Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Now you can edit collaboratively with Google Docs for Android

http://www.itworld.com/252472/now-you-can-edit-collaboratively-google-docs-android

Just a few short weeks after giving users of Google Docs for Android offline access to their documents, Google on Wednesday announced another highly sought-after addition to the software.

Microsoft ties SkyDrive tightly to Windows 8

via Cloud by Barb Darrow on 2/21/12

Microsoft isn't taking the cloud storage challenge lying down. The company plans to build in tight links from its upcoming Windows 8 client to its SkyDrive cloud storage, making it easy for users running Windows 8 on tablets, PCs or phones to store and access their digital stuff on SkyDrive fast and fluidly, according to post to the Building Windows 8 blog Monday.

While SkyDrive has been around for awhile, and claims 17 million users (and stores 10 petabytes of data), the bulk of the mind share around cloud storage has accrued to Dropbox, which at last count claimed 45 million users.

The blog, written by SkyDrive Program Managers Mike Torres and Omar Shahine, describes how Microsoft insiders have been using the Windows 8-SkyDrive tandem internally:

We clean install Windows 8 on a new PC and sign in, and all of our settings, browser history, and customizations just show up. In addition, one of the most important steps we take to make a new PC "ours" is to copy over our personal files – like documents and photos. With Windows 8, we wanted to make sure that your files would be instantly available and up-to-date as you move between PCs – without configuring add-ons or using a USB drive.

They also talk a little about how they've built the Windows 8 onramp to SkyDrive, the current iteration of which Microsoft describes as more a web site than a true cloud service.

 We built the entire app using modern web technologies like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5, and because of our recent updates to SkyDrive.com, we were able to use the same JSON APIs and JavaScript object model that the website uses. The only difference on Windows 8 is that we bind the results to modern controls that were built for touch. This is part of the reason it's so fast, and the touch behavior works so well (and works on Windows on ARM too). Over time, we fully expect the Metro style app and SkyDrive.com to "converge" on functionality so there won't be a question of which experience someone should use. When using Windows 8, the SkyDrive Metro style app will be the best way to browse and manage your SkyDrive.

"Metro" is Microsoft's term for its tablet or phone interface.

Microsoft is expected to launch a consumer preview of Windows 8 at the Mobile World Conference next week in Barcelona.

Given the noise around cloud storage — from startups like Dropbox and Box, along with legacy behemoths including Microsoft and Google with its long-rumored Google Drive — look for the battle to rage on.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user redjar


Disaster recovery is ripe for cloud disruption

via Cloud by Carlos Escapa, VirtualSharp Software on 2/25/12

Cloud computing will soon disrupt the market for basic storage and data center backup.

Dropbox, Box and other cloud-based backup tools for desktop and mobile devices have already been wildly successful. Similar tools, such as Riverbed, StorSimple and Ctera, are available for the server market, but they take a hardware-centric approach that has failed to garner a large market.

When Amazon Web Services launched AWS Storage Gateway last month, the move seemed entirely logical, almost expected, given the enormous appetite that desktops have shown for cloud-based data sharing and backup.

But is this enough? Most companies have become pretty good at copying data. The real challenge is not restoring data, but going a level higher and recovering services when disaster strikes. That's particularly important in the era of IT consumerization, where end users expect to access data through applications of their choice on the device of their choice. In other words, it is useless to protect data and not protect the applications that exploit it.

This is where current backup tools fall short. End users are concerned about how long the outage is going to last, not whether the data is safe (which they assume is a given). Disaster recovery is about minimizing downtime. The cloud has huge potential to make an impact here. By managing and scheduling all of the components involved in service delivery, the cloud could turn recovery time objectives into guarantees.

We are at a fork in the road: backup and disaster recovery are going to be two separate processes.

Backup will be used to quickly restore data — including files, mailboxes, attachments and database tables — and to keep auditors happy about long-term data availability.

Disaster recovery will focus on continuity and service recovery, not data restoration. It will orchestrate all of the components involved in service delivery — from storage to hypervisors, operating systems, databases, middleware and applications — across collaborating clouds. This means that when a cloud disappears, another cloud will be ready to take over at the push of a button. And we'll be 100 percent certain about the maximum outage time. There will be no need to worry about doing disaster recovery exercises, because clouds will do them on their own, continuously and accurately.

Carlos Escapa is the CEO of VirtualSharp Software. Previously, he was a senior executive at VMware in Europe, where he managed VMware's field operations in France, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Burkett.


Open source opens doors for Aussie start-up



"The Telmex guys saw that MNIS was a commercially-supported product, then downloaded the free version and put it in," Maher said. "Within a day they had it doing all the stuff that they hadn't been able to achieve with the other product for the previous nine months. They then reached out to us and pre-purchased six commercial modules which we were yet to release, and support and our assistance for implementation."



Dropbox: disruptor or flash-in-the-pan?

via Cloud by Barb Darrow on 2/27/12

After Dropbox on Friday made it easier to move digital photos from smartphones to cloud, the debate as to whether Dropbox itself is the next big disruptor or just a feature to be acquired or co-opted flared anew. The debate boils down to whether the web needs a neutral storage service that works pretty well with all the major technology platforms, or if ease of use and synching is paramount.

By all accounts, Dropbox provides a slick way to upload and store digital paraphernalia in the cloud. From there, users can access their stuff from any device and sync files across devices. The service has been hugely popular — as of four months ago, Dropbox claimed 45 million users. But the success of the five-year-old company has bred imitators and competitors including the biggest companies in tech.

The new private camera upload feature will let users take their photos as always but then easily move them from smartphone or tablet or camera or SD card to their cloud data trove using Wi-Fi or their cellular data plans. Dropbox uploads the photos and videos in their original size and full resolution to the user's camera upload location. The feature is available now for Android phones with Windows, Mac, and iOS support to come, Dropbox said.

Those who forget history …

The cautionary tale for Dropbox is that the best technology doesn't always win. (I would insert the Betamax vs. VHS argument here, but no one remembers it anymore.) Should Microsoft or Apple or Google offer at least reasonably good cross-platform file storage and sync capabilities, Dropbox will be in trouble. Working in Dropbox's favor is that CEO Drew Houston appears acutely aware of history.

According to this Forbes Magazine account, when Apple announced iCloud, Houston shot off a memo to employees, reaffirming the company's status as one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Then, he listed several other once-fast-growing companies: MySpace, Netscape, Palm, and Yahoo.

Photo courtesy of Dropbox.


Saturday, February 25, 2012

How to manage a distributed development team

http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/how-to-manage-a-distributed-development-team/144913

Alot of managers have a bias for having employees in the same office. However, you can make better hires and have higher productivity from many developers if they work from home, wherever that may be

4 reasons we procrastinate despite knowing better

http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/4-reasons-we-procrastinate-despite-knowing-better/144934

We know procrastination will only create more stress for us, yet we succumb to it anyway. Why is it so hard to ignore procrastination's siren song? cloud 4 reasons we procrastinate despite knowing better

Price of DRAM plunges to all-time low of around $1

http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/price-of-dram-plunges-to-all-time-low-of-around-1/144938

This means cheaper storage faster access to cloud data

Friday, February 17, 2012

Apple’s iCloud Is No Dropbox Killer (It’s Much More)


Apple's iCloud Is No Dropbox Killer (It's Much More)

icloud-logo

With today's reveal of the next version of OS X - OS X 10.8, aka Mountain Lion – Apple is more deeply integrating its iCloud service into the operating system itself. No longer will storing your documents in the cloud feel like an extra, value-added feature – it will feel like part of the OS itself. The cloud is just another drive, Apple seems to say, and saving to the cloud should look and feel no different than saving to your Documents folder or your Desktop.


...






Thursday, February 16, 2012

Sourcefabric booktype

there's a new option. BookType is a self-hosted, open source and collaborative authoring tool for e-books and print books. Think of it kind of like a Wordpress for books.




Appward's Field Guide to Web Apps



The Chrome folks have put together a Field Guide for Web Applicationsthat is almost as notable for its design as the content itself. The field guide is a short resource with four chapters on Web apps, and one devoted to "Bert Appward" – the fictitious author of the guide.



Engagio “social dashboard”



Email is the bane of many people's lives, but at least most users only have a single inbox to worry about. If you're trying to keep up with comments and other social input from blogs and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, not to mention other social sites you use, it can be overwhelming. That's the problem a startup called Engagio is trying to solve: the company's "social dashboard" service, which has been in private beta for several months, launches officially today,



Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Cloud Storage: Changes Coming to Online Storage | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community


One of the big cloud technologies to filter down to the consumer level in the past year has been online storage. Services like Dropbox are adding thousands of members a day. Even Apple, after two previous failed attempts, seems to have found a successful online storage product iniCloud. Like other areas of the cloud, though, online storage is still maturing.






Cloud Infographic: The Evolution Of Web Hosting | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community



Cloud Infographic: The Evolution Of Web Hosting Source: Peer1 Hosting Tags: Cloud, evolution, Host, Infograph, Infographic, IT, Web, Web hosting, Web Hosting Source




And the most in-demand tech skills of 2012 are …


And the most in-demand tech skills of 2012 are …

One way to find out what skills will be in highest demand this year is to look at job posts.


I decided to analyze recent Craigslist San Francisco Bay Area job ads. It's a good proxy for the local demand. The Bay Area is often a trend setter, and technologies that become popular here frequently gain broader adoption. So the findings can also be viewed as a leading indicator for other geographies.


Here are the key insights:



  • "Mobile" appears in 30% of all ads, winning the popularity (or hype?) contest.

  • Java continues to lead the pack among the development languages, followed by Ruby, Python, and PHP.

  • MySQL is by far the most commonly mentioned relational database.

  • NoSQL is featured prominently. Hadoop is first on the list of NoSQL databases, followed by Cassandra, Redis, and MongoDB.

  • Linux has little contest among the operating systems. Ubuntu is mentioned more frequently than CentOS.

  • Android is mentioned slightly more often than iOS/iPhone.

  • jQuery is the most commonly mentioned JavaScript framework.

  • Spring continues to be the most commonly mentioned Java framework.

  • Git outranks subversion among the source code management systems.

  • Selenium is the most frequently mentioned testing tool.

  • Drupal is the most frequently mentioned CMS tool.


I ran similar analysis a year ago. For the most part, the results were similar. But a few differences are worth noting:



  • Demand for mobile skills is accelerating. "Mobile" and "social" had similar mention frequency last year. This year "mobile" mentions are far ahead of "social".

  • NoSQL skills requests increased significantly.

  • PHP mentions went down, Ruby went up.

  • Git overtook subversion.

  • Flash/ActionScript mentions went down.


The full top 50 list of tech skills most commonly featured in Craigslist posts follows. The counts reflect the number of posts a term appears in. Multiple mentions of the same term in a single post count as one. Counts reflect listings in the SF Bay Area Internet Engineering category between Jan. 1 and 31, 2012.


Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Google Confirms Gmail and YouTube Blocked in Iran Since Feb. 10 (Bloomberg)


Google Confirms Gmail and YouTube Blocked in Iran Since Feb. 10  —  Google Inc.'s (GOOG) encrypted search, Gmail, Google Videos and YouTube have been blocked in Iran since Feb. 10, the company said in an e-mailed response to a query.  —  More than 30 million Iranian Internet users …






SharePoint Applications: 8 Basic Steps to Success


SharePoint Applications: 8 Basic Steps to Success

In my last post, I sketched out at a high level what I see working at organizations trying to move off of older repositories onto SharePoint. 

What I want to do in the next few posts is walk through a process that, while by no means a silver bullet, gives you a better chance of success than the typical approach.


Read full story...






Education: Why Cloud Computing?


Education: Why Cloud Computing?

Education: Why Cloud Computing? There are a lot of good reasons why schools, both in the lower and higher education sectors, should adopt cloud computing and embed such into their systems. In this article, we are going to talk about the different benefits, as well as some of the disadvantages and limitations of using cloud computing. [...]






How The Accounting Industry Is Being Changed By Cloud Computing


How The Accounting Industry Is Being Changed By Cloud Computing

How The Accounting Industry Is Being Changed By Cloud Computing The market for accounting and tax services are in quandary primarily because customers are gearing towards bookkeeping services which are less costly and that big accountancy firms are pushing other players out of the high-priced market. However, all is not lost. Accountants must see it [...]





Sunday, February 12, 2012

How sites like MegaUpload make millions from pirated video

via VentureBeat by Peter Yared on 2/10/12

This story originally appeared on CNET and is republished with permission.

For the scope of this article, I am leaving all of the commentary on SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and such aside for others much more well-versed than I to discuss.

A lot of people have been asking me the same question lately: Just how do file-sharing sites like MegaUpload — recently taken down by an international collection of law enforcement — make hundreds of millions of dollars a year and fund lottery-winner style lifestyles that include mansions and private jets?

It's actually pretty straightforward. These sites use the same techniques as legitimate Web sites: search, social media, ad networks, and online payment processors.

Sites that feature links to illegal videos optimize for the keyword "links," and users that seek such videos have learned to search for "links." Generally, providers of legal content are not trying to land in searches for links; they are trying to land in searches for the word "videos." So searching Google for a popular TV show such as NCIS followed by the words "free links" returns sites that feature links to pirated copies of the TV show.
Clicking on one of these Google links, such as TV-Links.com, returns a well-designed Web page featuring advertising from the likes of American Express and Hertz via retargeting ad networks such as Chango.

The page also features links to the latest NCIS episodes that are illegally hosted on download sites. Each link has a rating so that visitors will know when a file is no longer available due to a DCMA takedown. As there are numerous links available on numerous download sites, there is generally always an illegal copy available for viewing. It's technically legal to link to illegally hosted copyrighted content, so these types of sites are seemingly doing nothing wrong.

Like many profit-oriented Web sites, clicking on one of these links actually takes you to a secondary page so that the site can generate an additional page view.
Clicking on a link sends the user to file-sharing sites such as VideoWeed.com that allow streaming video of hosted files, including retargeted ad networks ads from advertisers such as Virgin America.

After watching a set amount of video, users are incentivized to pay to watch more using their credit cards, processed by payment networks such as Skrill. You're also offered the option to earn points towards viewing videos by accepting "offers," such as a Netflix trial subscription.

If this all looks familiar and resembles so many media sites you come across, they've succeeded. That's the intention.

Peter Yared is the CTO of CBS Interactive and has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. You can follow him at@peteryared.


Google Drive already referenced in Google Docs code

via Cloud by Janko Roettgers on 2/9/12

Updated. Google is close to rolling out its cloud storage product, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, which stated that the offering is "expected to launch in the coming weeks or months." The actual launch could happen rather sooner than later, judging from some references to the product that have shown up in the HTML code of Google Docs.

The code, which can be viewed with any browser, shows a button labeled "Add to My Drive," but the button itself is currently not visible to end users within Google Docs. Notable about this is the capitalization of "My Drive" — The Journal reported that the product will simply be branded as Drive, but this suggests that at least the personal storage component of it may actually be called My Drive.

It's unclear when exactly Google added the button to the Google Docs code. A quick Google search revealed that the Spanish Tecno-Net blog stumbled across the code snippet as well some time last month.

Update: Traces of the product apparently popped up in Google Docs as early as last September, as one commenter pointed out below. Also, take a look at some of the rather interesting things reader Brian Ussery has unearthed.

Image courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user Sebastian Fuss.



Fwd: Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?

via Cloud by Charlie Oppenheimer, Matrix Partners on 2/11/12

Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the trailblazing provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has changed the dialog about computing infrastructure. Today, instead of simply assuming that you'll be buying and operating your own servers, storage and networking, AWS is always an option to consider, and for many new businesses, it's simply the default choice.

I'm a huge fan of cloud computing in general and AWS in particular. But I've long had an instinct that the economics of the choice between self-hosted and cloud provider had more texture to it than the patently attractive sounding "10 cents an hour," particularly as a function of demand distribution. As a case in point, Zynga has made it known that for economic reasons, they now use their own infrastructure for baseline loads and use Amazon for peaks and variable loads surrounding new game introductions.

An analysis of the load profiles

To tease out a more nuanced view of the economics, I've built a detailed Excel model that analyzes the relative costs and sensitivities of AWS versus self-hosted in the context of different load profiles. By "load profiles," I mean the distribution of demand over the day/month as well as relative needs for bandwidth versus compute resources. The load profile is the key factor influencing the economic choice because it determines what resources are required and how heavily these resources are utilized.

The model provides a simple way to analyze various load profiles and allows one to skew the load between bandwidth-heavy, compute-heavy or any combination. In addition, the model presents the cost of operating 100 percent on AWS, 100 percent self-hosted as well as all hybrid mixes in between.

In a subsequent post, I will share the model and describe how you can use it for scenarios of interest to you. But for this post, I will outline some of the conclusions that I've derived from looking at many different scenarios. In most cases, the analysis illustrates why intuition is right (for example, that a highly variable compute load is a slam dunk for AWS). In other cases, certain high-sensitivity factors become evident and drive the economic answer. There are also cases where a hybrid infrastructure is at least worthy of consideration.

To frame an example analysis, here is the daily distribution of a typical Internet application. In the model, traffic distribution is an input from which bandwidth requirements are computed. The distribution over the day reflects the behavior of the user base (in this case, one with a high U.S. business-hour activity peak). Computing load is assumed to follow traffic according to a linear relationship, i.e. higher traffic implies higher compute load.

Note that while labor costs are included in the model, I am leaving them out of this example for simplicity. Because labor is a mostly fixed cost for each alternative, it will tend not to impact the relative comparison of the two alternatives. Rather, it will impact where the actual break-even point lies. If you use the model to examine your own situation, then of course I would recommend including the labor costs on each side.

For this example, to compute costs for Amazon, I have assumed Standard Extra Large instances and ELB load balancer for the Northern California region. The model computes the number of instances required for each hour of the day. Whenever the economics dictate it, the model applies as many AWS Reserved Instances (capacity contracts with lower variable costs) as justified and fills in with on-demand instances as required. Charges for data are computed according to the progressive pricing schedule that Amazon publishes. To compute costs for self-hosting, I assume co-location with the peak number of Std-XL-equivalent servers required, each loaded to no more than 80 percent of capacity. The costs of hardware are amortized over 36 months. Power is assumed to be included with rackspace fees. Bandwidth is assumed to be obtained on a 95th percentile price basis.

Now let's look at a sensitivity analysis. Notice in the above example, that a bit more than half of the total cost for each alternative is for bandwidth/data transfer charges ($35,144 for self-hosted at $8/Mbps and $36,900 for AWS). This is important because while Amazon pricing is fixed and published, 95th percentile pricing is highly variable and competitive

The chart above shows total costs as a function of co-location bandwidth pricing. AWS costs are independent of this and thus flat. What this chart shows is that self-hosting costs less for any bandwidth pricing under about $9.50 per Mbps/Month. And if you can negotiate a price as low as $4, you'd be saving more than 40 percent to self-host. I'll leave discussion of the hybrid to another post.

This should provide a bit of a feel for how I've been conducting these analyses. Above is a visual summary of how different scenarios tend to shake out. The intuitive conclusion that the more spiky the load, the better the economics of the AWS on-demand solution is confirmed. And similarly, the flatter or less variable the load distribution, the more self-hosting appears to make sense. And if you've got a situation that uses a lot of bandwidth, you need to look more closely at potential self-hosted savings that could be feasible with negotiated bandwidth reductions.

Charlie Oppenheimer is a serial-CEO and currently an executive-in-residence at venture-capital firm Matrix Partners. His most recent company, Digital Fountain, was acquired by Qualcomm, and his previous company, Aptivia, was acquired by Yahoo. He blogs at stratamotion.com


Friday, February 10, 2012

“Agile” grows up, readies to take over your whole business


"Agile" grows up, readies to take over your whole business

Agile, a software development methodology born back in 2001, has now entered the mainstream. According to a Forrester Research report issued last month, Agile is not only used in several of the world's leading companies now but is being applied in areas beyond software development.

 





Thursday, February 09, 2012

Watch Out Netflix: Amazon to Stream Everything From Spongebob to Jersey Shore


Watch Out Netflix: Amazon to Stream Everything From Spongebob to Jersey Shore

Amazon's on-demand streaming video offering just got a whole lot more attractive. The company announced today that they signed a deal with Viacom, allowing them to offer thousands of new videos from sources like MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon, among others.



In total, Amazon Prime will have over 15,000 videos available for streaming, including some very popular television shows. Amazon launched its video streaming service about a year ago with 5,000 videos. With today's announcement, that number is now tripled.



The move comes just as Netflix struggles to rebound from a rough 2011. One of the ways it's hoping to do so is by launching original, Web-only TV content like the new series "Lilyhammer." That strategy is only in its infancy so it remains to be seen how it will play out. In the meantime, Amazon Prime is slowly emerging as a serious potential competitor to Netflix.



Wired's Tim Carmody argued recently that Amazon is particularly well-positioned to emerge as a such a competitor, not only to Netflix but to cable television as well.



Amazon Prime still has some growing to do, and for now the service is tied to Amazon's free shipping service of the same name. GigaOm's Ryan Lawler argues that unbundling the two and launching a stand-alone streaming service could make the service an even stronger contender for Netflix's throne as king of this space.



It's worth keeping in mind that Amazon Prime Instant Video only launched in February of last year. Netflix has been around since 1997 and launched its Watch Instantly streaming feature in 2007. Amazon is rising fast, and its clear that digital content is a growing priority for the company, especially now that its also sells its own media tablet.



Google Near Launch of Cloud Storage Service (Amir Efrati/Wall Street Journal)


Google Near Launch of Cloud Storage Service (Amir Efrati/Wall Street Journal)

Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:

Google Near Launch of Cloud Storage Service  —  Google Inc. is close to launching a cloud-storage service that would rival one of Silicon Valley's hottest start-ups, cloud-storage provider Dropbox Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.  —  Like Dropbox, Google's storage service …






Cloud Computing In China Looks Set To Soar



Cloud Computing In China Looks Set To Soar

Cloud Computing In China Looks Set To Soar China is notorious for being a closed market, however, as the largest single market in Asia it could prove to be the game changer necessary to tip the scales of Cloud Computing adoption (at least in Asia). While we all know that a single grain of rice [...]



I alway like to know what china is going towards as it brings in the dollars  and drives down the prices. 



Dreams of the Paper Free Office: AIIM Reports


Dreams of the Paper Free Office: AIIM Reports

 aiim_logo_2010.jpg We had dreams of a paperless workforce. By now we should have laser rays shooting out of our eyes that can scan, decode and upload relevant information into our bionic brains, eliminating the need for us to handle paper documents of any kind. For many of us, that simply isn't the way it worked out.

Read full story...






The forgotten 'R' in CRM


The forgotten 'R' in CRM

For many years, the idea of a customer relationship management rollout was interchangeable with the word "failure." As CRM moves into the cloud, mobile and social, are we any more primed for success?





Wednesday, February 08, 2012

What Accountants Must Know Before Choosing The Right Cloud Application Vendor | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community

What Accountants Must Know Before Choosing The Right Cloud Application Vendor | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community


Accountants can benefit from cloud computing because it eliminates purchasing software and servers, and maintaining and running them. The old technology infrastructure which requires all software and servers to be housed in the accountant’s office is now being replaced with a more robust and inexpensive technology known as cloud computing. Cloud applications are run through the web. An accountant just needs a computer or a laptop and an internet connection to be able to run accounting applications. The software and server are managed not by the accountant but by the cloud application vendor. Typical applications available for accountants include full ERP (enterprise resource planning), payroll, and tax software. The accountant need not purchase a license to use the software. He/she just needs to pay subscription fees.

Many accountants are hesitant to use the cloud computing technology because they don’t know the benefits of moving to a cloud environment. One of the benefits of cloud computing is that the accountant doesn’t need to install a software in his/her computer. He/she just has to remotely access his/her application anytime, anywhere. If he/she has employees, his/her employees can access the same application and data. As long as there is internet connection, the accounting application and data can be accessed wherever and whenever.

Cloud companies rejoice: Amazon S3 lowers prices for storing your precious terabytes | VentureBeat

Cloud companies rejoice: Amazon S3 lowers prices for storing your precious terabytes | VentureBeat

Not a huge discount , but a good sign that moving to the cloud cost are passed on. So not only do you save but you will keep saving. Amazon S3 services for their cloud storage needs might find themselves paying up to 13.5% less starting this February

Adobe Creative Cloud will get you CS6, Lightroom 4, 20GB storage for $50/month | VentureBeat

Adobe Creative Cloud will get you CS6, Lightroom 4, 20GB storage for $50/month | VentureBeat

Adobe Creative Cloud, a forthcoming service that will let you license Adobe’s highly sought-after Creative Suite and give you a plethora of cloud-based extras, now has a price tag: $50 per month with a required one-year contract.

Google (finally) brings Chrome to Android


Google is finally bringing Chrome to the Android platform. A beta release of the increasingly popular Web browser was published this morning in the Android Market and is available to users who are running Android 4. The port includes Chrome's advanced HTML rendering engine and many of the browser's popular features.
The Chrome beta is designed to run on both phones and tablets. The tablet version of the user interface is nearly a perfect match of Chrome on the desktop, including the distinctive slanted tab design. The phone version has a more compressed interface, suitable for smaller screens, and includes the standard Chrome features such as the Omnibar and application shortcut pane.

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Microsoft to deliver CRM apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone in Q2 | ZDNet

http:/www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-deliver-crm-apps-for-ipad-iphone-android-windows-phone-in-q2/11822


—  Summary: Microsoft will deliver mobile versions of its Dynamics CRM app and service for iPad, iPhone, Android phone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 in the second quarter of 2012.


Sunday, February 05, 2012

Creating a credit policy | Flying Solo


1. Debtor assessment

2. Set a credit limit

3. Develop payment terms

4. Communicate with your clients
5. Monitor debtors and enforce your terms

6. Communicate your terms with your team

Introduction to cloud computing



Proponents argue that cloud computing will deliver wonderful productivity gains at low costs. So what is it, and could it be useful for your business?

The cloud is arguably top of the list of seismic shifts in the computing world in recent times. Having grown from the fringes just a few years ago, cloud services were valued at more than $70 billion in 2010, and are projected to grow by almost 20 percent per annum for the next 5 years. It's anticipated that cloud services will contribute more than $175 billion to the global economy by 2015. That's a lot of dollars!

But what is it? The name "cloud" is taken from those cute little network diagrams with a couple of computers, a couple of squiggly lines and a fluffy cloud in the middle joining them all up.  In reality there is something in that cloud, and for most small business users that will be a bank of computers in a server centre hosting your application.

In the past, businesses of all sizes have installed computers to store their data and run their applications. Businesses with more than a single employee have installed servers (and hired IT people to manage them) to allow their employees to share that data. With a cloud solution, organisations are able to effectively rent a small slice of capacity in a server centre (via the apps they sign up to), taking away all the issues around maintaining their own hardware.

This might mean paying for a hosted email service (rather than installing your own exchange server), paying for a file data storage service rather than storing data on your own file server (and managing security, backups and so on), or paying for an application such as customer relationship management (CRM), payroll or accounting rather than installing the equivalent applications on your PC or server.

This is generally taken to mean a little bit more than simply taking an existing (desktop) solution, putting it on a remote server, then paying to access that on a monthly basis. The ability to do that has been around for a decade or more, and you may have heard suppliers of this option referred to as application service providers (ASPs). Cloud solutions differ from ASPs in a number of crucial ways:

1. Most cloud apps involve sharing of the actual software. For example, with Gmail (one of the most widely used cloud solutions) users are moving from each having their own copy of a mail program (such as Outlook) installed locally on their PC, to sharing a common instance of an email solution hosted somewhere in the cloud. This is commonly referred to as "multi-tenancy" – lots of different users with their data in the same database, running on the same program (rather than lots of copies of the same program).

2. Most cloud apps allow you to sign up for a monthly fee, and exit again anytime you want to.  This is very different from having to buy software upfront, which if it is not suitable for your business you are then stuck with (it is often very difficult to sell software second hand).

3. With what are generally referred to as "web 2.0" applications, users are able to share data on-line, in real-time. In this way the cloud opens up opportunities for collaboration (either within a business, or with clients or external service providers).

This is the first article in a three-part series. The next article will cover some of the claimed benefits and potential dangers of the cloud, and the final article in the series will look at some specific applications, and compare desktop and cloud solutions that might be suitable for small businesses.

Have you embraced cloud computing yet, or are you still considering your options?





Want to build a business? You need an IT ecosystem. | Cloud Computing News


The rapid delivery of new solutions means that companies will no longer wait patiently for "their" provider to catch up to major innovation leaps. The only way to stay in front of your competition is to grease the technical infrastructure skids with strong management platforms and clear adoption, ownership, and orchestration strategies.





VentureBeat’s 2012 Mobile Summit: Great minds tackle 5 key mobile issues

via VentureBeat by Devindra Hardawar on 2/3/12

Mobile SummitVentureBeat is proud to announce our second annual Mobile Summit, where we are once again inviting 180 top mobile executives, investors, and policymakers to discuss five significant issues facing the mobile industry.
The event will be held at the beautiful Cavallo Point Resort (just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) on April 2-3. The Mobile Summit is an invitation only event, but you can request an invite here.
We decided to host the Mobile Summit last year after realizing that there aren't many places for mobile leaders to sit down and have a conversation. There are plenty of mobile conferences out there, including our own annual MobileBeat conference, but those events can often be crowded, and don't allow for the same sort of intimate discussions that our Mobile Summit fosters.
This year we're discussing five new issues facing the industry:
1. Platform Wars: Size matters, but what else will dictate who wins among iOS, Android, Amazon and Microsoft?
Four titans, iOS, Android, Amazon and Microsoft, are now duking it out on the global stage to become the biggest mobile "platform" upon which users — and the mobile industry — will standardize. But what will really determine the winner?
2. The mobile shopping revolution: Where billions can be made with location, targeting, and the mobile web.
The adoption of mobile commerce is poised to create a massive, multi-billion dollar opportunity. With smartphones becoming smart wallets, as well as instant research tools that are able to communicate specific tastes anywhere people go, what technologies and what companies will help improve the way people discover and pay for items? Who will be the biggest winners from this trend?
3. Mobile disruption of the enterprise: What are the new types of apps and services that will spur productivity and competitiveness?
Employees are choosing to bring their own devices to work — iPhones, iPads, Android phones and more — and enterprises are using the cloud to adapt. Given the new enterprise cloud, what are the next disruptive apps or services that will dramatically improve productivity and competitiveness?
4. The media revolution: What forms of content will survive and thrive in mobile?
With mobile devices evolving in 2012, and millions of new consumers buying them, who are the most successful publishers of new mobile media, what are the factors driving their success, and what is the impact of that success on the mobile industry?
5. User Acquisition in 2012: What lessons will the mobile gaming industry show the rest of us?
In terms of models of user acquisition, the games industry has led the way. What are the next steps game companies must make to stay compelling and innovative on user acquisition strategies (advertising, offers, etc.) now that better broadband, better OS's, better interfaces, and better devices (including tablets) have arrived. What can the rest of us learn from that?
Just as we did last year, we plan to take the results of conversations from the Mobile Summit and make them an integral part of our MobileBeat conference, which will be held together with our GamesBeat conference taking place July 10-11.
We already have some great participants lined up for this year's Mobile Summit, including Jason Spero, Google's head of mobile; Mihir Shah, President and CEO of TapJoy; Jim Goetz, General Partner at Sequoia Capital; and Simon Khalaf, President and CEO of Flurry.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat


What’s Google up to? Search giant is testing an “entertainment device”

via VentureBeat by Tom Cheredar on 2/3/12

Google has asked the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) for permission to use an undisclosed new "entertainment device" in four major cities over the next six months.
The information came from a FCC application Google submitted in December, which was uncovered by Gigaom. The mystery device will connect to the Internet over a home Wi-Fi network and then sync up with other (probably mobile) devices via Bluetooth.
While details of what the actual device is aren't included in the application, it almost certainly has something to do with Google TV. Using the data transfer process described in the application, the device could be a way for people to grab video content from the Internet and distribute it to all the other mobile devices. The benefit of transferring content in this way would be that people wouldn't be exhausting their broadband Internet connections, meaning it wouldn't slow down the connection for anyone else on the network. Also, people with wireless plans wouldn't have to worry about hitting data caps just because they wanted to download a few episodes of a TV show once or twice a week.
The application indicates that over 250 devices will be used in Mountain View, Calif.; New York City; Los Angeles Calif.; and Cambridge, Mass.
We've pasted the full description from the FCC application below. Let us know your theories in the comments section.
Testing throughput and stability of home WiFi networks using an entertainment device. Testing will include functional testing of all subsystems, including WiFi and Bluetooth radio. Users will connect their device to home WiFi networks and use Bluetooth to connect to other home electronics equipment. This line of testing will reveal real world engineering issues and reliability of networks. The device utilizes a standard WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the planned testing is not directed at evaluating the radio frequency characteristics of the module (which are known), but rather at the throughput and stability of the home WiFi networks that will support the device, as well as the basic functionality of the device. From this testing we hope to modify the design in order to maximize product robustness and user experience. Utilizing the requested number of units will allow testing of real world network performance and its impact on applications running on the device, so that any problems can be discovered and addressed promptly. All devices will be used by and registered to specific individuals (all Google employees), and Google will maintain a record of each device, so that they can be easily recalled at any time during testing and when testing is complete. The devices will be tested at Google facilities and within employees residences in the following areas: Mountain View, CA: 37.421265 N, -122.085314 W; Los Angeles, CA: 33.995388 N, -118.477035 W; Cambridge, MA: 42.362754 N, -71.088023 W; and New York, NY: 40.741872 N, -74.004579 W.

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Opening enterprise collaboration to the world

via Software as Services Blog RSS | ZDNet by Phil Wainewright on 1/24/12

Cloud collaboration platform Huddle is seeking to cement its enterprise appeal with the launch today of a new unlimited user edition and a 99.9% total uptime guarantee. The UK-headquartered, venture-backed start-up is less well known than US rivals such as Box, Dropbox, Jive and Yammer but it believes it has a unique market opportunity because of its focus on external enterprise collaboration.
"Traditional collaboration was very inward-looking," CEO Alastair Mitchell told me when we met last week in Huddle's offices overlooking London's 'Silicon Roundabout' . "Jive, Yammer, are very much of that paradigm," he went on. "What's driving our growth at the moment is that organizations are demanding collaboration that goes beyond the firewall — that allows the whole ecosystem to operate."
Huddle says the 93% of its customers that use its platform to connect beyond the enterprise firewall work with an average of 25 other companies (sounds like a great demonstration of frictionless enterprise in action). The new Unlimited Enterprise edition supports collaboration across that entire business ecosystem, with the ability to freely add 'lite' users who can view or download content, or contribute to document comments, task whiteboards and discussions.
Unlike its more consumer-focused competitors such as Box and Dropbox (though Box in particular has recently sought to target larger enterprise accounts), Huddle already has a heavy focus on the enterprise market — implementations typically start at a hundred users and many run into thousands of seats, Mitchell told me. Its 'True Uptime' guarantee should enhance its appeal to that market. Whereas all cloud uptime guarantees cover unexpected failures, most explicitly exclude 'planned' uptime, when systems are taken down to make infrastructure improvements or upgrade to a new release. In contrast, Huddle is including these events within its meagre 0.5% downtime allowance. It is bolstering the guarantee with a money-back promise if it fails to live up to 99.5% uptime. The company is confident it can meet this tough standard, for example achieving in excess of four nines — 99.995 percent — over the past 90 days.
One of the most potent demonstrations of Huddle's appeal to an enterprise market is in its penetration of government accounts, which make up a quarter of Huddle's business globally. Government is a natural candidate for collaboration outside the firewall, says Mitchell: "It's all about content. It's extremely collaborative. It's totally interconnected … To be able to plonk a secure extranet in front of everyone is ideal."
Although Huddle is a firm proponent of the multi-tenant cloud model, it does offer a dedicated version of its service that runs over the private internet networks that many governments run independently of the public Internet. A first implementation for the UK government, introduced last year, "has gone absolutely crazy," says Mitchell. Now the company is seeing demand for the same solution from the US, Australia and many European governments. "It's delivering networked collaboration on content, in a secure environment," explains Mitchell. But he's careful to emphasize that this is "not a branched version of Huddle," which would break "a fundamental tenet of multi-tenancy."
For Huddle, multi-tenancy is not just an architectural choice, it's part of its raison-d'étre. "The next coming of the collaboration sector really has been enabled by cloud," Mitchell asserts. "Facebook is the prime example of that, using cloud in its purest multi-tenant form. Facebook could only have happened not just because of the Internet but also because of that ability to connect to one central, multi-tenant service."
The other component of Huddle's strategy is its attractiveness as a replacement for a very conventional enterprise collaboration platform. "We're benefiting from companies moving to the cloud and taking big and clunky kit such as [Microsoft's collaboration platform] Sharepoint off their servers," says Mitchell. "Sharepoint is near the top of most people's hitlist — it's so unpopular." Huddle offers easier mobile access, simpler connection to external users and faster speed of deployment among other factors, all for a lower cost than enterprises currently spend to maintain their existing Sharepoint instances.
Although Huddle is not as generously funded or as lauded by the Silicon Valley echo chamber as some of its competitors, it has the ambition to punch above its weight and an advantage in terms of its proven enterprise credentials that it aims to leverage to maximum effect. As a Brit, perhaps I'm biased, but I think this Silicon Roundabout prodigy is one to watch.

A Week in Google: Are 100 Million Google+ Users Still Wrong?

via CMSWire.com - All News by Chris Knight on 2/3/12

With all the news of Facebook's IPO this week, Google's still-fledgling social service marched over another user milestone as the improvements and other changes in the Google ecosystem keep on coming.
Read full story...

I think google will become the facebook of business , it will be interesting if facebook can grow its advertising revenue.

How Cloud Computing is Like Transforming a ’68 Dodge Dart

via CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community by cloudtweaks on 2/1/12

How Cloud Computing is Like Transforming a '68 Dodge Dart I've spent a lot of time lately in front of customers trying to help them understand what cloud technology means and, more important, how it can help their businesses be more efficient, effective and better able to meet or exceed their goals and objectives. In [...]

Organizations look to the cloud for BI says Gartner

I think small and medium companies under utilize BI, because of the costs. By using cloud software it allows them to leverage tools out there. Great things are on the way.


Gartner Survey
A report from Gartner released this week shows that more companies are turning to BI in the cloud as an alternative to the traditional on-premise solutions. Nearly one third of organizations either already use or plan to use cloud or software-as-a-service solutions to augment their central business intelligence (BI) functions.
Of 1,364 IT managers in the Gartner survey almost a third (27%) already utilise or plan to improve their BI options with cloud based solutions. A further 17% said they already have or plan to completely overhaul their current BI functions and replace it with a SaaS solution.
SaaS-y BI
Saas products hold many advantages over traditional on-premise solutions which are often associated with long lead times and a demand for highly technical expertise. Cloud solutions don't have these problems and can compliment existing IT infrastructure whilst still providing powerful functionality. Cloud solutions offer wider access and sharing capabilities, allowing users to dig into their data whenever and wherever they need to. A SaaS pay-as-you-go pricing model provides more flexibility and low capital expenditure. James Richardson, research director at Gartner said:

speech Organizations look to the cloud for BI says Gartner"Business users are often frustrated by the deployment cycles, costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructures demanded by on-premises BI solutions. SaaS- and cloud-based BI is perceived as offering a quicker, potentially lower-cost and easier-to-deploy alternative, though this has yet to be proven."

As GigaOm reported earlier today, "the momentum for SaaS is strong". Such advantages have lead legacy solutions to start offering their own SaaS offerings, however users need to be wary as some vendors are attempting to ride the cloud wave by merely re-branding existing apps without offering true cloud functionality, known as cloud washing. Bime is a true cloud BI, solution born and built in the cloud, incorporating all the best and most current technologies into our solution to harness the advantages mentioned above. We gambled on the cloud a long time ago and although BI has been slow in its uptake of cloud compared to other sectors, this latest Gartner research shows that the clouds are forming around BI !



LibreOffice stats: 400 total contributors, thousands of code commits every month


LibreOffice stats: 400 total contributors, thousands of code commits every month






The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project's rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.



LibreOffice is a community-driven fork of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The project started after Oracle's acquisition of Sun with the aim of offering a better governance model and a more inclusive environment than OOo. LibreOffice quickly attracted the support of the major Linux distributors and a large number of independent developers.



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CRM’s Next 5 in 5


CRM's Next 5 in 5

Each year, IBM publishes "The Next 5 in 5," in which they predict the five technologies that will change the way we work, play and live in the next five years. Some of their predictions this year seem plausible: systems will use your unique biological identity to protect your information, eliminating the need for passwords. Others border on sci-fi: scientists will create technology that links your brain waves to your devices, allowing you to control them with your mind.


I wanted to follow IBM's lead and ask, "Where will CRM be five years from now?" To answer that, I reached out to some of the foremost thought leaders in the field:



Without further ado, I present the five technologies that will change CRM in the next five years.


Context Services Will Provide a Clearer Picture of Customers


A key benefit of CRM is that it aggregates information about current and prospective customers, collectively painting a picture of the person or organization a company is dealing with. Context services, with data originating from social media, location-based services and mobile devices, contribute additional context (location, relationships, behavior, etc.) to that information. The result is a far richer customer profile. These services provide the foundation for intuitive offers, which are promotions or up-sell opportunities based on customer interactions and behaviors.


Ray Wang suggests that in the next five years, we will see tremendous growth in context services and the data they provide. A key source of this context data will be from mobile devices. Gartner predicts that by 2015, 1.8 billion people will have smartphones. Of those, they estimate 40 percent will opt-in to context services that track their activities. By 2017, these numbers will increase and, based on current growth, likely double. This could fuel an entirely new mobile CRM industry.


Real-time Customer Intelligence Will Become a Reality


The variety and sources of customer data is exploding,...






eXo Takes Its Latest Release Into the Cloud


eXo Takes Its Latest Release Into the Cloud

exo_logo_2010.jpgeXo has released the latest version of its open source portal, eXo 3.5. The release has lots of new features, but the big news may be the portal's journey to the cloud.


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Collaboration in 2012: Predictions 3 & 4


Collaboration in 2012: Predictions 3 & 4

As a follow up here are third and fourth predictions for what 2012 holds for collaboration:


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Cloud Finance: Best Practices for Implementing Rolling Forecasts


Cloud Finance: Best Practices for Implementing Rolling Forecasts

Rolling forecasts allow finance executives and key decision makers to see both a financial and operational vision of the future, by projecting four to six quarters or twelve to eighteen months ahead. It also helps them assess next steps in their execution of their plan, understand critical pivot points in the plan and better judge the impact the changing economy may have on their plan.

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Freemium Is The New Piracy In The SaaS World


Freemium Is The New Piracy In The SaaS World

It is estimated that approximately 41% of revenue, close to $53 billion, is "lost" in software piracy. This number is totally misleading since it assumes that all the people who knowingly or unknowingly pirated software would have bought the software at the published price had they not pirated it. RIAA also applies the same nonsense logic to blow the music piracy number way out of proportion. The most people who pirate software are similar to the people who pirate music. They may not necessarily buy software at all. If they can't pirate your software, they will pirate something else. If they can't do that, they will find some other alternative to get the job done.

Fortunately, some software companies understand this very well and they have a two-pronged approach to deal with this situation: prevent large scale piracy and leverage piracy when you can't prevent it. If an individual has access to free (pirated) software, as a vendor, you're essentially encouraging an organic ecosystem. The person who pirated your software is more likely to make a recommendation to continue using it when he/she is employed by a company that cannot and will not pirate. This model has worked extremely well. What has not been working so well and what the most on-premise vendors struggle with is the unintentional license usage or revenue leakage. Customers buy on-premise software through channels and deploy to large number of users. Most on-premise software are not instrumented to prevent unintentional license usage. The license activation, monitoring, and compliance systems are antiquated in most cases and cannot deal with this problem. This is very different than piracy because the most corporations, at least in the western world, that deploy the on-premise software want to be honest but they have no easy way to figure out how many licenses have beed used.

In the SaaS world, this problem goes away. The cloud becomes the platform to ensure that the subscriptions are paid for and monitored for continuous compliance. You could argue that there is no license leakage since there are no licenses to deal with. But, what about piracy? Well, there's no piracy either. This is a bad thing. Even though a try before buy exists, there's no organic grass-roots adoption of your software (as a service) since people can't pirate. In many countries where software piracy is ram...