Ashton Kutcher may be playing an internet entrepreneur on TV at the moment, but in real life he’s also one of the backers of Gidsy — a platform for hooking up consumers with people offering real-world experiences.

What does that mean? In practice, it’s a place where people sell their time giving tours, teaching, and much more. In Amsterdam, for example, a retired cop offers red light district tours. A London cab driver promises a tour of Harry Potter locations, and a course in Berlin offers to help people create their own sock monkeys. New York options range from walking tours to a lesson in “getting shit made in the USA.”

Basically, almost anything goes, and people seem to be lapping it up: the company only started operations in Berlin and Amsterdam around three months ago, and it’s already rolled out to San Francisco, London and New York.

Trust is crucial

Gidsy has a very simple business model, taking a 10 percent cut of what customers pay for their experiences. The rest goes to the person who’s offering up the activity, making Gidsy something of a micro-employment platform.

Like Airbnb and other services that bridge the divide between online and offline, Gidsy is largely based on trust. The service plugs into Facebook, making it reasonably identity-driven and the company holds fees in escrow — only releasing them to the seller after checking the customers got what they paid for. The flipside is that Gidsy also makes sure the vendor doesn’t have to collect the fees at the event. In theory, everyone’s protected.

The moneymen seem to be impressed. Kutcher’s involvement came along with seed funding from Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures, former Nielsen Entertainment CEO Peter Read and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, all in all totaling $1.2m.

Gidsy’s Dutch CEO, Edial Dekker, told GigaOM on Tuesday that experiences lined up for the LA launch will include a Cirque du Soleil veteran teaching you how to breathe fire.

“We’re super excited to be launching in LA and can’t wait to see for which activities Gidsy will be used. It’s really interesting to see that every city has unique offerings that show a glimpse of what the city itself is like,” Dekker said.

In the future, he added, Gidsy aims to go as global as possible, taking in whole regions and branching out to support more currencies. The company also wants to add geo-search capabilities, to make it easier for people to find interesting local experiences.

“Next to the city launches, we’ve been working on a new way for organizers to offer activities through Gidsy, and we’re incredibly excited about this one,” he said. “Launching in LA brings us one step closer to a global community.”

Other LA Gidsy experiences will include a Hollywood sign hike and a course in how to avoid buying processed condiments ever again. Would it be too much to ask to have Kutcher giving a $15 studio tour?

Photograph of Edial Dekker used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Opendata Network

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It has been some time since WikiLeaks stunned the world with classified video of U.S. military attacks on civilians in Iraq and thousands of secret diplomatic cables — revelations that triggered an all-out attack on founder Julian Assange by the U.S. government, which roped in Amazon and other companies as accomplices. On Sunday, the shadowy organization announced what it called an “extraordinary” new release of information: namely, a cache of several million emails from the security-consulting firm Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting). But the nature of the emails and WikiLeaks’ new partnership with the hacker collective Anonymous raise some pointed questions about the future relevance of the organization.

The rise of WikiLeaks, led by the almost mythical figure of Assange, has been something straight out of a science fiction novel. A global organization made up of hackers and borderline anarchists, aided by freedom-of-information advocates like Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir and activist/hacker Jacob Appelbaum, releases a massive trove of military and governmental documents and video, which it obtains from a courageous whistle-blowing former military intelligence analyst (Bradley Manning, who has now been in prison on espionage charges for more than 18 months).

The military information that WikiLeaks released, including video of U.S. military aircraft killing civilians in Iraq, shocked the nation and the world, but the follow-up to that release was somewhat less of a blockbuster in intelligence terms. The thousands of diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks published — with the help of the New York Times and the Guardian newspaper, among other partners in the mainstream media — drew criticism because some argued they might put U.S. agents or foreign activists at risk, but for the most part, there was little of real and urgent value in most of the cables.

While some of WikiLeaks’ partners published cables that showed U.S. diplomatic sources thought Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi was a loud-mouthed idiot with a penchant for voluptuous blonde nurses, this was hardly a revelation for most who have followed events in that country. Some of the cables referring to events in the Middle East were cited as a trigger for the uprisings in Tunisia that precipitated the Arab Spring demonstrations in that country, but others argued that those links were a stretch and that the cables were not crucial intelligence information in most cases.

So far, the Stratfor emails seem underwhelming

Now WikiLeaks has millions of emails from Stratfor, a security-consulting firm that works with corporate clients and also has ties to the U.S. government. While it may make the release of these emails seem more interesting, it seems like a stretch to describe Stratfor as being “somewhat akin to a privatized CIA,” as Wired magazine has called it. The company is known to have ties to the U.S. military intelligence establishment, as the release from WikiLeaks makes clear, but there doesn’t seem to be much that qualifies as a smoking gun in the email dump (although WikiLeaks and its media partners are apparently still combing through them).

When it comes to partners, WikiLeaks is no longer working with any leading U.S. or British newspapers as it did earlier — a development that probably isn’t surprising, given the kind of enmity that people like former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller clearly still have for Assange. Instead, the list of partners includes outlets like Al Akhbar in Lebanon, Bivol in Bulgaria and La Nación in Costa Rica. In the U.S., the organization said it is working with the McClatchy newspaper chain and with Rolling Stone magazine. Not exactly a who’s who of mainstream media sources, in other words.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has an interesting new non-media partner in Anonymous, the hacker collective that arose out of the anarchic online community 4chan and has a history of both releasing classified information (including internal documents from the Church of Scientology) and targeting corporations and governments with hack attacks. The two groups clearly share similar goals, and Anonymous has used its massive “denial of service” attacks to bring down websites run by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and others that cut off payments to WikiLeaks after it released classified documents.

Is the partnership with Anonymous a sign WikiLeaks is weakening?

But does moving away from media partners like the New York Times and partnering with a group like Anonymous mean WikiLeaks is gaining strength or losing it? While journalism professor Jay Rosen called the organization the first “stateless media entity,” much of the publicity it gained came through existing outlets like the NYT and the Guardian. Will McClatchy and Rolling Stone, or La Nación and Malaysia Today, serve the same purpose? And the partnership with Anonymous may make sense, but it almost feels like Anonymous is taking the lead role now, as WikiLeaks’ dominance continues to weaken.

Foreign Policy magazine columnist and author Evgeny Morozov has argued for some time that WikiLeaks is disintegrating, thanks in part to the legal issues around Assange (who is still fighting extradition over rape charges in Sweden) but also to what some former collaborators say is the WikiLeaks’ founder’s difficult personality and desire for power. And Anonymous may be on the rise now, but it suffers from different issues, including what appears to be a lack of any organized power structure. That may make it more flexible and difficult to target, but it could also arguably blunt its effectiveness.

Attempts to duplicate WikiLeaks’ success, meanwhile, haven’t really taken off. OpenLeaks, which was started by a former colleague of Assange’s who left the organization, has yet to have much obvious impact, and mainstream media attempts at setting up WikiLeaks-style platforms for leaks at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere also seem to have been largely ineffective. Could it be that WikiLeaks was a unique event produced by the chance combination of Assange and Manning? And if so, is the world better off without WikiLeaks, or did it serve a purpose that others should be trying to fill?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users New Media Days and jphilipg

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Profit margins of Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Home Depot and Apple over the past decade.

Mobile ubiquity, in turn, has led to “showrooming,” where consumers use their nearby retailer as a personal testing ground to try before they buy — and as often as not, make a purchase on Amazon instead of at the retail store. And broadband is transforming entire categories of products (music, video, books) that were once exclusively analog to digital, and boundary-less.

Obviously, the game has permanently changed for brick-and-mortar retailers (see Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn’s recent letter), and companies must evolve to survive.

I’d argue that offline retail stores have three primary paths to avoid extinction (note: my first career was in retail real estate asset management).

1. The first, and least appealing, is to compete on price. The hard truth is that in the age of the connected consumer, the real cost of a product is transparent. In the most commoditized of segments, this means that retailers have to live within Walmart (3.4 percent) or Amazon (less than 3 percent) profit margins, or they will die.

This is an incredibly challenging strategy to execute over the long-haul. Even at low-margin price points, consumers expect educated pre-sales service, functional post-sales support and seamless logistics from store to home.

2. The second path is to embrace a store-within-a-store model, where retailers focus on a few key product lines. With this approach, retailers and manufacturers work hand-in-hand to ensure that their products are meaningfully differentiated from the competition and that sales personnel are trained to articulate these differences.

Target is beginning to experiment with this via two different avenues. One is to work with Apple to create mini-Apple stores within Target locations, with a goal of tapping into everyday consumers who might not otherwise be looking for electronics. And under the name The Shops at Target, the company has partnered with specialty boutiques to co-create affordable, limited-edition collections.

3. The last path is to focus the totality of the business on creating products and experiences that are proprietary and unique. This, of course, is the Apple story. Apple focuses every fiber of its being on transformative solutions that blend design, development and distribution.

There are numerous innovation strategies that retailers can pursue on this path. For example, creative marketplaces like Kickstarter and Etsy could evolve into R & D farms for retailers. The upstarts get symbiotic funding, incubation, distribution and joint marketing, and the retailer gets exclusivity and a low-cost way to seed R & D.

Retailers can also build brand loyalty by retooling their manufacturing processes so that consumers can participate in product creation. Nike is doing some amazing things with their Nike ID system, which helps people design their own custom shoes and updates customers as their shoes are being made.

By perennially thinking beyond conventional wisdom about product categories and logistical boundaries, Nike has grown its stake of consumer mindshare, and it’s done so profitably through differentiation.

Applying this same ethos, retailers can optimize their entire supply-chain to achieve real-time agility within the markets they serve. With this approach, companies produce smaller lot sizes, tailor their inventory to suit local geographies and change inventory as rapidly as tastes change.

This strategy has served fashion retailer Zara extremely well. Zara’s “fast fashion” model has been a game-changer for the company, enabling new designs to move from the catwalk to its stores in two weeks (the industry average is four to six months). This helps Zara stay in sync with the latest fashion trends, and the new designs create a sense of exclusivity. The net effect is that 85 percent of their clothes sell at full-retail price, and the company now sees dramatically higher return visits by customers.

The critical point here is that each of these approaches goes way beyond platitudes about “delivering better customer service.” Instead, each path focuses on innovation, integration and extension to deliver a retail experience that is more than the sum of its parts.

Mark Sigal is an eight-time entrepreneur, whose ventures have sold to Apple, IBM and Intel. He is chief product officer at Unicorn Labs, an eBooks and eLearning platform provider.

Carousel image courtesy of Flickr user teofilo.

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The big picture is that as the network becomes the pipeline running through modern society, his company stands to gain — if he can mange the transitions.

Lucky for Cisco, it’s not like the transition to an all-IP world connected by networks is a sudden shift. Change is happening in waves, and Chambers hopes to take advantage of as many waves as he can. Already, Cisco has managed to successfully predict and deliver products for the transition to video on consumer and corporate networks. In four years, Chambers believes video will dominate corporate communications — and even IT.

I’ve whittled down the 90-minute discussion into three key takeaways (and reported earlier on why Cisco didn’t buy Skype) that our readers will find most interesting. The topics range from the failure of the Flip buy to Cisco’s plans for the data center. Let’s begin in the home.

The changing set-top-box market.

Cisco is not, I repeat, not selling the set-top box business it purchased in 2005 when it paid $7 billion for Scientific Atlanta. Chambers denied it at least three times during the call, but he also said that in five years, he’s not sure content from service providers will be delivered from a box. Instead, it will be all done in the cloud.

Cisco's home videoscape product.

On it’s face, that seems like an admission that the set-top box is headed for the scrap heap, but Chambers is right that service providers are not going to give up on boxes inside their subscriber’s homes. None of the executives inside telcos or cable companies are eager to provide a pipe into the home, they all want some kind of hardware to ensure a device where they can deliver software, services and any other value add that will help them stay above the commodity pipe business. The only question is will that box be a modem, set-top-box or a residential gateway. Whatever it is, Cisco will be happy to provide it.

Speaking of the cloud, Cisco has a (secret) plan there too.

Chambers was mum on his plans to address the dual threat of an entirely new data center customer that cares mostly about price and scaling out, as opposed to the nifty software and plug-and-play aspects of Cisco’s UCS gear. He was also pretty quiet on the looming threat of software-defined networks, although he pointed out that Cisco is a member of the Open Networking Foundation and will support Open Flow. However, the real threat of Open Flow and SDNs is that they will undermine Cisco’s architecture play.

Cisco's UCS server.

In the data center, Chambers emphasized the customer wins at service providers (about 45 percent of the customers) and Fortune 500 companies. Cisco is betting that a system that goes from chip-based to software and services will win out. So far it’s doing well, but I also think it’s missing out on the next big wave of growth in the server market — companies like Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo that buy their servers by the racks (and even by the data center) as opposed to by the box.

Those companies are trying out merchant silicon in switches such as those sold by Arista, or even lower-level gear from the likes of companies like Huawei or Quanta. Chambers’ response to the rise of merchant silicon and commodity boxes is to bring on the ASICs. That’s right, Cisco plans to keep designing its own chips as part of its architecture play — but it also plans to design them faster. When I asked Chambers to go deeper into this, he declined.

It’s possible a custom ASIC could bring value to Cisco, even in the webscale world, if used a little bit more strategically. For example, SeaMicro is a hot startup in the server space because it’s building a box that could replace 500 machines from five years ago and run at 96 percent of the power. SeaMicro can do this because it has developed its own ASIC to handle the networking inside that box.

When I pointed this out, and asked if Cisco could deliver a fundamental rethink of its ASIC to deliver that type of functionality, Chambers said he wasn’t willing to discuss this further, so as not “to let all his competitors know where Cisco was going.”

But M&A is in the air.

Chambers seemed frustrated that no one asked about Cisco’s recent announcement that it planned to start buying other companies. He didn’t really offer any insights about who or what he wanted to buy, but on Friday Cisco announced the planned acquisition of LightWire, a company that makes an optical transceiver.

He also acknowledged Cisco’s mistaken efforts to get into the consumer market with the Pure Digital acquisition (otherwise known as the Flip camera buy.) He said when his team realized the deal wasn’t working, they quickly decided to shut it down, and did so, which is possibly the best way to spin a $590-million mistake.

Indeed, Chambers appeared to be the master of being able to admit his mistakes, and then spinning them quickly to an asset. Whether it was his ability to recognize quickly that the $590 million buy of Flip wasn’t going to work or his realization that an effort to change the pricing and product mix on switches led to a sudden drop in margins that he has since fixed, Chambers hasn’t met a market transition he couldn’t either see coming or fix in retrospect with quick action or an acquisition.

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Earlier this week Nielsen released a study that found just about a third of smartphone users turn to their device for shopping-related activities. The study, conducted during the third quarter of 2011, gives a good picture of how we’re using smartphones in stores. One thing the study highlights is that while not everyone is using their phone in this way, many more would like to.

Below I’ve combined Nielsen’s results with a primer on how you can get in on the trend of being a savvy shopper with your iPhone specifically using apps that are available in Apple’s Apple Store.

38 percent are comparison pricing aka “showrooming”

Nielsen found that 38 percent of survey respondents use their smartphone for comparison shopping while in a physical store. This is encouraged by online retailers, and last holiday season Amazon gave a 5 percent discount on certain products to users who scanned retail items using the Amazon app. Big box stores like Target are annoyed by this new trend, however — so much so that they are asking manufacturers to modify their product offerings to prevent comparison shopping.

As a consumer, I love the ability to find the best price for an item so long as I am willing to wait for it to ship. As a small business owner who works with other small businesses, I see this as driving revenue away from our local communities and hurting the local tax base. I try to shop local when possible, but to me, I see a big box “brick and mortar” and an online retailer as synonymous. When the bargain is good enough, it’s hard to resist.
If you want to get in the middle of this war between physical and online retailers, some of the top apps for comparison shopping are RedLaser, ShopSavvy, Google Shopper and Amazon’s Price Check. Both Red Laser and ShopSavvy also allow you to find an item locally, but ShopSavvy and Google Shopper provide reviews — which are the next most popular shopping-related activity we do with our phones. If you search online, you might want to stay away from the in-store Wi-Fi as it can show different prices since you could be redirected to an “internal” version of the website with slightly different pricing or be blocked entirely from a competitor. Use your 3G signal to play it safe and make sure your surfing isn’t being intercepted.

32 percent are reading online reviews of products

For more in-depth research, I found the Consumer Reports App lacking, and I prefer to access their website, which requires a separate paid subscription from the magazine (a discount is given to current print subscribers). Many of us like to know what the crowd thinks of a product rather than trusting a salesperson (after all, it’s in the job title to sell us something). Mobile phones are ideal for this, and 32 percent of us use our phones for product review research. Google Shopper and Amazon’s Mobile App make it easy to find what others have to say about millions of products. Amazon carries practically everything, so it’s the place I start for online reviews.

24 percent are searching for and using online coupons

We all want to save money, so why not use your iPhone? The king of coupons is Grocery iQ, owned by Coupons.com. If you regularly shop at a grocery store or other retailer, be sure to install their app as they often offer coupons or special sales directly via their app. Don’t assume coupons are just for the big retailers. Individual stores often have their own apps featuring coupons. Even groups like AAA offer discounts.

A hidden place for coupons and direct savings is check-ins via foursquare or Facebook. In particular, American Express has a program in which you check in via FourSquare to both small businesses and national chains to receive a discount. I use this quite often and can tell you it works. I get free cupcakes at my locally owned Cupcake Construction Company as well as national retailers like Whole Foods. If available in your area and where you shop, Shopkick is a great way to earn rewards and discounts.

22 percent are purchasing products

Whether it’s because the store is out of stock or the pricing is better online, shopping on your phone is fun and easy. It gives you instant gratification. A friend suggests a book to you at the coffee shop, you buy it right then and there. Your spouse tells you that the water filter needs replacing while you are waiting for a table at the restaurant. Bam. Problem solved. But considering this usefulness, this number is still rather low — 0nly 22 percent of the people who are using phones for shopping are actually making purchases.

What’s interesting to note is how this behavior changes when we’re talking about shopping on a tablet. Tablet shoppers are three times more likely to purchase an item compared to smartphone users, and they spend more, according to a recent study by Adobe.

A caution while shopping via a mobile device: because public Wi-Fi is unprotected, I use 3G while making purchases so nothing is intercepted. I’m also careful of prying eyes when pulling out my credit card. Read my article about how to keep your credit card number hidden in plain sight in your address book so you can cut and paste, keeping your card in the wallet.

To get an additional savings boost, use sites like dealnews.com and FatWallet to find discount codes and earn cash back for your online purchases.

18 percent are using location-based services to find a retail location

“Yes, we have no bananas” is a fun song, but a lousy thing for a clerk to say when you need bananas. Instead, by using Google Shopper or one of the other purchasing apps mentioned at the beginning of the article, you might be able to find the product locally or find other retailers that have it.

9 percent are paying via smartphone — but 71 percent are interested in paying via smartphone

Talk about a missed opportunity, in particular for the brick-and-mortars losing out to online retailers. NFC (near-field communications) has been discussed for a while for the iPhone, and Ryan Kim believes Apple could take the lead on this in the U.S. Meanwhile, Kevin Tofel is already using his Google Wallet and his Galaxy Nexus.

The closest thing we have currently to NFC on the iPhone is the Square Card Case, which merchants can use for seamless transactions via an app. I tried it out this weekend in St. Louis, and it really was a blast to say “put it on my tab!” The app uses your GPS location and the location of the merchant, and when you are close enough, it notifies the merchant of your presence. The only caveat is that the merchant must use Square’s popular credit card processing system.

So while we’re making progress in what kinds of activities we’ll do with our phones, we’re still a ways off from mainstream acceptance of the phone as a shopping tool and a payment tool. When you think about it, it’s odd that we fancy up our phones with fun cases and apps, but then we use our credit card the same way we always have since the 1950s. The Square experience comes close to modernizing this process — every merchant I know who uses Square, including myself, sees the giggles of glee and fascination when customers sign with their finger and have a receipt texted to them.

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But a Bay Area start-up is looking to come to the aid of retailers while still giving consumers a good deal and a reason to keep shopping in-store. Pricetector, which launched a beta price adjustment app and website called Savvy.com in November, is rebranding the company and service under the name Eyeona, as it looks to become an even more useful tool to both consumers and retailers. It also announced that it bought up SavvyCircle, a another shopping service which it will use to add more wish list and price notification features to its product.

Eyeona, based in Los Gatos, Calif., takes its names from the idea that consumers like to keep an “eye on a” product, whether it’s something they want to buy in the future or something they’ve bought in the past and want to make sure they got the best deal on. The service, under the name Savvy.com, has gotten the most notice for its ability to do price adjustments for consumers, helping alert them when a product they recently bought from a supported retailer has lowered the price and will offer price adjustments.

The service has signed up 100,000 users since launching and has helped alert consumers to $3 million in potential savings. It has also increased the number of retailers it signed up to 110 merchants, including Neiman-Marcus, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lens Crafters and Barnes & Noble. It’s available on iOS and Android apps and though a website.

Eyeona will continue to be a way for consumers to find the best prices on products they already bought. Users can take a picture of a receipt of a product from a supported retailer or email an online receipt to Eyeona and if it goes on sale within a certain amount of time, Eyeona will alert users who can go back into a store and get paid the difference. The company is now piloting a program that lets retailers automatically send out gift cards for the amount of a price adjustment to users, even if they don’t come into the store. It’s also poised to announce a deal to roll out its services to a membership organization with 2 million members.

In addition, it’s also working on a building out its “deal maker”  and “watch list” features with the addition of the SavvyCircle acquisition. Previously, users were able to scan the barcode of a product they wanted to buy and Savvy would alert them when the price hits a certain point that they’ve previously indicated they were willing to pay.  They were also able to keep a list of items they wanted to buy and Savvy would alert them when they went on sale. Now, Eyeona will incorporate SavvyCircle’s more personalized wish lists and the ability to share items through social channels.

The goal, said Paul Patterson, co-founder of Eyeona, is to help retailers build a stronger relationship with consumers and provide retailers with more tools to address a consumer’s need for better prices and more service. He said while many first generation shopping apps were aimed at sticking it to retailers, he said Eyeona is positioned to bridge the gap between merchants and consumers.

“Retailers need to be competitive but what they’re realizing is consumes are not just focused 100 percent on price; it’s relevant but they also need to up their game and service level,” said Patterson .”Eyeona is a way to up their game and service level and give consumers the view you can trust them, because they’ll be proactive in engaging consumers to reduce costs.”

He said while shopping apps like RedLaser and ShopSavvy have often been the enemy for some retailers and have helped divert sales to Amazon, they can also be a way to build back trust and loyalty between retailers and consumers.

I like the Eyeona’s approach and its recognition that retailers need a way to fight back against the rising tide of mobile-enabled shoppers using their stores as show rooms. Eyeona can help consumers feel better about the purchases they make in store and not worry as much about losing out on a better deal online. More importantly, it’s establishing that retailers are willing to forgo some profit to better their relationship with consumers. That can ultimately help foster a stronger bond between a retailer and a customer and encourage more in-store shopping in the future.

Retailers are desperately trying to figure out how to handle the rise of what Om calls the smart buyer – one who is armed with a smartphone and shopping apps. Pew recently reported that half of U.S. shoppers rely on phones for in-store research. Eyeona is emerging as an attractive tool for retailers to help beat back the assault of shopping apps. But more importantly, it’s showing retailers that they need to use mobile and social technology to help establish a better rapport with consumers. They may not be able to beat online prices on many occasions but if they show some effort to better cater to consumers, they can keep many transactions from disappearing. Pew found that among shoppers who conducted online price research, 35 percent still bought the product in the store while 19 percent purchased online. If a retailer can provide some convenience, a competitive price and a willingness to work with consumers, they can stay competitive in this age of the smart buyer. Eyeona is providing one way to do that.

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What the company promises here is wide deployment choice for companies that want to build internal private clouds for security or other reasons or want to put all or part of their workloads into a public cloud.

As a systems integrator with a global presence, Dimension Data or DiData, can boast geographic coverage that gives it an advantage over other cloud providers. “We do about $5.8 billion a year and have 14,000 employees — we have the wherewithal to serve customers all over the world,” said Keao Caindec, CMO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit. (Dimension Data is a Johannesburg, South Africa-based subsidiary of NTT Holdings.)

Dimension Data Cloud Services layer OpSource’s software know-how atop EMC storage, VMware virtualization, Cisco networking and Dell servers, Caindec said.

The platform is managed by Dimension Data’s Cloud Control which provides the workflow orchestration, resource provisioning, and billing. A service administration layer does all the metering, sets the permissions and enforcement.

These cloud services hit a market that is rapidly filling up with cloud computing options. Just last week, EMC — which already backs the VCE company that bundles EMC storage, VMware and Cisco UCS servers — said it would team up with a VMware and Atos, a French IT giant with global presence, on Canopy, another wide-ranging cloud services initiative. And, another tech triumvirate – Cisco, VMware and NetApp — offer a FlexPod hardware-software bundle that competes with the VCE’s Vblock offerings.

The biggest webscale clouds — the prototypes of which are run by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Zynga — tend to deploy commodity “scale-out” hardware. That trend leaves premium vendors — EMC, Cisco, NetApp — looking for ways to embed their pricier hardware in cloud deployments. Hence all the joint efforts. Last week it was Canopy, this week DiData, stay tuned for more.

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Kamala Harris worked with Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft, and Research in Motion on what appears to be a formal agreement to help app developers comply with an already existing California law that requires them to have privacy policies. The main change is that the six companies responsible for the vast majority of app downloads in the U.S. must now provide app developers with a way to link to an app’s privacy policy on their own Web sites or insert the text of the policy within the app. But the statement released by Harris’ office was “not intended to impose legally binding obligations on the (mobile companies).”

It’s hard to imagine the new agreement having too much of an effect on mobile privacy. Even if “the majority” of mobile apps lack privacy policies (per Harris’ office), the majority of those downloading apps blow right past those privacy policies in order to install their new toy. Those who do read the policies are in store for some of the finest legalese yet created as to hide as much as possible the notion that free apps depend on the collection of personal data. Having a policy is much better than not having a policy, but greater emphasis on making those policies easier to understand would be appreciated.

Harris’ agreement stops short of pinpointing specific uses of personal information that might harm consumers, but it does make it easier for app developers to post policies and for consumers to report violations of those policies, so it’s probably better than nothing. The AG’s press release said the parties will reconvene in six months, at which point there will likely have been yet another incident along the lines of Path’s address-book snafu that drew widespread attention.

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Distimo said that of the top 110 apps that appear in both the  Android Market and Amazon Appstore, 42 of them make more money on Amazon than on Android Market. Overall, 28 percent of the revenue in those top apps came from the Appstore. That’s a big showing for an Appstore that is less than one year old and has 26,826 available applications, compared to more than 400,000 worldwide for Android Market, according to Distimo.

Amazon Appstore is turning out to be a great place for paid app downloads, compared to Android Market which monetizes better through in-app purchase. Distimo said paid apps in Appstore made up 65 percent of all apps, while the percentage of paid apps in Android Market has slipped from 38 percent to 32 percent over the last seven months. Of the top 200 grossing Android Market apps, 66 percent of the revenue comes from in-app purchases.

The rise of Amazon Appstore is due in large part to the emergence of the Kindle Fire, which has been a major accelerant for Appstore and is now used more than any other Android tablet. In December, the total number of downloads generated by the top 100 apps in the Appstore increased fourteen-fold compared to two months earlier. While Android Market generated 22 times more new apps than the Appstore in September last year, by December and January, the number of new apps on Amazon had surged, cutting the Market’s advantage for new apps to about 5-1.

The fact that paid app downloads are bigger proportionately on Amazon than on Android Market may be due in part to Amazon’s pricing controls. One of the key differences between the two stores is that Amazon can change the price of apps, a provision that concerned some app makers. That control has apparently resulted in the average price of the top 100 paid applications in Amazon Appstore being 40 percent lower than in the Market. The average price of the top 100 applications is $3.76 in Google’s Android Market and $2.24 in Amazon Appstore. The game Monopoly, for example, was available for 99 cents in Appstore for a limited time last month, compared to a fixed price of $4.99 for the whole month in the Market. Amazon’s simple one-click check-out process and its overall reputation for commerce may also be driving paid downloads.

One interesting fact that emerged is that about 50 percent of Amazon’s apps don’t appear in Android Market, said Distimo. That suggests that, while many app makers are simply porting over their apps from Android Market to Amazon Appstore, a big number of apps are bypassing the Market and going straight to Amazon. It’s unclear if this is just Kindle-versions of established Android apps, but it still suggests that developers are making specific investments in Amazon apps.

The strong showing by Amazon Appstore appears to back up early anecdotal evidence I gathered in December, in which a number of Android developers reported seeing a big boost for paid app downloads on Appstore. It’s pretty amazing considering that a big proportion of these downloads is coming from just one device: the Kindle Fire. Appstore also provides apps for other Android devices, but it’s really shining because it’s the app store for Fire owners. Appstore benefits in some ways from its smaller base of apps, which makes discovery easier for users, who don’t have to wade through as many options. It will be interesting to see if Amazon can still remain as lucrative if its appstore attracts a lot more apps.

Overall, what this means for Android developers is that, if they’re looking to make money from paid downloads, they really need to think about Amazon Appstore. The work to submit an app to Amazon increasingly looks like a solid bet. And it may make sense for developers to look at the Fire as its own distinct platform. Android Market still has the largest reach compared to Appstore, which is still limited to the U.S. But more and more, we’re seeing how the Kindle Fire is providing an outsized impact on the Android ecosystem, which has gained a pretty potent way to make money from Android apps.

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