The Tech Elite’s Quest to Reinvent School in Its Own Image

Caption: Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Lab School, photographed in Mountain View, California, in September 2015.

By WIRED

SALMAN KHAN SITS at the head of a conference table, surrounded by about a dozen children, talking about Hitler. It’s late June, nine months into the first year at Khan Lab School, Khan’s educational R&D lab in Mountain View. At most schools, the students would be counting down the minutes until their summer vacation. But the Lab School eschews most of the traditional trappings of US education, including summer break. So the kids here don’t seem particularly fidgety. Or at least not any more fidgety than your standard group of 9- to 12-year-olds sitting in a warm room analyzing the decline of the Weimar Republic.

Khan himself is the famed creator of Khan Academy, the online juggernaut that provides thousands of hours of free video tutorials and exercises to anyone with an Internet connection. Plenty of big-brained tech types—including the likes of Bill Gates, Ann and John Doerr, and Walter Isaacson—have hailed Khan Academy as a breakthrough: world-class teaching unencumbered by space and time, an agile system that lets students learn at their own pace, the most compelling case yet for how technology might revolutionize education around the globe. Khan, an MIT grad and former hedge funder, has become a Silicon Valley celebrity, feted on 60 Minutes, at TED, and in the pages of WIRED. “The world’s best-known teacher,” he has been called. “A true pioneer.” “One of our heroes.”

But a few years ago, Khan began arguing that videos weren’t enough. They were supplementing traditional education, when the entire system needed to be rethought. He wrote a book called The One World Schoolhouse that spelled out his vision, one in which schools abandon outdated practices—like homework, daily schedules composed of distinct 50-minute periods, grades, and classes organized by age—and embrace radical new methods to prepare students for the post-industrial world. Khan argued that the traditional lockstep approach to education, in which students all learn the same material on the same schedule, is anachronistic and crude; kids who are capable of learning faster are compelled to slow down, while others are forced to move on before mastering a subject, dooming them to a lifetime of incomprehension. Instead of inspiring students to think creatively, classes are filled with soul-killing lectures and emphasize conformity and obedience over passion and individuality. “The old classroom model simply doesn’t fit our changing needs,” Khan wrote. “It’s a fundamentally passive way of learning, while the world requires more and more active processing of information.”

Khan was hardly the first to level this critique. Reformers from John Dewey to Carleton Washburne had made similar arguments for more than a century. But Khan suggested that the digital revolution might finally enable a new model of education, more flexible, inspiring, and affordable than the current system. He proposed a school in which kids work at their own pace, picking up core skills via software like Khan Academy, with teachers tracking their progress and helping out as needed. Most of the day would be spent on creative projects, with kids working together across age groups. And the whole place would be suffused with a spirit of experimentation, with teachers testing out new ideas and collecting data to measure their efficacy. Khan admits today that many of those ideas were “theoretical” and “utopian.” But while those adjectives might seem like drawbacks in traditional education circles, they are irresistible to tech types with a penchant for philanthropy, some of whom eagerly fronted $1 million to help Khan build his dream school.

For decades now, technologists have been attempting to reinvent the school system. But at least so far, most of these efforts have run afoul of the rigid bureaucracies, parental anxieties, and political minefields that define much of the US education debate. InBloom, a system for collecting and tracking student data, shuttered in the face of parental protests; Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million investment in Newark’s public school system evaporated without leaving much of a trace; and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s ambitious plan to give every student an iPad broke down amid finger-pointing. In a country where even textbook purchases, to say nothing of tougher math standards, can spark national screamfests, the idea that the US would sanely and thoughtfully reengineer its approach to education seems naive at best. Then again, it’s hard to fault parents and educators for their conservatism. Innovation is an inherently risky endeavor. The tech industry fetishizes failure—the millions of eggs that must be broken on the way to making a unicorn omelet. That may be fine for business models or user interfaces, but not so great when those eggs are your kids.

So now, instead of massive top-down attempts to cram innovation into the public school system, some tech-minded parents and entrepreneurs are building their own alternatives. Home schooling has become a trend in the tech community; it’s “off the charts” at Google, Khan says. When it came time to educate his own children, Elon Musk hired a local teacher and built a 20-person school without grades or age-based cohorts. Zuckerberg and the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz participated in a $100 million funding round for AltSchool, a software-driven private school franchise founded by a Google alum. Facebook has partnered with a network of charter schools to build pedagogical software, one of a wave of new California schools using technology to make classroom education more flexible and individualized. “The Bay Area is the destination for educators who want to see early signs of what these new school models could look like,” says Brian Greenberg, CEO of the Silicon Schools Fund, a nonprofit that has backed the Lab School and other new schools.

This may come across as the educational equivalent of on-demand laundry delivery—privilege couched in the language of disruption. And there’s certainly nothing new about well-off kids receiving expensive, bespoke education while the rest of the country wrestles with the unforgiving economics of public schooling. Khan acknowledges that for now, most of the students at his school come from relatively wealthy tech-industry families, but he says that his annual tuition of $22,000 is much less than many private schools, especially considering that the school offers year-round classes and optional extended days. (He eventually aims to bring the tuition down to the amount public schools spend annually to educate each student. It’s also worth mentioning here that the Lab School is in the process of obtaining not-for-profit status, like Khan Academy.)

More to the point, his goal isn’t just to build one fancy school but to develop and test a new model of learning that can be exported to other schools around the country and the world. His team is diligently recording and tracking every student’s progress and sharing the findings with their parents and the staff, an open source approach to educational innovation. In this view, the Lab School kids are guinea pigs, the eggs in the omelet, willingly subjecting themselves to new ideas that have never been tried before, then adapting and adjusting and trying again.

“This is a lab for establishing new theories that could affect the rest of the planet,” Khan says. “The whole point is to catalyze change.”

The students of Khan Lab School are back from lunch, standing in a circle, trading public accolades. “I have a shout-out for Mary, because when no one would take me to the bathroom, Mary did,” one student announces. “It showed conscientiousness and social intelligence.” Another student adds, “I have a shout-out for Mishal for being a really good sport about going inside and about not eating with everyone else. It showed social intelligence, self-regulation, self-awareness, and conscientiousness.” After each compliment, the entire student body waves their fingers and chants “faaaantastic!”

It’s the kind of Kumbaya moment that could easily occur in squishy-minded, confidence-boosting schoolrooms across the country, with one difference: Orly Friedman, the school’s director, asks the students to add every remark to a Google form that tracks who delivered the praise, who received it, and which specific traits they called out. Over time, she says, she will have a detailed analysis of her students’ character development.

Students at the new school are encouraged to think creatively and work in teams. BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN

This is a pretty good snapshot of the Lab School’s overall approach to education—a touchy-feely surface that masks a rigorous fealty to tracking data about every dimension of a student’s scholastic and social progress. Every week, students set their own academic goals—the level of math they hope to master, the amount of time they plan to dedicate to reading, and so on. Over the course of the week, they use Khan Academy and other self-directed educational software to try to accomplish those goals. Their headway is charted so that teachers can identify where they are struggling and offer assistance. The afternoons are usually given over to broad, real-world projects—during my visit, one group of students was charged with redesigning the classroom’s library, a task that led them to draw maps, study taxonomy, and research barcode-scanning apps. The class also picks an overall theme to explore over the course of eight weeks. Last term’s theme, “endangered species,” culminated in a carnival in which the students designed games based on their favorite threatened animals. Unlike many progressive schools, the Lab School is a firm believer in standardized testing—students are evaluated three times a year, the better to measure their progress and make sure the school is living up to expectations. “It’s not acceptable for even one student in this school to not grow as expected,” Khan says, “and hopefully all of them are growing two to three times as expected.”

Khan has fantasized about starting a school like this ever since he was an undergrad. Indeed, even before Khan Academy became an international phenomenon—it now reaches 31 million students a month in some 190 countries in 36-plus languages—he began exploring meatspace brand extensions. In 2009, before he left his hedge fund job to devote himself full time to Khan Academy, he used his vacation time to run a summer camp for middle-school-aged kids, in which the campers mentored one another and worked together on big projects like building robots. In 2010, he began a pilot program with the Los Altos, California, school district. Instead of delivering lectures, five teachers had their students use Khan Academy to learn math at their own pace, then tracked their progress on a special dashboard.

Over the years, Khan had occasionally pursued the idea of starting a school, but any time he spoke to anyone about it, he came away discouraged. Real estate in Mountain View was prohibitively expensive, and the liability insurance alone presented a massive headache—to say nothing of all the usual bureaucratic hurdles from local government. But in the summer of 2013, Khan began to consider education options for his then 4-year-old son. That same year, Khan ran his first summer camp for younger kids, and at the end of it one of the parents begged him to start a school. “It was like, OK, if we’re ever going to start a school and we want our own kids to be in it, it’s now or never,” he says. “Everyone will tell you that starting a school’s a crazy thing, don’t even try. And we were like, well, let’s at least try.”

Khan initially figured he would start a homeschooling cooperative with about 10 families, but when he brought the idea up to the Khan Academy board, several members encouraged him to think bigger. “The vision of Khan Academy isn’t the website, it’s the book, it’s The One World Schoolhouse,” says Dan Benton, a board member who was among the school’s loudest proponents. “We haven’t demonstrated all the other elements of Sal’s dream, and I think the school gives us that opportunity.”

Khan’s startup mentality meant building the school extremely fast—and courting disaster at every step. They signed up 30 kids for the initial cohort, mostly from families who worked at Khan Academy or knew someone who did, but warned them to have backup plans in case the whole thing fell apart. They didn’t have a space built to code for the school until August, weeks before they were due to open. (Google eventually leased them a couple of floors in a company-owned office park.) They had to push back the start date by two weeks. Meanwhile, Khan was remodeling his house, and his wife had just given birth to their third child. “Honestly, I like to multitask, but there were nights when I did not sleep,” Khan says. “I would get up and wander the streets. ‘What am I doing?’”

But it all ended up coming together. “I probably used some of my capital,” Khan says. The city of Mountain View granted permission for them to open a school in a space zoned for offices. He hired a couple of other teachers who already used Khan Academy, were fans of The One World Schoolhouse, and were eager to explore a new approach to education. On September 15, the school opened for its first day of class with 30 students.

One of the tenets of the Lab School is that kids should play an active role in designing their own education. This means that a lot of the school day is spent discussing the school itself. While I was there, kids put in hours designing new storage space to stow their backpacks, devising a new meal system, and figuring out how to incorporate the new classmates that would be arriving in the fall, when the school doubles in size to 60 and welcomes more middle-school-aged students. They often sounded more like tech entrepreneurs than elementary students, talking about things like “rapid prototyping” and “design thinking.” On more than one occasion, I heard them begging to spend more time on math and reading.

“We haven’t demonstrated all the elements of Sal’s dream. The school gives us that opportunity.”

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Using data science to beat cancer

Posted by Nancy Brinker, Elad Gil - 01/08/2017

The complexity of seeking a cure for cancer has vexed researchers for decades. While they’ve made remarkable progress, they are still waging a battle uphill as cancer remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide.

Yet scientists may soon have a critical new ally at their sides — intelligent machines — that can attack that complexity in a different way.

Consider an example from the world of gaming: Last year, Google’s artificial intelligence platform, AlphaGo, deployed techniques in deep learning to beat South Korea Grand Master Lee Sedol in the immensely complex game of Go, which has more moves than there are stars in the universe.

Those same techniques of machine learning and AI can be brought to bear in the massive scientific puzzle of cancer.

One thing is certain — we won’t have a shot at conquering cancer with these new methods if we don’t have more data to work with. Many data sets, including medical records, genetic tests and mammograms, for example, are locked up and out of reach of our best scientific minds and our best learning algorithms.

The good news is that big data’s role in cancer research is now at center stage, and a number of large-scale, government-led sequencing initiatives are moving forward. Those include the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs’ Million Veteran Program; the 100,000 Genomes Project in the U.K.; and the NIH’s The Cancer Genome Atlas, which holds data from more than 11,000 patients and is open to researchers everywhere to analyze via the cloud. According to a recent study, as many as 2 billion human genomes could be sequenced by 2025.

There are other trends driving demand for fresh data, including genetic testing. In 2007, sequencing one person’s genome cost $10 million. Today you can get this done for less than $1,000. In other words, for every person sequenced 10 years ago, we can now do 10,000. The implications are big: Discovering that you have a mutation linked to higher risk of certain types of cancer can sometimes be a life-saving bit of information. And as costs approach mass affordability, research efforts approach massive potential scale.

A central challenge for researchers (and society) is that current data sets lack both volume and ethnic diversity. In addition, researchers often face restrictive legal terms and reluctant sharing partnerships. Even when organizations share genomic data sets, the agreements are typically between individual institutions for individual data sets. While there are larger clearinghouses and databases operating today that have done great work, we need more work on standardized terms and platforms to accelerate access.

The potential benefits of these new technologies go beyond identifying risk and screening. Advances in machine learning can help accelerate cancer drug development and therapy selections, enabling doctors to match patients with clinical trials, and improving their abilities to provide custom treatment plans for cancer patients (Herceptin, one of the earliest examples, remains one of the best).

We believe three things need to happen to make data more available for use for cancer research and AI programs. First, patients should be able to contribute data easily. This includes medical records, radiology images and genetic testing. Laboratory companies and medical centers should adopt a common consent form to make it easy and legal for data sharing to occur. Second, more funding is needed for researchers working at the intersection of AI, data science and cancer. Just as the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation is funding new tool development for medicine, new AI techniques need to be funded for medical applications. Third, new data sets should be generated, focused on people of all ethnicities. We need to make sure that advances in cancer research are accessible to all.

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Dropbox Alternatives for Agencies and How to Migrate

By Joe Oliveto

For nearly a decade, Dropbox has helped media companies and creative agencies collaborate on their projects with greater efficiency. While many have embraced the benefits the service offers, enough time has passed for teams to realize that Dropbox is not tailored to everyone’s needs. Specifically, agencies that work extensively with video have found that slow upload speeds, poor playback quality, and limited branding options make Dropbox an imperfect tool for their projects. As video becomes a more ubiquitous component of the digital landscape, the demand for an alternative option has grown.

The collaboration app Wiredrive is one such option. Built specifically for teams who work heavily with video, Wiredrive streamlines the digital media management process and optimizes team collaboration. Offering fast upload and download speeds, as well as enhanced branding, presentation, and organization tools, it’s a Dropbox alternative designed to address the particular needs of creative and interactive agencies.

Finding a new, reliable option is only half the battle, though. Most groups have already been using their current collaboration app for several months or years, and migrating to a new file hosting service can seem like an intimidating task for agencies. The prospect of moving all your media assets from one cloud over to another can appear overwhelming, and if members of your team have grown accustomed to the interface and function of one service, the idea that they may need to learn to work with a new digital media management product could discourage you from making the switch. While you may appreciate and understand the benefits of another option, you might not feel prepared to actually start using it.

Fortunately, Wiredrive offers a solution to this problem. By allowing users to upload files from their current Dropbox accounts, Wiredrive smoothes the transition process. If you’re already using Dropbox, you can continue to do so, knowing that nothing you work with there will be lost as you begin to explore the usefulness of a new collaboration app. Should you plan to phase out Dropbox use at your agency, you can do so gradually. Rather than making a sudden shift, team members can acquaint themselves with the features and tools offered by a new service. Products that boost the efficiency of team collaboration tend to be most effective when groups embrace them naturally, instead of feeling that they’ve been forced to learn something new.

For creative agencies, Wiredrive also has the added benefit of integrating with popular Adobe software, including Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects. Team members can work on their projects and sync them directly via the Wiredrive panel, significantly reducing the learning curve and allowing them to focus on the creative work.

Dropbox made an impression, but for creative agencies, it’s not the ideal collaboration app. Boasting features that allow for more efficient digital media management, as well as tools which make the transition period much simpler for teams, Wiredrive is an option more fitting those in the creative fields.

https://www.wiredrive.com/dropbox-alternatives-for-agencies/

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How Algorithms run Amazon's Warehouses

Amazon's vast, 40,000 sq m, fulfilment centre in Hemel Hempstead (Credit: Amazon)

By Chris Baraniuk, 18 August 2015

When you click “buy’ on Amazon, a flurry of activity begins inside a nearby warehouse – all managed by smart computer code. What’s it like to work there?

“Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History.” So reads a sign above the entrance to Amazon’s newest UK “fulfilment centre” (or warehouse) in Hemel Hempstead.

Inside lies more than 40,000 sq m of shelving, packing lines and millions of products. One area where larger products are stored is known as “pallet land” and adjacent, at another end of the space sits “the tower”, where several floors of shelving are stacked on top of each other. Pickers constantly, and more or less silently, walk up and down the tower’s lengthy aisles, pushing carts into which they deposit items purchased by someone, somewhere online.

Founded at the dawn of the web in 1994, Amazon is now reportedly worth $247bn (£157bn). But the company is not, in fact, hugely profitable. What keeps Amazon afloat? As for any business with tight margins, efficiency is key.

A recent New York Times investigation revealed that the corporate culture inside Amazon is highly driven by data: personal performance, for example, is continually checked with a software system called the Anytime Feedback Tool that allows employees to share praise or criticism about their colleagues.

At the company’s warehouses, the workers are also guided and monitored by software, but in a much more direct way. When you order an item online, the Amazon system quickly works out where the item sits in its inventory, and dispatches a human picker to go fetch it. “It’s not about learning where things are, in your head, or having to memorise,” explains general manager Henry Low. “We make the task as simple as possible.”

One of the first things that strikes you about the Amazon fulfilment centres is that the products aren’t organised logically – or at least in the kind of fashion that a human would use. For instance, products on shelves are not organised by category. Instead, they are placed on shelves as if by random. An HDMI cable lies near to five copies of some Harry Potter sheet music. A brand of baby’s bottle is across the aisle from a drain water diverter. But there is method to this apparent madness. “Imagine picking one model of HDMI cable from a shelf of hundreds of them,” says Low. The pickers are not meant to have to think too long about what they’re retrieving – the whole process is designed to be as streamlined as humanly possible.

Preparing for Christmas in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire (Credit: Rex)

When an item is collected by hand, the picker scans it with a handheld device to ensure that the correct object has been taken. And every item’s progress throughout the warehouse is constantly monitored thanks to a series of points at which it is scanned again – for example at the moment of being labelled with the customer’s name and address. “We are able to track where the item is at any one time at the fulfillment center,” says Low, who is both confident and clearly proud of the attention to detail.

The BBC’s Panorama programme has reported in the past on the high levels of accuracy and productivity expected of employees in Amazon warehouses. Reportedly, the pickers’ handheld devices in some warehouses count down the seconds that they have to retrieve the next product, in order to meet their performance targets.

Scanners instruct the pickers where to go, and reportedly count down in seconds how long it should take (Credit: Rex)

Initially, Low denies this is the case at Hemel Hampstead. However, when asked to see one of the scanners it becomes immediately apparent that such a countdown does indeed exist.

Thomas Owens, a picker at the centre estimates that he picks, on average, 1,000 items a day. “It depends on what process path you’re doing. But between break-times it’s normally between 200 and 300, so I’d say it’s about 1,000 or 1,200 a day,” he explains. In a 10-hour shift, that equates to almost two items every minute. Still, Owens adds that missing a handful of these countdowns is perfectly acceptable, and does not prevent pickers from meeting their overall productivity targets.

Workers in Peterborough prepare for 'Cyber Monday', the busiest online shopping day of the year (Credit: Rex)

Even so, the human element is arguably the weak link in the efficiency chain, and new computer-based systems that promise to automate Amazon’s operations even further might one day take over the ferrying of products themselves. Kiva Systems is a little-known Amazon subsidiary which develops hi-tech warehouse robotics. Instead of human pickers going to and from shelves in a large space, the shelves themselves are mobile and travel on wheels to stationary pickers who simply lift off the required item. Dutifully, the robot shelves then return to their place.

Another company, called Sick, has invented sophisticated sensing equipment that can be used in highly automated warehouses. Human eyes may be less and less useful in the future since, as a company press release about a visual sensor boasts, “the Sick Inspector P30 […] enables the automated crane system to pick and place more quickly, saving typically 10 seconds per pick (potentially 15% extra picking cycles per hour).”

Pickers, here at Peterborough, wander the shelves almost silently (Credit: Rex)

And yet, human involvement in the whole business of getting Amazon products from these massive fulfilment centres to your doormat is, for the time being, still crucial and evident. Human workers don’t just lift items off the shelves at the centre, they’re also responsible for packing products in boxes (the size of which is predetermined by an algorithm) and stuffing packing paper and vouchers in along with the purchased item.

Several rows of workers tasked with this part of the process are busily filling boxes, keeping packages moving onto conveyor belts at a steady pace. Later, of course, these packages will be driven to homes and businesses up and down the country by human drivers for delivery. Still, with Amazon now experimenting with the idea of delivery-by-drone, it’s not clear for how long exactly that part of the chain will go unmodified.

Items on shelves are not organised logically, by category, but seemingly at random (Credit: Rex)

When it’s time for a break, a notification sounds and the workers flood dutifully to the canteen, which seats at least 100 of them easily. There they enjoy the mid-shift break, eating, reading, chatting quietly.

“Work Hard,” said the sign near the entrance. On the warehouse floor, it’s apparent that the largely anonymous people who handle your online purchases take the first part of this mantra seriously.

Amazon's software tracks progress of your item delivery at every stage (Credit: Getty Images)

Workers often collect more than 1,000 items per day (Credit: Rex)

Will human pickers eventually be replaced? (Credit: Rex)

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What Is Cloud Computing?

BY ERIC GRIFFITH - APRIL 17, 2015

The 'cloud' is a real buzzword, but what is it, how does it impact what you do, and is it anything really new?

What is the cloud? Where is the cloud? Are we in the cloud now? These are all questions you've probably heard or even asked yourself. The term "cloud computing" is everywhere.

In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. It goes back to the days of flowcharts and presentations that would represent the gigantic server-farm infrastructure of the Internet as nothing but a puffy, white cumulonimbus cloud, accepting connections and doling out information as it floats.

What cloud computing is not about is your hard drive. When you store data on or run programs from the hard drive, that's called local storage and computing. Everything you need is physically close to you, which means accessing your data is fast and easy, for that one computer, or others on the local network. Working off your hard drive is how the computer industry functioned for decades; some would argue it's still superior to cloud computing, for reasons I'll explain shortly.

The cloud is also not about having a dedicated network attached storage (NAS) hardware or server in residence. Storing data on a home or office network does not count as utilizing the cloud. (However, some NAS will let you remotely access things over the Internet, and there's at least one NAS named "My Cloud," just to keep things confusing.)

For it to be considered "cloud computing," you need to access your data or your programs over the Internet, or at the very least, have that data synchronized with other information over the Web. In a big business, you may know all there is to know about what's on the other side of the connection; as an individual user, you may never have any idea what kind of massive data-processing is happening on the other end. The end result is the same: with an online connection, cloud computing can be done anywhere, anytime.

Consumer vs. Business

Let's be clear here. We're talking about cloud computing as it impacts individual consumers—those of us who sit back at home or in small-to-medium offices and use the Internet on a regular basis.

There is an entirely different "cloud" when it comes to business. Some businesses choose to implement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where the business subscribes to an application it accesses over the Internet. (Think Salesforce.com.) There's also Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), where a business can create its own custom applications for use by all in the company. And don't forget the mighty Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Rackspace provide a backbone that can be "rented out" by other companies. (For example, Netflix provides services to you because it's a customer of the cloud-services at Amazon.)

Of course, cloud computing is big business: The market was already generating $100 billion a year in 2012. It could be $270 billion by the year 2020.

Common Cloud Examples 

The lines between local computing and cloud computing sometimes get very, very blurry. That's because the cloud is part of almost everything on our computers these days. You can easily have a local piece of software (for instance, Microsoft Office 365) that utilizes a form of cloud computing for storage (Microsoft OneDrive).

That said, Microsoft also offers a set of Web apps, now called Office Online, that are online-only versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote accessed via your Web browser without installing anything. That makes them a version of cloud computing (Web-based=cloud).

Some other major examples of cloud computing you're probably using:

Google Drive: This is a pure cloud computing service, with all the storage found online so it can work with the cloud apps: Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Drive is also available on more than just desktop computers; you can use it on tablets like the iPad$589.00 at Amazon or on smartphones, and there are separate apps for Docs and Sheets, as well. In fact, most of Google's services could be considered cloud computing: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and so on.

Apple iCloud: Apple's cloud service is primarily used for online storage, backup, and synchronization of your mail, contacts, calendar, and more. All the data you need is available to you on your iOS, Mac OS, or Windows device (Windows users have to install the iCloud control panel). Naturally, Apple won't be outdone by rivals: it offers cloud-based versions of its word processor (Pages), spreadsheet (Numbers), and presentations (Keynote) for use by any iCloud subscriber. iCloud is also the place iPhone users go to utilze the Find My iPhone feature that's all important when the phone goes missing.

Amazon Cloud Drive: Storage at the big retailer is mainly for music, preferably MP3s that you purchase from Amazon, and images—if you have Amazon Prime, you get unlimited image storage. The Cloud Drive also holds anything you buy for the Kindle. It's essentially storage for anything digital you'd buy from Amazon, baked into all its products and services.

Hybrid services like Box, Dropbox, and SugarSync all say they work in the cloud because they store a synced version of your files online, but most also sync those files with local storage. Synchronization to allow all your devices to access the same data is a cornerstone of the cloud computing experience, even if you do access the file locally.

Likewise, it's considered cloud computing if you have a community of people with separate devices that need the same data synched, be it for work collaboration projects or just to keep the family in sync. For more, check out the The Best Cloud Storage Services for 2015.

Cloud Hardware

Right now, the primary example of a device that is completely cloud-centric is the Chromebook.

These are laptops that have just enough local storage and power to run the Chrome OS, which is essentially turning the Google Chrome Web browser into an operating system. With a Chromebook, most everything you do is online: apps, media, and storage are all in the cloud. Coming soon are ChromeBits, smaller-than-a-candy-bar drives (pictured) that turn any display with an HDMI port into a usable computer running Chrome OS.

Of course, you may be wondering what happens if you're somewhere without a connection and you need to access your data. This is currently one of the biggest complaints about Chrome OS, although its offline functionality is expanding.

The Chromebook isn't the first product to try this approach. So-called "dumb-terminals" that lack local storage and connect to a local server or mainframe go back decades. The first Internet-only product attempts included the old NIC (New Internet Computer), the Netpliance iOpener, and the disastrous 3Com Audrey. You could argue they all debuted well before their time—dial-up speeds of the 1990s had training wheels compared to the accelerated broadband Internet connections of today. That's why many would argue that cloud computing works at all: the connection to the Internet is as fast as the connection to the hard drive. Or is it?

Arguments Against the Cloud

In a 2013 edition of his feature What if?, xkcd-cartoonist (and former NASA roboticist) Randall Monroe tried to answer the question of "When—if ever—will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?" The question was posed because no matter how great your broadband connection, it's still cheaper to send a package of hundreds of gigabytes of data via Fedex's "sneakernet" of planes and trucks than it is to try and send it over the Internet. (The answer, Monroe concluded, is the year 2040.)

Cory Doctorow over at boingboing took Monroe's answer as "an implicit critique of cloud computing." To him, the speed and cost of local storage easily outstrips using a wide-area network connection controlled by a telecom company (your ISP).

That's the rub. The ISPs, telcos, and media companies control your access. Putting all your faith in the cloud means you're also putting all your faith in continued, unfettered access. You might get this level of access, but it'll cost you. And it will continue to cost more and more as companies find ways to make you pay by doing things like metering your service: the more bandwidth you use, the more it costs.

Maybe you trust those corporations. That's fine, but there are plenty of other arguments against going into the cloud whole hog. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak decried cloud computing in 2012: "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years," he said.

In part, that comes from the potential for crashes. When there are problems at a company like Amazon, which provides cloud storage services to big name companies like Netflix and Pinterest, it can take out all those services (as happened in the summer of 2012). Last year in 2014, outages afflicted Dropbox, Gmail, Basecamp, Adobe, Evernote, iCloud, and Microsoft. Usually for just hours.

But Wozniak was concerned more about the intellectual property issues. Who owns the data you store online? Is it you or the company storing it? Consider how many times there's been widespread controversy over the changing terms of service for companies like Facebook and Instagram—which are definitely cloud services—regarding what they get to do with your photos. There's also a difference between data you upload, and data you create in the cloud itself—a provider could have a strong claim on the latter. Ownership is a relevant factor to be concerned about.

After all, there's no central body governing use of the cloud for storage and services. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is trying. It created an IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative in 2011 to establish standards for use, especially for the business sector. Last year's Supreme Court ruling against Aereo could have told us a lot about copyright of files in the cloud... but the court side-stepped the issue to keep cloud computing status quo.

Cloud computing—like so much about the Internet—is a little bit like the Wild West, where the rules are made up as you go, and you hope for the best.

For more, check out our roundups of the 20 Top Cloud Services for Small Business and our The Best Cloud-Hosting Platforms for Small Business.

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What is Cloud Computing?

Oracle

The simple definition: It’s a style of computing based on shared, elastic resources delivered to users in a self-service, metered manner using web technologies. Yet, if you ask five people “what is cloud computing?” you can expect five different answers. Why? Because what matters to them is not what cloud computing is, but what it does for them.

To fully understand cloud computing across an enterprise, you need to understand the different functional benefits driving cloud’s popularity. Let’s look at cloud through the lens of different roles in an enterprise, and then think about how to craft a cohesive cloud strategy that works for everyone in the enterprise. Let’s start with these important roles.

Business Leaders

This group wants cloud for modern, personalized applications. In the digital economy, companies must execute in real-time, from providing customer experiences to building talent-centric HCM strategies. Your customers want to seamlessly interact with their brand, wherever and whenever they want on social media, mobile, in-store, through the call center, on your website, and when making a purchase online. Speed, integrated processes, and analytics are vital. For these people, cloud often means SaaS-based applications that are fast, simple, and give the business side more control.

IT Leaders

IT also sees enormous value in the cloud, particularly in the application and platform services that let internal IT groups offload technology management. CIOs cannot forget existing infrastructure requirements when they evaluate cloud computing, and cloud services such as PaaS and IaaS can help them integrate applications and create consistent workflows across multiple systems—both on premises and in the cloud—while maintaining security and performance. As a result, IT can move away from technology administration and concentrate on business innovation.

Cloud Builders

Private cloud deployment is booming, as companies see the benefits of faster provisioning, on demand access, and scalability. Cloud builders can help their IT department become agile, cost-efficient private cloud providers. They view cloud from a lifecycle management perspective, from resource management and monitoring to capacity planning and chargeback mechanisms.

Developers

For this group, moving development and testing environments to PaaS platforms allows them to cut significant time from the development cycle by removing management tasks, cutting complexity, and increasing developer productivity.
Total Cloud

The key then is to build a cloud strategy that helps every group define not only what cloud computing means to them, but also how to best use it.

The best use might be to build a cloud behind your firewall. Or it could be to subscribe to cloud applications and compute services from a trusted cloud vendor. Another option is to use infrastructure or application that is dedicated to your organization but hosted by a vendor or a local partner.

Most likely, you’ll be using several of the above of the above scenarios at once. So it makes sense to choose a cloud provider with solutions that are preintegrated and tested to work across the entire stack, whether in your data center or in the cloud. That way, even though cloud computing means different things to different people, you will have a single, complete, and integrated platform to serve them all.

Explore the resources on this page to learn about the most complete, integrated cloud solutions in the industry.

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