Founded by Facebook, Intel and Rackspace, the Open Compute Project aims “to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost.”

Crawford says both Open Compute and OpenStack are built on answers to the question “What if?” For OpenStack, that led to this week’s Summit with almost 3,000 attendees. For Open Compute, that led to innovations such as widening standard 19-inch racks to 21 inches to include more hard drives and blade architecture.

The result is what Crawford calls a “platform for rapid innovation.” Hardware has gone from design to completed circuit boards in six months. Companies in Japan are investigating hanging racks from the ceilings of data centers as a better way to guard against earthquake damage. A new cabling technology called silicon photonics will move data at up to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is much faster than current technology and speedy enough to effectively connect equipment even if it’s not physically located close together.

Crawford says the project’s journey is only 2.5 percent complete. As one of the biggest fans of the project, we can’t wait for the remaining 97.5 percent.

The company moves at a swift pace – HubSpot CIO Jim O’Neill said from idea to production it could be just 30 minutes. Historically, HubSpot relied on the public cloud to scale workloads. Now, HubSpot uses a combination of Rackspace’s public and private clouds powered by OpenStack and dedicated environments, which help it grow its infrastructure to accommodate business needs. According to O’Neill, HubSpot sees an improvement in provisioning efficiencies in this open hybrid model.

The Rackspace open hybrid cloud arms HubSpot with the ability match its application needs with any form factor – public cloud, private cloud and bare metal. This gives HubSpot the ability to tackle rapidly growing and changing workloads as it expands product offerings and its customer base diversifies.

In this video, hear HubSpot talk about how it uses OpenStack and the Rackspace open hybrid cloud:

The USB device creates a virtual two-foot cube above it where it can precisely discern all 10 fingers and the motions they make in 3D. So grabbing a block and moving it to another position or molding virtual clay are just some of the possibilities. While impressive for games and simulations, the controller could also change the way we interact with web sites sand web applications. Leap Motion’s director of developer relations Avinash Dabir walked us through how the new controller could advance the idea that best user interface is no interface. Check out his demo in this video:

While Leap’s web site demo is still in the works, developers can check out its JavaScript API.

A team from Groupon got early access to a Leap controller and successfully flew its quadcopter drone with nothing more than hand motions. It was an impressive display of the new controller, which is being unveiled publicly for the first time at SXSW, before it is scheduled to debut for sale in May. That wasn’t the only motion-sensing device in the competition, though. Another group from Austin used a Microsoft Kinect controller and The Chicken Dance to keep its drone aloft. The more team members flapped their arms, the higher the drone went. A few minutes later, another drone did the dancing – to the Harlem Shake – after it received a tweet from a Chicago-based team.

A fourth demo included a drone with onboard sonar that sent back enough data of its flight to create a 3D graphic visualization.

The Rackspace team of Jordan Rinke and Nick Mistry went last and successfully showed how its flying drone could take control of other drones in the room. While none of the drone demos was perfect, they showed how new insights arrive when coders focus on a new problem with open source solutions (The drones run on Linux, and hacks are shared online). Rinke, for one, seems excited about the possibility of combining what he and Mistry learned with the Chicago team’s dance moves to fly a flotilla of drones in perfect sync with each other. Could there be a music video in their future? The same idea could someday have use within a data center or other industries, Rinke said.

Check out the wild competition in this video:

And check out our previous video of Rinke and Mistry preparing for the Drone Games at SXSW.

Drone Games is just one of many events Rackspace is participating in around SXSW Interactive 2013. If you want to find us on Twitter, be sure to keep an eye on the hash-tag #SXRackspace.

The biggest change, Clark says, is the sensors that give us more comprehensive insight and input than ever before, which rockets the utility of mobile devices well beyond typical desktop and laptop computers.

Sensors save users time because they are able to intelligently gather data through GPS, cameras, microphones, accelerometers and more.

Apps like Tabledrum “push the interface of the screen itself” by mapping real-world object to sounds in a “whimsical way” to create augmented audio, Clark explains.  Anytouch lets users turn anything – even a sheet of paper — into an interface.

As a result, Clark believes “the best touch interface may be no touch at all.”  Gestures and speech can make magic all by themselves.

On top of that, it has become “trivially inexpensive to put a sensor on anything,” even tiny sensors in pills that track when you take your medicine.

As all the sensors and smart devices proliferate, users aren’t going to want multiple operating systems or even multiple interfaces, Clark says.

Ultimately that has to happen with open systems, he says.  It’s a future of social devices based in a social cloud.  “We’re all cloud developers now,” he concluded.

Clark paints an exciting picture of what’s ahead.  Here’s my take: as these interfaces, devices and apps emerge, they will undoubtedly move even more to the cloud, where the same app and APIs can adapt to multiple devices and data from all those sensors can be easily created, saved and recalled.  And when it comes to open systems, there’s no better place than the open cloud.

Known as “Project Yada Yada,” the team hopes to build on prior winning entries in the robotic helicopter drone competition. While a lot of fun, team member Jordan Rinke says the project shows the value of open source and may even produce new ways for Rackspace to operate.

Check out their preparation, including some wild on-board barrel roll video,  below.

We plan to follow the team tomorrow and see how they do!

Drone Games is just one of many events Rackspace is participating in around SXSW Interactive 2013. And if you want to find us on Twitter, be sure to keep an eye on the hash-tag #SXRackspace.

The final presentations of marketing plans and product prototypes wrapped up a 3 Day Startup event sponsored by Rackspace with some good advice from a group of panelists, including our own Shane Young.

More than 20 students from MIT and Harvard participated in the weekend entrepreneurship education program that emphasized “learning by doing.” Seven Rackers joined in to help the students with design and technical needs, including some free hosting to get the projects off the ground.

The weekend started with 11 startup ideas, which were trimmed to five and ultimately reduced to three. The new startup ideas included:

Teach For Me – A new app for college students to give professors real-time feedback about the speed and clarity of a lecture. The app gives students simple feedback buttons to tell the professor to speed up or slow down or to ask a question.

Living on a Prayer – A kind of Kickstarter for the needy, the site matches businesses and donors with those who need specific items. For example, a person in need of an operation could raise money through the site by seeking donors who would contribute to help pay for hospital costs. The group signed up several businesses to participate over the weekend.

Grouper – A new group chat app designed to bridge the gap between the ways small groups and very large groups communicate. Tour groups, for example, could get on the same Grouper channel to share schedule updates and photos. The name is a play on schools of fish. “Fish have it down,” said team lead Catherine Yun, a freshman at MIT. “Humans not so much.”

The group of panelists encouraged all of the ideas while pointing out some additional factors to consider.

3 Day Startup does not declare a winner for the weekend. Instead, all groups are encouraged to continue to work on their ideas and ultimately launch their companies.

We captured the final day of the weekend in this video:

Be sure to check out our coverage from the rest of 3 Day Startup at MIT:

• 3 Day Startup And Rackspace Team Up At MIT
• Fanatical Support In Person At 3 Day Startup At MIT

When the Teach for Me team needed to some server space and help launching a web site, Racker Ryan Richard jumped in. He set up a Rackspace Cloud Server and helped troubleshoot why some of the team’s code wasn’t working. That saved the team a lot of time and trouble, said Rabeea Ahmed, a young entrepreneur and computer science and astrophysics student from Harvard. Other Rackers assisted other teams throughout the day on everything from user interface design to business strategy.

The three remaining teams did some quick market research to validate and reshape their startup ideas and then practiced their pitches for tonight’s 3 Day Startup finale.

For more, check out this video:

Be sure to tune in to our coverage from Day 1 of 3 Day Startup at MIT.

Several Rackers are among the mentors for more than 20 students from MIT and surrounding areas who are working on building five startups by Sunday night.

The weekend’s events started yesterday afternoon with students and mentors brainstorming and then pitching 11 different startup ideas. Of those, the group picked five ideas to pursue this weekend ranging from a more personalized version of Yelp to a new way for groups to communicate at concerts and field trips. Now the race is on to field customer research, create branding and marketing plans and build a working prototype of each product by Sunday night, when final pitches will be presented to a panel of venture capitalists and business advisors.

Unlike other hackathons, 3 Day Startup is not considered a competition. No winner is selected.  Instead, all groups are encouraged to continue to pursue their ideas. At past 3 Day Startup events, several startups have come to life, so some new businesses could be born this weekend.

For more on 3 Day Startup, check out our video of Day 1:

Be sure to check out our coverage from Rackspace Training for OpenStack at MIT.

Proulx set up the OpenStack deployment six months ago as a new way for CSAIL’s 1,000 members to work on projects ranging from natural language processing to biomedical imaging to machine learning algorithms.

The CSAIL OpenStack deployment now has more than 50 users, working on 20 different projects, bursting compute power as they need it. The move to open source cloud computing is also delivering cost savings to MIT. Researchers previously were paying commercial cloud providers, which could quickly became too expensive. Those same researchers now have access to OpenStack at no charge. In fact, Proulx says few, if any, of the current research projects running on the MIT OpenStack cluster would be running at all if not for OpenStack.

Proulx studied OpenStack’s documentation and then built the deployment using existing hardware in about two weeks, which is impressive for such a large cluster.

While the deployment is still relatively new, Proulx believes he will soon expand it to include more capacity and capabilities, including file storage.

See more about CSAIL’s use of OpenStack in this video:

OpenStack Training At MIT Concludes

Proulx also could soon have more OpenStack business at CSAIL, after our Rackspace Training for OpenStack team concluded a four-night class with MIT researchers, grad students and others from the area.

At the end of the last class, students applauded each other and the team – Rackers John McKenzie, Byron McCollum, Phil Hopkins and Cassandra Cortez.

Perhaps the biggest measure of success was that almost all of the students kept coming back to the class for four straight three-hour night sessions, delivered as part of MIT’s Independent Activities Period. During that time, many students went from a beginning curiosity about OpenStack to making plans about how they want to use it for their own projects.

Check out more reports from Rackspace Training for OpenStack at MIT:

• Rackspace Training For OpenStack Heads To MIT
• OpenStack Hits A Sweet Spot For MIT Students, Researchers
• OpenStack At MIT: A Closer, Time-Lapse Look At Our Cloud In A Box

To learn more about OpenStack, tune in to OpenStack 101, a brief video primer on what OpenStack is and who uses it.