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The Library of Congress and Columbia University are taking steps to assure we keep our maps intact through a partnership to provide best practices, methods and services to assist organizations in preserving geospatial data.

Through its partnership with Columbia, the Library of Congress is creating a digital clearinghouse of maps and satellite images that are important for preserving the unique insights that geospatial data provides.

Today, SalesForce partners FinancialForce, the first native accounting package for SalesForce.com, and CloudApps, a new breed of carbon management solution, announce their products integrate to enable carbon credits to be managed in accounting terms within the Salesforce platform.

In reviewing this integration and observing the momentum of the ecosystem we see another clear example of the advantage in being both first in a new platform - and going native into it. This seems especially true in the cloud as it is positioned for massive growth.

Is there a way to defeat spam? Late last week, the Yahoo Mail team shared news from an independent study that users of the Yahoo Mail receive significantly less spam messages in their email inbox than other competitive services.

We caught up with Vish Ramarao, anti-spam guru at Yahoo, to learn how the company was able to achieve these results and whether it is possible to outsmart spammers using more capable filters.

Today at Google's annual conference, I/O, the company announced a partnership with VMware. This news immediately turned our minds to the possibilities for enterprise app developers.

What we see is that like the parent companies, the partnership has a bit of genius embedded in the way it offers more tools and choice to developers for scaling, experience, and speed to market.

NorthScale is on the move. Hot off its recent accomplishment of winning several awards - including best in show at the 2010 Under the Radar event - the company announced a successful round of financing from the Mayfield Fund.

Its successful product release in March put the company on the map as a defining leader in the noSQL approach to data persistence. The company has already gained Zynga as a customer of its beta version of Memcached, and has announced its plans to provide elastic data infrastructure as an approach to scaling applications in the cloud.

Gist now is available as a Google Gadget, plugging its contact-enhancing knowledge base into the Gmail inbox.

The company has integration with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, as well as increasing support for GMail. We asked the company CEO, T.A. McCann, what it was like working with Google in the apps marketplace and what it takes to bring the social Web into the daily flow of the enterprise consumer.

Cloud Sherpas offers additional IT administrative tools that help make it easy to manage the increasingly popular Google Apps platform. The company is riding the momentum of growth today announced over 300,000 end users under management by IT professionals who have depoloyed Cloud Sherpas as part of Google Apps.

To learn more about the current state of affairs IT managers implementing Google Apps, we spoke with company founder, Michael Cohn. He shared with us a few of the insights that led the company to its products and what it means to "be native" within Google.

Where there are definitions, there are reasons to bend them. Outsourcing, the practice of bringing outside organizations to manage a part the business process, is one of those concepts.

In this post, we'll take a brief stroll through the work of Caliber Point in mixing up both outsourcing and cloud computing.

We look at where it touches on major shifts in enterprise software architectures and franchises like Oracle which this software-as-a-service product is built on.

And, where people are productive, security is to be questioned. In this short review, we look at the new feature Google offers admins and look a bit closer at security in a browser-based world.

When running blogs for community, and business interests, the important question of of "who" has visited has been a big challenge. This problem was one of the inspirations for the creation of OpenID and other approaches for identity sharing.

As corporate blog applications grow as operational business tools, the ability to respond to users who launch comments becomes a critical component of doing business. This requires being able to integrate this information flow into company processes as a natural extension of the blog.