Cloud

Microsoft announced the worldwide availability of its Dynamics CRM Online on Monday. The software is the cloud-based version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and will be released globally both in on-premises and partner-hosted versions on February 28.

Dynamics CRM Online first launched in 2008 (after shedding its original "Live" moniker) to compete in the burgeoning business of cloud-based Customer Relationship Management software where Salesforce and Oracle also sought to establish dominance.

In what could be viewed as a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Google on Friday announced that it had modified its Google Apps service agreements to promise users 99.9 percent uptime. In addition, it removed wording that accounted for planned or scheduled downtime as part of the service reliability promise.

"Unlike most providers, we don't plan for our users to be down, even when we're upgrading our services or maintaining our systems," Enterprise Product Management Director Matthew Glotzbach said. He said Google would be the first company to eliminate maintenance window clauses from its service contracts.

Would someone please stop the "Twilight Zone" music from playing. I'm hearing it now following today's Google bombshell (Yes, there is other news besides Verizon iPhone): Chrome will soon no longer support the H.264 codec. Google supports Flash Video, but Apple has abandoned it. Apple supports H.264, and Google is giving it up. Someone pinch me when there is something resembling sanity among these companies' positions. Perhaps Firefox can save us all and our online video streaming. No, wait! Mozilla also spurns H.264. Well, gulp, Internet Explorer anyone?

Apple's Flash abandonment is nutty enough, at least in the here and now, given how widely Adobe's technology is used on the Web. H.264 also is pervasive, making Google's plan as out of touch, from a user experience perspective. Then there is Google's support for Flash to consider. Am I missing something or isn't H.264 a primary Flash codec?

Wavy Gravy famously used to say, "We are all bozos on the bus, so we might as well enjoy the ride," meaning none of us really knows what we're doing. We do the best we can, try to look cool and hope nobody notices when we screw up, when it'd be so much easier to simply admit we're all just trying to figure it out, and let our mistakes hang out for all to see, so others don't have to make the same mistakes. You've got to take chances, and that's what I've done by moving from the safety and familiarity of the desktop to the cloud.

Let me start by letting you know I'm a total bozo when it comes to this cloud thing. I think we all are. It's so new, nobody really knows how to do it all right, and many people are afraid to try. Will their stuff be safe? What if there is no Internet connection? So I'm putting on my red rubber nose and diving into the cloud for everyone to see -- hope you enjoy the ride.

Settling into the cloud is taking longer than I expected, as I try to root out enough applications to make up for what I used locally on my last laptop -- the 11.6-inch MacBook Air. The simple reality: There aren't enough good applications yet, or perhaps I'm just too slow finding them. Strangely, if I were living in a different cloud -- from smartphone or tablet -- I could choose from plenty of apps and many of them would be better than those available on the PC (the difference, of course, being something running locally and connected versus something running in the browser that must be connected).

I got a stronger-bitter sweet taste of the difference between the clouds on the evening of Day 5, when I bought the Nexus S smartphone running Gingerbread (aka Android 2.3) from the local Best Buy Mobile.

Wednesday, the mapping component of Microsoft's search engine Bing got another significant UX upgrade and new features for both the desktop and mobile versions of the service.

Last August, a new style of the Bing Maps was unveiled, which focused on providing a cleaner visual experience for users. Today, that new style has been updated even further with subtle changes to color contrast and brightness, as well as to the density of information and size of text to help in overall legibility and usability.

Though it is primarily known as a social networking site, Facebook is actually one of the top destinations for photo sharing, and a new user profile design change unveiled Monday ups the visibility of Facebook photos and encourages users to share personal information in a more visual way.

Two years ago, Facebook came forward with some staggering figures about the photo sharing taking place on its sites, which amounted to between 2-3 Terabytes of photos being updated daily with a peak of 300,000 images per second. Facebook would serve about 15 billion photos, and the storage dedicated just to photography amounted to more than a petabyte.

In a keynote presentation at the Silverlight Firestarter event this morning, Corporate Vice President in Microsoft's developer division, Scott Guthrie officially announced Silverlight 5, and outlined its new features and 1H 2011 beta availability.

Silverlight 5 adds more than 40 new features to the Web application framework that focus on improving its streaming media functionality for users and on improving application development for engineers.

Today's Wall Street Journal features an article by Christopher Lawton that talks about the difficulty independent app stores face when competing with Apple and Google for developer and consumer attention. Paul Reddick, chief executive of third-party app store HandMark told WSJ that he couldn't simply bet the whole company's fate on independently distributing apps with a presence like Google to compete against.

It may not even be a prudent bet to be in the app store business at all.

At GSMA Mobile Asia Congress yesterday, Sina Mobile general manager Gaofei Wang said his company's 15-month old microblog Weibo is well on track to hit the 100 million user mark by the second quarter of 2011. The Twitter-like service launched in August 2009, and recently hit the 50 million registered user mark. It took popular microblog Twitter a little more than three years to hit the same milestone.

One week ago, Microsoft's Web services branch MSN announced it had partnered with Sina.com to team up and offer a comprehensive web services package to Chinese users.

Google on Wednesday announced that it will add support for real-time document editing in Google Docs on iOS 3.0+ and Android 2.2 (Froyo) devices.

The feature is an extension of the real-time document editor that Google added last April, and it will be rolled out at docs.google.com over the next few days. The new web-based document editor lets multiple users access the same document or spreadsheet, and changes show up in real time. For Android users, the added benefit of speech-to-text is available, letting users dictate their document changes.

Google on Monday unveiled a new service called Hotpot which marries Google Places with Google Profiles to try to provide more accurate recommendations when searching for physical destinations such as local restaurants and businesses.

Users of the new service are encouraged to use their Google Profile to rate and review businesses they've had experience with. These reviews then serve two main purposes: to strengthen the database of Google Places reviews, and to build a profile of what the user likes and dislikes to help Google learn what to suggest to him in the future.

Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that "isn't just e-mail," but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread.

The new system puts a user's identity above the communication protocol. Facebook Engineer Joel Seligstein today said, "You decide how you want to talk to your friends...They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message."

Google on Tuesday announced yet another upgrade to its search results pages intended to provide more information so that users don't haphazardly click away: Instant Previews. These previews are as simple as a small magnifying glass icon next to a search result, which users can click upon to see a visual snapshot of the linked site. These snapshots may also include search terms highlighted in orange where they appear in the resulting page. That's about it.

It's an understandable concept, and Google said on Tuesday that the feature increased users' satisfaction with search results by about 5% in internal testing.

ComScore's most recent qSearch Web search market share analysis gave Google 66% of the core search business, with the closest competitor, Yahoo trailing by 50%.

Of the more than 16 billion explicit core searches conducted in September, Google handled 10.6 billion of them. Yahoo sites handled 2.7 billion, Microsoft sites took care of 1.8 billion, Ask Network fielded 593 million, and AOL sites took 362 million.