
Acknowledgement matters
In face to face interactions we are programmed to recognise the importance of feedback. As we move many previously physical interactions online, are we in danger of forgetting just how important it is? When you walk into a shop and buy something, a plethora of tangible and intangible signals reassure you that all is proceeding...

Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Last night, cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,”...

A guest post on VentureBeat
As part of the work I’m doing to help assemble the programme for this year’s CloudBeat conference (you should come, you’ll love it), I had a guest post published on VentureBeat earlier today. The big vendor extravaganzas – the Dreamforces and OpenWorlds and I/Os of the world – wrap attendees in a warm and fuzzy blanket of...

CloudCamp reaches Leeds on 14 June
The global CloudCamp movement continues to grow, with events over the next few weeks in Denmark, Germany, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and across the United States. And now, I’m very pleased to announce that the English city of Leeds is joining the party. CloudCamp events have been taking place in the UK for years, and the...
Data Market Chat: Rufus Pollock and Irina Bolychevsky discuss the Open Knowledge Foundation and CKAN
The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) promotes the creation, dissemination and use of ‘open knowledge.’ As part of this activity OKFN developed a data repository called CKAN, and has seen this become increasingly important to a range of data dissemination activities such as data.gov.uk and publicdata.eu. In this podcast I talk with OKFN Director Rufus Pollock...
Data Market Chat: Hjálmar Gíslason discusses DataMarket.com
With Iceland’s DataMarket.com, Founder Hjálmar Gíslason is on his fourth startup, and ready to expand overseas. Focused upon becoming “Google for datanumbers,” DataMarket concerns itself with collecting and providing access to quantitative data; numbers from governments, international agencies, and commercial providers around the world. Alongside the business of collecting data and making it available for download, DataMarket...
TOSCA may prove a prescient name for new cloud standards effort
Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, CA, and Cisco...
Curating a bit of the Cloud over at GigaOM Pro
Image via CrunchBase I’ve been a fan of Om Malik‘s boutique analyst site, GigaOM Pro, pretty much from the outset, and happily renew my subscription each year. The site covers a wide range of industry topics, and those Quarterly Wrap-ups are worth the fee all by themselves. I’ve written a few reports for them in...
KnowledgeTree offers Comfort Blanket; helps customers pull data from Cloud
Image by Anua22a via Flickr KnowledgeTree, a provider of cloud-based document management solutions based in Raleigh, North Carolina, today announced that customers on their enterprise payment plan will be able to download copies of documents, workflows and associated metadata for local backup. As Krish noted over on CloudAve when the company recently announced their single...
Talking about Microsoft BPOS with Scott Rodgers and Bob Fahey of Avanade
In my latest podcast I talk with Scott Rodgers and Bob Fahey of multinational IT Consultancy firm, Avanade. Formed as a partnership between Microsoft and Accenture, Avanade focuses upon delivering IT solutions based upon Microsoft’s suite of technologies and products, including Cloud offerings such as Azure and the company’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS)....
The Semantic Web Gang talk about semtech2009, LIVE
Back in May, I mentioned that the Semantic Web Gang podcast for June would be coming – live – from the stage of this year’s Semantic Technology Conference. Well, we did it, and it was a lot of fun. And as I mention during the session, being able to see the panel made my job...
Forrester reckons Private Clouds are OK
Image via CrunchBase It might seem that the mega-bucks reports from the likes of Gartner, Forrester et al are the preserve of CxOs with vast desks upon which they can array the multitudinous documents to which their employers’ subscription entitles them. The truth, though, is that these documents — which notionally sell for hundreds or thousands...