Four years ago, the idea of running large infrastructures in elastic virtualized compute clusters seemed outlandish. Now, it’s commonplace. A convergence of technology, cost, and need has led to a revolutionary way of accessing compute resources. Service providers such as Rackspace and Amazon have democratized access to enterprise-grade infrastructure. At small scale, this has enabled…
I can’t help but take notice of the recent string of cloud failures we’ve been hearing about this year. Blogger went down for about 20 hours last month and Microsoft’s BPOS hosted bundle also reported a significant amount of downtime. Perhaps the most notable was when Amazon’s cloud was overloaded with Lady Gaga fans clamoring…
We are living in the age of “Big Data” where billions of transactions, events or activities are generated through use of smartphones, web browsing, smartmeter sensors and more. Hadoop, MapReduce and a new generation of NoSQL technologies are helping us manage, transform, analyze and deal with the data overload. Together they process extreme volumes using…
Salesforce.com is the recognized 800-pound gorilla in cloud CRM software. However, while they may own “CRM” on the stock exchange, they do not own the market. Salesforce’s tool is fairly intuitive with deep Sales Force Automation (SFA) functionality. It should definitely make your shortlist, but what other companies should you be looking at? Below are…
The media-sharing application Color was launched amidst much hype – and criticism – at the end of March. Color allows users to make and share photos, videos and commentary, and stores the content in the cloud. This content is considered “public” and instantly shared with anyone also using Color in the user’s immediate vicinity, as…
Twitpic, Twitter media sharing site launched video support this morning enabling Twitter users to share their video clips in real time. Users can post photos or videos to Twitpic from their phones, the Twitpic site, or via email. This new feature is key considering worldwide company’s growing reliance on Twitter for marketing, customer service and…