Infotrade

Last week, after   VMware introduced businesses to the idea   of an automated cloud service portal called vCloud Integration Manager (vCIM) that could give private cloud consumers a way to become public cloud providers, the question was: How many small-to-medium enterprises would jump on board? Interrupting the answer to that question today is AT&T - arguably still one of the world's largest public corporations - which has itself become a vCloud customer in a retooling of its Synaptic cloud services to include VPN access. It's a move that could not only help AT&T gain parity, or something approaching it, compared to cloud giant Amazon, but could also help even the stakes between VMware and Citrix in the one field where the latter's Xen has a market share advantage: the private cloud. The story of AT&T's cloud rollout begins in 2006, with the acquisition of what was then considered a "business management service" called USi. That company ha...

Telephone companies have the assets and track record in delivering secure and reliable services to grab a piece of the enterprise cloud services market popularized by Amazon and Rackspace. "The cloud is not the cloud without the network." Those were the words of NTT America CTO Doug Junkins during his keynote presentation at Monday's day-long   Cloud Carrier Forum , one of several breakout summits that took place on the first day of the   Cloud Connect conference   in Santa Clara, Calif., produced by UBM TechWeb, parent to   InformationWeek . Junkins was speaking to a standing-room-only mix of cloud industry stakeholders including telcos; cloud infrastructure and management solution providers; enterprise consumers; and software as a service (SaaS) and cloud application providers. The message--practically a constant theme throughout the day--was that carriers like AT&T and Verizon are uniquely positioned to be the preferred providers of an array of cloud-bas...

In January, Bain & Company produced the following chart as part of their report on “ Publishing in the Digital Age ” (PDF): Bain Analysis Then on Tuesday, someone   posted it on Flickr . Subsequently, Peter Kafka of Wall Street Journal's   MediaMemo   noticed it and passed it along to Jay Yarow, who made it Business Insider’s   Chart of the Day   on Wednesday, citing Kafka and the Flickr post. On Thursday, the excellent John Gruber at Daring Fireball   linked to it   and between those two postings the chart garnered a fair bit of attention, including from the likes of apparent digital music expert   Bob Lefsetz   (“ First in Music Analysis ”). No one seems to have   tracked it back to the original source   nor noticed what happened to catch my eye straight away: This chart sucks. What’s Wrong With It Oh, Bain – I hope no one has hired you for your expert “analysis” in this field: The chart uses raw revenu...

Hemp Paper Hemp Paper Society may be moving away from paper dependency, but we’re not there yet. Forty-two per cent of the world’s industrial wood harvest goes to the production of paper, and 87 per cent of that paper is used by industrialized western nations like the United States and Canada. And despite its pristine appearance, paper is anything but clean. The process industrial paper makers use to turn wood pulp into paper has been shown to result in a number of harmful chemical by-products such as carbon monoxide, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, mercury, nitrates, methanol, benzene, chloroform, and dioxins. Despite its negative side effects wood paper is the only game in town these days, but it wasn’t always that way. Back in the day hemp paper was a popular and widely used alternative to wood paper. Many of the founding documents of the United States are printed on hemp: two drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Hemp paper doesn’t require bleach...