ReadWriteCloud

Email, instant messaging, forums, code forges and other collaboration tools make it possible for distributed teams to get work done - but they're not great tools for making decisions. The team behind Loomio wants to solve that with a new Web-based tool for focused, concise discussions that allow all team members to be heard. 

Looking to tap Amazon S3 storage for your WordPress blog? The WP2Cloud plugin lets you store all your WordPress data - not just media files - in S3.  

With an expected valuation of close to $100 billion, it’s understandable that no one can stop talking about Facebook’s initial public offering this week. But while Facebook basks in the social media spotlight, companies tackling tough business problems are exciting investors, if not consumers. Workday, for example, is expected to be among the largest IPOs this year in the business software market.

The cloud database market continues to solidify as Google puts a price tag on its Cloud SQL offering. With actual charges to begin on June 12th, the move finally gives developers a way to see what they'll be spending on Cloud SQL, but comparing Google's offering to Amazon, Microsoft and others might still be a bit tricky.

If your business is producing Web sites, then it's all too easy to assume that the way you innovate is by producing bigger, broader, more content.  When you consider the platform as something that exists only on the client side - where the customer determines the scheme and not you - any functionality you create becomes a slave to the browser, the runtime and the operating system. And your business model maintains its 1995 profile. Standards attempt to ameliorate this dilemma, but as the HTML5 process demonstrates, such attempts may last decades.

If you're an applications developer, then your business is to deliver service. In that case, you have a life-altering choice to make: Do you deliver all your functionality to your client and count on it to be executed there in its entirety, or do you let some or all of it be executed on a server in what your customers are calling the "cloud"?

Microsoft's Azure just got a little more competition from Amazon. The cloud giant announced yesterday that it was adding support for SQL Server to its Relational Database Service (RDS) and added .Net support to the Elastic Beanstalk cloud app deployment and management service.

Ask yourself this: Would you install ReadWriteWeb as an app? You might, if you were convinced that it did something useful for you, and if you didn't have to pay much (or anything) for it. You may already have installed Dropbox, and services like Pinterest and LinkedIn are now smartphone apps. Can you foresee a time when you won't need a browser to do the things you do online? And if so, would you miss it much?

Server-side virtualization is a modern-day fact of life. Today's data centers pool their processing, storage and even network resources to create macrocosmic virtual-machine entities that transcend the boundaries of hardware. We call that "the cloud."

With Windows 8, Microsoft extends its server-class hypervisor platform to the desktop. And no, it's not just a play for enthusiasts and testers: There's a solid reason for Hyper-V to become the backbone of future Windows versions.

If you've wondered why so many companies are eager to control data storage, the answer can be summed up in a simple term: data gravity. Ultimately, where data is determines where the money is. Services and applications are nothing without it.

IDC says that spending for cloud storage will triple by 2015. It had better, because the roster of companies with their hands out for some of those storage dollars keeps growing. The latest contender is Inktank, a service and support company formed by the creators of the Ceph open source storage project.