The US case against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is looking shakier by the day, following news that warrants used to raid his New Zealand home were invalid.

On Thursday New Zealand High Court Judge Justice Helen Winkelmann ruled that the warrants used in January “did not adequately describe the offences to which they related”. Many of Dotcom’s substantial assets were frozen, and property seized including a 20 luxury vehicles, works of art and computers.

Moves by the FBI to copy data from Dotcom’s computer and take it offshore were also unlawful, she said.

In January Dotcom was cut out of a safe room in his $30m Aukland mansion by SWAT officers and arrested along with four others. Now under house arrest, he was initially judged a flight risk and denied bail.

Megaupload was unceremoniously executed, provoking outrage from millions of users who had legitimately used the service to …

I’ve been intrigued by two recent and fairly consistent comments made by cloud thought leaders about the power and significance of the under-hyped private cloud. Zynga CTO Debra Chrapaty recently commented about the Zynga migration from public to private cloud centricity.

Zynga owns the base and rents the spike; see The Power of the Private Cloud for a link to the GigaOm Research interview.

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The Cloud community have been talking recently about Everything as a Service; they call it EaaS. At first hearing it’s an interesting idea, another acronym to complement IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Unfortunately it’s rather like the tail wagging the dog! The Cloud community use the term Service liberally but with minimal consistency.

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ndependenceIT (iIT), provider of the complete Cloud Workspace, has announced its acquisition of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Veddio Cloud Solutions, a cloud services management platform and aggregator for managed services providers (MSP). The acquisition broadens independenceIT’s customer base and enables channel partners of all sizes to reap the business-enabling benefits of the cloud through simple, intuitive management tools. The terms of the acquisition were not publicly disclosed.
“This is an exciting opportunity as Veddio’s platform has been validated by an industry leader in independenceIT,” said Todd B. Myers, Veddio’s co-founder and CEO, who will now take the position of chief operating officer with independenceIT. “An integrated solution from the two companies will provide the marketplace with the means to easily control all of their cloud services from an intuitive dashboard.”

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SYS-CON Events announced today that ActiveState, whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ActiveState empowers innovation from code to cloud smarter, safer, and faster. ActiveState’s cutting-edge solutions give developers and enterprises the power and flexibility to develop in Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, Node.js, PHP, Tcl, and more. Stackato is ActiveState’s groundbreaking application platform for creating a private platform as a service (PaaS), and is the cost-effective, secure, and portable way to develop and deploy apps to the cloud.

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The problem with cloud computing is that the adoption challenge is firmly rooted on the ground.
All too often we hear vendors talk about the need for “management and usability” as key must-have characteristics in cloud application platforms, but these over-used generic marketing terms now have arguably less value in terms of real-world real-time real-data deployments.
At a more granular level we need to know what programmers need to a) migrate existing application structures to new hosted virtualized environments and b) initiative new cloud application and database builds that are architected in such as way that they can migrate across different cloud formations (i.e., private, public and hybrid) as and when this shift is needed.

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Not too long ago, I wrote a post about IBM’s then very recent acquisition of a mobile application platform company called Worklight. Given the fact that is has been a while (at least in mobile market time) and IBM recently released (6/15) the new IBM Worklight 5.0 product, I thought it was a good time to revisit the topic.
First things first, the acquisition of Worklight by IBM and the subsequent release of IBM Worklight does not change the nature of the solution. It is still a mobile application platform, and it still provides the end-to-end capabilities that you probably (or at least should) expect from such a solution.

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“Eucalyptus 3.1 is open for business,” writes Eucalyptus VP of Community Greg DeKoenigsberg in a blogpost. “No more artificial separation between Enterprise and Community. No more frenzied checkins to the ‘enterprise edition’ while the separate-but-equal ‘community version’ atrophies…(and) no more wondering about what’s on the roadmap.”
The new release features “FastStart,” designed for users “to deploy on-premise, AWS-compatiable IaaS clouds” in less than 20 minutes, according to the company. Source code is now available on GitHub, and there are enterprise platform deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Enterprise Virtualization, and VMware vCenter 5.
With a nod toward what seems to be an emerging hybrid cloud (and multi-cloud) world, Eucalyptus also notes that the “Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization delivers a comprehensive virtualization platform…that provides benefits for cloud deployments, both private and hybrid.”

Eucalyptus Systems “is enabling 25,000 cloud starts each year, including instances at more than 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies,” the company says. In DeKoenigsberg’s words, “Build together. Run together. Manage together. That’s been the mantra for this release…we are deeply committed to the open source model, because we believe that it creates the best software, and we’re going to prove it.”

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The Cloud Essentials course is a two-day, interactive, classroom-based learning experience. The course provides a balanced curriculum and addresses the business and technical perspectives of cloud computing. It will also explain how to adopt, operate, and govern the cloud. The course enables participants to successfully complete the associated CompTIA Cloud Essentials Exam to become a Cloud Essentials Professional (CEP). In addition, the course complements the Virtualization Essentials course, which they can do either before or after they’ve taken the Cloud Essentials course.

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