Elastra today unveiled an updated cloud strategy that aims to tackle one of the biggest challenges of cloud computing: How to move applications smoothly between in-house infrastructure and clouds like Amazon’s EC2. If the strategy works, it could pave the way for so-called “hybrid clouds,” those that combine on-demand capacity with in-house compliance. Continue »

When Google first released App Engine as a “Preview Release” last April, developers had relatively little computing power. Only a few apps got Google’s permission to grow beyond the free computing quotas, including BuddyPoke, Lingospot, Mentalfloss and Giftag.com. Now, the company’s going to start charging for its App Engine cloud platform. That’s welcome news for early adopters of the cloud computing platform, because even if they have to pay, they’ll now have access to the company’s vast computing resources. Continue »

Microsoft is hoping people will use Photosynth to document the inauguration. In partnership with CNN, they’re asking people to upload 1-3 pictures, no more than 10MB each, and email them. The result will be a three-dimensional record of the event.

That’s a lot of data. Having millions of people with cameras taking a picture at the same time gives Photosynth a lot to work with. I’m going to make an educated guess how much.

There are around 2 million people going to the inauguration (an astonishing 0.6 percent of the entire population). Let’s assume that one-tenth of those people are in eyeshot of the event, having cameras whose pictures are a useful vantage point.

How big will those picture files be? Well, the cameras at the event have a wide range of resolutions (and file sizes), with modern cameras clocking in around 8MBytes. I’m going to assume around 800 KBytes, compressed, which is fairly typical from what I see on Flickr.

That’s 38 Gigabytes of pictures Photosynth could have to chew on if this project gets attention.

Think about it another way: If each person there with a camera takes 50 pictures, some 250 million images — around 18.6 terabytes of data — is going to make its way to Flickr, Picassa, and other cloud storage areas.

In other words, the inauguration may represent the greatest influx of user-generated content onto the Internet, in one day, ever.

Customer relationship management giant Salesforce.com just gobsmacked the fledgling community management industry with its launch of a customer support service called Service Cloud. While initially positioned as a tool for customer service, it also tracks interactions with various online communities.

This puts Salesforce on a collision course with community monitoring startups. After all, monitoring a conversation is one thing, but responding to it is another entirely — the domain of CRM, something Salesforce knows better than almost anyone else.

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Identi.ca’s plans to build an open-source alternative to Twitter got a vote of confidence this week with an investment from the VCs at Montreal Start Up. While the amount of the financing wasn’t disclosed, Montreal Start Up Managing Partner John Stokes said the firm invests between C$150,000 ($120,135) and C$400,000 ($320,329) per deal.

A bigger question is why microblogging companies are getting any investment at all. If Twitter can’t find revenues with the vast majority of market share, why would an open-source version make money? Continue »

Joyent today announced it has agreed to acquire Reasonably Smart, a fledgling cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git, for an undisclosed amount. While on the surface it might look like simple industry consolidation, Reasonably Smart’s technology will in fact help Joyent compete with emerging service-centric clouds while retaining an open model that makes developers comfortable.

You might think the deal is just cloud roll-up: Reasonably Smart was a very small startup. David Young, Joyent’s CEO, said the company–whose backers include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel– is in “a strong financial position that supports making strategic acquisitions.” Dig a bit deeper, however, and the deal is more than just a roll-up. Joyent gets an open platform with which to attract developers while preparing the company for the looming threat of Google and Microsoft.

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Until now, Google’s App Engine has been a great playground for coders: Everyone gets a daily quota of computing resources to play with. But without understanding how pricing will work when you go beyond those quotas, it’s been harder to understand business models built on it. Today, however, Google has shown us how the pricing model will work.

The approach is similar to AdWords: You set a daily budget, and when your application exceeds its free quota for that day, additional capacity comes out of the budget. The cost is split across processing, storage and bandwidth.

It’s easy for Google to offer a free daily quota because App Engine isn’t built around virtual machines the way competitors like Amazon’s EC2 are: You’re not paying by machine, because there aren’t any machines. Competition from Google’s free quota model may encourage other clouds such as Amazon to introduce free cloud computing quotas for small-traffic applications; meanwhile, Google is carefully launching an ecosystem for developers to build and sell their cloud-based software.