gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

TechCrunch reports that Nokia closed the deal to acquire Dopplr. [via CNET]

Update 9/26: TechCrunch Europe has a more detailed post about this supposed deal.

Update 9/28: The announcement is now available on Nokia’s web site. [via vowe]

Incidentally the Dopplr blog has also been updated with a post about the acquisition.

To work smarter, we’ll need smarter organizations. To learn more, please join us for our Smart Work WW Videocast and our Smart Work Global Jam.

Oracle is going to buy Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) for $7.4b.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

According to Microsoft Austria’s CGM our job market has 1,700 open IT jobs and IT projects are not being implemented because of this. I know I’m being sarcastic, but maybe they should offer a program for laid-off Microsoft employees to come and work in Austria. That alone would more than satisfy the “demand”. How are they going to top this on April 1st?

“Der heimischen Informationstechnologie-Branche fehlen rund 1.700 Fachkräfte. Trotz Wirtschaftskrise, so Microsoft-Österreich Chefin Petra Jenner am Montag vor Journalisten. Dadurch können “Projekte nicht umgesetzt” werden.” – Microsoft: Österreich fehlen 1.700 IT-Fachkräfte

“At first, the balloon factory folks shush the unicorn and warn him away. That often works. But sometimes, the unicorn ignores them and wanders into the factory anyway.

That’s when everyone runs for cover.” – Tribes, by Seth Godin

The Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Lab at UC Berkeley recently released a paper titled Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing discussing the current state of cloud computing and the challenges ahead.

I really liked that they set a base level and defined what their understanding of cloud computing is, which vendors there are, and that they cover a broad level of publicly available cloud providers. It seems that IBM is not really on their radar as a public cloud provider – the study was not covering private clouds and focusing on providers providing services available without contract negotiations with the vendor – which is a bit surprising given that with IBM as an affiliate member of the lab I would’ve thought that information about our cloud efforts would’ve been available and might have been an interesting addition to the paper.

Covering more about cloud APIs might have also been a great addition. They emphasized the problems of proprietary APIs on clouds because of vendor lock-in, but discussions about potential standards in cloud APIs or middleware were not covered.

Nonetheless I really recommend reading this paper if you consider using cloud computing for business applications to get an understanding of what cloud computing is and what the scenarios are where it can provide advantages today.

If you’re interested in further details and discussions about this paper you might also want to look at the Above the Clouds Blog.

“…the application execution environment is managed, complete with the same sort of service level agreements that are expected in the mainframe world” – Mainframes in the Cloud?

the same SLAs… just… uhm… lower.

It’s not unheard of to have servers that can’t withstand an unexpected surge in load. Every system will break at some point. It’s just a matter of the capacity you plan for or additional capacity available that you’re able to reallocate automatically to handle the load.

I would’ve thought that this might have been a great way to show and use Windows Azure, the cloud computing initiative Microsoft is working on. This kind of thing was funny when Microsoft was a software company that was a little challenged on the IT management side of things, but when you’re starting to host people’s e-mail and try to get into hosting business applications for your customers it gets a bit more serious. I guess someone at Microsoft – in addition to the admins – might lose some sleep over this.

The call for speakers is still open for Impact 2009 until January 16. I’ve never been there, but from all I read and heard it sounds like an impressive SOA conference. I only saw a few repeat sessions and hands-on labs at WSTC 2008 from Impact 2008 and they were all of extremely high quality with excellent speakers.

Don’t know yet if any of my customers will be there or maybe even presenting. We’ll see.

Seth Godin wrote an interesting post titled “Do ads work?” and poses an interesting question…

If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?

I’ve never thought about it this way, but it’s an interesting point of view.