combattery84

The numbers overwhelmingly point to mobile's bulging bank account
But first, let me detail the numbers. Cloud services brought in about $3 billion in 2010 from its three main components: infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and software (SaaS) offerings. In IaaS, Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services (AWS) made about $500 million in 2010, and Rackspace -- the No. 2 IaaS provider -- raked in about $100 million. SaaS did better: Salesforce.com pulled in $1.3 billion in 2010, with the other four major SaaS providers -- NetSuite, RightNow, SuccessFactors, and Taleo -- earning about $200 million each. Revenues for PaaS offerings -- exemplified by Salesforce.com's Force.com and Microsoft's Azure -- aren't broken out but are widely believed to be minuscule.

I'm not counting sales of so-called private cloud technology, as that dell inspiron 2500 Adapter Dell Inspiron 1150 Adapter Acer Aspire 3100 Adaptermeans pretty much anything in a data center, which covers most of what IT's expenditures ($1.5 trillion on tech last year). Whether you think a private cloud is a real cloud or just marketing buzz for the same old server, storage, and network gear (using virtualization, of course!), it's money that IT would be spending anyhow. Even if you decide that virtualization spend should be counted as cloud spend, that adds "only" about $5 billion to the cloud total, bringing it to $8 billion.

Now to some real money: Mobile technology brought in $173 billion in 2010 from its major sources: $62 billion in 3G data plans, $99 billion in smartphone sales ($29 billion to Apple, $20 billion to Nokia, $15 billion to Research in Motion, and $9 billion to Samsung), $10 billion in tablet sales (almost all iPads last year), and $2 billion in app sales ($1.7 billion to Apple alone). Note that I'm not including iTunes and similar music, book, and video sales via mobile devices, as they can be accessed on both PCs and mobile devices. If you're curious, they added up to $8 billion, with $4.1 billion going to Apple and $3.3 billion going to Amazon.com, including for the Kindle hardware.

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As these numbers show, when you look at the whole mobile market, the cloud appears downright sickly as a business. Maybe mobile can help. After all, what other computing platform is more dependent on the cloud concept than mobile?

While the new electrodes could eventually be useful for hybrids, and for stabilizing the grid, they aren't particularly good for other applications such as all-electric vehicles. For electric vehicles, the total amount of energy that batteries store is more important than how fast that energy can be delivered, since it's the total amount that determines how far these cars can travel between charges. The MIT researchers who developed the new carbon nanotube electrodes are also developing a different type of battery to store large amounts of energy. Called a lithum-air battery, where one of a battery's two electrodes is replaced by an interface with the air, the technology has recently attracted large amounts of government funding and interest from companies such as IBM. In theory, such batteries could store three times as much energy as conventional lithium-ion batteries. But the design has a number of problems that make it hard to commercialize, among the vulnerability of its active materials to moisture (the lithium metal it uses can catch fire if it gets wet) and the batteries' tendency to stop working after being recharged just a few times. Adapter toshiba Tecra A8 adapter Acer TravelMate 600 AC Adapter
Like lithium-air batteries, other potential high-energy battery technologies face a number of hurdles, which could help explain why hybrids with their high-power rather than high-energy batteries have been more successful than electric vehicles. Many of the most promising battery chemistries are too difficult to make at a large scale, fall apart after a few cycles, or are too expensive. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, complete battery packs today cost between $800 and $1,200 a kilowatt hour, and store about 100 to 120 watt-hours per kilogram. To make electric vehicles practical and affordable, the DOE would like to see costs drop to $250 per kilowatt hour and increase storage capacity to over 200 watt-hours per kilogram. (Reaching these goals will require even higher storage capacities for the individual battery cells that make up battery packs--about 400 watt hours per kilogram.)

While improving batteries for hybrids and electric vehicles is difficult, one of the biggest long-term challenges for battery researchers is making batteries that can cheaply store vast amounts of energy generated by solar panels and wind turbines, so that electricity from these sources is available when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. For now, such batteries aren't needed--there's enough power from conventional sources to take up the slack. But if solar and wind are ever to provide the majority of electricity, storage will be needed, and batteries today are far too expensive. The DOE goal for such batteries is less than $100 per kilowatt-hour, less than half its goal for electric vehicles. It's cheaper today to build a natural gas power plant as a backup source of power, or to store energy by pumping water uphill, where it can later flow downhill to spin a generator. One experimental approach to such low-cost batteries is something called a "liquid" battery, which uses inexpensive battery materials that assemble themselves. Normal 0 7.8 磅 0 2 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:普通表格; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} sony VGP-AC19V11 adapter toshiba Satellite A205 Adapter acer PA-1750-04 

Even if problems with batteries are overcome in the lab, these technologies face obstacles to being commercialized. To drive down costs, battery makers are turning to applications other than electric vehicles and the grid to get new technologies off the ground, applications such as microelectronics, power tools, and race cars. Plug-in hybrids can also help serve as a bridge to electric vehicles. Plug-ins use back-up gas-powered generators to help extend their range, allowing automakers to use smaller, less expensive battery packs than they'd need for electric vehicles. Automakers such as GM, with its Chevrolet Volt due out this year, are taking this approach. The electric vehicles on sale now, and that will be going on sale in the next few years, are either expensive sports cars and luxury vehicles, where costs can be high, or their upfront costs are being decreased using creative financing, such as leasing battery packs or offering per-mile plans something like the per-minute plans offered by cell phone companies.