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Giant distributor TechData announced today the opening of its StreamOne Solutions Store. Think of it as an app store for VARs. No, your local VAR isn't going to start selling iPad apps, but the "bigger apps" for their clients to download cloud services or download commercial applications software products and their licenses. It is a great idea.

"The Tech Data StreamOne platform is unlike anything currently offered within the channel," says Gertrud Pillay, Vice President, Category Marketing and Licensing Operations at PCMall, a leading computer retailer. "With its intuitive interface, we're able to quickly and easily bring greater value and efficiency to our customers by identifying which software solutions and cloud services will help our customers reach their goals."

"The Store of the Future," as retail electronics vendors have depicted it over the past few years, features eight-foot touchscreen walls that double as mirrors, interacting with the customer as she tries on virtual clothes without sacrificing her own modesty, scanning the ID tags and profiles of items she's already selected, and giving store clerks tools to dazzle the customer with demos and make on-the-spot deals without having to rush to the back office. These are the wonders made possible by embedded technology... ah, can't you hear the voice-over announcer now!

The thing is, customers are already entering the stores right now with touchscreens, scanners, IM clients, Twitter clients, and live video displays - they're just in the customer's pocket or purse. So at the National Retail Federation's big show earlier this week in New York City, there were dueling visions of "The Store of the Future." The challenger looks more like a kind of smart Wi-Fi that communicates directly with the devices the customer already has, using hardware that could cost retailers a lot less.

We often write about better tools for how people can collaborate easily, and one of our favorite companies just keeps coming with new ones that now it is hard to keep track of what they have in their portfolio. I guess that is a nice problem to have. Starting this week, Zurb.com launched a new service called Influence. It is useful for quickly collecting remarks and advice on graphics and PowerPoint slide decks. It is a great way to work jointly on website design mockups or presentations for example. "We recognized that presenting design ideas, controlling and making sense of feedback you get was a problem for any freelancer, contractor, or company that is designing products," they state on their blog post.

Ever wonder what other companies are choosing for hosting, Email, DNS, etc.? As it happens, there's an app for that (so to speak) and someone put the Y Combinator companies under the microscope. With 248 companies examined, you get some pretty interesting results. If Y Combinator companies are the future, Google is looking really good for email hosting, and Amazon is doing really well for Web Hosting.

Last year I wrote this post reviewing 40 years of using email. I am old enough to recall many of those events and while I wasn't exactly present at the dawn of email, I know people who were. But it seems as if email, at least corporate email, has come and is in the process of going all in my own lifetime. A number of factors are making turning off, or at least reducing your email dependency, more viable these days. And I should point out that we are talking here about just eliminating internal emails; no one is suggesting that we go without emails to connect people in different domains.

The Socially Aware blog has put together a nice infographic that highlights several key decisions in social media case law, starting with the Sony v. Universal Supreme Court Betamax recording decision of 1984 and continuing to the more recent past. In light of the SOPA and PIPA protests and discussions of this week, I found the review enlightening and interesting to see how far we have gone in terms of legislating copyright violations and other digital misdeeds. Remember Facebook suing and ultimately crushing Power.com? How about Courtney Love's Tweet that supposedly defamed a fashion designer?

The SOPA/PIPA blackout today by Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress.com and many other sites is (I hope) drawing attention to proposed legislation that is considered a threat to "Internet freedom." That's fine, admirable, and (with any luck) will be effective at curbing SOPA/PIPA for at least another legislative season. The backgrounders I've read so far by Wikipedia and others explain pretty well why SOPA/PIPA shouldn't pass. What they don't say is that SOPA/PIPA are business as usual, and the protest is a last-ditch effort necessary because the legislative system and mainstream media are fundamentally broken.

It seems that the lowly spreadsheet can be used to do just about anything, apart from adding up columns of numbers. Spreadsheet abuse has been happening almost since its invention by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston (who wrote Visicalc) in 1979. But since spreadsheets have gone online, people have come up with even more creative ways to use them. Today on TrackVia's blog they have compiled their top ten most unusual applications, and some of them are quite quirky. We last wrote about them last summer when we compared online database tools.

Recent news reports name GenY as the most influential generation for retailers. Given ReadWrite's coverage of Gen Y working preferences here, I thought I would take a moment to provide some of the many lessons we've learned with building communities aimed at this cohort.

By now, most folks have heard of phishing scams, and know to be on the lookout for fake PayPal and bank sign-ons. But what happens when your co-workers get a link to a site that looks just like the corporate intranet? Using the Simple Phishing Toolkit (SPT) you can find out.

The concept behind SPT is pretty simple: Most companies spend a fair amount of money on trying to secure their environment. How much do they spend on educating users? Very little, and in many cases nothing at all. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is much better than a pound of cure.