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Last Friday was my last day at the White House. As I begin my fellowship at Harvard University, I'd like to share my reflections on public service.  "On a bright February day, the previous morning's dusting of snow melting on the ground, I arrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, "stuck" in the "Dark Ages of technology." In their words, "If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past." As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27 billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on the performance of IT projects. My neighbor's ten year old could look up the latest stats of his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn't get an update on how we were spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at the same time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get a blackberry.  These were symptoms of a much larger problem.

Connect various web services with a simple equation wizard.

"uClassify is a free web service where you can easily create your own text classifiers. You can also directly use classifiers that have already been shared by the community. Examples: Language detection, Web page categorization, Written text gender and age recognition, Mood, Spam filter, Sentiment,, Automatic e-mail support.   So what do you want to classify on? Only your imagination is the limit!"

""All of these businesses can shift strategy," Colony said. "Every 10 years in tech, there's a big vendor who we think is dying who makes a big comeback. In 1980, it was Intel, moving from DRAM to microprocessors. In 1990, it was IBM [from hardware to services]. In 2000, it's Apple." In 2010, Microsoft is a candidate for reinvention, Colony said. And if history is any lesson, it will require a change of leadership."

So many cloud pundits are piling on to the misfortunes of Amazon Web Services this week as a response to the massive failures in the AWS Virginia region. If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don't get it: it was the cloud's shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing. In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model.

Dropbox explains changes to their Terms of Service and their various policies and approaches to protecting user data

Google's business customers, specifically users of Google Apps, have to wait a bit longer to try Google+. The Google Profiles service, a required component of Google+, has not been compatible with Google Apps for several months. Google engineers are working to remedy the situation but there are significant hurdles to overcome

a new service that is trying to bridge the world of Google+ and Twitter by watching your public profile for + posts with #p2t in them.  It will then cross post them to Twitter. In invite-only as of July 10. 

Many of these tools were mentioned by my team in a recent offsite - nice validation!