Grazed from TechGoblin.  Author: Daniel Moeller.

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way millions of people share, store and even safeguard information. Just a few years ago, most PC users would balk when their monitors refused to turn on or decided to mysteriously reboot for fear that all their information would be lost. Sure, methods of backing up information existed since the floppy disk, but who really bothered with such a cumbersome procedure at the end of a long night of writing? Many a report has been lost by such carelessness.

But now with cloud storage services, from iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive, the fear of losing your documents has diminished, as your information is no longer saved in just one location. Add to this your ability to save thousands of photographs and ebooks (say, almost 3000 copies of Ulysses), and your laptop has suddenly been transformed into both a music festival and a library, which you can bring to life with your fingertips…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Startup Prior Knowledge opened up the public beta to its database API on Monday so it can solve the problems of developers who want to play with data, but who would rather avoid all that pesky math.

The need for data analysis often starts with a hunch. But somewhere between trying to figure out if the parking meters near a local police hangout are generally ticketed faster than others, you realize that aside from the data on where parking tickets were given and how often, you may need more info and you still aren’t sure what math to perform to prove a relationship. Generally, that’s where most people give up…

Grazed from The Washington Post.  Author: Alex Rossino.

Three years ago, cloud computing was generating all of the hype in information technology. Now the spotlight is on “big data,” a term used to describe the exploding volume of data accumulated by federal agencies.

Despite the attention, big data spending within the federal government is likely to be limited at first and probably will not pick up until cloud computing is more established.

Private industry has already realized the value in the collections of data stored on their servers. This data can tell companies what their customers have bought, and what they might buy again, particularly if a targeted marketing campaign reaches them at the right time…

Grazed from FierceCommunications.  Author:  Chris Rizo.

A quick-moving catastrophic storm late Friday night knocked part of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) data center temporarily offline, and with the crash down came the websites of some of the marquee customers of Amazon.com’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) cloud-computing unit.

Downed was AWS’s vaunted Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which remotely hosts the public-facing websites of movie-streamer Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), cloud platform-as-a-service Heroku, photo-sharing service Instagram, and the social-networking site Pinterest, among other online services that similarly rest on Amazon’s digital infrastructure.

The content-delivery failures–blamed on a two-hour massive electrical storm–affected one AWS availability zone, the US-East-1 Region, which resides at Amazon’s data center in northern Virginia…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: James Urquhart.

This week’s announcement by Google of its new Google Compute Engine cloud offering is a big deal, and GigaOM’s coverage to date has been pretty spot on. However, having read the excellent coverage by Om Malik and Derrick Harris, as well as some interesting analysis on other sites (like here and here), I’m stuck with the feeling that most are missing the real reason Google will get some stalwart Amazon Web Services customers to give Compute Engine a try. Google’s quest to win over users will be all about performance.

The Google Developers Blog post announcing the service broke down three key “offers” of GCE,  which I interpret as the three key differentiators from Google’s perspective of its service over the competition (not necessarily just AWS):…