Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Om Malik.

NewScale, rPath and Eucalyptus Systems are working on a new self service, private cloud initiative which is going to be announced on August 24. This new effort is going to an integrated offering that is targeting hybrid and private clouds. This will be yet another offering that would perhaps compete with a whole series of companies and efforts, including the open source cloud stack, OpenStack. More details will likely emerge around the time of VMworld 2010.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Om Malik.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Boulton.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Gary Orenstein.

In a world with millions of different mobile devices, televisions, screen sizes and video formats, something has to give. But instead of giving in, device proliferation combined with content producers’ desire to deliver clean video is giving rise to a new market for hosted video encoding, sometimes called transcoding. The goal is simple: provide the right format to the right screen at the right time without requiring content producers to invest in infrastructure. Done right, content producers should be able to dial up a video encoding service in the cloud.

Grazed from Internet Evolution.  Author: Sean Gallagher.

In July, American Eagle Outfitters — which has a market capitalization of $2.52 billion — had the sort of apocalyptic outage that many companies fear. Its e-commerce site was down for eight days. Both a primary and a secondary storage system failed, backups wouldn’t restore properly, and a disaster recovery site wasn’t provisioned properly.

These are the sorts of nightmare scenarios that drive many companies to turn to outsourcers, data center specialists that have the resources to protect against this sort of worst-case scenario.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Clint Boulton.

Google confirmed that it acquired Jambool, whose Solid Gold platform provides a virtual currency service for providers of online games and others who want to put payment options in their applications.

TechCrunch broke the news Aug. 9, saying the deal was worth $70 million. Jambool and Google confirmed the deal Aug. 13.

Jambool’s Solid Gold virtual payment platform lets application developers insert payment options into online games and other applications.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Alex Benik.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Brian Prince.

Facebook has fixed a bug that could have been abused by someone looking to get their hands on the full names and photos of users.

Atul Agarwal of Secfence Technologies posted information about the issue to the Full Disclosure mailing list Aug. 11. If someone entered a user’s e-mail address and the wrong password in the log-in page, the site coughed up the user’s full name and profile picture in addition to an incorrect password message.

Grazed from Destination CRM.  Author: Umberto Milletti.

Few would argue that CRM has been one of the most significant business trends and application categories to emerge over the past few decades. Wikipedia, reference of the masses, defines CRM as a "broadly recognized, widely implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects, using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes."