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As one of the head counselors of Energy Camp (Tom Raftery of Greenmonk fame is the other; blog, Twitter), I pay pretty close attention to anything colored green; green organizations, green initiatives, green events, green vendor programs, green news, etc. It was only after the last Energy Camp at Interop in Las Vegas that it dawned on me why the overall green movement gets only pockets of traction, and what we should do about it. Hopefully, someone in Obama's administration is listening.

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Love it or hate it, YouTube has become the de facto video presentation portal for, well, everyone. Now comes some worried discussion about what format YouTube may support when HTML 5 and its <video> tag make their debut.

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Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandanavian Airlines (SAS) and author of the bible on customer satisfaction (Moments of Truth) would be rolling his eyes right about now if he could have heard the telephone conversation I just had with a US Air. I've just learned that despite holding a US Air-issued Dividend Miles card (pictured below) in my hand (the one to which I've been applying my last 15+ years of US Air travel), I am a figment in US Air's imagination. Neither I nor any miles I've traveled with the air carrier exist.

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Mozilla's Prism entered public beta testing on Friday, a milestone marking the software's readiness for general use and the convergence of local computing with the cloud.

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It's the week of May 4th and if you're down at RIM's annual user conference in Orlando, you might be wondering what some Google-folk are doing there circulating amongst all those BlackBerry-lovers. Answer: They're giving enterprises yet another reason to swap Google Apps' cloud-based email, calendaring, and contact management for their on-premises installations of Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. I've been testing the new technology and have a podcast interview with Google's Raju Gulabani.

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When not organizing all the world's information and making it universally accessible, Google can often be found not doing evil, in keeping with its unofficial motto.

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Mi5 Networks, which makes a Web security appliance, will be integrated into Symantec's product line later this year.

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At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with Apture CEO and founder Tristan Harris to "shoot" a ReviewCam movie of Apture's innovative cloud-based hyperlinking service that seems to automagically work with any content management system. What's special about Apture is how frictionlessly it adds new levels of context and depth when hyperlinking something (e.g.: text) in ways that the native CMS (egg: WordPress) could never do and it does this (a) by adding only a bit of Javascript to your templates and (b) without even having to go into your CMS's content authoring console. For end users of your content, the results are just as slick.

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I've been at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco all day "shooting" ReviewCams of sites and services that claim to fit into the Web 2.0 category. One such demo that I captured on video (see below) is essentially a search site that's designed for especially for people who are researching topics and who would prefer to have their search results organized in a way that's conducive to learning about some subject matter rather than just wading through pages of search results. Kosmix.com may be worth a try if you want to get smart about something in a hurry (instead of looking for a needle in a haystack).

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While working on the post that I just published about whether data that's stored in the cloud is really safe or not (answer: your mileage will vary), I came across a post from Michael Arrington that speculates on whether Google's forthcoming super secret announcement on April 7th is that Google's App Engine platform-as-a-service will support the Java programming language. Last week, during a cloud computing panel in NYC that I moderated (in front of an audience of Java developers), I asked Google App Engine product manager that exact question.

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Earlier this week, over on InformationWeek's sister site that's dedicated to Cloud Computing -- Plug into the Cloud -- George Crump asked a question that I thought I knew the answer to: Is data in the cloud risky? Crump points to a "recent report that the FTC is considering a request to shut down Google Apps." But after I got done laughing at such a waste of taxpayer money, I turned back to the seriousness of the question at hand.

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Probably not. But ROI is only one way to measure value. Here's an informal business case from EMC on the benefits.

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With no change to its business model or pricing (subscription-based support starting at $349 per server), Novell launched version 11 of it Linux distribution known as SUSE Enterprise Linux. For the first time, according to Novell officials, support is now available for running applications that were originally designed for Microsoft's .NET or Silverlight platforms. But, given how IT shops are starting to pinch pennies by moving to the cloud, must Novell change course?

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While at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference where Sun announced a pretty compelling entry into the cloud computing market (called the Sun Cloud, see the details and listen to the podcast), I caught up with Sun Cloud Computing CTO Lew Tucker who sat down with me to demo a GUI-based virtual datacenter deployment tool (all in a Web browser). Perhaps Sun should call it 4D; Drag, Drop, Deploy, and (voila!) Datacenter (in Sun's Cloud that is). I caught the entire thing on tape as one of our video ReviewCams (below).

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The Web is brewing with analysis of the news that IBM is in talks to buy Sun. Most of it covers the sensibility of IBM buying into Sun's existing businesses and customers. But, should IBM acquire Sun, it will also get a portfolio of cloud offerings that are being announced later today at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference in New York. Given the traction that cloud computing is getting and how IBM isn't viewed as a cloud player (by a long shot), an acquisition of Sun would instantly put IBM in the game against the likes of Amazon and Google with a new offering that actually packs quite a punch.

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Although she dodged the question at the end of my podcast interview (below), Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal can't help but think that history is going to repeat itself. Following Cisco's acquisition of Crescendo Networks in the '90s (where she worked), Ullal ended up working for Cisco for 15 years. Notwithstanding its newly announced Intel-based blade servers, Cisco usually prefers to buy than build. If everything Ullal says about Arista's 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and "the cloud's" appetite for them is true, she'll probably end up at Cisco again (by way of acquisition).

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Stealing a page from the playbook it used to launch the Liberty Alliance (and undermine Microsoft's Passport service in the process), Sun Microsystems' newly appointed cloud computing chief governance officer, Michele Dennedy, tells me in this podcast how she now has her sights set on forming a similar industry consortium for governance and privacy in the area of cloud computing. Additionally, Dennedy's appointment is one of many ducks that Sun is getting in a row as it gears up to make some allegedly blockbuster cloud computing announcements in New York City on March 18.

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Based out of Reston, Va., ScienceLogic CEO David Link is no Silicon Valley insider. He might as well be, though, because the technology that ScienceLogic has cooked up in the form of it's 7-in-1 EM7 data center management appliance is the sort of solution that usually requires a patchwork of solutions from the management titans normally associated with such functionality: BMC, CA, IBM, and HP.

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The satellite imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps is the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, which is to say that it's not protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.

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Web application security is of particular importance because so much of our digital life is spent interacting with Web applications. Lori MacVittie, technical marketing manager with F5 and former Network Computing senior technology editor, has spent years kicking the question of where application security belongs -- in the network or the application -- back and forth. But I want to draw a line in the sand: Don't depend on Web application firewalls to fix your software problems.

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There's been a persistent rumor circulating that Virtual Iron is about to be acquired, fueled in part by a recent Jefferies & Co. research report that said Oracle was interested in the virtualization startup. Why would Oracle, with its own Oracle VM, want a third-tier player in the virtualization market?

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If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to check out our first ever ReviewCam. Using video, the goal of our ReviewCams is to put you up close and personal with an editor's-eye-view of Web services or software.

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In this, our first ever "ReviewCam", Socialcast CEO founder Tim Young demos his company's namesake service while we're "rolling tape" on the demo. For $1 per user per month Socialcast offers its customers a private service that includes Twitter-style microblogging, Del.icio.us-style social bookmarking, and FriendFeed-style lifestreaming. But for brownie points, Socialcast also integrates with the actual Twitter, Del.icio.us, and other social networks like YouTube, Digg, Facebook, and Google Reader.

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Google wants you to use energy to save energy. In its latest scheme to save the planet, Google is asking anyone with a video camera to make and upload a video that illustrates the benefits of energy-efficient computing.

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In this, my second installment of Interop Insider, Cisco e-mail security group product manager Nick Edwards explains the company's newest foray into the cloud -- that of reproducing the e-mail security functionality found in the company's IronPort appliances as a cloud-based service offering. With Interop in Las Vegas just around the corner, I'll be publishing an entire series of Interop Insiders (each with a write-up and podcast interview) to give you an idea of what can be found at the show.

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Last week, I wrote about how the recent Gmail outage actually draws attention to why Gmail is more worthy of enterprises than it has ever been. That opinion stands in contrast to a story my colleague Antone Gonsalves recently published (see "Google Takes Credibility Hit With Gmail Outage"). My response: If you are currently insourcing your e-mail and, at the very least, not considering that system's replacement with Gmail, I want some of what you're smoking.

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John Herren, known by some for inventing TagCloud.com, is a talented developer who has spotted opportunity at the intersection of Twitter and what he calls "Web hooks." In a blog he posted earlier today, he offers some real-world examples of how easy it is to trap Twitter's e-mail notifications for events that can trigger any business process. The same could go for any site (eBay, Facebook, etc.). If there is such a thing as Web 3.0, he may have scratched its surface. Bigger picture: Could social networks like Twitter end-up disintermediated by open protocols?

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I've decided to start publishing a new series of podcasts that I'm calling Interop Insider. After all, in addition to publishing InformationWeek, TechWeb also is the producer of some great events like Interop. So, given that us InformationWeekers can get an inside track on what's happening with our sister events, why not jump on that track early and develop an audio series that can be heard over time, or piled in its entirety into your iPod for en-route (to Vegas) listening? My first guest for this episode? Interop head honcho Lenny Heymann.

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When it comes to running custom apps in the cloud, there are basically two architectures. One involves an IaaS (Intel-as-a-Service) provider like Amazon with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) where you load your own software stack onto Amazon's pay-as-you-go bare metal (virtual as it may be). The other is to develop your code to run on one of the platforms as a service (PaaS). One such PaaS is Salesforce.com's Force.com. Another is Google's App Engine, which had limitations on its usage because it was free. In this interview, App Engine Product Manager Pete Koomen discusses the business model for App Engine that Google announced yesterday.

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In this, my first "unboxing" video on InformationWeek, you'll see me unpackage an Amazon Kindle 2 straight off the UPS truck. Amazon had planned to ship the first round of Kindle 2's on Feb. 24. But they shipped a day early and I received my review unit yesterday. Here's a video from carton to Kindle 2.

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One reason Apple's Macs have consistently produced a pristine experience -- particularly when multiple Apple technologies are involved -- has to do with the degree to which Apple controls both the hardware and the software. It's also one of the reasons that the Mac is such a great multimedia workhorse. But judging by a great many posts across the Web and our experience here at InformationWeek, Apple has a serious problem with two technologies that should work flawlessly together: the iSight cameras that are built into Apple's MacBooks and QuickTime Pro's ability to whip out great, ad-hoc movies using that camera.

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Barely one month has passed since the folks at Google announced that users of Gmail would be able to access their in-boxes even though the Gmail servers themselves were inaccessible. For example, if (a) you have no Internet connectivity or (b) the Gmail service goes down. It was only a matter of time before a Gmail failure put the newly announced offline mode to the test. Although most of us here in the U.S. didn't notice, that test came yesterday, just as Europe's business cycle was getting under way.

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Google searches provide insight into the spread of the flu, so it's perhaps no surprise that they also reveal something about our ailing economy.

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Did you know that power issues come in separate flavors, and that you need different kinds of UPS systems to deal with different kinds of power problems?

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I've got a bunch of interesting jobs here at TechWeb. Some jobs have titles (currently, I've got three official titles). Others don't. One of my lesser known roles has to do with our video strategy across TechWeb's Web properties and events. I wore a similar hat when I worked for ZDNet and thanks to innovative video cameras like Panasonic's AG-HVX200, we were able to publish nicely produced video without sacrificing too much of the speed of blogging. But now, in an effort to move the ball forward again, I can't find the right camera (requirements below).

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And not an electric one. Today, thanks to yet another political inquiry, the White House disposed of all its technology (computers, smartphones, etc.). And thanks to some Draconian law dating back to 1908 (the same one preventing Congress members from parking their goats on Capitol Hill), President Obama and his team will have to rule the free world without the collaborative agility currently enjoyed by teenagers and terrorists alike. After all, that is how I read reports of clampdowns on everything from Obama's BlackBerry to his staffer's use of Gmail.

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Last week, after shooting my video coverage of the launch of Amazon's Kindle 2 in NYC, I sat down with O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly, who was producing the Tools of Change For Publishing Conference across town. The book publishing industry is going through a massive, and in some cases very painful, transition. In my podcast interview with O'Reilly (full transcription below), he discusses Amazon's decisions from his perspective as a book publisher, how this transition actually began centuries ago, and where it's going. Is it a case study that your industry can learn from?

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For tech titans, it's a time-honored ritual in the hi-tech business; Use your market "influence" to drive acceptance of your proprietary technology for as long as possible, until you have no other choice but to lift the proprietary veil (if only just a bit). By then, momentum is driving your success anyway. Such has been the path of Goliaths Microsoft and Apple. But it remains to be seen if Amazon-the-book-Goliath can repeat industry tradition with its strategy for Kindle, or, if a tiny 3-person self-funded "David" known as Lexcycle could spoil the party (podcast included).

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The damage could have been worse. I had my guard down. Although today started like any other day, I hadn't even taken one sip of my tea when I noticed a slight hiccup to the way things normally work when logging into Facebook (see image below). And now, someone out there (I'm not sure who) has the password I used to use for Facebook as well as for a handful of other sites. It's one of my not-to-be-used-for-transactional (financial)-sites passwords. So, nothing serious is at risk and I think I moved fast enough to go so far as to say nothing is at risk. But I should have known better and you can learn from my mistake.

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The OSGi Alliance just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Another vendor consortium congratulating itself? Not exactly. OSGi has done a lot to make Java less of a mountain to climb. It specifies simpler, independent modules of code that can be modified, even when the application is running. And therein lies new opportunity.

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It's about 9:53am and I'm at the Morgan Library off of Madison Avenue in NYC where Amazon executives are preparing to make a big announcement. Since the notices first went out to this invite-only affair, the speculation has been that Amazon is going to to announce version 2.0 of its proprietary electronic book (ebook) reader; the Kindle. The Internet is already riddled with pictures of the new model (video and photos below). Based on what's been written,...

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Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a certification program sponsored by the non-profit U.S. Green Buildings Council (USGBC) that is a nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) yesterday posted a draft "LEED for Datacenters" on its website that the lab developed in partnership with a who’s who of datacenter industry groups, including the ASHRAE, The Green Grid, The Uptime Institute, 24x7, the European Commission, the Critical Facilities Roundtable and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

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Six years ago, just before moving into our current home, my wife and I decided that we would constantly have that home filled with music and she entrusted me to the task of making it happen. Yet, it was only over these last holidays that I finished "the design." It took me that long to figure out how to do some complicated things like integrate a single digital audio library across the whole home audio system, all of our computers, and our portable digital audio players. I'm still not completely done, but here's my recipe if you want to try it yourself.

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I arrived in Austin, Texas, today to go talk to IBM, again, about how it's helping make the planet smarter, this time focusing on how Web 2.0 technologies can help companies become more green. I am well prepared for Austin because I was just here in November (editor's note: It was October, Fritz), and I have a photogenic memory (editor's note: uh, photographic, and no).

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As with most things, persistence pays off on Twitter. Just post regularly, a few times a day. Follow people. Engage in discussion. Respond to what other people say. Post whatever interests you if you think it interests other people. Sometimes post what interests you even if you don't think anyone else will find it interesting. Experiment.

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When thinking about applications in the cloud, it's best to think of new applications, applications oriented toward Web operations, and applications that do things in a way that's contrary to what you're accustomed to. In other words, think about using Google Bigtable.

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Moving applications to the cloud is what the Cloud Connect conference is all about. But cloud services at this stage tend to be somewhat self-referential. They're about working with what's already available in the cloud. Look at Lasso2Go, for example, a service I didn't know I needed.

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Semantic search is like porn: I'm pretty sure I'll know it when I see it. So when semantic search upstart Truevert came by for a visit, I got all googly (I think I might have even screamed "yahoo"). The Truevert system, powered by OrcaTec's discovery toolkit, is narrowly defined around green, but it's definitely an eye-opening, fresh approach to an elusive problem.

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I'm sure just about everything can happen in the cloud these days -- maybe even things I don't want to know about. But when we're starting to help companies perform API management in the cloud, which is what Mashery is doing, it's probably a pretty good sign.

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The savings that flow from server virtualization are well known and accepted. The potential savings on the client side, I believe, are even greater. But that premise is much less widely accepted, and even less frequently implemented. Perhaps virtualizing end users one application at a time is the way to go.

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