Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

The basic idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) is inter-connectedness. Where machines with internal sensors are wirelessly connected to the internet and constantly deliver data. For the true power of the IoT to be realized, the utilization of cloud computing is a mandate.

Machine to Machine technology and the Internet of Things is the way the world is going. Already you see things like “smart cities” and “smart sensors” in utilities becoming a common practice, rather than a scene from a 1980s futuristic film. Cloud computing is fundamental to the IoT because of the interconnectedness I mentioned earlier. How? Let’s start with an example…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Katie Fields.

Low on cash, always busy and prone to wonder, first-time entrepreneurs who rely on technology are fighting an uphill battle. Along with the sales, recruiting and administrative responsibilities entrepreneurs shoulder, these human swiss-army knives must also arrange an efficient IT structure. Entrepreneurs in years past had to use the bulk of their start-up capital to buy servers and hire IT professionals, leaving little money left to grow the rest of the business.

An new era in technology has removed a large part of the IT hardware and hiring burden from these eager entrepreneurs. Cloud computing saves business owners from spending capital on expensive hardware and IT staff. It also enables information access from anywhere. Business should use small business credit cards for things that will promote growth. Cloud computing frees up money for new business. For start-ups trying to establish a stable business, cloud computing is a game-changing development…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sue Poremba.

The term “big data” may be a bit of a misnomer. For some companies, big data is actually huge data. Even small companies now find themselves immersed in massive amounts of data of all sorts, which leads to the problem of storing all of it.

Enter the big data cloud storage solutions, which allow companies to store and access media by the terabyte. Storage by the terabyte may have seemed unfathomable just a few years ago, but according to John Griffith of SolidFire, by today’s standards, terabytes of block storage really isn’t all that much. “Many service providers look at opportunity in hundreds or thousands of terabytes. Between storage hungry database applications and other mission critical systems, terabytes of data can be consumed rather quickly,” Griffith said…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Equinix opened a $60 million SE3 data center in downtown Seattle Thursday to enhance its data center and network communication services to the RightScale cloud management service, and potentially to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and major enterprise customers. AWS and Equinix are already cloud partners in six other locations, and Equinix officials said the close working relationship makes it likely that AWS will use the Seattle facility at some point in the future.

Amazon Web Services currently relies on Equinix facilities to power its Direct Connect service, used by financial services and other privacy-oriented organizations that wish to establish a fiber-optic communications link with an Amazon data center rather than relying on the public Internet…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) today announced the Netflix Cloud Prize, a competition designed to make cloud computing better for everyone. With US$100,000 in available prize money, the Netflix Cloud Prize challenges developers around the world to do their very best to improve the features, usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the Internet, popularly known as cloud computing. Contest submissions will be judged by a panel of experts. All submissions will be available freely to anyone.

"Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging," said Neil Hunt , chief product officer at Netflix. "No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Ayushman Baruah.

Adobe’s popular creative software such as Photoshop, Flash and Premier are among the most pirated. The reason for this is, everyone wants to use it but no one wants to buy it because of the huge one-time cost. With Adobe’s Creative Cloud launched in India today, you no longer need to pay upfront for the software and this will invariably tend to reduce software piracy. “With the easy of availability of products through the Creative Cloud and the attractive price points, we do see a significant impact on the piracy rate of our products,” Umang Bedi, Managing Director–South Asia, Adobe.

This launch is also seen as a major shift in Adobe’s business model wherein it could be offering more software through the cloud in the days to come. Adobe’s Creative Cloud is aimed at giving creative professionals their first chance to experience a radical new way of accessing Adobe’s tools and services. Creative Cloud is a membership-based service that provides users with unlimited access to download and install all Creative Suite desktop applications like Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Muse, Adobe Edge tools and services, game developer tools and integration with Photoshop Touch apps…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

SnapLogic has released an update to its SnapLogic Integration Platform enterprise platform. New and enhanced features in this release were designed to enable users to more quickly build, deploy and efficiently manage multiple high-volume, data-intensive integration projects.

Key features in this release revolve around helping enterprises improve data provisioning in their SaaS and on-premise apps while also increasing agility by enabling private enterprise SnapStores, according to the company. The new features include:…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

The message from the cloud has always been simple: Surrender your cares, IT managers, and we’ll handle everything. Forget about skinning your knuckles installing servers, double-checking diesel backups, or fretting about 1,000 or 10,000 things that could go wrong. Give us a credit card number and your data. We’ll do the rest.

For the last few months, I’ve been living the dream, building a vast empire of computers that spanned the globe. Machines everywhere crunched my data into teeny tiny bits, then crunched the numbers even more. Private networks carried my secret scraps of info between the machines so that others could work the data and reform it into pretty graphs. Sure, my desktop is a bit old and it could use more RAM, but with my browser I created a worldwide army of machines with about as much ease as the sorcerer’s apprentice in "Fantasia."…

Grazed from InformationWorld. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware told Wall Street analysts Wednesday that it is launching an approach to hybrid cloud computing that will enable its customers to use their VMware-based data center environments in conjunction with infrastructure-as-a-service providers in the public cloud.

In VMware’s view, its virtualization management console will be the command post for both sets of workloads and will allow movement out to the cloud and back again. Before such a situation can become a reality, however, VMware must move further down the road to virtualized networks that act as an integral part of a software-defined data center…