Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Say what you will about Rackspace as a cloud computing provider and OpenStack steward, but don’t say the company isn’t fighting the good fight against patent trolls. Its latest effort is a challenge to the validity of a patent that an entity called Rotatable Technologies is using to sue, well, just about anyone developing mobile applications that take advantage of a rotating screen display. Yes, the same rotating screen display that’s been a staple of smartphones since the iPhone first graced consumers in 2007.

Rackspace General Counsel Alan Schoenbaum detailed the legal challenge in a blog post on Friday. You can read the details there and in its petition to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but the gist is that Rotatable sued Rackspace (as well as Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods Market and numerous other large companies) and then told Rackspace it was ready to settle the claim for $75,000, possibly less. Classic troll behavior…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jason Perlow.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’d think it was the beginning of the end for the Personal Computer industry.  According to a report recently released by Gartner, sales of PCs in the first quarter of 2013, regardless of manufacturer and operating system platform, are the worst since an all-time low in the second quarter of 2009.

IDC presented similar results in another study that indicates sales are down 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012.This is not just bad news, it’s awful news for no matter who you are, whether you produce PC software and operating systems, or PCs and PC components themselves…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Extreme Networks officials more than a year ago launched their Open Fabric network architecture in the data center to help businesses deal with such trends as cloud computing, virtualization and mobility. Now the company is extending its Open Fabric capabilities to enterprise campuses. With Open Fabric,

Extreme brought such features as high availability and low latency, low power, automation and open standards to the data center, according to Jake Howering, senior director of marketing for Extreme. The next natural step for Open Fabric is the enterprise, where the influx of mobile devices, virtualization, cloud computing, wireless LANs and software-defined networks (SDNs) is putting new pressures on the network, Howering told eWEEK. And right now, IT administrators are having to manage multiple networks for workloads like unified communications (UC), physical security and WiFi, he said. Such situations are expensive and inefficient. “That isn’t going to scale and let you grow,” he said…

Grazed from Sky.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Search giant Google has decided to give its users a ‘digital will’ option for their online data.  The new facility allows consumers to decide what happens with their online account data after they die.  The cyber-stored information may also be wiped with approval if they become inactive online for any other reason.

According to Goldsmiths PhD student Stacey Pitsillides, who has focused her research on the issue of data and death, the Google strategy breaks new ground.  Ms Pitsillides, 26, told Sky News: "Google is one of the first major players to develop a clear opening strategy to deal with this issue and it is hoped that this will encourage others in the industry to follow suit."…

Grazed from Appirio.  Author: Balakrishna Narasimhan.

This week, Gartner released three stunning pieces of data that demonstrate that enterprise IT is going through another dramatic shift (via @alexwilliams). First, Gartner reported that PC shipments were down 11% since the same quarter in 2012. We knew we were moving into the post-PC era, but the speed with which the shift is happening is surprising. Second, Gartner reported that in 2012, 39% of all CRM was delivered through SaaS and that Salesforce was the leading CRM vendor overall. Third, they projected that mobile CRM apps are set to explode from about 200 apps today to 1200 apps by 2014.

Put all that together and there are three clear implications:

• Customer information increasingly lives in the cloud, mostly within Salesforce
• Most business’ internal and external customers will access customer information on mobile devices
• People much prefer task-specific mobile apps rather than all-purpose desktop-style apps…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Matthew Finnegan.

HP can stake a bigger claim in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market by creating an enterprise-friendly rival to Amazon’s ‘consumer’ cloud, according to the head of the firm’s Converged Cloud unit, Saar Gillai.  HP is in the process of reimagining itself in what it terms the ‘new style of IT’, with its traditional businesses are coming under threat while attempts to move into new areas such as the Autonomy acquisition have proved problematic.

Targeting cloud revenues is top priority for CEO Meg Whitman, as the company attempts to find other avenues of growth says Gillai. According to HP figures, total cloud-related revenues, including sales of cloud services and hardware used to setup clouds, were almost $4 billion for 2012, and this is targeted to double by 2015…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud computing market is expected to grow to $177 billion over the next two years, and in turn, many companies will be looking to capitalize from this bubble. For those unfamiliar, cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). Mainframe computing from around the 1970s was replaced by client-server computing architecture in the 1980s and 90s, but by the time the Internet flourished, the world found a need to centralize the storage of data again. In recent years, this necessity of centralization has created a cloud computing bubble.

Consumers may be more familiar with cloud service offerings. This includes Google Drive, offered by Google (GOOG), SkyDrive by Microsoft (MSFT), Box.com, and Dropbox.  Here are some other ideas for investing in cloud computing that investors should consider:..

Grazed from Wired.  Author: Robbie Wright.

You know what they say about two things being certain in life. The tax part of that illustrious pair is now rearing its ugly head in the world of cloud computing. It seems that politicians are finally starting to realize that this cloud computing “thing” is actually generating a lot of revenue — and they want their slice of the pie. However, let’s stay far away from the politics and just consider the ramifications of cloud taxation on cloud adoption.

Legislators in Massachusetts, among others, have begun pursuing or have already been successful in applying taxation to web-based services. The big question in my mind is what this actually affects. What difference, if any, will taxation make in the cloud market?…

Grazed from Dr.Dobbs. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Cloud and mobile app testing company Soasta and Java PaaS player CloudBees have formed a partnership that sees the release of a new Jenkins open source plugin for build, test, and deployment. With continuous integration features for mobile development utilizing real mobile devices, CloudBees architect (and creator of Jenkins) Kohsuke Kawaguchi says he optimized the plugin for Jenkins to eliminate manual tasks in testing.

"I appreciate Soasta open-sourcing its Jenkins plugin and collaborating with the Jenkins community," said Kawaguchi. "Soasta brings the product expertise and the Jenkins community brings their Jenkins expertise. When we collaborate, it’s a win for everyone. We look forward to seeing more companies follow the same path."…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Cisco Systems is working with Microsoft to offer new products designed to make it easier for businesses to virtualize their data centers, reduce complexity and leverage cloud computing technologies. Cisco is combining its Unified Computing System (UCS) converged data center solution with Microsoft’s Fast Track 3.0 architecture offerings to give businesses integrated solutions that will make it easier for them to provision, deploy and manage their data center environments, according to the two companies.

In addition, Cisco is offering new Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 packages that can leverage options from either EMC and its year-old VSPEX integrated virtualization solution or NetApp and its FlexPod technology…