Monthly Archives: March 2012

Infographics Stats On Cloud Computing

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[Infographics] Stats On Cloud Computing | TheTechJournal.

Key factors:

 

  • Worldwide Cloud based IT increasing 25% annually.
  • 52% business application adopting Cloud Technology.
  • So far only 8% server is Cloud based.
  • 73% believes Cloud Based technology will reduce IT costs.
  • 56% of internet user using Web mail service like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo.
  • Google Control 2% of all web server in this world.
  • Overall right now Cloud Computing is $100 Billion dollar business.

Infographics Credit Goes to HudsonYorke.com

 

Canadian Solar Inc. | manufacturer of silicon, ingots, wafers, cells, solar modules (panels) and custom-designed solar power applications

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A Canadian company that is one of the largest solar panel producers in the world are part of this international Green IT project.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/xiamen-university-partners-with-leading-technology-and-energy-providers-to-build-chinas-first-direct-current-microgrid-2012-03-19

Canadian Solar Inc. | manufacturer of silicon, ingots, wafers, cells, solar modules (panels) and custom-designed solar power applications.

Open data is the raw material of ‘new industrial revolution’ | Public Leaders Network | Guardian Professional

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Many cities, some countries, are moving towards open data.  Edmonton is leading in Canada http://data.edmonton.ca/, Calgary is getting started https://cityonline.calgary.ca/Pages/Home.aspx?redirect=/cityonline.  Canada has a pilot project http://www.data.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=F9B7A1E3-1 that is not very active or exciting or marketed yet.

The UK http://data.gov.uk/ and Australia http://data.gov.au/ seem to be leading.

Here’s a good article:

Open data is the raw material of ‘new industrial revolution’ | Public Leaders Network | Guardian Professional.

Canada Ranks at Top of Innovation

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WASHINGTON (March 8, 2012) – In the midst of intense global competition for innovation supremacy among countries, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation released today one of the most comprehensive assessments ever undertaken of countries’ innovation policies. The Global Innovation Policy Index benchmarks the effectiveness of the innovation policies of 55 countries – including virtually all EU, OECD, APEC and BRIC economies – and provides a framework for making effective policies.

Canada and Singapore rank highest across seven policy indicators; the United States excels in all categories except high-skill immigration

Report here http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/kauffman-foundation-and-itif-unveil-global-innovation-policy-report-ranking-55-nations-capacities-for-economic-growth.aspx

Cloud Culture, Privacy & Security

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Day 2 of the national cloud conference’s morning panel on corporate change was the most entertaining and thought-provoking for me. A big discussion was whether to start a separate group with cloud skills and migrate the enterprise to the new group, or on the other hand, to have champions within the existing structure. It was felt that the cloud is a new way of doing business, definitely not just a new technology.

Some of my tweets from the conference:

“bite the elephant one bite at a time” = transition to the #cloud is a journey, good IT, once on the journey will never look back

If IT doesn’t provide it, then the users will go around IT -> reason IT depts must move to #cloud

Winners are often pioneers, but most pioneers fail – First mover paradox. Canada can still be first mover in #cloud

The #cloud is the perfect storm. It is not hype. It will deliver faster, cheaper, better

Bring your own device is the new way of business and security has to deal with it

Public clouds may in fact be more secure than private #clouds as they have the best IT expertise and it is their core business

Canadian Cloud Computing Conference Day 1

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I am taking a break at the first Canadian Cloud Council conference in Edmonton that runs March 12-13.  I was a big part of organizing this, along with 4 other members of a somewhat grassroots effort to create a vendor-neutral forum for cloud providers and users from a Canadian perspective for mutual benefit.  cCc web site is www.candiancloudcouncil.ca

I used a lot of cloud-based tools to help me organize this distributed team.

RegOnline – is a Software as a Service program that supports online conference registrations and credit card payments, and badge printing and email followups and surveys.  I would not want to do a conference without this.

Google Docs – we shared some checklists and informtion using Google spreadsheets and some uploads.  We did not use this a lot.

Dropbox – for some big graphics files for the printers, we used DropBox.

Salesforce – we had access to a 10-person version of this, but have not set it up to use it for anything yet.

We are forming a national not-for-profit and will create a cloud-supported virtual organization.

Email – the great consolidator

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Email is still the standard communications channel for most people I know.

I’ve ranted about this elsewhere recently in a discussion on collaborative tools. It seems to me that despite the proliferation of social media and collaboration tools, a lot of communications are done via email.  Whether it is blog or discussion summaries, or sharing files, many people say, “send it to me by email”. At least this is what I experience.

But my 18 year old son, is not so email-centric. His communication channel of choice is SMS from his phone or online texting, I think, not talking on the phone or composing or reading emails or blogs. I should ask him what he thinks about email.

That is sort of why I started this SoManySites blog in the first place – there were so many sites that I had to visit every day. I started looking for a “site consolidator” See the post https://somanysites.com/2012/02/16/14-personalized-homepages-compared-feature-by-feature/ but still, none of them do what I want, which is to collect all of my communications in one place.

Email seems to be the great consolidator – most people’s main channel for information.

So, for those of you who want to follow my blog by email, just click on “Follow” on the top of the WordPress menu bar at the top of the blog.  But I’m not sure that anyone wants a feed of my wanderings through cyberspace…. so you can also set the Email Delivery Settings to only get a summary daily or weekly.

Avatars Blavatars Favicons

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So I once was a techie but am now mostly a manger.  But I really like the challenge of figuring things out technically.  That’s partly why I have this blog, so I can learn WordPress and other interesting tools.

WordPress is the most popular tool for creating web sites.  It’s free for a yourblognamehere.wordpress.com blogging site and is *fairly* easy to get started for a person with some computing or word processing or html background, I think – what do you think?  How techie do you have to be to set up your own wordpress blog site?  Anyways, I digress (a lot (sometimes very far from where I started) (where were we?) oh, I remember).  It is not easy to customize much, though, unless you are really a techie.  And I’m not so much.

But, some things can be done fairly easily, like changing your favicon which is the little picture that shows up on you browser tab beside the name of the site.  Hey – I even created a transparent favicon for my grokiam.com site – that was a nice little piece of techier geekdom on my part IIDSSM IMHO.

So, if you want to know how to change your favicon in WordPress, go here Blavatars.