Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Retailers and marketers often face the challenge of getting coupons, offers and promotions delivered at the perfect time and in the right context to their customers. The rapid advances in cyber foraging, contextual computing and cloud computing platforms are succeeding at revolutionizing this aspect of the retail shopping experience. Context-aware advertising platforms and strategies can also provide precise audience and segment-based messaging directly to customers while they are in the store or retail outlet.

What makes context-aware advertising so unique and well adapted to the cloud is the real-time data integration and contextual intelligence they use for tailoring and transmitting offers to customers. When a customer opts in to retailer’s contextually-based advertising system, they are periodically sent alerts, coupons, and offers on products of interest once they are in or near the store…

Grazed from UC Strategies.  Author: Editorial Staff.

It was announced last week that Amazon Web Services had improved storage capabilities that could handle data intensive applications. The new storage designs are dubbed High Storage Eight Extra Large, and compliment applications with large amounts of data. Warehousing, Hadoop workloads and log processing are included in this.

Amazon stated: “We know that these applications can generate or consume tremendous amounts of data and that you want to be able to run them on EC2 [Amazon Elastic Compute 2].”…

Grazed from Globe and Mail.  Author:  Iain Marlow.

Every once in a while, industries collide and create immense opportunity. It happened a few years ago with smartphones, when increasingly more powerful computing was enhanced by the explosive growth of the wireless industry.

Dennis Kavelman has seen these collisions firsthand. He joined Research In Motion when it had only 20 employees, and he helped it become a global smartphone giant, 15,000 people strong. As COO at yet another fast-growing tech company, he may be about to see it again. Desire2Learn Inc., Kavelman says, is staring into a “perfect storm” of two industries converging: cloud computing and the enormous technological revolution taking place in the education sector. “We have a really hot market, at a time when it’s going to explode,” he says…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

Managing existing information security programs while also extending into new realms of security and applications can be a tricky task, at best, for channel partners. Bringing everything together into a centralized, cloud-based management platform or tool makes things easier not only on the channel partner but also on the customer, who can generally be assured of more consistent security management.

Enter the TraceSecurity TraceCSO API, a new enhancement to the company’s TraceCSO risk-based information security program. The API extends the product’s risk management capabilities to customers’ existing security solutions and incorporates them into TraceCSO. For the channel, this provides them with a tool to offer customers centralized management of their information security programs…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Calxeda, the Austin, Texas-based startup that is building out highly dense, low power ARM-based servers has a new market in the storage world. During a visit last week to the company’s headquarters, company executives shared that in addition to web hosting and big data applications it sees a near-term opportunity in the storage world and that is has fielded more than 20 requests for proposals for systems using ARM-based processors…

Grazed from Proformative. Author: Editorial Staff.

There is no question about it; cloud computing is going to grow even larger than it already it is in 2013. Traditionalist accounting firms will find it increasingly difficult to ignore organization’s prevailing use of cloud storage internally and with their clients. According to a recent study by the AICPA, 11 percent of CPA firms already operate completely in the cloud. Another one-third of the 624 respondents reported using cloud software, such as bill management, accounting and payroll applications, in some areas of their practice.

While the biggest concern surrounding cloud use is security, professionals around the world are benefiting from remote access to work data and information, forgetting about software updates, among other benefits. As the cloud is going to hover over the accounting profession more and more, here are three predictions to consider…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

The cloud is all about applications, media and information. But of the three, media seems to be the largest with applications coming in at close second, while information ranks last place. But what we are seeing in the last two years suggests that information and other data is gaining ground and will soon overtake the other two in terms of relevance, at least in the non-consumer space, the business side. Experts are calling this “Big Data” and it is all about data processing and analytics.

Everything we do online from social networking to e-commerce purchases, chatting, and even simple browsing yields tons of data that certain organizations collect and poll together with other partner organizations. The results are massive volumes of data, hence the name “Big Data”. This includes personal and behavioral profiles that are stores, managed, and analyzed on demand…

Grazed from Fast Market Research. Author: PR Announcement.

Hybrid Mobile Cloud (HMC) computing represents a systems in which a local, native mobile application with a great user interface, is married with cloud computing to provide an intelligent and scalable solution that is better than either native mobile app alone or an HTML5-only cloud computing application. Our research defines the roles of mobile and cloud computing in the enterprise today and provides a vision for how HMC computing will develop into a new paradigm that will become dominant within the next few years.

This report provides visibility into how HMC computing enables enterprise IT management to deploy customer-facing applications and become a more valued strategic asset for the organization. The analysis focuses on the impact of mobile becoming the primary channel for customers interaction most organizations. The report also provides recommendations for enterprise IT leadership regarding best integration practices for HMC computing within a corporate environment…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Brian X. Chen.

For some on Christmas Eve, “White Christmas” was a blackout on Netflix. That’s because problems with Amazon’s cloud computing service, which provides storage and computing power for all kinds of Web sites and services, caused Netflix to go down for much of the day.

In updates on a Web site that reports on the status of its online services, Amazon traced the trouble to Elastic Load Balancing, a part of its service that helps spread heavy traffic among multiple servers to prevent overload. The company gave few details about the problems in its data center in Northern Virginia beyond this and did not offer an official statement or explanation…