Digital cloud plan for city skies

By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News

The inflatable elements of the building would sit on top of thin, lightweight towers

A giant "digital cloud" that would "float" above London's skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.

The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.

The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.

The unconventional structure was originally envisaged as a centre piece of the city's Olympic village.

The building draws inspiration from the work of Tomas Saraceno

Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.

"It's really about people coming together to raise the Cloud," Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.

"We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached."

The size of the structure will evolve depending on the number of contributions, he said.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York who has seen the design described it as a "sculptural spectacle" and "a celebration of technology".

'Data streams'

The Cloud was shortlisted in a competition set up by London Mayor Boris Johnson.

The mayor has committed to build a tourist attraction in the Olympic Park "with a legacy for the east end [of London]".

Other finalists are thought to include the former Turner prize winner Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, the designer of the Angel of the North.

The mayor is still in the "process of deciding" which design will be commissioned, according to a spokesperson.

However, the team, which also includes the writer Umberto Eco and engineers from Arup, has decided to push ahead and publish details of its design.

The structure draws on work by artist Tomas Saraceno, a German-based designer who has previously shown off huge inflatable sculptures.

It is envisaged that the spheres would be made of a plastic known as Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), the material used to build the Beijing Aquatic Centre.

The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.

"We could provide a custom feed of… searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time 'barometer' of the city's interests and mood," said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.

The team also envisage projecting weather information, spectator numbers, race results or even images of the Olympic Torch on to the building.

Ramps, stairs and lifts would carry people to the top of the structure to look out over the city.

'Zero power'

The inflatable elements of the building would sit on top of slender, lightweight towers, stabilised by a net of metal cables.

Damping technology, similar to that used in Japanese skyscrapers to resist earthquakes, would prevent the towers being buffeted by the wind.

The Killesberg Tower in Germany is built using similar principles

"Many tall towers have preceded this, but our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the spheres," said professor Joerg Schleich, the structural engineer behind the towers.

Professor Schleich was responsible for the Olympic Stadium in Munich as well as numerous lightweight towers built to the same design as the Cloud.

The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti.

"It would be a zero power cloud," he said.

As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars.

That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.

The team have launched a fundraising website called raisethecloud.org and are now looking for a site for the tower.

Google has already offered to provide free advertising for the so-called "cloud-raising" effort.

The firm has offered a sponsored link at the top of the page advertising a "£1 for 1 pixel" concept to people who search for terms relevant to London 2012.

"It will be a monument to crowd-sourcing," said Professor Ratti.

據國外媒體報導，倫敦的標志性建築不少，如今，美國 麻省理工學院和 Google 正考慮為倫敦奧運村興建一個 超現代的建築「數字雲」。

美國麻省理工學院「感知城市」實驗室 (SENSEable City Lab) 正在為這一建築項目尋找資金，該實驗室還 表示， Google 和全球最大的工程咨詢公司、英國 Arup 公司將加入設計團隊。義大利著名作家翁貝托‧艾柯 (Umberto Eco) 也是該項目的顧問。

新華網報導，這個最初被列為倫敦奧運村的中心建築包 括高達 120 米的鐵架，頂端安裝一系列相互連接的塑 料泡狀圓球，並可以顯示各種圖像和數據。遠遠望去， 就好像一團雲彩矗立在鐵塔之上，加之這些「雲彩」能 展示數字化圖文信息，因此被稱作「數字雲」 (Digital Cloud) 。

這一設計被倫敦市長約翰遜選中，作為倫敦奧運公園建 築的備選方案，其它還有幾個建築也在考慮之中，最終 的結果尚未揭曉。不過，「數字雲」得到了不少人的青 睞，有關方面甚至推出網站，面向普通民眾籌集捐款， 希望將這一設計變為現實。

設計者之一的卡洛‧拉蒂 (Carlo Ratti) 說，我們建 造這個「雲」的費用可以是 500 萬英鎊、也可以是 5000 萬，由於建築結構靈活多變，這樣我們可以根據 籌集到的資金來決定到底修建多大的雲。

通過樓梯、電梯或斜坡可以登頂「數字雲」，遊客可以 鳥瞰城貌，或在裏面休閒。

新浪科技指出，「雲」的表面使用的建築材料是類似於 北京奧運會「水立方」的膜狀結構物，為了讓又細又高 的支撐鐵架更穩固，設計者借用日本高樓建築的防震技 術，使其能經得住風雨。

負責提供圖文數據的 Google 表示，我們可以提供在倫 敦奧運會期間大家最關心的搜索信息，然後將其投放到 數字雲上，讓人們了解到此時此刻人們感興趣的是什麼 。

除了設計獨特外，「數字雲」還融入最先進的環保技術 ，確保這是一個「零排放的雲」。 此外，「數字雲」 也是遊客觀光和休閒的好去處，通過電梯、樓梯或者斜 坡登頂，就可以鳥瞰倫敦全貌。

Open Source as a Model for Business Is Elusive

By ASHLEE VANCE

Published: November 29, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — In many ways, MySQL embodies the ideals of the populist software movement known as open source, in which a program’s creator releases it to the world free of charge, and legions of volunteers contribute improvements that are also freely shared.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Paul O'Driscoll for The New York Times

Neelie Kroes, Europe's competition commissioner, wants open-source software to be available.

Related

New Snag for Oracle in Sun Deal (September 4, 2009)

The start-up company came out of nowhere, building a database application beloved by vibrant, young Internet companies. Logging in from homes scattered around the globe, its workers seemed more a part of a virtual commune than a corporate monolith, and they relished taking on proprietary software giants like Microsoft.

But like most open-source companies, MySQL’s sales, tied to support deals, never matched the astronomical number of downloads for its product, about 60,000 a day. In January 2008, the founders decided to sell the company for $1 billion to Sun Microsystems. And this year, Sun agreed to sell itself to Oracle, which makes database software aimed at larger companies and tougher jobs, for $7.4 billion.

Now, disagreement over the value of MySQL — both as a stand-alone entity and as part of a big company — lies at the heart of a bitter public battle between Oracle and the European Union over the Sun acquisition. The fight illuminates a larger truth about open-source companies: their societal and strategic importance far exceeds their financial value as operating businesses.

European regulators view MySQL as sort of a database of the people, a low-cost alternative to Oracle’s costly proprietary products. The regulators worry that Oracle may stop improving MySQL in favor of protecting its core traditional products, and customers will lose an important option in the database market.

“In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective I.T. solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions,” said the European Commission’s competition chief, Neelie Kroes, in a recent statement. “The commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.”

Oracle, meanwhile, insists that it will continue to develop MySQL and other Sun technologies. Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, contends that MySQL serves a different part of the database market than Oracle’s main products do — an assessment supported by many analysts. One main incentive for Oracle to keep improving MySQL is that the program serves as a bulwark against Microsoft’s SQL Server database, which challenges Oracle’s products on the low end.

“The commission’s statement of objections reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics,” Oracle said in a statement.

To Ms. Kroes’s point, there is an open-source alternative, and usually a pretty good one, to just about every major commercial software product. In the last decade, these open-source wares have put tremendous pricing pressure on their proprietary rivals. Governments and corporations have welcomed this competition.

Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question.

The best-known open-source company is Red Hat, which produces a variant of the Linux operating system for server computers. Like most of its peers, Red Hat offers a free version of its base product and relies on selling support services and extra tools for revenue. In its last fiscal year, which ended in March, the company’s revenue rose 25 percent to $653 million, and it reported net income of $79 million.

But Red Hat is a rare case. “There’s only one company making real money out of open source, and that’s Red Hat,” said Simon Crosby, the chief technology officer at Citrix Systems, which acquired the open-source software maker XenSource for $500 million in 2007. “Everyone else is in trouble.”

The enduring appeal of open-source software revolves more around its disruptive nature than blockbuster sales.

As long as there has been software, there have been some people eager to share and improve it for the common good. The rise of the Internet made such sharing easier than ever, enabling people the world over to work together on projects outside the confines of a formal corporate structure.

Open-source software has thrived and played a prominent role in the building of the Internet’s infrastructure. Many companies rely on Linux-based computers and Apache Web server software to display their Web pages. Similarly, the Mozilla Firefox Web browser has emerged as the most formidable competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The grass-roots nature of open source has led advocates to view the projects as a populist foil to proprietary software, where a company keeps the inner workings of its applications secret.

But in the last decade, open-source software has become more of a corporate affair than a people’s revolution.

In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary operating systems.

Many of the top open-source developers are anything but volunteers tinkering in their spare time. Companies like I.B.M., Google, Oracle and Intel pay these developers top salaries to work on open-source projects and further the companies’ strategic objectives.

In the last three years, there have been five big acquisitions in which a major technology company bought an up-and-coming open-source company for many times its annual revenue. Sun, for example, bought MySQL for about 10 times its revenue, while Citrix bought XenSource for more than 150 times its revenue, according to people familiar with the companies’ sales.

Most recently, VMware, the leading maker of virtualization software, brought SpringSource for $420 million, or about 20 times its annual sales.

“A lot of these guys were getting close to an I.P.O., but they elected to go the acquisition route instead,” said Michael Olson, the chief executive of Cloudera, an open-source start-up. “A lot of open-source firms are one-product companies, and it’s hard to build a long-term, successful business that way.”

The larger technology companies have tended to buy these one-trick ponies for strategic purposes. With its core server business declining, Sun hoped it could piggy-back on MySQL’s momentum with Internet companies. In SpringSource, VMware acquired a company that had cultivated deep interest with software developers and helped VMware diversify beyond its virtualization roots.

“VMware took into consideration that which money can’t buy, which is a critical mass of adoption,” said Peter Fenton, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, who has been involved in some fashion with many of the large open-source deals. “SpringSource’s main product was the equivalent of a best-selling novel.”

Citrix took perhaps the biggest risk of all, paying a huge premium for XenSource in the hopes of disrupting VMware’s position in the virtualization market.

“I don’t think Citrix would ever say it paid too much,” Mr. Crosby said. “Citrix leaped to the forefront of a whole software category. The ability to talk credibly about virtualization is worth a huge amount in its own right.”

Meanwhile, the ideal of an independent open-source giant has faded.

Mr. Fenton said that many open-source advocates had once hoped Red Hat would scoop up the top open-source start-ups, keeping these crown jewels out of the hands of proprietary software makers. But the company failed to go after other open-source companies initially and later could not afford to pay the high prices offered by larger companies.

“You could make the case there was a window of opportunity to do that three to five years ago,” Mr. Fenton said. “That opportunity has gone away. And it’s hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again now.”