From the Blogosphere

Eleven Reasons Why Windows Phone Will Overtake Android

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:39:00 EST

Please hold your skepticism, keep an open mind, go through the following points and only then pass a judgment on my prediction that “three years down Windows Phone would have overtaken Android." The UI is different but very well designed for mobile and tablet. The same view is expressed by most experts and most owners of “Mango” phone. Google and Android handset manufacturers are fighting legal battles with Apple in so many different countries. These battles are prompted by similarity in the design and user interface.

Google’s Currents Is What Reader Should Have Been

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:23:00 EST

You might have missed it last week, but Google released one of the best designed apps I have ever seen. It was their news consumption app – Google Currents. Google released it for both Android and iOS. There are smartphone and tablet versions for Android, and the iPhone app seems to be the exact same as the Android smartphone version. The app allows you to subscribe to a host of different periodicals, all which are displayed in a clear and easy to read format. You simply swipe left or right as you read to continue reading. There are options for formatting the text, etc, but the real key is that Google has made news easier to read than any other app out there. Currents allows you to subscribe to the host of pre-determined sources, as well RSS feeds of your choice. As well, anyone can become their own editor (so look for a CTOvision Currents feed soon).

Vendors Survival: Will Google Survive until 2021? - Part 2

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:51:00 EDT

Searching the Web Search Engine is Google's most strategic product. Some of its other products are using it as component of the services they provide. Limitation or failure of it, as described in Why we desperately need a New (and Better) Google cited in part1 of this post, could negatively affect Google's market position. This is a major challenge facing Google. Google has no control of some of the factors limiting its effectiveness. Challenges in Searching the Web The following bullets describe major Web Data problems, which could affect Web Search:

Google+ and Mobile Productivity for the Enterprise

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:30:00 EDT

Mashable reports that Google has improved its IOS Google+ app: The search giant follows Tuesday’s Android update of Google+with a similar refresh to its iOS version, now available free on the App Store. What’s new? Like its Android cousin, the iOS version of the Google+ mobile app now supports Hangouts, letting groups communicate with each other using front-facing cameras on the iPhone 4 and iPod touch. In addition to Hangouts, the app offers better control of its various notifications, and a renamed Messenger (formerly Huddle) that now lets users attach photos to chat threads. Other niceties include the ability to +1 in comments, improved +mention support, a map view in Profile for places you’ve lived, and various reliability improvements.

Google + Motorola Mobile

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 13:30:00 EDT

This morning we heard that Google has decided to pay a hefty $12.5B to acquire Motorola Mobile, the group that separated from parent Motorola under the leadership of Sanjay Jha. Google is paying quite a premium of 40% for this. Now what does this mean? Henry Blodget in his Business Insider article thinks this might be a disaster for Google. Android is the key motivation here. Motorola endorsed Android early and their android-based phone was the second most in market share at 29%. HTC has the highest share at 35% and Samsung is number 3 at 25%. Google was supposed to be the neutral supplier of the operating system to all these hardware manufacturers. Now with its acquisition of the second largest player, the others will see a channel conflict and if Motorola gains market share, they will be more upset. Of course Google continues to emphasize its vendor neutrality statements and claims the reason for the acquisition is to own Motorola’s patents.

A Cloudy Subject? Here's Some Clarity

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:15:00 EDT

The cloud hype machine is well and truly in full swing these days; it seems every tech company out there is telling you they are in the cloud and their products are cloud-based. A lot of that is marketing spin - cloud is the buzzword that people want to be associated with at the moment. Apple's announcement of iCloud probably attracted the most attention of any of the recent cloud developments (the marketing clout of that 'i' is truly remarkable). Steve Jobs has now put Apple firmly into the cloud game and we thought it would be interesting to see how the world's three largest technology companies are approaching the cloud and what their vision is for this rapidly growing platform.

As of This Monday...I Don’t Like Mondays

Mon, 02 May 2011 04:45:00 EDT

As the lyrics to the classic Boomtown Rats song make clear, Mondays can be a real downer. I’ve never really felt that way before - I’ve always enjoyed getting a jump on the week. But today comes word from the story, “Howard Stern’s new shorter work week is beginning,” in Radio-Info.com that Howard Stern, one of the guilty pleasures of returning to the work week to catch up on all the pop culture and political happenings of note, will begin taking every other Monday off starting - wait for it - this Monday. Say it isn’t so!

It's Official - Google Is Now Part of the Travel Ecosystem

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:34:06 EDT

Google acquiring ITA is an exciting development in the travel technology space. It opens up the ecosystem which is currently dominated by the GDS players. How exactly it will benefit the travelling passengers or new entrepreneurs to launch new innovative travel solutions is not yet known. The nirvana state from my perspective is the emergence of "Travel Apps Store" which will make creation and consumption of new Travel business and technology applications much more easy and interesting. Is Google - ITA a right step in that direction? Absolutely yes.

"Small Bites All Day Long – Whatever Tastes Good."

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Occasionally in the life of every commentator, even those of us who look at the future of the future day and night, you experience what amounts - yes, there is no other word for it - to an epiphany.

‘Anonymous’ Hacks Investigative Agency

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:58:00 EST

‘Anonymous’ outdid itself once again and hacked the very agency that is investigating it. Security firm HBGary Federal had its Twitter, LinkedIn and email accounts of COO Ted Vera hacked. ‘Anonymous’ posted the information online, including the text of over 60,000 company emails. Read the full article at CNet.com

Android Gaining as Enterprises Ramp up Mobile App Development

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 10:15:30 EST

While the iPhone and iPad are still the leaders of the pack, Android smartphones and tablets are gaining large amounts of developer interest. It's a post-PC world, and mobile development is the name of the game. According to a report from Appcelerator and IDC, businesses and developers are racing to define a winning mobile strategy, while keeping an eye on platforms and business models. The first-quarter report, garnered from a survey of 2,235 Appcelerator Titanium developers, shows that while the iPhone and iPad are still the leaders of the pack, Android smartphones and tablets are gaining large amounts of developer interest. Google has nearly caught up to Apple in smartphones and is closing the gap on tablets.

Okta Seeks to Accelerate Secure Adoption of Cloud Apps

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 06:15:00 EST

"Enterprises everywhere are realizing the inherent benefits of running their core IT services in the cloud,” said Todd McKinnon, most recently VP of Engineering at Salesforce.com from 2003 to 2009, and now CEO of the on-demand identity and access management service, Okta. "This shift fundamentally requires them to rethink their IT infrastructure and how their employees access it," McKinnon added. "Okta," he continued, "is the only enterprise class, on-demand service purpose built to help customer secure and manage their entire cloud services network and the people who need access to it, with no professional services required."

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Human Rights Sites

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:54:00 EST

A DDoS is an attack that consumes the resources of the target machine so that that machine is not able to respond, Hal says. It is an old problem: there was a CERT Advisory about an IP spoofing attack in 1996. A distributed DoS attack uses lots of machines to attack the host, typically via botnets (armies of infected machines). Hal gives an example in which infected machines check Twitter once a minute looking for encoded commands to do nefarious tasks. Gambling sites have often been targets, in part because they are reluctant to report attacks; they’ve also been known to attack each other. In one case, this resulted in the Net going down for 9 hours for most of China. Hal points out that botnets are not the only way DDoS attacks are carried out. In addition, there have been political uses. Botnets have been used to spy as well as bring down sites.

What Might Google 3.0 Look Like?

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:44:00 EST

Google announced yesterday that they would be making some changes to their executive team and I covered one angle on that here. Even more interesting than the pace of change over the last 10 years is what Google 3.0 might look like. I wrote my MBA Strategy thesis on a future Google business model, but that was two years ago and it seems woefully out of date now. Looking back on it now, it was very focused on moving into new ways to collect information (mobile, social, etc.), enhancing the core advertising business.

Life After WikiLeaks – Exposure Is Still a Threat

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:00:00 EST

WikiLeaks might have been the first large scale provider of what was once secret information, but are they the last? How important is corporate data and how is it being kept from leaks? If nothing else, Julian Assange was an Internet pioneer for exposing things that otherwise would not have seen the light of day on such a large scale. There have been whistle-blowers and various documents made available to the press and courts in years past, but nothing on the scale and public availability of what Wikileaks provided. Like opening a can of worms, the potential for copycat sites and rogue insiders trying to make money from stealing internal documents is now unfortunately a lurking reality. A leak of memos and internal reports on such a widespread public forum could be a crippling risk to any corporation if they were the next big leak. Many of these leaks, like the one announced yesterday involving US Navy intelligence specialist Brian Minkyu Martin, are inside jobs and potentially the hardest to stop. For these, a combination of a “bullet-proof” security policy and a lockdown of anything that looks like a storage device plugged into a USB port could potentially stop many of the amateurs.

File Sharing, Torrent Finder, WikiLeaks, Are You Next?

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:00:00 EST

When the US Government came for file sharing domains, I remained silent; I was not a file sharer. When they shut down Torrent Finder, I remained silent; I was not a Bit Torrent user. When they pressured Amazon to shut down WikiLeaks, I did not speak out; I was not a leaker. When they passed the COICA bill, I remained silent; I wasn't an infringer or counterfeiter. When they came for my domain, there was no one left to speak out.

Google Storage for Developer – How to Use?

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:39:00 EDT

Yesterday I received a Google Storage for Developer Update email from the Google Storage Team. Here is a quote from the email: Thank you for using Google Storage for Developers. We write today to make sure you're aware that we've changed our service. Increased Account Limits & Billing When we began the Google Storage for Developers preview, all accounts were free and limited to 100 GB of storage. Google Storage accounts can now access increased storage by providing credit card billing information. Additionally, for accounts with billing we provide a service level agreement (SLA). Find our published service level agreement at: https://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/sla.html.

Mashable Sees Double Rainbows as Google Goes Gaga for OAuth

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 06:51:00 EDT

Enterprise developers and architects beware: OAuth is not the double rainbow it is made out to be. It can be a foundational technology for your applications, but only if you’re aware of the risks. OAuth has been silently growing as the favored mechanism for cross-site authentication in the Web 2.0 world. The ability to leverage a single set of credentials across a variety of sites reduces the number of username/password combinations a user must remember. It also inherently provides for a granular authorization scheme.

Bounce Rate and Its Meaning

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 12:41:00 EDT

In Google Analytics, there is a somewhat mysterious metric called the Bounce Rate. The meaning of the bounce rate is defined by the number of people who look at one page and then "bounce away" to other sites. Wikipedia has a decent definition. As always, Avinash Kaushik has a great article on it as well. My definition is this: Bounce rate = how much your website sucks Now every web sites sucks to some degree, but it is only a question of how much. No site will ever "not suck" with a 0% Bounce Rate. The goal is to "suck less."

Sync Local Documents to Google Storage

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:30:00 EDT

In the past when I felt that a document was important, I would email it to my Gmail account and label it with “important document”. After all, it has over 7G free space and growing. Now there are more choices. First is the Google Docs account can be used for storage. Second is the Google Storage for Developer. If you do a Google search for “Google Storage”, you can see these two options.

F5 Friday: Elastic Applications are Enabled by Dynamic Infrastructure

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:45:00 EDT

You really can’t have the one without the other. VMware enables the former, F5 provides the latter.

The use of public cloud computing as a means to expand compute capacity on-demand, a la during a seasonal or unexpected spike in traffic, is often called cloud bursting and we’ve been talking about it (at least in the hypothetical sense) for some time now.

When we first started talking about it the big question was, of course, but how do you get the application in the cloud in the first place? Everyone kind of glossed over that because there was no real way to do it on-demand.

OVERCOMING the OBSTACLES BIT by BIT and BYTE by BYTE

The challenges associated with dynamically moving a live, virtually deployed application from one location to another were not trivial but neither were they insurmountable. Early on these challenges have been directly associated with the difference in networking and issues with the distances over which a virtual image could be successfully transferred. As the industry began to address those challenges others came to the fore. It’s not enough, after all, to just transfer a virtual machine from one location to another – especially if you’re trying to do so on-demand, in response to some event. You want to migrate that application while it’s live and in use, and you don’t want to disrupt service to do it because no matter what optimizations and acceleration techniques are used to mitigate the transfer time between locations, it’s still going to take some time. The whole point of cloud bursting is to remain available and if the process to achieve that dynamic growth defeats the purpose, well, it seems like a silly thing to do, doesn’t it?

As we’ve gotten past that problem now another one rears its head: the down side. Not the negatives, no, the other down side – the scaling down side of cloud bursting. Remember the purpose of performing this technological feat in the first place is dynamic scalability, to enable an elastic application that scales up and down on-demand. We want to be able to leverage the public cloud when we need it but not when we don’t, to keep really realize the benefits of cloud and its lower cost of compute capacity.

FORGING AHEAD

F5 has previously proven that a live migration of an application is not only possible, but feasible. This week at VMworld we took the next step: elastic applications. Yes, we not only proved you can burst an application into the cloud and scale up while live and maintaining availability, but that you can also scale back down when demand decreases. The ability to also include a BIG-IP LTM Virtual Edition with the cloud-deployed application instance means you can also consistently apply any application delivery policies necessary to maintain security, consistent application access policies, and performance.

The complete solution relies on products from F5 and VMware to monitor application response times and expand into the cloud when they exceed predetermined thresholds. Once in the cloud, the solution can further expand capacity as needed based on application demand. The solution comprises the use of:

VMware vCloud Director
A manageable, scalable platform for cloud services, along with the necessary APIs to provision capacity on demand.
F5 BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM)
One in each data center and/or cloud providing management and monitoring to ensure application availability. Application conditions are reported to the orchestration tool of choice, which then triggers actions (scale up or down) via the VMware vCloud API. Encryption and WAN optimization for SQLFabric communications between the data center and the cloud are also leveraged for security and performance.
F5 BIG-IP® Global Traffic Manager™ (GTM)
Determines when and how to direct requests to the application instances in different sites or cloud environments based on pre-configured policies that dynamically respond to application load patterns. Global application delivery (load balancing) is critical for enabling cloud bursting when public cloud-deployed applications are not integrated via a virtual private cloud architecture.
VMware GemStone SQLFabric
Provides the distributed caching and replication of database objects between sites (cloud and/or data center) necessary to keep application content localized and thereby minimize the performance impact of latency between the application and its data.

I could talk and talk about this solution but if a picture is worth a thousand words then this video ought to be worth at least that much in demonstrating the capabilities of this joint solution. If you’re like me and not into video (I know, heresy, right?) then I invite you to take a gander at some more traditional content describing this and other VMware-related solutions:

A Hybrid Cloud Architecture for Elastic Applications with F5 and VMware – Overview

Hybrid Cloud Application Architecture for Elastic Java-Based Web Applications – Deployment Guide

F5 and VMware Solution Guide

If you do like video, however, enjoy this one explaining cloud bursting for elastic applications in a hybrid cloud architecture.

Related blogs and articles:

Bursting the Cloud

vMotion Layer 2 Adjacency Requirements

Cloud-bursting and the Database

Cloud Balancing, Cloud Bursting, and Intercloud

Cloud Balancing, Reverse Cloud Bursting, and Staying PCI-Compliant

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Makes Internal Cloud bursting Reality

How Microsoft is bursting into the cloud with BizTalk

So You Put an Application in the Cloud. Now what?

Migrate a live application across clouds with no downtime? Sure ...

Just in Case. Bring Alternate Plans to the Cloud Party

CloudFucius Asks: Will Open Source Open Doors for Cloud Computing?

The Three Reasons Hybrid Clouds Will Dominate

Pursuit of Intercloud is Practical not Premature

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,F5 Friday,VMware,vCLoud Director,VMworld,LTM,GTM,GemStone,WAN,optimization,acceleration,load balancing,global load balancing,cloud bursting,dynamic infrastructure,elastic applications
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Google Is Becoming Big Brother

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:00:00 EDT
My company recently started using Google's enterprise mail service. We did this as part of an effort to be more efficient and more competitive. Google has great administrators and programmers who manage the service, as well as spam-detection and firewall features. And the price is terrific. It is clearly a superior choice versus managing our own mail server the way we've done it for the past seven years. Something is definitely not right about it, though.
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Drag and Drop to Google Docs (G-Drive)

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:04:00 EDT
Since when we got used to drag and drop documents for copying files? Windows 3.0? Now 20 years later, Windows apps turn into web apps and no drag and drop from Windows 7 to Google Docs? We know that HTML 5 is promising with drag and drop support some years later. Now, we will describe Gladinet Cloud Desktop’s capability to turn Google Docs into a drive and support drag and drop upload/download.
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A Sync Folder to Google Docs (G-Drive)

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 20:28:00 EDT
When we were in the habit of using external thumb drive, what is the best practice of keeping documents around? The best practice was that you always save to local folder such as My Documents. At the end of the day, sync the My documents folder to the external thumb drive with a drag and drop, xcopy or a backup program. First of all, saving to local drive is always much faster than to a thumb drive. Second, keeping a copy on the thumb drive, you prevent accidental deletion of the local copy.
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Many Different Kind of Google Storage

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:16:00 EDT
First we know there is storage in Gmail. After we saw Google Docs, there is storage in Google Docs. If you are a Google Apps User, you will say there are storage in the Google Apps Gmail and Google Docs too. If you have attended the Google I/O event, you will say there is Google Storage for Developers too! Basically there are 3 kinds of Google Storage.
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The Google AdWords Broad Match Modifier

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:16:00 EDT
couple of months ago, Google added a modifier option for the Broad Match type. This option basically allows you to control which words must appear in exact or synonymous form within the search phrase. For the record, I have always disliked the Broad matching option. Especially since Google introduced Expanded Broad matching where Google show you ad for every word they deem close enough to the actual word you bid on, not just the exact word. Ever since they did that, it's become very difficult to control your Adwords campaigns because the search phrases you bid on become much less targeted and cost you many irrelevant click$. The new Broad match modifier is a step in the right direction as it allows you to better control the phrases that bring up your ad.
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A Clever Way to Migrate Aging File Server to Google Docs

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:56:00 EDT
We are helping companies migrating their in house file management solutions to cloud-based Google Docs. We saw one clever way of migration from one of our customer and would like to share the story. The customer has around 100 employees, using an in house file server to share documents. The file server is quite old and can’t keep up with the increasing volume of files. They decided to migrate to Google Docs. The first big task for the admin was to migrate existing documents from the file server into Google Docs before switching everyone over to the new Google Docs-based solution.
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Backup Google Docs to SkyDrive

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:13:00 EDT
If I have documents sitting in Google Docs, why do I need to back it up to a different online storage such as SkyDrive? Maybe because I need the peace of mind that I can access it the moment I need from either places. Or in some countries, access to one may be blocked. Or maybe some days, one may go down temporarily. Anyway, it is a good practice to back up documents to increase reliability and availability.
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Web Marketing Analytics: Hosted or In-House?

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:21:00 EDT
When we first began marketing and selling our software over the Internet, we used Google Analytics extensively. SiSense was a young and small company then, with a tiny marketing budget relying on cost-effective online marketing to acquire customers, and therefore any free tool that gave us more information than we already had on how our marketing dollars were being spent was a crucial weapon for surviving this tough economic climate. Using paid services, such as Omniture, wasn't an option strictly for pricing reasons. We used what we could afford, and at that point we couldn't afford anything commercial (expensive!). So we ended up using Google Analytics for simple traffic reporting and in-house applications built over our own Prism software for everything else.
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The Next Revolution

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:32:00 EDT
Every so often a few technology trends converge that yield results much greater than their individual parts. I think we have reached one of those moments with mobile devices (like the iPad) and HTML5. In many ways, the iPad is the perfect web device. It’s a lean-back experience optimized around consuming content. With HTML5 (which mobile Safari does better than just about anything else), the kind of experience you can create on these devices is just really spectacular. You only need to use the NPR demo we wrote earlier this year for a few minutes to realize this is obviously the future of software.
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Pause Your Google History

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:40:00 EDT
Have you ever used your Google search history? If you are logged into any Google service, Google automatically keeps a history of your search queries ad web activities. You know that great web site you saw online and now can’t find? From now on, you can. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages you’ve visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. You can also manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time. View and manage your web activity. You know that great web site you saw online and now can’t find? [...]
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First Look at Google Storage for Developers

Wed, 19 May 2010 22:44:00 EDT
So what exactly is the Google Storage for Developers (GSD)? We have been waiting to see since the news hit TechCrunch yesterday about the launch at the Google I/O 2010 event today. From an S3 developer’s perspective, it looks almost exactly like S3’s RESTful API, with several twists. From a Google Data API developer’s perspective, it looks different from the existing Google Docs APIs. Here is a quote from the Google Storage for Developers site.
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Just-in-time Google Apps Provisioning

Mon, 03 May 2010 11:18:00 EDT
Quest has just made available technical preview of it’s just-in-time access provisioning provider. The idea is that instead of granting cloud services accounts to all your users, you set up a framework for users to request access if they need it. The demo below shows how this works for Google Apps. User tries to access Google Apps but does not have an account. The system detects that and allows to user to request the account from her manager. After the approval, she can goes to the exact same Google Apps site and gets to the service with no issues. This all is integrated with corporate Active Directory so no usernames or passwords are ever being asked.
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Open Group Publishes Guidelines on Cloud Computing ROI

Sun, 02 May 2010 16:15:00 EDT
In an important industry contribution, The Open Group has published a white paper on how to build and measure cloud computing return on investment (ROI). Produced by the Cloud Business Artifacts (CBA) project of The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group, the document: Introduces the main factors affecting ROI from Cloud Computing, and compares the business development of Cloud Computing with that of other innovative technologies; describes the main approaches to building ROI by taking advantage of the benefits that Cloud Computing provide; and describes approaches to measuring this ROI, absolutely and in comparison with traditional approaches to IT, by giving an overview of Cloud Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics.
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Who Was First to Anticipate New Media's Coming Importance?

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:45:00 EDT
It is often said that becoming an entrepreneur is the modern-day equivalent of choosing to be a pioneer on the old frontier. Only people with certain strength of fiber decide to found companies. They tend to be forward thinkers by nature, natural born pathfinders. But in age that loves metrics, how do you measure the extent to which the true trail-blazer is ahead of the pack? How prescient does a go-getter's prescience need to be to qualify for the label of business 'visionary'? Well let us take the current new-media movement as one example. The precursor to that, undeniably, was the rapid popularization of Internet itself - without which New Media would not ever have been possible.
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Google Apps Even More Powerful Now

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 11:11:00 EDT
We have been writing for years about the megatrend of Cloud Computing, and have also underscored that many of the opinions on Cloud Computing reflected here are because of both hands-on experience with enterprise IT and also the use of cloud capabilities for our business at Crucial Point LLC. The core IT capabilities of our firm is run by Google Apps. This provides us with full featured cloud computing power in online applications like email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, chat, video, sites and an array of add-on applications like Manymoon for project management and SocialWok for business grade social networking. Those many tools and features enable us to focus more on our mission and less on IT and they also provide great agility in where we work from. And they provide agility when it comes to ramping up to larger teams for bigger projects and, as important as that, in ramping down after the project is over. But there is another feature that is just incredibly exciting about the Google approach to cloud computing. The Google team is constantly innovating around their cloud offerings. New features are rolled out and when they are they become instantly available to users.
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For Thirty Pieces of Silver My Product Can Beat Your Product

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:25:00 EDT
One of the side-effects of the rapid increases in compute power combined with an explosion of Internet users has been the need for organizations to grow their application infrastructures to support more and more load. That means higher capacity everything – from switches to routers to application delivery infrastructure to the applications themselves. Cloud computing has certainly stepped up to address this, providing the means by which organizations can efficiently and more cost-effectively increase capacity. Between cloud computing and increasing demands on applications there is a need for organizations to invest in the infrastructure necessary to build out a new network, one that can handle the load and integrate into the broader ecosystem to enable automation and ultimately orchestration.
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OffiSync 2.0 Ships Today

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:18:00 EDT
Cloud Sherpas is eager to announce the next major release of OffiSync! A longtime Cloud Sherpas partner, OffiSync 2.0 boasts a one-of-a-kind Microsoft Office to Google Apps extension tool that enhances Office with the cloud collaboration capacities of Google Apps. We proudly affirm that this is a must-have for all organizations on Google Apps that still use Office for various or specific purposes. If you’ve already heard about OffiSync and/or you’re looking to download, the newest version was released this afternoon and is available for download here. The most significant upgrade from the previous version of OffiSync is the new, real-time co-authoring feature. Every time a collaborator saves his document in Word, you can see the change in your Word document in real time as well.
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Google Open Sources Power Meter

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:19:00 EDT
Google announced that they would open source the PowerMeter API that integrates home energy monitoring devices directly into Google's Power meter . The Google meter is a free software tool that lets you monitor your personal energy consumption from iGoogle homepage so that you can make more efficient use of power at home. Using the open standards based Apps interface, developers can now customize the energy information available to customers while assuring privacy. Google also has provided resources for utility service providers and device makers in terms of samples and implementation guidelines to build their own Google meter compatible systems. For more info, check out Google's official blog site: http://blog.google.org/search/label/PowerMeter.
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Microsoft Passes Geeknet Open Source Test with Flying Colors

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:15:00 EDT
Geeknet network which includes SourceForge, Slashdot, ThinkGeek, Ohloh, and Freshmeat conducted a study initiated by Microsoft and found that at the end of 2009, over 82% of open source software was compatible with Windows Operating System. The results are a significant improvement from 2005 when only 72% of Open source software worked on Microsoft’s proprietary OS . In fact 23 out of the top 25 all-time-most downloaded projects on SourceForge also ran on Windows and 14 of them work exclusively on Windows. It’s not surprising that Microsoft is patting itself on its back for its headway on the OSS front.
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