Hope you all have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year.
If you were good this year, you will get a visit from Santa. Google have even set up Google Earth so you can track Santa around the world. What a great idea. Google teamed up with Northern American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to keep tabs on Santa Claus in real time. Google also said you can leave Father Christmas a voice message on his Google Voice Number.
This is such a neat idea from Google. I know they are always coming up with cool and funky things, but this has to top them. It makes the Santa Claus story more real even to those kids who feel they are tool old to believe in good old St Nick. How does it work I hear you say?
Well people can track Santa’s journey through a plugin for Google Earth Web Browser. The plugin can be downloaded by Windows users for Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Flock browsers. Mac users can do so, by downloading the plugin for Safari and Firefox.
I know this site is also about SEO and optimising traffic to your own website, but we cannot ignore the growing mobile market and this new area called “the mobile cloud”.
According to a study conducted by ABI research, nearly all mobile money service providers will be impacted by mobile cloud computing. Cloud computing is defined as the evolution of computing processing in which processing and data storage move away from desktop and latops. In simple terms it means data storage and processing occurs outside the mobile device. Some you many have already seen is the mobile Gmail and Google Maps. Mobile cloud computing will continue to grow, ABI think it will expand rapidly over next five years, growing to 998.1 million subscribers by 2014.
Why are they so confident that this will happen? Well two reasons really:
1. There will be a rise in Platform as a Service players in the market. Otherwise known as PaaS these are are development platforms for which the development tool is hosted in the cloud and accessed through a browser. This means there is no need to install tools on developers computers to build Web applications. It can all be done on the PaaS platorm, making it cheaper and easier to develop these applications.
2. There are several standards intitiatives within the mobile industry such as the BONDI intiative and the GSM Associations’s OneAPI initiative that will help the growth of mobile cloud services. The GSM Association’s OneAPI sets the standards for network APIs which means developers can access parts of the network providers’ capabilities such as location services.
So who uses this PaaS?
A lot of companies, one of the first ones is Salesforce. They have their Force.com platform which allows business applications to be built and run in the cloud. Others are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google’s App Engine. I know you may be surprised by AWS, but this is what happens in the market place today, a company that starts by selling books over the internet, can expand into a greater and more diversified business and now AWS is used by over 500,000 developers.
Ok, when will this take effect?
It all depends on the market. Those markets that use internet more will lead the way such as Western Europe, North America and parts of Asia.
The next step is for these companies to offer the service to not just the smartphones – Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone but to the other Symbian and J2ME phones on the market. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are major players in this market.
So you may even find by end of this year, early next there will be a growth in these mobile cloud appplications and those who haven’t yet started using apps will start using them like there is no tomorrow. Who would have thought people would be using mobile phones for more than just calling?
Search engines | Jo Turnbull | 
December 25, 2010 3:42 pm | 
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