Cloud Computing

Don’t Be A Chicken Little: Rosetta Stone Knows The Sky Isn’t Falling

The market has fallen two weeks in a row and the analysts are already running around like Chicken Little. While it is so tempting to get caught up in these daily dramas, it is also short-sighted. Consider, for example, the case of ...READ»

The True Sustainability Potential of Cloud Computing: Smarter Design

To hear experts tell it, cloud computing is “the new dot-com,” the “biggest shift computing shift in two decades” or even technology era’s “Cambrian explosion.” But it's also a way to address the enormous need for energy ...READ»

Can Cloud Computing Ever Truly Be Sustainable?

Data centers aren't exactly known for their sustainability--the power hogs are responsible for 1.5% of all power use in the United States. But as cloud computing, the IT golden child that uses mega-data centers to store information, ...READ»

Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud Bridges Gap Between Enterprise and EC2 Atmosphere

Amazon, everyone's favorite online bookstore, also offers some pretty neat pay-per-use cloud computing systems. The company's just tweaked them, adding in all sorts of hooks for business networks to make it an even more useful ...READ»

Religion and Social Responsibility, Moishe Alexander

In Egypt last week President Barack Obama gave a speech titled "A new beginning." I think that is an unfortunate title for what some consider to be an important speech. Can you imagine a speech entitled "An old beginning." The ...READ»

Successful Business Intelligence: Moishe Alexander

Moishe Alexander says that Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App by Cindy Howson is a powerful book. Rating it 4.5 out of 5.READ»

Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause

Moishe Alexander reviews Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause and gives it 3.5 out of five.READ»

Is Apple Shooting for the Cloud?

More information is trickling out about Apple's new data center in North Carolina--it seems it's going to be big. Amongst the biggest in the World, in fact. Are the folks at Cupertino shooting Apple into the cloud computing ...READ»

Head in the Clouds

What does Amazon nuking Kindle copies of 1984 tell us about cloud computing? Unfortunately, quite a bit.READ»

The Ultimate Showdown of Open Source Web CMS

At the recent SXSW (or South by Southwest Conference), they recently held “the ultimate open source CMS showdown.” The format of the event was patterned after “Project Runway” and “The Iron Chef” reality shows where three teams of all-star Web developers were asked to build a Web site in each of their chosen platforms using a single design concept (in this case provided by the award winning Mark Boulton Design studios) and project specification (a fictional nonprofit). Participants came from the camps of three of the best known and most widely used open source CMS projects out there: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.READ»

Making Money in Open Source

The folks over at Pingdom in their Royal Pingdom Blog have collected the financial information of some of the most popular open source software companies.READ»

Survive (and Thrive!) During these Tough Times with Open Source

Many business executives are looking for more ways to cut costs during these tough times and have a mandate to "do more with less." Open source software fits the bill perfectly as it has little or no upfront costs, licensing flexibility (often times you can install on as many PCs you want and for as much users as you need) , development flexibility (the source code and APIs can be customized, the platform and toolkits are readily available), and the fact that many open source projects actually have better and larger support communities than proprietary products.READ»

Open Source Gaining Ground in Southeast Asia

Read some posts, news items and press releases today about the growing adoption of open source in Southeast Asia:READ»

Exonovation: Leveraging the Innovation of Others

A few weeks back I was invited to attend an executive briefing on open, collaborative, community-based innovation. The speaker was Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. He titled his talk "Exonovation," to avoid the connotation the word "innovation", he says, has with internal organizational efforts at innovation. In his talk-he showed how organizations today (including his own company) are able to leverage the innovation of others to create sustainable competitive advantage that benefits not only themselves, but their community and industry ecosystem as a whole as well.READ»

The Best Business Books of 2008

These books run the gamut of what Fast Company is about--innovation, creativity, design, sustainability, technology, marketing, and global business. Their central theme: finding and sharing new ideas is essential to success.READ»

• Gift Guide Central

Data Center Cost Avoidance

Last week in the New York Times, Steve Lohr wrote an article, In Tough Times, Build Fewer Data Centers. He makes a compelling case that “The smartest, greenest, most efficient data center is the one that a company decides it ...READ»

The Reputation Green IT Doesn’t Deserve

Green IT is suffering from a disconnect. Although people say they are pro-environment and will look for this in their products, in reality their spending behavior paints a different picture.READ»

Smackdown: Google, Microsoft and IBM in sub-Saharan Africa

American companies looking to diversify investments and expand grips in other markets are eyeing sub-Saharan Africa, and for good reason: The International Monetary Fund expects continuous annual growth of 6 percent and minimal effect from the recent turmoil of financial markets. Here's how the tech giants are faring.READ»

Perfect Storm Forming for Green IT

Once we dispel the common misconception that Green IT, the practice of environmentally sound practices in the Information Technology field, is an altruistic pursuit alone and not grounded within the constraints of capitalism, we ...READ»

Steve Ballmer’s Cloud Computing Ambitions for Microsoft

Inside Steve Ballmer’s push into Web services.READ»

• Young Flakenstein

Cloud Computing Goes Cucku

Four years ago, a nasty virus infected my hard drive. Windows essentially just froze and never thawed. After a few days of trying to fix it with no success, I realized I would have to reformat my computer. I had no backups, and I ...READ»

Intro to the Business Technology Roundtable

Today, the application of technology is an integral part of most businesses – in some shape or form. However, while many decision makers are now primarily concerned with using technology to pursue new business opportunities, ...READ»

Hey, You, Come on to my Cloud

Lots of good reporting lately on the $13.9B purchase of EDS by HP. Many are saying its the clearest sign yet that cloud computing has fully arrived. Others say the purchase is more about buying market share and becoming the ...READ»