The Green Grid membership now open to Individuals

The message :

We are pleased to announce a new membership opportunity for individuals to join and contribute to The Green Grid’s valuable work! The Green Grid provides a great way for you to get to know and work with industry experts on IT, facilities, and operation of efficient computing infrastructures.

Individual membership is open to individuals who are passionate about resource efficiency in business computing, saving money, and saving resources. Employees of a TGG member company are already eligible to receive membership rights through their companies so they are not eligible for Individual Memberships. You can check the Members List to see if your company is a member. To learn more, read the press release and visit the Become a Member page to watch the Executive Director’s short video about this new level of membership!

For an annual fee of $400, Individual Members of The Green Grid receive the following benefits:

v One complimentary registration pass for The Green Grid Forum 2012 (a $250 value)

v Admittance to the members-only Web site with exclusive, early access to documents before they are published to the public as well as access to members-only resources at no additional cost

v Participation in committee and work groups, as well as global expansion initiatives

v Participation in all General Meetings of The Green Grid

v Participation in members-only webcasts on technical topics such as technology, market studies, and roadmaps

v Exclusive use of The Green Grid Individual member logo

Scoop.it : All in one Curation Engine

This is NOT a sponsored post.

Recently I got a chance to use the free version of Scoop.it and I must admit, it came very close to my model of Curation Engine.

You can read more about previous posts on Curation Engine model here:

• Content Curation in 5 Steps
• Content Curation Tools and examples
• Content Curation Types

Visit www.scoop.it and try for yourself. You will love it.

Cloud for Dummies : free ebook

So we have ‘Cloud for Dummies’ available now for free .. courtesy IBM.

Get the free eBook here.

Content Curation Types

This is third post in Content Curation series.

You can read the previous two posts here:

1. Content Curation in 5 Steps

2. Content Curation Tools and examples

There are basically three types of curation engines:

Individual – This is the one which we all do to get best and add our part to it. We use Twitter, facebook, Google Reader, etc to aggregate best of content for our reading. We even share our curated content with others to consume.

Crowd – Yes, the wisdom of crowd. This is what you see on digg or trending topics on twitter.

Software – This is the only automated engine and is becoming more and more popular and efficient. These are the agents which continuously scan the web for popular and highly rated content. Two of the good examples are:

News gadget on iGoogle 

www.LikeButton.com

Every type of engine has its own pros and cons. While the individuals can do a personalized curation, software based curation helps in discovering new content.

The goal is to create an engine which brings best of all three types.

Do you know of any such engine ?

Content Curation Tools and examples

Continuing to my earlier post on Content Curation in 5 Steps, here is list of some digital content curation tools. The list can be endless and so I have picked few popular ones.

Most of the tools come under one or more of the following categories

Twitter is an example of personal and aggregator content curation.

The Huffington Post is a great example of team of humans doing curation which includes lot of content creation too.

Paper.li works very well with twitter hastags and does create a page automatically.

So, what are the content curation platforms you use in your daily routines ?

Content Curation in 5 Steps

Content Curation is the antidote for Information Overload.

Here are the basic steps done during content curation.

Discover

Discover refers to activity where you decide the topic of your content curation. It can be need of yours, organization or community in general.

Research

One you have decided on the topic you start researching it. This includes collecting all the content which has already been published related to this topic. It includes exploring books, blogs, feeds, twitter, journals and even talking to people and publishing surveys.

Filter

After collection all the related content already published, now is the time to select the quality and unique ones. Rest is all discarded or archived.

Synthesize

This step refers to studying and understanding the selected material. Connecting the isolated content published and figuring out the gaps. Filling those gaps by creating the content. Creating something which is useful and unique.

Share

Share refers to publishing or teaching the new content produced in form of blog, book, presentations, podcast, etc.

I welcome comments from all content curators.

Journey to the Cloud : Free IASA Webinar

Thursday, March 15, 2012 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM CDT

The journey to the cloud can be fraught with problems and detours. Unless of course you know the secret language used by Cloud professionals. A language filled with initials and acronyms like IaaS, PaaS and more. The goal of this webinar is to introduce you to the terms and components of cloud computing. This introduction will arm you with what you need to know as you begin considering cloud solutions.

Register here : https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/474512930

Bank Enterprise Architecture–BIAN and TOGAF come together

The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) and The Open Group today announced a partnership to integrate their individual industry frameworks for specific use in the banking industry. Mapping together these frameworks will accelerate project delivery, while dramatically reducing IT integration costs.

BIAN and The Open Group have collaborated to produce a white paper, in which the core elements of the two individual frameworks have been projected onto each other. This is a practical document, which will be used by enterprise architects within banks and the vendor community who wish to reap the benefits of both architecture frameworks. There are clear synergies in using BIAN’s Service Landscape in combination with TOGAF ®. When applying TOGAF®, an Open Group standard, in a banking environment, the BIAN content will speed up the work by providing banking-specific architecture content. On the flip side, TOGAF provides a structured approach and adds value to the BIAN deliverables for the project approach and capability to perform.

Register for Webinar to understand better.

WEF Technology Pioneers 2012

The World Economic Forums’ Technology Pioneers 2012 report is out and here are few of the interesting companies featured in Information Technologies and New Media category.

Appirio enables companies to navigate today’s complex cloud computing ecosystem. Provides rapid application development platform over existing cloud platforms.”Appirio was able to build a cloud-based CRM (customer relations management programme) for Starbucks in just four weeks, based on a SalesForce.com software framework”

CloudFlare’s intelligent network accelerates Web traffic over the Internet while deftly dodging abusive bots, crawlers and denial of service attack. The virtual scaled out Web.

DoubleVerify provides tools designed to restore public confidence in business forced to operate in a global net environment increasingly exposed to swindlers, malware and cyber theft.

Dropbox connects the cloud to everyday life. We all know DropBox.

Kickstarter’s innovative crowd-funding platform lets the public in on venture capital funding for imaginative projects.

Living PlanIT develops operating systems for future cities.

Mocana’s responds to the “Internet of Things” with a deviceindependent secure platform for smart communications.

Palantir pioneers an engineering-centred approach to radically change the way data is analysed.

Download complete report from http://www.weforum.org

Free and Open : Bloomberg’s market data APIs

Under Open Market Data Initiative, Bloomberg has released its market data interfaces as free and open APIs which can be consumed by anyone with no restrictions.

The APIs are available in Java, C, C++ and .NET

Here are some deep links to get started quickly.

http://open.bloomberg.com/

http://open.bloomberg.com/pdf/blpapi-developers-guide.pdf

http://open.bloomberg.com/pdf/bloomberg_open_market_data_whitepaper.pdf

On a side thought, they can be a very good reference on how to design high performance public interfaces and APIs.

Secure your Data in Cloud

Microsoft has released a new SDK and Management called “Microsoft Codename Trust Services SDK and Management Tool” to encrypt the data before storing it in the cloud.

Microsoft Codename Trust Services is an application-level end to end encryption-based framework that can be used to encrypt stored content. Data publishers can use Trust Services to encrypt data before it is stored in Windows Azure storage or SQL Azure, and authorized subscribers of data can decrypt data after it is read from storage. Using Trust Services encrypts the data, and helps reduce concerns about unauthorized access to data by Windows Azure administrators and/or unauthorized third parties. Using Trust Services helps address data security, privacy, and sovereignty issues that might block or limit typical scenarios, such as distributing data to branch offices, making data accessible to mobile employees or customers, sharing data across businesses, and leveraging cloud scale for computation and analytics.

Download SDK

The Green Grid

Few days back I blogged about Green Cloud .. how Cloud Computing is indirectly promoting Green Computing.

Here is an interesting group of influential members which aim to bring energy efficiency to data centers.

The Green Grid is a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers and business computing ecosystems. With more than 175 member companies around the world, The Green Grid seeks to unite global industry efforts, create a common set of metrics, and develop technical resources and educational tools to further its goals.

http://www.thegreengrid.org/

Checklist for Application Architecture and Design

• Architecture and Design Checklist
• Communication Guidelines Checklist
• Presentation Layer Checklist
• Business Layer Checklist
• Data Access Layer Checklist
• Service Layer Checklist
• Web Application Checklist
• Rich Internet Application (RIA) Checklist
• Rich Client Application Checklist
• Service Archetype Checklist
• Mobile Application Checklist