Grazed from Out-Law.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

UK law makers and the judiciary should take note of new research that has claimed that a narrow reading of copyright law exceptions can result in an erosion of investment in new technologies, an expert has said.19 Jun 2012.

Harvard Business School Professor Josh Lerner has published a new report (32-page / 300KB PDF) that claims that venture capital investment in cloud computing companies in France and Germany has fallen in relation to elsewhere in the EU as a result of court judgments on copyright issues in those countries.

Technology law expert Luke Scanlon of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the report should be a warning to UK legislators and judges over the impact copyright law, and its reading, can have on the economy…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Yammer, Inc., the leading provider of Enterprise Social Networks, today announced it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

"At Yammer, preserving the confidentiality and integrity of our customers’ data is of critical importance," said Josha Bronson, director of Security Engineering, Yammer. "We look forward to bringing our internal security expertise and insight to the CSA to help shape the future of cloud security, while also learning from the various other experts in this rapidly growing space."…

Grazed from Business Insider. Author: Ramon Ray.

I am sure cloud computing has its shortcomings like data security and reliability ( read more about it here), but despite that small businesses are seeking to cut computing costs and improve efficiency through adopting cloud computing applications in this never-ending recession. Cloud based services can help small businesses to simplify business operations, keeping track of their finances while dramatically reducing their software and other computing cost. These cloud based applications can be bought through independent vendor/ service providers or application marketplaces (lists software from well-known vendors).

Application marketplaces are nothing new; they are online shops of different business applications that enable users and software providers to do business in cloud. These are viable resources for finding and using business software…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The enterprise cloud storage opportunity is big and Panzura plans to use $15 million in new venture funding to attack it in a bigger, more global way.

Panzura’s Series C round was led by Opus Capital, bringing total funding to $33 million. The new cash which will go towards building Panzura’s global sales force, CEO Randy Chou told me recently. Unlike many of the other cloud storage startups, four-year-old Panzura focuses exclusively on big enterprise accounts not on small and medium businesses, he said. Current enterprise customers include Relativity Media and Jazz Pharmaceuticals.

The company’s cloud storage gateway can front-end private or public clouds. Panzura lists Amazon, Nirvanix, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Google as public cloud partners and works with EMC, OpenStack, Amplidata and Nirvanix on the private cloud side…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Since the dawn of the digital age we’ve scattered more and more information about ourselves on the web, inside home computers and laptops and in online storage lockers. It’s the reason we love Facebook and use it as our personal scrapbooks. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime for marketers. And for Caringo it’s the reason it exists.

Caringo, an Austin Texas based company, was formed in 2005 with the idea of creating a new type of file system for storing data of storage software that uses a single namespace to scale to many petabytes of data. Its three founders had worked together at several startups including SequeLink and FileLink before forming Caringo. In 2006 before Amazon launched its Simple Storage Service Caringo released CAStor, software that created a scalable storage service. Amazon’s launch of cloud storage validated Caringo’s plans, and gave it something to sell against…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Microsoft’s reported $1 billion deal to buy Yammer isn’t done yet, but the move — despite what many see as a too-hefty price tag — could make sense.

Yammer has big name recognition in the burgeoning field of enterprise social networking — its product lets colleagues chat about projects and share tips in a business-defined context. Microsoft Office remains the market-leading productivity suite despite incursions by OpenOffice, LibreOffice and Google Apps rivals. Pairing the Office with Yammer makes sense, as Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz wrote in Forbes…