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Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, has added a new Web-based control panel and a behind-the-scenes provisioning system to its Hosting Cloud service.

The company said Wednesday the control panel makes it easier for users to set up and manage hosted applications. It includes a new Web-based file manager that gives users access to stored data so that they can create and decompress archives and change access permissions more easily.

The Mosso control panel includes a new Web-based file manager.

A snapshot tool, within the control panel, lets users access and reinstate previous versions of files in the case of accidental overwrite, the company said.

The provisioning system--used to deploy applications--shrinks the time needed to get an application up and running. The company built the new system using Apache's ServiceMix, according to co-founder Todd Morey. "We wrote our initial provisioning system in Java. As we have grown, we started to see some real strain on that system. The new provisioning system is a competitive advantage versus Amazon EC2, for example. We do a lot of the hard work for (the customer)."

Mosso's service, along with a hosted storage offering called CloudFS now in beta testing, competes against services from Amazon and others. Morey says Mosso's selling point versus competitors is that it is easy to set up and run. "Our key differentiator is that we're tightly integrated and easy to use."

The Hosting Cloud service is priced from $100 per month. "You pay for what you use--as you expand, your bandwidth expands," said Morey.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

While Marc Benioff may rail against the status quo in the enterprise software business, not all software buyers will join in the chorus, according to one of Benioff's chief competitors.

Web-based business software sold by companies such as Benioff's Salesforce.com will likely augment, not replace, large, complex enterprise systems, SAP Chief Executive Henning Kagermann told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Kagermann said that while some of the main selling points for Salesforce and other Web-based services make sense--namely, better usability and productivity--corporate buyers are a notoriously conservative bunch.

Kagermann: Big software is here to stay.

(Credit: SAP)

A slicker user interface and easier access to corporate applications answer only some of the needs of big business. Security, a uniform data model and corporate-wide compliance with regulatory rules are more pressing for C-level executives, he argues.

Clearly, Henning's argument is biased toward his company's product line. But he may have a point: it's more difficult to manage Web-based systems implemented piecemeal at the departmental level. Regulatory compliance is becoming a corporate nightmare, and companies need all of the help they can get.

Still, much of the real innovation is taking place at companies like Salesforce and Google, as well as at many smaller firms hard at work defining the next wave of cloud-based business software. (Microsoft is making strides here, too).

SAP, for its part, is still struggling with its on-demand strategy.

As Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise, said earlier this month, technology innovation is being spurred by the consumer market, which will, in turn, drive demand for better business systems.

Some things never change. For decades, CIOs have been a conservative lot. And for decades, end users have demanded more.

Once Barack Obama started Twittering, John McCain created a MySpace page, and Hillary Clinton joined Facebook, it became apparent that the 2008 presidential election was relying heavily on social media. But now, a Pew survey has the numbers to prove it, concluding that 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet for politics so far this election season, with topics like Obama and online videos taking a front seat.

The poll, conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project, was based on information provided by Princeton Survey Research Associates.

Earlier this spring, the surveyors contacted 2,251 Americans to find out how they are using the Web to investigate and communicate about the election. The survey results found that almost half are turning to the Web to get information about the presidential race. That's a significant jump from the spring of the 2004 election, when only one-third of adults said they looked online for election news.

Several of the conclusions show numbers doubling or tripling from the last presidential election season. One of these was in the area of online political videos. In 2004, only 13 percent of adults said they watched online videos concerning the election, but this year, already 35 percent use sites like YouTube for partisan information. And people aren't just watching campaign ads, but seeking out primary sources like recorded speeches.

Young Democrats and Obama supporters reportedly lead the wave of political blogging and researching, with 74 percent of Internet-using Obama supporters logging on to follow the campaign, compared with Clinton's 57 percent and McCain's 56 percent.

And young voters are using the Web in different ways than other generations. The study found that young voters are consuming more political online video than older adults, while creating their own political commentary with posts, e-mails, text messages, and social-networking sites. One-third of all 18- to 29-year-old adults used a social-networking site for political activities like adding candidates as their friends.

Despite the statistics on increasing Internet usage, the Pew study concluded 74 percent of users said they would be just as involved in the campaign without using the Internet, a result that was also highlighted in a Pew report this January.

I didn't attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this year, but judging by Jeff Whatcott's commentary, I'm not sure I missed much.

It would appear that the Enterprise 2.0 world is still recycling the same froth in an attempt to stand out. Here's what Whatcott had to say:

I spent some time checking out the competition to benchmark our messaging and functionality. I was struck by how thoroughly undifferentiated the pitches were. Everyone was giving essentially the same demo, talking about the same functionality and use cases.

Internally, I heard from Jean Barmash on the Alfresco consulting team who echoed Jeff's comments:

Walking around the exhibition floor, it looked like everybody was offering very similar stuff--big focus on "communities"--creating them, managing them, etc.

It feels like we're in the early stages of Enterprise 2.0. Let's call it Enterprise 1.8 where everyone is showing the right slideware and demos, but few, if any, really know how to put it all to productive business use.

Until the money steps in, I think we're going to remain in a curious limbo where "shiny baubles" (a colleague's favorite term) get rolled out widely but for which few pay because no one on the enterprise side has really connected the dots between community, user-generated content, and enterprise productivity/business value.

BOSTON--Google sees all enterprise trends pointing toward cloud computing, and it wants a piece of the action.

"The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away, but there is a transition taking place," said Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise.

Chandra, speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference here, laid out his case for why Google stands to gain more business customers in the coming years. Foremost is Google's strength in the consumer market, which he said will eventually translate into a stronghold in business computing.

Google doesn't have all of the answers, but it does have big enterprise plans.

(Credit: Mike Ricciuti/CNET News.com)

"The cloud has arrived. It's not a question of when, but how fast it will arrive. Google runs itself off of Google apps," he said.

Chandra acknowledged that several well-established competitors, including Microsoft, Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and others are converging on the same market: delivering business applications via the Web with the same reliability and security as existing on-premise systems.

He downplayed competitive rivalries with Microsoft. "We are competitors with Microsoft. But we don't think about it in a competitive way. We are working to bring apps and a new way of using apps to the market today. We're all about end user focus," he said.

Microsoft, of course, has its own cloud-based plan. While Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie may worry most about open source, Google's larger ambitions are clearly on his mind. Microsoft has discussed some of its cloud computing plans under the Live Mesh umbrella. More details are expected later this year.

Chandra said four trends in the industry are playing to Google's strengths. First, he said Google sees technology innovation being spurred by the consumer market. The consumer world is more "Darwinian" than the enterprise world. Users are unlikely to stick with an inferior product. "The cost of switching is zero in the consumer world. Millions and millions of testers in the consumer world help the enterprise market. As a result, users are getting better technology than the enterprise world. IM, search, VoIP, all have foundations in the consumer world," he said.

Google has learned several lessons from the consumer market, Chandra said. "Simplicity wins. Not lowest-common denominator simplicity. Instead, you build a powerful, robust tool that is easy to use. That technology from the consumer space will translate into the enterprise."

Another trend, Chandra said, is the rise of the "power collaborator" within companies. "In the enterprise, things are still built for the power user. Software is built by experts for experts. Increasingly, people work in teams. We believe that you need to do a complete rethink to accommodate this new generation of employees. It shouldn't matter what OS people use, or in what geography they're located. Software is based on open standards. This is the vision of cloud computing and why we think this is the vision for the next generation of enterprise computing."

Also, the economics of enterprise computing are changing, Chandra said. Companies are being forced to deal with scalability to handle the increasing flood of content, video, and photos. He cited Picasa, Google's photo site, which handles 7 million images per day. "There is a huge benefit that we can share with the market because of that," he said. Google's App Engine, basically a scalable hosting platform, offers "almost unlimited scalability. Honestly, we don't know where this is going. There are others like Amazon and Salesforce.com in this market. But the opportunity is huge," he said.

Finally, Chandra said the barriers to adoption of cloud computing by enterprises are beginning to fall away. In what might have been a competitive dig aimed at Amazon, which has experienced several outages in the past week, Chandra cited reliability as a major concern for businesses. "Reliability, with the notion that Web apps were based in a consumer world, it was expected that they were somewhat flaky. Now, Google cannot go down. Customers will leave us if that happens. We have invested in this," he said.

In March, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced an upcoming system for downloading third-party applications for the iPhone. At the Worldwide Developers Conference on Tuesday, he brought a parade of developers onstage to show off exactly what those new apps can do.

The apps range from monkey slinging to medical imaging and should be available sometime in early July (along with the iPhone 2.0 software required to run it), according to Apple representatives. Follow the jump to check out demos of each of the applications announced during the keynote speech. We'll update this post with more video demos as they come.

The sequel is imminent--but what will it be called?

(Credit: Apple)

There's near universal agreement that Steve Jobs is going to unveil the next iPhone at next week's Worldwide Developers' Conference keynote in San Francisco. Whether it's next week, next month, or next year, however, it raises a thorny semantic question: what will it be called? Most wags are dubbing it "the 3G iPhone," as it's certain to include the high-speed 3G (third-generation) wireless capabilities missing on the original model. But it's still going to be the second-generation iteration of the product--thus, "the 2G iPhone." Which one's correct?

Remember the movie The Game, with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn as unlikely brothers, shot before the backdrop of vertiginous San Francisco?

Well, here's a new interface for the city by the Bay: SFZero is "a new representation for the data that's already there. Your mind is full of inaccurate representations that are affecting the way you use the San Francisco data flow, steering you away from interaction and collaboration and toward unproductive reflexive data loops.

SFZero designers are working double shifts to engineer this next-generation interface that will bring you together with your cohabitants to experience the freedom that is hard-coded into San Francisco's protocol."

Sounds enigmatic, looks enigmatic, and is enigmatic. I am therefore not sure if I fully get it, but in any case, SFZero seems to be a new kind of ARG (alternate-reality game)--a "Collaborative Production Game," as they call it.

"Let Someone Else Plan Your Day!" SFZero says. "Release total control of your life to an anonymous source that supplies you with instructions and directions!"

How can you not sign up for that?

Hat tip to Chelsea Holden Baker.

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Geography buffs tantalized by the quantity of geographic information hidden away among countless municipal computer systems have something to cheer about.

Combining Portland, Ore., geographic data and Google Earth can help show how long it takes to drive from a given point. Blue areas can be reached in five minutes, for example.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

The new version 9.3 of the dominant geographic information system (GIS) software, sold by a company called ESRI, now makes it a relatively simple matter to expose that data for easy consumption over the Internet.

"We are engineering it so it plugs in. It becomes effectively a support mechanism to the geoweb," said ESRI founder and Chief Executive Jack Dangermond, announcing the change at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Showing one example of what can be done with the idea if detailed geographic information were more readily available, he used mapping information supplied by the city of Portland, Ore. Using Google Earth software, he showed a color-coded map that showed how far a person could drive in a certain amount of time from a specific location. Yellow was a short trip, blue took longer, green was another notch longer, and the areas were shaped according to driving speeds on different road types.

Another example showed a projection of the recent San Diego forest fires spreading into residential areas and evacuation routes that reflected up-to-date road closures.

ESRI CEO Jack Dangermond

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

GIS software long predates Internet-based mapping services such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth, Microsoft Live Maps, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. The software is used for tasks such as recording housing property lines, telephone pole locations, sewer lines, and boundaries between residential and industrial zones.

Governments are naturally reluctant to reveal some details such as where the fiber-optic lines head into the New York Stock Exchange. But a lot of information is limited not by such constraints, but rather by the resources needed to process the data, argued John Hanke, head of Google Maps and Google Earth.

"It takes time and takes money," Hanke said. "If Jack can make it a one-click move for them, a lot more will do it."

The new ESRI software will let users export data as KML files, a Google format that's now a neutral format. KML data such as trails or 3D building models can be overlaid on online maps and with software such as Google Earth and Virtual Earth.