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The cloud computing story for the iPad will fill out as more applications become available. The first few applications we've seen give a glimpse into how the cloud plays a role in the iPad's future, especially with collaborative services such as online meetings. Cisco is launching a WebEx client for the iPad . Cisco is one of the more experienced companies for developing cloud-based products through its hosted service. It's beefing up that strategy, too, as mobile plays a more significant role in the workplace, especially as video is concerned. Sponsor Cisco is building a number of data centers throughout world, with the latest rolling out today, said Grace Kim of Cisco. The network gives Cisco flexibility in developing its client software for multiple platforms. WebEx is available on most smart phones through the browser. The app is available on the iPhone and the iPad. It is available on the Blackberry. WebEx does not as of yet have an app for the Android, With the data centers in place, Cisco gets some flexibility in how it structures pricing for clients, which it can extend to new platforms. A catalyst for that strategy may be the iPad itself. The iPad's form factor allows customers to view meetings on a screen that is simply much bigger. That's where the iPad has value. That, too, comments on how cloud computing becomes more important. The iPad makes video more logical to use. It's not available yet on the WebEx app. Cisco developed the app in the 50 days since Apple announced the iPad. Like a lot of other apps. we notice that WebEx is lacking some features. Cisco, though, is fully focused on video as a focal part of its collaboration strategy. You can expect that we will see video as part of the iPad app in future versions. The iPad is the right device for meeting collaboration. Far more so, we would say, than the iPhone. Customers will take advantage of this, fueling the need for more data centers that are designed for tasks that require elasticity, a key tenant of the cloud computing movement. Will Cisco offer more elasticity in its pricing models? Online conferencing has its roots in the ancient history of cloud computing. That's a time that dates back more than 10 years ago, (chuckle), when we first saw the glimpses of a per use model. Kim said they are always exploring new pricing structures which you can see in new products such as its hybrid offering that allows a large enterprise to use an on-premise client for data critical sessions and the hosted service for meetings that require lesser levels of security.

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The Cloud's Important Role for WebEx on the iPad

Nurph , which just launched its public beta, combines a URL shortener and chat rooms. You simply create a shortened link by going to Nurph.com and share it with your friends. That link will then take your friends over to the URL you shortened, which now features a Nurph chat room that pops up on the bottom right side of your browser window. Nurph is the successor of Nurphy.com , which will shut down at the end of April. Sponsor Give it a Try and Chat with Us If you want to give Nurph a try, just click here and join your fellow ReadWriteWeb readers in a Nurph chat room attached to this post. Twitter Integration: Leaving A Digital Trail As Nurph's co-founder Neil Cauldwell noted when we talked to him and his fellow co-founder Paul Horsfall earlier this week, adding the Twitter feature was a request from some of Nurph's early beta testers. One interesting way to look at this feature is as a way of broadcasting your digital location. Whenever you enter a room - or "channel," as the Nurph team calls it - a message is pushed out to all of your Twitter friends who can then join you on this site. One nice feature of the service is that whenever somebody posts a link to the chat room, clicking on that link will simply open up a new Nurph channel and won't take you out of the Nurph experience. From within the chat room, you can also share your link on Twitter, Facebook and by email. Like all good URL shorteners, Nurph also offers a boookmarklet that will work with any browser. Links will also work on mobile browsers, though you will only see that chat room and not the site behind it. Still in Beta Given that the service just opened up its public beta, there are still some missing features - though they don't take away from the overall experience. Right now, for example, you can't see if any of your friends are currently typing in the chat room, which makes sticking to good chat etiquette hard. As of now, there are also no moderation features, though the team is thinking about this and you can report any vandalism here . As you have to sign in with Twitter, though, the Nurph team decided to keep spammers out by only allowing Twitter users with at least 25 followers to use the service. There is also no API for third-party developers to hook into and integrate the URL shortener into their apps yet. Publishers, who often like to see detailed statistics about how their shortened URLs were used will also have to miss this feature if they use Nurph (unless, of course, they decide to shorten the Nurph link with another URL shortener). Verdict Overall, though, this is a very interesting concept and it will be interesting to see if any larger publishers will adopt it for sharing their links and bringing their communities together. The team plans to regularly release new features during the public beta phase and it will be interesting to watch if and how users will adopt this service. Discuss

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Make Shortened URLs More Interactive With Nurph Chat Rooms

Will popular websites, especially those from news and entertainment companies, work on the iPad? Apple, in an arguably brilliant PR effort now has an answer: an online collection of iPad-Ready sites . The Cupertino-based maker of iPods and iPhones made a bold, potentially Internet-changing decision when it decided that the upcoming slate computer known as the Apple iPad would not support Adobe Flash technology. This browser plugin, used across the Web for everything from streaming video to casual games, is slowly being phased out by HTML5, the next revision of the core markup language used in the creation of Web pages. The video support included in the upcoming Web standard requires no downloadable, installable plugin in order to work. But HMTL5 is still new, and details - including what video codec it will support - have not been ironed out. Sponsor Apple's New "iPad-Ready" Collection Initially spotted by the eagle-eye bloggers at The Next Web , the new "iPad Ready" resource available at www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad is a collection of websites that now officially work on the iPad. According to the site's description, this collection includes websites that take advantage of standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. In other words, these are sites that have been designed just for the millions of new iPad owners expected to be online by the end of the first quarter this year. Included in the list are CNN, Reuters, New York Times, Vimeo, Time, Major League Baseball, The White House, Virgin America, Sports Illustrated, Flickr, People Magazine and TED. Site owners who want their website listed can use the included submission form to be added to the list. Also, at the bottom of the page, there's a link to the Safari Technical Library documentation detailing how to get your Web content ready for the iPad . Flash vs. HTML5: Did Apple Make this a War? This "iPad Ready" site's launch seems all the more relevant in light of yesterday's news from Apple's newest rival Google : the Internet giant announced it would begin integrating Flash into its Web browser Google Chrome . Was that a shot at Apple? Or was Google genuinely interested in making Web browsing less complex for everyday users? It's a valid question. The debate about Flash's future on the Internet is so hotly charged at the moment, that even WSJ reporter Walt Mossberg seemed afraid go into detail in his otherwise stellar, in-depth iPad review . The only mention he made was this: "I probably used the laptops about 20% as often as normal, reserving them mainly for writing or editing longer documents, or viewing Web videos in Adobe's Flash technology, which the iPad doesn't support, despite its wide popularity online." Perhaps he honestly doesn't think the iPad's inability to display Flash content will be an issue...and maybe it won't be. But to ignore the burning question that many soon-to-be iPad owners have - that is: will my favorite websites work? - seems like an oversight at best. These days, the Flash vs. HTML5 discussion is being framed as a "war" (and if you read through the comments of a post detailing video performance test results, you would think it certainly is). But the truth is, HTML5 isn't displacing Adobe Flash anytime soon. It likely will...eventually...but that day is years away. This is according to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire , whose company is helping website owners prepare for iPad. The issue, said Allaire, is that the percentage of Web browsers that support HTML5 is "tiny," and those that do so haven't yet settled on one video codec as the default. Until there's uniformity in the implementation of HTML5 video, he said, publishers will offer multiple versions of their websites, dependent on what device, browser and operating system is in use by their website visitors. So in the meantime, that means desktop Web surfers will see Flash, iPad Web surfers will see HTML5 on some sites and the " Flash broken blue lego " elsewhere. Even if that's the case, it won't, in the end, take away from the iPad's relevance in the new age of touch-based computing. It will just be a temporary setback until the rest of the Internet catches up with its own future. Discuss

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Worried About Flash on the iPad? Apple Tries to Ease Your Fears

Cloudkick is a cloud monitoring start-up that helps system admins manage cloud servers. Today, the company announced it is getting physical, bringing its cloud monitoring capabilities to internally hosted servers and virtual machines. The company has had a lot of success in helping companies who startup in the cloud and start to achieve scale. It already has a host of hot startup companies including Posterous , Bump Technologies , and Urban Airship . Through listening to users, the company decided to offer local server support to merge its view of all server assets for these organizations. Sponsor What is CloudKick? Cloudkick enables a company to manage internally hosted servers and run the Cloudkick's agent and report into the same console as your cloud computing infrastructure from AWS, RackSpace, SliceHost and others. When installed, the CloudKick agent will respond to status checks from the Cloudkick monitoring solution, which itself is a distributed cloud application. Cloudkick supports a host of cloud provider solutions and shares a report of feature. We met with the company at their offices in San Francisco. Upon entry to the warehouse, called " The Farm " near the Mission District, we realized that was a true technology startup , founded by system administrators trying to make their jobs easier. The team participated in Y-Combinator and has received an initial capital infusion by Avalon Ventures. The Cloudkick system offers consolidated server reports and shows server events by polling registered clients in cloud (and now data centers) and piping them to Cloudkick's multi-tentant event aggregator. The tools are modeled after administrative tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Munin, but are delivered on on top of an agent-driven real time view of the underlying assets of server infrastructure. When checking out the demonstration, we also noted that the browser is updated in real-time as events are polled. This keeps the information fresh without having to re-check and brings the best of browser based real-time communication to system administrations. Cloudkick's implementation is simple and elegant. The young company is demonstrating product leadership by living the mantra of simplicity and utility. Here's a sample of the graphs from CloudKick's feature inventory . Monitoring Every Server The goal of this release is to bring servers from the datacenter to power of cloud monitoring. It allows a larger and larger region of infrastructure to rely on outside controls to monitor it's health and well being. One feature we we intrigued by with Cloudkick was the ability to tag and filter groups of hosts, and to then set rules across them. For example, tagging all servers "web apps" allows a rule to quickly set custom rules for checking up time. The company offers an API for its services and uses 2-legged OAuth for API authentication. OAuth is "an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.". The company also offers a proxy service that streamlines and secures the connections for hosts that will connect to the Cloudkick services. Cloudkick is a cloud company monitoring clouds and shows us in many ways the architecture of the future. In one of the blog posts from company, they share " love affair with cassandra " and how multi-master database technology is an enabler for co-location of server assets in infrastructure clouds. Where does Cloudkick go from here? Discuss

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Cloudkick Broadens its Scope: Now Monitors the Datacenter

Fennec , the mobile version of the Firefox web browser, is now available in an early build designed for Android handsets thanks to a fan-compiled download posted on an Android developers forum . And by early, we mean unofficial, pre-alpha, device-specific and downright buggy. But for anyone interested in mobile browser developments, this port is an interesting sneak peek into the future of Firefox's mobile plans. Sponsor Fennec for Droid German developer Martin Schirr's version of Fennec is ideal for Droid users because it requires a hardware-based keyboard. Without support for touch input or multi-touch, it won't work on all flavors of the Google Android mobile operating system. It's also a hefty download - 41 MB in size. And it freezes upon first boot. Plus, it's slow and prone to crashes and bugs. But that's what pre-alpha means - especially a pre-alpha that wasn't released by the Mozilla organization itself. So what can you do with the Android version of Fennec? Well, you can test out its features, like tabbed browsing, tab synchronization between desktop and mobile and browser add-ons. Right now, there aren't too many add-ons available, but given the stage of development, that's not surprising. Fennec: Slow to Launch? We first heard of Mozilla's plans to bring Fennec to Android back in June of last year when Google announced a change in how software can run on Android. After the release of a new Android NDK that used C/C++ programming languages - the same as Firefox - Mozilla began to consider the possibilities of bringing the Fennec browser to the Google-branded mobile platform. In October, Mozilla CEO John Lilly re-confirmed the organization's plans to build an Android version, while touting its many features like support for "Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video and audio." It would be "the first mobile browser to support add-ons," he said. Now it's nearly 9 months later and there's still not a usable version of the browser for Android devices - just pre-alpha builds like this. Should we be concerned? Should Mozilla? While waiting for a real version of Fennec, the popularity of Webkit-based browsers continues to grow, Opera gains mobile ground (especially on feature phones), and last month, Microsoft announced a new mobile OS launching by year-end, Windows Phone 7 Series. This OS will include an updated version of Internet Explorer Mobile that offers multi-touch gesture support and tabbed browsing, among other features. Mozilla is expected to release a working build of Fennec around the same time, but depending on the exact launch dates, they may not get to claim "first" anymore - at least among the top web browsers out there. (Third-party apps already deliver tabbed browsing on various mobile devices). That being said, support for Mozilla is still strong. And once functional, it may have a lot more to offer than its competitors. In the meantime, intrepid Android geeks will be definitely be interested in giving this new fan-compiled Fennec build a look. However, general Android users should probably stay away for now - this version is by no means meant for daily use. Discuss

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Mobile Firefox Comes to Android (Sort of)