I am in Berlin for most of the week and I got this message from Vodafone

From Vodafone: Just to let you know, you’ve used over 3MB of data which has cost you £1 incVAT per MB so far. Once you use more than 5MB, the charge changes to £5 incVAT for the next 5MB. If you’d like to stop receiving these alerts, text STOP to 40506 Sent SEP 14 @21:39 UK

Can anyone make sense of it?

Its 1£/mb till 3Mb
AFTER that, its £5 for 5M – which is also 1£/Mb

Whats the point?

why have something so complex?

This is why regulation and transparency is needed on priceplans

I had a friend once who was a Unix geek. He tried to convince me for a long time about how he could create a relational database only using unix tools like sed and awk .

By ‘relational database’ he meant that, he could create and manipulate data from flat files using uinx file processing tools.
It was amusing on first impressions, but he did have a point i.e. the basics of a relational database are simple. The complexity lies in the scaling, support etc.

For a long time, I thought that corporations and enterprises would always pay a premium for relational databases since they needed the scale and the transaction processing power and the protection for their data ..

Until I saw how facebook uses open source to scale

In a nutshell, facebook users spend 8 billion minutes on the site every day. There are 3.5 billion pieces of content shared weekly. 2.5 billion photos are uploaded every month, and 1.2 million photos are served up every second. And as 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States, the amount of data served and stored is further complicated by the locations of users and data centers.

So, facebook uses the LAMP stack but also Memcached: memory object caching system; Hadoop open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing ; Cassandra: Distributed storage system for managing structured data; Hive: data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop; HipHop: which transforms PHP source code into a highly optimized C++.; Scribe: Facebook logs approximately 25 terabytes of data a day. so Facebook developed Scribe to log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers; Thrift: Thrift provides a framework for scalable cross-language services development in C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Etc ..

And now comes xeround
Xeround launches its new database that is, according to CEO Razi Sharir, “the best of both worlds.” In other words, Xeround’s new database technology promises both the transactional and query capabilities of relational databases alongside the scalability of NoSQL ones.

So, if you compare with a classic relational database like Oracle which is expensive, many of the features and scalability seems to be possible.

So, while I smiled at the sed-awk-rdbms, I am not so sure now!

Maybe relational databases will be obsolete more sooner than I thought ..

Update

Next month sees two events in London: Connected home summit and Next generation mobile devices. I cannot attend either since I am speaking at CTIA at the mobile web and apps event and the ipad and tablets event but I would have loved to do so.

I think the topics are related and I see connected home with all the related trends like Internet of things, smart grids etc as the next frontier for mobile networks and devices.

However, I don’t know how innovative and radical the Operators and vendors will be in these discussions i.e. the topic is very forward looking(hence of interest) but not sure how many new perspectives some of the more traditional players in the industry would add to it

For instance: Vodafone is talking of femtocells but in reality they are promoting femtocells only for network coverage – which is fine but not innovative enough. Swisscom is speaking of the mobile decade but swisscom is a very conservative operator operating in Switzerland which has some unique conditions (ex ownership of Bluewin). BT retail is speaking of smart homes .. but today there are many players in the smart home arena and BT is not radical enough ..

Having said that .. the following sessions are definitely interesting and I would have loved to attend and see what they have to say ..

Defining The Device – Where in the Mobile Internet Heading? Ed Candy – Chief Technical Officer, Three Group (Hutchison)

Enabling The Digital Lifestyle – Exploiting The DLNA Eco-System Nidhish Parikh – Director, Personal Media, Nokia (DLNA Chair)

Changing Market Dynamics – Terminal Vendors, Content and Service Providers: Challenges and Opportunities Kamran Kordi – Head of Development – Devices, T-Mobile International

Exploring New Device Form Factors Caroline Gabriel – Chief Analyst, Rethink Research

How Do Vendors/Operators Attract Application Developers? Sanjeet Matharu – Principal Manager, Developer Marketing, Vodafone

One-API – Driving The Culture of Collaboration Graham Trickey – Senior Project Director (One-API), GSMA
Exploring The Open Source Value Chain And Internet Centric Applications Alex Reeve – Mobile Business Group Director, Microsoft

Wholesale Application Community – An Operators Perspective Pierre Combelles – VP, 3rd-party services, FT-Orange Group

Seizing The M2M Opportunity Robert Brunback – Head of Market Strategy, Telenor Connexion

Battle of Smartphones: Google vs Apple vs ROW Roberta Cozza – Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

All in all, this will be an interesting event I suspect. Pity I cannot make it but if you are attending, happy to do a guest post for you on OpenGardens blog. Please contact me at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com if you are attending either of these events and would like to do a guest post on this OpenGardens blog