Cloudy with a Chance of Gaming
Over 25 years ago, Super Mario was the only one who could say he was gaming in the cloud, stomping Goombas, eating mushrooms and occasionally using extraordinary leaping skills to jump from cloud to cloud in search of Princess Peach Toadstool. Fast forward to over a decade later and come hear from Rackspace, Zynga, EA Games and RightScale how they are also gaming in the cloud. Cloud Gaming is the next generation in online gaming. The main upside to using the cloud is that huge upfront costs are gone. Users don’t have to get expensive and bulky consoles - all they need is a reliable and fast Internet connection and service providers can provide an almost seamless and quick online gaming experience. The panelists will talk about how gaming leaders are using the cloud to keep track of in-game player achievements and building out the software. They can also discuss how they are relying on the cloud to provide the scalability needed as the games gain more users and functionality.
Presenters
Ari Levy
Technology Reporter
Bloomberg News
As a technology reporter at Bloomberg, Ari Levy has covered networking, Internet and mobility while following deals and dealmakers in private equity and venture capital. He joined Bloomberg in 2003 as a stock market reporter in New York and moved to San Francisco in 2006 to write about Silicon Valley. He is also a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Ari has a master's degree in business journalism from Baruch College in New York.
Darryl Eaton is the head of Product Management at RightScale where he oversees new and existing product lines, interfaces with customers across the IT spectrum, and helps set RightScale’s vision for the future of cloud computing management.
Prior to joining RightScale, Darryl headed up Product Management at PlayFirst, Inc., a leading casual games company. He was also a Product Manager at Yahoo!, where he conceived of and shipped Yahoo! Web Messenger (http://web.im/), now a main feature in Yahoo! Mail.
Darryl held a previous career as a Software Architect at multiple successful startups (WiredPlanet acquired by Listen.com, Enuvis acquired by SiRF), At these startups, Darryl often acted as the lead systems administrator, solidifying his own ‘DevOps’ mentality early on – a mentality that is now a pervasive contributor to the success of cloud computing.
Darryl holds a BS in Computer Science from Yale University, and an MBA from Berkeley. In his spare time, he enjoys cycling, rock climbing, and spending time outdoors with his family.
George Miranda manages the Online Infrastructure R&D group at Electronic Arts in Austin. He is a self-professed automation junkie and lives to program himself out of a job. He believes that automating workflows and codifying best practices are the key tenets to success in "cloud" environments. He is convinced that the IaaS wave of the future will consist primarily of savvy engineers who can think abstractly while they simultaneously drill down deep into the minutia of technical hands-on implementation to accomplish tasks in generic ways that, paradoxically, also encompass marginal special use cases. He studied Mechanical Engineering at UCLA and is happy to dive into deeply philosophical discussions about the future of IT professionals and bleeding-edge technologies.
Megan Wohlford is a Product Manager for Rackspace Hosting's cloud storage product line, including Rackspace Cloud Files, Cloud Block Storage, and CDN. Megan has spent three years in the cloud industry, with a variety of focuses including cloud storage, hosted applications, and content delivery networks. She has two BA's from the University of South Carolina's Darla Moore School of Business in Marketing and Management.
Saturday, March 10
