You are Never Alone

A special report from The Economist argues that the cloud is already here. We have seen its early manifestations in Google and the applications it has spawned, and the cloud is here to stay.

In some ways the cloud is already hanging in the sky, especially for consumers. According to a recent study, 69% of Americans connected to the web use some kind of “cloud service”, including web-based e-mail or online data storage (see chart 2).

One of the commenters on the article said

Just wait until your milk bottle in the fridge tells the fridge, that tells the cloud, that your milk needs replacing, and your laptop, or mobile sees the message and adds it to the new shopping list … the possibilities are endless!

A line in the Yale Daily News caught my attention:

Suddenly, you’re no longer bound to your computer for simple tasks.

You are not restricted to an individual computer for the completion of a task. The fact that you have stored whatever it is that you are working on “in the cloud” means that when you get home, you can access it from your computer there, with the same login.

Today I discovered Cloud Trip: a free to use directory of cloud computing web sites. In reality it seems to be a directory of software offering either limited trial or genuinely free to use online applications. I think we are going to see more of these.

Finally, my last on the topic for a while:

Judy Breck on Cloud Computing at the MicroLearning Conference in 2008.
I had an interesting experience here.
There is a video of her presentation here:
http://www.vimeo.com/1254106
It’s not a good video because her presentation itself remains sort of in the background, and you can feel a bit disconnected.
But I also found the slide show itself at
http://www.goldenswamp.com/micro/breck08.html
On the presentation try clicking the little buttons on each slide for different and additional information. I found I needed both the video with its sound, and the slideshow to understand what she is talking about.
Do what I did: load the two sites in different browser tabs, pop your headphones on and listening to what she is saying and hop between the two screens.
You get a very practical demonstration of the potential of cloud computing.