Google Chromebook: Is it worth your $500?

The desktop market is at the precipice of change as Google recently announced their brand new laptop computer named Chromebook. The browser-based notebook stacks up very well against most of the modern netbooks and tablets as well. However, is a simple web-based laptop worth your 500 bucks? Wouldn’t it be better if you buy an iPad instead?

Let’s look at why you should be buying the Chromebook and why you shouldn’t.

Reasons to buy Chromebook:

1. It’s superfast

Firefox 3 was pretty much ruling the web browser market until this little devil called Chromecame along. Initially, people were hesitant to try out a new browser. However, as news about its speed spread, Chrome quickly caught up with its competitors. There are 3 reasons people choose Google Chrome over Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE: speed, speed and speed. If you’ve tried out Google Chrome browser before and were awed by its remarkable speed, then Chromebook maybe worth your buck.

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Samsung Series 5 Demo Official Chromebook

Check out the official demonstration and overview of the new Samsung Chromebook Series 5 running Chrome OS.

Samsung Series 5 Demo Official Chromebook video samsung chromebook price sale get buy

Samsung Chromebook UK Release – 24th June £349 for Wifi £399 for 3G

Samsung has announced the UK release date and pricing plans for Chromebooks in UK. The device will go on sale from June 24th on Amazon.co.uk and PCWorld.co.uk.

Samsung Chromebook UK

The 3G Wi-Fi model will retail at £399 and the Wi-Fi model has a price point of £349 nearly £100 difference to the actual prices if you compare those with US prices, thanks to taxes and other expenses.

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Aussies First to Get Chromebook Laptops

The Kogan Agora Chromebook will go on sale in Australia on June 7.

An Australian device manufacturer has beat Samsung and Acer to be the first company to release a laptop based on Google's Chrome OS. The Kogan Agora will start shipping on June 7. Kogan's Chromebook has features similar to the Samsung Series 5 and Acer Chromebook, which are expected later this month in the United States.

The Kogan Agora has an 11.6-inch WXGA display, like Acer's Chromebook. The company says it will come with 1GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4GB), 30GB of SSD storage, a battery that will last 3.5 hours, and HDMI output. There's no 3G option, but Kogan's website says you can stay connected by turning your Android phone or iPhone into a hotspot (the product webpage oddly has a 3G icon under the "always connected" heading).

The Agora is available for order today--but only in Australia--for $349 AUD ($375).

By Melanie Pinola, PCWorld 

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iCloud: Why Apple must go big in the sky

Apple is going to reveal an Internet-based media and storage — aka "cloud" — strategy next Monday, and it better be one mother of a program.  Not only does the company have the audacity to call their network "iCloud," but the competition is already hot and getting hotter. 

Google and Amazon are out in front with their streamed bring-your-own-music services. Apple not only must match their offerings, but one-up them with a bigger, better system, one that caters to both phones and tablets. The stakes may well be the future of its mobile platform. 

By Wilson Rothman

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Cloud Computing: Holland Strongly Represented at Cloud Expo 2011 New York

Holland is considered one, if not the most important data exchange point for the European continent. Unlocking the $16,228.23 billion EU economy (2010) and over half a billion people. To showcase what Holland and the Dutch Cloud Computing Industry have to offer, the Dutch government invited eight selected companies with international experience and ambition to present their software and services at the Holland Pavilion during the Cloud Expo in New York.

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Who's a Bigger Danger to Cloud Innovation: Hackers or the Government?

The recent phishing attack from China on Gmail targeted influential journalists, senior military personel and government officials in the White House. Along with the hack on Sony's Playstation network--a 44-day affair that cost the company an estimated $171 million--the recent rash of internet security breaches has many wondering whether America is prepared to take the big leap into cloud computing. 


One of the major impediments to quicker adoption of cloud services is the lack of an open standard for companies building in that space. Dell, IBM, Cisco, Hewlett Packard and others are working together to simplify the infrastructure so that applications can work seamlessly across platforms, but the more open they make the standards, the more susceptible the cloud becomes to hackers. 


Assuming Apple can fend of the hackers and thieves, one other body may stand in the way of a quick and lucrative shift to cloud computing: the government. A recent flurry of activity on Capitol Hill to reevaluate the government's role in protecting citizens' digital rights and regulating e-commerce show that lawmakers are making the Internet a priority. Senator Al Franken grilled representatives from Apple and Google over mobile privacy practices, and Senator Jay Rockefeller took Facebook to task over letting younger users sign-up for its services.


The inverse relationship between digital security and digital innovation is something that neither the government nor the technology companies seem to be handling incredibly well. Google's Eric Schmidtwagged a finger at the government this week for tinkering with the basic fabric of the Internet, but only a few days later his company failed to keep hackers out of Google users' inboxes.

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Cloud Computing: Six Steps to Cloud Adoption at Cloud Expo 2011 New York

A recent CDW-G survey found that although many organizations are using cloud-based applications, few have a formal adoption strategy. Sometimes, just jumping into the pool forces rapid acclimation; however, the resulting effort suffers an uphill climb to succeed rendering an environment that is reactive instead of driving forward. Successful cloud computing efforts start with a solid adoption strategy that incorporates clearly defined goals, economic justifications, governance planning, definitive metrics and a means to monitor and maintain the environment long term.

In his session at the 8th International Cloud Expo, JP Morgenthal, Cloud Evangelist at Smartronix, will outline a proven strategy for cloud adoption that has been used with multiple customers in the public sector. 

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Acer Chromebook Renamed – Acer Cromia AC761

Ever since the annocement of Acer’s Chrome OS powered notebook we have always thought that this device would simply be called the Acer Chromebook. Well, a recent update to Amazon’s listing of this device shows that they have been directed by Acer to name it the ‘Acer Cromia AC761′.

Acer’s Croma notebook will be released on the 15th of June and will be on sale online from BestBuy and Amazon.

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Hacker attacks threaten to dampen cloud computing's prospects

The recent high-profile hacking of Google's Gmail service and Sony's Playstation gaming network is threatening to slow the take-off of the next big thing in the computing space - the cloud.

Computer companies will need to collaborate to work on addressing security issues to boost confidence in cloud computing, where data and software is stored on servers and accessed via the Internet, especially in the corporate space where the potential market size is much larger than the retail space.

"Many enterprises have reservations about the security of cloud computing because of the multi-tenant architecture and the fact that cloud providers are 'big targets'," said Steve Hodgkinson, IT research director at UK-based research firm Ovum.

"The reality, however, is that the leading cloud providers have a very strong incentive to invest in the latest security technologies and processes -- and will arguably be more secure than most enterprises themselves."

Security is a hot issue in the computing world. Hackers broke into Sony's networks and accessed the information of more than 1 million customers, the latest of several security breaches.

The breaches were the latest attacks on high-profile firms, including defense contractor Lockheed Martin and Google, which pointed the blame at China.

Concerns over security could slow the growth of the market for cloud computing, which is expected to reach $3.2 billion this year in Asia alone from $1.87 billion last year, while the global market could reach $55 billion in 2014, according to estimates by technology research firm IDC.

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Disney won't be a part of Apple's cloud-computing launch on Monday

When Apple announces its new iCloud initiative on Monday, one prominent content provider won’t be part of the iHoopla.

In an interview at the D9 digital conference last week in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Disney CEO Bob Iger said his company will not be part of Apple’s cloud-computing launch.

Apple’s initiative is rumored to be a streaming music service that would offer users the ability to store all their media in the cloud and have it made available to all of their devices.

It’s a concept that a lot of companies are finding attractive and possibly profitable as consumers increasingly expect to have their media available at all times and on as many devices as they might own.

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Action Plan for Cloud Computing

Governments around the globe need to take action to ensure that Cloud Computing's potential is realised. That's the conclusion of the latest phase of the World Economic Forum's (WEF)  research study Exploring the Future of Cloud Computing, which has spawned an 8 point action plan based on the findings of a series of workshops around the world.
The research study was mandated by the IT Governors at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2009 in Davos, Switzerland. Two objectives for the research were defined:

• Develop an understanding of what is needed to steer the healthy development of both public and private cloud computing environments.
• Develop a set of industry and public policy action areas that could help mitigate the uncertainties and accelerate the benefits of Cloud Computing.

The report identifies three broad areas of concern that need to be addressed: data governance, security and the business environment.

Data Governance
The report notes a lack of clarity around which legal jurisdiction data in the Cloud falls – especially if, as many Cloud architectures require, the data is split up and stored in multiple locations. Data often falls under more than one legal jurisdiction, and it is unclear how inconsistencies among those jurisdictions would be resolved. Users surveyed were worried about the potential for foreign governments to demand access to their data while governments in turned were worried about losing the legal ability to “oversee” data in the Cloud and apply their laws to the cloud. These twin concerns risk the imposition of data location constraints, such as requiring data to be located only within national borders which some fear will lead to protectionist behaviours.

Security
The old bug bear of security worries remains relevan with users particularly concerned that Cloud-held data is more susceptible to cyber-attacks, while governments are concerned that current technical security mechanisms such as encryption could give users a false sense of security. Government representatives also expressed concern about the resilience of Cloud providers to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The report also nots that data deletion is more challenging in the Cloud, because Cloud providers are the only ones with access to the physical infrastructure on which users’ data is stored, and often data may be mirrored on multiple machines.

The Business Environment
When considering the wider business environment some division emerges between governments and Cloud providers. Governments are keen to ensure interoperability as a way of driving competition and increasing the resilience of the Cloud system as a whole, especially where the market consists of only a few providers, but this seems to be at odds with a reluctance by Cloud vendors to focus on standardisation.

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Computing in the cloud

The concept of cloud computing isn’t something new, though — Hotmail has been around for ages, but the idea, coupled with today’s faster Internet speeds, is creating new opportunities to spend more time in the cloud.

In the past, computer users had to store most of their files on the hard drives of their own PCs. If you had a big music collection on your computer from iTunes or something similar, those music files live and take up space on your drive.
It’s the same with video games.
The game has to be loaded onto a computer hard drive — taking up valuable space. Not only do all those files slow down your computer, but in the event that hard drive crashes, wave bye-bye to your collection and your high scores.
But with cloud computing, those game and music files reside elsewhere — not only freeing up space on your computer and keeping them safe from crashes, but also making them accessible from any computer anywhere.
With new services like Amazon’s Cloud Drive for music and OnLive for gaming, you can access your music from home, office or cell, and play top games like Batman Arkham Asylum and Call of Duty from anyone’s computer.
That also means gamers won’t need powerful (and expensive) rigs to play these graphics-heavy games, as games are run on huge server farms, rather than being rendered on the users’ own PCs. Of course, the somewhat huge downside is if you lose your connection to the Internet, then you pretty much get dropped out of the cloud like a human-shaped hailstone and lose access to all your data, files and games.
Also, the music industry isn’t very fond of the cloud, as it supposedly offers easy access to friends’ music collections and could promote piracy.
Regardless, the cloud is fast becoming the future (as well as an annoying buzz word), and the rest of us had better get used to keeping our heads — and all our files — in it.

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Google's Chromebook Plan Could Be the Answer to Updating Outdated Schools

Google Chrome Notebooks are Going to Be the Game Changer in Education. Instead it was the the way in which they were selling it to schools. Devices can be counted on to work all the time and instantly replaced if they don't, hopes for such programs often dissipate quickly. 

If done right, the rumored plan could solve some major problems with how we use technology for learning in schools including:
1) Internet access at school
2) Internet access at home
3) Equipment repair and replacement
4) Imaging and reimaging
5) A way to purchase more devices with yearly school funding allocations
6) Students won't lose their work

This is because they are talking about selling schools subscriptions to their devices that includes instant replacement when necessary and 3G access on each device.  The plan isn't perfect, but it's changing the paradigm which is exactly what is necessary if we truly want to update outdated schools.

 

Purchase Plan

• Consumers:  The price is expected to be on par with other notebook/netbook devices going for between $350 and $500 out front. 
• School Enterprise:  Google will rent you a Chromebook for roughly $28-$31 per month for businesses, but is expected to charge about $20 per month for schools when signing on for a three-year commitment. That totals to about $720 over the course of the contract and you have no laptop to your name at the end of it. Depending on how you budget shakes out and how much you’re currently paying for a support infrastructure, that may or may not make fiscal sense for a school or district.

3G Access Plan
The 3G-equipped Chromebooks come with 100MB of mobile internet provided by Verizon Wireless for about $3 more per month according to Engadget.100MB isn’t a lot and certainly isn’t enough to allow you to get rid of your wireless network, but it’s not bad either for $3 a month. 

What 100MB Could Get You
100MB is pretty meager, but has some ideas around how this could be beneficial. 

• With 3G-access, you could take a dozen Chromebooks with you on a field trip and create interactive and collaborative activities for your students. You’d have plenty of data for occasional visits to the school garden.
• It might serve as a leveler for students without Internet access at home. 
• It could fill in at wired schools when there are connectivity issues.

Device Imaging
There is little to no setup and no loading on an image with all of the necessary software and settings baked in. Connect it to wifi, log in with your Google account and you’re back in action. Kinney notes this is a tremendous advantage as with high-end computers, a colossal amount of time can be wasted wiping out hard drives and reloading images from external hard drives. 

 cloud computing chromebook school google chromebook

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Who Watches the Watchmen, Part 3: Flying Headlong Into a Cloud

Though the data possessed by small businesses, enterprises and even government agencies are embarking on a mass exodus skyward toward the all-knowing, all-accepting cloud, working with off-site storage and processing utilities shouldn't be regarded as a panacea. Keep your feet on the ground even if your head's in the cloud.

The current U.S. presidential administration is committed to the cloud, and Washington has targeted about one quarter of its US$80 billion IT budget for potential migration to the cloud.

The federal government's General Services Administration has also set up the Apps.gov website, which it describes as government agencies' "source for cloud computing applications."
Many enterprises making efforts to move at least some of their assets to the cloud, move often made to costs and take advantage of the flexibility of cloud-based systems.
However, with several recent well-publicized breaches of cloud systems and the recent crash of the Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) EC2 cloud, is it really safe for enterprises and the federal government to go boldly into cloud computing? Or is this another example of high-tech Babbittry gone wild?

Hole-y Cloud Computing, G-Man!

The federal government has come late to cloud computing; many firms in the private sector, most notably heavy hitters like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Facebook, have been built from the ground up on cloud-based systems.
However, the cloud is not infallible.
Sony's (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation Network, a cloud service, has been hacked repeatedly in the past few weeks.
Facebook is a favorite target of hackers, who seem to be using it as a malware distribution service, and Google's systems were hacked into last year during the well-publicized Aurora attack that hit several large major U.S. corporations and led to a standoff between Washington and Beijing.
"Once you're in the cloud, information doesn't belong only to you but also to the provider of the cloud service," Sorin Mustaca, a data security expert at Avira, told TechNewsWorld.
The risks involved in moving to the cloud include the possibility that the cloud provider could be hacked by external cybercriminals or rogue employees. There's also the risk of the cloud provider going bankrupt, causing customers to lose their data, Sorin pointed out.

Being Clever About the Cloud

"The cloud is a generic concept which can't actually be used without personalizing it," Mustaca said.
Enterprises and government agencies should only move to the cloud after they have identified what they need and expect from the cloud service, and have set security and privacy policies.
"People think that if they move their computers and services to the cloud, they make the problems disappear," Mustaca remarked. "But the problems don't vanish; they simply move to the cloud."
Cloud service providers must guarantee a minimum level of security and privacy, but the differences between vendors' offerings "are sometimes significant," Mustaca warned.
Going to a big provider doesn't necessarily mean you're any safer than if you went to a smaller one.
"It doesn't matter how big the provider is; it can still be hacked if the correct security policies aren't set up," Mustaca said.
Before signing up with a cloud service provider, enterprises should ask certain core questions of them, Frederic Kerrest, president and cofounder of Okta, told TechNewsWorld.
"Some key examples include what kind of controls the provider has in place over its computing infrastructure; how it secures the storage and transmission of your data across different domains; whether you have to reconfigure your network -- meaning punch a hole in your firewall -- to use the provider's service; and whether the provider uses third parties to do security testing," Kerrest said.

Security in the Cloud

Granted, moving to the cloud can save enterprises money. However, they should think twice before accepting the lowest bid when cloud service providers respond to their RFPs (requests for proposals).
"By choosing the lowest bidder, you often end up with weak or nonexistent security strategies," Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos, advised.
"The cloud is just a fancy word for outsourcing," Wisniewski told TechNewsWorld. "We've been doing it for years, and the risks that come with it are the same as for outsourcing."
Enterprises should have their contracts with cloud service providers state that their data is being handled the way it would be in-house, Wisniewski suggested. They should also reserve the right to audit their providers.
"There are risks when moving to the cloud in that you are depending on someone else to provide security on your behalf, and it's more difficult to verify the work has been done properly," Wisniewski said.

The Cloud Can Fail, Too

In April, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud service suffered a crash, taking down the websites of dozens of high profile companies for several days, in some cases.
Victims included Foursquare, Reddit and Cydia.Some clients permanently lost their historical data. Chartbeat for example, couldn't recover about 11 hours' worth of data.

"We recovered nearly all of the affected volumes, but a small number -- 0.07 percent of the volumes in our U.S. East region -- were not recovered," Amazon spokesperson Kay Kinton told TechNewsWorld.
That's well within the published annual failure rate for volumes in the Amazon Elastic Bloc Store, Kin pointed out.Such losses do occur on-premise, but then someone's head often rolls, adding to the incentive to improve services.

"Cloud solutions tend to be more transparent than their on-premise counterparts in general," Okta's Kerrest pointed out. So when a breach occurs in the cloud or there's a crash, news of the problem is disseminated faster than it would be if the problem occurred on-premise.
Then again, an on-premise breach impacts only one company while a breach or system crash in the cloud impacts a lot of businesses.

The bottom line: Tread cautiously when going to the cloud and don't let your desire to save money or go faster override your common sense.

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Mobile devices pose risk to enterprises: Survey

A very high number of Indian Information Technology leaders believe mobile devices pose a great threat to enterprises, a survey by ISACA has said. The survey also revealed that 43 per cent business enterprises in India have still not adopted cloud computing for any IT services as part of their plan for 2011.

The survey, IT Risk/Reward Barometer, done by Information Systems Audit & Control Association (ISACA) has uncovered several surprising results regarding how risks from mobile devices are perceived and the usage of cloud computing in India.

The survey found that more than 90 per cent of Indian IT leaders believe that mobile devices, whether personal or provided by employer - pose a risk to enterprises. More than 50 per cent of respondents in India recognise this risk from mobile devices and said that their enterprises have put policies and systems in place to mitigate the risk arising out of mobile devices use. 

These security measures include controlling application installations, remote-wipe capabilities, encryptions and password requirements, to name a few. The survey also showed that 56 per cent of respondents say that their enterprises do not allow installation of applications on mobile devices used for work activities. Mobile devices, in this case, include smart phones, flash drives, notepads, tablets and broadband cards.  

This year's IT Risk/Reward Barometer indicates that striking a balance between reducing risk and enabling reward is evolving towards a more strategic, cross-enterprise view. The survey indicates that 87 percent of enterprises have effectively integrated IT risk management with their overall approach to risk management. Increasing risk awareness among employees is considered the most important driver in improving coordination between IT risk management and enterprise risk management. 

According to the survey, as many as 43 percent of enterprises in India have still not adopted cloud computing for any IT services as part of their cloud computing plan. In the US, 61 per cent of enterprises do not have a definite plan of deploying cloud computing in 2011.

The major concerns in deploying cloud computing, as cited by Indian IT leaders, are security and privacy concerns and the discrepancies in the type of data/service. However, the respondents whose enterprises do use cloud computing noted that cost optimizations and availability, centralized operations, and cost reductions were the primary drivers. 

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June is Samsung gadget month; Chromebook and tablet shipping days apart

June is turning out to be a good month for Samsung, eh? It sounds like both the Galaxy Tab 10.1" Android tablet, and the Series 5 Chromebook are on schedule to launch this month.
In fact, some early adopters will the get the Chromebook starting next week. Through a deal with Gilt, certain CR-48 recipients (myself included) were offered an early shot at picking up Samsung's dual-core Google-fueled netbook. $499 got you the 3G version of the computer and a "limited-edition Chromebook sleeve designed by Rickshaw." Sadly I'm not hip enough to know who or what Rickshaw is, but I was still mighty tempted. Luckily for me, my willpower held out long enough for the deal to sell out, but I still put my name on the waiting list.

Gilt orders start to ship next week (June 8th) but the Samsung Series 5 is due to be available more generally on June 15th, so really you haven't missed out on much more than a fancy sleeve, if you missed this special offer.

Then we have the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1" Android tablet. If you're based in New York you can (try to) pick one up at the Union Square Best Buy on June 8th. The rest of us have to wait until June 17th. I keep hearing from those who've had hands-on time that the Galaxy Tab is the best Android tablet out there right now, but it still isn't exactly clear why it beats the Asus Transformer, Motorola Xoom or Acer Iconia A500. Granted it ships with Honeycomb 3.1.

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Inside the Hybrid Cloud Storage Wars

When it comes to cloud computing, storage is usually the first thing that most IT organizations think about. While the idea that an external service provider could be used to store massive amounts of data can be appealing, the management of that process across hybrid cloud computing scenarios can be more complex than most IT organizations tend to realize.

In fact, the ability to support hybrid cloud computing within the context of a storage environment is rapidly becoming a major bone of contention within the storage vendor community. Both EMC and NetApp, for example, have committed themselves to sell storage systems that can be used to build either private or public cloud computing platforms, but neither company plans to deliver a cloud computing service. Instead, they will rely on service partners to deliver cloud computing services based on their core technology.

But some cloud computing providers such as Nirvanix are arguing that this will put customers in an untenable situation. They will either have to find ways to bridge private cloud storage deployments that might rely on EMC storage with public cloud storage providers such as Amazon that don’t use EMC storage, or limit their options to cloud service providers that have the same storage architecture in place as the customer uses within their private cloud computing platform.

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Ingram Micro Cloud: Video In The Cloud Is A New Frontier

So much of the chatter around cloud computing comes in the form of solutions around hosted email and backup/disaster recovery. But what about other technology being fueled by cloud's flexibility and performance? During the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit held June 1-2, Guido Jouret, CTO of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group and VP/GM of the vendor's enterprise video group, shared his opinion.

He kicked off his session by sharing an interesting statistical tidbit: 90% of the traffic on the Web will be video by 2014. So, that begs the question: Why video? The answer lies in the demographics of today's business workforce, and many of its leaders. As part of the Millennial generation, today's 20- and 30-somethings were raised on computers; they are the YouTube generation. "Those employees are driving how we see video being used in business today," explains Jouret. The most common use -- business meetings -- is no longer the only place you find video in a business setting. Rather, you find video being used for organizational communications, advertising, customer/patient interactions, events (such as the 1,000 Ingram Micro partners watching the live feed of this cloud event), physical security, and training/education. All those use cases are helping businesses validate the investment into high-quality video technology. Jouret stressed that as video, empowered by cloud, becomes a higher priority with businesses, solutions providers must understand those business drivers behind the adoption of sophisticated video solutions in order to offer value and turn the video opportunity into a profit center.

For example, looking at where your customers are on the five-step path from dipping their toe into video to a full-blown strategic and organizational-wide use of video technology. "You can help your customers move from a crawl to a run, and therein lays the opportunity for the channel," he advised attendees. To support that, Cisco has developed several business use cases that start basic, then add layers of technology, all of which start to blur together at some point, an inflection point Cisco calls pervasive video -- a portfolio of video apps that support all the business needs within a company. One case highlights the transformation of a business from using video for business meetings – simple video conferencing – to an integrated, automated telepresence service that including recording of video conferenced meetings for on-demand viewing, delivery and interoperability of video meetings on any device, and automated speaker recognition and tagging that makes archived video meetings searchable.

While the business outcomes of video are clear across each of this use models, video remains challenging … and hurdles such as bandwidth and load balancing in support of video are part of the video opportunity for the channel. "We like to say, where there is mystery, there is margin," joked Jouret. While some video enablement solutions are rooted in the on-premise infrastructure, the movement is to house video support systems in the cloud, further accelerating the adoption of video.

Those solutions providers interested in video – from telepresence to physical security – should start at step 1 – thinking about the multiple video use cases and identifying where your customers are on the path to full video strategies. From there, solution providers should assess their customers' environments with video in mind, develop a comprehensive video architecture in that environment, and then transform their customers' businesses with video.

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Will Apple’s iCloud Offer Movie And TV Show Streaming As Well As Music?

According to Cnet, we may see more that music streaming with Apple’s iCloud service in the future, as Apple are reported to be in talks with a number of movie and TV studios about bringing video streaming to their iCloud service.

It seems that this feature wont launch when iCloud is announced next week, as the report says there are a number of details that need to be ironed out with the studios in order to offer video streaming through Apple’s iCloud.

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Infosys bets big on cloud computing

Infosys, India's second largest software exporter, is betting big on cloud computing, reports news agency Press Trust of India. As per the report, the company has appointed about 2,000 experts to work on the technology.

Infosys already has more than 100 engagements and over 2,000 cloud experts, ads the report.

Infosys vice president and global head business platform Samson David said that Infosys will invest significantly to build new services, tools and platforms on the cloud platform.

Infosys had set up a cloud unit about a year ago and as part of its 3.0 strategy, announced that it would focus on cloud computing, sustainability and enterprise mobility as new verticals of growth, adds the report.

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The Next Big Thing for Cloud Computing

An exclusive Q&A with Joe Bromley, Systems Consultant at Texas Memory Systems

Q: A very general question first, about Cloud Computing itself: Surely we've heard all of this before in various forms and guises - grid computing / utility computing, etc.? What is different this time - why is everyone so convinced it will now work?
Joe Bromley: Cloud computing has become more affordable, and is now a cost-effective option for the mainstream. In the past, the costs involved with cloud computing made it very difficult for most companies to justify the price. With the continual rise in the power of x86 hardware, and the use of less expensive, and open source, file systems, the infrastructure costs have dropped dramatically over the last five years, and this savings has been passed along to the customers.

Q: What are the three main factors driving companies toward the Cloud?
Bromley: The three main factors are:

1. Cost savings associated with smaller in-house IT staff, less software licensing, and less hardware.
2. Ease of management, customers no longer have to worry about software upgrades, hardware upgrades, migrations, or any of the management that comes with running a datacenter.
3. Having an easy and inexpensive way to store a redundant copy of their data. Many companies will keep the primary copy of their data in-house, and use the Cloud for the redundant copy(ies).

Q: And what are the three main barriers preventing some companies from moving some of the on-premise computing to the Cloud?
Bromley: The three main barriers are:

1. Trust - If a company loses it data, it is very likely that company will go out of business. Many companies would rather manage their own data, and not take the chance of having someone else lose it.
2. Losing their IT staff - Many companies see their IT staff as a competitive advantage against other competitors in their field. One of the best examples is the financial exchanges. IT staff that can trim the latency from their transaction times can add profitability to their companies' bottom lines. Many companies do not want to give up this competitive advantage.
3. Lack of knowledge - For many customers, the Cloud is still just an idea, and they do not know how the Cloud is built and operates. Cloud providers should continue to educate customers on how easy it is to take advantage of their services, and let customers know the hardware that is in place that is being used to serve and protect their data.

Q: How does your own company's offering/s assist CIOs and organizations/companies?
Bromley: We built a high-performance solid state storage appliance that allows companies to cut down the transaction times for their customers, and reduce their own batch processing, reporting, and modeling times. This allows companies to cut costs and increase revenues, helping them to improve the bottom line.

Q: Are there other players in the Cloud ecosystem offering the same - or is your company unique? Why?
Bromley: There are other solid state storage companies in the industry, but TMS is unique because of the level of performance that we can offer. Due to our unique RAID architecture, we offer performance levels that are 5X higher than any other solid state storage company in the industry. This allows Cloud providers to offer higher levels of service, and maintain lower response times to a higher numbers of users.

Q: In the future what do you see as being the next "conquests" by virtualization and/or cloud computing? Are there any unclimbed heights yet in the enterprise? Is for example the convergence of telecoms and the cloud the Next Big Thing, or...?
Bromley: The Next Big Thing for the Cloud is backup and recovery. I believe that the Cloud is an excellent and incredibly cost-effective way for companies to keep a redundant copy of their data. If the production copy of a customer's data goes offline, the company can simply point their users towards the redundant copy in the Cloud. Moving the users to this redundant copy can be quick and easy. With performance available on an "as-needed basis," Cloud providers allow customers to get more performance instantly when the redundant copy of their data becomes the production copy. This allows customers to hold on to their primary copy, and also allows them to use their IT staff as a competitive advantage if they see their IT staff as such. Backup and Recovery is not always sexy, but it is absolutely vital when needed.

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Amazon, Microsoft Cloud Outages No Reason To Avoid Cloud Services

 
The string of recent cloud outages shouldn't stop solution providers from moving toward cloud computing, several executives said this week at Ingram Micro (NYSE:IM)'s Cloud Services Summit in Phoenix.Instead, cloud outages suffered by Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and others reinforce the importance of rock solid SLAs and cloud systems that are designed for failure.

"New technology is a tough sport; I call it a full-contact sport," said Ingram Micro CIO Mario Leone. "If you're not ready to accept that you're going to have some issues along the way, you're not ready."
 
Amazon Web Services suffered a massive cloud outage in April, a major hiccup that knocked some Amazon cloud customers offline for days. Following Amazon's cloud outage, Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) was hit with a trio of outages that caused delays and downtime for Exchange cloud e-mail.Those outages put cloud computing environments under a microscope and called into question the reliability and performance of cloud. But several industry experts said the cloud outages shouldn't thwart solution provider cloud plans.

Gartner analyst Tiffani Bova said the fallout from Amazon's outage can be chalked up to poor planning, and is not an indication that the cloud as a whole is unreliable."It's not that on-prem is perfect and cloud is flawed," she said. "IT is flawed."

According to Bova, customers that were hit hardest by recent cloud outages didn't design for failure and have the systems in place to survive and outage. Many Amazon customers that were hit hardest during Amazon's cloud outage did not have failover or redundancy in place.

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Taiwan’s Quanta moves into cloud computing

Taiwan’s Quanta, the world’s biggest contract PC maker, made more than 50m notebook computers last year and, for the first time in its 23-year history, generated revenues of more than T$1,000bn ($35bn).
But like many other electronics contract manufacturers, Quanta is in a quandary. Rising labour costs in China, rising raw material and oil prices, and a weakening US dollar, are all squeezing profit margins, such that Quanta last year had just T$2.3bn in net profits for a 1.7 per cent margin.Other contract manufacturers are in a similar bind.

Taiwan’s Hon Hai, an assembler of Apple products, saw its margins fall to a historic low of 2.6 per cent on an unconsolidated basis in the first quarter of 2011, as costs increased due to its wage increase last year and as it moves factories further inland in China.

Compal, the world number two PC manufacturer, last month said it would seek to raise the fee it charges PC brands such as HP and Dell to offset rising costs.

Yet moving to lower cost regions and trying to raise prices, may only be temporary fixes. For Quanta, even though it correctly predicted a decade ago that notebook computers would replace desktops, the longer-term solution lies in identifying the “next big thing”, which it thinks is cloud computing. 

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Apple fuels cloud computing hype all over again

Apple iCloud is not cloud computing.

You know what iCloud is? Streaming media. In other words, it's a Web service. Not relevant to cloud; not even in the ballpark.

Big IT providers are feeling their way into true cloud infrastructure services. Fujitsu has opened the doors on its U.S. cloud service, and HP is slated to -- shocker -- make a cloud announcement at HP Discover next week that will likely fill in the gaps between HP's converged infrastructure line and the fact that enterprises want cloud computing services, which HP hasn't got, period.

As for IBM, it recently brushed up the SmartCloud service and re-launched it, Kitchen Nightmares-style, with a slightly more coherent look. It's up to 850 concurrent cloud users, too, which many of you will point and laugh at, but SmartCloud turned over $30 million in revenue last year essentially while still in beta, so laugh that off. IBM's customers are big.

Fujitsu's cloud service is also clearly a first dip in the water; the login asked for the preferred spelling of my name in furigana and, instead of billing me and letting me launch servers, asked about an application for credit with Fujitsu. It then let me build an elaborate simulated networking and server architecture for fun. No, really, it was a little strange for those who've used Infrastructure as a Service before.

AT&T recently let it be known they're spending $1 billion dollars on cloud, which is absolute horse apples because they're lumping mobile, network investment, IT services and some healthcare IT thing in with "cloud-based and emerging services." Besides, they've already got a cloud with Synaptic, but I think I might be the only one who's signed up and tried it out.

Clearly, all of these big vendors and telcos are onboard; they're all fumbling into cloud computing, finally. It's been a strange year so far for the cloud market. An overinflated hype balloon burst sometime near the end of last year, showering technologists with rotting marketing juices, and a new wave of cloud startups are beginning to either bow out or get acquired. Warning: Bring up the Gartner Hype Cycle and you will be deservedly beaten with a Gantt chart.

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Public Sector Slow To Adopt Cloud Computing

Compared to the private sector, government customers are still evaluating using clouds more than actively adopting them, according to a new study by Red Shift Research.

With all of the publicity surrounding the federal government's push into the cloud, the public sector still trails the private sector in its adoption of cloud computing globally, according to a new study.
Only 23% of organizations in the public sector are actually using cloud computing, versus 42% of private-sector companies, according to a Red Shift Research global cloud computing study.

Moreover, global public-sector cloud computing adoption remains more in the investigative stages than in actual deployments, according to the study, whereas the private sector seems more willing to invest in and deploy the technology. 

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Hacker attacks threaten to dampen cloud computing's prospects

The recent high-profile hacking of Google's Gmail service and Sony's Playstation gaming network is threatening to slow the take-off of the next big thing in the computing space - the cloud.

Computer companies will need to collaborate to work on addressing security issues to boost confidence in cloud computing, where data and software is stored on servers and accessed via the Internet, especially in the corporate space where the potential market size is much larger than the retail space.

"Many enterprises have reservations about the security of cloud computing because of the multi-tenant architecture and the fact that cloud providers are 'big targets'," said Steve Hodgkinson, IT research director at UK-based research firm Ovum.

"The reality, however, is that the leading cloud providers have a very strong incentive to invest in the latest security technologies and processes -- and will arguably be more secure than most enterprises themselves."
Security is a hot issue in the computing world. Hackers broke into Sony's networks and accessed the information of more than 1 million customers, the latest of several security breaches.

The breaches were the latest attacks on high-profile firms, including defence contractor Lockheed Martin and Google, which pointed the blame at China.

 Concerns over security could slow the growth of the market for cloud computing, which is expected to reach $3.2 billion this year in Asia alone from $1.87 billion last year, while the global market could reach $55 billion in 2014, according to estimates by technology research firm IDC. 

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VMware, Citrix on virtual desktop collision course

VMware is increasingly eyeing Citrix’s virtual desktop turf as it moves beyond being a one-trick data center pony. Citrix, however, is a very formidable foe. The duel for your increasingly skinny, cloud-enabled desktop should be interesting to watch.

In recent months, VMware has been buying up parts to focus on the virtual desktop. VMware bought Socialcast this week to add to its Sliderocket and Zimbra acquisitions. Combine those parts with the Horizon App Manager and it’s clear that VMware has some serious desktop ambitions.

The problem for VMware is that Citrix has been on the desktop as a virtualization play well before it was cool. Now Citrix is leveraging that experience in bringing the Windows environment to thin clients to expand into mobile. Citrix’s Receiver app is a popular vehicle to bringing desktops to any device—phone, tablet, Google Chromebook.

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Google ‘student package’ to offer Chrome laptops for $20 per month

The company announced on May 11th that  a “student package” plan, offering a Chrome laptop — presumably the Cr-48 or something similar — as part of a $20-per-month purchase plan.

The report comes from no less a reliable source than Forbes, which cites an unnamed “senior Google executive.” It is believed that this deal, which will presumably be revealed at today’s Google I/O keynote, is the test run for a more full-featured business offering. Forbes speculates that a package could be sold to professionals which sweetens the purchase of Google Apps, the company’s Microsoft Office-like suite of productivity tools that currently sells for $50 per year, with a Chrome OS laptop. Google Apps offers the advantage of cloud-based storage.

“Small and medium-sized businesses are banging on our doors to get something like this,” Forbes’ source said, further suggesting that the rumored (for now) “student package” is a test run. You have to respect the forethought here; give students access to a cheap, Internet-connected laptop and then, when they enter the professional world, they’ll already be well-versed in using Chrome OS for work purposes. The problem with anything cloud-related, of course, is the inability to work with saved content when no Internet connection is available. The Google source tells Forbes that a solution is very close to being cracked.

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Chromebook presale already sold out, but there's a wait-list

Google Chromebooks are not going to be up for sale until later this summer, but Google surprised some of us with an invite to buy one early. The Samsung Chromebook is being sold by invite only through Gilt starting today, with a limited number available. It will be interesting to see how many people bite as a result of this deal, but I won’t be one of them.

The Samsung Chromebook as offered is a whopping $499 as configured:

• 12.1″ (1280×800) Display
• 3.26 lbs / 1.48 kg
• Up to 8.5 hours of continuous usage
• Intel Dual-Core Processor
• Built in dual-band Wi-Fi and World-mode 3G
• HD Webcam
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• 4-in-1 memory card slot
• Mini-VGA port
• Fullsize Chrome keyboard

The Chromebook comes with “up to 100MB per month of Mobile Broadband service included with device for 2 years, provided by Verizon. Also available are an unlimited day pass for just $9.99 and pay-as-you-go rates that don’t require any long-term contracts.”

 

But the free, designer case are of not value or quality.

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Beware the Google steamroller

Google spends quite a bit of time trying to convey to people it's not just a search engine.

And judging by the raft of new products it released in the last month, it's doing a good job. Google’s vision is for a “100 per cent web” world. Why? Because if people are online it’s easier to advertise to them, which is where Google makes the majority of its revenue.

It therefore makes sense that Google’s foray into the notebook space is the Chromebook, a device tied to the web and untied from operating systems that allow you to work while offline.
The Chromebook changes the playing field for notebooks, and capitalises on the ‘always on’ world we’re becoming accustomed to.

I wonder if the Chromebook was dreamed up during a Google staffer’s ’20 per cent time’ – the one day a week Google engineers get to spend working on projects that aren't necessarily in their job descriptions.
Google says the time can be used to develop something new, or fix something that's broken. The Chromebook certainly qualifies as new.

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Kogan launches early Chromebook

Maverick consumer electronics manufacturer Kogan has once again stolen a march on his big global rivals; launching a laptop in Australia running the open source version of Google's Chrome OS before companies like Samsung and Acer have brought their products to market.

Last month, Google revealed in the US that it had signed up the two Asian electronics giants as foundation partners to sell laptops with the Chrome OS platform.They announced the chromebook to be officially released on 15th of July this year.

However, today, Kogan started shipping a laptop similar to that which the larger manufacturers will sell — but based on the open source Chromium version of Google’s platform. This story appears to have been broken by the iTech Report.

The device will be sold at a similar price point — $349 — as the larger companies’ products, with Kogan’s site billing it as a “world first” launch. It will feature quite modest specifications — a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 30GB SATA SSD hard disk and a 11.6″ screen which can do a resolution up to 1366 by 768. Battery life on the device will be about 3.5 hours.

Kogan’s site touts the speed of the new laptop, as well as its convenience, claiming that it takes just five seconds to boot the machine, and that with all documents stored in the cloud, if you lose the device, you can log in on another one and “get right back to work”. 

It’s not the first time Kogan has experimented with selling devices based on open source platforms, including Linux. In April this year, for example, the company launched a tablet based on the Android platform, also from Google, in addition to a netbook based on Ubuntu Linux.

Opinions are divided as to whether Chrome OS will become a mainstream platform as Google’s Android system has for mobile phones, or whether it will remain a niche offering. Since Google first outed the new operating system in 2009, the laptop market has changed dramatically, with much of the global interest in netbook devices being subsumed into the burgeoning tablet market let by Apple’s iPad.

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