Grazed from FleetOwner. Author: Sean Kilcarr.

European traffic location and navigation provider HERE is spearheading an interesting project in Finland, one that seeks to use cloud computing to help vehicles spot a variety of road hazards well before a human driver can see them. This pilot project, expected to start in 2016, intends to assess the capability of current and emerging mobile network and location cloud technologies to transmit critical road safety information in real-time to vehicles, such as black ice, an animal on the highway, sudden traffic build-up, or an accident.

George Filley, who heads HERE’s digital transportation infrastructure program, said in a statement that his company is being tasked by the Finnish Transport Agency (FTA) and Trafi, the Finnish Transport Safety Agency, to lead this pilot – called Coop – and will work together with traffic information management service company Infotripla in implementing it…

Read more from the source @ http://fleetowner.com/blog/european-project-seeks-use-cloud-spot-road-hazards

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Anthony Wing Kosner.

What is an app? Most people think of them as the little, self-contained bits of software on our phones. They have shiny icons, and we get them through app stores. Sometimes they are useful. Often they are amusing distractions. But there is another way to think about apps in terms of the data they consume and create.

In this view, apps are what will turn the global network of smartphones into a massively distributed computing platform. Everything we know about user experience still applies in this world, but reducing friction for each user is only part of the problem. The bigger issue becomes how to coordinate the data bouncing around between all of these devices and servers in the cloud. This coordination is the primary problem that the JavaScript app platform Meteor has set itself to solve…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Kristen Knapp.

Before moving to the cloud, enterprises face a long to-do list of technical tasks, ranging from application redesign to defining security requirements. The biggest challenge with a cloud computing project, however, lies not with the technology itself, but in the massive cultural shift it requires of an organization.

"The technical [cloud] solutions are usually not that hard," said Odd Waller, manager of application hosting and service design at Volvo IT, the IT arm of Swedish manufacturing giant Volvo Group, during the Red Hat Summit last week. "But to get the whole company moving in that direction — getting 8,000 people to think in a way they haven’t thought before — that’s been the real work."…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/4500249040/Avoid-culture-shock-in-your-next-cloud-computing-project

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Editorial Staff.

The great cloud migration has begun in earnest. 2014 was a pivotal year when the clients of MSPs started pushing back and demanding cloud computing solutions over on-premise capital expenditures. It’s simply not enough to be an MSP or VAR and sell only servers, storage and hardware upgrades. These days, business owners know a great deal about the cloud offerings available. Additionally, the early fears of cloud security are being diminished by the countless success stories and case studies of big name companies moving to the cloud.

MSPs have a few options–more SaaS solutions or delaying the inevitable replacement of on-premise infrastructure with cloud infrastructure. Sure, email and CRM migrations to the cloud were painful, and many MSPs experienced margin loss. However, today, in 2015, most of those projects are viewed as a success…

Grazed from NYT. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Many in the tech community expressed dismay at a Supreme Court decision on Monday not to hear the appeal of a copyright decision against Google. But it could be years before lower courts provide clarity around an important component of big software systems, called Application Programming Interfaces.

Google had asked the Supreme Court to revisit a 2014 federal appeals court decision that A.P.I.s in the Java programming language owned by Oracle, used by Google to create the Android smartphone operating system, are entitled to copyright protection. In that ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District reversed a 2012 decision by Federal District Court in San Francisco, which had concluded that the software in question was not subject to copyright…

Read more from the source @ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/supreme-court-declines-to-hear-appeal-in-google-oracle-copyright-fight/?_r=0

 Grazed from Bloomberg.   Author: Dina Bass.

Microsoft Corp. is getting out of Web display advertising, with AOL Inc. taking over the business and letting the software maker focus on mobile and cloud computing.  AOL will use Microsoft’s Bing Internet search engine instead of Google Inc. as part of the 10-year deal, the companies said in a statement Monday. Microsoft also said it’s expanding an ad partnership with AppNexus Inc., an online marketing company.

AOL will hire about 1,200 Microsoft workers in display ad sales, marketing and engineering, according to Gerasimos Manolatos, a spokesman for AOL. AppNexus will take other Microsoft employees. Some remaining employees will be offered other jobs at Microsoft, said a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because specific details of the deal haven’t been announced…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Brian Taylor.

Grazed from CDN.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author:  Mike Vizard.

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

The lifecycle of any given technological innovation follows a fairly standard path: proposal, development, deployment and then either success or failure based on cost, efficacy, execution or a number of other factors. With the cloud, however, we seem to be diverging from this pattern, or at the very least the process is being drawn out due to the radical and fundamental way it affects the entire data stack, and indeed the entire business model.

The private cloud in particular seems to be caught in a no-man’s land of doubt/certainty, confusion/clarity, and ongoing debate between those who support it to the nines and those who chalk it up to so much wishful thinking. On any given day, a web search of the terms “private cloud” can produce the following results:…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/infrastructure/shifting-the-cloud-debate-to-a-higher-plane.html