"Cloud computing" can sound like a very amorphous concept, perhaps even conjuring up images of important business data floating around in the skies above us. It often raises questions about control and security. But the reality is a lot more down to earth and it is quite simply the future of computing and the way in which businesses will consume pooled resources of software and hardware.

It is not a technology that is on the way or in "beta testing". Cloud computing uses tried and tested software that is just delivered in a new way. It is already empowering thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK while saving them money, increasing productivity and allowing them to get on with running their business instead of their IT.

The arrival of cloud computing - where software and hardware is pooled centrally and made available over the internet - has parallels with the early use of electrical power. When industry first started using electricity, each business had to build a generating plant.

This model was replaced with large centralised power stations with electricity distributed using the National Grid network - providing customers with "on-demand" power without any investment or maintenance costs and billing based on only what was used.

My business Outsourcery is a leading provider of communications and cloud computing solutions to 25,000 SMEs in the UK. We have two purpose built data centres, complete with security, 24/7 monitoring, expert staff, redundancy and real time back-up of systems and data across two sites that even most corporations could not afford. If one of our data centres was catastrophically destroyed, our customers would probably not even notice.

I have been involved in many start-ups and SMEs where looking after technology was a constant burden - involving the purchase of expensive servers and software and maintenance support.

The same expensive start-up costs were always needed - whether the office had a team of five or 25 people. Data back up solutions, PABX phone systems and the installation of ISDN lines were all part of the expensive communications and IT mix.

All of these systems were separate, with no integration. It usually was not long before we had to hire an IT Manager to look after the "stuff in the cupboard".

Things have changed. Now, businesses of any size can benefit from state-of-the art IT without enduring any infrastructure or maintenance costs. These businesses pay for the service on a per person, per monthly basis.

This is all done without the business needing its own server, telephone system or maintenance contract. Whether the business is a two-man band or a company with 200 employees in different offices, the technology can be rapidly deployed.

When documents, e-mails, contacts and other business critical data are switched from an "on-premise" server inside your office to the cloud it makes them accessible from any PC, laptop or mobile device anywhere in the world.

Mobile and virtual businesses are now a reality. Switching business critical functions to an external "cloud computing" solution is not really about outsourcing. It is more about reducing costs and focussing the resources of a business on what it does best - serving its customers.

Whether we are providing a hosted IT solution to a freight distribution company, a cake shop or a charity - the overarching aim remains the same: we handle the communications and IT while our customer gets on with the business of running their business.

We do this by providing a holistic solution which links an employee's work PC, laptop, landline telephone and mobile together. This is what we call "unified communications" - the seamless blend of real time communication (mobile, voice, video and instant messaging) with non-real time communications (e-mail and voicemail).

This is then seamlessly integrated with mobile devices, document collaboration and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

While the case for this type of cloud computing solution is compelling, IT managers of large and small companies still have fears about the risks involved in switching business critical IT functions to an external supplier.

For example, a YouGov survey, commissioned by IT assurance specialist NCC Group, found that 20 percent of IT managers working in large businesses believe that their outsourced systems and processes have less IT security than those based in-house. These fears have doubtless been fuelled by high-profile cases of outages where data has been lost and the common confusion with the low security available for users of consumer focused sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

Thousands of people with Sidekick smart-phones, for example, lost their address books, calendars, photo albums and other personal data which was stored in the cloud. But the reality is that outages where sensitive personal or business data is lost are extremely rare in the business sector. However, choose your hosted IT and communications supplier carefully as they are not all the same. Companies such as Outsourcery are attuned to the growth of cloud computing and the major commitment made to it by global-leading technology companies such as Microsoft and Google.

During my time in business I have experienced a failed IT back-up system - which was a result of it not being set up properly - and days without e-mail as the internet connection cable for our e-mail server had been knocked out by a cleaner and we were all abroad. The fact is that it is far more risky to house a server in your office where an accident or mishap can result in a server being damaged and business critical data being lost forever.

All businesses need to embrace cloud computing as it will make them more efficient and more productive while enriching their working relationships. Businesses already using cloud computing quickly ask themselves how their competitors can cope without enjoying the many benefits that this new technology brings.

I am sure that the last company to ditch its own electricity generating plant for a far cheaper, more efficient and more reliable on-demand supply via the national grid lost out to those that embraced the inevitable process towards the grid earlier on.

Cloud computing is the future of computing.

Cloud dialogues...

Imagine you are sitting in an airport in the U.S. using a wireless network and you urgently need to obtain access to a proposal on your secure intranet that you want to send to an important customer who needs it for a key internal meeting, but it needs to be updated.

You can see in a glance next to the document that one of your colleagues involved in preparing the proposal is available in your London office and online as their "presence" icon, which checks their diary and status, is green. Another is in a meeting and their status is red. You instant message your available colleague to ask whether they can help you to amend the document.

They reply "yes" and initiate a voice call over the internet at no cost. You put on your bluetooth headset, open the document and then start a web conference allowing you to have a face to face conversation.

At the same time you can share the document and collaborate to amend the document in real time. You bring in another colleague by dragging and dropping them in to the call window, but just converse by instant message to ask a few simple questions.

As soon as you've finished, you drop out of the conference, but your two colleagues continue using instant messaging as they've had an idea to improve the document. They actually then go on to escalate to a voice call from their desk phones by one click to continue the conversation. You save the document back to your intranet, which is automatically subject to version control.

You then look at your customer record launched from a CRM solution integrated with Outlook, which lists all of your company's communications with the customer to ensure that somebody hasn't already sent a similar document and pricing to a different decision maker. You then send the document by email to your customer and it is logged in the CRM system automatically and an automated notification is sent to your commercial team - with a link to the document on your intranet - so that they know that a proposal has been issued.

You try to call your customer in London and the call is routed over the internet to the UK where a UK call over the fixed line network is made so that you would only pay for a local call, but there is no answer so you leave a voicemail. You then close your laptop and head to your gate.

As you board the plane your colleague instant messages you on your smart phone to ask whether you got it out in time. As you read the instant message, your customer confirms receipt by email and thanks you for a speedy response and your follow up voicemail.

They also called your office number to thank you, as they don't know where you are, and left a voicemail, which is sent automatically as a sound file to your smart phone. You should have actually diverted all calls to your mobile though using the toolbar in Outlook that controls how people can, or can't, reach you.

You respond to your colleague by instant message typing "they have it. thanks". You then forward your colleague the customer's grateful voicemail as an email attachment from your smart phone - just before you switch off for your flight.

In my business, this is how we work every day. It astounds most people that see these powerful yet cost effective and scalable solutions in action.

Still, all the advertising, and the positive reviews from bloggers and gadget gurus including David Pogue and Walt Mossberg, did help to lure some customers to Verizon stores.

Tech website Cnet’s Marguerite Reardon said that she found about 100 enthusiasts lining up for Verizon’s special midnight opening in New York under what could hardly be described as balmy weather conditions. This morning, in a follow up story, her headline read “Slow start for the Motorola Droid?”.

In a research note entitled “Droid is no iPhone, not even Storm,” Jefferies analyst Bill Choi said the launch didn’t compare well with Verizon’s launch of the  much criticized BlackBerry Storm last year.

But Choi noted that store traffic was higher than usual in the locations he checked out and he said “anywhere between 5-7 people huddled around the Droid station at any given time.”

While some of the Droid phones being sold today are HTC’s new cheaper device, dubbed Droid Eris, Choi noted that all stores were reporting far better demand for Motorola Droid than that of HTC.

The “Motorola brand is helping and people really like the keyboard” said Choi who estimated that Verizon could sell as many as 750,000 of the Motorola Droid devices by year end.

That’s no iPhone, but it’s somethign, especially for Motorola’s Sanjay Jha who is betting the future of the entire company on Google’s Android system.

(Reuters Photo of Motorola’s Droid)

Keep in mind that Thomson Reuters likes to remind people when they ask these questions that Thomson Corp, before buying Reuters, got out of its Canadian newspaper empire for a reason. (See below)

I asked our chief executive, Tom Glocer, a question along these lines on a Thursday phone call he had with reporters to discuss the company’s third-quarter financial results.

Here is what he said:

Thomson did a remarkable job, far earlier than any other company I know, of seeing what was coming and transitioning their business out of print for the most part… I don’t see any particular time or reason at this juncture why we should go the other way.

Later on Thursday, when I interviewed Glocer, we returned to this theme. (I can’t help it, I’m a print guy.) I used the Financial Times, owned by Pearson Plc and beloved of its CEO, Dame Marjorie Scardino, as a sample target:

Here is Glocer’s reply:

When I came to London, Marjorie was famous for saying she would never sell the FT, or it would go “over my dead body.” There were many years in which the FT had fallen on harder times when people held that up as well: Marjorie has to go before the FT.

That sounds like a “no” on the FT. What about other properties?

Is it impossible that somewhere in the world that we’d take a print property and move it electronic? No, but we’re not looking to go out and buy consumer print publications. That’s not what we think our business is.

That sounds like a “no” on print. At that point, Chief Financial Officer Bob Daleo took over, saying that Thomson Reuters is a company where “what we shy away from are advertising-based models. We charge for content, we charge for information and news.”

What about Reuters.com, an ad-supported site that runs our news? Glocer said:

I would argue that the overwhelming amount of our news is behind the firewall in the sense that you only get it as part of a product that you pay for. It’s great that we have it. I’m very proud of reuters.com. I use it on weekends and evenings when I’m not in front of my bigger service, my subscription service.

I asked one more question on print: Why did Thomson Reuters get involved in any way at all with ZelnickMedia’s losing bid for BusinessWeek? What was that about?

We had no ownership interest or economics in the deal… We have done very similar things already. I would point you to the deal with the International Herald Tribune where Reuters supplies a couple pages’ worth of business news. So the way I’d think of it is, we have a news agency providing television, text, photos, etc…. There is no particular magic about BusinessWeek. We stand ready to do sensible, commercial deals to help deliver value to media customers, and it’s not a sort of, ‘Well the TR play is BusinessWeek.’ It never was. For a while it got reported like that because it was amusing to people.”

And that’s the last word on print…today.

The company announced a new feature on Thursday that lets people view all the personal information they’ve entered into Google’s sundry Web-based products over the years.

The information in Google’s new Dashboard covers everything from your personal account information for email and other Google services, to your viewing history on YouTube and the photos you’ve uploaded to Picasa. It’s information that was always accessible in the past, but Google is now making it viewable in one, all-inclusive snapshot.

Privacy advocates have long warned that Google is accumulating too much information about people through its broad menu of Web-based services and not providing enough insight into how the information is being used.

Whether Google’s Dashboard will appease them remains to be seen.

Google said it will begin by incorporating information from 23 Google products in the dashboard, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

Of course, the dashboard also has the benefit of reminding consumers about all the Google services they signed up for in the past and may forgotten about - a reminder that just could lead someone to start using a product again.

For Google, transparency has its benefits

Late on Monday, Cisco's Ned Hooper used the company's blog to insist it had offered "a very good price" for Tandberg, after some shareholders of the Norwegian videoconferencing company said the price was too low. (See his full post here.)

The "Driving Conversations" blog of General Motors Europe has also been a source of news on the long-running (and now abandoned) talks to sell Opel, hosting posts from GM's chief negotiator, John Smith. (See some of his posts on the topic here.)

So could blogging become a major channel of communication on M&A transactions? Big corporations have enthusiastically adopted it for other uses- for example, "Randy's Journal", a Boeing blog, has a following in the industry and among aeroplane enthusiasts.

But it is hard to believe this trend would be welcomed by some financial regulators -- like the UK's Takeover Panel, which banned advertising during takeover battles more than 20 years ago.

This was the third such gathering that Zelnick and his co-hosts organized, with the aim of bringing New York’s best media-focused minds under one roof to talk about the future of the business. In keeping the setting intimate and the number of invitations in the ballpark of about a hundred people, the organizers hope to turn the “New Media Dinner” into a recurring salon-of-sorts, where ideas, capital and expertise can mix and match.

In a half-hour chat before the guests started arriving, Zelnick and two of the co-hosts, drop.io founder Sam Lessin and Thrillist’s Ben Lerer explained to me how this all came about.

For Zelnick, chairman of video-game publisher Take-Two and co-founder of private equity firm ZelnickMedia Corp, the idea of organizing the event sprang from “a desire… to meet the next generation of leaders in the media business.” Naturally, he turned to Lessin and Lerer, who are now in their 20s but who have known Zelnick since they were in their teens and frequently turn to him for advice on their ventures.

“I suspect that between the organizers, we collectively know almost everybody doing the most interesting things in new media in New York,” Zelnick said. News Corp’s Jeremy Philips and venture capitalist Stuart Ellman of RRE Ventures were the other co-hosts for the evening.

And sure enough, they pulled in a power crowd that included veteran dealmaker Quincy Smith, CBS’s Internet chief who is quitting to start his own advisory firm, former Doubleclick CEO-turned-ex-Googler David Rosenblatt, and even Ron Conway, Silicon Valley’s star angel investor who was in town for meetings.

Over dirty martinis and mini lobster rolls, denizens of “Silicon Alley” such as Betaworks’ Andy Weissman and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson rubbed shoulders with some of New York’s media elite including Journalism Online’s Gordon Crovitz and my own boss, Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.

Crovitz and I had planned to chat at the dinner but I missed the chance, so we followed up on Tuesday. The former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, who now invests in early-stage media and technology companies, gave me his take on e-mail: “Technology has led to a period of intense creative destruction for the media and information industries,” he said. “New York is the center for this transition, with an enormous amount of innovation and reinvention by new media entrepreneurs and the old-media executives who understand this period of fundamental change.”

Some new media entrepreneurs, like Lessin, have been privileged enough to seek the help and advice of traditional media power players in navigating this changing landscape. “I’ve always had access to people like Strauss who’ve helped me figure out the landscape and told me when my ideas were terrible,” said Lessin, who is 26 and the son of investment banker Bob Lessin.

But the new media get-togethers are about “introducing my best, brightest and smartest friends to some of Strauss’s friends,” he said, adding that the past two events — in February and July — have spawned many interesting discussions between people who met at the venue.

Later, I mingled with many of the guests, picking up stray bits of conversation: here a pitch from an entrepreneur to a venture capitalist, there a bit of M&A gossip, chatter about which start-ups are working and which aren’t doing too well, mentions of the recent pay-models-for-journalism panel at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, not to mention heated debates on the Yankees-Phillies game.

“It was a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” said Kenneth Lerer, chairman of The Huffington Post, when I followed up with him on Tuesday. “My guess is that a few investments and a few deals and a few hires will be made out of last night.”

“One of these (events) don’t mean much but if you have a series of them — and I think that’s what Strauss’s intention is — it’s smart, good business,” Lerer added.

Although most folks seemed to know each other already, I was happy to point out Fred Wilson and Tom Glocer to various entrepreneurs.

For many of New York’s young media entrepreneurs, it was also an opportunity to relax (not all of them were in ties) and catch up on industry chatter. The hosts made sure the booze didn’t run out, and there were few complaints about the first course of pappardelle with wild mushrooms, followed by entrees of prime rib roast and sea bass.

For dessert, the guests were treated to New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, whose boss David Remnick spoke at the first gathering in February and was also at this one. Gladwell infused his short speech with healthy skepticism about the power of technology to bring about social change and improve our collective well-being. The audience took the bait spiritedly, and a brief back-and-forth followed. Then it was almost midnight, and the party was over. I have to believe that not a few guests were already thinking about the next one.

Photo: Strauss Zelnick (Reuters)

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster called the China launch a “disappointment.” He was expecting something in the range of 30,000 units. “We believe that eventually China will emerge as a major market for iPhone sales but it could take a year or two to gain meaningful unit traction as it did in the U.S.,” he wrote in a research note Tuesday.

The iPhone is Apple’s biggest growth story, with more than 30 million units sold worldwide since its launch in 2007. China represents a huge market opportunity for Apple, which is starting with about 1,000 places selling the iPhone.

In August, China Unicom signed a three-year non-exclusive deal to sell the iPhone in China, aiming to boost its launch of 3G services. However, some analysts say the handset — which costs $700 to $1,000 — will eventually require more subsidies to boost sales.

IPhone sales in the U.S. are heavily subsidized by exclusive carrier AT&T, enabling consumers to get the latest generation device for as little as $199.

When they meet at the Plaza, they will talk about a ton of different things that their customers, their investors and other readers want to know. I have to apologize for them because they’re not letting in any riff-raff. And that includes reporters who get paid to spend all day figuring out how these people decide what kind of entertainment you want, what kind of technology you pay them for and what deals they pursue with the money that you give them when you buy their stock. This event always excludes press, but that’s no reason not to highlight what you probably are missing because of this. After all, who wants to wait for the 8-K filing?

Some press will be allowed, but it will be an assortment of celebrity journalists who will moderate panels and, according to Peter Kafka, author of “MediaMemo” at News Corp’s AllThingsD blog, will not write about the event (I’m talking about Maria Bartiromo and David Faber of CNBC, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, etc).

Peter wrote two posts about this, here and here. He also issued me a challenge to sneak into the conference, but horror of horrors, I’m on a deadline that I can’t shirk any longer. So consider this an invitation from me to you to go to the Plaza and catch these guys on the way in and out of the building. It’s a fun way to spend the day, and maybe you’ll learn something interesting.

Here is the agenda, courtesy of Peter Kafka. Below that is a list of speakers. Outrage breeds corrections: I have to amend the record: The list I had posted here of topics is last year’s agenda. My mistake. The list of speakers appearing THIS year still appears below.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

(Photo of Barry Diller, who will remain away from prying eyes at Quadrangle’s confab: Reuters)

(Corrects to show Kenny Wallace, not Rusty Wallace did a similar program)

A company launched by a NASCAR fan to allow fellow race lovers to collectively sponsor a car has signed up a former NASCAR champion driver as its first recipient.

FanCar said it will sponsor two-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Terry Labonte and Carter/Simo racing at the Ford 400 race on Nov. 22 in Miami, the last race of the season. The company was launched by Texan and NASCAR fan Matt Ferguson last week.

“Our sport is struggling for sponsorship,” Ferguson said in a telephone interview. “There are way too many great drivers out there without sponsors.”

Smaller teams in NASCAR have cut jobs and merged this year to survive as corporate sponsors have cut spending amid the weak economy.

For $20, each fan will be able to vote on the car’s paint scheme as well as the overall message on the vehicle, and will receive their name on the car and a certificate of sponsorship and a digital photo of the car. Before Labonte’s involvement was announced, donations had come from Alaska, Massachusetts and Canada, Ferguson said.

Labonte (above, in 2007) has won 22 races in his NASCAR Sprint Cup career and was the series champion in 1984 and 1996. In 1998, he was named one of NASCAR’s 50 greatest drivers.

Ferguson said he did not know how much he has raised for Labonte because the response was so heavy after FanCar was announced that he turned off the email notifications he received on his BlackBerry cell phone every time someone made a donation.

NASCAR driver Rusty Kenny Wallace took a similar approach to sponsorship for a race in Canada earlier this year, raising about $100,000. Among the sponsors of his care were Lombardo Bail Bonds, AmmoSam, Repo Rob, MarriageJunkie.com, Iowabarns.com and a cat, according to reports.

Ferguson said all money raised goes to Labonte as he pays for his business through advertising on the website, as well as the sale of FanCar merchandise. The 32-year-old entrepreneur from College Station, Texas, added that he intends to continue the program next season and has been contacted by other car owners and race tracks about the program

(Reuters photo)

Video game executives are some of the most optimistic you’ll ever meet. But you have to think they dream of the good old days (of only one year ago) when the industry was called “recession resistant”, thanks to the idea that “cocooning” consumers would, ad infinitum, plop down $60 for games.

Those days may be gone — just ask Nintendo. Now game makers are eyeing the holiday shopping season, with a lot on the line. Still, many are upbeat. Activision Blizzard Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, for one, says that at its core, the industry slowdown is about the wicked recession, not a shrinking appeal for games.

Reuters: Has the appetite for games dwindled?
Kotick: I think the reason why the take-up rates over the last 6 or 7 months have been what they have been, as compared with where they were, has much more to do with macroeconomics than fatigue in the category. Once you are getting to that gift giving (season), my sense is that you are going to see a change in consumption.

One thing you won’t see this the holiday season: a drop in prices from the standard of $60 and up for top shelf games such as Activision’s highly anticipated “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ and “DJ Hero Renegade Edition” ($199). Kotick says that the price is right, given the rising cost of development, and the fact that that prices have been steady for a long time compared to that of other entertainment forms.

Reuters: Any chance for price movement?
Kotick: Not that I’m aware of. If you look at the cost of development ten year ago to today and the cost of marketing, our ability to hold prices firm over ten years (is worth noting). If I told you that we had a 4x increase in 10 years in production expenses and even more than that in marketing and selling, we are still holding firm on those low price points.

Reuters: So prices could have been even higher?
Kotick: Yes — (even) if you just added some inflation adjustment. We have tried to maintain no-price-increases and making sure that the products we are delivering are always the highest quality.

Photo: Reuters Archive