We also offer insight into how to take advantage of horizontal scaling in the cloud. By integrating your app with the open cloud API, it can now control the hosting infrastructure to spin up and down servers as needed. And since our cloud is open, you never have to worry about your app getting locked in.

Up your game with Rackspace – we got your back.

Some of our DevOps Rackers have created Five Pillars of Cloudiness to make sure that you know how to code your application to take advantage of all the benefits of the open cloud. To help you monitor your infrastructure, we offer Cloud Monitoring, a tool that helps you setup a variety of monitoring checks that can notify you in an instant if your app goes down.

Don’t let downtime ruffle your feathers – we’ve got your back.

Rackspace also offers a managed support level for your cloud hosting needs. This team of system administrators and account managers are experts in the cloud – they take the reins so you can focus on your business. Finally, we know that many people need a hybrid hosting solution that requires both a presence with both a dedicated and cloud configuration. For these folks, we have a solution called RackConnect that provides a link to both of those types of configurations. Now that’s fanatical!

With Rackspace working behind the scenes, you can sleep easy without fear of things that go bump in the night.

The Rackspace Knowledge Center is a great place to go for informative how-to articles and whitepapers. The information here is created by Rackers to help folks learn more about the cloud and our products. The Rackspace Open Cloud Community is an excellent place to search for answers or to post a cloud question to the forum. Rackers and people outside of Rackspace offer answers and best practices.

Cloud U is another  place for people to get knowledge of the cloud in general. Cloud U is vendor neutral and designed to give an overall better understanding of the cloud at a high level. Complete the online coursework and you can become Cloud U certified.

Rackspace has also created the Open Cloud Academy, a place for people to get hands-on technical training about the open cloud right here in San Antonio. The training helps offers a unique and affordable way to earn IT certifications that are in demand by employers.

Whether you are a novice or an old pro, Rackspace has the tools and training to help you learn more about cloud hosting. We can take you from a cloud beginner to a cloud big timer.

Check out this other video where we asked kids to explain the cloud!

The nationwide budget cuts played a factor as Brian Forde, senior advisor to the U.S. CTO Todd Park, had to deliver his presentation at SXSW Interactive via Skype as non-essential travel had been cut. Forde said that only 4.5 percent of college students in the U.S. were graduating in engineering fields, compared to 11 percent in Europe and more than 20 percent in Asia.

Furthermore, in spite of having higher graduation rates to their male counterparts, only 1.3 percent of women graduated college in an engineering major. Additionally, Forde said that of engineer graduates, only 13 percent of them were Hispanic or African American, a number disproportionate to the percentages that make up of the overall population.

Want more information on STEM? Check out our infographic on STEM Education.

The problem of STEM becomes two-fold: (1) getting more students interested, and graduated, in the STEM fields and (2) achieving a higher diversity among those graduates.

Forde said that there are plenty of challenges that exist today that could be solved by STEM professionals. Healthcare and energy are at the top of the list, and there is a strong need for scientists, engineers, computer scientists and developers to find solutions to these challenges. “If we don’t have a diverse workforce, we limit the set of life experiences an engineering team will have, and consequently we limit the creativity that can be brought to bear. And really as creative problem solvers we’re trying to identify the most simple, elegant solution,” Forde says.

Brian Forde speaks during his SXSW presentation.

To help combat this, the White House hosted a Tech Inclusion roundtable in August and created five initiatives to help achieve the goal of adding one million STEM jobs in the decade. As Forde says, achieving this lofty goal will “take an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and developers to get there.”

Here are the five initiatives that came out of this meeting.

America 2020 – Students can learn about technology through mentorship from STEM professionals. CEOs at science and technology companies are encouraged to commit 20 percent of their tech employees to teach and mentor at least 20 hours a year.

CS Online – This initiative aims to train teachers at the high school and collegiate level in computer science as well as today’s web languages (such as PHP and Ruby on Rails). Teachers can then incorporate these languages into their curriculum. Nicole Sanchez, chief of staff for the Level Playing Field Institute, pointed out that, “There is a huge gap between the need of computer science teachers and the gap [of available] computer science teachers.”

Connect2Tech – Sometimes the hardest thing is knowing where to start. Connect2Tech aims to eliminate this barrier by helping connect STEM programs to parents and youth of underserved communities. Additionally, they identify points of entry and assistance for aspiring entrepreneurs and coders.

HBCU Startup Initiative – To encourage more diversity in STEM and startups, there is a campus-based initiative at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) to foster entrepreneurship. According to Diverse Education, “The initiative will be separated into three primary goals: exposing, educating and empowering HBCU students and faculty.”

Mayor’s Challenge – This initiative is designed to engage mayors, NGOs and private businesses in a community to come together and host their own local tech round tables around the country. The goal of these meetings is to help develop local economies and will be starting in Cambridge, Philadelphia, Chicago and Portland.

For more information on the White House Tech Inclusion initiatives, please visit www.whitehouse.gov/techinclusion.

In his SXSW Interactive talk “The Best Interface Is No Interface,” Krishna said that with so many apps, smartphones and screens, “our love of the digital interface has gotten completely out of control.” He believes that it is his goal to solve people’s problems, but as an industry we are losing sight of that goal.

To illustrate this unwavering devotion to the screen, Krishna examined an automotive app used to unlock a car door. After fishing for a smartphone, entering the password, locating the app and finding the unlock feature, the user went through 12 steps to unlock the car. Of those steps, 10 involved fiddling around with the smartphone.

The designer gave three steps for people to evolve to a no interface style of thinking.

1. Embrace Typical Processes Instead Of Screens

Krishna argues that it is this blind devotion to the screen that is obscuring what is helpful and what is not. Using the previous example, simply using a key would be a two step process (locate the key, unlock the car), or taking advantage of technology that was available at the end of the 90s could help your unlock the car in one step (key is in your pocket and as you pull the handle the car unlocks).  “Somewhere along the way we got confused. We tried to make user experience equal user interface,” he says. “Good experience design isn’t good screens, it’s good experiences.”

2. Leverage Computers Instead Of Catering To Them

Instead of serving computers, Krishna argues that we should reverse the relationship and have computers serve us. To illustrate this idea, he talked about caving headlamps for search and rescue. A doctor who would help people in caves had a problem: when he looked out on the terrain the lamp brightness was awesome, but when he needed to look at his map at a close range, it would wash it out. Petzl saw this problem and designed an interface that was aware, knowing the difference of looking “out” versus looking “down” and would adjust the intensity of the beam, helping save the doctor time in finding the people to rescue. Krishna pointed out “when computers serve us, they can help us save lives.”

3. Create A System That Adapts For Individuals

“It takes a really smart team to solve most things for most people,” Krishna says. Big Data and data science help consider the individual. He talked about an experiment that IBM did with a rugby team. Rather than having this team log into a health portal and use a graphical representation of a person to point out what hurts, IBM placed sensors on the players during practice and the game. This uncovered new information about the players that enabled the team to predict injuries before they happened. “We can make systems that help you before you know you even need help,” Krishna says.

This is what gets me so excited about the next app revolution. If the last five years were about mobile apps, the next five are going to be about contextual apps. Rather than opening an app and inputting information, contextual computing can take this information automatically. This ability to easily gather data, the accessibility of that data and the availability of cloud computing power to interpret the data solves what is needed to get to Krishna’s “screenless” world. This could have dramatic impacts on our health, well-being and efficiency in the very near future.

What are your thoughts on the “no interface” future? Are we too dependent on screens?

For his SXSW session, Fogg focused on how to modify personal behaviors instead of looking at how to change an entire marketplace; however, after hearing him speak on personal change I feel that many of the ideas and theories he presented can be applied to developers. Fogg believes that making behavior modifications is hard to do all at once, and to achieve true change you have to do it in tiny steps.

For example, imagine one individual who has a goal of exercising 30 minutes a day for the rest of his life, and another individual who sets a goal of walking 5 minutes after work. Fogg hypothesizes that the individual with the more modest, tiny goal will ultimately become healthier. This individual has an achievable goal that results in what Fogg terms, “success momentum.” When success is experienced early and often, it reinforces that behavior and has the added bonus of helping individuals get through the rough times.

I can see how developers can apply this idea to their software to combat the “blank screen” problem when a user first signs up. By creating an environment where users can experience small successes, you can help build this success momentum early on in the use of the software. This is not only a way to engage the user in the present, but can also be crucial when the user encounters a bug, issue or obstacle with your software. Instead of abandoning the app completely, the previous successes could influence that user to stick with you.

Fogg told the audience to “start recognizing that behavior and behavior change is systematic – it is not random.” He created the Fogg Behavior Model that plots the exponential graph of the ability to activate a change on a quadrant with ability and motivation on each axis. The central idea is that if the behavior is easy to do and doesn’t require a lot of motivation, the individual will still perform that behavior even as their motivation dips.

Image courtesy of www.behaviormodel.org/.

He used weight lifting as an example. For an individual who has not lifted weights in a long time, doing a set of 50-pound kettle bells three times a week would be extremely difficult. Furthermore, this set would probably instigate a degree of pain and soreness the day after the exercise, decreasing the participant’s willingness to do the exercise so much that they never lift that weight again.

However, if the individual sets a modest goal of doing one set of 10-pound kettle bells every day, the exercise is easy enough that the participant doesn’t have to have a high degree of motivation. These small successes create that success momentum, which can increase confidence and motivation to try the next class of weights in the future.

I feel this is why designing for the experience of the user is crucial for developers. New users may have a very low amount of motivation to use your app at first, so in order to remain above the activation threshold, it is key to make sure it is easy for people to interact with your software. Good design is what ultimately makes it easy.

Fogg also talked about the importance of celebrating success. For the personal behavior change it could involve audibly shouting “woo hoo!” after you completed your weight lifting for the day, internally saying, “I’m the man!” or even doing a dance. He feels that these celebrations can foster the “tiny thrill” of accomplishing something, which will in turn foster the behavior change.

Celebrating tiny successes can be a way for developers to endear themselves to their users. While this may be a fine line of balancing the cheesy factor; giving your users mile markers to celebrate how they successfully impact your platform can help solidify their new behavior of using your application.

Alex spoke about numerous startups that were revitalizing downtowns and city centers across the Midwest – areas that had been vacated as people moved out to the suburbs. These startups, in turn, spurred the development of bars, restaurants and shops, revitalizing many of the downtowns.

Ohanian’s talk about how the open Internet spurred innovation across the heartland was quickly woven into a passion of his: ensuring that the Internet remains open. He talked about SOPA and PIPA and how the online community rallied across the country to help stop those laws from passing. Yet, even at the height of this awareness, the mainstream media reported on this issue only a handful of times, being eclipsed by stories on Kim Kardashian and Tim Tebow.

The serial entrepreneur warned that even though SOPA and PIPA had failed, there would be many more attempts to restrict the Internet, calling these a potential death by a thousand cuts. “It is much harder to rally around something that is not as glaringly obvious or stupid as SOPA or PIPA,” the entrepreneur said.

Ohanian believed that if we could know what our favorite celebrity is eating for breakfast, then we ought to know what our representative is doing in Congress. He believes that your representative has a “digital district” to consider as well as a physical one. To prove that point, Ohanian demoed an app called Contact Congress where he effortlessly dialed his representative with just a push of a button. He got a staffer on the phone and voiced his disproval of CISPA, the latest acronym to join the fray of restricting the Internet.

Ohanian added that open source is a leading indicator for what online collaboration can be. He said nearly every major website that we couldn’t live without is built on open technology. “That’s the power of the open Internet,” Ohanian said. “It used to be gatekeepers… and right now it is falling and we don’t know where it is going.”

Giving people more access, especially in rural areas, along with continuing to push STEM education and coding in schools will ultimately lead to power and a vibrant society. “The Internet can provide the place where good ideas can win,” Ohanian believes. That goes for the “Silicon Prairie” as much as Silicon Valley.

That is until now.

Recently, we had a photographer come out to create an inside Google Street View of our HQ so our customers, friends and family – anyone, really – can get a virtual feel for what it is like to work at Rackspace. There’s a ton to see.

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Did you know that Rackspace has a slide to help Rackers go from the second to first floor in style? Or that we have several gondolas that were part of the Sky Ride at San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park? Have you heard about our quirky themed conference rooms (Count Chocula anyone?)? What about our giant word search, which is the world’s largest according to Guinness World Records?

Working at The Castle is an experience, and one that changes and morphs overtime. Walking through our 1.2 million square-foot facility, I always run into something new and exciting. Our surroundings are always in flux, whether it’s the flags being hung above desks, art installations that the real estate team brings in to liven up some of our empty space or clever impromptu things that Rackers post around the office (some personal favorites: a calendar with the word “Hustlin’” printed on every day, printed Minecraft blocks lining the halls and funny things written or drawn on our chalkboard). Seeing so many creative things around me inspires me to volunteer my best each day.

And while what happens inside The Castle each day is motivating; the impact that the Rackspace headquarters is having on the surrounding community is equally inspiring.

The Rackspace Foundation has partnered with seven schools in the surrounding area, dubbed the Magnificent 7, and helps fund school- and afterschool-based programs. Rackspace also supports workplace mentoring through Big Brothers Big Sisters, and has 52 Racker Bigs meeting regularly with Littles from neighborhood schools. The Castle represents one of the world’s largest recycling projects, and, in a recent New York Times article, Graham Weston, our chairman and co-founder, revealed that we plan to break ground for a neighborhood park that will include gardens, trails, fields and a performance venue.

We invite you to take a step inside The Castle and explore our beloved headquarters. There is a lot to see!

If Rackspace looks like the place for you, we’re hiring – hop on over to jobs.rackspace.com for all our available positions.

In this rapidly changing landscape, these students will become the innovators, creators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow. But before they become the great minds of the 21^st century, they are the children of 2013. We thought it would be interesting to ask the children of our Rackers a question, “What is the cloud?”

The answers run the gamut from cute to insightful, and we hope you enjoy hearing their answers as much as we did.