GigaOM

The current economic meltdown and its effects, which are expected to be felt for at least the next year, require entrepreneurs to find investors with deep pockets and a long-term investment horizon starting from a company’s earliest days. In other words: venture capital.

There’s buzz around Silicon Valley that there will be a big announcement made at VMworld next week in Las Vegas. I think Cisco Systems will announce support of VMware virtual machines on their networking hardware. And if I’m right, it will have numerous ramifications, not only for the two companies, but the networking industry overall.

Ten years from now, I believe that clouds will be evaluated based on three generic criteria: transactions, user experience and presence. And as with any active market, it’s a safe bet that there will be plenty of companies that best showcase each of them. But which of them will own the cloud?

The usage-based pricing plans being considered by AT&T, Time Warner and others will force us all to wonder about the size of our connectivity bill on a monthly basis. Which means it won’t only be bad for users, but for some of the Internet service providers’ largest customers.

While the Internet has evolved, U.S. Internet service providers have not kept pace. And their lagging is costing them money, which they are now looking to pass onto the consumer in the form of usage-based pricing.

I was recently talking to Richard Donaldson (an adviser of ours at Panorama Capital) of United Layer about a novel approach to optimizing data center cooling – using forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras.

United Layer rents a FLIR camera, he told me, the kind typically used to help pilots see at night or in dense fog, [...]