This guest post is written by Jack Arrington, who contributed 50% of the genetic material required to produce TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Jack was around at the very beginning of what we today call the Information Technology business. In 1950 pure business necessity drove Bank of America, then the largest bank in the world, to look for ways to automate the labor intensive job of handling checks. From that necessity ERMA was born, one of the first large scale data processing machines for business. Jack joined Bank of America in 1963 as a Computer Operator Trainee. He retired in 2002 as Head of Data Processing Operations.

2009 is the half-century milestone in the use of information technology for business applications, and it‚'s an opportunity to look back and give a nod of appreciation to those early IT entrepreneurs.

In the mid-20th century, the majority of people did not have checking accounts and none of them had bank-issued credit cards. Those in the lower and middle economic classes mostly relied upon cash to buy goods and pay bills. If funds needed to be sent long distances, Western Union provided facilities for the purchase of money orders that were communicated via telegraph and could be retrieved by the payee in another town or country. But the process of consumer banking was tailored for the needs of people who lived most if not all of their lives in the same town. Banking activities were mostly limited to home and car loans and the average customer was well known by the banking staff.

Editor‚'s note: The following is a guest post by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The views he expresses are his own, and we present them here to foster debate.

The mainstream press, such as The New York Times, has noticed that even Google itself is starting to worry about the possibility that the Department of Justice may seek regulation, possibly even the break-up of Google. How can this be? How can a firm seen as a triumph of creative capitalism and a virtuous contributor to the economy (‚"Don‚'t be evil!‚") possibly be suspected of anything? Is this regulatory oversight gone mad? Not exactly.

Below I summarize what I do know about Google‚'s behavior and what I believe the Department of Justice is likely to perceive and likely to need to demonstrate if it seeks to act against Google. In a later post I will expand, including what I believe but cannot yet demonstrate. It‚'s important to remember that I am not an attorney, just a computer science faculty member at a major business school, with some litigation experience, and that I have had no conversations with Google or with the Department of Justice about these issues, but I believe that what follows provides some insight into thinking at the Department of Justice.

On Friday, during our cloud computing event, Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary noted, ‚"The cloud is the new dotcom.‚" He was one of the judges for the demo startups, and for good or for bad, he might be right. Cloud computing as a term is broad enough to encompass most internet startups and already is in danger of being latched onto as the next catch-all category. Yet there is also obviously something there. Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook all want to become the cloud platform of choice for startups and developers to build their Web apps on.

And we are already seeing some impressive cloud-based apps that would have been much more difficult to build without these platforms. During the demos, for instance, Veodia showed an app for recording video in the cloud straight from a laptop‚'s camera‚-no uploading required. FathomDB is putting a relational database in the cloud (on Amazon‚'s EC2), and Diomede Storage is offering its own cloud service with a twist: online storage where you can monitor the power consumption of each file and act accordingly.

Below are four video highlights from the roundtable that followed the demos. In the first video, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues that ‚"we are on the threshold of fundamentally a new paradigm of computing.‚" He defines cloud computing both as as software-as-a-service and as platform-as-a-service (and judging by how many cloud platforms were represented at the event, it seems like everyone wants to be the latter).

In the second video, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains why Amazon is in the cloud computing business in the first place, and says that overall for cloud computing in general: ‚"This is still Day One.‚" We talked a lot about how enterprise apps are starting to look more and more like consumer Web apps, partly because they are both being built on similar back-end cloud architectures. But in the third video, Google‚'s Vic Gundotra takes exception to the idea that enterprise apps mimicking consumer apps is anything new.

And in the final video, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini talks about the importance of video in the cloud and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talks about how consumers don‚'t care where all the data and applications are stored, but that applications on different cloud platforms nevertheless have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. (Videos after the jump).

Embedr is a relatively new free service that lets you build custom video playlists from a variety of online clip sources and gives you the opportunity to aggregate the entire playlist into a good-looking widget which you can easily share on your blog or website.

It‚'s an elegant solution for those times you want to embed multiple videos in a blog post or on any web page without cluttering your site and forcing visitors to scroll down in order to watch all the clips you‚'re sharing. Creating widgets is ridicously simple, but we should note Embedr doesn‚'t host videos and can only pull videos from third-party services like YouTube, MySpace Video, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, Vimeo, Blip.tv and more. The maximum number of videos you can add to one playlist is 100.

eBay is having second thoughts about how easy it will be to spread the Kijiji brand in the U.S. The company is testing out the name ‚"eBay Classifieds‚" in two cities, San Antonio and Pittsburgh. A letter sent out to Kijiji members states:

We here at Kijiji thought it made a lot of sense to start using the eBay brand name. After all, we are part of the eBay family and we are a classifieds site‚Ķso ‚"eBay Classifieds‚" just seemed like a good idea.

Maybe it also has something to do with the ‚"j‚"s and ‚"i‚"s blending together beyond recognition in ‚"Kijiji.‚" It‚'s not just the name that needs work. The number of visitors to Kijiji sites worldwide was up only 7 percent in January to 23.2 million, while Craigslist grew six times faster and widened the gap. It ended January with 41.4 million unique visitors (comScore numbers).

Well done to the Authors Guild! Amazon revealed last night that the text-to-speech feature in the Kindle 2 will now be optional for publishers. The guild had been tenaciously fighting this feature, arguing that it had the potential to turn the Kindle 2 into a de-facto audiobook player. Right or wrong, Amazon has caved, and now publishers will be able to dictate whether or not the Kindle 2 is able to read aloud their books.

Photo gift service Personello has launched a simple but useful web service dubbed DAZZ that lets you preview a wide variety of goods with uploaded photos on them, completely automated and with both custom images and video clips.

It seems like a no-brainer for any personalized photo gift service provider to offer a similar functionality, but to the best of my knowledge DAZZ is currently the only one of its kind.

What you do is create an account on the DAZZ website and upload a photo that you‚'re considering printing on things like mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, teddybears, snowglobes, jigsaw puzzles etc. to give away as a gift. The startup‚'s ‚-DAZZigners‚' will then strip out the background and create a collection of so-called photostyles (e.g. Flowers, Heart, Sepia, Pop Art, etc.) centered around the main subject of the photo.

In a heated bidding war, ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours.

ToysRUs really didn‚'t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn‚'t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead?

Our Cloud Computing Roundtable just saw the launch of FathomDB, a new Y Combinator startup that offers database administration as a service. The startup manages many of the tasks that database administrators typically have to deal with, like database backups, monitoring, and launching replacement servers in the event of a crash. The service is primarily operating with MySQL databases hosted on Amazon‚'s EC2, but will expand to support other cloud-based computing services as they become available. And because it uses industry-standard systems, developers won‚'t have to modify their code to make it work with FathomDB, and they aren‚'t locked into the service.

Aside from routine maintenance tasks, FathomDB also offers an array of analytics tools that help developers track the status of their servers and identify where their performance bottlenecks are. CEO Justin Santa Barbara says that the system isn‚'t necessarily meant to actually replace database administrators, but instead to take care of low-level tasks so that they can focus on more complex and important issues.

Final pricing for the service is still being determined, but the company plans to charge a small (~10-20%) markup over standard EC2 prices.

Sometimes it‚'s hard to remember which video you have seen, left a comment on, rated, or who recommended it to you. And it‚'s getting harder to cut the noise in the heavily crowded online video space (YouTube users alone are uploading 15 hours of new content every 60 seconds). This is where Mitter, a service provided by Tokyo-based Metacast comes in (the site is available in English).

Mitter wants to do for video what recently introduced Dutch startup Twones does for music. The service tracks viewing patterns over multiple video services and generates a social feed based on that information. And much like Twones, Mitter doesn‚'t make much sense without installing an add-on for Firefox or the Internet Explorer (there is also a browser-independent bookmarklet available). To date, the Mitter toolbar has been distributed 1.5 million times. It‚'s now being actively used by more than 150,000 people, mostly in Japan.

The iPhone is like the bacon-wrapped scallop of the mobile world. Both are quite visually pleasing relative to their peers, easy to use, and generally liked by the masses. Spend a little too much time with either, however, and you start to see the flaws. With the scallops, the grease and animal fat that was oh-so delicious on the way down begins to clog your arteries and slow your saunter. With the iPhone, the interface that seemed oh-so-polished when it first met your fingertips begins to show signs of oversight and imperfection.

We‚'ve been using the iPhone for just a few months shy of two years now, and a few things that once seemed trivial have come to drive us up the wall. You‚'ll find no mention of the glaring faults (The lack of MMS, Copy and Paste, etc) in this list - we‚'re talking about the stuff that we just can‚'t believe made it through Apple‚'s user experience team.

At today‚'s TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable event, a new storage company called Diomede launched in private beta with the goal of offering low cost cloud-based storage that is also very energy efficient. The basic premise behind the service is that not all data in the cloud needs to be immediately available, but that most people still pay for the immediate access anyway. While most data centers have their servers and disk drives operating 24/7 with near-immediate access, Diomede allows customers to designate files that they don‚'t need instant access to, and places them either as ‚-nearline‚' or ‚-offline‚'. These files have an access time of five minutes or four hours, respectively, but cost only 1/12 as much as standard cloud providers to store and take as little as 1/60th the amount of energy. If you‚'d like to try it out, go to this page and enter the invite code ‚-tcrunch‚'.

The service offers a full API to developers, and also allows them to view metrics like the power consumption of each individual file. Possible applications include allowing developers to set their redundant file backups (which rarely need to be quickly accessed) to ‚-offline‚', where they can be stored at only a fraction of the normal cost.

One of the most requested features for Twitter is the ability to create groups. While users wait (and wait and wait) for Twitter to add this feature, a number of startups are going ahead and showing how it should be done. The latest of these is a LaunchBox Digital startup called Buzzable which just launched today. Buzzable lets you create Twitter groups around RSS feeds, and does so in a very compelling way.

Right now anyone can browse public groups, but you need an invite code to create a new group. Anyone with a twitter account, however, can join a public group and post a message. We have 500 invites. Just use the promo code: techcrunch.

You sign in using your Twitter ID, which lets you join and create both public and private groups centered around different topics. Some of the public groups right now include Android, Kindle, the New York Knicks, and the White House. There is even one for TechCrunch.

Groups are built around RSS feeds. So the TechCrunch group is simply our feed. But you can set up topic-specific groups which pull from a number of feeds, including Google News, Eventful, Digg, Yahoo Finance, Twitter itself, blogs, and so on. You can set it up so that the feeds are filtered by keyword (such as ‚"Android,‚" Kindle,‚" ‚"Knicks,‚" etc.). Members of the group can then discuss any headline by commenting in-line. Each comment can be pushed out to Twitter proper as well. The result is a combination of RSS content and Twitter conversation, all in the same stream.

Here‚'s the live stream of our Cloud Computing Roundtable, which kicks off at 2:30 PST with product demos from a handful of early-stage cloud-focused start-ups, with commentary from a panel of experts. Shortly thereafter our roundtable discussion will bring together a dozen panelists from some of Silicon Valley‚'s most acclaimed companies who will discuss the future of cloud-based services. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks.)

Twitter Hash Tag: #tccloud

Live Videos by Ustream

When I was a kid one of my favorite parts of Disney World was Tomorrowland‚'s Carousel of Progress. It was steeped in 1950‚'s futurism: Why, of course! Every family will have their own electric paint mixer in the future! And I only wish I‚'d been old enough to see this gem before it was torn down and replaced with a souvenir stand: The Monsanto House of the Future, a house built entirely of plastic.

Disney likes to talk up inventions the house featured that wound up becoming commonplace, like the microwave oven. What it leaves out are all the ones that never did. You know, the type of things we saw on the Jetsons: flying cars, our food in pill form, robot butlers and maids. Sadly, as it turns out the ‚"future‚" looked a lot like the past, just more streamlined. Had Tomorrowland stayed in tact, it would have looked more like the Tomorrow-that-never-happened-land.

I‚'ve been thinking about Tomorrowland for about three days. It started when I read Farhad Manjoo‚'s excellent piece on Slate about the ‚"Jurassic Web.‚" He painted a picture of what the Web was like in 1996. It was mostly a place you went and then thought, ‚"OK, I‚'m here. Now what?‚" He reminded us of the sheer wonder the first time you could search on Amazon by author or browse through Yahoo‚'s hand built ‚"directory‚" of Web pages.

The note Manjoo struck at the end of the piece was pure Silicon Valley: If all this happened in just 13 years, what will the next decade of the Internet hold? Will we look back on YouTube, Facebook, Hulu and iTunes as primitive?

This is where Tomorrowland and the Jetsons come in.

Mufin, an automated music recommendation engine that actually works (most of the time), has released a new native media player in public beta. The player includes a powerful recommendation engine based on technology developed at the Fraunhofer Institute, allowing users to quickly generate playlists similar to any song they have in their library. The player is for Windows only at the moment, but Mac users can still try out the recommendation technology at Mufin.com, which launched to the public in November.

Mufin‚'s core technology is based on finding recommendations based on knowing a few songs that you like. Unlike Apple‚'s Genius feature, which creates recommendations based on aggregate data compiled from user listening habits, Mufin actually analyzes the sound file itself, ‚-listening‚' to 40 audio characteristics as it tries to recommend similar songs. In my testing the service has usually worked surprisingly well, though there are sometimes a few bizarre results. Oftentimes these apparent errors actually do share characteristics with the original song I used to gather recommendations, but they are very obscure and sometimes in a completely different genre (which is both the blessing and the curse of using such audio-based recommendation engines).

Gary Vaynerchuk is going after the Oprah set. The wine wholesaler who launched a career as a Web video celebrity talking about wine and marketing just launched Obsessed, a new video talk show hosted by Samantha Ettus. With Obsessed, Vaynerchuk hopes to move beyond niche programming on the Web to appeal to a mainstream audience.

The format of the show is an in-depth 30 to 40 minute interview with guests that appeal to 25 to 55-year-old women. The first interviews on the site right now are with food writer Mark Bittman and floral designer Preston Bailey. Future guests will include Today Show travel editor Peter Greenberg, TreeHugger founder Graham Hill, and BlogHer founder Liz Stone.

Ettus will host the show and be the main star, while Vaynerchuk will come on at the end for 3 minutes to talk about wine, which is his thing. He is the host of Wine Library TV and also serves up regular videos on gary vay‚'ner‚'chuk, mostly about marketing. ‚"There is only so much content I can pump out,‚" Vaynerchuk say. ‚"I need to own as many media properties as possible.‚"

Prime View International, maker of electrophoretic displays AKA epaper makes the screens for Amazon‚'s Kindle 2. That much we know. However, rumors that they are working on a larger-sized touchscreen makes us think they are now ramping up production of the ‚"student‚'s Kindle‚" we talked about last year. This Kindle will have a larger screen and more research-oriented features - Wi-Fi, anyone?

If this post on a local blog about Brooklyn has it right, the NY Times will be debuting a neighborhood blog project next week on Monday. Here‚'s the gist:

Look out, local bloggers, the Gray Lady is moving in on your turf. Starting next week, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative starting mid-day on Monday. Our home soil of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will be one of the two pilot sites (the other site will cover Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey). According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include ‚"cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‚-SoHo of Brooklyn.‚'‚"

We‚'ve had OpenId to make the transport of your ID easier between Web sites. We‚'ve had initiatives on Data Portability to make it easier for you to move your data around between social networks and other apps. But what we haven‚'t had yet is a way to allow you to share your location between different mobile social platforms. That‚'s something that a new, largely European-inspired, initiative hopes to address. The alliance, called OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) includes many of the players in mobile social networking and location-based social software. Twelve startups, all of whom serve their users with location-based services, have signed an agreement to enable their combined 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks. Currently most location-based systems operate in a similar fashion to instant messaging systems, and don‚'t interoperate. The question is, will Google‚'s Latitude and Yahoo!‚'s FireEagle come on board?