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"Startup Numecent has come out of stealth mode today with some of the most impressive enterprise technology we've seen in a decade. Plus the company is interesting for other reasons, like its business model and its founder. Numecent offers something it calls "cloud paging" and, if successful, it could be a game-changer for enterprise software, video gaming, and smartphone apps. Red Hat thinks so. It has already partnered with the company to help it offer Windows software to Linux users. "Cloud paging" instantly "cloudifies" any software, even an operating system like Windows itself, says founder and CEO Osman Kent. It lets any software, with no modification, be delivered from the cloud and run as fast or faster than if the app was on your desktop. Lots of so-called "desktop virtualization" services work fast. But cloud-paging can even operate the cloud software if the PC gets disconnected from the network or Internet. It can also turn a smartphone into a server. That means a bunch of devices like tablets can run the software -- like a game -- off of the smartphone. Imagine showing up to a party and letting all your friends play the latest version of Halo from your phone. That's crazy cool. Cloudpaging can do all this because it doesn't use "pixel-streaming" technology like other virtualization tech. Instead it temporarily downloads bits of the application itself (instructions) and runs them on the device. It can almost magically predict which parts of the app the user will need, and downloads only those parts. For business owners, that's not even the best part. It also helps enterprises sidestep extra licensing fees associated with the cloud. For instance, Microsoft licenses its software by the device, not by the user, and, in many cases, charges a "Virtual Desktop Access" fee for each device using a virtual version of Windows. (For a bit of light reading, check out the Microsoft virtual desktop licensing white paper: PDF) Cloudpaging has what Kent calls "f

http://www.manageit.me ---The greatest minds in IT in 50+ presentations : top industry-leaders: Creator of MySQL Michael "Monty" Widenius, Internet Celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, Co-Creator of PHP & Zend CTO Zeev Suraski, Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations & Pioneer of Agile eXtreme Programmi...

One of the "Lessons of Massachusetts" is that the key lock-in point for Microsoft's monopoly is their iron fisted control of the productivity environment, anchored by MSOffice and the Windows local workgroup client/server system.  Key to office productivity is the compound document model that fuels every business process and business productivity system.  It's the embedded logic and database connectivity (OLE, ODBC, MAPI and COM ActiveX controls) that juice the compound document model.   Convert a compound document to another format (or PDF), and you BREAK the both the document, AND THE BUSINESS PROCESS!!!! It was the breaking of the business process that stopped Massachusetts from moving to the Open Document Format !!!! So now comes a story with consumer sales vs enterprise sales numbers that seemingly shatter the Lessons of Massachusetts.  How is that? My take is that the numbers Microsoft touts are true.  Consumers are making new purchases - NOT enterprises.  The simple truth is that, as Microsoft introduces new OS and Application Services geared to Mobile / Cloud Computing, these new systems BREAK legacy business systems.  It's still way too costly for businesses to transition to the new models. Eventually though, businesses will replace those legacy business productivity systems with Mobile / Cloud Computing systems.  And it will be a rip-out-and-replace transition; not the gradual "value-added" transition everyone hopes Microsoft will provide.   Interesting stuff. excerpt: "If Microsoft is an enterprise company, then why is it spending so much time and money on stuff like Bing, Xbox, Windows Phone, and the Surface RT? It should be going all-in on cloud computing and services. If you were to ask Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, his answer would probably be: It's a dumb question, we're both. In an interview with Jason Pontin at MIT Technology Review, he said: ""Our number-one thing is supplying products to consumers. That's kind of what we do.

Note that rip-out-and-replace to get to the cloud is a very risky strategy for MSFT because the company forfeits its vendor lock-in advantage; the question for the enterprise then becomes "replace with what?" The answer in many cases will be non-Microsoft services. And traditionally, what the enterprise uses has driven what enterprise workers use at home far more than vice versa.

Very interesting the way JavaScript Libraries are continuing to challenge Native Code for Web Application dominance.    excerpt: "The code library, ORBX.js, can be thought of as a cloud-based alternative to Google's Native Client technology. It permits Linux, OS X and Windows applications to run on remote servers and to be presented in a Web browser." "With ORBX.js, native code and legacy applications can be hosted in the cloud (e.g. Amazon EC2), and stream interactive graphics, 3D rendering or low latency video to a standard HTML5 page without using plugins or native code, or even the video tag (which, like Google NaCL,is vendor specific - ORBX.js works on all five major browsers)," explained Otoy founder and CEO Jules Urbach in an email. "The video codec created for ORBX.js can decode 1080p60 at a quality on par with H.264, using only JavaScript." "With ORBX.js and a cloud service provider, you could conceivably run Value's PC Steam client on an Apple iMac or Google Chromebook. You could run Autodesk 3DS Max 2014 on an Android Nexus 7 tablet. You could run a big budget, graphically demanding game title like Left 4 Dead 2 in a Web browser, without any plugins, Flash, Java, NaCL or other supporting technology."

Control vs. Creativity.  As the ulitmate control freak, Ballmer was guanteed to crush the life out of Microsoft's most creative individuals and teams.  Gates was focused on Windows and MSOffice, and Ballmer on control.  That one-two punch made certain that Microsoft would not be a player in the next great wave of computing; The Cloud.   excerpt: This is yet another example of what I like to call the Wile E. Coyote syndrome. Like the unfortunate character in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, Microsoft now seems to be a company that has long since run off the cliff but, with legs spinning for all they are worth, doesn't know yet that it is ready to drop. Yet drop it most certainly will. Microsoft Win8 Tablet Is NOT a Game Changer Adam Hartung Contributor Snapshot: Steve Ballmer Follow (93) #44 Billionaires IDC Analyst: Microsoft's Surface Sizzle Needs Win8 Steak Daniel Nye Griffiths Contributor To understand how this happens, take a look at the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian who studied the rise and fall of civilizations. He argued that a civilization flourishes when it motivates insiders and attracts outsiders with its creative dynamism and culture. The civilization breaks down when its leadership loses this creative capacity and gives way to, or transforms itself into, a dominant minority. When this happens, the driver of the civilization becomes control, not attraction. And it's precisely this switch from attraction to control that is the source of the breakdown. Interestingly, Toynbee says that the consequences may not be immediately apparent. A civilization can keep up momentum because the controls it puts in place generate some short-term efficiency. But eventually it will run its course and collapse, because no amount of control can replace the loss of collective creativity. Observe this in the corporate world by looking at the example of General Motors. G.M.'s 2009 bankruptcy came at the end of a long decline dating back to the early 197

Is Intel right?  Is there a "compatibility-interoperability" problem between Windows RT Office (ARM) and legacy (x86) Windows MS Office productivity environments?  It seems to me that the entire reason iPAD, Android and other ARM based tablet systems want MSOffice and MSOffice Visual Document Viewers is exactly because they want and expect a high level of compat-interop with legacy Windows productivity workgroups and client/server systems. What's the truth?  And is there anything x86 providers like Intel and AMD can do about compat-interop and the unstoppable cloud-mobility revolution? excerpt: The Asus tablet has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia. Windows RT comes preloaded with Office 15, a group of widely used productivity applications. Microsoft has said it had to re-engineer Windows RT to deal with expectations for ARM based devices, which include all-day connectivity and low power consumption. The tablet also has an 8-megapixel camera at the rear with LED flash, and a 2-megapixel camera at the front. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Intel has already started the war of words against ARM around Windows 8, with Intel's CEO Paul Otellini saying that ARM devices will be incompatible with existing Windows applications and drivers. But analysts have said that Windows RT devices will likely be attractive to users who have few ties with legacy Windows PCs. Low prices could also attract users to Windows on ARM devices.

Nice OpenMobster graphic!  Good explanation of the Android notification advantage over iOS and Windows 7 too.  Note the exception that iOS-5 finally introduces support for JSON. excerpt: Why Android Rocks the Cloud Most open source mobile-cloud projects are still in the early stages. These include the fledgling cloud-to-mobile push notifications app, SimplePush , and the pre-alpha Mirage  "cloud operating system" which enables the creation of secure network applications across any Xen-ready cloud platform. The 2cloud Project , meanwhile, has the more ambitious goal of enabling complete mobile cloud platforms. All of the above apps support Android, and many support iOS. Among mobile OSes, Android is best equipped to support cloud applications, said Shah. Android supports sockets to help connect to remote services, and supplies a capable SQlite-based local database. It also offers a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) interchange stack to help parse incoming cloud data -- something missing in iOS. Unlike iOS and Windows Phone 7, Android provides background processing, which is useful for building a robust push infrastructure, said Shah. Without it, he added, users need to configure the app to work with a third-party push service. Most importantly, Android is the only major mobile OS to support inter-application communications. "Mobile apps are focused, and tend to do one thing only," said Shah. "When they cannot communicate with each other, you lose innovation." Comment from Sohil Shah, CEO OpenMobster: "I spoke too soon. iOS 5 now supports JSON out of the box. I am still working with a third party library which was needed in iOS 4 and earlier, and to stay backward compatible with those versions.  Anyways, it should have been supported a lot earlier considering the fact that AFAIK, Android has had it since the very beginning. "

Prepare to be blown away. I viewed a demo of Numecent today and then did some research. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the end of the shrink wrapped- Microsoft business model. It's also perhaps the end of software application design and construction as we know it. Mobile apps in particular will get blasted by the Numecent "Cloud - Paging" concept. Extraordinary stuff. I'll leave a few useful links on Diigo "Open Web". "Numecent, a company that has a new kind of cloud computing technology that could potentially completely reorganize the way software is delivered and handled - upending the business as we know it - has another big feather in its cap. The company is showing how enterprises can use this technology to instantly put all of their enterprise software in the cloud, without renegotiating contracts and licenses with their software vendors. It signed $3 billion engineering construction company Parsons as a customer. Parsons is using Numecent's tech to deliver 4 million huge computer-aided design (CAD) files to its nearly 12,000 employees around the world. CAD drawings are bigger than video files and they can only be opened and edited by specific CAD apps like AutoCAD. Numecent offers a tech called "cloud paging" which instantly "cloudifies" any Windows app. Instead of being installed on a PC, the enterprise setup can deliver the app over the cloud. Unlike similar cloud technologies (called virtualization), this makes the app run faster and continue working even when the Internet connection goes down. "It's offers a 95% reduction in download times and 95% in download network usage," CEO Osman Kent told Business Insider. "It makes 8G of memory work like 800G." It also lets enterprises check in and check out software, like a library book, so more PCs can legally share software without violating licensing terms, saving money on software license fees, Kent says. Parson is using it to let employees share over 700 huge applications such as Au

Sounds like Microsoft must-buy-or-kill technology.

Wow!  30GB free.  250 file formats with a "universal translation engine".  And HTML5. excerpt: "You can't have convergence unless you have the ability to translate files across different platforms and devices," Donald Leka, TransMedia's CEO, told Macworld. "There's a war between the big tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and these compatibility issues are not going to go away." Glide also lets you share any documents or media in your account with other users or the public. And with new desktop clients for Mac and PC that can sync a local folder up to your cloud storage space, Glide is taking on popular competitors like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Apple's own iDisk. Glide is free to use in desktop browsers and on the iPad, and free accounts get 30GB of space to start. Premium accounts offer 250GB of space for $50 per year.

Excellent but light weight and breezy review of the Flash-Silverlight-Open Web HTML5 battle for the future of the Web. excerpt: At the top of the org chart, Apple's deprecation of Flash technology is all about politics. Apple doesn't want its mainstream video delivery system controlled by a third party. So Mr. Jobs backs up his politics with tidbits of technical truths. However, discovering the real truths about HTML5 and Flash is a bit harder, as this survey shows. On February 11th, I wrote an editorial, "What Should Apple Do About Adobe?" Part of the discussion related to Adobe's Flash Player on the Mac, updates and security. Inevitably, the comments escalated to a discussion of Steve Job's distaste for and blocking of Flash on the iPhone and iPad. The question is: is Apple's stance against Flash justified? Of course, any political argument needs only the barest of idealogical arguments to sustain itself. More to the point is, can Apple fight this war and win based on the state-of-the-art with HTML5? Again, Apple's CEO must believe he can win this war. There has to be some technical basis for that, or the war wouldn't be waged.

1)  What's the Best Android Phone for Verizon Right Now? Droid X. This was one of two reviews to break into the top 10, both of them on Android. It hit as the Android frenzy was reaching a crescendo and highlighted how a bigger screen could work on smartphones. This review and the number two post also hit the top mobile posts of the year. 2)  Android Sales Overtake iPhone. This has been a theme that has generated a lot of traffic all year. With Android ascendant, we saw the first quarter where recent sales surged past the iPhone. While the iPhone appears to still have a larger overall installed base, the reports of Android's rise touched off a lot of debate about where the two platforms will end up. 3)  Nexus One: The Best Android Phone Yet. This post went up in January and foreshadowed a big year for Android. While praising the device, Om said it still didn't match the experience of the iPhone, but it showed Google was ready to compete. 4)  4chan Decides to Do Something Nice for a Change. This was a nice change-up and showed that 4chan, despite its reputation for sophomoric humor and sexual imagery, could be used for good. The online community banded together to wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday. 5)  Your Mom's Guide to Those Facebook Changes and How to Block Them. Where would we be without a Facebook post in our top 10? This post looked at the expansion of the "like" button to outside websites and instant personalization and explained how users can sidestep the features. This fit into a larger story about privacy on Facebook, which never seems to get old. 6)  Is Apple About to Cut Out the Carriers? This post stirred a lot of conversation after we reported that Apple was looking at putting its own SIM card in iPhones to sell devices directly to consumers. The move would have allowed Apple to cut out European carriers. It looks like the plan didn't come to pass, but it illustrated the power of Apple and its am

Enterprise cloud storage provider Box.net is launching a new version of its software that includes a front-facing interface built from scratch and additional mobile features, the company announced today. The new Box.net interface is a mash-up of micro-blogging activity streams like FriendFeed and online storage like Dropbox. Box users can drag and drop files from their computer directly onto the site to send files into cloud storage. There are also folders that are synched up directly with the cloud, like Dropbox, that automatically update files as they are changed. Users can preview those files directly within Box.net - and the software supports a lot of file formats. Box developer Kim Lockhart showed off the capabilities by opening up Adobe Illustrator files within the web interface and previewing other files from Photoshop and the like. Whenever any file is viewed, commented on or changed, Box.net users get an update on their activity feed. "This basically kills the software problem," Lockhart said. "You can view files like illustrator files and pretty much anything else as we move forward without ever having to have the software." The idea was to remake the front-facing application from scratch because it was becoming too complicated with too many features. Box.net released a new update just about every week last year and added more and more features, and that was clouding up the service and making it too complicated for some end users, said Box.net CEO Aaron Levie. While Box is mainly focused on the enterprise, Levie said Box had plenty of potential in the consumer space - to compete with cloud storage providers like Dropbox and the like.

"Based on the results of this survey, it's clear that SMBs see the value of cloud-based solutions and are eager to benefit from a productivity and ROI perspective," said Fonality president and CEO Dean Mansfield. "Cloud-based communications tools in particular can be leveraged by companies to drive competitive differentiation while maximizing working capital." Minimizing total cost of ownership is the "ultimate goal" of adopting service-based offerings, according to survey results, while mobility and UC were recognized by a strong majority of those surveyed as key technologies to increase efficiency and profitability. Most respondents saw their current communications solutions as being "good," but 78 percent also seek to improve their capabilities. There was a very high amount of interest in cloud-based solutions and an "excellent prognosis" for cloud-based AaaS (Anything as a Service), with market opportunities still emerging "The needs of small and mid-size businesses differ significantly from large enterprises," said Steve Taylor, editor-in-chief and publisher for Webtorials, "This study shows that SMBs have a notable disposition to leveraging cloud-based technology to enhance their operations and their communications capabilities in particular."

PALO ALTO, Calif - Box.net unveiled a redesign of its cloud-based content management (CMS) and collaboration system at a press event here today at company headquarters. The new interface, features and partnership announcements with NetSuite, Samsung and VMware are all part of the company's strategy to win over more enterprise customers. "This is an all new version of Box, remade for the enterprise, enabling a new set of workflows and features," Box CEO Aaron Levie said in opening remarks. Storage in the free version of Box has been upgraded to five gigabytes (up from one) and is unlimited for enterprise users of the paid version. Box has also increased the viewing area for content by 30 percent, added real-time updates of content including new comments, edits or deletions of a document. Updates are also ranked and collated to present the user with the most important information. Another improvement is a simplified administrative console designed to improve readability and organization. Overall, Box said it has developed a much more scalable framework for its user interface that makes it easier to roll out new features.

I'm not convinced that iCloud will eliminate Windows, MAC and Linux desktops.  I've been using DropBox, SyncDocs, Live.com while testing a number of backup-store-synch-share file services. IMHO, it's all about the apps that act on your data.  And these can come from the desktop, the Browser, or the device.  The best app platform for Cloud hosted data seems to be moving towards HTML5-JS.  Not Win32, .NET, C#, Java or Cocoa (iOS).  And Google clearly has he best platform of integrated services and API's.  They are best positioned to win the Cloud Wars if HTM5-JS and Native Client can close the deal on Cloud apps.  IMHO. excerpt: Apple's announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function - killing Microsoft. Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device - just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer. This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman has a great post where he lists the tools he used to get his company off the ground. We're using it with our own amendments and suggestions to give you the best tools to get your startup off the ground.  Business Insider has a slide show for the 11 tools.  Good stuff!