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Good article but leaves out any mention of WebKit and incredible impact that open source project has had on HTML5 and the future of the Web.  I left a lengthy comment explaining this.  Also referenced ODF, OASIS and Corporate support of standards and OSS projects.

Salesforce offers five separate editions of its Sales Cloud 2 product. Contact Manager Edition costs $5 per user per month, and somewhat resembles a cloud-based ACT. It tracks contacts, customer interactions, tasks, and hooks into Outlook and Google Apps, while also offering document sharing and mobile access. Group Edition costs $25 per user per month. It tracks sales opportunities, offers pre-built dashboards and basic reporting, adds the ability to capture leads from your Web site, and tracks Google AdWords performance within Salesforce.com. Group Edition is a good starting point for many SMBs, but Professional Edition is even better. It costs $65 per user per month, and it's is the real SMB sweet spot. It offers full reporting and analytics, custom dashboards, e-mail marketing, sales forecasts, granular permissions, real-time data sharing, and basic customer service tools.

Interesting article describing a recent press conference where Microsoft introduced their latest SkyDrive alternative to Apple's iCloud initiative.  Having had considerable experience with SkyDrive and the entire "sync-share-store" Cloud category, I left a lengthy comment. Computerworld - Microsoft is pitching its SkyDrive online storage service to Office for Mac users, calling Apple's iCloud offering "not enough" for collaboration, file sharing and anywhere-access to documents. Microsoft released an OS X SkyDrive client preview two weeks ago, adding Macs to the list of devices -- Windows, particularly the upcoming Windows 8, iOS and Windows Phone -- with native support for the Dropbox-like service. On Monday, the Redmond, Wash. developer stumped for SkyDrive on its Office for Mac website. "With the SkyDrive for Mac OS X Lion preview, SkyDrive for Windows, and the release of SkyDrive for iPad, you can save and store your important documents or other files in the SkyDrive folder in Finder and access them from anywhere," the Office for Mac team wrote on its blog.

Excellent Hadoop/Hive explanation.  Hat tip to Matt Asay for the link.  I eft a comment on Matt's blog questioning the consequences of the Oracle vs. Google Android lawsuit, and the possible enforcement of the Java API copyright claim against Hadoop/Hive.  Based on this explanation of Hadoop/Hive, i'm wondering if Oracle is making a move to claim the entire era of Big Data Cloud Computing?  To understand why, it's first necessary to read Matt the Hadoople's explanation.   kill shot excerpt: "You've built your Hadoop job, and have successfully processed the data. You've generated some structured output, and that resides on HDFS. Naturally you want to run some reports, so you load your data into a MySQL or an Oracle database. Problem is, the data is large. In fact it's so large that when you try to run a query against the table you've just created, your database begins to cry. If you listen to its sobs, you'll probably hear "I was built to process Megabytes, maybe Gigabytes of data. Not Terabytes. Not Perabytes. That's not my job. I was built in the 80's and 90's, back when floppy drives were used. Just leave me alone". "This is where Hive comes to the rescue. Hive lets you run an SQL statement against structured data stored on HDFS. When you issue an SQL query, it parses it, and translates it into a Java Map/Reduce job, which is then executed on your data. Although Hive does some optimizations, in general it just goes record by record against all your data. This means that it's relatively slow - a typical Hive query takes 5 or 10 minutes to complete, depending on how much data you have. However, that's what makes it effective. Unlike a relational database, you don't waste time on query optimization, adding indexes, etc. Instead, what keeps the processing time down is the fact that the query is run on all machines in your Hadoop cluster, and the scalability is taken care of for you." "Hive is extremely useful in data-warehousing kind of scenarios. You would

IntalioCloud takes on Salesforce.com with public-private cloud design. Note that business applications developed for use in Salesforce's platform have to use the company's proprietary programming language, while IntalioCloud is open to many languages such as JavaScript and Ruby. Third, Intalio says it provides 25 gigabytes of data storage per account, much more than Salesforce. $42 Mill in VC The nexxus here is that both salseforce.com and Intalio need to provide integration into the MSOffice productivity environment to compete with Microsoft Azure.

Wow!  This reads like a premature press release, but if true it's breakthru technology.  I wonder though why Ericom is targeting education?  Seems this innovation would be of immediate importance to enterprise and SMB businesses struggling with the great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity systems to Web Productivity Platforms. excerpt: Ericom has released AccessNow, a pure HTML5 remote desktop (RDP) client that runs within a Web browser without the need to install anything on the client device. AccessNow provides accelerated remote access to applications and desktops running on Windows Terminal Services, remote desktop services (RDS), and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including applications, remote desktops, VMware View desktops, virtual desktops running on Microsoft Hyper-V, and other hypervisors. AccessNow works on any device with an HTML5-capable browser, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and others, without the use of browser plugins, Java, Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight, or other underlying technology. Internet Explorer is also supported, although it does require the Chrome Frame plugin. AccessNow uses only the standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This approach helps IT administrators maintain centralized control of school resources. It also enables students and staff to use any Internet-enabled device, including smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks, to do their work anywhere and anytime.

Incredible project exploring new methods of story telling that make full use of an emerging interactive, graphical and multimedia rich, extraordinarily visual Web platform.  Awesome use of Web technology and a great story to boot!   While the Snow Fall Project is hardly the first Visual Document, it's truly a landmark effort.  Hopefully the business process and systems editing tools for Web based Visual Productivity will not be far behind simple Visual Web publication tools. Marbux viewed the source code and pointed out the great efforts that the NY Times had gone to to provide cross browser compatibility.  That in turn reminded me just how close the world came to having Microsoft seize the Web and take control of its future.  A very close call if ever there was one.  Many thanks to Marc Andresssen and the Netscape investors for their heroic efforts to stop Bill Gates and his Microsoft monopoly.

excellent comparison!

Developers can publish their apps directly to the service and the Pieceable team will create a web page that displays a fully functional copy of the app. Developers or anyone who needs to share an app can then send a link to whomever they'd like to give the demo to. "It ends up being the easiest way ever to share an iPhone app on the web," CEO Fred Potter tells me. "There's no UDID exchange, there's no worry about the 100-device limit Apple places on dev accounts - it's zero friction and hassle." Using Flash to simulate the app's functionality, Pieceable Viewer works without any code modifications on the developer's side, "It's literally a one line command to publish an existing app to the viewer service," says Potter. But Pieceable Viewer isn't Pieceable's core product. The company itself, in the same space as Mobile Roadie and AppMakr, aims to be a WordPress for mobile platforms, helping people write apps even if they don't know how to code.

Wow, watch the video!  The Web rules because it is the first universally available platform to combine communications with computing.  Finally though we are seeing devices designed to truly take advantage of the Web's unique communications and collaborative computing capabilities.  An iPAD with WebEX demonstrates the future.  I hope Google is paying attention.  Every business needs this.

"You have to think that the addition of apps to Office 365 is the continuation of the evolution of documents from static entities that only change when you change them, to living creations that that can update themselves. And by giving documents apps, Microsoft essentially is transforming documents into apps … all the while and not incidentally giving you, me, and any Joe Blow Nonprogrammer the ability to build things that only short years ago would have required extensive development. Not only is Microsoft is making office productivity tools more like the web, it's giving us the ability to create mashups of data and analysis and visualization on the fly. "

Use case for Google Apps described.  This is very interesting stuff and for sure i need to take a much closer look at how others are using Google Apps.  The integration with MailChimp is very interesting.  Good stuff.  As i read through this, i found myself wondering about using Google Apps Document templates in MSOffice 11???

Need to speak with Brian about this :)

Good video walk through demonstrating Windows RT running on an Asus ARM-NVIDIA Tegra tablet.  Very cool.  One thing that caught my attention though was the comment that the entire MSOffice Suite will be included with every Windows RT OS when it ships in November of 2012.  Wow.  Doesn't answer the compat-interop issue Intel (x86) is raising.  But certainly the stakes are very high here. excerpt: The annual Computex show is happening in Taiwan this week, and we're finally getting a look at some real Windows 8 devices. Below is a video from NVIDIA and Asus, demonstrating a new tablet running Windows RT. It's called the Windows RT Tablet 600. (Windows RT is the version of Windows 8 that will only run on tablets.)  The Tablet 600 looks a lot like Asus's excellent Android tablet, the Transformer Prime, thanks to an optional keyboard dock that turns it into a laptop.