Open Web

The General Services Administration made a bold decision to move its email and collaboration systems to the cloud.  This is a huge win for cloud-computing, but perhaps should have been expected since last week the Feds announced a new requisition and purchase mandate that cloud-computing had to be the FIRST consideration for federal agency purchases.  Note that the General Services Administration oversees requisitions and purchases for all Federal agencies!  This is huge.  Estimated to be worth $8 billion to cloud-computing providers. The cloud-computing market is estimated to be $30 Billion, but Gartner did not anticipate or expect Federal Agencies to embrace cloud-computing let alone issue a mandate for it.   In the RFP issued last June, it was easy to see their goals in the statement of objectives: This Statement of Objectives (SOO) describes the goals that GSA expects to achieve with regard to the 1. modernization of its e-mail system; 2. provision of an effective collaborative working environment; 3. reduction of the government's in-house system maintenance burden by providing related business, technical, and management functions; and 4. application of appropriate security and privacy safeguards. GSA announced yesterday that they choose Google Apps for email and collaboration and Unisys as the implementation partner. So what does this mean? What it means (WIM) #1: GSA employees will be using a next-generation information workplace. And that means mobile, device-agnostic, and location-agile. Gmail on an iPad? No problem. Email from a home computer? Yep. For GSA and for every other agency and most companies, it's important to give employees the tools to be productive and engage from every location on every device. "Work becomes a thing you do and not a place you go." [Thanks to Earl Newsome of Estee Lauder for that quote.] WIM #2: GSA will save 50% of the cost of email over five years. This is also what our research on the cost of email o

Good overview of 2010 products and trends. This post is part of our ReadWriteEnterprise channel, which is a resource and guide for IT managers and technologists in the Enterprise. As you're exploring solutions for your enterprise, check out this helpful ReadWriteWeb report provided for FREE courtesy of HP: The Age of Exabytes This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking "how?" instead of "why?" Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features. We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the spa

With the increased interest in cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and mobile computing, applications are jockeying across multiple networks, both in terms of how services are assembled, as well in how users in different environments access and respond to these critical applications. Indeed, cloud computing forces a collapse in the gaps between the former silos of private, public, and personal networking domains. Since the network management and governance tasks have changed and continue to evolve rapidly, so too must the ways in which solutions and technologies address the tangled networks environment we all now live and work in.

December 9th, 2010.  Good roll up.  Market is now said to be $1 Trillion in USA alone.  Google and Microsoft are fighting for BIG Federal contracts, thanks to the recent mandate that Cloud Computing be the first consideration for any software purchase.  Google drew first blood with a $8 B GSA contract.  Microsoft got the FDA contract.  And the BIG loser is IBM Lotus Notes - which lost both contracts!!!  Feds plan on spending $5 - $10 B to improve Cloud-computing security.  Guess all those Google and Microsoft contributions to Obama paid off.  

Excellent explanation.  Uses the "stack" motif to explain everything having to do with cloud-computing

This ruling could have a major impact on uptake of data storage in the cloud. It's not a done deal until the Supreme Court rules, of course. But the susceptibility of data stored in the cloud to warrantless searches by the government has been a major disincentive for cloud usage.

First, what is a "cloud OS" and why should I want one? Actually, I don't even know if anyone calls it a "cloud OS", but I couldn't find a better generic term for something like ChromeOS. The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet, which is has been renamed "The Cloud" since that sounds cooler, and your laptop or whatever is basically just a window into that cloud. If your laptop is stolen or catches fire or something, it's not a big deal, because you can just buy another one and nothing has been lost (except your money). Many people characterize this approach as using a "dumb terminal", but that's wrong. Your local computer can still do all kinds of smart computation and data manipulation -- it's just no longer the single point of failure. To me, the defining characteristic of cloud based apps is "information without location". For example, in the bad old days, you would install a copy Outlook or other email software on your PC, it would download all of your email to your computer, and then the email would live on that computer until Outlook corrupted its PST file and everything was lost. If you accidentally left your computer at home, or it was stolen, then you simply couldn't get to your email. Information behaved much like a physical object -- it was always in one place. That's an unnecessary and annoying limitation. By moving my email into "the cloud", I can escape the limitations of physical location and am able to reach it from any number of computers, phones, televisions, or whatever else connects to the Internet. For performance and coverage reasons, those devices will usually cache some of my email, but the canonical version always lives online. The Gmail client on Android phones provides a great example of this. It stores copies of recent messages so that I can access them even when there is no Internet access, and also saves any recent changes (such as new messages or changes to read state), but as soon as possible it sends those chang

In-depth look at Google TV and its market. Well worth the read. Is this at last the long-anticipated convergence of television and the Internet?

Add this to the Sports Illustrated "immersive" magzine for the iPAD as clear indication that the entire idea of what a visual document is has changed dramatically.  Radically. excerpt: The coolest media experiences that I've seen on the iPad - Operation Ajax, a graphic novel created specifically for the device. At the time, the idea was still very much in development, but today the Operation Ajax application has gone live in Apple's App Store. The major startups in digital comics, ComiXology and Graphic.ly, have focused their energies on making deals with publishers to transfer existing comics to the iPad or other devices. Operation Ajax, on the other hand, was created with the iPad in mind, avoiding some of the issues that come with transferring from print (the iPad screen is slightly smaller than a standard comic book page, for starters), and also making the supplementary material that can't be delivered in print a natural extension of the experience.

These contrasting cross-currents are going to make 2011 a fascinating and turbulent year, one in which SaaS enters the tornado and mobile enters the bowling alley at the very same time as cloud trips over the chasm. I've decided to highlight six trends in enterprise computing for the coming year, but here's a seventh prediction: middle-of-the-road analysts and pundits will find it even harder than ever to make any sense of everything that's going on right now.

UBS analysts believe that the total market for AWS-type services will be between $5-to-$6 billion in 2010 and will eventually grow to $15-to-$20 billion in 2014. How they arrive at these numbers: * IDC says the total global cloud market in 2010 will be $22 billion and $55 billion in 2014. * IDC says the total servers and storage account for $5 billion-to-$6 billion in 2010 and $15-to-$20 billion in 2015.

Good review of Stoneware's private / public cloud computing system.

Viewing and printing of documents.  Support for PDF, RTF, RTFD, iWork, MSOffice (subject to iOS compatibility), Web archives, HTML, text, source code, and standard iOS multi media.  No discussion yet as tho whether or not Avatron can support Visual fixed/flow viewing of these supported formats. Some interesting support for mounting remote file servers - cloud storage systems like DropBox, Box.net , FTP and secure HTTPS. No WebDav.   Seems to be struggling to make that cross-over from iOS device to desktop to cloud-computing connectivity.

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

what does Meeker see in her crystal ball this year? Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking. Such a conclusion is hardly earth-shattering news to GigaOM readers, for we have been following these trends over the past year or two, but Meeker puts some pretty large numbers next to those trends, and looks at the shifts that will (or are likely to) take place in related industries such as communications hardware. She also compares where the rest of the developed world is in terms of mobile communications and social networking with Japan. Again, not a radically different approach to the one many tech forecasters take, but Meeker has the weight of some considerable research chops on her side. The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says - predicting that within the next five years "more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs." As she puts it on one of the slides in the report: "Rapid Ramp of Mobile Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some Companies Will Likely Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened."

1. ESBaaS Will Emerge in Enterprise Clouds.  (enterprise service bus as a service for internal messaging and exchange between apps) 2. Enterprise Cloud Computing will Accelerate Data Center Consolidation. 3. Desktop Virtualization.    4. SME Data Center Outsourcing into Public Clouds 5. Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage will Look to PODs and Containers.

Early in December Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle notified the German regulator that they planned to form CPTN Holdings with a view to purchasing 882 of Novell's patents. But the filing was withdrawn (Rücknahme) on Dec. 30. No reason was given for the withdrawal by German authorities, but it is likely voluntary as authorities would not yet have had time to investigate the proposal. However, in recent weeks the German Federal Cartel Office has received letters and recommendations from various open-source organizations including the U.S.-based Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). These open-source advocates are extremely alarmed that patents with claims on some elements of open-source software could fall into the hands of companies that compete with that open-source software. Given Novell's past involvement in free software development, it's seems very likely that at least some of the company's patents would cover free software technologies.

Good explanation of how Bump and PayPal work together. People have predicted the death of cash and checks for a long time. But there are certain transactions - like paying a friend back for dinner or buying vegetables at the farmers' market - for which they remain essential. ¶PayPal's new iPhone application could finally change that. It promises to let you quickly divide a restaurant bill and send a friend the portion you owe just by bumping your iPhones together. ¶The application is free to download from the App Store. Users log in with their PayPal credentials or with their cellphone number and a numeric PIN, and they can send or request money and manage their account on the phone. ¶To send money, users choose a recipient from their cellphone contacts or bump two phones together. For that, the app uses technology from Bump Technologies, which developed it to swap contact information between two phones. The money is transferred immediately

If someone told you that you could drop your operating costs by 40 percent, would you listen? If that same person said you could save between $70 and $150 per user per year in energy savings alone if you tried something new, would you try it?  A lot of companies are listening, and those same businesses are trying something new - cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) - and reaping the many benefits, which start with the aforementioned cost savings. "It's about saving money, and there's a tremendous amount of money to be saved, because if you look at IT budgets, nearly 80 percent of that budget, in many cases, is spent just to keep the lights on, which means the other 20 percent is the only money that's actually able to be used to implement new technologies into the model," says Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer at Wyse Technology Inc.