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I've always liked the term OpenStack.  I also am up to my ears in Cloud-computing and Cloud Document management.  So it's only natural to type in the URL CloudStack.com and see what pops.   Here's what i found; a Texas USA operation specializing in P2P Jabber sync-share-store alternative to DropBox.  Very cool. "Dead-Simple Sharing.  No uploading. No emailing. No FTP." "We build p2web-based apps that help people share their photos, videos, and documents the simple way."

Android device owners have one less reason to drive to the bank now that PayPal has added check scanning to its software. PayPal today released an update to its mobile app for Google's platform that brings the feature: Users can snap a picture of a check with their Android 2.1 or better phone and have the amount automatically deposited to their PayPal account. The newest version of the mobile app, version 2.8, also allows the software to be stored on a handset's memory card, which can free up internal storage on the device. iPhone owners have had the check scanning feature since October of last year and they don't seem shy about using it. In a blog post today, Shimone Samuel, the Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile, says that iOS device owners have been scanning about a million dollars per month using the image capture feature with checks. I noticed some lengthy terms of service upon installation of the new PayPal app; notably that users are limited to $1,000 per day and $3,000 per month for check scans. After accepting the terms, I ran through a quick test by writing myself a quick check for $5; note that you can't write checks to "Cash" using the software.

Roger Black is a publication designer, and Filipe Fortes was the project manager for Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation - Silverlight project.  Today he specializes in dynamic layout algorithms written in Open Web JavaScript.  Roger is a reknown publication designer, and describes here the genesis behind TreeSaver.  Fascinating story certain to become a key explanation of how digital media ran away with the print publishing industry.   I'm wondering what kind of authoring tools will evolve that can publish directly into the TS JavaScript templates?   My first inclination would be to adapt OOo Impress.  It has an outline view, a notes editing capability, and provides a decent visual canvas.  The problem is that it's locked into "slides".  Can Impress be unlocked and flowing?  That might work. excerpt:  when Microsoft put together a dynamic page layout for The New York Times Reader, did they know that it was the future? It certainly wasn't the immediate present, since they couldn't pry the WPF visual layer off of Windows, leaving it a single-OS solution. (The Times' Reader later was taken up by Adobe, which at least got it to work on both Mac and PC.) Filipe Fortes, PM on the MS news client project, knew. I'd met him when the group invited me out to Redmond to help design the first templates for the Times. Later I saw him at the 2007 Mix conference in Vegas, and I asked him how to make the dynamic page size idea work multi-platform. He said, "We could do it in HTML."

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network. Project Developers :::: Satoshi NakamotoGavin Andresen -  (PGP)Martti Malmi -  (PGP)Amir Taaki -  (PGP)Laszlo HanyeczNils Schneider

Microsoft already got its big Windows 7 sales bang -- 400 million licenses sold since the operating system shipped nearly two years ago. The global install base of PCs is around 1 billion. The majority of licenses are going to emerging markets. Microsoft estimates that they totaled 40 million PC shipments for the quarter or -- get this -- half of global volume. It's simply a stunning number that represents faster recovering economies in many emerging markets and new sales. The majority of Windows sold in developed markets are resales -- to existing customers. Microsoft is still getting some bang from businesses. During yesterday's earnings conference call, Bill Koefoed, general manager of Microsoft Investor Relations, said that "business PC refresh cycle continued and drove estimated business PC growth of 8 percent". Those business deployments won't last forever, however. The reality is this: If not for Windows Vista's market failure, successor 7's sales situation might be a whole lot worse today. Windows 7 released with about 80 percent of the install base on XP. Upgrades were inevitable in developed markets. Whenever Windows 8 ships, much of the established install base will be on 7 or moving that way. Enterprises don't deploy overnight. For now, Koefoed says that "90 percent of enterprises have committed to a deployment plan" and one-quarter of their desktops have Windows 7. Windows 7's lifeblood is two-fold, then: Pent-up demand from businesses still using Windows XP and sales to emerging markets. It's not a sustainable growth business, although legacy sales should keep the Windows & Windows Live division profitable for some time. Microsoft's Business Division long ago passed Windows as the big revenue and profit generator, $5.78 billion and $3.6, respectively, in fiscal Q4. Windows & Windows Live generated $4.7 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in profit. Actually, Server and Tools division nearly generated as much revenue as Windows & Windows Live -- $4.6 b

Android Essentials: Dolphin Browser HD still supports gestures, multiple tabs, and browser extensions, but now includes Webzine: a Flipboard-like, magazine layout style for reading web pages.   Very slick!  But there is no way to add RSS feeds?  The new Scribd "Float"  webzine is also lacking RSS.  Since 95% of my news and info management comes from RSS, this is a problem!

Cloud computing is becoming more than a tactical measure adopted by managers and professionals seeking quick solutions to business and technical problems. It is increasingly being seen as a strategic initiative. Not only are most executives now planning to adopt some form of cloud computing for their organizations, they also expect these technology services to help position their organizations to succeed in today's rough-and-tumble economy. These are some of the findings of a new survey of 900 executives released by KPMG International and Forbes Insight. The majority, 81%, say their organizations have already moved at least some business activities to the cloud and expect 2012 investment "to skyrocket, with some companies planning to spend more than a fifth of their IT budget on cloud next year," the study finds. Economic factors were cited by 76% as an important driver for cloud adoption, bringing strategic benefits such as transforming their business models to gain a competitive advantage. Other considerations for moving to cloud computing include improving processes to offer more agility across the enterprise (80%), and offering technical benefits that they otherwise could not gain from their own data centers (76%). Eighty-seven percent of executives feel that the changes delivered by cloud will be "significant." This view is consistent among companies of all sizes and whether the respondents work within IT functions or business units.  KPMG summarized the transformative effects cloud is delivering:

Google releases JavaScript alternative Web application programming language.  Release includes Cloud SQL, a cloud computing database to write Web apps against - using either JavaScript or DART. excerpt: Google on Monday introduced a preview version of Dart, its new programming language for Web applications. The introduction was widely expected, not only because the announcement was listed on the GOTO developer conference schedule, but because a Google engineer described the language and its reason for being in a message sent to a developer mailing list late last year. "The goal of the Dash [Dart's former name] effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of Web development on the open Web platform," said Google engineer Mark S. Miller in his post last year. More Insights White Papers The Dodd-Frank Act: Impact on Derivatives Technology Infrastructure Simple is Better: Overcoming the complexity that robs financial data of its potential Analytics Mobility's Next Challenge: 8 Steps to a Secure Environment SaaS 2011: Adoption Soars, Yet Deployment Concerns Linger Webcasts Effective IT Inventory and Asset Management: From Quagmire to Quick Fix Outsourcing Security: What Every Potential Cloud Security Customer Should Know Videos In an interview at Interop New York, Cisco's Justin Griffin shows how their wireless products can physically map radio sources by analyzing the spectrum. This allows you to detect rogue devices and sources of interference. Lars Bak, a Google engineer who helped develop Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine and one of the creators of Dart, said in a phone interview that Google works regularly on large Web applications and that the company's engineers feel they need a new programming language to describe large, complex Web applications.

Cisco's James Urquhart discusses the NIST definition of Cloud Computing. The National Institute of Technology and Standards is a non regulatory branch of the Commerce Department and is responsible for much of the USA's official participation in World Standards organizations. This is an important discussion, but i'm a bit disappointed by the loose use of the term "network". I guess they mean the Internet? No mention of RESTfull computing or Open Web Standards either. Some interesting clips: ...(The NIST's) definition of cloud computing will be the de facto standard definition that the entire US government will be given...In creating this definition, NIST consulted extensively with the private sector including a wide range of vendors, consultants and industry pundants including your truly. Below is the draft NIST working definition of Cloud Computing. I should note, this definition is a work in progress and therefore is open to public ratification & comment. The initial feedback was very positive from the federal CIO's who were presented it yesterday in DC. Baring any last minute lobbying I doubt we'll see many more major revisions. ....... Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is comprised of five key characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models.

Gary, NIST really is not "responsible for much of the USA's official participation in World Standards organizations." Lots of legal analysis omitted, but the bottom line is that NIST would have had to be delegated that responsibility by the President, but never was. However, that did not stop NIST from signing over virtually all responsibility for U.S. participation in international standard development to the private ANSI, without so much as a public notice and comment rulemaking process. See section 3 at http://ts.nist.gov/Standards/Conformity/ansimou.cfm. Absolutely illegal, including at least two bright-line violations of the U.S. Constitution. But the Feds have unmistakably abdicated their legal responsibilities in regard to international standards to the private sector.

In a recent speech to Stanford students, Siebel system's Thomas Siebel argues that the 20 sweet years of IT spending growth between 1980 and 2000 has ended.  IT growth no longer outpasses the growth of the economy.  In 2000 IT spending fell from a compounded annual growth rate of 17% to 3%, and has languished there since. Shane Greenstein, an economist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management who has written extensively about the computer industry, to take a look at the raw data upon which those numbers were supposedly based: the annual I.T. spending estimates published by IDC.  He found that the hay day of IT spending was actually between 1961 and 1980, where the rate was upwards of 35.7% growth!!! One thought i had is that IT spending today is very focused on the problem of connecting legacy business systems to the Web.  It's not focused on replacing those systems. One very interesting excerpt:  "when one company dominates a certain area of technology, it can be a bottleneck along the road to innovation - an obstacle to the technology of others. Mr. Bresnahan says that this has happened with Microsoft in the PC side of corporate information technology, and in earlier times with I.B.M. in computers and AT&T in telecommunications. But he said that entrepreneurial companies of those earlier days - like Siebel Systems - ultimately invented around bottlenecks and "innovation-led growth picked up again."

Custom Document Format Interoperability You may have heard that Office 2007 SP2 will now support editing files in the OpenDocument 1.1 (ODF) format. This document format was added to Office's long list of supported documents formats to give customers more choices for the format they use to save their documents. In addition to allowing you to edit the ODF 1.1 format within Office 2007, SP2 also supports a new External File Format API that can be used to edit other document formats as well. With this API, users can choose to save their documents in any format they want. In this post we will explore how to use the API to enable Office 2007 to edit our own custom document format. We will then use Office 2007 to save our custom format as DOCX, ODT and HTML. Our Custom Document Format For the purpose of this article, we have a company who needs to manage their sales pipeline information. The data is available as XML, but they do not want to spend the money to build a custom editor. They just want to let their users edit the pipeline data in Word, as a table. They give these files an extension of SPLX (i.e. Sales PipeLine Xml) The sales pipeline information is made up of a series of SalesItem tags, each with a unique id that represents the index of the item. They track the name of the customer (CustomerName), how much the deal represents (DealValue) and a percent that represents how confident they are that the sales opportunity will close (ConfidencePercent).

Good review of SugarSync.  5GB free, reliable and stable copetitor to DropBox.  Excellent array of mobile platforms.  Better mobile file and folder management than DropBox.  Also blocked from China!  Thank you Sursen.  Amazon enters the Cloud sync-share-store space today with 5 GB free.

excellent comparison between Amazon S3 champion, DropBox, and Rackspace champion JungleDisk.  DropBox kicks ass.  Again.  Amazing. The stages of Cloud Document / Content Management Stack: ......... Backup-restore ........... backup-restore-store .............. backup-store-share ......... sync-share-store ............. sync-share-store-collaborate   (wikiWORD-SPoint) ......... Visual Document Portfolio DropBox has moved the industry to the sync-share-store level.  Collaboration remains a mystery to most, relying on Google Docs or Zoho (Rackspace). Google Cloud Connect can match DropBox for ease and reliability at the sync-share-store level.  MS-Live/Azure/SkyDrive however fails miserably at this level. The problem with Google Collaboration is that it breaks the Native Documents when converting to the Google collaboration format.  GCC (Google Cloud Connect) does store the original Native document, but does not keep track of revisions to the native!  Advantage DropBox! DropBox however does not have collaboration. The Visual Document Portfolio model is a design that saves the Native document to a Cloud Folder, and the system provides all visual representations on demand from that Native.  A Visual representation would be PDF, SVG (fixed), HTML (flow), ePUB or an HTML5 immersive visual representation packaged as a webzine.

Great charts!  Improving efficiency and optimizing business processes continue to dominate as top content management issues.  They are the leading business drivers.  Collaboration is in the middle of the pack, but with a high level of notice and concern.  Waiting to explode i think.  Expectations for collaboration continue to outpace reality. No mention of mobility or productivity!!!!  (Doing more work with fewer people?  is that a improve efficiency equation?)  Where is Cloud-computing?

Excellent List:  Check out these 101 small business web applications - software in the cloud. The selections reflect the breadth of innovative ideas and new business pursuits at play in the small business technology cloud landscape. From sales to legal to productivity tools, we can attest that the small business technology is alive, kicking and doing extremely well in 2011. It's getting much easier and cheaper to operate a business than ever before. Absolutely great news for small business! Here is the list of categories we will cover on this post: Business Development Email Marketing Event Marketing Video Marketing Social Media Marketing Online Sales Online Payment Presentation Billing and Accounting Funding Hiring and Team Building File Sharing Legal Building Websites Website Testing Market Research CRM Productivity Customer Service Team Management Voice Communication Online Education

Good comparison of Microsoft and Google "Cloud" initiatives.  Sure, Microsoft has the numbers.  They own the legacy desktop productivity platform.  But their execution in the Cloud is horrific.  Businesses will always opt for integrating existing desktop apps with Cloud productivity systems over rip-out-and-replace platform alternatives.   But the benefits of highly interoperable and universally accessible Cloud communications and collaborative computing have to be there.  So far MS has failed to deliver, and miserably so.   excerpt:  With Office 365, Microsoft has finally delivered an end-to-end cloud platform for businesses that encompass not only its desktop Office software, but also its server software, such as Exchange and SharePoint. Contrary to Google's narrative, cloud based office software is still a wide open market. The three million businesses that have "Gone Google" - proclaimed on billboards in San Francisco airport's new Terminal 2 - are for the most part Gmail users, who are still happily using Microsoft Office and even Microsoft Outlook. Gmail is a fast, cheap, spam-free and great solution for business email, especially relative to the expensive, lumbering email service providers. Google Apps has definitely found a niche for online collaboration, but generally for low-end project management types of spreadsheets and small documents. The presentation and drawing Google Apps are barely used. Yes, there are definitely Google Apps wins, since it seems cheap. On implementation, businesses find that switching to Gmail is one thing, but switching their entire business infrastructure to Google Apps is a completely different animal that goes far beyond simply changing how employees are writing memos.

Not sure why this is "huge", but it is very cool.  Personally i don't care for Box.net.  DropBox sync has them beat by a mile.  Where Box.net could seriously improve and distinguish themselves from DropBox is with the Project Management component.  Needs improvement.  Maybe they should hire Conrado?  For integration with Google Docs, SyncDocs is still my fav.  For sync-share-collaborate with MSOffice, nothing beats wiki-WORD. excerpt: Box.net made a huge announcement about online collaboration. Box.net is now almost completely integrated with Google Docs for collaborating with friends or in the workplace.

Marcy Wheeler's specuiulation that various government databases simply move to another agency when they're brought to light is not without precedent. When Congress shut down DARPA's Total Information Awareness program, most of its software programs and databases were just moved to NSA.