No, it’s not an entirely rational company, but rather a “fanatical” one. That’s the word the company uses in its marketing messaging to describe its customer service, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate to use the same word to describe the dedication of CEO Lanham Napier and his team to remain independent and take full advantage of the cloud computing opportunity that lies ahead. From that you could conclude that they see a big opportunity and you’d be right. Rackspace executives are now accustomed to questions from persistent reporters like myself pressing them on the subject of being acquired. The answer, now as before, is still no.

In fact, Rackspace sees the cloud opportunity as being so big that it has made some acquisitions of its own to exploit it. In February, it grabbed Anso Labs in a bit of an “acqhire” deal that brought the team that built NASA’s cloud computing system to Rackspace. That move was part of a wider strategy to promote Openstack, an open source cloud computing platform that Rackspace has spearheaded with partners including Dell, Cisco Systems Citrix, and with a little help from — get this — Microsoft.

These were among the many things I talked over with Rackspace CTO John Engates when he stopped by my office in New York recently.

AllThingsD: So for those who haven’t done their homework, what is Openstack and what is Rackspace’s place in it?

Engates: When Rackspace got into the cloud business, we had to build everything ourselves. The hardware was there but to make a cloud you have to have software. And that software didn’t exist as a commercial product. We went to work building our own software and acquired some companies to help us build it. We looked long and hard at what we could use to build an enterprise scale cloud, and at that point it was all lab scale, you could build a small lab-sized project but you couldn’t run a business on it let alone offer as a service. Amazon had already built their service, and we knew that Google was already a cloud and that Microsoft was working on the Azure platform. We just had to build something ourselves because it wasn’t going to be handed to us on a platter, so since 2007 we’ve been building our own software and in 2010, we asked ourselves whether we wanted to continue building our own software long term or if we just wanted to make sure we had access to the caliber that everyone else was going to have.

So the strength in the cloud is really about software?

I’ll go ahead and say it: There’s nothing really unique about one vendor’s servers or storage networks today that one vendor has a real advantage over the other when it comes to the cloud. But the software that makes the cloud the cloud is the real difference. That’s why Dell and Citrix and Cisco have all joined on to the OpenStack project, even Microsoft is contributing code. I know that sounds weird, but the reason that Microsoft is interested is because Openstack is hypervisor-agnostic. You can run Xen or KVM or Microsoft’s Hyper-V or even VMWare.

Is Openstack really the basis of your cloud offering or will you support other cloud platforms?

We will. It is today a big part of our cloud strategy. Our Cloud Files project sits 100 percent on Openstack. They’re one and the same. Our cloud compute product is being migrated to Openstack by the end of the year. But we also have a large VMWare-based business. Why not? We’re sort of technology agnostic. We’re not tied to any one vendor.

Historically, I think of Rackspace as a Web hosting company, one that was always outside of my price range as an individual. The cloud is supposed to be flexible enough that even the smallest operations can use it. Do you have that flexibility now?

We’re a host and in that business, but we don’t play in that lower tier of the market where the Mom and Pop-style operations are, but for big operations. We start at the small business and go up. We’ve always offered a 100 percent dedicated server, and you can’t offer hosting like that for $20 a month. But with the cloud, because it’s inherently multi-tenant, we can start to reach some of those smaller customers. Our smallest Linux compute instance starts at about 1.5 cents an hour, and if you do the math it works out to about $10 a month, so we can reach the really small customers now.

So tell me about the overall state of your business. Openstack is obviously a big part of your strategy. But what are you hearing from customers, and what do they need right now that they’re not getting?

I think our customers are not unlike most other cloud or hosting customers. They want things to go faster and they want it cheaper and better. A lot of things are obviously moving in that direction and the cloud helps get them there. They look at it as a way to automate, to get things online. Some people worry about the shared nature of the cloud because they worry about security. They want some better sense of security, and one of the things we’ve done is leveraged our hosting business as a way to bring together a hybrid offering. An example I like to use is Under Armour, the sports clothing company. They use some of our cloud resources and dedicated services in concert with each other. They do all their e-commerce on the dedicated site so they can meet all their security requirements but also use the cloud to be much more responsive on their site when they need to be.

Does that combination help companies get over their concerns about security? There is still an ingrained resistance to putting critical files off premises.

It helps a lot, because it’s something that they can wrap their head around. When they know they have a dedicated firewall and server. They get that. When it goes to the cloud, it’s a little bit more of a stretch because its most abstract. There are always concerns about what else might be going on on that server next door. You hear the phrases “noisy neighbors and nosey neighbors” a lot these days in relation to the cloud. You don’t want either one of them. We’re getting better at isolating customers from those, but still there are some things that belong in a dedicated environment.

So your business has been growing like crazy, and many of your competitors have been acquired by telecom players. Terremark became part of Verizon, then Saavis was acquired by Centurylink. The conventional wisdom has long been that Rackspace was going to be the next one taken out, and yet here you are still independent. What gives?

Lanham Napier, our CEO, has said many times that Rackspace doesn’t want to be acquired because we think the opportunity is huge. The opportunity is, and that’s why some of these telecom players are grasping at other companies that they think will help them get there. We’re a public company and in theory someone could certainly show up with enough cash, but sometimes the people who show up with that kind of cash do so because you’ve sent a signal that you want to be acquired, but Lanham I think has done a pretty good job of saying that we don’t want to be acquired. I think it’s because he thinks we have something special.

And what’s that?

We like to talk about fanatical customer support, and that’s more than a marketing pitch. With us, its really the real deal. I like to compare us to Zappos. They were customers, and they had sort of a funky, weird corporate culture but in a good way, and I think we’re a little like that. We’re all about having a great customer service outcome, and that’s hard to do at a telco. They’re the phone company. They’re not exactly known for great customer service outcomes.

Rovio, maker of the popular mobile game, announced on Friday that it is teaming up with Twentieth Century Fox to create a version of the game centered on the upcoming animated movie “Rio,” which hits theaters in mid-April. The game will arrive ahead of the movie, launching sometime in March.

In Angry Birds Rio, the original flock is kidnapped and taken to Rio, where they then escape and seek to help their friends–the two macaws Blu and Jewel, who are the stars of “Rio.”

The game will have 45 levels initially, and then additional levels will be available via updates. The game will be available for various smartphones and tablets, the companies said.

The Angry Birds have one detour or more before they make it to Rio, though. Rovio is planning a Valentine’s Day update to its seasonal Angry Birds game. The Birds have been on a tear of late, with an expanding empire that includes a line of toys, T-shirts and more.

Under the terms of the agreement, Sony will license some of RealD’s technology and equipment, such as 3-D eyewear, which can be used with Sony TV screens and other equipment intended to create a three-dimensional viewing experience similar to what is now offered in movie theaters. The equipment is expected to hit stores in 2010.

No other terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were disclosed. RealD’s agreement with Sony isn’t exclusive, which means the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company can also partner with other equipment makers for the same technology.

This year marked a massive roll-out of 3-D technology in movie theaters, as Hollywood released a string of films, such as DreamWorks Animation SKG’s “Monsters vs. Aliens,” and Twentieth Century Fox’s “Avatar,” which hits screens this weekend. News Corp. (NWS) owns Twentieth Century Fox as well as the The Wall Street Journal.

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FoxPop, a technology that makes its debut next month, works like a specialized Twitter feed, offering up a string of trivia, photos and shopping suggestions during selected movies.

Users can run the application on their computers or their iPhones or iPod touches. It syncs with the movie, displaying material that is supposed to be relevant to what is happening on-screen at that moment.

FoxPop is to make its debut Dec. 1 with the home-video release of “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” this year’s sequel to the 2006 Ben Stiller comedy. Fox hired a marketing company to write a string of informational tidbits and quizzes about the movie’s stars, props and setting, which is filled with artworks and artifacts from the museum’s archives.

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“We think we have solved the real fundamental problem, which has been that choosing movies on a television has been extremely challenging,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told the New York Times. “Video-on-demand companies worked at it for a long time, but choosing movies on the TV just doesn’t have the power of the Web. We want to be integrated on every Internet-connected device, game system, high-definition DVD player and dedicated Internet set-top box. Eventually, as TVs have wireless connectivity built into them, we’ll integrate right into the television.”

A compelling vision of Netflix’s future and one that may sound the death knell for Blockbuster, Amazon’s Unbox and Vudu as well. Or perhaps not. Certainly, this little bit of legalese at the tail-end of the press release announcing the services belies Hastings’s optimism just a wee bit.

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements regarding the development of a set-top box for delivery of content over the Internet to television sets, the delivery of a compelling online home entertainment service, Netflix’s strategy and positioning in online delivery of content, and the future of Internet to the television. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and events to differ, including, without limitation; the risk that the development of the set-top box or its associated online delivery service may not meet technical requirements, consumer expectations, or otherwise be implemented by the parties; that certain studios will not grant either of the parties necessary rights or otherwise impose limitations on such rights that might impede implementation or hamper consumer adoption; Netflix’s ability to create other partnership opportunities for the delivery of digital content to the television; and possible technological or content licensing impediments.”