Are conference calls the new coffeehouses of idea enlightenment?

Edison is believed to have said «genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration», and nine out of ten times «implementation trumps innovation» when it comes to achieving commercial success, but is it just me, or has the well of new ideas around cloud computing run a bit dry recently?

Big Data is rapidly gaining ground on cloud computing when it comes to search popularity on gartner.com. And SDN (Software Defined Networking) may be flavour of the month in cloud blogs, but although there is a succinct impact on cloud computing, this is really more a networking idea.

Now of course,  cloud computing is only one force – and mainly an enabling one – in the nexus of cloud, information, social and mobile, but when monitoring the various publicly available industry news feeds, I get a bit of a Groundhog Day (the movie) feeling.

You might even say we have taken a …