By moving SMS from the device to the cloud without the need for a phone client, the device becomes irrelevant, and consumers are given much more flexibility to communicate wherever and however they please.
via Innovation Generation – Sarah Reedy – Got the Message: Texting on Tablets Takes Off.
Back in the day this used to be called instant messaging.
BigQuery is a cloud service that lets users analyze terabyte-sized data sets using SQL-like queries. It’s based on Google’s Dremel querying system, which can analyze data where it’s located (i.e., in the Google File System or BigTable) and which Google uses internally to analyze a variety of different data sets.
via Google BigQuery is now even bigger — Tech News and Analysis.
If you want to see the future of Big Data, look no further than the nearest gaming-development studio. It isn’t all fun and first-person-shooting. Game developers are the sentinels of a variety of advanced IT techniques, placing them in front of the general IT population with regard to using real-time analytics and cloud computing, among other areas.
Generally, the idea is to offer customers with a one-stop shop and access to all of their work needs without having to leave a program.
via Salesforce’s Do.com intros ‘More’ ecosystem to link third-party apps | ZDNet.
Janitor Monkey detects AWS instances, EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots, and auto-scaling groups. Each of these resource types has distinctive rules for marking unused resources. For example, an EBS volume is marked as a cleanup candidate if it has not been attached to any instance for 30 days. Janitor Monkey determines whether a resource should be a cleanup candidate by applying a set of rules on it. If any of the rules determines that the resource is a cleanup candidate, Janitor Monkey marks the resource and schedules a time to clean it up.
The optimal policies for each application are then packaged into periodic firmware updates sent back to routers. People who sign up for the cloud service and contribute data will get the updated policies in automatic updates. Even those who want nothing to do with the cloud service can get the benefits by updating their router whenever they’d like.
via A wireless router that tracks user activity—but for a good reason | Ars Technica.
What could possibly go wrong with this plan? 
One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe.
via Google Apps Moving Onto Microsoft’s Business Turf – NYTimes.com.
The biggest power hog inside a smartphone is the GPS chip. This component can take 30 seconds just to acquire the satellite data necessary to get the information it needs for an initial location fix; it then has to churn through the downloaded codes to calculate its location precisely.
Microsoft researchers reduced that power consumption dramatically by offloading some of the work to the cloud.
NTT Com says its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering, called Enterprise Cloud, launched in June, utilized the OpenFlow SDN protocol that enables remote controllers to modify the behaviour of network devices and was the world’s first to use network virtualization technology.
Developed using OpenFlow-enabled devices from NEC Corp., it enables users to add and control virtual appliances such as firewalls and load balancers to their networks as and when they need them, according to the operator.
Despite being in “the cloud,” Amazon Web Services has always required developers to know what they’re doing. Customers still have to manage a lot of the infrastructure even though they’re not monitoring physical servers and storage. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be a hassle, so Amazon simplifying something as important as disaster recovery is a big step in the right direction.
via Building Amazon cloud apps that span the world is now much easier | Ars Technica.