The Future Of Cloud Technology

Cloud computing. Everyone is doing it. Literally.

And this TechCrunch roundtable on cloud commuting is well worth a look.

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From the TechCrunch release on their roundtable:

The cloud is many things to many people. It is a a data center in the sky, a platform for a new bread of enterprise apps, a way to bring Web-scale computing to businesses small and large.

But are we on the verge of a new set of platform wars that will make the Windows Vs. Mac war look like Tiddlywinks? Or will all the different cloud platforms which are emerging create an interwoven fabric of Web applications that draw from each cloud as is convenient? Mission critical apps are moving to the cloud. In fact, entire industries are being built on cloud computing infrastructure.

Yet as both consumer and enterprise apps move to the cloud, they start to look more and more alike. They also begin to take on social features. What does a social enterprise app look like?

To help us explore these questions we’ll have on hand:
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT

Safari 4 Just Released

Which will mean absolutely nothing to 99 out of 100 people.

But for those of you who like to be on the cutting edge of new browsers (like us) here is the download link.

And here is a video review:

Tech Genius Marc Andreessen Sits Down With Charlie Rose

The whole thing is well worth a look.

Will The New Palm Pre Replace b-fresh's Blackberrys?

Unclear. We love our Blackberrys.

But the soon to be released Palm Pre looks mighty fresh.

"Mining The Thought Stream"

TechCrunch has an interesting post up on why they think Twitter is probably worth the additional $35 million it just secured from their investors:

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right now about any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).

While b-fresh isn't yet totally sold on the real world application of Twitter, the whole post is worth a read.

Join The Me & Goji Revolution...

Now THIS is fresh!

A New Hampshire small business is crunching through the traditional cereal industry, one personally developed cereal combination at a time.

They are young, smart and globally aware. Oh, and they BLOG too!

Now what would a b-fresh cereal taste like...

Google Earth's Global Mapping Software Is Now Waterproof!

And the BBC dove right in.

Approximately 70% of the world's surface is covered by water, which contains nearly 80% of all life - yet less than 5% of it has actually been explored.

Google Ocean aims to let users visit some of the more interesting locations, including underwater volcanoes, as well as running videos on marine life, shipwrecks and clips of favourite surf and dive spots.

Conservation organisations hope the tool will improve awareness of issues facing undersea life.

"With this, everybody can see the unbelievable beauty of our marine life and how incredibly threatened it is," said Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the global marine programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"We hope this major technological innovation will get the public more involved in marine conservation and encourage governments and businesses to stop driving ocean species to extinction."

Dive into Google's program here!

Convergence

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