Well you may notice the new headline. Trying to find 10 stories that were really interesting was sometimes a challenge. And sometimes it made it hard to then find one or two others to give a little more perspective on. So I’m shrinking the list.  Here we go:

1. I’m not sure why I’m so riveted by the patent fights between Oracle and Google over Java and Apple v. Samsung and HTC. Well maybe it’s because they may have industry-altering implications. Nobody covers it better than Florian Mueller. This latest post on Google’s flawed stance on patents is gold.
2. I love visualizations. I think that they can be very powerful. Here’s a new app that provides a visual interpretation of your Facebook friends social graph. It’s not 100% perfect, but it does a nice job of clustering real social circles. Automatically creating or suggesting to add friends to ‘circles’ in this way would be a cool, easy to use, feature for Facebook and operate much closer to real life than G+ Circles (IMO)
3. AirBnB, fresh off their big fundraising round has a PR disaster (aka #Ransackgate) as a “host” house is trashed. CEO Chesky quickly pens an article about safety for TechCrunch, but it’s easy to look concerned in retrospect. The apology that came on Monday doesn’t make me feel much better either. But this is what creeps me out about their model.
4. HP joins OpenStack along with Dell. Big, big win for the open source PaaS, which now seems destined to be the leading private/hybrid cloud stack.
5. Google launches Hotel Finder, a new “experiment” to help users find the perfect hotel. What I like about the tool is the more exact, visual way you can create a search area that’s not simply a radius around a particular location. I’m not so sure that the rate discount comparison feature is something that hotels will appreciate however.
6. Cloud Computing and SOA: 2 great tastes that taste great together. JP Morgenthal pens a nice article about what Cloud can learn from SOA and vice versa.
7. Lastly, I’m sorta sad to see Borders go (not that I ever bought books there; but the idea of fewer bookstores in general), but this is a great article written from a branding point of view.

Image courtesy of Kevin Dooley via Creative Commons.

1. Concur continues its investment binge with $5M for Yapta and integrates the air and hotel price tracking tool into TripIt.
2. Isis, the carrier-led near field communication (NFC) mobile payment platform has signed up Visa, MasterCard and American Express along with original partner Discover, who will join the carrier initiative when it launches next year. Interesting development, but a long way to go still for Isis and any NFC payment scheme. PayPal still seems to be in the lead IMO, but perhaps this puts Isis ahead of Google Wallet.
3. Cisco laid off 6,500 employees which was greeted much more warmly by the investment community than the actual workers. And who knows if any of this will actually help restore Cisco’s former glory.
4. Evan Konwiser always has an opinion – this time it’s on Google, ITA and disruption of the travel industry.  Nice post, but the best stuff is in the comments. Lots of great dialogue.
5. Zillow, the real estate site founded by ex-Expedia chief Richard Barton, had a rollercoaster of an IPO. First the share opened at $60, twice the value it was initially priced at, only to see its shares tumble down to the $30’s.
6. American Airlines orders 460 jets from Airbus and Boeing. Flightcaster’s Evan Konwiser asks the question that many others are thinking.
7. There was a lot written about American Express’ new Link, Like, Love daily deal program launched with Facebook (the deals you see are influenced by what you and your friends “like” on the Web). It doesn’t provide the same deep discounts as you might find with Groupon or LivingSocial, but seems a heck of a lot healthier for merchants (MUCH better financially, real stats/analytics about redemption, no impact for employees at point-of-sale).
8. TripAdvisor finally got what it wanted as Google drops [scraped] web reviews of hotels on Google Places.
9. Cloud security is kind of an evergreen topic. Take a look at how Google secures it’s cloud services. I’m guessing this doesn’t resemble your infrastructure operations.
10. Microsoft can’t seem to figure out the online space and the problem is only getting worse as evidenced by the latest earnings report. Microsoft’s online division LOST $2.5 BILLION last year. I can’t imagine what their cost structure looks like.

As an NY Islander’s fan I’ll always remember legendary NY sportcaster Bill Mazer saying “7:11, lucky numbers for the good guys”, in a sports special about the Islanders winning their first Stanley Cup over the Philadelphia Flyers on an overtime goal by Bobby Nystrom (assists by Lorne Henning and Wayne Merrick).  But on to the new from the week of July 11th, 2011.

1. Aliph, the company behind the Jawbone noise cancelling Bluetooth headsets, just raised $70M. I love their products. I just got my second Jawbone, the new Era, last week. Maybe they’ll invest all that money in making better earbuds.
2. Citrix buys Cloud.com to enhance the virtualization giant’s cloud infrastructure offering. Cloud.com is already a major player in the market and has a very high-profile client in Zynga. CloudAve’s Krishnan Subramanian provides great analysis of the impact of the deal on Citrix’s business and their competitors.
3. Google beats Wall Street EPS estimates by almost $1 and shares are up.
4. The concerns around Google’s use of Java in Android seem to keep escalating, especially with Oracle asking for Google CEO Larry Page to testify and Judge Alsup’s recent notice which references ‘willful infringement’ and could result in treble damages. If you’re interested in this story, you’ve got to be reading Mueller’s blog.
5. Tom Friedman writes that you need to be thinking like a tech startup when looking for a job in today’s market.
6. Building great applications is important, but it’s wasted effort if they can’t be deployed easily. F5’s Lori MacVittie introduces the application deployment lifecycle and says the enterprise needs to focus more effort on improving the application deployment process.
7. Is Microsoft moving to a single OS unifying the desktop, phone, gaming and home media platforms? Apparently those were the hints dropped at last week’s Worldwide Partner Conference. But I don’t quite buy it unless Microsoft moves to a lighter weight Chrome-y style OS.  And it’s harder to comprehend under a Ballmer-led Microsoft. Time will tell.
8. Citrix isn’t the only virtualization technology provider working on enhancing their cloud infrastructure play, as VMWare introduces its Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure Suite.
9. With all the hype around Google+, that just adds to the complexity of managing social profiles and across tools in the enterprise. Enter OpenSocial 2.0.
10. On Friday July 15, the ITC handed down an initial determination in Apple’s favor saying that HTC’s Android products infringed 2 Apple patents. If this determination is upheld, it can have a major impact on not just HTC, but other Android licensees. Fantastic analysis by Florian Mueller.

This seemed to be one of the more interesting weeks I’ve seen in quite a while. Yahoo makes a big move in Big Data, Google+ launches, Homeaway IPO’s and much more. Good stuff, take a read through.

1. They’re dancing in the streets of Austin…well that isn’t so out of the ordinary on Sixth Street. But after a successful HomeAway IPO, with a $2.2B valuation, they’re dancing down on First Street too. Amazingly, while some thought HomeAway’s offering was overvalued, shared soared almost 50%, raising the valuation to over $3B. Perhaps lost in the news is the announcement that the VRMA/Pegasus switch concept is dead which should only brighten HomeAway’s outlook.
2. Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li says that Google+ could offer great utility if you’re a Gmail/Android user, but that it increases the amount of trust that you have to have in Google. But in an AllThingsD interview with Google’s Vic Gundrota and Bradley Horowitz, it seems as if Google+ is still in the “science project” phase as the purpose of the limited launch is to get customer feedback before a big launch.
3. Mobile payment startup Square raises a $100M Series C round and now has a valuation of $1 Billion.
4. Microsoft officially launches Office365, the subscription-based cloud version of the vaunted Office suite. It should be an interesting transition for the folks in Redmond, particularly from a revenue perspective. I do wonder how enterprise adoption will unfold, but unfortunately it looks like Office365 is basically unusable on mobile devices, so that will slow adoption dramatically.
5. HP is looking for a hardware partner for WebOS in the Microsoft/Nokia vein.
6. Yahoo! launched Hortonworks, a spinoff with the sole focus on developing and commercializing the Hadoop technology originally developed in the company. Hortonworks is a joint venture between Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. This made big news at the Hadoop summit…and may be the first thing Yahoo! has done right in a while…but folks like CloudEra and MapR are making plenty of headway as well.
7. Another software leader born in the cloud commits to HTML5. First it was Facebook, not it’s Salesfore.com who has a big footprint within the enterprise. Just another example of how companies who are not bogged down by the baggage of the past 30 years can move faster to adopt new tech…which helps attract more customers. However, WindowsXP and IE 7 & 8 still hold back the pace of adoption of HTML5 in the enterprise.
8. It’s one thing when a company is no longer the darling of the media. It’s another when customers start to flee for alternatives. But can anything be salvaged when the employees plainly state they’ve lost confidence in the direction of the company? That seems the situation at Research in Motion. Worse yet, the tepid response from RIM seems to indicate they don’t yet believe there is a problem in the first place.
9. Everyone always wants to get the most of their employees, but the focus is often on “productivity”. How about tapping your employees “cognitive surplus”. Not familiar with the term? Check out this really interesting article and learn. Well worth the read.
10. A consortium of tech companies including Apple, Microsoft and RIM won the bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio.  That group looks like the epitome of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

Last week I had the opportunity to interview John Engates, CTO of Rackspace after his appearance on the Cloud Supersession at HITEC in Austin, TX. In the interview we cover a topics such as:

• Compare and contrast Cloud v. Virtualization strategies
• Advice for customers struggling with how to justify ROI for the cloud when they have existing infrastructure investments
• Security in the cloud
• OpenStack for private and hybrid clouds

The cloud computing “supersession” was moderated by Horseshoe Bay Resort CIO, Lyle Worthington and featured Infor’s Senior Vice President of R&D Javier Buzzalino, PAR Springer-Miller President and CEO Larry Hall and Charles Henderson, Trustwave’s Director of Application Security Services in addition to Engates.  You can find a link to my article recapping the session on Tnooz.

That’s the title of a post I wrote for Tnooz last week as the HITEC show was set to kickoff. As some of the commenters wrote, the advice I give isn’t just useful for hoteliers, but for any company considering leveraging the cloud.

Here are a couple of highlights from the article:

• According the recent IBM Global CIO study, cloud computing notched the highest gains in interest in CIO roadmaps than any other technology
• Cloud computing is not just hot in the enterprise, but was central to many PMS and hotel technology announcements at HITEC
• in evaluating whether to choose a cloud/SaaS solution over on premise you also need to do an honest evaluation of your own IT organization’s ability to manage your infrastructure. Google’s cloud-based Gmail service offers 99.984% availability, which is 46 times better than the averageMicrosoft Exchange implementation.
• Despite the articles about cloud failures and warnings about security, the cloud is probably more secure than your own infrastrucutre and is in use by financial institutions and governments that have more regulatory compliance requirements than travel. Further, major cloud platforms offer better physical and network security than virtually all hotel chains can provide.  These examples show that the cloud is not inherently less secure or less available than on premise solutions.

Finally were the Top Six Questions to ask companies offering cloud-based systems:

1. Is it really cloud or just cloud-washing?
2. Do you have Service Level Agreements on RTO/RPO?
3. What are the application availability SLAs?
4. Is there an offline mode?
5. What about integration with other systems?
6. How can I get my data back out (aka data portability)?

Click here to read the original article.

Apple’s announcements at WWDC are easy to get excited about, but be sure to check out the pieces by James Kobielus on big data and Florian Mueller on the latest in the Oracle-Google battle over Java.

1. The event of the week was Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and Steve Jobs’ keynote.   The major announcements were iCloud, iOS5 and Mac OSX Lion. I would say that only those that felt a new iPhone announcement was required (i.e. Henry Blodget) were disappointed.
2. eBay keeps up their eCommerce acquisition spree, this time buying Magneto, an open source eCommerce platform and rolling it into a newly formed X.Commerce unit along with GSI Commerce (the deal just closed) and other pieces. eBay originally bought PayPal to reduce purchase friction, but now has built a broad eCommerce and Payments platform that is driving most of the growth and about 40% of the revenues for the company.
3. Choice Hotels rolled out a new cloud-based PMS system which could help induce hoteliers to switch flags. The cloud based offering eliminates OpEx costs and dramatically lowers implementation costs. The system is being used by 4,000 hotels worldwide.
4. I don’t know anyone who seems to know more about databases than Forrester’s James Kobielus. So listen to him when he says that Hadoop is the future of enterprise data warehouses. But fear not: “All of your investments in pre-Hadoop EDWs, data marts, data hubs, operational data stores, and the like are reasonably safe from obsolescence”. That’s comforting J.
5. Brilliant analysis by Florian Mueller on Oracle’s case against Google with respect to Java and Android. I’ve written about this before and it looked more like posturing then. Google’s own admission that they rejected a license offer from Sun and willfully went forward is pretty damning. This looks like real trouble.
6. Some feel the GDSs are “evil” and are limiting innovation in the travel sector, while others see that the GDS still plays a vital role in travel distribution and deliver a higher average yield while offering a completely variable distribution cost. Who doesn’t like healthy debate…or a cookie.
7. TIMN’s Nilay Patel writes that phone numbers are “…a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers”, yet provides some hope for the future.
8. JavaScript has made an amazing evolution from niche technology to a foundational element of the modern web.
9. Room77 closed an oversubscribed Series B round of $10.5M led by General Catalyst Partners. The financing will go toward expanding the company’s core search technology and its global index of hotel rooms.
10. Fusion-io builds more momentum for technology IPOs and investments with a successful IPO and a $2B valuation. Fusion-io, the Utah-based startup that uses flash memory to make ordinary servers run faster, technology plays an integral role in the recent mega-datacenters built by Facebook and Apple. Incidentally, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is Fusion-io’s Chief Scientist.

In case you missed it:

1. Aloft Hotels, a Starwood brand, is rolling out a new “Smart Check-In” program which uses a RFID keycard & a push notification to a smart phone to let guests by-pass the check in lines and head straight for their rooms. I think this might be a better solution than trying to directly use NFC chips in smartphones.
2. Expedia & Groupon announced Groupon Getaways at the All Things Digital D9 Conference. Henry Harteveldt and Evan Konweiser provide perspectives. Both agree that consumers will like it but that travel suppliers may not.
3. Yahoo and Alibaba have made up (well sort of). But Alibaba’s Jack Ma thinks that Yahoo! would  be better off it were broken up, something that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has resisted thus far.
4. Just a day after American Airlines released an attack ad against Orbitz (the video has been made “private” by American shortly after the court decision) the courts ruled in favor of Orbitz and ordered American to reinstate their fares on the Chicago-based OTA. But fear not CourtTV fans, the legal shenanigans continue.
5. “Ooh, the cloud is scary…it’s unreliable to put complex, mission critical apps. You should keep it all on your own internal systems”. Yeah, right. Ignore the haters. NYSE Technology just built a custom cloud for financial markets. If a highly-regulated industry that relies on real-time data can implement the cloud, any industry can.
6. Oracle donates OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation. While @krishnan wonders about the ramifications wrt the LibreOffice fork of the project, I wonder whether the real purpose behind the move is to re-ingratiate Oracle to the Apache folks and bring them back into the JCP as part of a strategy in the ongoing litigation against Google for the forking of Java in the Android platform.
7. Nokia downgraded its earnings outlook and the markets responded with a vengeance knocking down the stock by about one-fourth to almost half the 52-week high price. Asymco’s Horace Dediu breaks down the value of the different components of Nokia’s business.
8. Groupon filed for an IPO and some of the information released made a few people wonder where the real value of the company lies and if the model is sustainable. What was most shocking to me is that in the last funding round – which was a BILLION dollars – 86% of the funds were paid back out to existing investors, board members and officers. I have never seen such an exit for investors between rounds. Crazy.
9. I was having a conversation with a client the other day about how to balance support of older platforms versus building their apps with an eye to the future. An hour later, Google announced they were dropping support for Firefox 3.5, IE7 and Safari 3. Good decision IMO. If only Microsoft built a version of IE9 (the only version of IE that supports HTML5) that worked on XP, life would be much easier for people designing web apps.
10. Ever hear of “Availability Zones”? In the wake of the Amazon outage a few weeks ago, you may want to learn. There’s not a lot of info out there on how they work, but F5’s Lori MacVittie does a nice job summarizing and putting it into context regarding application reliability and availability & DR in the cloud.

1. Airline cutovers are challenging and fragile projects. So it’s not surprising that there are often hiccups, but the problems during the cutover at AeroMexico had some fairly significant impacts to travelers.
2. Building airline systems is hard work too as HP is reportedly working through some challenges with their Agiliare Passenger Service System which is the basis of American Airlines’ Jetstream product. HP reportedly let go upwards of 200 contract developers. But conflicting sources make it hard to know whether this is just growing pains or something more significant. The only thing for certain is that many people are watching.
3. There’s a lot that I like about the OpenStack cloud platform – it’s been built by real rocket scientists and can be deployed on any infrastructure. Citrix has taken the platform another step ahead by launching Project Olympus – the first commercialized distribution of OpenStack which will include a Citrix-certified version of Open Stack along with a cloud optimized version of Citrix XenServer as hypervisor. A shrewd move by Citrix to counter the momentum that VMWare is creating.
4. Software AG buys Java performance specialist Terracotta with the stated goal to build a cloud application platform that would compete with the big boys – IBM, Oracle and VMWare. Perhaps it’s a little ambitious of a goal given its current enterprise application lineup.
5. After a period of rumors, Twitter officially buys TweetDeck. One hopes that Twitter leaves TweetDeck alone, or at least doesn’t make many significant changes. Here’s a story from the inside on how it all went down.
6. Getaround…the Airbnb of car rental wins TechCrunch Disrupt. Getaround is an alterative to ZipCar and traditional car rental agencies allowing customers to rent personal cars by the week, day or hour.  Besides winning the $50K, the must be real happy about this next story.
7. Can Airbnb really be worth $1B or are we just partying like it’s 1999? At least the folks at Andreesen Horowitz thinks so as they lead a $100M investment into the alternative lodging startup.
8. Choosing between developing native apps or going down the mobile web route is a decision that companies struggle with all the time. This article points out two key considerations for commerce companies – native apps have significantly higher conversion rates and can deliver better performance than mobile sites, also impacting conversion. Just something to keep in mind.
9. PayPal files suit against Google and some former employees, specifically recent hire Osama Bedier who joined Google to help create Google Wallet, a direct competitor to PayPal’s mobile payment platform.
10. Kayak reports stellar results in advance of its planned IPO.

OK, I thought this post went up a few days ago, but it was saved as a draft. Sorry for the delay:

1. Linkedin had an amazing IPO, going out at $45 and seeing the stock price more than double in the first day of trading. That’s a market valuation of over $9 billion…with a “B”.
2. Is Android gaining market share because of carriers? It seems so. And it makes sense. Android’s “openness” gives the carriers the ability to “customize” the phones with pre-loaded (often carrier-branded) apps, and more importantly, get a piece of the transaction pie through direct to carrier billing, whereas all iPhone billing goes through iTunes.
3. Most of the analysis of the smartphone market is focused on the platform battle between Apple and Google. But check out this analysis of handset vendors by Horace Dediu. For all the success that Android handsets are having in the aggregate, Apple is leading in terms of revenue share and absolutely killing it from a profit share perspective with more than half of all handset profits.
4. Expedia keeps evolving its Asian strategy increasing its investment in eLong, the largest Chinese OTA to 56%. Tencent also invested $84M in eLong for a 16% stake with the potential to market the service to its 674M active users.
5. The one thing that Google wants but can’t have is access to Facebook’s data.  And now Microsoft’s got it.  Definitely feels like an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind a deal. The question is how deeply Bing will integrate the data into their search results.  Even so will anyone care? Will it be the proverbial “tree in the forest”? Bing’s latest TV ads make me think they may have a winner.
6. Many companies look to analysts like Gartner and Forrester for advice on how to improve their businesses. So here’s a guest’s-eye view of The Fontainbleu’s new mobile app from Forrester eCommerce analyst Julie Ask.  Seems like there’s still work to do.
7. LTE looks like it is going to be the standard for 4G networks (sorry Clear). But unlike GSM it may be very hard to take your LTE phone around the world as there are no fewer than EIGHT “core spectrum bands”. And it looks like spectrum fragmentation is not going away anytime soon, so read this great article discussing the implications of the problem and other reflections from the recent LTE World Summit.
8. The check-in was a novelty when it started, but I gave up on it a while ago as the odds of being the mayor to earn a reward was low. But Starwood may have revived the check in, crediting Starpoints to guests who check in at Starwood properties.
9. Well at least it’s not NFL lockout news, but the American court system is still hard at work. This time, the DOJ is investigating potential anticompetitive practices by the GDSs.
10. Many people get excited about the promise of NFC for mobile payments. I was involved with RFID and NFC a decade ago and am, let’s just say “skeptical”. I think this article does a great job of describing why the recent buzz may be just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.