Author: David

Zynga, the maker of popular social games including Farmville, CityVille, and Mafia Wars, has made a major shift in where it gets the computing horsepower for its more than 227 million monthly active users, in effect, upending its dependence on Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure.

"Nearly 80% of our daily active users were hosted in the (Zynga) zCloud at the end of the year, compared to just 20% at the beginning of the year," said John Schappert, Chief Operating Officer, during the earnings call Tuesday.

That would still make Zynga one of the largest implementers of hybrid cloud computing, building regular use of the public cloud into its IT staff’s planning for how it will add to and use its own data centers. But it also represents how quickly the supplier of social networking games is revising its approach…

The budget unveiled Monday by the White House features $78.9 billion in federal IT spending, a 1.2 percent decrease from the budget enacted in 2012. Much of that decrease comes from more than $1 billion cut from the Department of Defense IT budget by way of data center consolidation, a centerpiece of the 25-point plan from the office of the federal CIO.

IT spending across non-military agencies will go up from 2012 levels by about $459 million to $41.7 billion in 2013, according to proposed budget figures. Since 2009, IT spending has remained relatively flat, while the total budget presented by Obama grew to a historically high $3.8 trillion…

CloudSpokes, the crowdsourcing community that matches companies who need cloud development work with a worldwide community of specialist developers, has attracted more than 30,000 developers, fulfilled more than 150 challenges, and created innovative solutions for companies like Suntech, Medtronic and Glocap in its inaugural year. The community, created and managed by Appirio, takes advantage of the unique elements of cloud computing — specifically the ability of developers anywhere to work with cloud platforms instantly — to enable the crowdsourcing of development…

CloudNOW, a nonprofit executive consortium of the leading women in cloud computing, announced during Cloud Connect Santa Clara today, the first annual CloudNOW Awards presented to 10 outstanding women in cloud computing for their contributions, accomplishments and thought leadership.

"It was amazing and gratifying to have the caliber of candidates participate in our first annual awards," said Jocelyn DeGance Graham, founder of CloudNOW. "As we continue to fulfill on our mission, we plan to expand the awards next year to recognize the outstanding contributions of more women in the cloud and further the reach of women in technology."…

Google’s Drive, aka Gdrive, cloud storage service is finally due for release, more than four years after it was first rumored in 2007. Clearly, users want cloud storage, both at the enterprise and the retail levels. Just look at the success of Dropbox and Box.net, not to mention Amazon.com’s S3. Of course Apple is in that game as well with its iCloud document-syncing cloud service. I use them all.

So what’s new with Gdrive? Not much.

We’ve been able to store stuff for free using Google Apps for years. Moreover, we’ve had other more retail-oriented cloud storage systems, such as Dropbox, that already work pretty well and have been battle-tested. While I wouldn’t put state secrets on these services just yet, their security is much better than a USB thumb drive’s, which is the real-world alternative for most users…

The Internet highway may start looking like a proverbial New York traffic jam at rush hour soon.

Feel free to substitute any town you like because Cisco says there’s going to be a faster-than-expected 18x surge in worldwide mobile data traffic between 2011 and 2016.

That’s when mobile cloud traffic should account for 71% of total data traffic, or 10.3 exabytes a month, up from a mere 269 petabytes a month now, outgrowing global fixed data traffic by 3x.  That’s like 33 billion DVDs or 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files…

CX Inc. the fastest growing cloud storage and data file management system, introduced their CX Android application today. With the new application, Android and Kindle Fire users will now have additional devices for getting into the CX cloud.

"CX, which launched its production release in October, is one of the fastest growing cloud computing storage applications welcoming on average 30,000 new customers every week," Brad Robertson, CEO of CX Inc. "While, CX can always be accessed via the mobile web client – users can now go native on their devices with the latest additions of the native Android and Kindle Fire applications. These recent additions compliment CX’s ever-growing list of applications that enable secure syncing, creation, consumption, and collaboration of content in the cloud with CX. As promised, CX.com will continue to be your secure digital command center, through which you can take control of all your content from any device."…

A lot of companies have woken up to the fact that they can make huge profits by foraying into this domain.

A lot has been said about cloud computing. As a matter of fact, it has often been projected as the need of the hour. Perhaps this hype has been purposely created by cloud computing companies for their own benefit. Experts suggest that it is impossible for a technology of this kind (read: not yet fully developed) to cause a stir.

However, it cannot be denied that ‘cloud’ has certainly sparked a flurry of interest. In such a scenario, a lot of companies have woken up to the fact that they can make huge profits by foraying into this domain. The following tips would help you in separating the good from the bad:..