The other day I was given a briefing by Sunny Ghosh from Wolf Frameworks. Founded in 2006, WOLF is a 100% browser (Ajax, XML and .NET) based standards compliant, PaaS that is targeting users who need to create mashable…

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Image via CrunchBase

Despite being an evangelist for all things in the cloud, I’m actually a little reticent when trying out the latest web app. I find that my schedule is so busy that the time taken to learn an application tends to greatly outweigh any benefits that application can deliver. There are exceptions though…

TripIt is an online service that helps people organize all their travel plans—flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, cruises—no matter where they booked. To get started, travelers just forward their travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. TripIt processes these emails and automatically creates a master itinerary with travel plans, daily weather, local maps, restaurant reservations, city guides and more. With TripIt, travelers can print, access and share their travel plans online, from a mobile device or even in their personal calendar.

It’s one of those services that is crazily simple, yet crazily useful. I travel both domestically and internationally a reasonable amount – this travel generally includes a bunch of flights, various hotel stays and the like. I’m also a bit of a fitness fan and I always like to know probably weather conditions for wherever I’m going to make the all important “gym or outside” decisions and the luggage requirements that stem from that.

TripIt really is the greatest thing in the world for what I do… I simply book my travel, hotels and other events and forward the confirmation emails onto TripIt. Nearly instantaneously, and in a lovely show of automagicalism, my personal calendar reflects all of my booking and I can click on individual event to see additional information (weather, sights to see, restaurants etc etc).

TripIt is a free service, in-part monetized by selling advertising to vendors who (forlornly in my case) hope that a showing next to an itinerary will cause me to change my plans and eat at the hideously expensive restaurant down in SoMA, San Francisco.

TripIt just launched a new, updated look. According to their press release they;

We added big share, print and edit buttons to the itinerary. Share your trips with friends and on social networks with one click. Plus, easy access to calendar sync and other handy tools.

The new “People” section shows you which of your TripIt connections will be close to you on your trip. It’s a great way to set up meetings, connect with friends and colleagues, and much more! Add connections to make the most of who’s close.

None of which makes the slightest bit of different to my particular use-case and none of which changes the bottom line fact that TripIt is free and that I have never and probably will never click (or even see for that matter) one of the ads they serve up to me.

But I still hope they solve the monetization conundrum – TripIt is altogether too good to lose.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

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Over on the salesforce.com blog, Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research at salesforce posted in light of the recent problems suffered by Gmail users. Coffee points out correctly that Gmail did not, in fact, go down. Rather users of the web application were unable to access their accounts. As Coffe said;

Gmail did not go down. If you were using an IMAP client such as an iPhone, or if you prefer the simplicity and diversity of using a POP interface, Gmail remained accessible by either of those means. People who assessed the risks of even an occasional interruption of access to cloud-based mail, and found those risks unacceptable, have always had — and will continue to have — many options for providing as much redundancy as they need for as much as they’re willing to spend.

The thrust of what Coffee said then is that the client used to access a cloud capability is only a skin. The capability itself is cloud computing – regardless of how that capability is delivered to, and consumed by, the customer.

While on a literal level what Coffee says is correct, I have to say that it feels like he’s missed the point. Of the millions of Gmail users affected by the recent problems, I’d guess that only a very small proportion actually understand the distinction between Gmail being down and merely the Gmail web app being inaccessible.

Coffee makes the point that it’s over two years since salesforce crossed the point where more than half of their workload is driven by API requests rather than direct access of the website. This may be the case but similarly most users seeing inaccessibility of a salesforce data-driven application would be hard pressed to determine exactly what the issue – salesforce itself, the API or the third party application.

Coffee eventually swings around to what is the bottom line when discussion cloud computing. He contends;

Can you make on-premise solutions arbitrarily reliable? Well, you can always spend more money. Must you give up that freedom of choice in the cloud? Emphatically not — but in the long run, any given level of information security and operational assurance will inevitably wind up costing less in the cloud.

All of this bought to mind something that Vinnie Marchandani bought up recently when he contended that “the best UI is no UI”. Vinnie was riffing on a post by James Governor who was discussing the major portal re-skinning projects taken on by some of the big corporate in an attempt to “make existing enterprise applications and their portal front ends less painful for users” – In his long and compelling post, Governor call for a greater degree of “plasticity”. As he says;

Web 2.0 is more about information than presentation, and the social aspects of information sharing at that – and that’s where plasticity is required.

And of course he’s right – who cares about the presentation… it’s all about the information… kind of…

Which swings us back to the start of this post… yes it is true that users have no real understanding, or indeed care greatly to where the data they are utilizing  is stored or manipulated but, notwithstanding this fact, any time that data is unavailable, all vendors in the chain pay the price. And that’s a paradox that looks to continue for a long while yet…

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

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Considering CloudAve’s core thesis is the move to cloud computing, and given this authors penchant for cloud applications, one would have thought any development in the desktop software space would be dismissed. The truth is somewhat different however. I’m…

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There is some poetic irony in the news today as the originator of the SaaS acronym, salesforce.com, announces an investment in one of the copybook examples of moving from on-premises to SaaS, Coda2go. (More on Coda here). Here we see a marriage between salesforce – the king of the on-demand world, and Coda, a traditional vendor with a 30 year pedigree that has successfully switched to SaaS – it’s a meeting of two worlds – both in terms of technology, but also geographically – Coda is owned by Dutch company Unit 4 Agresso while salesforce is firmly entrenched stateside.

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It seems fitting for a morning post to include coffee themes – no doubt many are reading this post with a brew in hand, and in that spirit I’ll admit that I’m writing it with a supreme C4 Coffee…

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