Sorry for the late Monday post. So without further adieu:

1. Google introduced App Inventor, a simple GUI based app builder for Android OS. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid takes it for a spin. Mike Loukides from O’Reilly Radar discusses the different philosophies behind Apple and Google as evidenced by App Inventor. I for one don’t think that we’ll be better off having more bad apps at our disposal, but to each his own. And I guess that’s Google’s point.
2. Tnooz reports ITA had been working on hotel search. Add this to Google’s display of hotel listings and pricing on Google Maps and you’ve got some serious juju going.
3. Big cloud announcements at Microsoft WDC10. Perhaps Azure-in-a-box is the most intriguing. Ben Kepes has an interesting take.  And eBay is the first high-profile client to take the plunge.
4. Facebook v. Google: the upcoming travel wars. Interestingly the author ponders Microsoft’s potential role, but doesn’t consider Apple.  Curious.
5. Apple had its press conference on Friday, but the real-world experiences of Engadget’s own writers shows that perhaps the iPhone4 antenna issue isn’t as big of an issue that the media is making it out to be. And I would say that Microsoft COO Kevin Turner’s lame attempt at a joke equating the iPhone antenna issue with the outright suckiness of Vista was imprudent at best. First ship a mobile OS that doesn’t suck and then you’ve earned the right to say something.
6. In related news, it looks like Microsoft Phone7 OS isn’t going to be the game changer they hoped it would be.
7. Can Google make a good travel product? TravelPost’s Simon Breakwell has some definite opinions. A must read.
8. Google Click-to-Call. Is this the new face of mobile advertising?
9. Bing Travel introduces Flight Summary with savings if you’re flexible with your travel plans. Pretty cool. Would be even cooler if they could integrate dynamic packing of hotel and car to give the best overall travel value.
10. Homeaway hires their new COO from PayPal. This signifies a move to better integrate alternative payments (including mobile) into the booking process, but perhaps shows an appreciation of the benefits of having a more professional software engineering organization in order to keep up with the needs of the business.

Well I hope that everyone enjoyed their holiday. But before I get to the tech and travel news, I must comment on “The Decision”.  Yes, I was among the 10 million people that watched LeBron James rip the heart of his own city when he announced his decision to play for the Miami Heat next year. Like many I feel terrible for Cavs fans and LeBron is diminished in my eyes. Not for the choice that he made. I mean hey, if I was a single, 25-year old mega-millionaire, I’d probably want to play with my two best friends and live in South Beach too. For LeBron South Beach won’t be eye-candy, it will be candy.  And he’s the owner of the candy store (or at least COO with Dwayne Wade as CEO).

Credit: Al Diaz/Miami Herald

But what was unforgivable for me was the way that he manufactured the drama and built-up his own TV special when in fact the decision had been made days, if not months ago. I just can’t imagine that as an Ohio native that he didn’t understand just how his decision to leave would devastate the community and his fans…and how dragging out the process and announcing his decision on national TV would make the effect even worse.  Jeff Van Gundy had it right on the broadcast when he said that the one thing he’d regret is not informing the Cavs of his decision before the broadcast. I think that Cavs’ owner Dan Gilbert’s fantastic/unfortunate/comical “open letter to Cavs fans” is testament to that.

OK, on to this week’s curation.

1. Everbread raises about $85M from Bessemer Ventures. I guess it pays to be named by Google as a competitor.
2. YouTube Mobile goes HTML5. Seems as if the mobile web site beats the app, which seems to jive with Google’s strategy of moving towards a mobile web, rather than an apps.
3. There has been a lot of talk about how Facebook could have an impact on the travel industry via their OpenGraph. Well Facebook made their first overt move into the travel space by acquiring NextStop, but then immediately shut it down.  In all likelihood we’ll see the NextStop tech in another form, but it will continue to get interesting.
4. Last week OpenAxis debuted, this week it’s the BLLA announcing the development of a new standard for defining boutique and lifestyle lodgings in hopes to level the distribution playing field with the large hotel chains.
5. Very interesting stats on how people are using the iPad from Resolve Market Resarch. On a related note, Enterprise Irregular Jeff Nolan recants his original take on the iPad and notes that besides e-Readers, netbooks are getting smacked down in favor of iPads.
6. Good sign for a future recovery: US Venture Capital fundraising is up 13%, although that’s still only half of what was raised in the first half of 2008, it’s moving in the right direction. And since emerging businesses are the real jobs engine in the country (many say small business, but really it’s new businesses), this is promising for the future.
7. Continental re-ups their GDS relationship with Travelport through 2013. It’s interesting that CO is doing these kinds of deals with the merger with United scheduled to close later this year. I understand the urgency on Travelport’s part, but with another year on the existing deal, why did CO jump now? At some point doesn’t a merged CO-UA have to re-evaluate and re-negotiate these kinds of contracts?
8. Next week is Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner conference in DC and Azure (Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform) is supposed be front and center. Altimeter Group’s Ray Wang gives Microsoft partners some Azure rewards and risks to keep in mind while listening to the presentations at the conference.
9. Just a week after OpenAxis is announced, American Airlines announces that it will be making all its optional services available exclusively through Farelogix.
10. Two weeks in a row a major technology company buys a travel firm.  This time it was Facebook buying Nextstop. At first there was speculation that this was Facebook first step into the travel sector to keep up with Google and Apple, as had been rumored after they unfurled their OpenGraph at f8 in April. But according to TechCrunch it looks like perhaps they’re just accumulating talent.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Microsoft’s Pivot technology, developed in Live Labs, could potentially revitalize hotel search or travel search in general.  Well today Microsoft is using the technology to power Silverlight PivotViewer which is now available for download.  I’ve embedded the following video where Microsoft tries to give examples of how different sectors can use the Pivot technology (4 minutes).

In a TechCrunch article they highlighted Hitched.co.uk, a wedding planning site as one of the first websites to implement Pivot.

So with this very cool capability to visualilze data and search, who will do it first in the travel sector?  Will you?

Let’s see what came up:

1. Forrester analyst John Rymer’s take on Oracle’s Cloud strategy. And for a bonus, a slightly different interpretation by fellow Forrester analyst Stefan Reid.
2. Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDnet: The Facebook imperative for enterprise software.  Hinchliffe is great. Longish articles at times, but good insight. Riffing off Benioff’s recent proclamation that enterprise software should look like Facebook (not sure I want my enterprise software UI changing every 3 months), he asks important questions like “Should Enterprises be Social” and has a Top 5 list of why IT should be social (I certainly won’t limit to IT).  But I think that social is critical for organizations, particularly global organizations, who want to innovate.  R&D has gone global and the best way to harness that is to make sure those teams are social with each other, collaborating and sharing.
3. David Linthicum: Cloud Provider Roulette.  Bottom line: If you are evaluating cloud computing technology today, you have to consider that your choice could be bought up this year or next. That means you need to make sure your legal agreements are rock-solid and spell out what happens if your provider is acquired
4. Wyndham Hacked for Third Time. Not good. Wyndham please talk to me about security testing.  Related article noting that recent research shows that the hospitality industry is hit hardest by hackers, with the natural focus on payment card information.
5. Tnooz: Will Priceline come back to the field?  The concentration of revenue in the OTA (online travel agency) business is pretty staggering.  It’s the Pareto Principle on steroids.
6. Tnooz: TripIt maps employee travel with TripIt groups.  Pretty cool way to keep tabs on the organization. Would be very helpful in case of a crisis and there was a need to know/get in contact with employees at a moments notice.
7. Daring Fireball: Thoughts on Windows Phone 7 by John Gruber (not related, but I’d be somewhat glad if people confused him with me. Would certainly help me get gigs on the speaking circuit)
8. Keeping in the iPad theme this TechCrunch article on Apple’s HTC patent Lawsuit indicates that the real focus of Apple’s ire is (spoiler alert) Google’s Android OS (ok, not really a spoiler).
9. Three theories why Google pushed Buzz out the door.  What’s more interesting to me is that it seems that the Buzz experience is vastly different on an Android device, with all it’s location-based goodness, than on a web client. Is this really targeted more at Foursquare than Twitter?
10. And last but not least: Ballmer’s really committing Microsoft to the Cloud. Yet somehow I still don’t quite believe it.

Last week Red Hat’s CTO Brian Stevens introduced a new initiative called Deltacloud that has a very lofty goal of simplifying the process of invoking cloud services via a new unified standard.  It address interoperability which can be an important challenge in cloud computing for ISVs.  Out of the box they have some pretty good market coverage, supporting Red Hat’s own Enterprise Virtualization, VMWare ESX and Amazon EC2 with support for Rackspace to follow.

This is a good start, but I think that this is about as far as Red Hat’s going to be able to take this.  Nowhere is there any mention of, nor do I expect support for, some of the other leading Cloud platforms from Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.com.  And this highlights the both the problems with the mega-vendors and the open source movement.  Open Source levels the playing field, but that is diametrically opposed to what the mega-vendors like Microsoft and Oracle want, particularly Microsoft who loves their proprietary standards.  And between Microsoft and Oracle, they control so much of the ISV ecosystem, that I don’t see how Red Hat’s Deltacloud gets any traction.  Even Stevens’ own statement talks about “creating a buzz”.  Well maybe for one day.

The other day I responded to a tweet from James Urquhart that prompted an interesting discussion:

“Does a successful virtualization strategy take away from the ROI of cloud computing?” <- Interesting. Not enough to avoid cloud, me thinks.“

What that made me start to think about was the underlying value proposition and ROI of cloud computing and the juxtoposition of operational and financial goals.

Under Urquhart’s perspective, a company that has deployed a successful VM has a lower Cloud strategy ROI than a company that has not deployed VM.  This may be true from a raw number perspective because the company with the VM strategy is already getting much more benefit from their existing infrastructure.  But they may still fight problems with scalability, depending on the projected use of their application, which might push them towards the cloud.

But it brought me to a very practical question that few are talking about: “How can companies maximize the value from their existing IT infrastructure when planning a cloud strategy?” If the Cloud is all about ROI, how should companies factor in their existing investments?

Now most public cloud advocates talk about the Cloud as if there is no existing infrastructure.  All you hear is No CapEx, Lower OpEx, Unlimited Scalability, Superior Performance.  Yet most of the people they’re trying to sell to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in infrastructure investments.  For those companies the ROI of the Cloud is a much more difficult proposition because it leaves them with dead assets.  Yes, they can try to re-purpose those assets to run other systems, but that would require some detailed analysis and planning of their entire infrastructure needs, look closely at when to retire servers or other equipment and build a phased plan to enter the Cloud.  Quite frankly that kind of analysis is probably long overdue anyways.  But in today’s economic environment – which is improving, yet still a long way from boom times – people are trying to figure out how to squeeze more value from what they already have, not how to abandon it more quickly.

And for those who are thinking about evaluating a private cloud strategy (although a cloud on your own infrastructure in my view is not a cloud), they may be able to get more value out of virtualization and other strategies, but they lose the operational efficiencies and instant scalability to match spikes in demand that the Cloud has to offer.  It’s an alternative to the public cloud, but in many cases still doesn’t solve the business problem that moving to the Cloud is supposed to address.  As an aside @krishnan wrote a good post on his own changing views regarding the debate between public and private clouds and helped spark a few ideas for this post.

So it leads me to this.  If “Cash for Clunkers” worked for the car industry (at least to the tune of 690K vehicles), why not bring the concept to the Cloud?  Why not “cash for Infrastructure”? When you think about it, it’s a virtual rush to acquire clients.  While there may not be true lock-in, it’s certainly a hassle to move operations from Cloud to Cloud, so it’s time to lock-up customers.  So why wouldn’t deep-pocked companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft offer some sort of upfront cash for a company’s existing computing infrastructure assets to lock in a customer now?  Of course companies on the next tier like OpSource, Rackspace or GoGrid probably don’t have the resources to offer it, so they’re at a disadvantage.

Does anyone have the “onions” to make this offer?  I’m sure there are a lot of companies who’d be willing to take them up on it.  If any of the above companies run with my idea, I only want 0.5% of the assets they acquire in compensation

UPDATE: @lmacvittie had a great suggestion on Twitter to improve the idea. It doesn’t have to be cash. Even credits for cloud usage would be a good incentive. Maybe now guys like OpSource and Rackspace have a way to play.

Geva Perry is starting a series called “The Purpose-Driven Cloud” where it appears that he’s trying to address the aforementioned question by evaluating a number of different attributes that are all technology-centric.  It looks like it should be a worthwhile discussion, although it’s mostly written from a developer’s point of view.

But I think his angle is missing some important elements (although in fairness they may get addressed along the way) that are more customer-driven and business-driven:

• Suitability to task: What is the kind of application that you have?  Is it primarily workflow and transaction oriented like an ERP application or are you doing heavy number crunching and using complex algrorithms like a pricing credit default swaps?  Some cloud platforms like Force.com are great for the former, but wouldn’t be good for the latter. And if you are accessing data frequently, cloud storage options like Amazon S3, might not be the right selection.
• Data and Code Portability: When you are deciding what cloud platform to select, you’re not just making that decision for yourself, you’re making it for your customers.  So choosing a platform that doesn’t lock you in to a proprietary codebase or where extracting the data is more of a challenge must be a primary consideration.  Nobody wants to be locked in.  Call it the ‘Hotel California’ effect.  Many companies are wary of the Force.com platform for this very reason, unless they’re building their product in order to take advantage of the Salesforce.com ecosystem.  Also, what kind of protections are you afforded via code escrow?  Think about the challenges that companies who built their businesses — don’t just think about building applications — on Coghead?  For many this was extremely challenging to their business and to some it was fatal.  there’s a financial stability aspect to this as well, so advantage to the mega-vendors like Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce.
• What Does Existing Code Look Like?: Let’s start out simply: do you have existing code?  If not your choices are much wider.  But if you’re heavily invested in .NET or Java, your choices may be clearer, because the migration path afforded to you will be faster.  And speed does count for a lot.  Here’s one area where Microsoft Azure will have a strong value proposition to existing Microsoft shops.
• Integration: According to Forrester Research, integration is a top concern of clients when selecting SaaS companies.  So does the platform you’re selecting make this challenge any easier on you?  With Force.com, AWS and OpSource Connect you have a lot of existing connectors and modules sitting at the ready that make solving the integration problem easier and significantly reduce the associated coding effort.  Of course there are integration platforms like Boomi and Pervasive Software that you can integrate into your application, but if all else is equal, why not go with the platform that has the integration built in?

What else did I miss?  Please let me know.

According to a recent post by SD Times’ David Worthington, the Azure team is projecting that 50,000 applications will reside in its cloud within three years.  Did anyone expect something different?

Everything at Microsoft is big, and if it can’t be big, it can’t be at Microsoft.  The company has over 10 products that have annual sales over a billion dollars.  And with a large installed base of applications already written on the .NET framework, it’s logical to think that many companies will develop their next generation applications on the next generation of Microsoft technology, especially as Microsoft is trying to make the upgrade path smooth.  But the operative word is “trying”.  Even according to their own website, many of the new .NET Services are still in the works, although I don’t doubt that they’ll get it done eventually.  But the question is when. Time is ticking along.  Force.com has over 100,000 applications already and AWS and AppEngine are picking up steam.

And that’s why the introduction of the concept of Azure was more important to the actual set of services and technology. Part of the strategy is a stall.  Don’t develop on AWS or Force.com or Google’s AppEngine, wait for Azure.  It will make life easy, it will feel good.  Even the name evokes visions of sitting on a beach looking at beautiful blue waters under crystal clear skies.  But at the end of the day they’re going to have a deliver a platform that performs very well (as a comparison, Salesforce.com runs its’ entire business on about 1,000 servers — that’s extremely efficient) and provides a reasonably clear and easy upgrade path to existing Microsoft shops.  And more importantly, it’s going to have to deliver a strong business proposition.  Worthington states that “…[Microsoft] is pitching Azure more on its merits as a business model than as a technology,” and they’ll have to.  How they structure the platform pricing and cost of the different software components will be key.  But the guys at Microsoft are no dummies, so we’ll see what they come up with in a month or two.  But otherwise, there are a lot of technology options and interesting business models that ISVs and Enterprises alike will have to choose from.