This is one of those questions with which I am getting bored.  You can’t attend a conference these days without someone asking that question.  The constant theorizing is akin to the classic debate of “Kirk or Picard?”  It’s a question that may never get answered, and in fact will engage the nerds for decades to come.

After my conversations last night at the Structure VIP reception, I came to the conclusion that the word “cloud” is like catnip for nerds.  You can attach the word cloud to anything to attain relevancy.

During his panel at the Structure 09 conference (being live streamed from GigaOm), James Lindenbaum from Heroku said that he doesn’t want to think about the question anymore; in fact, he wants to avoid the word “cloud” all together.  Instead, he would prefer that people focus on building applications and rely on abstractions provided by the development frameworks than to think about to cloud or not to cloud.

This just in, local San Francisco entrepreneurs are launching the world’s first cloud gas station.  They supply a true multi-tenant, pay by the drink model, removing the need to purchase your own refineries, and abstracting the gas production process to deliver a truly seamless experience for downstream customers.

Next up on the zeitgeist watch?  Attaching the word “scale” to the name of your company.

I spent the better part of the last month looking to buy a new car.  I have to say, I am quite surprised at the tactics that would be employed to sell a car.  It’s bad enough that we are in a bit of an economic, erm, situation borne of borrowing too much and living beyond our means, but to willfully create fiscal irresponsibility is something I could not let go.

Let me start by saying I ultimately bought the Honda Odyssey from the lot in question, Bellevue Honda.  The sales person, Gil, was a great guy, and had nothing to do with my issue.  I take Honda to task.  Since I didn’t notice this “issue” until the day that I was buying the car, I don’t know whether or not this is an issue with other lots.  I suspect it is.

This first picture is from the window of a Honda Insight.  At a whopping 40-45 miles per gallon, what’s not to like about this car?  Sounds great, and the $1,464 in fuel costs per year sounded normal to me.  Normal is a relative term, of course, and I didn’t do the math in my head to sort out if this number made any real sense at all.  It wasn’t until I wandered past a Honda Pilot that I did a double take, with the words “WTF” flying out of my mouth.

You see, the Honda Pilot is one of those SUVs.  They tend to drink gasoline.  I should know, I used to own one.  This sticker shows that they get 16-22 miles per gallon.  That’s an improvement over the initial model year (when I was an owner), but clearly worse than the Insight, right?  Apparently, your estimated fuel costs for the Pilot will be about $1,585 per year.  Again, WTF?  At first I thought that Honda was playing games with the number of miles per year that someone would be driving.  You know, because someone who is driving a hybrid will drive that shit to death because of all the great gas mileage they are getting.  Nope, it turns out that they estimate 15,000 miles per year on both cars.

So the culprit lay at the feet of the estimated fuel costs.  $4.10 per gallon for the Insight and $1.90 for the Pilot.  Again, WTF?  I really, really want to believe that this is not a calculated move on the part of Honda, and in fact the fuel prices reflect the reality of the fuel costs at the time the lot took ownership of the car.  Regardless, with that kind of spread in pricing, the lots should take the initiative and change the stickers in the cars to reflect a price of gasoline more in line with reality.  At $1.90, the estimated fuel costs for the Insight would be about $680.  The Pilot, at $4.10 per gallon, would estimate out to about $3,400.

Again, I want to believe that Honda just dropped the ball.  I don’t want to think that since SUVs have historically been the profit honey pots for car dealerships that they are maliciously misleading customers with an artificially low per year fuel costs to make them seem more affordable.

This week should be an exciting one.  Not only do I get to travel down to CA and see old friends, I get to talk to a bunch of great startups, and cap the week off by participating in a panel discussion at Structure 09 – the 1:30PM session titled “Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise as a First Step.”

The panel is being run by George Gilbert, who, like myself, is an ex-Wall Street guy, and he used to work at Microsoft.  He’s now running TechAlpha, and based on the few conversations we’ve had in preparation for the panel discussion, it should be a good one.

If you are going to be at the conference and want to get together to talk about your company or your cloud needs, find me by sending me a DM or @ on twitter – I am @brandonwatson.

I just logged into my App Engine dashboard to check out some things, and look what popped up on the left hand side nav bar.  Intrigued, I clicked on the link to reveal a page with the below text.  That link to task queues goes nowhere of note at this time.

Truth be told, I have been doing some really nasty stuff on App Engine using cron jobs, so getting access to the tasks stuff would make me really happy.

I went and pulled the presentation from Google IO about offline processing to see if I could figure out how to use them in the absence of any sanctioned content on their dev portal.

UPDATE: Looks like was ahead of the gun by mere minutes, and the links now go places that have info on task queues.  Good for GOOG, though I haven’t wrapped my mind around this new feature yet.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say something which is going to be very unpopular.  Digg, as an entity, is a gigantic hypocrisy.  There.  I’ve said it.  Want me to prove it?  Here goes.

It begins with the Terms of Use.  Digg very clearly lays out in section 5 – USER CONDUCT -what they do and do not want in terms of use of the site.  There have been no shortages of bans for pointing to sites that could be seen as affiliate farms, but that is not my beef.  I take exception with item #9:

As a condition of use, you promise not to use the Services for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by these Terms of Use, or any other purpose not reasonably intended by Digg.

By way of example, and not as a limitation, you agree not to use the Services:

<snip>

9. with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services;

Right there, they make it very clear – do not, under any circumstances, try to inflate your digg count.  The most common manifestation of this sort of thing would be to mass email everyone you know to go digg your story.  This is where I take exception.

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I am reaching out to my audience, and hoping my readers can pass on the message.  My great friends are getting their new company going and need to hit beta customer milestones for June.  If you are in the process of buying a new car, or know someone who is, check out CarWoo.  They will save you time, money and hassle in your new car buying experience (full disclosure: I am an advisor and investor in CarWoo).  I can’t share anything about the service, but if you become one of their beta customers for June, you will find that there is a far better way to buy a car, and they are the service for you.

If you aren’t in the car buying process, but can help pass along this message, we would be much obliged.