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About the Cloud Connect Launch Pad

The Cloud Connect Launch Pad, produced by TechWeb (producers of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, the Web 2.0 Expo, and publisher of Information Week magazine) is a competition that lets companies present their innovative application (either in development and about to launch, or recently launched) to the Cloud Connect community. All entrants will receive visibility here on the Cloud Connect Launch Pad site, and finalists will be invited to present their applications live to the Cloud  Connect audience.

Who can enter. All software developers, large and small, are invited to enter their software applications  - you do not need to be an exhibitor at the Connect Connect.  There is no entry fee.  You just enter by filling out our application form, and then Tweeting your entry to the Cloud Connect Launch Pad Twitter handle #cc_lp.

Entries we are looking for. Entries should target the Cloud Connect market.  Examples can  include (but are not limited to) the following types of applications (a tip o’ the hat to Wikipedia for this list):

What makes it Launch Pad worthy. The application must be announced after January 1, 2010 and release before December 31, 2010.

How the voting works. First, fill out our online application form (so we know who you are). You’ll then receive an email with the Cloud Connect Launch Pad Twitter handle #cc_lp. Upon Tweeting your entry to the handle, the Cloud Connect Launch Pad Jury will flag you as an entrant.  Contest entrants are given the chance to pitch their best ideas and new products through several rounds of voting.  The Cloud Connect Jury will whittle down the Twitter round to 8 quarter-finalists. The community will then vote on the 8 demo videos on our website. Once the community has spoken, those Final Four will present live on the Cloud Connect keynote stage. To determine the winner, the audience will do a live text-to-vote via Mozes.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is an umbrella term for delivering computing platforms on a pay-as-you-go basis. It’s widely used to describe everything from virtualized managed hosting, to software-as-a-service providers, to everything in between.

Economically, cloud computing is simply standardization. Cloud providers get economies of scale they can pass on to users, and have the ability to quickly allocate resources to customers. This means that they can offer dramatically shorter contracts — charging by CPU-hour or gigabyte instead of by month or cage.

Technically, cloud computing is abstraction. The cloud abstracts out certain functions — storage, for example — and the cloud’s user doesn’t care whether the data is stored on a hard drive, in memory, or in a box buried in the earth, provided that it behaves reliably. Recent advances in virtualization, combined with the broad adoption of a few programming languages and HTTP as a universal front-end, make this achievable. Beyond this definition, however, there’s a lot of contention. Every vendor is trying to cloudwash their offerings. SOA companies are claiming clouds are SOA; management companies are claiming they manage clouds; and on-premise data center technology is claiming it’s a “private cloud.”

One thing’s for sure, however — once you cut through the hype, computing as a utility has its place in the CIO’s toolbox and promises to change how we think about buying and using IT.

Click here to download the Cloud Computing Whitepaper.

About the Cloud Connect Conference

Cloud Connect brings together the entire cloud eco-system to better understand the transformation we’re experiencing and promises to be the defining event of the cloud computing industry. TechWeb has successfully produced cloud events intended to define and frame cloud computing discussions for business technology executives, IT professionals and developers since June 2008.

For more information about the event, visit the Cloud Connect website.