Peter Pham was the 5th employee hired at photo sharing site Photobucket . 18 months later the then giant site was acquired by Fox Interactive Media for a reported $300 million. Then Pham joined the Boards of Advisors of a number of high-profile startups, including live video streaming service UStream.tv and document sharing service Docstoc. After just less than a year at Fox, Pham left to become the CEO of an innovative consumer expense optimization startup called BillShrink . Today Pham announced that he’s leaving BillShink to become Entrepreneur in Residence at Trinity Ventures . He’s got new ideas and a great track record; now he’ll have all the more financial backing and connections to put those ideas into play in a very big way. Sponsor Trinity Ventures has backed a wide variety of companies that readers may be familiar with, including curation tool Posterous , crowd-sourced labor platform CrowdFlower , mobile browser SkyFire and many more. The firm makes 8 to 10 deals a year, according to a February profile by Stacey Higginbotham at Gigaom. That write-up focused on Trinity Ventures General Partner Fred Wang’s argument that though Trinity was doing fine, he believes the VC industry in general has too many players raising too much money. Pham was trained as a biologist and enjoys skydiving, donut eating contests and taking photos of rainbows, according to publicly available information on Facebook. His next startup is likely to be something interesting. Pham can be followed on Twitter here . Photo by Dave Sifry. Discuss

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When film critic Roger Ebert posted on his blog that “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” he seemed to incur the wrath of the gaming community, and the entry now has over 3,000 comments, many protesting Ebert’s claims. Ebert wonders why the designation of art or not-art matters to those who play video games: “Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, “I’m studying a great form of art?” Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.” Sponsor Here’s an argument to make gamers happy. According to John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC , massive multiplayer online games demonstrate ways in which groups can manage information and maximize learning. At a recent lecture as part of Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, Brown said that World of Warcraft guilds can serve as models for entrepreneurs in understanding how to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. Brown urges entrepreneurs to look at WoW for ideas on how to boost information management and performance feedback. Brown points to the guild, the game’s primary organizational structure, as the way you “get things done in World of Warcraft.” Noting that over 12,000 ideas are posted to the official World of Warcraft forums daily, Brown points to the necessity of having a guild in order to process this information. “If your guild is going to be successful,” says Brown, “you have to figure out how to get the members of your guild to process tens of thousands of new ideas.” The guild structure, Brown argues, allows for groups to crowdsource information and to test, filter and disseminate strategies. The most successful guilds also meticulously record and review their performances. “In terms of extreme performance,” says Brown, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. World of Warcraft high-end guilds do after-action reviews on every high-end raid.” Brown praises the way in which WoW players have developed their own dashboards so they can constantly measure and adjust their own performance. Brown argues this vigilance around feedback helps WoW players learn exponentially. With over 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers, chances are WoW is an incubator for future entrepreneurs, whether or not the game is “art.” Discuss

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Last September, China’s most successful consumer-to-consumer online marketplace, Taobao.com launched a massive online promotion. By offering exorbitantly low prices on a series of brand name consumer electronics by Lenovo, HP, Philips and others, the site attracted 1.8 billion visitors (non-unique) – the equivalent of every single person in China visiting the site at least once. With 145 million online shoppers expected by the end of 2010, e-commerce in China has come a long way since it began about a decade ago. What types of business models exist? Who’s shopping online and what are they buying? And where do we go from here? Sponsor Guest author Joel Backaler writes The China Observer , an award-winning blog focused on Chinese technology trends and consumer culture. His writing has appeared in and he has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal China Journal, BusinessWeek, and Seeking Alpha. Joel is a Mandarin-speaking former Fulbright Fellow who has worked and lived in Taipei, Beijing and Singapore with Frontier Strategy Group. Follow Joel on Twitter . How did it all begin? Jack Ma and his partners launched Chinese e-commerce in 1998 with Alibaba.com , a business-to-business online platform. Like the Web firms of Silicon Valley, Chinese firms felt the shockwaves of the Internet bubble bursting in early 2000 – but in China the Internet industry continued to grow. 2003 was a turning point for Chinese e-commerce with the release of Alipay, Alibaba’s version of PayPal, which provided a secure means for online payment. 2003 also marked the first entry of Western multinationals in the Chinese e-commerce market – first by Ebay taking a controlling stake in Eachnet, and then with Amazon subsequently doing the same with Joyo.com in 2004. Roles reversed in 2005 when Alibaba Group gained control over Yahoo!’s Chinese search platform. A period of explosive growth began in 2008 as China’s e-commerce market grew to 100 billion RMB, with 80 million online shoppers. Where are we today? In 2009, China’s e-commerce market totaled 263 billion RMB (approximately $38.5 billion) with growth equivalent to about 105% increase year-on-year. Currently, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) represents the largest segment of China’s e-commerce market; however, business-to-consumer (B2C) is increasingly growing in importance due to two trends. Traditional Retailer to Online Retailer : Traditional retailers are developing e-commerce platforms as additional channels to get consumers to buy their products. From brand name domestic retailers to state-owned enterprises, there is a major push to go online. It has even been reported that Wal-Mart is set to release its own e-commerce platform for the Chinese and Japanese markets . Individual Seller to Online Retailer : Due to the extreme success of particular sellers on existing C2C sites like Taobao.com, online shops that began with a single college student or a small family have been forced to seek out additional support to satisfy market demand. As a result, these one-time, single-person operations have been incorporating into formal enterprises stepping into the B2C space. What types of business models exist? China’s e-commerce platforms can be classified by the following three models: marketplace model, online retail model and traditional retail model. Marketplace Model : The marketplace model connects buyers and sellers, whether it is business-to-business or C2C. The company provides a platform to facilitate business between two parties but has no products of its own to offer. It maintains a searchable database of information for buyers and seller to connect, and a secure means to facilitate payment between both parties. Top B2B players : Alibaba.com, HC360.com, Myekoo.com Top C2C players : Taobao.com, Paipai.com, Eachnet.com Online Retail Model : The online retail model is where a company has no formal real-world storefront. It provides both products and a channel to sell directly to end customers. Top B2C Online Retailers : 360buy.com , Joyo.com, Dangdang.com Traditional Retail Model : The traditional retail model is similar to the online retail model; however, in addition to the online website the company also has real-world retail outlets. Top B2C Traditional Retailers : Gome (electronics), COFCO (state-owned: food and beverage), Lining (athletic apparel) Who’s shopping online and what are they buying? Shanghai-based iResearch estimates that by the end of 2010 there will be 145 million online shoppers in China. Online shoppers are relatively young – the majority are between the ages of 18 and 35. While this number is split roughly evenly, slightly more women shop than men. In the early days of Chinese e-commerce, products such as software and DVDs were the top purchases. Currently clothing, books and cosmetics are the top sellers. Additionally, as we have seen in the U.S. with sites like Etsy, companies that focus on niche markets are also sprouting up. For example, 21Cake.com is a popular made-to-order online cake company that sells custom-made cakes online and delivers to China’s major cities. Where do we go from here? China’s e-commerce market is yet to fully mature, but it is entering a period of high-speed growth. C2C sellers that are growing more successful will begin to establish more formal companies, leading to an increase in the number of companies in China’s B2C space. While many view the Internet as a sensitive area subject to regulation by the Chinese government, the government supports e-commerce due to its economic benefit and potential for job creation. One example is Xinjiang, a remote province in western China which recently experienced social unrest. Most websites and email there are blocked – but you can still access Alibaba.com and Taobao.com. Of China’s e-commerce companies, Alibaba Group will remain the company to watch in this space for many years to come. However, there is still a lot of room for niche operators to capitalize on the growth potential of China’s e-commerce market. Image by Kim2402 . Discuss

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Mplayit , a Facebook-based mobile app store, just released some interesting new data about people’s willingness to pay for mobile apps. According to Mplayit’s report, about one-third of users across all the major mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) are interested in paid apps. iPhone users are the most willing to pay for some of their apps (57%), followed by BlackBerry users (33%). Android users are the least likely to be interested in paid apps (16%). Sponsor While only a third of BlackBerry users are willing to pay for apps, it’s worth noting that, with a median price of $5.99, they are willing to pay the most for their apps. iPhone users only want to pay around $1.99 and the average Android user is willing to pay up to $2.72. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that these are just average prices and people’s willingness to pay definitely depends on the quality of the applications. As we noted earlier this month , the average price for iPhone apps continues to fall, but the average price for the most popular iPhone apps is around $2.43 in the U.S. – which – judging from Mplayit’s data – indicates that most users would like to pay less than $2 for their apps, but are more than willing to pay extra for the best and most popular apps. Bonus: Percentage of Games in the Top App Stores Discuss

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Eucalyptus a software layer that forms private clouds patterns in the enterprise. Private clouds are bringing together the best of Linux, Amazon, and VMware in a practical way. It could be argued that the cloud itself is a product of the open source spirit. So, with that in mind, we took a closer look at Eucalyptus and sat down with Dr. Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer of the Eucalyptus team to figure out what is the opportunity and why it is gathering the attention of successful open source entrepreneurs , investors, and partners. Sponsor A Cloud Forest. Where the Cloud and Servers Meet? We asked this abstract, but also practical question. Eucalyptus offers a solution for that models enterprise resources around Amazon’s core cloud services. The result is resources in the enterprise having parity with instances in Amazon’s cloud. By modeling the Enterprise Cloud after EC2 , EBS , and S3 and joining a cloud control center into the enterprise, the company introduces a control point for enterprise resources. The resources are bound together at the core model of compute and store, and build a network control point for surrounding services. Simple, but elegant. Dr. Wolski pointed us to a reference implementation that shows a cloud enabled data center with the cloud manager enabled, Intel® Cloud Builder Guide to Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel® Platforms , which features a scenario provided by the Ubuntu cloud . We found this scenario a great description of the powerful join happening around open source and Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services). The components of this model described here in the white paper give an idea of how this model includes the cloud controller as a map to the brains. It gets access to each of these core services on the network, and choreographs how they connect. Here is a little bit more about each, offered by the white paper. “•The Cloud Controller provides the primary interface point for interactng with the cloud. Commands to create or terminate virtual machines are initiated through the API interface at the Cloud Controller. • The Walrus Storage Service exposes the object store. The object store is used to hold the virtual machine images prior to instantiation and to hold user data. •The Storage Server hosts the actual bulk storage (a 1.4 TB JBOD in this case). Storage is exposed to the Block Storage Controllers and the Walrus Controller as a set of iSCSI volumes. • The Cluster Controllers manage a collection of Node Controllers and provide the traffic isolation. • The Block Storage Controllers (SCs) manage dynamic block devices (e.g., EBS) that VMs can use for persistent storage. •And, the Node Controllers (NCs) which are the servers in the pools that comprise the compute elements of the cloud. *It is noted that many of these pieces are interchangeable (e.g. Walrus) in this example with other components. Also noted: Eucalyptus supports numerous hypervisors in the market today. So, in this quick list of components we have a real-life definition of cloud computing, in the form of an enterprise service layer. Is the enterprise more complex in reality? You bet. Now, the fun begins. If a Tree Falls in the Forest, Does the Forest Know? Now your server distribution of Ubuntu, et al can one-click to cloud. That is interesting, but we know there is more. We found that cloud computing capability and cloud design are two different things and there are many pieces ripe for market upheaval. In a way, Dr. Wolski and team bring a new protagonist into the network, as he told us “A new abstraction to the toolkit”. If Eucalyptus works, we’ll see the company continue to grow as a piece of the fabric and bring this cloud object into the enterprise toolkit in a substantial way. IT leaders will start to plan around it, model it, and evolve it into core practices, disaster recovery, and the many scenarios around turning down and bursting resources. To do all of this, Eucalyptus creates a lens to distributed resources, a join of all the facets of the cloud that should move to keep in sync. This model is built on core compute fabric that is offered by Amazon to isolate the simplest go-to-market pattern for connecting enterprise and public resources. Here, we see a view of this model from the white paper. A Pristine Forest of Enterprise Cloud Servers We have a few questions left remaining, so we plan on keeping in touch with Eucalyptus. Will Eucyluptus gain enough mass in the private cloud while continuing a cozy relationship with Amazon? Will Eucalyptus bring forward competitors to AWS and/or commoditize Amazon’s services by offering “in parity” providers? Is it possible to compete? What impacts might this have to VMware’s core offerings, will this move VMware offering cloud computing closer to Amazon’s AWS How does this impact software that is packaged for a data center and/or cloud? Will this model become critical mass for deploying Amazon? How does it trend with the deployments of Amazon’s model of creating private data centers and cloud monitoring services? Also, a bigger question came to mind. Is this Eucalyptus further evidence that AWS was ” the shot heard round the world “? Computing may never be the same, as freedom has rung now that the base computing solution is in the cloud? It really feels like competing has forever changed, and as a server, it just doesn’t make sense to be a alone, when a forest is all around you. Open Source – Fastest Way to 10 million downloads Eucalyptus seems to have chose the path of least resistance, and brought open source into its corner. Becoming packaged at the core, in the Linux distribution and connected to other fabric it has the opportunity to grow quickly. And, since it’s a private cloud, it can also grow for critical tasks. To that end, we see friends of open source, like Intel, Extreme, and Ubuntu ready to go the distance with Eucalyptus in their stacks. We asked about traction for the product. Dr. Wojiski chuckled a bit when he mentioned the large volume of downloads it has received with company partners. “It’s rewarding being in open source model. It’s in the core of our company and our motivations”. Can you win by binding dominant platforms with open source? And, is that itself, open source? Photo credits: kubina & lgb06 Discuss

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