Grazed from NFCNews. Author: Emil Bonaduce.

Let’s get to the point: plastic ID cards used for transactions are going to be around for a long time. Sure, smart phones are amazing. We’ve seen phones utilizing NFC technology buy sodas in ultra-tech environments. Just bump your phone and transfer personal data. It’s so cool and easy, why don’t we just do it, now, today!

Don’t get me wrong, the penetration of the transaction market via smart phones has only just begun, and its use as a percentage of the total market including cash, prepaid, credit card and other, will increase exponentially. However, the expanding transaction market will continue to drive plastic card growth as well. Of all things, the major credit card processors plan to push chip cards in the U.S., the last bastion of mag stripe cards in the developed world. The growth of plastic cards will grow at a decreasing rate, but not halt and decline…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Robert Shaw.

Cloud computing wasn’t always cloud computing. Depending on who you ask, first it was either time sharing or grid computing. Strangely, nobody actually claims to know how cloud computing got its name. To this day, no one claims credit for coining the phrase. (Maybe I shouldn’t have said that…)

The phrase “cloud computing” is rather poetic for a field that’s not known for its literary devices. It’s certainly not typical of utilitarian terms like social networking, Internet, voice over IP, and distributed computing.Perhaps that’s why marketing pros love it so much — and why it grates on so many old-school IT pros…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Imation, the storage and data security outfit, has bought Nexsan, the privately held disk-based and solid-state storage systems shop, for $105 million in cash and $15 million in stock.  Imation said Nexsan, which has raised about $36.5 million in venture funding and twice abandoned the idea of going public, had 2011 revenues of $82 million and is still growing.

It reportedly has gross margins in the 40% range. The deal is expected to be immediately accretive although Nexsan’s profitability is questionable. Imation means to use Nexsan to focus on the SMB market with purpose-built storage systems and appliances…

Grazed from FierceGovernmentIT. Author: Greg Slabodkin.

While federal agencies have made progress expanding their use of cloud services, many challenges remain for full implementation, Citizens Against Government Waste says in its 2012 review of the federal cloud.

As part of the Obama administration’s "cloud ?rst" strategy for IT procurement, federal agencies are moving various services, including email, legacy software, archival services, public website hosting and infrastructure services to the cloud. CAGW says federal spending on cloud computing, include public, private and shared service models, is expected to total $11.2 billion between 2012 and 2017…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

As a long time advocate of cloud computing, I already know most of the technology and terms surrounding cloud computing and if someone mentions a new application or feature I might be able to gleam how it works based on the technologies used. This is not necessarily true for most people even if they have been in the IT industry for a long time. That is why I write “simple” articles that the less informed might be able to grasp easily. But to get a real understanding of something, you need to get an understanding of its internal structure, understand how it works and not just what it does. If someone tells you that an airplane flies because of engines and wings, it will still seem like magic because you are not really informed on the how. Same as cloud computing, for many it simply provides them with that service that they take for granted without really knowing how it is done. And to understand it better, we must understand the underlying infrastructure of cloud computing.

To put it simply, the infrastructure or how all the hardware technology and other elements come together cloud computing is very similar to that of traditional network computing. You have your servers that contain the CPUs, RAM, and other processing elements, and then you have your various storage devices like NAS and RAID-style setups. Of course, to round out the bunch you have your networking hardware, the routers, switches, modems, repeaters, and any and all combinations of networking hardware technology. If you look at the list I just mentioned, it is obvious that the hardware used for cloud computing has been existing, but why hasn’t cloud computing existed as long?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Google is encouraging users of its Google Drive online storage service to go paperless in 2013 as a way to save time, money and trees. "This year, Google Drive is part of the Paperless Coalition, a group of organizations and products that help you live completely in a paper-free world," declared Google product marketing manager Meredith Blackwell in a blog post. "So whether you’re an expense reporter, invoice tracker, file hoarder or note jotter, you can do it all without using paper."

Joining Google in its coalition are several other online services: HelloFax, an online fax service; Manilla, an online bill management service; HelloSign, an e-signature service; Expensify, an online expense reporting service; Xero, an online business accounting service; and Fujitsu, which makes the ScanSnap scanner…

Grazed from CSO. Author: Ellen Messmer.

Cloud computing is blowing into 2013 on the winds of confidence, with IT professionals increasingly convinced that the security controls are adequate, but still very, very leery. Take Len Peters, CIO at Yale University, who has undertaken a cost-benefit analysis of cloud-based services in comparison to on-premises software purchases, finding that not only are unit costs less for the kind of software-as-a-service (SaaS) he’s most interested in, but that SaaS can also further the compliance and security goals the IT department has long espoused.

Last spring, Yale elected to migrate from an on-premises IT management application to the cloud-based ServiceNow. The economic analysis indicated a positive cost advantage within 13 months. But security and compliance considerations were and always are going to be critical factors in cloud-computing decisions, Peters says. Like many IT pros, he found himself asking the questions, "Is the cloud safe? What are the potential risks?"…

Grazed from eCommerce Bytes. Author: Ina Steiner.

The largest retailers and the smallest online merchants bemoan the power Amazon wields in retail, but the company also has tech firms racing to keep up. Over the years, Amazon developed expertise building its own retail site, and in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to other businesses in the form of web services – now commonly known as cloud computing.

Some people may have been confused when an outage at Netflix on Christmas Eve was blamed on Amazon, but despite the fact that Netflix competes with Amazon in streaming digital content, Netflix uses AWS to power its site. (Amazon apologized for its outage without naming which customers had been affected.)…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Hewlett-Packard, which is desperately seeking ways to get its boat off the sandbar, told the SEC last week in its annual 10-K that "we continue to evaluate the potential disposition of assets and businesses that may no longer help us meet our objectives."

Bloomberg, which worked over New Year’s Eve, says the company didn’t use that language in its last 10-K filing when CEO Meg Whitman reversed her ousted predecessor’s destabilizing notion of somehow spinning off the company’s PC unit, and instead moved printers into it…

Grazed from Business News Americas. Author: Patrick Nixon.

Chile-based Latin American IT company Sonda sees 2013 as the year when cloud computing will see consolidation in the region. Sonda’s regional cloud computing manager Sergio Rademacher has identified 10 key trends.

1 Cost saving

According to international studies, 30% of companies will move a significant part of their business applications to the cloud, generating a reduction of 10-40% in the cost of hardware, servers, software licenses and upgrades, energy consumption, and support tasks…