Why Foursquare Needs Infrastructure to Beat Facebook
Google Predicts Rise of Web OS in 2011
With the launch of ChromeOS, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has realized his long time dream of building a network computer, one that taps into the Internet and offers browser-based-network-hosted applications. My view, when it comes to the ChromeOS? Google should forget chasing the consumers and go hard after the corporate market – especially after verticals that need low-cost, zero-maintenance machines dedicated to a few tasks.
The Cloud Made Open Source “Invisible” This Year
"The big open source news in 2010 is that open source became essentially invisible," writes outgoing Canonical COO Matt Asay in his 2010 year in review column for The Register. It’s not that the media stopped reporting on open source Asay explains. In fact, according to Google News, the number of stories mentioning the phrase "open source" roughly doubled. What’s happening is that open source is moving behind the scenes, thanks in large part to cloud computing…
Standing Cloud Closes $3m Financing, Launches Partner Program
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.
Socialytics and cloud top ICT trends for 2011
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.
Asia’s economic growth to spur cloud adoption
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.
Rackspace Acquires Cloudkick for Cloud Server Management Software
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.
Cloud computing security ‘should follow best practices’
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.
Oracle takes office suite to the cloud
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.