Tagged: cloud

Intelligent Agents are backs

Ray Ozzie: Dawn of a new day

[…] We’re moving toward a world of 1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and 2) appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do. On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded scale. They’re constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online worlds. They’re constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn’t. By bringing us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric underlying our society, organizations and lives. From news & entertainment, to transportation, to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are being transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate flawlessly, 7×24, behind the scenes. […]

Follow-up: Don Dodge gives its own vision

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Managing both personal and work agendas

Google CalendarIn my move to Google services (more generally going “all cloud”), I started to use Gmail (love it though there are rooms for improvement regarding the UI) but I also wanted to start using Google Calendar.

Before: One agenda that contains both work and personnal information hosted in Outlook at work. I synched it with mobile device over USB or bluetooth. Pros: one agenda with all my appointements and todo in one place, can take it with me on my phone, nothing in the cloud (no “corporate” securiy issue). Cons: Mixing both professional and private appointments, I can not share it, no access control (my management could see my personal appointment ?).

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Going Google

GoogleLast week I decided to leave aside my doubts about Google and went “all Google“. I am already an user of many Google services (like Adsense, Analytics, Google Docs,…) but I am in the process of integrating Gmail and Google Calendar in my workflow. Big move to host those datas in the Google Cloud but the services look good enough and they are so well packaged with nice features that it is probably worth it. I am not 100% sure I can trust Google but I have to reckon that so far they have been pretty good at not fooling around with my datas and hopefully it will remain like that (why would not they?). Also, unlike some “competitors”, they do not try to lock you down by “encrypting” your datas in some proprietary formats, you can always move away with your datas in an interoperable format.

Coincidentally I have been playing around with an Android phone and it appears quite obvious now that any Google user will end up as an Android user (if it is not done yet).

Right now I am trying to find the best possible way to move and manage my agenda with Google Doc, Outlook, my phone… more on that later.

One more thought, I might be about to fully trust Google but I am still wondering if the monopol they are building up on the internet is not dangerous.

Cloud computing is crap but not for Washington DC

ReadWriteWeb: Google Apps Unseats Incumbent Microsoft Office in Washington, DC (via mfavez on twitter)

[…] Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, has decided to switch the District’s 38,000 employees from the installed Microsoft Office suite to the Web-based Google suite […]

This news comes only a few weeks after Richard Stallman (GNU founder) warned about Cloud Computing… Guardian: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman:

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control, it’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

Well an US government agency is using US company infrastructure… so far so good.

Should “cloud computing” becomes trendy, and it will, I wonder how non-gov companies are going to address that privacy issue and I wonder if Washington state would have done the same choice if Google was not an US company ?