Much good will undoubtedly sprout from the $1 billion in networked computing services that Microsoft has pledged to give to charity, but the company will also clearly benefit in the ongoing war of the clouds.
There was a time once when the early Internet was more or less made up of islands of information. If you wanted to get news, you'd type in the address of one of a few news websites you knew existed, and the same went for any other topic or sphere of knowledge you were interested in.
Telefónica, one of the largest Spanish telecommunications companies with a big presence in Latin America, announced this week that it had acquired eyeOS, a cloud computing startup behind a suite of open source web applications. With this acquisition, Telefónica further enters the realm of enterprise internet solutions, as well as open-source software.
The cloud - or online data solutions provided by various companies - is primed to take over the internet soon. Just as Cisco Systems announced plans to invest $1 billion in its cloud, Google on Tuesday took aim at Amazon, the current leader of cloud hosting, by dropping its prices.
