Wouldn’t it be great to wake up every morning and be able to look out the window and see whatever you want to see?
Now is this cool or what?
Flickr
Nine Cloud Computing providers
Cloud computing is the natural next step from virtualization. No need to invest in hardware anymore and virtually unlimited scalability. Here’s a short list of cloud computing providers.
- Google App Engine for building and running Python and Java apps.
- Amazon Web Services offers a wide range of virtual services
- Microsoft Windows Azure platform offers OS, relational database and an application platform as a service
- Sun Cloud Computing offers Solaris, Storage, Application servers, MySQL database and Netbeans developer tools
- Enki offers a full virtual private datacenter
- Flexiscale is currently the only cloud computing service based in Europe.
- Rackspace Cloud (previously called Mosso) provides servers, sites and storage
- Rightscale lets you deploy applications to the cloud using the Amazon EC2 infrastructure.
- Terramark offers shared and dedicated cloud services, but cloud is shared by definition isn’t it?
Digital magazines on the iPad
Popular Science + is the first digital magazine to emerge from Bonnier’s Mag+, an ongoing project across all Bonnier titles in the U.S. and Europe to rethink the way magazines can be read on a new generation of full-color, touchscreen tablet devices.
See more videos from Bonnier if you found this interesting
Are you a social media addict?
I found this image looking for icons, but it made me wonder how much of these I knew the name and what they do. I came to 26, and you?
Social networking from Salesforce: chatter
Salesforce Chatter offers all the features you can expect from a ‘microblogging’ system: profiles, following, status updates, feeds, groups and sharing documents and links. In addition it also pulls in data from twitter, facebook so it becomes a social datamart.
A cloud based social collaboration platform is not new, even though this is offered on a tried and tested platform that many organizations trust with their sales data. And if you use Salesforce CRM you also get tight integration with accounts, contacts, opportunities, reports and dashboard.
Even more interesting is that it is architectured to be extended. I expect you should easily be able to add new functionality through the app exchange or build your own on the Force.com platform. As Salesforce puts it: “With the new Chatter social platform, social features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform”. I’d love to see it built out to more than just microblogging, for example with blogs, wiki’s and workflows.
The product was announce mid november 2009, it is scheduled to become generally available in calendar year 2010. Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.
A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user per month. Even though this will also include Salesforce Content and Force.com this is a surprisingly high cost. Especially since many microblogging tools are offered much cheaper or even for free.
But for existing Salesforce CRM customers this is an amazing offering. And Salesforce joining this application space is an interesting development.
We are implementing Video Conferencing
We spent some time looking at different options. We tried a few high-end solutions, that deliver great quality, but they are too expensive to rollout to many offices.
Surely you can choose to have a few video conferencing hubs so you can cut down on intercontinental travel, but research that shows if people need to travel anyway they generally choose to travel all the way instead of doing the shorter travel to a VC location.
Hence we decided to investigate alternative, more cost efficient solutions. We ended up with LifeSize and Tandberg as close contenders based on desk research and demos. The final choice was made after having test units of both vendors in house and using them on our own network. Tandberg is more mature and polished, but we found LifeSize to work better with low bandwidth and they are a little cheaper.
The great news is that almost all our offices joined the project and we are looking to implement most of them in the first quarter of this year. Even better news is that our staff is eager to start using it. So I look forward to see many of them on screen soon – and to break even on the project in the first year.