“In its broadest sense, cloud computing describes something apparent to anybody who uses the Internet: Information is stored and processed on computers somewhere else — “in the clouds” — and brought back to your screen.

But no two clouds, apparently, are alike. A company’s backroom mass of servers and switches is cloudlike. So are social-networking sites like Facebook Inc., or the act of buying a book on Amazon. Some clouds, like Google’s email service, Gmail, are public. Others, like corporate networks, are closed to outsiders.”

“It’s something many iPhone owners have been waiting for since the iPhone first appeared 2 years ago. It was on again, off again, will they, won’t they?

Well, it seems they did. Sling has announced that SlingPlayer for iPhone has been submitted to the app store for approval. The company had previously said the app would be submitted this quarter, and it’s in just under the wire.”

Worth listening to if you live in San Francisco and have kids

"…in pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn't view them as competition. "We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort," he says. "

Mr. Stone says Twitter recently hired a product manager to oversee the development of commercial accounts. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee, but Mr. Stone says Twitter hasn't set a launch date for them.

Twitter continues to creep into the enterprise

"I believe that more standardization leads to more agility," John says. "SaaS allows us to say, 'This is good enough … for what we need.' So you don't end up with these horrible situations where you have these highly customized systems. We go with [configuration] option A, B or C. If one of those three doesn't meet our need, we can try to influence the next release. But in most cases, A, B or C is going to meet the need."

"TwitterHawk allows you to automatically send tweets to people based on key words. Guy gives an example of someone tweeting about “fashion week” and TwitterHawk sending that person a tweet directing them to the Fashion page on Alltop"

"With roots in computer clustering and grid computing, the technology that first sprouted during the ASP era of the late 1990s is now the computing topic du jour. There's understandable reason for the excitement but advocates of cloud computing now have to battle the inevitable hype that attends any major technology shift."