Links for October 6th through October 8th

• A Visit to The Macallan
  Nice pictures of the renowned Scotch being made.
• Inside Vanguard's IT Innovation Strategy
  Write-up of how Vanguard tries to promote innovation in the IT department.
• Upwardly Mobile
  Short piece on big banks doing mobile app stuff for their customers.
• CA Dips Its Toe Into Enterprise Collaboration With CA Open Space
  Putting faces on Those Damn IT Guys.
• David Pogue on Flash on Devices
• IBM Survey Says Mobile Apps Will Dominate Enterprise – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ
  "After surveying 2,000 information-technology professionals in 87 countries, IBM found that more than half believe that within the next five years, more developers will be working on mobile applications and cloud-based architecture than traditional computing platforms for enterprise."
• Onward and upward « Views from the bridge
  Jon Collins stepping back from analyst hoopla to do some side projects. He's one of the best in the business, always kind and never brown-nosed.
• Cisco Flip Mino HD 8GB video camera
  These things are just great.
• MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle's wallet love
  Hey, everyone likes getting more money. Previous MySQL pricing was: "This program gave customers the right to run unlimited instances of MySQL for an initial annual fee of $40,000, which program was adopted by Sun and bumped to a $65,000 entry fee."
• Get your HR VP an iPad.
  Solid recommendation from the Clan Gartner: Give your execs an iPad, and then maybe they'll actually look at those million dollar dashboard you built them.
• Citrix previews XenDesktop 5.0, release planned for Q4 2010
  "The tool provides statistics about the deployed applications instances and virtual desktops, the software inventory usage and even basic information about the health of underlying infrastructure."
• VMware to announce vCloud Request Manager
• Mapping Buildings With Personality
  I think you'll see a lot more of this "post-ironic quest for genuineness without the Nifty 50s retro bullshit" thing going on: "The duo has initiated a community project and invites residents to contribute by putting named buildings on their online map, thus evoking memories of a time when owners and builders used to name their residential properties."
• Foursquare outage post mortem – mongodb-user | Google Groups
  Details of MongoDB's role in Foursquare's recent downtime. Good for for figuring out NoSQL benchmarks, which are terribly hard to track down. As Jeff Hammerbacher summarized it in Quora: "MongoDB only seems to be useful if your data fits in RAM."
• Nokia: Apple’s App Store ‘is a must have’ (but so are we)
  Some humbleness coming from Nokia, along with a "oh yeah, and we have '2.5 million downloads per day'" rejoinder.
• Cloud.com Selected as Cloud Computing Platform for Korea’s First Large-Scale Private Cloud | Cloud.com | The Power Behind Your Cloud
  More telcos getting into IaaS.
• How big is the Red Hat Xen market share?
  For all the kids interested in Xen vs. KVM, some August 2009 data.
• 4G/LTE – CTIA 2010: AT&T's Enterprise Challenge
  "…more and more, employee are coming into work, saying 'hey, why can't I use this iPad? What can't use my iPhone? Why can't I use this device, and access my corporate applications?' And that's challenging for the corporate CIO. We have to help the CIO manage the diversity of devices and operating systems, and secure the corporate data. …[This is a chance for AT&T & partners to sell something]…The numbers of devices out there is creating some challenges, but opportunities for us." –Michael Antieri, President at AT&T Advanced Enterprise Mobility Solutions
• Data Center Automation Startup Puppet Labs Acquires Open Source Project The Marionette Collective
• Microsoft and Adobe Chiefs Meet to Discuss Apple – NYTimes.com
  "A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options." Wow, that's a kind of shaky idea.
• Service-now Adds Automation, Lifecycle And Portfolio Management – Network Computing
• On HP hiring Leo Apotheker as its new CEO, and the Ray Lane Manoeuvre
  "HP is currently a product company more than an ecosystem company, which needs to change."
• Stealth Company PROFERI Raises $6.3 Million in Series A Funding
  "We’re building a new kind of end-to-end system for developing and running analytical applications."
• Rackspace Helps Businesses Find the Apps They Need with New AppMatcher | Business Wire
  Take a survey and have the new Rackspace SaaS service select apps for you.
• News Analysis: SAP’s CEO Léo Apotheker Resigns
• Ars examines Chrome and Firefox bookmark sync protocols
  Get your nerd on.
• The State of Enterprise Mobility
  Summerizes Forrester report on mobile use in the enterprise.
• Telus Turns to AlcaLu for Digital Store
  Alcatel-Lucent launches its first white-label app store for a telco.
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: 'Cloud will automate millions of IT jobs' – Silicon.com Mobile
  'Ballmer said 20 to 25 million people worldwide work in the IT business, either with vendors or in-house IT departments. "There's a chunk of that, 10 to 15 per cent, whose jobs will be automated in new ways as a consequence of moving to the cloud," he added.'
• OpenStack: An Open Source Cloud for VARs and MSPs?
• MCollective – Overview
  "Mcollective’s primary use is to programmatically execute actions on clusters of servers. In this regard it operates in the same space as tools like Func, Fabric or Capistrano."
• AMC releases new trailer for The Walking Dead | TV | Newswire | The A.V. Club
  I may never leave the house again.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.