Grazed from THE Journal. Author: Margo Pierce.

All students, educators, and administrators are subject to data-gathering when they use cloud resources. Everyone’s online movements are followed by a number of service providers or advertisers, especially when the services they are using are "free," according to Jim Siegl, chair of the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) Technical Committee, which researches and reports on internet privacy, along with other education technology issues.

Data is the most common (yet invisible) fee extracted from users by companies that make search engines, e-mail, and other cloud computing resources accessible to schools. Siegl reads the user agreements and terms and conditions of various cloud offerings such as Google Apps for Education or Microsoft 365 in order to understand the true cost of "free."…

Grazed from Xconomy. Author: Benjamin Romano.

It’s a good time to be doing big data in Seattle. So says Ed Lazowska, the University of Washington computer science professor who played host and tour guide to the region’s big data lineup during the Washington Innovation Summit last week. He points to the region’s strengths in cloud computing, and a steady stream of big data achievers marching forth from the UW.

While Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) may be among the most recognizable of these players, the work being done here now is not just about finding a better way to get you to buy exactly what you didn’t know you always wanted. From startups and investors to giants like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), the Seattle-area big data cluster is at work on novel solutions to major problems in healthcare, transportation, energy, communication, and yes, commerce, too. They’re also building tools to democratize big data and improve upon Hadoop, an underlying piece of big data computing infrastructure…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jnan Dash.

Marc Andreesen said recently that 2012 will be remembered as the year of SaaS. What he meant is that SaaS has been around for a while, but it came of age this year, with examples of successes such as the Workday IPO. No one questions the significance of SaaS any more. But the year 2013 will see a shift to PaaS (Platform as a Service) with “most” new activities.

There is already a blurring of the lines between IaaS and PaaS, as seen from Amazon’s AWS stack. But programmatic interface in PaaS will dominate as we move forward, catering to the developer community. The incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe (representing “on-premise” software) will have to combat with pure-play cloud players. I saw a list of cloud pioneers and new cloud tools that are be worth sharing…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Geoff Simon.

Santa Monica based younity announced today the beta launch of it’s unique personal cloud storage service designed to eliminate device to computer syncing and storage limitations for iPhones and iPads. Today marks the public beta launch of the app, which allows iPhone and iPad users to access all their music, videos, photos and other files from all laptops, desktops without any plugin, plugging in or syncing.

The service also removes storage limitations by not actually storing any of your files online, but instead works by providing a single file system across all devices where younity is installed (either Macs or PCs). Once installed, Younity indexes all your photos, documents, videos and music and represents it as a single file system. So what it allows for, is your machines, whether it’s a Mac or PC to stream the files directly to your iOS device from where they’re at, not by syncing it to a online cloud…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Marissa Trejada.

The future of cloud computing will have much to do with cloud federation, according to a new report by CloudNOW, a non-profit worldwide association that recently announced its top predictions for cloud trends in the next year. The large use of cloud stack, greater control over cloud services, and resources deployed through enterprise class characteristics were also mentioned in an article featured in The Cloud Times as top trends from the report.

Federated clouds will be a big focus in the next year, and as a result, certain applications will become essential to organizational cloud strategy. A federated cloud manages many external and internal cloud computing services to match the needs of a particular business. Putting such a model into practice requires standardization. According to the article, "Providers will begin to differentiate through support, enterprise-class features such as more appropriate SLAs, geolocation services to assist in meeting regulatory and compliance needs, and baked-in social collaboration features."…

Grazed from ForexNews. Author: David Trainer.

Contrary to public opinion, the long-term implications of cloud computing on the storage and computing businesses are very positive. Western Digital (WDC) is highly undervalued at anything below $70/share as this company stands to benefit more from cloud computing than it will suffer.

Not since the United States developed a national power grid for the delivery of electricity have we seen a movement as impactful to our daily lives as cloud computing may be. The national power grid effectively opened access to electricity to the entire country. And since that time have we seen a decline in the amount of electricity consumed or the number of devices that consume electricity? Not at all. In retrospect, the national power grid removed the bottleneck of proximity to the use of electricity as it allowed people and businesses most anywhere to access electricity in almost unlimited amounts…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, has learned a thing or two over the years about what it takes to build a 21st century architecture. Speaking at the Amazon re:invent conference, Vogels detailed his commandments for modern IT architecture during a keynote session. For the CTO of Amazon, modern IT architecture is about the cloud and not being constrained by physical hardware.

Vogels admitted that he has somewhat of a love/hate relationship with physical hardware servers. He said that he has tried to hug servers to get them to do what he wanted. "Believe you and me, I’ve hugged servers enough in my life and they do not hug you back," Vogels said. "They hate you."…

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

10gen, the company commercializing MongoDB, and SoftLayer, the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider in the world, have just launched MongoDB Cloud Subscriptions. It’s a unique pay-as-you-go managed cloud subscription pushing certified pre-engineered and orchestrated MongoDB systems through a highly scalable, automated cloud platform.

The idea is to make the open source NoSQL database more available through the push-button provisioning of high-performance, production-grade, highly scalable clusters at SoftLayer’s portal or API. It’s supposed to be easy to buy and promises ease of management, administration and support…

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

EMC and VMware confirmed Tuesday that they’re reshuffling their assets and forming a so-called cloud and Big Data "virtual organization" called the Pivotal Initiative under EMC’s chief strategy officer, VMware’s former CEO Paul Martiz.

VMware is contributing Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, Gemstone and Cetas. EMC is putting in Greenplum and Pivotal Labs. The move involves 1,400 employees, 600 from VMware and 800 from EMC. The companies said they "expect to formally unite these resources by Q2 2013, with a specific operational structure to be determined." So evidently for now it’s being run out of EMC…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panetierri.

At Dell World 2012, expect Michael Dell and his executive team to offer numerous updates involving public cloud and private cloud initiatives. Among the technologies atop Dell’s (NASDAQ: DELL) priority list: Boomi for cloud integrators, Quest Software for cloud monitoring and management, and a hands-on Dell Cloud lab at the conference.

Dell World (Dec. 11-13, Austin, Texas) will likely promote six cloud computing opportunities for customers and partners. They include how to:

• Build private and public cloud infrastructures with Dell servers, storage and networking. Surely, Compellent, EqualLogic and Force10 networking will enter the conversation here.
• Operate, monitor and manage cloud infrastructure. Here, listen closely for information about Quest Software…