Last Friday, December 3, THINKstrategies rolled out a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)/Cloud Computing daily, online newspaper powered by Paper.li. This publication and the online service which creates it illustrate many of the exciting ingredients of the ‘Cloud’, some of the major implications and a few of the unanswered questions.

For the uninitiated, Paper.li is a relatively new, online service created by a privately-held startup, called SmallRivers, incorporated in Switzerland. It compiles links to web articles which have been tweeted or mentioned on Facebook regarding a particular set of user-designated subjects over a period of time (also user-configured) and displays them in a newspaper-style format.

I’ve long believed that Twitter out-performs Google as a search engine and alerting tool for the latest news and views on various topics of interest to me. Every day I’m amazed at how many articles and announcements I find via Twitter, which … Read More »

As the new year and decade get underway, here are a few of the areas of the cloud computing market which I think will be important competitive battlefields for established and emerging players:

Collaboration Wars: Collaboration is the ‘killer app’ in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) segment of the cloud computing market. The rapid adoption of Google Apps has demonstrated the latent demand for these web-based solutions. Now, IBM is promoting the enterprise-class qualities of its LotusLive offering to win a share of the market. Cisco Systems is also intensifying its efforts to promote its collaboration solutions built around WebEx and Telepresence. I also think Microsoft will accept a greater level of cannibalization of its Office products to win a bigger share of the collaboration market with OfficeLive.
Business-Oriented Social Networks: These are closely linked to collaboration and have gained a tremendous amount of attention because of the explosive growth … Read More »