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Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

One of my New Year's Resolutions for 2012 is to move away from depending on Google services for my business. Last year's Gmail redesign, and the pseudonym battles have convinced me that Google is not quite the right home for services I depend on professionally. The first service to go is Gmail. I spent part of my weekend moving email for my personal domains to another service. The experience has already had a few ups and downs, but on balance I think that moving away from Gmail is the right choice.

Amazon's Dynamo paper (PDF) is the paper that launched a thousand NoSQL databases, if you'll pardon a twisted metaphor and wee bit of exaggeration. The paper inspired, at least in part, Apache Cassandra, Voldemort, Riak and other projects. Now Amazon is making its own take on Dynamo, melded with SimpleDB, available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels wrote about the new service this morning on his blog, saying that Amazon DynamoDB is "the result of 15 years of learning in the areas of large scale non-relational databases and cloud services."

If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

Measuring an intangible like "most innovative" is tricky, at best. At worst, it's a complete disaster, like measuring "most innovative" by using patents as a measure, like this infographic from Good and Column Five Media.

It's based on Top 100 Global Innovators, which uses the Derwent World Patents Index and looks at patent-related criteria.

This doesn't just use patent volume, but also looks at success in patents granted (as opposed to just patents applied for), global patents (applied for in more than one country) and the "influence" of a patent. (That is, how often it's cited.)

Last year Xmarks, the cross-platform bookmark sync service, narrowly escaped being shut down for good. After tons of media attention focused on the shutdown, and then acquisition by LastPass, a funny thing happened – the service received almost no attention at all in 2011. So whatever happened? I caught up with LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist about the features added to Xmarks this year, the fate of the original Xmarks team and what he calls anti-competitive behavior on Apple's part.

This is a new one on me. I've heard of tree huggers, but Patrick Thibodeau's piece in ComputerWorld today is the first time I've run into server hugger. What's a server hugger, you ask?

According to Thibodeau, it's a term coined by Forrester analyst James Staten, for IT folks who "have significant concerns about their ongoing value to the company if they don't run [IT systems] themselves." Does the term fit, or is it perhaps a wee bit early to be labeling IT folks who haven't put all their eggs in the cloud basket?

David Carr and John Kestner are hoping to raise $35,000 to "connect your things to the Internet, without a nerd degree." The project, Twine, promises "the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing." No programming required.

Twine as pictured on the Kickstarter page is a tiny square that has internal and external sensors coupled with WiFi connectivity. According to the Kickstarter page, requires just two AAA batteries that will keep it running "for months."

Eucalyptus was once "the" open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu's cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn't developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

Another dangerous bill is winding its way through Congress, this time it's the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by Texas representative Lamar Smith. Smith's bill would establish a system for taking down Web sites that the Justice Department "determines to be dedicated to copyright infringement."

The bill is, by nearly any sane measure, overreaching and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the bill targets Mozilla specifically for refusing to comply with Homeland Security's ICE unit.