I am currently engaged with mentoring some young technology start-up businesses.  What strikes me about these companies is that they spend the majority of their time utilising their skills to deliver their product.  They are agile, knowledgeable and very hungry to succeed and to create.

When do they find time to “learn” new emerging technologies?  They seem to have learnt it “on the fly” as they go along – such is the pace of technology at the moment.  With cloud computing, mobile computing and social media now becoming the current “bubble”, I realised just how easy it is for anyone in IT to become out of date quite rapidly.

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There is an old saying which says “use it or lose it” and I will add “use it, grow it and keep your eyes open to what is happening around you, always”.   In this process we must keep learning.

Stopping learning, even for a few months or a whole year can make a huge difference.  It is like being having a motor car – use it regularly and it works fine (sure it may need a little maintenance), but leave it parked outside for a year unused and the battery will be flat, tires a bit softer, oil a bit tired, the gas will have lost its vitality etc.  (Of course it does depend on where you park it – it may not even be there when you return!)

Learning is the same, especially in IT (and most other professions – like medicine, law, tax etc) we need to keep up to date, and even a few months “out of the game” will render us less sharp, and left with an uphill battle if we want to regain our status.

If “IT” is our career, then we need to learn on a regular basis, via personal learning, e-learning, books, attending classes, or as I am realising, by working with very sharp entrepreneurs who are leveraging the three technology areas listed above without even breaking into a sweat.

What are your experiences of keeping yourself in the best shape you can?

Amazon’s rumored tablet possibly due out this year will come with free streaming video service and be priced at around $399, according to a report from investment firm Detwiler Fenton.

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“It is particularly interesting to note that AMZN is expected to include its movie service for free for an unspecified amount of time to buyers of the device,” states the report, spotted Tuesday by CNET. “This is the same movie service AMZN already offers for free to its Prime customers.”

The Amazon tablet will reportedly feature a 10-inch color screen and “have a more robust applications processor” than the chip expected to power color Kindle ereaders that Amazon will also reportedly launch by the end of 2011, according to Detwiler Fenton.

The Detwiler Fenton report also corroborates some details reported earlier about the rumored Amazon tablet. It’s said to be due out before the end of the year and is codenamed Hollywood.

Reports from Taiwan in early May indicated that Amazon is ordering enough tablet components from Taiwanese manufacturers to assemble up to 800,000 units a month and plans to slash prices for its Kindles when it releases the tablet sometime in the second half of 2011.

Established tiers in the tablet market could shake out more fully in the coming months.

Detwiler Fenton expects low-priced color ereaders to fill a “low-end tablet niche” situated well below the most expensive devices, particularly Apple’s iPad. In the middle will be sub-$400 tablets like the rumored Hollywood tablet, the investment house predicted, as pricing pressure builds on companies like Motorola and Research in Motion which make tablets that are similar in price to Apple’s but not nearly as popular.

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. We’re keeping our eyes on four particular stories of interest today.

Apple Unveils iCloud, iOS 5 & More

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At its developer conference Monday, Apple announced its much-anticipated iCloud service; that the next version of Mac OS X, Lion, will be out in July for $29.99; that its next-generation mobile software, iOS 5, will be deeply integrated with Twitter, offer wireless syncing, its own messaging service and Newsstand, and more.

Rep. Weiner Admits to Tweeting Lewd Picture

Admitting that he had “not been honest with myself, my family and my constituents,” Rep. Anthony Weiner confessed at a press conference Monday that he sent a lewd photo via Twitter and that he had since lied about his account being hacked.

HTC Reports Strong May Sales

HTC says it generated $1.42 billion in sales in May, which is more than double than the same month in 2010 and a solid improvement from April’s $1.35 billion.

Xbox Live Getting Live TV, YouTube & Voice Search

Microsoft unveiled a redesigned version of Xbox Live at E3 Monday, one that includes more voice commands, YouTube integration and live television.

Further News

* Tuesday is World IPv6 Day, and Google is leading the charge to test and adopt the new Internet Protocol.
* As expected, former CBS Evening News anchor Kate Couric has signed a multiyear contract with Disney/ABC Television Group to host her own nationally syndicated talk show and join the ABC News team.
* Sony’s next-generation handheld gaming system, the PlayStation Vita, made its official debut at E3 Monday.
* Microsoft has released a trailer for Halo 4.
* Note-taking platform Evernote now has more than 10 million registered users, up 67% from January.

Call it Cloudgate, Cloudpocalyse or whatever you’d like, but the extended collapse of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is both a setback for cloud computing and an opportunity for us to figure out how to stop it from happening again.

Amazon may be best-known for its online shopping site, but it also has a substantial cloud computing business. It provides a scalable, flexible and particularly efficient solution for companies to store and deliver massive amounts of content. Its model of only paying for what you consume was a radical innovation when it launched in 2006.

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In fact, Amazon Web Services has been so affordable and reliable that thousands of companies from Foursquare to Netflix utilize the company’s cloud computing technology and servers to run their businesses. They put their faith in Amazon’s cloud because there was no reason to think that it would falter. One of cloud computing’s key tenets is reliability through redundancy of both servers and data centers.

Then on Wednesday, Amazon’s northern Virginia data center started experiencing problems that caused major latency and connectivity issues. The trouble was apparently due to excessive re-mirroring of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes — this essentially created countless new backups of the EBS volumes that took up Amazon’s storage capacity and triggered a cascading effect that caused downtime on hundreds (or more likely thousands) of websites for almost 24 hours.

The collapse took its share of victims. Among the most prominent companies affected were Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, SCVNGR, Heroku, Reddit and Wildfire, though hundreds of other companies big and small were affected. Luckily, one of Amazon’s most prominent customers, Netflix, didn’t experience problems because it’s built for the loss of an entire data center, while companies relying on Amazon’s four other global data centers didn’t experience too many issues.
A Learning Moment

FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara has a detailed post on his blog about what may be the biggest problem to come out of this week’s collapse: Amazon’s cloud redundancies failed to stop a mass outage. Its Availability Zones are supposed to be able to fail independently without bringing the whole system down. Instead, there was a single point of failure that shouldn’t have been there.

This week’s disaster in the cloud is a reminder to startups to build redundancy into their applications and their own systems, but as Santa Barbara points out, most startups don’t have the time or resources to engineer for multiple cloud systems (each Amazon global region/data center has its own rules and features, making a simple “switch” to another center difficult). These companies trusted Amazon to keep them online, and Amazon failed to deliver.

Catastrophic issues will always occur, but in the pre-cloud era, downtime only affected a single computer or website. Today, a catastrophic event takes down thousands of websites, causing millions or even billions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity.

This incident is no reason for us to shun cloud computing, though. Its benefits (scalability, cost reduction, device independence, performance and more) far outweigh its cons. We do need to take a hard look at how we structure our cloud infrastructure though and find new ways to either prevent single points of failure or quickly move content off failing clouds faster, especially as the world’s computing power is consolidated into fewer and fewer systems.

Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and today’s events make it clear that we still have a lot of work to do. It could be a whole lot worse next time if we aren’t prepared.