an earthquake anywhere in the world, though you can specify by region and by the Richter Scale intensity so your in box is overloaded. For example I get alerts on North American quakes of greater than Richter 5.5, and all quakes around the world greater than Richter 6.5. When a big quake hits you’ll know about it well before the cable networks start flashing their “Breaking News” banners.

Finally, you can keep up with the constant stream of updates out of the Japan via this ongoing blog from our friends at The Wall Street Journal.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Marketwatch reported that two or three undersea cables belonging to China United Network Communications Group Co. were affected by the quake. The information was incomplete, and it wasn’t immediately clear specifically which of its cables were affected and to what extent. Meanwhile Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom Co. reported some damage to the APCN-2 cable.

I talked with Stephan Beckart at Telegeography, a firm that tracks the submarine cable business, and he said there are 20 undersea cables touching Japan. (Click the image above to see a bigger version of the map.) He said few countries are better prepared for a major quake than Japan, and that this extends to planning for its communications infrastructure. Cables are put down away from major fault lines and have lots of redundancies built in. Most of the cable landing points in Japan are well north of where the quake hit, he said.

Bloomberg is reporting Japanese telecom providers have been struggling to maintain service after the quake, and that wireless service is poor across the country.

EETimes is reporting that several semiconductor and other electronics manufacturing operations are in the affected area. Both Fujitsu and Toshiba have wafer fabs in Iwate prefecture. Reuters is reporting that six Sony plants have been closed; at least one of them is a semiconductor fab. Dow Jones Newswires is reporting that Sony has ceased all manufacturing operations in the country.

IBM has reported damage to some of its facilities, but specifics aren’t yet known.

Salesforce.com has issued some status updates saying there are service degradations on three separate instances as a result of the quake. Amazon Web services, which just opened a new data center in Japan, appears to be running normally.

Generally speaking the Internet itself seems to be holding up, judging by the various YouTube videos and other information that is getting out Japan. NHK’s English service is broadcasting live on the Web and I’ve had it running on my screen all morning without interruption.

I’ll update this post as I learn more.

Given how much people talk about cloud computing and the number of companies that use it, you’d think the cloud was a huge business for Amazon Web Services–or AWS for short. It’s not. Amazon doesn’t break the units results out specifically, and instead lumps it into the “other” category for financial reporting purposes, which amounted to $953 million in 2010, or about three percent of Amazon’s total sales. But you can get sense of its growing importance elsewhere within its financial reports: Capital expenditures in 2010 were $979 million, more than 2.5 times the amount it spent in 2009. Amazon didn’t detail exactly how it spent that money–some went to offices, some to infrastructure for AWS–but it did say this: “We expect this trend to continue over time.”

Next week, Amazon Web Services will hit its five-year mark, so with that milestone in mind, I took the opportunity to ask Selipsky first about its beginnings, before diving into its future.

NewEnterprise: Adam, I remember vaguely the day that Amazon announced it was getting into the vaguely worded “Web Services” business, and really scratching my head at it. How did all this start?

Adam Selipsky: We built it out of necessity. We wondered why projects were taking longer than it seemed they should, and so we did a study and found that our engineering teams were spending about 70 percent of their time on non-value-add work like provisioning and managing their server and IT infrastructure, and not innovating on behalf of customers. That was a big aha moment. We got a blinding glimpse of the obvious, we realized we were not the only ones with this problem. We figured out there was a broad need for these basic technology infrastructure services.

When I think of all the companies that I know have started out using AWS, my head spins. Who’s your biggest customer?

We wouldn’t break that out. Zynga is one the biggest, obviously. Look at their growth. They couldn’t have grown the way they did without AWS. Netflix is another highly significant one. They said they have moved most of their infrastructure to AWS. They have a talented set of engineers who could build and manage their own infrastructure if they wanted to, but the point is that they don’t want to. They’d rather work on Netflix rather than the underlying infrastructure.

You’ve recently added a service called Elastic Beanstalk. Are you going to continue to add services like that through the year?

As fast as we knock out new services and features, the list of what our customers want from us continues to grow. I think that’s because this is so new, and since we’re replacing the data center, there’s a lot of things built up over the decades that run in those data centers. There’s going to be a long list of mission critical services that we need to bring up.

What’s the big one that people are asking for?

More flavors of databases. We have RDS, the relational database, and we’ve said we’re going to do an Oracle engine. So there’s more to do on databases, not only adding new flavors, but also just being more scalable. There’s big demand for really highly scalable, high-performance databases, and I think we’ll continue to work on that. And I think that there will be more stuff around ease of use. There’s going to be more features to help you figure out and deploy whatever you need.

We’re starting to see a lot of talk from other companies like Google and Microsoft and IBM who want to get into the cloud services business. What kind of competitive threat to see coming at you?

We’ve been in business for five years with real paying customers, with large companies down to guys in basements, and I think we were lucky enough to have a real first-mover advantage. A lot of technology companies have not followed quickly in part because they haven’t wanted to follow quickly. They make money by getting seven-figure purchase orders, which is good for them, but not so good for their customers, so they have a real dilemma about making the transition.

Another thing I’m hearing a lot of these days is talk of private clouds. Companies are wondering why they can’t build their own clouds themselves, and still maintain the on-premise control of their data. Do you sense any threat from that?

There are a lot of companies with large sales forces who are banging the private cloud drum very loudly. When they all do that in concert, some customers are going to listen. But you have to parse that talk from the reality. I think some customers have to be very careful because they lack some fundamental characteristics of the cloud. If you’re still writing a very large check, and not operating in a pay-as-you-go fashion, you’re losing one of the key advantages of the cloud. If you just bought machines that had to appear on a loading dock somewhere, then what you have isn’t instantly scalable. Most importantly, it doesn’t take the heavy lifting out of your hands so you can focus on the things that your customers care about and instead focus on things that are really just table ante at the end of the day. CFOs and CIO are going to have look really closely at the benefits that are being advertised to them. A lot of those models look like yesterday’s economic model.

What about hybrid models? Along with private clouds I hear a lot about mixing cloud and on-premise.

I don’t want to come across as some kind of religious zealot for the cloud. We’ll live in some kind of hybrid world for many years to come. But I think that what hybrid principally means is when there’s cases where there’s applications that can’t move because of government regulations or it was just built in 1978 and it’s just not conducive to moving–you see that a lot actually–but you want to run other things in the cloud. One of our jobs is to make it really easy for enterprises to live in that hybrid environment.

Hewlett-Packard’s not the only company with an enterprise-ready Windows 7 tablet. Dell’s got one as well and plans to launch it later this year. “The upcoming tablet is designed for end-users who need greater mobility, as well as IT organizations that demand control, security, manageability and integration with existing infrastructure investments,” the company said. “Dell’s tablet will empower a more mobile workforce in a way that offers customers the business applications and corporate data they need, while meeting regulatory mandates and IT requirements.” Dell showed off the Windows tablet at a media event in San Francisco this morning, where it uncrated 24 new pieces of business-geared hardware.

Today I heard back from him. His sister, who lives in New York, had checked his messages for him, and kindly replied to my email messages. She then gave me the number of a wireless phone he has that is for one reason or another able to send and receive text messages.

I sent a message to that number and heard back from him, mere minutes after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had finished giving the speech in which he said he wouldn’t be a candidate in the forthcoming election in September.

It is one thing to see the media reports that have been emerging from that country, but quite another to hear from someone you know on the ground, especially under the difficult communications circumstances that the government has imposed. Because of that, his terse messages feel all the more precious.

In response to my first message he wrote:

Hosni Mubarak is clinging to power despite everything. There is a lot of impatience among Egyptians for him to leave office now. Protests are intensifying and they are drawing bigger crowds. I am working on some filming.

I replied that I thought at first the people would be feeling victorious following Mubarak’s announcement. He replied back:

They want him to leave this minute! They don’t want him to stall. He is already 20 steps behind the demands of the street. His time is up. Mubarak is in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. But if he were in Cairo, he would have fled the country by now, fearing protesters might charge the presidential palace.

I sent another reply containing the phone numbers for Speak2Tweet, the service Google and Twitter launched yesterday that allows people in Egypt with working phone lines to leave audio messages that are then broadcast to the world via Twitter. That Twitter account has now carried more than 1,000 messages from people in Egypt, some of which, like the one from the young woman below, are in English. Judging by her tone, events there have yet to reach their conclusion.

For those messages not in English, some volunteers have been translating the messages into English and publishing them into a continuously updated spreadsheet on Google Docs. This effort in turn led to a site called “Alive in Egypt,” where SayNow messages continue to be translated and transcribed.

I haven’t heard back from Abdulla after his last message. Now that Mubarak has pledged to leave office in September, there is as yet no information about when Egypt’s communications infrastructure will be restored to a normal operating posture.

Meanwhile, the folks at Internet research firm Renesys, who have so deftly tracked the finer technical details of Egypt’s disappearance from the Internet, have produced yet another visualization of the peculiar event as it unfolded. The video below is a minute-by-minute graphical representation of Egypt’s four major Internet service companies as they went dark. In a new blog post, they point out that what you’re watching is the silencing of the voices of 80 million people. One of them is my friend.

[Image Via: SheKnows]

The contract, I’m told, is worth $7.7 million and covers the first part of a three-phase project called CITIServe, which will ultimately see the consolidation of 50 different municipal data center operations scattered around the city over five years. The city hopes to save $100 million on its IT budget over the five years. Helpful, yes, but it’s not likely to put much of a dent in the city’s budget deficit, which is expected to be $2.4 billion in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

It might not occur to the average New Yorker that the city has so many data centers. It certainly surprised me, though calling them data centers may be overstating it a bit. A few are groups of servers in back offices no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The plan is to get them centralized both physically and from a management perspective. Each agency has its own staff handling the management.

The first things that will be streamlined in this phase of the project are the help desk, hosting, storage, email, virtualization and network for several city departments, though neither IBM nor the city is saying yet exactly which departments are involved. A statement from the city last March said the departments of Education, Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development, Sanitation and Finance would be among the first involved. Finance itself will be a pretty big job. It collects $25 billion in taxes and other revenue, and assesses about a million individual properties collectively worth more than $1 trillion. Then there’s the matter of the 10 million parking tickets the city issues each year.

The agency in the spotlight is the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which will be in charge of managing the migration and then will run the new data centers once they’re operational. The plan is the result of a top-down 30-day study of the city’s IT infrastructure that Mayor Mike Bloomberg ordered last year.

Getting these services centralized will make them easier to protect and reduce the power needed to run them, thus reducing the city government’s carbon footprint, says David Cohn, program manager of the Smarter Cloud program at IBM Research. It’s not uncommon for servers that are set up to run just one application to use only 10 percent of their computing capacity, and then sit idle the rest of the time, burning electricity throughout that idle time.

“Getting a smaller number of systems running more applications and using less power is just the beginning,” Cohn told me. “After that you start developing deeper insight into where all your information is going that you couldn’t get before.”

It’s a positive sign for IBM on the cloud computing front. You may remember that Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of cloud services, said government is a segment it considers a priority this year. If New York successfully adopts the cloud, more will probably follow.

In a blog post, Scott Guilfoyle, PayPal’s CTO, made the announcement and introduced the new head of the platform team, Matthew Mengerink.

But the departure of Bedier to Google is a big blow to PayPal, considering that both companies are racing to build next-generation payment platforms with a strong mobile component.

Bedier held the title of VP of platform and oversaw PayPal’s global payments platform, including mobile.

Mengerink is an internal replacement for the position, having worked at PayPal for 10 years. He previously led the PayPal architecture, infrastructure, payments development, core technologies, international development, customer quality and engineering services teams.

I will update when I hear more on what Bedier will be doing at Google.

After reminding the nation that “South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,” he went on to call for a national wireless broadband network.

Within the next five years, we’ll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans. This isn’t just about–(applause)–this isn’t about faster Internet or fewer dropped calls. It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.

It’s the latest attempt by Obama to try to solve the difficult problem of broadband penetration in America. In many places, most of them rural areas with low population density, cable and telco companies can’t make back the investments required to build out network infrastructure, and so they don’t build at all. As I’ve said here before, for Americans in those places, the options for participating in the digital culture the rest of us take for granted are few, and it often means the difference between participating and not in so much of the daily discourse that occurs online.

Part of the answer lies in taking back some radio spectrum that’s used for other things. In June, Obama signed a memorandum calling for the freeing up of certain radio frequency spectrum in the 500 MHz range. This is a block of spectrum largely owned by TV broadcasters for free over-the-air TV transmission. Broadcasters have been under pressure–and so far they are resisting–to voluntarily give those licenses up so that the spectrum can be re-auctioned off.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, essentially telegraphed that this is going to be the commission’s major policy priority in comments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. He has said he’d like to offer broadcasters incentives to give up their spectrum, but this would require a new law passed by Congress, and those in Congress have their own ideas about how this should be done. You can expect a lot of debate about this in Washington this year, but probably not a lot of progress.

It’s connected to Amazon’s existing cloud services, so sending mail from applications already hosted on services like EC2 should be easy. Messages will cost 10 cents per thousand, and customers can send up to 2,000 per day for free when the messages originate from within an application already running on EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s new service for Java developers.

Amazon named two customers already using the service: Eyejot, a video-messaging service, is using it for sending transactional messages. Another is Neustar, a managed service provider that handles domain-name queries, which is using it to ensure smooth delivery of mail related to signup for services.

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

Today’s the day we all find out. The two are showing the first fruits of their combined quarter billion dollars worth of labor. The pair announced they have built four enterprise-focused appliances that they say will combine applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single unified system. The first half of this quartet is being announced today, with more to follow.

One is the HP Business Decision Appliance, which is intended to run business intelligence applications. The appliance, they say, greatly reduces the time and effort for companies to deploy and manage business intelligence, which is a fancy way of saying you’re analyzing the data from the operation of your business, and looking for patterns or trends that might not otherwise be apparent. It’s optimized to run for Microsoft’s SQL server database software and its SharePoint collboration software, and takes less than an hour to install, they promise.

The second is the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, a data store designed for small- and mid-size companies that they say delivers performance that’s suitable for a big enterprise, but doesn’t require an administrator to run it. It’s a smaller version of the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which the two first previewed in November and is available now.

Next up is a messaging appliance geared toward making it easy to install Microsoft Exchange 2010, the server piece of Outlook, Microsoft’s all-purpose email, calendar and contact software that’s so widely used in companies around the world. Its formal name is the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and the two companies say it’s the industry’s first self-contained server for enterprise-class messaging that can be deployed in only a few hours. It comes pre-configured and with “best practices” designed in. The mailboxes are large, centrally archived and available to any device. It will be available in March.

What’s after that? HP and Microsoft are also working on something they call the HP Database Consolidation Appliance, which can bring hundreds of databases into a single appliance. This one will run SQL server and Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud.

It’s all about making IT projects easy to deploy, says Mark Potter, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for industry standard servers and software. “It can take anywhere from one to 18 months to roll out a sophisticated service to end users,” Potter told me in an interview yesterday. “About 32 percent of all IT projects are rated a success. It takes our customers a lot of time, planning and risk. We’re trying to bring a solution to the market that does for business applications what Microsoft Office did for desktop productivity.”

Why spend so much to team up? Microsoft and HP think that by 2015 there’s a combined market worth $55 billion for business intelligence, data warehousing, messaging and online transactions, making that quarter billion potentially worth it. Now they just have to prove these appliances can sell.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:13:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39499

Two of Index Ventures’ high-profile partners–Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi–are opening a new Silicon Valley office for the Europe-based venture firm in September.

The move is actually more of a return home for both men, now located in London, who had lived and worked at tech epicenter for much of their careers.

Among other things, before their stints at Index, Rimer was an Internet analyst at Hambrecht & Quist and also at the now-defunct Barksdale Group, while Volpi was an exec at Cisco.

BoomTown had been hearing about the possibility of the move for months, but Rimer and Volpi finally confirmed it in an interview yesterday.

“We thought we would be better positioned to support our entrepreneurs by being in Silicon Valley,” said Volpi (pictured here), who left the area when he became CEO of the then-hyped Joost premium online video service. “Having two solid investors from Index on the West Coast was important, as opposed to a chipshot.”

Volpi noted that of Index’s $1.3 billion in investments in 173 companies, $400 million was in 58 U.S.-based start-ups. In addition, the firm had helped another 35 move here.

There are currently nine investing partners at Index, which is actually headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Rimer noted that initially it will just be him and Volpi here, as well as some support staff. But it was likely they would expand their office, which will be located in either San Francisco or around Palo Alto, Calif.

“It has been a challenge to be a European firm and also be present in the Valley and be considered an insider here,” said Rimer (pictured here), who often traveled to California. “There is a lot to have an immediate ability to be face-to-face with our companies.”

Recent investments by Index in California include Flipboard, Swipely, Boku and Factual.

Rimer and Volpi said the move did not mean deals were only to be found in Silicon Valley, as Index is not focused on geographical investing.

In addition, the pair will continue their focus on cloud computing, infrastructure and social, wherever the investments were to be found.

“We’re not coming to the U.S. to do only U.S. deals,” said Volpi. “But there is a lot to be said for being part of the daily mix in Silicon Valley.”

In other words: Party at Mary Meeker’s house!

(The well-known Morgan Stanley analyst has also recently moved to the West Coast from New York to join Kleiner Perkins.)

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