Last year marked a 10-year high for venture capitalists in terms of deals and dollars. This year is starting off just as hot. Joyent just announced an $85 million D round, bringing its total to date to about $115 million.

President Obama has committed himself to a return of manufacturing jobs in the United States. His idea is to use the tax code to punish companies that locate facilities offshore and reward those who return jobs onshore. His plan will go nowhere in this election year. Many Republican...

It's looking like the politicians of the world are waking up and realizing that pirates are pirates and non-pirates are not pirates. Pirates would be those homicidal, old-style drunken English guys with eye patches and wooden legs, and those modern, drug-hazed Somalians who ransom ...

Bandwidth is the oxygen of the Internet. The countries, companies, and individuals who have a lot of it breathe free and prosper. A lack of it literally slows down the progress of nations as they try to catch their metaphorical breath. My research over the past 18 months has uncover...

I guess it's my turn, and my obligation, to chime in with my opinion about the insane Facebook overvaluation. I don't know anyone at Facebook, or any of the company's financial advisors. But I know about tech bubbles. And I know railroads. A decade ago, a semi-hysterical chorus...

Hong Kong's economy is muddling along due to a continued lag in exports to the US and the world, and is estimated to grow as little as 1 percent in the coming year. This will result in a projected decline in IT spending of 4.4 percent this year, according to a budget announced this wee...

More than 50 percent of all workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2014. This statement comes from a Cisco “Global Cloud” whitepaper, which examines the current state of things and guesses where we'll be at in 2015. It also forecasts a 22-percent compound annual growth rate (CA...

Using American football metaphors to illustrate business strategies and tactics is a timeworn and tiresome practice. Monday morning quarterbacking is another. However... I was glad to see in yesterday's Super Bowl the use of a tactic that has been yammered to death over the past ...

Taiwan is one of the great economic and technological success stories of the past 30 years, transforming itself into the top rank of the world's economies in the face of political isolation and pressure. Starting with the success of its semiconductor industry in the 80s, and leadi...

As we traveled over the course of three flights and 22 hours from Manila to Chicago last week, making a return to the US after about three years in Southeast Asia, there was plenty of time to contemplate the global nature of cloud computing, big data, and all the rest. This sort of...

Cloud services provide a new and promising opportunity for Enterprises to address the growing complexity of Information Technology (IT). The availability of smartphones and the expectation of immediate and simple access to both private and company specific information on a global bas...

As I wrote yesterday, I'll be returning to the United States late this week, after spending most of my time over the past three years in Asia. From my base in the Philippines, I've covered cloud computing and related developments throughout Southeast Asia and China, with the occasional...

I'll be returning to the United States late this week, after spending most of my time over the past three years in Asia. From my base in the Philippines, I've covered cloud computing and related developments throughout Southeast Asia and China, with the occasional opportunity to cover ...

Which of these things do you like best – motorcycles, race cars, or big ol' jet airliners? This question is relevant when you're considering new markets or sources, an acquisition or subsidiary office, or an investment. Information about population size and wealth can be accessed i...

The research I've been conducting and writing about for the past several months provides a relative, “pound-for-pound” look at the IT expenditures of 80+ nations of the world. This image is popular among the people I meet in the Philippines, the home of pound-for-pound champion boxer/c...

It looks like the SOPA bill, known formally as HR 3261 is dead now that President Obama has come out against it. As I write this, support among its sponsors, and of its twin PIPA (aka Senate 968), is on the wane. The day-long blackout by certain sites, and the publicity surrounding it,...

“Oh, that way madness lies; let me shun that.” The quote is from Shakespeare's King Lear, and it applies to the new addictions spawned by the Web and social media; Facebook is the most prominent example. The addictive, "always on" nature of Facebook etc. may ultimately fail them,...

Big Data is undergoing a Big Redefinition, as the issue comes front and center in discussions about IT and Cloud Computing in 2012. We can be sure that vendors will become experts in defining Big Data in terms that match precisely whatever they offer. Less sure is whether and how I...

My father would tell me that during his time in the U.S. Navy, “we weren't encouraged to ask why we had to do something.” Creating and enforcing a strict command-and-control policy is critical in getting a military organization to function. Too often, this mindset permeates compani...

One of “those” debates broke out this week when word came of Vint Cerf's statement that Internet access is not a human right. His full quote can be accessed on the Internet easily enough, at least in places where free and open access is still a privilege. The quote enabled a lot of...

I was sitting next to about 50 gallons of gasoline, stored in uniform plastic containers that each held about five gallons. Many people on the boat were not smoking. We were aboard a ferry from the Port of Tacloban to the far island reaches of Samar Province, in the Eastern Visayas ...

“Cloud computing is expected to mature and become a mainstream technology for businesses in Asia-Pacific by 2015,” according to a new forecast from Frost & Sullivan. Meanwhile, Joe McKendrick writes in Forbes that “'cloud' will begin to fade as a differentiating term — because it w...

There is “a window of opportunity for Australia to be the the global leader in the creation and adoption of cloud computing innovation,” according to a recent report from the federal government's IT Industry Innovation Council. Australia is rich in natural resources and one of the l...

As the Big Data cascade starts to drown out other topics in 2012, it seems there will be an especial focus on WANs. Indeed, “DC2DC” (Datacenter-to-Datacenter) connectivity has been recognized for many years as a potential bottleneck and headache. With Big Data driving “Big Traffic” ...

'Twas the rev before Christmas, when all through the aisle, Not a cable was stirring, not even a dial. The servers were mounted in the cabinets with care, In hopes that St. Linus soon would be there. The geeks were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of disk arrays ...

Look around and be amazed, everything is being re-invented. From the tablet computer to the thermostat, from cars to enterprise software, from incubators to light-bulbs. We are living in an amazing time. Opportunities abound to capitalize on the biggest industrial change since elect...

It’s like unicorns…and rainbows! #mobile

Mark my words, the term “mobile” is the noun (or is it a ve...

With a sluggish US economy and Eurozone concerns continuing to sap the confidence of corporations and investors, the search for opportunity other parts of the world continues to intensify. This is as true for IT managers tasked with finding sources as it is for executives seeking new m...

If you live in, or spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, New York, or another innovative crucible of information technology (IT), you can get the impression that hot tech startups are the only great investment vehicles around. And to be sure, who wouldn't want to own a percentage of t...

One can see, when looking at these lists, that there is significant crossover among the three groups of countries in the Next Eleven, Frontier Markets, and Tau Index leaders. Bangladesh is a “triple play,” for example, appearing on all three lists. Still among the poorest nations o...

The countries in these tables are featured in my three-part series, "Life Beyond the US & Eurozone." Table 1. The Next Eleven 1. South Korea 2. Egypt 3. Indonesia 4. Iran 5. Mexico 6. Pakistan 7. Philippines 8. Turkey 9. Vietnam 10. Bangladesh 11. Nigeria Table 2. ...

Yesterday, I compared democratic India and the Philippines against communist China and Vietnam, respectively, in a look at some key economic factors and my own research. The commies were winning. I concluded by stating, “we can only hope that democracy is good in the long term, even...

“Any research on India should take into account the impact of diversity within the country, and its vibrant democracy,” writes Krishnan Subramanian (@krishnan), in response to my recent article about India lagging its fellow BRIC nations in economic development. “In my opinion, tha...

India has shown the most disappointing performance among the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – in the 10-year period since the term was coined by Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs' London office. The opinion above is reportedly held by Mr. O'Neill himself, who did offe...

The newly launched Appirio cloudwashing award – known as “The Washies” and said by the company to be an annual event – is a bad idea, poorly executed. No reason to draw too much attention to it, nor to rant too stridently against it. But I would like to point out a few things: ...

As consumers, we all interact in the cloud. A big part of our lives has been virtualized for more than a decade. We bank in the cloud. We buy insurance in the cloud. We book hotels, flights and cars in the cloud. We are so used to logging on that we often don't realize the extent to wh...

Hadoop and NoSQL are entering more conversations about enterprise IT and Cloud Computing. Mongo is now more than a guy who “like candy” and is “only pawn in game of life.” The usual brilliant explosion of innovation is ongoing in this space, which is both a sympton and a driver of the ...

Malaysia seems to be moving steadily toward cloud computing, at least according to results of the latest Cloud Maturity Index study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of WMware's Singapore office. Of the 158 Malaysian companies surveyed, 64% respondents said they have deployed ...

Not only are the volumes daunting, these integrations can be challenging to build and maintain. Extending your old integration methods won’t work. Take data integration for instance. There are multiple new requirements that must be addressed. Traditional direct database queries and...

I read a nice analysis of cloud computing by Joe McKendrick this week – it's at a sort-of-competing website, so I can't link to it – that said, in essence, IT is and will be driving the cloud, rather than the other way around. I agree. Cloud is the tail and IT is still the dog. No o...