Grazed from MIT Technology Review.  Author: Brad Feld.

Standing Cloud, which makes it easy to deploy and run apps in the cloud, recently closed a $3m financing led by Rich Levandov at Avalon Ventures. Rich and I have known each other and worked together since the mid-1990′s and more recently have invested together in NewsGator and Zynga.

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jamie Yap.

Claus Mortensen, principal for emerging technology research, practice group, IDC Asia-Pacific, noted that though the region was not as badly affected by the end-2008 financial crisis as the West, ailing economic conditions did impact market dynamics in Asia. Therefore, after the crisis passed, companies across all sectors faced increased competition for their products and services, and he noted that this will continue for the next few years.

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Tyler Thia.

In a phone interview with ZDNet Asia, Microsoft Asia Pacific’s regional director for Internet policy, John Galligan, said strong economic activities in this part of the world have seen governments invest heavily in broadband technology, which is a fundamental element for cloud services.

This, together with a keen interest in deriving more efficiency from citizen services and cost savings, will result in a greater cloud adoption, Galligan explained.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Fahmida Y. Rashid.

Rackspace will acquire Cloudkick, developer of a cloud-server management portal, to expand its cloud monitoring portfolio, Rackspace confirmed on Dec. 16.

With cloud computing, organizations can quickly and efficiently launch new servers, but in the automated cloud environment organizations can end up using server resources inefficiently and can "even lose track of some," said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace. "Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl" and makes cloud computing "more powerful with less expense," he said.

Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: neil Hill.

Businesses that have started to use cloud computing and want to improve their security levels should be able to do so by following the right procedures.

This is the view of Alexandria Hubbard, assistant editor of the Search Cloud Computing website, who explained while there are still lingering concerns about the safety of data stored by a third-party provider, there are steps that can be taken to address this issue.

"There are a lot of best practices and features that will work to protect your data in a real world environment and meet compliance requirements," she said.

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Ben Woods.

In its announcement on Wednesday, the business software specialist also launched OpenOffice 3.3, the most recent iteration of the desktop office software picked up in its acquisition of Sun. Both releases fall under the umbrella of Oracle Office and are built on the Open Document Format (ODF) open standard.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jack Clark.

The EMC Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform (ACDP), announced Tuesday, adds a host of modules that will allow Atmos customers to turn the storage product into a storage-as-a-service platform without having to write their own metering, management, utilization and billing modules.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Ryan Lawler.

Grazed from Internet Evolution.  Author: Sean Gallagher.

A former contributor to the code in the OpenBSD operating system that handles encryption of data has alleged that the FBI paid developers working on the code to write in backdoor mechanisms to circumvent authentication and give law enforcement unfettered access to data.