Cloud Computing:It's getting Personal Date:   Sunday , August 05, 2012 Yahoo! Inc.(NASDAQ: YAHOO) is a digital media company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. Yahoo! provides online properties and services to users, as well as a range of marketing services designed to reach and connect with those users on Yahoo! and through a distribution network of third-party entities. Hari Vasudev is a Vice President in the Connections business unit at Yahoo!, based in Bangalore. In this role, Vasudev is responsible for leading the newly-formed Connections group for Yahoo! in India. The Connections group at Yahoo! focuses on connecting the company’s 700 million customers to each other and to the content they love through a number of industry-leading products, including Search, Communications and Social properties such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, and Answers. On the Internet we have seen a massive growth in the technologies that can personalize content delivered to Internet users. The science behind personalization has undergone tremendous changes in recent years, yet the basic premise of personalization remains the same, which is to provide users with what they want without them having to ask for it explicitly i.e. to understand the implicit content needs of users and be able to cater to those automatically via the application of scientific models and algorithms to the vast content repository available to companies such as Yahoo!. The future of Internet will see continued focus on deeper social context and speedier generation of relevant content, alongside a growing presence on mobile devices and a more personalized content experience. Deep personalization on the web requires intensive sciences. Today, cloud computing has emerged as a key technology that allows companies to experiment at internet scale – in other words, experiment on the biggest sandbox known to science. Cloud computing has become the backbone of all critical internet activities as it rapidly extracts value from voluminous data. Big data meeting sciences Internet companies store consumer data like photos, email and other media and provide users with online services like search, news, games and TV. It takes a big engine built on top of a hyper-flexible cloud to collect all of that big data, store it and analyze it to make the online content contextual, personalized and to ensure that the systems can handle traffic spikes when major news breaking events (such as the attack on Osama Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan) occur. For example, as one of the largest providers of consumer Internet services in the world, Yahoo’s cloud operates at a virtually unprecedented scale, making it a unique environment and testing ground for cloud computing technologies. Yahoo!'s application of cloud computing technologies has played a pivotal role in enabling the company to rapidly personalize its content and advertising offerings to deliver highly relevant customer experiences. It handles 11 billion page visits per month and 100 billion events a day (200 petabytes of data) from nearly 690 million users. It is the engine that we run the company on. Cloud services store and deliver web content, personalize content for consumers, optimize ad selection and placement, improve search results, provide scalable virtual computing environments, and process and store enormous amounts of data to improve consumer experiences and drive innovation. Accelerating Innovation and personalization Cloud services enable Internet companies to provide superior user experiences and deliver targeted content to the enormous web audience. It facilitates Internet companies to achieve higher agility and quality while maintaining scale to meet the diverse needs of its users such as providing hyper-quick content access around the globe, real-time sports updates, a personalized homepage experience, targeted news feeds and geo-specific ads etc. Using cloud infrastructure, Internet companies are able to provide quick trending analysis based on user responses to stories on major breaking news events like – the recent tsunami in Japan, which allows them to offer content recommendations on the homepage that result in much higher user engagement levels. In my view, Cloud computing will allow us to harness the vast power of the Internet by leveraging big data and allowing personalization to ramp up quickly. In addition, it also allows Internet companies to add new features and products based on common, global and scalable platforms, thus enabling consumers to gain access to innovative features and products faster than ever before. The future Our digital world has indeed come a long way since the 1990’s and we are now in an era where data is available to us via high speed networks and data connectivity has gone down to handheld devices making us connected wherever we are. Cloud computing is going to become more visible in our everyday lives as we zoom around with our smart phones and tablet PCs. It promises to be an intangible force that will help hold together our digital lives across an increasingly diverse array of electronic devices. Without cloud computing it would be frustratingly difficult to store and access data from multiple devices. Therefore, cloud based services are going to become a more visible part of our lives; very rapidly in the very near future.