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Looking for a more affordable and more stable hosted email service than Gmail? According to Lotus, that's exactly what their new hosted email system called iNotes can provide. The company isn't being subtle about their desire to compete head-on with the Internet giant, either. Says Sean Poulley, an IBM executive overseeing the new service, "Google has shown itself to be weak. There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service."

Should Google be worried? Some analysts think so. "This is trouble for Google," said Matthew Cain of Gartner. Google of course, disagrees.

A recent bug in Google Apps allowed students at several colleges to read each other's email messages and some were even able to see another student's entire inbox. The issue occurred at a small handful of colleges, admitted Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, but he declined to say how many other institutions were affected. However, according to Donald Tom, director of IT for support services at Brown University, one of the institutions undergoing the transition, he got the impression that a total of 10 schools faced the problem.

While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern - at least at Brown - was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative.

The government cloud computing service rumored since late July is here, and companies are jumping at the chance to join Apps.gov, an "online storefront" for cloud services and applications pre-approved for use by federal agencies. According to the post by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, Apps.gov will move at the same cautious pace Data.gov has, and currently the site is pretty bare bones. Certain areas are without any vendors and all but those related to social media are dominated by Salesforce.com and Google. Other big players, such as Amazon Web Services, are also looking to cash in by becoming a part of the site.

LTech, an enterprise partner of Google, has released a new control panel for Google Apps to make managing the suite easier for IT. In addition to general cloud services LTech has a useful series of modules for enhancing Google Apps, such as a utility for backing up Google Docs. While Google has attempted to beef up its guides for Apps, LTech's panel is a working solution for making large scale changes in an enterprise environment.

A newly released feature from "cloud desktop" software maker Gladinet lets you perform a new kind of backup procedure: cloud-to-cloud. Usually, when you think of cloud backup programs, you think of applications that take your computer's files and upload them to the web for safekeeping. Or perhaps you think of apps that take your files in the cloud and back them up safely to your PC or external hard drive. What's not as common is finding a way to backup your online files from one cloud storage application to another. There simply aren't many good tools out there for doing so. However, with Gladinet's new cloud backup feature, currently only available for Google Docs, you can backup your files from Google's cloud to someone else's, whether that's Amazon, Box.net, EMC, or whatever else you choose.

Just days after Amazon launched its Virtual Private Cloud to try and attract enterprises to EC2, OpSource has announced what it's calling "the first true enterprise cloud." OpSource is essentially offering a similar "hybrid cloud" operation that allows customers to access resources in the cloud over a secure VPN connection. IT can decide just how accessible their instances are and can apply the same type of firewalls and other security policies that they would in a datacenter.

Amazon has launched a new endeavor that integrates traditional IT infrastructure with its EC2 cloud service. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud allows IT to connect to an isolated set of AWS resources to a data center using a VPN connection. Minus all the acronyms, that means that Amazon has created a hybrid cloud that can work securely for the enterprise, balancing the need for encryption with the low cost and scaling power that the cloud provides.

Amazon VPC provides an avenue for enterprises to more comfortably link up their infrastructure with the cloud. For Amazon, it's an endorsement of the hybrid approach, but it's also meant to combat the growing interest in private clouds. VPC is currently in limited beta (you can apply here) and doesn't work with the S3 cloud storage service or any other parts of AWS.

At last week's Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, a number of security researchers demonstrated new ways of attacking cloud computing services. One of the more notable presentations, "Clobbering the Cloud," looked at the vulnerabilities in Amazon's cloud infrastructure, Apple's MobileMe service, and Salesforce.com's cloud platform. Another demonstration showed how both Microsoft and Amazon used insecure methods for password retrieval. And still another presentation examined how the supposedly secure protocol SSL could be defeated.

But hacks alone aren't the only dangers to be found when moving to the cloud, as the Black Hat presentations quickly made clear. In reviewing the dangers brought up by the researchers, it was enough to make anyone wonder: is cloud computing putting us and our data at risk?

The term "cloud computing" is being bandied about a lot these days, mainly in the context of the "future of the web." But cloud computing's potential doesn't begin and end with the personal computer's transformation into a thin client - the mobile platform is going to be heavily impacted by this technology as well. At least that's the analysis being put forth by ABI Research. Their recent report, Mobile Cloud Computing, theorizes that the cloud will soon become a disruptive force in the mobile world, eventually becoming the dominant way in which mobile applications operate.

The US Federal Government has plans to offer both Software as a Service for government agencies and a cloud-based platform for agencies to develop, test and deploy new applications. Those programs could be announced at the Gov 2.0 Summit in September, according to a report this morning from Federal News Radio.

SaaS offerings made available will be government-approved services like email, productivity apps, document management and business process management software. Those services are intended for use by other government agencies. Even more exciting may be the application platform that's part of the plan.

Today, Salesforce.com has taken their enterprise cloud computing to the next level with Force.com Sites.

The new offering from this "platform as a service" allows anyone to easily build a fully-featured website using the very same cloud infrastructure it has provided for applications. In other words, a comprehensive website can now be created through Force.com, and literally all you need do is design your UI with web standards such as HTML, JavaScript, Flex and CSS.

A fabulous, ambitious virtual operating system, G.ho.st launched at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco two years ago. The browser-based computers allow users to leave their desktop, files, and applications in the Amazon-hosted cloud and access them from just about any place or device with an internet connection.

G.ho.st, which already implements well-known applications such as Google Docs, Meebo, Last.fm, and Pandora, has now announced an open API for developers, allowing them to add any web-based application as an integrated part of the G.ho.st virtual desktop.

3Tera, a California-based cloud computing company, today announced the upcoming launch of their AppStore, a marketplace for cloud components where users can find production-ready, scalable components on a free, trial, or pay-per-use basis.

AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools.

Amazon Web Services today announced the public beta of new features for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The new features purport to allow for simple and automatic monitoring, scaling, and traffic control using cloud resources.

"Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers," said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings."

We love our mobile phones, especially our smart phones, and we've come to think of them as "mini" computers in our pocket. However, the nature of the phones' hardware still limits them when it comes to sheer processing power. And the more work the phone has to do own its own, the quicker its battery life gets eaten up. That's why Intel Research Berkeley scientists Byung-Gon Chun and Petros Maniatis have been working on a solution to this problem. They've come up with something called CloneCloud, a new service that uses cloud computing to provide extra processing power for mobile phones.

Gladinet is a free Windows software program that lets you mount cloud storage as local folders on your PC while keeping both locations in sync with each other. It provides access to a number of "cloud" storage services which include: Amazon S3, Google Docs, Google, Picasa, ThinkFree, Zoho, Windows Live SkyDrive, and more. The product, which debuted as a tech preview back in the summer of 2008, has finally reached the release candidate milestone, a point at which the software should finally be more stable, more usable, and (hopefully) bug-free.

The University of Washington has announced two new research projects that will utilize cloud computing platforms from Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM. According to the press release published on Genetic Engineering News, the University of Washington has won grants from the National Science Foundation to fund projects examining ocean climate simulations and analyzing astronomical images. Both of these projects will utilize cloud computing to examine and interact with "the massive datasets that are becoming more and more common in science."

Dave Winer yesterday announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon's EC2. His how-to is so easy to understand that we had our own server up and running within the hour. Sure, it may not seem like much that this fairly uninteresting page is sitting out there somewhere, but for this writer, it was an amazing coup.

"It's time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas," Winer said in a podcast roadmap he created for this work. The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technical bent to get out there and create amazing new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which created it could have ever imagined.

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Cloud computing has arrived. You can scarcely open a computer magazine or business journal without coming across an article about this transformative new approach to providing web-based services. Cloud computing is undoubtedly shifting the landscape. But what many observers miss is that, while cloud computing has arrived, only through APIs will its full business potential be realized.

Almost every description of P2P in the context of business infrastructure starts something like this: "P2P is notorious for..." This comes from many years of people associating P2P with illegal downloading, to the point that the terms are now almost synonymous. Such an association is inherently unfair, however, because no one equates TCP/IP and crime, despite the fact that TCP/IP is the protocol of choice for many cyber-criminals.

Rather than resorting to out-dated and inaccurate definitions, let's start from scratch and consider the following: what is P2P, really? What is it good for? How can we use it to save and earn money?