eBay plans to move to MSFT cloud computing platform

eBay and MSFT announced yesterday that eBay is going to be one of the first customers to move to the MSFT Cloud computing platform. You can read more over here:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jul10/07-12msebayazurepr.mspx

iPad is here…

This really puts Kindle sales in danger   But then, that was expected, wasn’t it?  When you have a solid team like Apple’s under the tutelage of a genius like Steve Jobs, would you expect anything less?  Here are some links:

iPad official Page: http://www.apple.com/ipad/

GigaOm article by Stacey Higginbotham: http://gigaom.com/2010/01/27/will-the-ipad-kill-the-kindle-in-a-word-yes/

Apple vs Google Mobile Wars

Here is an excellent article by Peter Burrows in BusinessWeek – he discusses the past, present and the future of this rivalry:

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/108600/apple-vs-google

Data Driven Decision Making

Read an excellent interview of Tom Davenport in Intelligent Enterprise.  Take a look at the 5 stage DELTA model that he has described…you can read the interview here.

Nexus One is here

Google has now joined the smartphone market race with the launch of Nexus One.  It is also trying to change the market model by offering the phone unlocked so that it can be used with any carrier.  Here are some nice posts about this phone:

Google’s Nexus One Page – here.

CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/05/google.nexus.announcement/index.html

Om Malik’s Post: http://gigaom.com/2010/01/05/nexus-one-the-best-android-phone-yet/

A good comparison of Nexus One vs iPhone vs Droid vs Palm Pre: http://mashable.com/2010/01/05/nexus-one-vs-droid-vs-iphone/

Cloud Monitoring Solution

Hyperic has come up with the first service to provide an independent view into the cloud services provided by the different vendors like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine etc.

You can read more over here:

http://www.cloudstatus.com/

http://www.hyperic.com/products/cloud-monitoring.html

Yahoo and MSFT join hands

Yahoo and MSFT entered into a partnership to improve the web search experience for users and advertisers.  A combined approach is seen as a big threat to Google’s search capabilities – where there is vendor competition, the consumers always stand to gain so this is a good change.  You can read more on this here:

http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx

Google Fusion Tables

Google introduced their Fusion Tables approach towards data management in the cloud.  You can read more on this from their Research Blog here:

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

And here is the infoworld article on the same topic:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/google-tests-revolutionary-cloud-based-database-290?source=rss_infoworld_news

Transparency and Data.gov

Yesterday, we had talked about the power of data and how it can be used to make intelligent decisions.  In these turbulent times, there is an evergrowing need for the companies to be transparent to their shareholders.  We had blogged about it before when we were covering the news about the possibility of the broker vote going away.  The Obama government has been taking a very similar stance to provide the public visibility into the &787 billion stimulus that it is providing to revive the economy.  There is an excellent article on internetevolution.com that talks about it in detail:

http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=176439

Read the article in its entirety.  It is very well written and talks about the different initiatives taken by the department of federal CIO Vivek Kundra.  One other step that the government has taken is to provide the information via their site data.gov.  This site is intended for the businesses as well as fellow US citizens to be able to search the large data sets of government information.   Right now though, it is not aimed at the casual home user.  The aim of the site seems to be to provide the raw data as well as some online tools for helping with the data consumption and analysis.  Their build by collaboration approach is excellent since it not only gives the much needed transparency and helps restore the faith of the people, it also will pave the way to incorporate the great ideas from the public.  Time will tell though whether it proves to be a successful project or another one where a lot of money is spent but returns are not as they were envisaged to be.  But the efforts that this government has taken and continues to take are indeed praiseworthy.

FreeStyle, anyone?

No, we are not talking about freestyle wrestling here   We are talking about Coke’s new RFID based freestyle dispensers.  The new dispensers will not only provide the consumers with more than 100 beverage choices, the real benefit of it is the business intelligence data that Coke will be able to gather based on the consumption of thosse beverages.  There are many more data points of interests as well – you can read more on it in the information week article here.