Apple’s iPhone, Motorola’s Droi
d, Google’s Nexus One, the much anticipated Apple iSlate, and of course, the one that started the smart phone craze—the Blackberry. These are just some of the many tech devices that suddenly a majority of us can’t live without. In a country where the concept of fast food was born, and later spread throughout the world, it is no surprise that America loves the speed and immediacy of smart phones. Nowadays, even a laptop seems slow (seriously, who wants to wait for it to load the home screen?) when you can browse the net with the swipe of a finger and receive your news as it happens through Twitter. With the smart phone becoming an essential rather than a luxury and social gaming and social media permeating all businesses, 2010 promises to be a great year for the tech industry.
Every year, San Francisco-based law firm Morrison Foerster surveys its lawyers from the US, Europe, and Asia regarding the current state of the world’s outsourcing markets and emerging trends that will most probably shape the market over the next year. This year, the spotlight was on the tech industry, as lawyers made predictions about cloud computing. This of course is no surprise, because of social networking. It has become a major trend in the tech industry, is in all aspects including marketing and gaming, and it’s all cloud based. In social media everything is in a shared network and because of its commonalities with cloud computing, the two are slowly but surely intersecting . Together social media and cloud computing are slated to be the big movements in the web 2.0 space.
The firm expects cloud computing-the return to centralized processing-to become even more important this year, especially with major providers like IBM, Google, and Microsoft offering attractive desktop deals. The internet will be used to distribute services to multiple customers and 2010 will be the first year in which cloud computing will have a real role in procurement decisions. They mark cloud computing as a “global trend” and predict that the Cloud will become more important as companies realize they can achieve significant cost savings by exploring this option. But the key question hindering this prediction is: can anyone really define what “the cloud” means?
In an attempt to answer it, I am posing my own questions: what does “cloud computing” mean to you? What role do you think it has in 2010 and how big of a role is the social media trend playing in this return to cloud-computing?
January 26th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Cloud computing is an evolutionary vehicle that accelerates discovery and global interconnections. However, in the historical context, the “cloud” emulates man-made catalysts such as the interstate highway system or the Panama canal. All three have broken down barriers to discovery, freedom and passions that foster societal progress.
2010 will see our world’s torrential demand for information that can be delivered, discussed, deciphered via multiple venues and spectrums…… Key: This interchange of ideas has to accessible 7×24.
Well managed Cloud resources to maintain data availability will be critical for social media sites; to continue to dredge canals of communication.