Links for February 14th through February 16th

(Above: three foosball tables at building 045 on the IBM Austin campus, known as “The Rust Bucket” by some. IBM knows what techies want, and have the budget to multiply it by 3! I actually used to go to that building in the 80s a lot when my dad worked there.)

• DynamicOps Reports Record Growth in 2010; Sales Revenues Increase 200%
• Motorola's Xoom tablet priced at $799
• Appcelerator and Engine Yard Partner to Deliver Integrated Cloud Connected Mobility Solution – Appcelerator – pitchengine.com
• Twitter
• Pandoras Box? The Impact of New Technologies on Retail IT
  "In this year’s IT study (the 3rd in a series), RSR set out to uncover retailers’ attitudes about how new consumer-facing technologies such as “smart” mobile phones, social media and the web channel are affecting application portfolio and IT infrastructural decisions. We have found in the past that the “change cycle” in business is faster than the change cycle in most IT organizations, and this is a primary reason for the problems many companies have in aligning IT capabilities to business strategy. Our goal this year was to discover if retail IT organizations are rising to the new pressure to increase the speed of IT value delivery that the rapid adoption of “smart” technologies creates."
• Nokia & Microsoft, where 1+1 != 2
  "Nice analysis from a hedge-fund friend of mine: "So, the real question is whether WP7 is a viable contender or not? If it is, Nokia may be able to carve out a niche as the best WP7 experience. But they won’t be the low cost provider anymore , since they have to pay MS to license the OS. That honor will probably go to an Android phone. You are now dependent on Microsoft to successfully navigate your upgrade path in the future, and you’re ceding any app commissions over to them and their app store. Finally, you haven’t created any switching costs between Nokia and other WP7 phone manufacturers like Dell."
• Dell 4Q net income more than doubles, shares soar
  "Companies that clamped down on spending during the economic downturn continued to upgrade technology in the quarter. Dell's business is more heavily weighted toward corporate customers than its competitors, so this resurgence in spending is giving it a relatively big boost."
• Apple poised to become Samsung's biggest customer | Electronista
• Thunder in the Clouds – SXSWi 2011 Panel
  Panel I'm slated to moderate at SXSW.
• iPad A New Technology Paradigm — A Reluctant Admission
  A short piece on possible uses for tablets in the financial sector: "Institutional applications may be as straightforward as real-time operational dashboards, risk management platforms and positional alerts, or more complex applications that allow sales and service professionals to be more effective on business calls. They may even include applications focused on portfolio managers, traders and analysts to help them more easily keep abreast of the world when they aren’t sitting at their desks."
• @ MWC: Sorrell: Location Is The “Holy Grail”, WPP Looking For Acquisitions | mocoNews
  'Gartner predicts that apps will make revenues of $15 billion this year on downloads of 17 billion. Sorrell took that one step further and said that by the end of 2014 advertising will generate a third of all revenue in apps. But given that this will bring a price in the billions, compared to a media industry worth trillions world-wide, “we still have a long way to go,” he said. “The most popular app today is only a $30 million dollar business,” he said. Is that an Angry Birds reference? Sorrell said that while people are currently spending betwee 20 percent and 25 percent of their time online, WPP’s clients are only spending about 14 percent of their budgets online, and only “a small portion of that on mobile.”'
• Consultant travel revisited
• Adobe open source code backs – gasp! – HTML5
• NIST.gov – Computer Security Division – Computer Security Resource Center
  What various clouds meant in 2009.
• How do you explain what a hybrid cloud is (relative to public & private clouds)? – Quora
  Some respected answers here suggest that "hybrid cloud" isn't only mixing public and private cloud, but mixing 2 or more clouds (Rackspace + Amazon, for example). Two public clouds being used together could be a "hybrid cloud." Ugh.
• CTO Q&A: Self-Service Private/Hybrid Cloud

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.