HI all - please see below the Gartner report for the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. If your not doing it - catch up! 

Below  from Gartner:

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.

Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions. Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.

Client Computing. Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical. Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.

IT for Green. IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.

Reshaping the Data Center. In the past, design principles for data centers were simple: Figure out what you have, estimate growth for 15 to 20 years, then build to suit. Newly-built data centers often opened with huge areas of white floor space, fully powered and backed by a uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled and mostly empty. However, costs are actually lower if enterprises adopt a pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion. If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data center, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a nontrivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.

Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.

Security – Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements. A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.

Flash Memory. Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking. At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.

Virtualization for Availability. Virtualization has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphases new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer term implications. Live migration is the movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server. This takes place by replicating the state of physical memory between the source and destination VMs, then, at some instant in time, one instruction finishes execution on the source machine and the next instruction begins on the destination machine.

However, if replication of memory continues indefinitely, but execution of instructions remains on the source VM, and then the source VM fails the next instruction would now place on the destination machine. If the destination VM were to fail, just pick a new destination to start the indefinite migration, thus making very high availability possible. 

The key value proposition is to displace a variety of separate mechanisms with a single “dial” that can be set to any level of availability from baseline to fault tolerance, all using a common mechanism and permitting the settings to be changed rapidly as needed. Expensive high-reliability hardware, with fail-over cluster software and perhaps even fault-tolerant hardware could be dispensed with, but still meet availability needs. This is key to cutting costs, lowering complexity, as well as increasing agility as needs shift.

Mobile Applications. By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market and need for unique coding. It may take a newer version that is designed to flexibly operate on both full PC and miniature systems, but if the operating system interface and processor architecture were identical, that enabling factor would create a huge turn upwards in mobile application availability.

“This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “When determining what may be right for each company, the decision may not have anything to do with a particular technology. In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”

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http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613

Check out below in bold - apparently not so legal creativity? LAME

Section 4. Publicizing a Promotion on Facebook

You do not need our prior written approval if you are publicizing a promotion that is administered completely off of Facebook. However, we may remove any materials relating to the promotion or disable your Page or account if we determine that you violate these Promotions Guidelines, the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities or any other of our policies. If you publicize a promotion in any way on Facebook, in addition to the other terms and conditions contained in these Promotion Guidelines, without limiting your other obligations you agree to the following:

4.1 You will not directly or indirectly indicate that Facebook is a sponsor or administrator of the promotion or mention Facebook in any way in the rules or materials relating to the promotion.

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.” 

So everyone knows how to use Facebook - but for brands the facebook page is about as uninspiring as you can get. Hats off to Ikea for experimenting and turning an every day function into engagement genius!

After months of theory, strategy debate and ultimately planning and coding we have released our Branded Services and Webjam channels. We got there by listening to the requests of the Webjam partners and users. 

Listening to the ideas of others and molding it with our own vision and interpretation was an incredibly satisfying process and pushes us further toward the engaging eco-system that we at Webjam dream of. Interconnecting related communities via our channels can only help the end-user whether it be via a brand or our very own Channels.The tenets of sharing, collaboration and empowerment that have been part of the Webjam mantra since inception are now becoming a reality.

The best examples come from our first live partners :

. ChoirZone, edited by Zone New Media, gives choirs across the UK the ability to easily create and manage their site and community and allows them to stay connected. Scroll down http://www.choirzone.net to view one of the various choir templates proposed;

. The Other Side, a free paper distributed on the London Tube, which goes beyond comments by members by letting them create their own communities across the topics they like. Check out http://www.theothersidemag.co.uk/ and see how you too could easily create your own community in your neighbourhood.

Find more information about WBS on our brand new partner site on http://www.webjam.com/branded_services/

http://www.yongfook.com/post/view/522/the-blog-is-dead

After the great success of the last MiniBar and of course the monumental moment the official mini-bar community was launched on Webjam, it seems only natural I should wax lyrical on the future of web start-ups in the big smoke. After hearing the presentations (and the bantering background noise at the bar) it is clear that the enthusiasm for the future of our young industry is not waning.

I am sure that you enjoyed the presentation of ‘Web-Yam’ (aka Webjam) by the indomitable Spaniard Alberto Barreiro, co-founder and Creative Director as much as I did. During which, - I am sure like me, the concept of Webjam lit flames of ingenuity in your mind like a match to a petroleum canister. Quite seriously though, the mini-bar event presents us with a real vat of talent and product that can be integrated with our oh-so flexible platform.

After the launch of our Strawberry platform and the encouraging reviews we received, it became very clear to us we had struck a real chord in the industry – and internally with a now-stable platform (not for a minute suggesting that the initial beta version was not!), it set our eyes, ears and minds to the task of how we can take Webjam to the uber-mainstream and how we can use the talent around us in our fair city to take us there. Understanding if not anticipating the needs of the (novice) internet user with a purpose through a powerful and nonetheless easy-to-use service remains the goal which drives us. Thankfully the growing flow of testimonials we now receive every day shows that we are heading in the right direction by making it easy to answer the basic question : what do I want to share with whom, how and why.

Now deep into 2008 we keep building Webjam thinking that the social networking market is going to evolve into a more mature social publishing market, something we are proving ourselves with the recent online launch of a London magazine on Webjam, which publishes the user-generated content from its community (www.theothersidemag.co.uk).