John Sculley remembers going to Steve's house....

I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a  Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewelry… Go back to my lock example, and hinges and a door with beautiful brass, finely machined, mec

via cultofmac.com

Microsoft finally figures it out: "it's all about the cloud and web services"

The Microsoft Blog  (http://goo.gl/kdkJ)
 
Top 3 'hottest' college majors for working at Microsoft

You don't have to major in computer science or electrical engineering to work at Microsoft. In fact, there are a number of nontraditional areas within tech that Microsoft's recruiters are scoping out right now.

In a blog post Monday, Microsoft's Eugenia Sawa outlined the top three "hottest academic areas for a future career in tech."

"It is worth thinking beyond a traditional Computer Science degree or even an Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) program," Sawa said. "Microsoft is hiring people with unique backgrounds, some that are new with the inception of the Cloud, web services and the amazing scale at which the industry is operating."

The three academic areas are:

Data mining/machine learning/AI/natural language processing
"All of these fields help us sift through and organize huge amounts of information or data," Sawa wrote. "When you apply your knowledge in these areas to a challenging problem in the online space, you know that you are working at a scale that is just immense."

Business intelligence/competitive intelligence
"The ability to see trends, make sense of data to a business audience and help to understand your customers requires a special person," she wrote. "Someone with a mix of engineering, BI/CI experience and a business mindset can take this field to the next level. "

Web analytics, A/B testing and statistical analysis
"Retailers, web services, and advertisers will need people in these fields as they try to get the most for their advertising money," Sawa said. "As we continue to see the dollar amounts spent for online advertising worldwide, these fields will be hot and we will see online advertising change over time as a result of these positions."

It's all about the cloud and Web services, it seems. Microsoft finally figured that out, declaring this past spring that it's "all in" for cloud computing.

Yankee Group Survey Finds Infrastructure-as-a-Service Adoption Growing | EON: Enhanced Online News

Yankee Group Survey Finds Infrastructure-as-a-Service Adoption Growing

Twenty-four percent of large enterprises already use IaaS, proving cloud deployments are no longer limited to software as a service (SaaS).

BOSTON--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--SaaS’ younger sibling just got an ego boost. According to Yankee Group, 24 percent of large enterprises with cloud experience are already using IaaS, and an additional 37 percent expect to adopt IaaS during the next 24 months. While adoption is still much slower than that of SaaS solutions, the market is gaining traction.

“Is IaaS Moving Beyond Just Cloud Fluff?”

“Is IaaS Moving Beyond Just Cloud Fluff?,” a new report based on Yankee Group’s Anywhere Enterprise: 2010 U.S. Cloud Computing FastView Survey, uncovers adoption trends for this pay-as-you-go infrastructure solution, including:

  • Expedited adoption. Sixty percent of enterprises considering IaaS in the next 24 months are actually planning to implement it in the next 12 months.
  • Barriers to IaaS. The No. 1 barrier for enterprises considering IaaS adoption is virtualization security, but those that have already deployed IaaS rank regulatory compliance, data migration, reliability, employee use and quantitative benefits higher.
  • Preferred partners. Though the majority of all cloud adopters view systems integrators as their most trusted partners for cloud computing (29 percent), IaaS early adopters say telecom companies are best positioned for cloud services (33 percent).

“The desire to adopt is there, but IaaS solutions and providers still have some barriers to address,” said Sandra Palumbo, Yankee Group research fellow and author of the report. “As adoption plans begin to mount, the time is now for service providers, systems integrators and others to solidify their solutions and address the lingering concerns around the cloud.”

About the Cloud Computing FastView Survey

This Yankee Group survey probes more than 400 U.S. IT decision-makers and includes 53 questions focused on these companies’ plans for cloud computing. A free data snapshot with highlights of the survey is available for download at web.yankeegroup.com/2010CloudComputingFastView.html.

About Yankee Group

The people of Yankee Group are the global connectivity experts—the leading source of insight and counsel trusted by builders, operators and users of connectivity solutions for 40 years. Headquartered in Boston, Yankee Group has a global presence, including operations in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit www.yankeegroup.com.

Contacts

Yankee Group communications
Ashlee Clevenger, +1-617-598-7268
mediarelations@yankeegroup.com

via eon.businesswire.com

Yankee Group proclaims the obvious. Enterprises are moving to the cloud.

Lost in the supermarket

There's no reason to get lost in the supermarket anymore. That's at least the case if you're perusing the aisles of four grocery stores in Michigan. Meijer, the Midwest grocery store chain, today unveiled a new mobile application called "Find-it" which allows shoppers to quickly locate everything from diapers to Doritos.

The app was built by Point Inside, the Seattle upstart which has been rolling out interactive mobile maps for airports and shopping malls. With the "Find-it" app, shoppers now can locate more than 100,000 items in the Meijer supercenters. In addition to showing the locations of various products, shoppers also can browse special offers, sales and store maps. They can even mark their parking spot, so they don't get lost once they leave the supermarket.

"Saving time, enabling self-service, and making sure shoppers don’t leave the store without finding what they need is a win-win for both shoppers and retailers,” said Jon Croy, co-founder and vice president of business development at Point Inside.

And for all of those who didn't catch The Clash reference in the headline, here's a little blast from the past for what has to be one of catchiest tunes on London Calling.

via techflash.com

Ever need to navigate an unfamiliar supermarket in a hurry? Imagine the day when an app like this is ubiquitous and covers all supermarket chains. For The Clash nostalgia blast link to John Cook's TechFlash: http://goo.gl/IGPU

Voices of the Angels

Don of Hejira claims to have run into a former member of the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir cleaning hotels somewhere out in the heartland. Have they encountered hard times after the iron curtain evaporated? Whatever precipitated this sorry state of affairs my heart goes out to her. Whats this world come to when angels are cleaning hotel rooms?

Mobile iSilos

Bill Baxter CTO of Cozi, which offers a set of applications to keep busy families organized, spoke at the Thursday's Eastside Networking event. Bill offered a blend of "prognosticating and bitching" about the state of web and mobile apps. Citing an "unstoppable juggernaut named Apple," he warned that the current rate of platform proliferation — iOS, Facebook, Windows Phone 7, Windows 7/8 (desktop), Android, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Blackberry OS, Yahoo Connected TV, Google TV - was unsustainable. Providers of web-based apps face Sisyphean development cycles to simply to accommodate the major platforms.

Jonathan Zittrain addresses this conundrum from the end-user perspective in The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. Users increasingly access the open network through tethered devices such as the iPhone and the X-Box which are locked-down. Innovation has moved from the edge of the network to the creation of user silos. We experience the internet through beautiful walled gardens of our own choosing. Maybe we need to revisit the iconic Apple Superbowl commercial that introduced the Macintosh and ask "why 1984 won't be like "1984"."