The two indispensable enablers of this change have been:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/04/significant/38760/

The nested, or hierarchical, label system is one more step toward Gmail’s being a main base of one’s computing life, a la Outlook of yesteryear for me. More later, but that’s the news for now.

You can’t fail to have noticed the emergence of cloud computing as a tech buzzword. It’s all over the press and market analysts can’t stop talking about it.

With regard to shared services, a recent report from consultancy Deloitte went as far as to suggest that, at a local governmental level: “Given the threat to existing levels of public funding there is now a strong case for making the adoption of shared services for certain back-office functions mandatory.”

http://www.silicon.com/management/public-sector/2010/02/12/g-cloud-what-are-the-legal-risks-of-whitehalls-cost-cutting-plan-39745450/

Cloud computing and shared services produce all sorts of complications

Welcome to “What the hell is?” where we at Pocket-lint simply and briefly dejargonise technology talk into what people would normally say if they weren’t trying to sound clever. Now naturally, most of you out there are going to know some of these terms as if they were the backs of your hands, but rest assured that there’s one or two reading now that aren’t exactly certain what everyone’s been banging on about. So, let us enlighten you as to what the hell is cloud computing? Minus the uninteresting parts that you don’t need to know.

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/31275/what-the-hell-is-cloud-computing

So, now that you’re fully up to speed, please feel free to chat like a pro to tech pals and impress others at cocktail parties but, whatever you do, make sure you take some time to investigate what it’s all about for yourself and enjoy your time up in “The Cloud”.

The unveiling of Apple’s iPad was hailed by many as a revolution in computing, the latest in a line of glossy devices that would change the way we live and work.

John Suffolk, the Government’s chief information officer, wants to give the public sector a sprinkling of that Silicon Valley dust — a flavour of the ground-breaking technology of Google, Facebook and Apple.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/public_sector/article7023927.ece

Mr Suffolk also believes civil servants and public sector workers should be more active on social networking sites. He runs a blog, although it hasn’t been updated for almost a month.

Analysts and journalists appear to be far more interested in and active about analytics in the cloud than those who build and deliver analytic applications and capabilities for business use. The hype seems to outpace the adoption rate. But hype in IT circles is often the predecessor to adoption. So maybe it is time to ask what’s going on here.

The signals from the vendor community are mixed. Many business intelligence (BI) solutions providers – some new and some long-time BI players – have entered into cloud computing including Teradata, IBM, Cloud9 Analytics, Cloudscale, In2Clouds, Vertica and others (more about this later). Yet Lucidera, an analytics-as-a-service pioneer, ceased operations in June of 2009 due to financial and funding challenges.

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/12100

Cloud computing is the popular and widely used term for virtualization of computing services. Cloud technology is all about services, and it fits into several categories: