From Ux (User eXperience) magazine… As an eXperiment, Ux invested $50k in companies they considered did a great job at user centred design with some pretty interesting results. Also, Wikipedia has a good article on user experience.
I’ve seen the future for small business
Parallels focuses on service providers that address the needs of small businesses, Jack Zubarev, president of the company’s service provider division… During the last two years, telecommunications companies have been taking a growing interest in this space, and some three dozen telcos now use Parallels software to deliver cloud services to small businesses.… Zubarev believes small business is increasingly turning to cloud services, and he predicts that in around 10 years practically all small business IT will be in the cloud. The reason, he explained, is that small business owners want the best of what technology has to offer, but they don’t want to rely on IT consultants or specialist staff.
Signs get people to use stairs
Who would have thought that giving people information about their choices could help them to make better choices?
Dan Pink’s points to a study where they tried to get people to use the stairs more: Stairway to motivational heaven.
Euro. Net & Info Security Agency articles
While long, these articles include lots of interesting reports, recommendations and survey material:
For example,
Cloud computing is an on-demand service model for IT provision, often based on virtualization and distributed computing technologies. Cloud computing architectures have:
- highly abstracted resources
- near instant scalability and flexibility
- near instantaneous provisioning
- shared resources (hardware, database, memory, etc)
- ‘service on demand’, usually with a ‘pay as you go’ billing system
- programmatic management (eg, through WS API).
So many local clouds, so little time
Now Melbourne IT to bring cloud service out of beta.
The term “cloud” is a bit bit vague at the moment. One meaning is that the company can quickly provision server and storage services for use by large companies. Another is the hosting services for (virtual) applications.