The Cloud Condenser - Volume 7

ShuttleCloud is proud to present notable cloud industry news from April 2013.This series is updated bi-weekly with the latest and greatest resources on all things cloud.Bitcoin: The Wild West Years | Albert Wenger of ContinuationsWe owe it to ourselves and the universe to have a least one post on Bitcoin, what with the insane amount of chatter so far this month in the tech sphere. In this post, Albert very interestingly uses applied economics to roughly guess the peak value of a single Bitcoin. You'd be surprised at how many zeroes he's inferring.Improved Gmail Search for Google Apps Customers | Raviv Nagel of GmailRemember when Google launched autocomplete (originally "Suggest") back in 2004? Curious people everywhere began finding information even faster with the coupled confidence of instant keyword gratification and insights towards how other people are absorbing the same information. Now, with predictive search within your Google Apps account, the guessing game just got a little easier. Not only will predictive text perform autocomplete phrases with your content, but it will even remember prior searches. Get excited.The Cloud is Officially Boring. Finally | Matt Asay of ReadWriteCloudGoogle Trends is a free tool that provides search volume data back to 2004 for any keyword phrase imaginable. This week someone got clever and did a quick search for both "cloud computing" and "big data." The results are pretty staggering, and big data is on the rise. Check it out.Office 365: Now a $1 Billion Business | Talkin' CloudYes, with a 'b.' The war between Do no evil and Scroogled continues, with the most recently notable news on both ends being Q1 2013 reports. There are a couple concerns to the Office 365 business model, however, that may be exaggerating the real value behind the dollars. For one, users may pay for seats with 1-year commitment minimums, and in advance. This kills the churn rate of a comparable Google Apps flex plan, and is certainly a more aggressive strategy. Second, the pricing tiers offer vastly more expensive options than Google Apps, so while the revenues are impressive, the actual seats are diluted.Google: 60% of Fortune 500 Enterprises on Board | Joe Panettieri of Talkin' CloudAssuming you read above, you can probably infer this news went public around the same time: 58% of Fortune 500 companies are using at least 1 product in the Google suite for business. What's interesting, however, is the consistent growth in "cloud adoption" enjoyed by vendors, which is a bit different from winning over customers from a competitor. As more companies go cloud, these types of numbers prove that there's enough room for everyone (at least for now). We've seen a string of zeroes behind earnings reports from Amazon, Microsoft, Dropbox, Box, and even Apple over the past few years as they continue to tackle consumer problems. But it won't get really interesting until adoption rates are much higher, and the features between platforms begin to blur.