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Cloud computing blogger Chirag Mehta and Constellation Research Group principal analyst R "Ray" Wang published today a list of their cloud computing predictions for 2011. The pair sees public cloud adoption stalling temporarily, the spread of the app store model in the enterprise, the convergence of Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service and an overall simplification of the technology landscape as some of the most important trends in cloud computing in 2011.

nodeJsCloud is about to launch a cloud hosting service for node.js developers. node.js is a JavaScript framework for building server-side applications. It's one of the hottest development platforms in use, with an explosion of interest since its introduction in early 2009. If you want to know more about node.js and why it's so hot, read our article Why Developers Should Pay Attention to Node.js.

nodeJsCloud is the brain child of developer Cliff Moon (Update: Justin Keller of nodeJsCloud contacted us to clarify that Cliff Moon is not a part of the company) and will compete with Nodejitsu, an existing node.js hosting platform now in private beta.

Salesforce.com announced this morning that it will buy Ruby application platform provider Heroku for $212 million. Heroku will compliment Salesforce.com's VMForce, a hosted plafform for Java. Ruby is one of the fastest growing programming languages on the web, and Heroku has been seeing rapid growth. In November of last year the company hosted 40,000 applications. Today, according to Salesforce.com's announcement, it hosts over 105,000 applications.

The 2010 holiday season may be remembered for the distributed nature of the shopping experience more than anything else. Mobile technologies are on the rise and application platforms are serving as hothouses for any number of developments to buy and sell products and services.

The iPhone, Android and now Windows Phone 7 handsets are as much e-commerce platforms as are game consoles, kiosks or the traditional personal computer.

The variety of ways to sell goods and services online means that traditional e-commerce practices are opening to the new world of cloud computing, dominated by APIs, access to social networks and data services.

A couple of weeks ago, Alex Williams asked on the ReadWriteCloud weekly poll what people thought were the "worst terms" in cloud computing. The results were inconclusive. Or rather, there are a number of terms we dislike.

"Cloud-in-a-box," "cloudstorming," and "cloudburst" led the pack with the most votes, the latter two suggesting that we may be tiring of weather metaphors in cloud marketing.

But one of the terms that has recently been on the receiving end of criticism didn't make it onto Alex's list: platform-as-a-service. Or even just "platform."

Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company's Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for "multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency" enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite's SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP.

Although by no means a new technology, cloud computing retains the buzz as one of the latest innovative - and potentially transformative - elements of the industry. But there remains quite a bit of confusion about what exactly is meant by cloud computing, often making the question of whether or not your startup should be in the cloud difficult to answer.

Today, VMforce was officially unveiled by its parent organizations VMware and SalesForce. The companies came together to produce this love-child and are now proudly sharing it with the world. The new organization, VMforce is disruptive to the core premise and architecture, bringing a new generation mix of services and software to the enterprise.

We took time to talk to leaders at SalesForce and VMware to absorb the news and start to dig in. In this post, we'll share what we know and insert speculation in the force in the market this product may exert.

Heroku is a platform that offers an effective join of the best parts of scaling cloud infrastructure with simple but great tools for immediately provisioning Ruby applications. Last week, at the Under the Radar event, where Heroku is a alumni, the company announced that they are nearly at 60,000 applications - marking a growth rate of over 1,000 new applications hosted weekly.

In this quick analysis, we'll review Heroku and New Relic as two pieces of cloud infrastructure that helps web sites perform to service level agreements even the developer can love.

The Wordpress.com network went down last week. In the wake of the outage, we started looking at what infrastructure Wordpress.com uses to serve its 10 million blogs.

Wordpress.com is run from data centers in Chicago and San Antonio. Layered Technologies (LayeredTech) manages most of the Wordpress.com infrastructure. According to LayeredTech materials, in 2005 Wordpress.com had five servers.