ReadWriteWeb

The Next Web is having "a chuckle" at the expense of customers Microsoft is catering to with its enterprise resource planning products.

And after spending an hour talking with Fred Studer, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Business Solutions Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg Thursday, we can say it's probably an unfair chuckle at both Microsoft and its customer base. "I bet they still use IE6," Alex Wilhelm writes in his post.

The Wall Street Journal has revived rumors about Google launching a cloud storage service called Drive. The comparison everybody wants to make is to Dropbox. The thinking is that Google will challenge everyone's favorite start-up by releasing a native desktop and mobile Drive app with the same syncing features Dropbox users know and love.

Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they've always conformed to the understanding of "The Cloud" that has prevailed at the time. If it's not like Apple's iCloud, which is integrated into Apple's devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don't. There's room for a third, stand-out option here.

The mobile development ecosystem is a large, complicated space. There are innovative startups making tools for native and mobile Web apps along with large enterprise-grade companies that offer solutions from cloud support to frameworks and developer environments. For a mobile developer, it can be confusing to know where to turn and what to use to make the best app possible.

Mobile "backend-as-a-service" startup Kinvey created a map for ReadWriteMobile to help developers understand the ecosystem. Kinvey brackets the mobile ecosystem between two primary pillars: the service providers and the original equipment manufacturers. In between lies the meat of the environment from the "as-a-service" providers (platform, infrastructure and backend) to mobile software developer kit and application programming interface sources. Who has acquired what? What partnerships dominate the ecosystem? Use the map below as a resource when developing your next mobile app.

Mobile development company Appcelerator announced today that it is buying "backend-as-a-service" startup Cocoafish to implement cloud services and functionality in its Titanium Platform. Acquiring Cocoafish is an astute move by Appcelerator, which focuses on tools for developers to create native and mobile Web apps. The company realized in its latest mobile developer report that 84% of developers using Titanium were utilizing some type of cloud service. With Cocoafish, Appcelerator attempts to keep all the necessary mobile development tools on its own platform.

Appcelerator admits that with the purchase of Cocoafish it is moving into direct competition with other mobile cloud services providers like Parse, Kinvey and Stackmob. With Titanium and Cocoafish, Appcelerator now has an integrated client and mobile cloud platform making it one of the most powerful mobile tools providers on the market.

Argh! What was that video called? Was that on Twitter or Facebook? Where did I save that article? Who was it who made that joke about the Edsel? Do you find yourself asking these questions often? As we get wrapped up in more and more Web services, things tend to get disorganized.

We've got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. It's almost too much to keep straight. Fortunately, there are little helpers out there. I've found two I love, and I'll show you how to use them. One is free, the other is in closed beta, but there are invites below! If you've got other suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Gesture-based input is the present and future of computing. We have added whole new meanings to words like swipe, pinch, zoom and flip. For mobile developers, reconciling touch-based input with design and functionality goals in apps has become a problem. Testing gestures in an app is time consuming and problematic.

A "cloud testing" company by the name of SOASTA wants to change that. It has come out with several new products today to help developers test gesture-based input for mobile applications. SOASTA said last year that 75% of all mobile and Web apps go live without ever being scale tested. By merging the cloud and new touch modules, SOASTA believes it has evolved app testing to finally catch up with input methods.

Cory Doctorow's "keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress" and follow-up post (Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing) on BoingBoing raise the alarm about keeping the Internet and PC "free and open." Doctorow makes excellent points and if you haven't watched the keynote or read his essay, you should do so right away.

I'm generally in agreement with Doctorow, but I'm not really sure that he goes quite far enough with Lockdown. Doctorow's focus on the copyright war we're facing with things like SOPA and PROTECT-IP is well warranted, but I'm not sure it covers everything.

Amazon is offering direct connect more widely, Dell has gone green with its cloud and the folks over at CloudBees have some helpful tips on triggering builds in Jenkins from GitHub commits.

Amazon is offering direct connect in more areas. Now you can create a dedicated network connection between your business and AWS facilities in US West (San Jose or Los Angeles), EU West (Ireland) and two locations in Asia Pacific (Singapore and Tokyo). We covered the Direct Connect rollout in August of last year.

The most profound announcements made on the first day of the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show was, by far, made by AT&T. The carrier is hosting its annual developers' summit in Las Vegas and made a bevy of announcements today including new HTML5 APIs for developers, six new Android phones and one, enormous, Windows Phone, a partnership with an important cloud operator. Like Verizon, AT&T is making a push to give developers tools to make dynamic new apps intimately tied to the carrier's service and platform.

Socrates: And you did not know, you never suspected, that they were goddesses?

Strepsiades: No, indeed; I thought the Clouds were only fog, dew and vapour.

(Aristophanes, The Clouds)

Billions of words have been written about "the cloud" and its benefits, implications, and challenges. Hundreds of vendors have sprung up or re-positioned themselves as cloud companies, and there is a vast amount of real business change underway. However, I have seen very little that explains for the layperson what is actually new about the cloud that makes it so interesting and important.