Younger users may be leaving for apps such as Instagram or WhatsApp but data shows Facebook is still very strong.The memory of Facebook's painful stock market debut a year ago today is at last beginning to fade. Not for investors who bought at the opening price of $38 – their shares are still trading 70% below that – but by other measures the world's largest social network has made seemingly unstoppable progress.

In October, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a status update on his Facebook page that the site had reached 1 billion monthly active users. The business will make $6.6bn this year, up from $5.1bn in 2012, according to research firm eMarketer. And the crucial transition from desk and laptop computers to mobile appears to be going to plan; after Google, Facebook is now the second-biggest mobile advertising publisher.

So was it simply sour grapes that led Rupert Murdoch to suggest yesterday that Facebook could follow Myspace into social oblivion? The media mogul bought Myspace in 2005 for $580m, but its users melted away as Facebook's popularity grew, forcing a selloff at the bargain price of $35m six years later.

"Look out Facebook!" Murdoch tweeted. "Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously. First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago."

In case the news from Google I/O this week left you feeling Google can do no wrong, there's a story no one is writing about that lends a little balance. Google's handling of the challenge to the VP8 codec from MPEG-LA is now in progress — and it shows signs of unfamiliarity with the tenets of software freedom.

As you may recall, Google continues to assert there are no patents in MPEG-LA's pool that read on VP8, yet has secured agreement from MPEG-LA to a license settling once and for all that there's no risk to VP8 implementors and users from MPEG-LA's pool. At the time of the recent IETF meeting, Google promised to publish its ideas for a cross-license agreement, and it's done just that. The draft agreement is clearly marked as a work in progress, so there's still scope for change. I hope it happens.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Video codecs: The ugly business behind pretty pictures | Nokia battles Google to kill open video | Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]

The release of that discussion draft last week is good news for open source enthusiasts. At least, it sounds like good news. The explanatory blurb adorning the draft agreement's text says it's designed to give a "royalty-free license to certain patents that are necessary for the implementation of VP8." The fact that the document has been released while its specific points are still "under review" is also encouraging; perhaps Google is keen to measure the community reaction, testing the ideas publicly rather than releasing a completed document.

One of the many announcements flooding out of Google I/O that may have gotten lost in the shuffle is Android's expected support for Bluetooth Smart technology.

This may seem like an odd development, especially if you know that many Android devices already feature Bluetooth 4.0, the version in which Bluetooth Smart (that is, Bluetooth Low Energy) first appeared. What's new here, though, is that the fresh flavor of Android, expected to hit in the next few months, will natively integrate all of Bluetooth 4.0's fancy tricks, including BLE, or BT Smart. Previous Android iterations lacked this degree of Bluetooth collaboration.

More than 50 billion apps have now been downloaded from Apple's App Store since it opened inJuly 2008, the company said yesterday — and Google is not far behind, announcing 48bn downloads from its Google Play store so far.

Together, the figures highlight the huge new business created by the explosive spread of smartphones over the past five years, with downloads running at around 1,500 per second across the two stores and generating millions for developers.

The 50 billionth app was downloaded by American Brandon Ashmore from Ohio, who receives a $10,000 gift card after downloading the word game Say The Same Thing — but that's small beer compared with the $9bn (£5.9bn) that have been paid out to app developers, representing 70% of the app prices. It's a gigantic new economy that can now make teenagers into millionaires and create entire new businesses. Apple, which takes the other 30% of the revenue, has generated $3.86bn.

One of the problems with talking about the cloud is that it’s this obscure concept that consumers don’t really grasp. At best, many consumers think of the cloud as this mythical storage center in the universe where their files are stored and backed up. And up until now, many concept of the cloud is centered solely on storage, whether if it’s Google Drive with documents in the cloud or Google Music where users can upload to and stream their music from the cloud. Fortunately, though, at Google I/O, Google introduced a number of new services that truly highlight the power of cloud computing and makes it a tangible technology that’s seamless.

And it’s this notion of cloud computing and having quick, ready, cataloged access to all your information that will make Google the company and the platform to beat. The company already has most of our Internet activity stored in its cloud–there’s that mysterious word again–and it’s the ability to analyze, decode, and deliver this information to consumers that really makes Google standout.

On Google+, Google is using its knowledge graph to analyze each post, whether or not it’s tagged or marked. Google will analyse the post and automatically add hashtags and even if a photo isn’t labeled, Google can analyse the content of the photo to tag it based on popular landmarks even if no geotags were attached.

But that’s just the beginning. The power of cloud computing really shines with Google’s new photo editing suite, which brings some of the most advanced powers of Adobe’s Photoshop suite to even the most basic Android smartphone.

Google Inc launched a music service on Wednesday that allows users to listen to unlimited songs for $9.99 a month, challenging smaller companies like Pandora and Spotify in the market for streaming music.

With its new service, announced at its annual developers' conference in San Francisco, Google has adopted the streaming music business model ahead of rival Apple Inc, which pioneered online music purchases with iTunes.

Google's "All Access" service lets users customize song selections from 22 genres, ranging from Jazz to Indie music, stream individual playlists, or listen to a curated, radio-like stream that can be tweaked. It will be launched for U.S. users first, before being rolled out to several other countries.

Google unveiled a string of improvements to other services, including new mapping features and a voice-activated search, at the conference. The focus was on giving more options to users of mobile devices using its Android software, the operating system that now runs three out of every four smartphones sold.

Shares of Google, the world's largest Internet search company, jumped more than 3 percent while Pandora Media Inc shares were down more than 1 percent on Wednesday afternoon.

Google's new music service amps up the competition in the nascent market for subscription-based, streaming music. Amazon.com Inc and Apple are among the Silicon Valley powerhouses sounding out top recording industry executives, according to sources with knowledge of talks.

Walmart, via its Silicon Valley innovation lab @WalmartLabs, today announced the acquisition of two startups: cloud computing newcomer OneOps and the software development shop Tasty Labs, from Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. Tasty Labs offered two services Jig.com and Human.io – both domains which are now redirecting to Walmart’s acquisition announcement, along with that of their corporate parent.

Walmart declined to disclose deal terms.

OneOps developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that Walmart explains will enable it to “significantly accelerate” its PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies. The company offered developer tools built from the ground up for those who host their applications on cloud services like Amazon Web Services, for example, as well as Rackspace and HP Cloud. Developers could publish to any cloud and seamlessly port their apps elsewhere as needed, eliminating lock-in.

The company offered a library of predefined building blocks to quickly bootstrap an application, which could be visually assembled in its interface. A variety of categories such as content management (ex. Drupal, WordPress), e-commerce (ex. Magento), enterprise portals (ex. Liferay) and more were available.

OneOps was named one of the 12 Hot Cloud Computing Companies Worth Watching by Network World, and was a finalist at the GigaOM LaunchPad Competition.

“Walmart is looking to create a best-in-class global e-commerce platform to power ‘anytime, anywhere’ shopping for our customers. The Platform team has been working tirelessly to build the tools to help our developers deliver big site changes faster,” explains Walmart Public Relations Director Ravi Jariwala in a statement. “We are innovating on a very large scale, and OneOps brings us tools that will allow us to move even faster toward a global platform.”

When Bill Smyth wanted to launch a new business at 3M two-and-a-half years ago, he faced the daunting prospect of plunging into the $29.9 billion company's capital budgeting process. Or, he could circumvent that process and go straight to Microsoft's Azure cloud.

As a 14-year veteran at 3M with product responsibilities, he had been through the capital budget process several times. "I've got the scars on my back to prove it," he said in an interview.

Applying for capital funds puts an executive "into the competitive environment of capital money allocation," with repetitive meetings and discussions over how to divide up 3M's $1 billion capital budget. He only needed a few servers, but to get them, "I would be competing with executives building $100 million coating factories," he recalled. The budget process is the same whether someone needs three servers or a whole factory. And even if he received an allocation in one round of discussions, he could lose it in the next when a higher priority project was shown to be over budget and coming up short.

"I had a million things I knew I had to do" to launch 3M's Visual Attention Service (VAS), an image analysis service that advises clients which parts of their images or video will gain the greatest share of audience attention. Smyth only needed a handful of servers; going to the cloud gave him those servers quickly, along with one less thing to do.

In the battle for the next generation of enterprise IT, John Stratton carries a lot of weapons. Stratton is president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the nearly $30 billion unit formed just over a year ago to deliver networking, cloud, mobility, managed security, telematics and a host of other services in a more coordinated fashion for Verizon's top enterprise buyers. Building on a traditionally strong base of wired and wireless network services, Verizon Enterprise also blends in acquired assets like cloud hosting company Terremark, security company Cybertrust and Hughes Telematics. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Stratton spoke with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about Verizon Enterprise's progress since its inception, including a dramatic streamlining of internal systems and processes designed to make life much easier for the company's customers. Stratton also discussed the company's suite of services aimed at simplifying life for IT teams struggling with mobility and the influx of consumer devices, and he talked candidly about the prospects for a third mobile platform to rival Apple's iOS and Google's Android. He also talked about how cloud is reshaping the IT landscape and hinted at a series of major upcoming cloud announcements from Verizon Enterprise. Also, he explained how the "Internet of things" is creating powerful new business opportunities for Verizon and its enterprise customers.

While the cloud can simplify many IT duties, "from an operation and management perspective, you still need to deploy and instrument. You still need understand your SLAs [service level agreements]. You still need to ensure the compliance and governance of your workloads," Labat said.

To this end, the company has released version 10 of HP Operations Orchestration, version 10 of HP Server Automation and version 10 of HP Database and Middleware Automation 10. The company has also packaged all these software programs, along with the newly updated HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2, in a single integrated package.

The idea behind the new integrated set of packages is to make it easy for IT personnel to speed deployment of application-based services across a hybrid cloud environment, to "make it easy to deploy database services, or database backup services, or a full application across a site," Labat said.

HP Server Automation allows organizations to deploy and maintain the patching and updating of thousands of servers. The new version can update virtual servers that are sleeping. The previous version of the software could update only those virtual machines (VMs) that were active when the updating process was initiated. This was a problem, Labat said, because those virtual servers not running may fall out of compliance by not getting the required patches or updates. The new version can awaken a sleeping VM, update it, then shut it down again.

"If you didn't have this capability in a development environment where the engineers are standing up VMs very quickly, you would [have many VMs] that would be out of compliance very quickly," Labat said.

NASDAQ OMX has entered the $628 million virtual data room industry with the launch of WorkSpace, a cloud computing platform that will help communicators and executives share and store sensitive corporate information.

Launched on Monday, WorkSpace is part of NASDAQ OMX's corporate solutions group. The virtual data room allows users to protect sensitive and proprietary information online, update it in real-time, and collaborate with colleagues on issues such as mergers and acquisitions, IPO preparation, bankruptcies and restructurings, auditing, reporting, market research, and fundraising. WorkSpace also offers an iPad app to give users mobile access to the platform.

The target audiences for the product are on both the corporate and capital market sides, including IR and corporate communications executives, the private equity and VC community, and M&A, real estate, and law professionals, said Demo Skalkotos, SVP and head of corporate solutions at NASDAQ OMX.

Windows Azure has been in competition with the amazon web services (AWS) for quite some time. The recent news of Azure platform crossing $1bn in revenue definitely means that it has been growing and has been receiving a lot of support from developer folks.

Microsoft definitely wants developers and other companies to make use of the growing Windows Azure platform. In order to encourage the developers, with the support of CodeProject they have organized Windows Azure developer challenge where each of the participant has to create applications using different kinds of technologies and somehow have to link them together using the Azure platform.

The first stage starts on April 15 and ends on May 3, although it has been extended by 1 week due to late start. It involves you writing about the Azure platform and how you can efficiently make use of it to show off your skills and also show off some power of the Azure platform. If participants miss the deadline, they can directly participate to 2nd stage which is very good thing about this contest.

Second stage involves creating websites which would involve creating a responsive design and also should be able to tie up with the future challenges in the competition. In the third stage you are expected to create some sort of SQL deployment on the Windows Azure platform and of course your previous developments must be able to access this SQL for some sort of work.

Cloud computing services, both software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), are subject to taxes, whether your cloud provider tells you or not when you purchase them. Reid Okimoto, senior manager in the state and local tax practice at KPMG, shares tips to help you understand the real cost of cloud computing.

Q: What questions should companies buying cloud services be asking about state and local taxes?
Reid Okimoto
Reid Okimoto, senior manager, state and local tax practice, KPMG

A: One major question is, "Is it subject to sales tax?" If sales tax isn't clearly charged by the cloud provider, the customer may still be subject to 'use tax.' IT-focused professionals and their enterprises are consuming and purchasing cloud services and they're normally dealing with sellers and vendors of cloud services, not necessarily those familiar with the "taxability of services." Questions to ask the seller of the cloud services: "Are you charging sales tax or not?" If the answer is no, the next question is, "Why not?" It could be either that the provider does not have nexus or that the service is not taxable. This answer makes a difference to the consumer.MORE: How to keep your network in tip-top health ]

Q: So what happens with taxation and "nexus," which means a connection or link?

A: The concept of "nexus" determines who has the obligation of collecting and remitting a sales tax. Nexus is not synonymous with taxability. If the vendor has nexus in the state and the cloud service is taxable in the state, it should collect the sales tax. If not, the consumer will be responsible for self-accruing and remitting.

Q: State taxes vary, with some at 8% or even more. You note that state policies regarding taxation of cloud services also vary. Would you give us some examples?

A: New York imposes sales tax on many cloud services. California, in the majority of cases, does not tax cloud services. By contrast, a state like Washington shifts the burden of self-accruing and remitting the use tax from the cloud service provider to the consumer. States that offer multiple points of use exemptions for multi-state users of cloud services are preferred to those that impose sales tax of 100% of the purchase price based on the billing address. Imposing sales tax on 100% of the purchase price based on a billing address makes it likely that more than 100% will be taxed or nothing will be taxed. Taxpayers are always concerned about getting "whipsawed" by two competing states' taxing policies.

 American-Statesman Staff

Dell Inc. has acquired a small Minnesota software company that manages cloud computing services.

Round Rock-based Dell did not disclose the price for Enstratius, which was formed in 2008 and had fewer than 50 employees.

The company, based in Minneapolis, helps businesses and organizations manage software applications across private, public and hybrid computing clouds. It handles automated applications provisioning and scaling, management of applications configuration, usage governance and cloud utilization monitoring.

The company was recognized by CRN, an industry publication, for having one of the Top 20 Coolest Cloud Platforms.

Its software is regarded as complementary to Dell’s Active System Manager, which was acquired from Gale Technologies last year.

Red Hat announced on May 1 that its Gluster Community "has extended its charter from a single project to a multi-project open-source community for open software-defined storage."

Gluster, for those of you who haven't used it, is primarily about the Gluster file system (GlusterFS). Acquired by Red Hat in 2011, GlusterFS is an open-source network-attached storage (NAS) system that can be used both for virtual and cloud systems (PDF link). As such, it's positioned to be used to address big data problems.

As John Mark Walker, Red Hat's Gluster Community leader, explained at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco in mid-May 2013:

    Storage is morphing and merging with a host of other technologies. If you look at the industry trends that make up the open hybrid cloud, elastic, automated storage is quickly being recognized as an intrinsic part of any cloud architecture. The problem is, as with many technologies, those responsible for deploying these open hybrid clouds are discovering that the traditional, proprietary approaches don't scale. That in order to have an open hybrid cloud, they need an open hybrid storage platform that's agile enough to support their data center's rapid growth.

    Historically, compute was the sexy part of cloud computing, while storage was the backwater that nobody really cared about. And then storage requirements started to exceed the ability of operators to keep pace, and suddenly storage was recognized as something that needed to be just as elastic as everything else. The problem was, storage means data, and nobody can afford to lose data. If you lose compute resources, spinning those up is easy, and you can continue wherever you left off when the old compute node died. But that implies that there's a storage layer underneath allowing you to preserve the state of all of your virtualized machines and apps. If that goes away, you better have some mechanisms in place that allow you to quickly recover. So, in our brave, new, open hybrid cloud world, you must have an open storage counterpart that's baked into your data center architecture.

A debate is smoldering yet again in the Linux community as prominent figures debate whether it's time to give up hope on the "year of the Linux desktop" ever coming or whether the advent of Android is actually its fulfillment. Problem is, it came and it's been here a while, but we haven't even noticed. We just didn't know what it would look like.

I realize that statement flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Last year, Miguel de Icaza's controversial post "What killed the Linux desktop" famously claimed that the opportunity for a Linux-based desktop to dominate the market has passed and is now an unachievable dream. He pointed to what he sees as a series of problems within the culture of Linux development.

At the heart of his argument is the idea that overly frequent updates led to a lack of compatibility, which in turn put off third-party developers. This is not to say he's surrendered to Windows; he recently explained why he uses a Mac. Now that the world has seen the example of the Apple OS X App Store, products that struggle with compatibility issues feel like a big step backward, regardless of any great features.

MariaDB, the community-developed edition of the open source MySQL database now under Oracle's thumb, will become the database software that drives Wikipedia. The switch is yet another sign that Oracle open source projects seem to inspire as many breakaway projects as they do adherents.

For some time now, Wikipedia has been using a variant of MySQL 5.1, with patches contributed by engineers at Facebook. But Wikipedia has been eyeing MariaDB for two main reasons: The host of technical improvements being rolled into MariaDB, and the preference Wikipedia has for "[software] projects without bifurcated code bases between differently licensed free and enterprise editions."

Most of the migration to MariaDB has already been performed, and according to Asher Feldman, site architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, the switchover was "seamless" as MariaDB is intended to work as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. The change also provided a distinct performance improvement: "Many query types were 4-15 percent faster with MariaDB 5.5.30 under production load."

Makers of portable global-positioning systems are caught in a squeeze.

Once a luxury item, in-dash navigation is showing up in cheaper cars, while smartphone apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps are adding more nav-system-like features such as spoken- turn-by-turn directions.

Mitac International, the maker of the Magellan line of GPS devices, is taking the if-you-can't-beat-'em, join-'em approach. Its new $249 SmartGPS takes advantage of the Cloud and social media in an effort to co-exist with smartphones rather than compete with them.

The SmartGPS looks like an overgrown iPhone with a five- inch screen. It plugs into the cigarette lighter in your car and attaches to the windshield with a suction-cup mount.

On half of the screen, the unit provides 2D and 3D maps and turn-by-turn directions spoken in a clear, robotic voice. You can also link your phone to the unit via Bluetooth and use it as a mobile speakerphone.

Nothing particularly smart — or Smart — about that stuff.

Cloud computing is getting another boost thanks to Arista Networks’ announcement of a new data switch. The New York Times reports on May 1 that the updated technology will allow for 10 gigabits of data to be moved per second. The switch could lead to better computing centers and is positive news considering the immense growth of cloud computing in recent years. It is being heralded as another step forward for the future of enterprise cloud services.

The news of a better data switch comes at the same time as growth accelerates for enterprise cloud computing and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. A recent survey highlighted by Automation World notes the link between lower annual sales and the lack of an ERP system. Even this limited industry survey, with a strict focus on manufacturing companies, reveals that 22 percent of the businesses were already using a cloud ERP system and seeing better results than the companies without it.

It doesn't seem that long ago that Microsoft announced the demise of webmail stalwart Hotmail.  The plan was to migrate users over to a new Outlook.com service.

Microsoft announced this week that the migration was completed yesterday and that 400 million people are now active users of the new service.  They went on to say that 150 petabytes of email data was migrated as part of the transition in the past six weeks alone.

The company also revealed that it will be adding a couple of new features to Outlook.com.  The first is called SMTP Send, which will make it easier to send mail from different email accounts.  The second is a much better and deeper integration with SkyDrive.

The new SMTP Send service will make it much easier and faster to send emails from an alias account.  Recipients will no longer see a message telling them it was sent on behalf of the alias account.

Time Warner Cable Senior VP and General manager of Video Mike Angus discusses app development with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West".

Can students in top institutes really be the untapped market to figure out many of industry's burning problems?

Can students in top institutes really be the untapped market to figure out many of industry’s burning problems? Well, EMC India, a company in the storage, cloud and business analytics industry has partnered with People’s Education Society Institute of Technology (PESIT) to form a research team comprising 26 students from the college who are working on industry solutions in cloud computing and very specifically in a field called hybrid cloud.

Cloud computing is a web-based service that provides a host of services to companies from data analysis to data management. There are private clouds that are specific to one network of computers or public cloud whose services are available to everyone. The Amazon Web Services is one of the biggest examples of a public cloud provider. A hybrid cloud is where a company employs both private and public clouds for better data management and it is in this field that the students of PESIT would be working on.

“Imagine there is a big enterprise that has its own data centre. What happens when demand increases? Hybrid cloud provides for more resources for handling that data?” says Niranjan Thirumale, chief technology officer, EMC India Centre of Excellence.

According to Thirumale, hybrid clouds are on the verge of becoming the de facto enterprise model over time as they offer much higher value for the customer who wants to install both private clouds and public clouds in their services. Some of the benefits of doing so will result in cost savings, better service levels, and more agility. However it’s not all rainbows and puppies in this field, explains Thirumale.
 

Eucalyptus Systems has incorporated Netflix tools into the upcoming 3.3 release of its software for building an Amazon-compatible private cloud. Eucalyptus' ability to tweak the Netflix tools and include them in its 3.3 release enhances its claim that it offers the best way to build an Amazon-like cloud on premises.

Netflix is one of Amazon Web Service's largest customers and relies on Amazon infrastructure instead of building its own data centers. It has been a pioneer in building tools for use in Amazon's EC2 cloud, such as Chaos Monkey, which forces unexpected workload shutdowns at random to test an environment's resiliency.

"Eucalyptus was the first private cloud platform to support Netflix open source tools, including Chaos Monkey, Asgard and Edda, through its API fidelity with AWS," said Adrian Cockcroft, chief cloud architect at Netflix, in Eucalyptus' 3.3 announcement.

Asgard is a Web interface for deploying workloads as Amazon Machine Image virtual machines; Edda is a tool that queries a user's resources in the cloud, listing the results and showing what's changed. "Thanks to this integration, those tools can now be used in both private and public cloud environments." Cockcroft said.

[ Want to see how Eucalyptus' relationship with AWS changed from cold shoulder to warm embrace a year ago? Read Amazon Makes Clever Cloud Play. ]

The fact that Chaos Monkey, Asgard and Ebba perform their functions in the Eucalyptus cloud setting buttresses Eucalyptus' claim that it is the supplier with the closest match to Amazon. Eucalyptus started as a project of the computer science department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, led by professor Rich Wolski. The Eucalyptus developers produced open source versions of Amazon's cloud service APIs. Amazon in March 2012 named Eucalyptus a partner in providing cloud services.

With interest in private cloud reaching an all-time high in the enterprise, a private cloud operation based on Eucalyptus is one way to architect a future hybrid cloud operation, where a private data center works in conjunction with a public cloud.

Jonathan Rowley reaches into the basin of white powder and like a magician pulls out the frame of a pair of spectacles. Made of plastic, they're the same white as the powder, but hard, and unusually shaped.

Designed by Ron Arad for PQ Eyewear, each hinge on the glasses (pictured below and above right) consists of segments like an armadillo's tail. "We made these here," Rowley says, indicating a hulking white machine behind him, which looks like a cross between a dry cleaning apparatus and an industrial oven. "The thing is, you couldn't make these any other way," he says.

He points to the tiny detail at each segment, and how creating it in the closed position means the plastic arms try to stay closed – so the design is at its strongest when open, yet clings to your head face. But it's also a single piece; no assembly required, apart from adding lenses.

Located in the basement of a dentist's office in Wimpole Street, central London, Digits2Widgets – where Rowley, 47, is design director – is one of the companies in the forefront of one of the hottest technologies around.

3D printing starts by designing objects on a computer and then printing them with thermoplastics (and in this case, lasers) in super-thin layers to create intricate finished objects.

Amazon Web Services has begun a certification program for its cloud computing products. The program, launched today, will be offered in more than 100 countries.

“With cloud computing being quickly adopted by organisations of all sizes around the world, in-depth training programs as well as certifications for individuals who have demonstrated competence with AWS are increasingly important,” said AWS vice-president Adam Selipsky said in a statement.

As reported by my friend and Forbes writer Joe McKendrick, "A new survey finds that roughly one out of four organizations are heavily into cloud computing, and they are providing lessons from which everyone else can benefit." The lessons come from having two or three years of real experience, enough time to see the real benefits and issues.

Keep in mind the study is sponsored by RightScale, a cloud vendor, and it was done in a way to discover the positive, not the negative. It's as if Dunkin' Donuts sponsored a study on breakfast foods. You wouldn't expect to find results related to obesity or diabetes.

Still, the results are interesting and in line with what I see in the marketplace. One finding was that fairly new, bigger enterprises are the leading adopters of cloud. Although the survey of 625 companies found the cloud is "commonplace," 8 percent of respondents wanted nothing to do with cloud.

RightScale used the survey to categorize how many companies fall in its list of cloud "maturity" stages: 17 percent are cloud watchers (no implementations or pilots), 26 percent are cloud beginners (active studiers and perhaps a few pilots), 23 percent are cloud explorers (with multiple pilots and perhaps some deeper cloud deployments, and 26 percent are cloud-focused (with multiple deployments).

Google's personal assistant app is available for Apple devices, chat apps overtake traditional text messages, and Square Register updates with new tools for restaurants.

Siri may be feeling a little job insecurity. The sometimes droll assistant that answers questions and helps people manage their lives on Apple's iPhone and iPad is facing competition from an up-and-coming rival made by Google.

The duel began Monday with the release of a free iPhone and iPad app that features Google Now, a technology that performs many of the same functions as Siri.

It's the first time that Google Now has been available on smartphones and tablet computers that aren't running on the latest version of Google's Android software. The technology, which debuted nine months ago, is being included in an upgrade to Google's search application for iOS, the Apple Inc. software that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It's up to each user to decide whether to activate Google Now within the redesigned Google Search app, which is available through Apple's app store.

Siri tried to dismiss the competitive threat. When asked for an opinion about Google Now, Siri responded: "If it's all the same to you, I'd rather Google later."

Mike Allton, a St. Charles, Mo., resident who has owned an iPhone for four years, could hardly wait to check out Google Now, even if Siri might interpret it as a betrayal.

Siri "is looking a little green with envy," Allton, 36, said with a laugh after he installed Google's new app. "I love Apple products, but I like to see the competition because it probably will lead to even more improvements. I believe this technology is going to be even more deeply ingrained in our lives a few years from now."

Other iPhone users – even those who have grown fond of Siri – welcomed Google Now's arrival to iOS in mostly enthusiastic and sometimes amusing remarks posted on Twitter and Google Plus. One person joked that Google Now is so helpful that the technology prompted him to wash his hands after using the bathroom. The biggest gripe was about the possibility of Google Now's location-tracking features draining a device's battery more quickly.

Google Now's invasion of Siri's turf marks Google Inc.'s latest attempt to lure iPhone and iPad users away from a service that Apple built into its own devices.

For avid tech industry followers, it's hard to go more than a few days without seeing another article about the benefits companies can gain by taking business into the cloud. These benefits, such as the ability to better connect remote or mobile workers, can lead to legitimate gains in an organization's efficiency and bottom line. Nevertheless, cloud resources often demand that sensitive data be housed on an outside party's servers, so many institutions and enterprises are cautious about, if not prohibited from, adopting the new technology.

Teambox believes its newest offering, Teambox On-Premise, can help more businesses climb onto the cloud bandwagon. Released earlier this month, the product brings the capabilities of the Barcelona-based company's cloud platform behind the corporate firewall, allowing users to harness the file-sharing and collaboration advantages of the cloud while still meeting internal security and compliance requirements. The enterprise-oriented cloud market grows more competitive every week, but for organizations in highly regulated industries, Teambox On-Premise could offer the secure ladder into the cloud that they've been looking for.

Some cloud services focus on online storage, but Teambox has cultivated a name for itself by integrating not only hooks to other cloud repositories, such as Google Docs, Dropbox and Box, but also a host of collaboration tools for sharing and working on the stored files.

The approach has attracted a variety of customers, including not only brand names such as Square and Groupon but also an impressive list of universities. For certain industries, such as healthcare and financial services, however, Teambox's tools have been, like all cloud products, too risky for broad deployment.

Teambox On-Premise was developed to solve this problem. According to statements made during a recent webinar by David Ovadia, the company's VP of marketing, the new product was created to address the regulatory needs of a few "key customers." Healthcare institutions are bound by HIPAA requirements, publicly traded companies by Sarbanes-Oxley and credit card-processing businesses by PCI, he said, noting that these requirements prohibit data from being stored or moved without robust protections.

As the reviews of Google Glass start coming out from the Explorers program, the reaction is splitting along familiar lines of those sure that it is the future of technology, and others who think society will push back against the technology. It reminds me a lot of the early days of the Psion pocket computers.

Hailed by many as the first truly portable computer, Psion’s Series 3 range of computers are rightly seen as the fore-runners of the modern smartphone. At the time they were seen by many as little more than executive toys, and any appearances on TV were more often as punch-lines rather than plot driven – although the Steven Seagal/Kurt Russell cheese-fest of ‘Executive Decision’ did see a Series 3a used as a remote detonator for a nerve-gas bomb on a hijacked passenger aircraft. That explains the weird looks the TSA kept giving me…

Those of us using the Psion computers in anger were at the dawn of a new age. With the help of a cable to connect the device to a Nokia 2110, later Series 3 units could send and receive text messages from the Qwerty keyboard, emails could be managed using a battery powered modem, and a full office suite of applications allowed you to work wherever you were.