If this seems objectionable from the standpoint of U.S. citizens, imagine how it looks to outsiders who are storing their data there. Some European companies who do business with U.S. technology companies are concerned enough to start looking elsewhere for infrastructure.

The new service allows companies to easily deploy and manage database instances in the cloud while still delivering products to consumers in such a way that complies with EU data protection laws.

A recent survey indicated that 70% of Europeans have concerns about their online data and how well companies secure it. A statement issued by two European politicians said that companies wishing to do business with consumers in Europe should abide by local data privacy laws, including social networks.

Cloudnines and City Network are pushing the privacy angle when marketing their services, as well as the notion that hosting data nearby (as opposed to across the pond) will improve latency and performance.

Considering growing concern over U.S. privacy developments, some of which are quite reasonable, we can realistically expect to see other firms in Europe and elsewhere follow suite with this type of branding effort.

We have a special channel devoted to exploring the Cloud from a business point of view, called ReadWriteCloud. But over the past year it's become increasingly apparent that cloud services will soon rule the lives of consumers too. Which cloud service, or combination of cloud services, is right for you?

The Contenders

You're most likely going to end up with a mix and match of cloud services. The hardware you use will be one determining factor. For example I predominantly use Apple devices, so its new iCloud is going to become a key cloud service for me (more on Apple's increasing power in the cloud world below).

What applications you already use is also an important factor. For example, I'm a heavy user of Google services. Gmail has been my primary email application for years, I use Google Docs a lot and Google Calendar is where I organize my daily agenda. So while it's not a separately branded cloud service like iCloud, my Google Account is where I manage a lot of my key business data - and it's all hosted in the cloud. It's not necessary for me to host that much of my business content with Google, but it does help with sync and utilizing data across products.

So those are my two main cloud service providers: Apple and Google. Depending on your own hardware and software makeup, you might opt for other companies. Microsoft offers cloud services like SkyDrive and its Windows Live products (including Hotmail). Amazon is another strong contender. It cannily invested heavily in cloud infrastructure over the past 5 years. Amazon has also been releasing various cloud services, such as the March launch of a music storage locker called Amazon Cloud Drive.

There are a lot of specialist cloud services available, too. For example I use Evernote for online notes, Dropbox for files and Instapaper for cross-device news reading. Any one of these or other specialist services may yet emerge as a top dog in the consumer cloud space. My money would be on Dropbox, which has now become my central online repository of files.

Apple Could Show The Way Again, With iCloud

While it's a relatively new product, iCloud is going to be the one to watch in this market. It's certainly illustrative of how important the Consumer Cloud now is.

Steve Jobs positioned iCloud earlier this year as being the next big step in Apple's evolution. Apple started out as a computer company, then it morphed into a consumer electronics company (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.). Now Apple is offering an integrated cloud service to support all of those devices.

Steve Jobs announced iCloud at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference in June this year. It became available in early October, as part of the rollout of iOS5 - the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system.

In the Steve Jobs biography, there were a couple of key quotes that illustrate how key iCloud is to Apple's future. "We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud," Jobs is quoted as saying, "[that] streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data."

In 2010, before iCloud had been announced, Jobs told his biographer:

"We have a solution. It's our next big insight. We are going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device, and we are going to move the digital hub into the cloud."

Of course that insight wasn't new. Others, including all of the companies listed in this article, have been busy building online digital hubs. But nobody has really nailed it yet. Including iCloud at this point.

In upcoming posts, we'll delve into iCloud and other cloud offerings in more detail. As consumers, we just want to have our content available across all of our devices. That's currently easier said than done.

Let us know in the comments if you have any burning questions or issues about the world of the consumer cloud; we'll do our best to address them in future posts.

That is the expectation of about 39% of financial services CIOs worldwide, according to the survey. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 44% of CIOs for banking firms expect that more than half of their institutions' transactions will take place via infrastructure that lives in the cloud, and 33% expect most of them will be processed using some type of SaaS application.

Let the Machines Do What They Do Best, So People Can Focus Elsewhere

"As banks progressively replace people in the value chain with algorithmic operations (AOs) to run processes and make decisions, their intellectual property increasingly resides in these algorithms," reads a post on Gartner's blog. "The value of people is not in running operations but in improving the AOs."

It's this type of efficiency and operational enhancement that can drive what Gartner calls "creative destruction" within the banking industry.

As Gartner Managing Vice President Peter Redshaw summed it up, "Successful new cloud services can displace the existing and dominant process for design, distribution or transacting in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them."

We're already seeing clues about the future of the IT help desk today. The workforce is beginning to become more distributed and mobile, while the nature and number of devices people use day-to-day changes rapidly. That will have an impact on the way companies operate, especially as they continue their move toward the cloud.

Mobile, But Probably Not That Social

As much buzz as there's been about social CRM in the last year or two, the trend toward socially infused customer support probably has only a limited relevance to company IT departments, whose "customers" are really internal staff. And while some employees may take to Twitter with a knee-jerk complaint about crashing apps or connectivity troubles, most of these interactions will continue to happen directly.

That isn't to say that IT issues will necessarily be resolved face-to-face. Indeed, between solid help desk and ticketing Web apps and remote support solutions, there's almost no need for the IT team to ever interface with staff, who will increasingly be distributed across geographic regions.

Not only is the nature of the workforce itself becoming more mobile, but so too are the tools used by IT staff to fix problems. We're already seeing really solid mobile and tablet apps for things like help desk software, remote desktop support, accessing servers via SSH or FTP and managing networks, to name a few. As smartphones and especially tablets become more ubiquitous and powerful, we can realistically expect to see even more robust administrative tools built for them.

Supporting A Wider Range of Devices

It used to be that IT departments had only one set of devices to worry about: the desktop computers or laptops purchased by the company for employees to use. Today, organizations struggle with the blurry lines imposed by personal mobile devices and tablets and how to deal with them from a support standpoint. We can expect this to continue as both smartphones and tablets continue to proliferate.

In the future, it may not just be tablets and smartphones, but other connected devices as well. As the Web continues to grow outside of its original desktop boundaries, the list of devices IT departments need to support could grow as well. Anything that connects to the Internet and has a potential professional use is something that IT staff will at least need to be familiar with, even if they're not fully supporting it.

How the Cloud Can Help

Cloud computing is all the rage among enterprises and smaller businesses now, and that trend doesn't appear to be going anywhere. In addition to lower IT costs, the cloud can also help companies better troubleshoot IT problems.

As data gets bigger and the workforce gets more geographically decentralized, IT teams will need operations to be that much more centralized and easy to manage. As operations continue to move into the cloud, that will become easier, thanks to the rapid deployment of servers and applications, as well as individual virtual machines. Not only can IT solutions be deployed more rapidly, but they can be managed and troubleshot more easily, with many issues capable of being handled from a single, centralized dashboard.

Will IT Still Need to Use the Telephone?

Among customers, one of the most painful parts of seeking technical support is waiting on hold on the telephone, especially with bigger companies. For internal users, this pain may be minimized, but they often still have to deal with waiting in a queue one way or another.

At the end of the day, the telephone is one of the least efficient tools in the IT staff's belt. Phone-based support is already giving way to a host of other solutions, from Web-based ticketing to real-time chat. In time, we may see it disappear entirely, or at least be relegated to certain problems for which a voice conversation is better suited. In the meantime, the immediate future may see an approach that integrates voice with Web-based tools.

What are your hopes for the future of the IT help desk? Whichever side of the help desk you're on, what are some changes you'd like to see down the line?

Photo by Bill Rice

The outage, at first thought to have been caused by a lightning strike, may actually have been caused by a transformer failure, according to ESB Networks. Whatever happened, the data center's primary and secondary power sources were both knocked out, resulting in downtime for several Websites using Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Apparently, power was lost to not only the data center's main power source, but also the backup generator, which is rare.

To make matters worse, a bug in Amazon's EBS (Elastic Block Store) software appears to have accidentally started deleting snapshots of customer data, the company confirmed on Monday. Ouch.

These recent issues haven't had quite the severity of the AWS outage in April, which affected hundreds of websites, some of them quite large, for days. Even so, events like this have a tendency to spark debates over whether the cloud is stable enough for so many companies to trust it for their hosting needs.

Companies generally gravitate toward cloud computing because of the money and human resources it saves them compared to maintaining their own infrastructure onsite. But when mission-critical Web applications and sites go down or, worse, data is lost, some may call into question whether the cloud is worth it.

However, companies utilizing the cloud for hosting do have a few options when it comes to protecting themselves from the inevitable, occasional outage. In an article about what lessons may be learned from the recent Dublin power outage, Information Week explains:

"It's still possible that having the ability to fail-over to a second availability zone within the data center would have saved a customer's system. Availability zones within an Amazon data center typically have different sources of power and telecommunications, allowing one to fail and others to pick up parts of its load. But not everyone has signed up for fail-over service to a second zone, and Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener declined to say whether secondary zones remained available in Dublin after the primary zone outage."

Of course, in the April AWS outage, multiple zones went down, which would have precluded such a precaution from working. A few prominent Amazon customers, including Netflix, managed to stay up during the April outage, thanks to the way their architecture is engineered. Smaller organizations may not have the resources and technical know-how to pull off the level of resiliency boasted by Netflix during that outage, but there are other options.

In reality, these incidents don't so much call into question the validity of using the cloud, so much as the tendency for some businesses to rely exclusively on a single cloud provider without a thorough disaster recovery plan in place.

Should recent outages in cloud hosting services cause people to think twice before migrating to the cloud? Or is it just a matter or having a fool-proof backup plan in place?

In response to our request for comment, Google told us the same thing it told the U.K. Register yesterday: "We don't have anything to share at this time." This, then, is just a rumor; but I think it's a very thought-provoking one. What would it mean for a consumer cloud computing interface to be available dirt cheap, largely ad-supported and as a rental?

Would such a move democratize access to Web-based computing all the more? Would it change the fundamental nature of our relationships with our computers? (See the conversation below for more thoughts raised by readers.) If there's truth to this rumor, we could hear confirmation of the plans next month at the Google I/O conference.

July will mark two years since Chrome OS was first announced. Rumors arose this winter of a forthcoming Chrome OS lightweight "surf station" from Acer.

I wrote about a review unit Google sent out in December and said I loved its speed but hated the terrible CR-48 hardware it was shipped on, specifically the trackpad. If that could be fixed, and if the Google Ads were not too intrusive, I can see a lot of people renting such a device.

Schools struggle to keep up with continually changing technology. They simply cannot afford to replace hardware at the rate with which upgrades are released. And as such, the technology infrastructure of most schools is severely lacking.

Jonathan Hefter has built something that could solve that.

Virtualized desktops aren't new. There are several prominent companies that are addressing this for enterprise customers. But even though some liken school districts' technology implementations to ones in corporations, there are some substantial differences - budgets being the most obvious.

Neverware is designed lean. In fact, Hefter is currently bootstrapping the endeavor (although he is starting to look for funding). But the emphasis on efficiency isn't so much about Hefter's resources, as the resources of the schools he's aiming to support with Neverware.

Neverware's flagship product is the JuiceBox, a single server appliance that when connected to a LAN will power up to one hundred old machines with Windows 7. In case you haven't checked the system requirements for Windows 7 lately, here they are: 1 GHz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor, 1 GB RAM, 16 GB hard disk space, and a DirectX 9 graphics device. So how old can those "old machines" be? Hefter says he "hasn't found a desktop yet" that he can't make run.

The Juicebox generates a private, local cloud, something that addresses many of schools' concerns about privacy, security, and reliability. Hefter uses the analogy of electrical versus gas-powered cars to compare the energy and environmental waste of the PC industry with the efficiency of the Neverware project. It's a "single repository of computing power," and with it, schools need only focus on updating one machine, not many.

Currently Neverware is running in two pilot programs in schools in New Jersey, but Hefter says there are plans to go to market with JuiceBox in the next few months.

First of all, what exactly is cloud computing? To take a broad definition, Focus Research describes it as "the ability for organizations to share critical computing infrastructure (e.g. servers, storage, etc.) and related services over the internet." This can include IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or software (SaaS).

Needless to say, it's a huge deal. Gartner recently put cloud computing at the top of its list of top strategic technologies for 2011 and it's far from the only expert extolling the glory of the Web-hosted software and infrastructure.

For small businesses, the significance of this primarily comes down to cost. In many cases, using cloud-based infrastructure is cheaper than running and maintaining one's own physical servers. Likewise, the pay-as-you-go licensing model of software-as-a-service providers provides lower costs than traditional software, or at least distributes that cost across low monthly payments.

The cloud has perks beyond the cost savings. The more your business's applications are hosted online, the easier it will be to accommodate an increasingly mobile workforce.

It also helps enable collaboration. By virtue of their very design, VoIP services like Skype are inherently more collaborative than old school telephony. The same is true of Google Apps, where colleagues can work on documents simultaneously. For project management, there's BaseCamp, Apollo and literally dozens more. And when business lives in the cloud, meeting with colleagues is no problem thanks to a range of virtual meeting services like GoToMeeting, Fuze and WebEx, all of which have mobile apps.

Unlike many of their legacy, desktop counterparts, cloud-based applications can usually integrate with one another easily. Thanks to robust APIs and integration tools, I can tie my Web forms on Wufoo directly to my email subscriber database in MailChimp. I can make my Salesforce CRM software talk to social media tools and connect billing services to bookkeeping software in a few clicks.

For seemingly every business function, there's an affordable, cloud-based solution available, and more are cropping up every week.

Do you use the cloud for your small business? Let us know about your experience in the comments.

Activity streams, cloud computing, and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays are among those at that peak. Gartner defines this as a "phrase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections." And although according to Gartner's map, it means these technologies may be on their way to mainstream, the next stop is one of disillusionment because those technologies failed to live up to expectations.

Gartner's report examines 1800 technologies as well as trends in 75 industry and topic areas. These reports are meant to provide a snapshot into emerging technologies. as well as estimates in the time until these technologies become mainstream. Cloud computing and e-readers, according to the report will be mainstream in less than 5 years, but we have to look beyond the five year mark for mainstream 3D printing and robots.

Gartner identifies several themes from the Hype Cycle report, including the importance of UI, data-driven decision-making, and cloud computing.

HP is now the primary supplier of hardware for Microsoft's private-cloud initiative. The $250 million partnership calls for the two companies to align on sales, engineering and professional services.

Microsoft is pushing a strategy that looks similar to the approach that made it the multi-billion dollar company it is today.

Now comes the age of the cloud. Microsoft is focusing on making its software the core technology, integrated tightly with HP hardware. It's conceivable that the approach may work, especially in a virtualized environment.

HP's role is to provide the data center hosting services, networking gear and servers for the Azure platform. Applications will be optimized for HP's Converged Infrastructure. Companies may choose to deploy the platform in HP's container environment.

You can imagine the capital expenditures for these deployments. But it's also one of the realities of today's market. There is a class of the enterprise that wants this type of controlled environment. And then there are the hosting providers that serve a wide variety of customers who also want a contained environment.

But open source in the enterprise continues to gain acceptance as does it in the cloud. This week's news that Rackspace is open-sourcing its cloud infrastructure means there is the potential for a new network of open cloud offerings. Its promise is a level of interoperability that can not be attained in a virtualized network.

Once a customer commits to Windows Azure Appliance they are pretty much saying that Windows Azure will be its core cloud service. It will mean that they have to rely on the software and hardware development from Microsoft and HP engineers. It's powerful but not open-source by any means.

Cloud computing is a revolution. You get that sense at an event like last night's Cloudcamp here at OSCON. So much is changing.

But revolutions do not happen overnight. In the meantime, the existing power structure in the enterprise will be looking to extend the scope of what they do. And for many, that means a more complex, more virtualized data center. That's good news for Microsoft and HP.

The wild card? How soon the revolution will take to play out.

Like its progenitor, Memeo Connect still offers drag-and-drop uploads, but in the latest release, the application's operating system integration has been dramatically improved. Most notably, your Google Docs folder now appears as a virtual drive that Memeo labels "GDrive", and, according to company representatives, the name is being used with Google's blessing.

To Internet early adopters, the name "GDrive" rings more than a few bells. It's referring to the long-rumored cloud storage service that Google has yet to launch. In its imagined state, Google's GDrive would have been a lot like Microsoft's SkyDrive: several gigabytes of free storage available on the Web for all your files. On the theoretical GDrive, however, files could be in any format, of any size and there would be easy ways to sync them or move them back and forth between your computer and the cloud. Office files would open with Google's Docs service, an online counterpart to desktop programs like Microsoft Office, and some even imagined that GDrive would further integrate with other Google properties, like Picasa for photos or YouTube for videos.

Google never fully realized everyone's GDrive dreams, but its Google Docs service is functional enough for most. It allows for the upload of any file type while multiple third-party services offer decent options for keeping files in sync between your computers and cloud. These include Memeo competitors like Box.net, Dropbox, Syncplicity, SugarSync, OfficeSync, Gladinet and more.

There are few programs that actually offer the full virtual drive functionality that Memeo now does, though. The company worked closely with Google to build this latest version of its Connect software and when Google engineers found out Memeo was calling the virtual folder it creates "GDrive," they had a good laugh.

Sorry, Internet, Google isn't designing its own GDrive service anytime soon, but it's well aware of the rumors.

Google actually prefers that, when it comes to GDrive-type offerings, third parties do it for them. The closest thing we'll see to a Google-branded tool of any sort is a desktop uploader application now being built, sources tell us. But it's no GDrive, based on what we've heard.

Version 2.0: More OS Integration Blurs Line Between Desktop and Cloud

In Memeo's case, version 2.0 of its software continues to offer drag-and-drop uploads (even folders!) and automatic synchronization. But it goes further with a combination of features that make using its so-called GDrive a more viable option. For example, you can save files from your desktop-based applications like Microsoft Office directly to Google Docs via GDrive, and you can open GDrive-hosted files with its associated native desktop program. In other words, it blurs the line between the cloud and the desktop, just as Google's mythical GDrive would have supposedly done. And for that reason, we don't at all begrudge Memeo the name "theft."

Memeo Connect's other new features include the ability to select multiple files at once for deletion (from the cloud), filter files by type or category, download all Google Docs with a click, view folders shared with you via Google Docs and more.

And let's not forget one of the most exciting new features: full text search for documents, another benefit of the in-depth collaboration between Memeo and Google when building this new version of Connect. To truly transition to cloud-hosted files, this feature is considered a must-have for many users.

For Business Users Only?

Memeo Connect is more business-focused than it is a consumer tool. It's not available as a "freemium" offering, as some would expect. Surprisingly, that's not Memeo's decision, but rather Google's. Google restricts its API usage for these types of synchronization services so that they only work with those who have business-level accounts.

As far as pricing goes, for Google Premier users, it's $9 a year per user and for non-Premier users, it's $59 a year per user, which includes a new Google Apps Premier Account in addition to the sync service.

Memeo Connect 2.0 is available for free evaluation from here. Both Mac and PC versions are available.

Initially uncovered by U.K. tech news site The Register earlier this week, the news comes directly from a Google engineer Gary Kačmarčík who posted the following on the Chromium Google Group, an online message board for discussing the open-source project behind the Chrome browser and Chrome operating system:

We're adding new capabilities all the time. With this functionality (unofficially named "chromoting"), Chrome OS will not only be [a] great platform for running modern web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser.

When pressed for more details, Kačmarčík also confirmed that the functionality would indeed be "something like" Remote Desktop Connection, a Windows technology that allows you to connect to a remote computer from the computer you're currently using. One of the more popular uses for this technology in the past has been to access files and other network resources when away from the office.

Why? For Legacy App Access (Those Not on the Web)

But in Google's case, the technology would be used to run so-called legacy applications that Chrome OS does not support. By "legacy," Google means any application that doesn't run in a Web browser like Google Chrome, which serves as the basis of the new Internet-only OS, also called Chrome.

What sort of things would this include then? The Adobe Creative Suite, perhaps, whose flagship program Photoshop is top among designers. Or maybe the full Microsoft Office suite, whose desktop programs are still more feature-rich than Google's online Docs service or Microsoft's own newly launched Office Web Apps. Video editing software and other processor-intensive applications also come to mind. But none of these are the types of applications you would typically think a netbook user would have need of, which makes the Chrome remote desktop feature even more intriguing.

Could chromoting's inclusion hint at grander plans for Chrome OS? Perhaps as a new competitor to desktop and notebook computer operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Apple's OSX instead of just a netbook alternative? After all, a netbook user is only interested in lightweight computing - a little email, some Facebook maybe, a bit of Web surfing. That's why they bought a netbook in the first place - for casual activity, not full-on desktop-grade computing. Right?

Cloud Nearly Ready, Remote Desktop Stopgap Only

Then again, the world is turning to lightweight computing. So much can be done online these days. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently said at the D8 conference, we're entering a "post-PC" era, referring to the eventual phase out of the personal computer in favor of lighter, more thin client-esque platforms like, of course, Apple's new iPad tablet computer.

But where Jobs' vision differs from Google's is how the transition should occur. In the iPad's case, for example, Apple simply stopped supporting the Flash plugin, referring to it as an outdated technology that had run its course. The more modern technology, HTML5, is supported on the iPad instead, explained Jobs in a recent memo. But Google, on the other hand, partnered with Adobe, makers of the Flash plugin, and has now integrated it into its Chrome browser. Simply cutting off users from the ability to view Flash content on the Web isn't the answer, in Google's mind. It would rather slowly transition everyone to plugin-free standards like HTML5 while still supporting technology that people use today.

You can see the same mindset here at play with this remote desktop feature. Like HTML5, the cloud is almost ready to support this new computing paradigm. But until then, Google will provide access to the legacy applications, the PC-based holdouts of the soon-to-be-bygone era.

As for Google's response to this perhaps unintentional leak? A spokesperson will only reiterate, word-for-word, what Kačmarčík had already posted.

That's the conclusion of Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index, a report that demonstrates how data will soon become ubiquitous and why the networking race is becoming one to watch.

Layer on top the exponential data that traverses IP networks and the competitive environment only gets more interesting.

Mike Banic, vice president of enterprise marketing for Juniper Networks puts it this way in an interview this week in IT Business Edge:

"Server-to-server traffic over the old network is equivalent to flying from Boston to New York City via Buffalo, Chicago, and Philadelphia and having to go through security again at every stop. The new network must deliver a direct flight with a streamlined security process to improve the experience for users and lower the cost of deploying and operating the data center network."

And that's just with today's amount of data. According to Cisco, the amount of data traveling across IP networks in 2014 will be 10 times the total of all traffic traveling across IP networks in 2008.

On a per month basis, the total amount of data flowing on a monthly basis in 2014 will be nearly 64 exabytes of global IP traffic per month. Just for perspective, one exabyte equals 50,000 years of DVD video.

It's a mind boggling number but is reflective of a number of other trends that we are covering on almost a daily basis at ReadWriteWeb.

Advancement in virtualization are driving the current competition. Cisco is leading the market but it does have its challengers, which until recently were not seen as much of a threat. That's changing as the data center becomes in essence one virtualized computer with the network as the backplane.

Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group makes the backplane analogy and says this new dynamic is creating more disruption than the market has seen in a long time:

"So what does this all mean? It means that for the first time in a long time, simply buying the status quo may not be the right decision. Much of the decision may depend on whose compute and virtualization technology is used. The ability to solve the virtualization problem will far outweigh brand, the number of certified engineers or market share as this is the computing foundation companies will use for the next decade. Only time will tell whose solution works best but for the first time in a long time, we've got a fair fight on our hands."

What's at stake is represented in the projections that Cisco is presenting in its report. Network innovation will be required to sustain these levels of traffic:

• North America will generate the most IP traffic with 19 exabytes per month.
• The fastest growing region will be Latin America with a 51% compound annual growth rate.
• Video will dominate, exceeding 91% of global traffic.
• In 2014, about 87% of traffic will be generated by consumers.
• From 2009-2014, global mobile data traffic will increase 39 times.

To win, Cisco is betting on its established presence in the market and its unified communications strategy. Juniper is betting on its vision of network fabric. Avaya is in the race, too,

We still have to see how HP emerges but its mantra about openness and simplicity has helped it catch up to Cisco. It may be in the best position of all with its servers, storage and arsenal of computing power, management software and services.

Will the cost benefits of a simpler, open network outweigh the benefits of Cisco's tremendous technology infrastructure? How will the data disruption affect the networking giants?

Those are the big question as we continue to adapt to a world where science fiction seems more like reality every day.

The company's latest efforts? A new dashboard and an expansion of its so-called Joliplatform, the Jolicloud version of a Web app store, but one where apps can access both Web-based and local resources. Yes, "local" as in the files and folders you had on your computer prior to upgrading to Jolicloud.

Soon after that transition, another change followed, which allowed users running Jolicloud Express the ability to access their Windows data from within the Jolicloud operating system. (Jolicloud is targeted at users of Windows netbooks).

Jolicloud's New Launcher

Now the company is making new changes once again, this time with an updated HTML5 launcher where all your favorite Web applications are available. To get started, you sign into Jolicloud via Facebook or with a username and password combination. You then have access to a scrollable dashboard where apps can be re-arranged and organized much like how apps on a smartphone can be moved around.

You'll notice in that image that Jolicloud not only offers a wide array of Web-based applications, but many popular desktop-based apps as well, like Skype, Open Office and even alternative Web browsers.

This in-OS "app store" is now available to application developers by way of APIs that can call on both cloud and local system resources. And through a new partnership with Joyent, developers can host their Joliplatform applications for free. Joyent will provide a development sandbox, sample applications, APIs and a complete set of Web and graphical tools to build HTML5 Web apps to all Joliplatform developers.

Also worth noting is that Jolicloud OS provides local access to Windows files and folders like documents, music, pictures and videos - an important feature that makes transitioning to the cloud more feasible for many potential users. In the future, Jolicloud aims to help new users move their local files to the cloud by way of a setup process or wizard that prompts them to upload local files to online storage sites like Box.net, for example.

The updated interface to Jolicloud, seen in the video available here, will roll out to testers in the coming weeks.

In Peppermint's case, the vision is more of a mashup of cloud computing and desktop computing than the others mentioned above. Its desktop environment is LXDE, an environment designed for cloud computing and lightweight computers like netbooks and MIDs (mobile Internet devices). Also included in Peppermint's plans is the use of Mozilla Prism, a technology which runs Web apps as if they were native desktop software applications. A project from Mozilla Labs, Prism blurs the line between desktop and cloud as apps can run from a system taskbar or dock and they can even be configured to display alerts and status messages.

The Peppermint distro is being developed by Kendall Weaver, the maintainer for the Linux Mint Fluxbox and LXDE Editions, and Shane Remington, who works alongside Weaver as a developer at their day job at Astral IX Media in Asheville, N.C.

There isn't much additional information about Peppermint at this time, and since it's in a closed beta right now, we can't get our hands on it yet. But those who are interested can follow the official Peppermint Twitter account or Facebook page to stay tuned for more details as to its public availability.

(Hat tip: ResearchBuzz)