Amazon woos Microsoft devs with .NET, SQL Server support

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Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Let it never be said that the cloud computing wars are boring. Within hours of being blasted for locking developers into its ever-rising cloud stack , Amazon announced new managed database services  and Elastic Beanstalk support targeting thousands upon thousands of Microsoft-centric developers. Late on Tuesday, Amazon posted on its AWS blog that Microsoft SQL Server is now part of AWS’ relational database service (RDS) program

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Appfog takes Amazon to task for cloud lock-in

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Lucas Carlson, CEO AppFog Positioning his company as David to Amazon’s Goliath, Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson blasted Amazon Web Services for locking developers into a closed ecosystem.

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Microsoft pledges to be carbon neutral starting this summer

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Microsoft is joining a growing number of tech companies that want to do something about their growing carbon emissions due to power hungry data centers and office buildings. The software giant on Tuesday announced a plan to become carbon neutral by fiscal year 2013 (which starts this July), and said it plans to do so by putting a price on its emissions, using energy efficiency measures and buying renewable energy and carbon offsets. Microsoft will also consider investing in renewable energy projects, the company said .

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Survey: Cloud’s hard, insecure and my boss made me do it

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Many IT professionals makers find migrating corporate applications to the cloud a difficult, time-consuming and altogether painful task, according to the results of a new survey from Cisco. The 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey queried more than 1,300 people on their feelings and experiences with moving to a cloud computing model, and the findings paint a somewhat confusing picture (perhaps due in part to the questions asked). While the majority of respondents expressed relative comfort with the state of their cloud migrations, some took rather extreme negative positions.

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How Amazon Aims to Fill Your Wardrobe [Amazon]

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Amazon has dabbled in selling clothes online for a while, with limited success. Now, it's pouring money into its fashion division—and it won't be happy until it's filled your wardrobe

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The big picture on Rackspace’s Q1: It’s becoming Mr. Hyde

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Rackspace is the Dr.

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Journalism: Dying by a thousand cuts, or being reinvented?

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There are plenty of warning signs about the ongoing disruption in the media industry , and everyone is looking for someone to blame. But when it comes to their journalistic competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look primarily at other media players such as the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed or Politico. As information architect and web developer Stijn Debrouwere notes in a smart post about the evolution of media, however, the reality is that much of what we find competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely even recognize as journalism

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LG’s Google TV-enabled sets coming to US end of May

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LG revealed two Google-loaded TVs at CES, but never gave us prices or told us when these LED models might dangle their skinny bezels in stores. In briefings at Google last week, we heard that the 47-incher (47G2) and 55-incher (55G2) would sell for $1699 and $2299 respectively -- although Amazon already has them listed significantly cheaper than that. Now, to complete the jigsaw, Reuters has quoted LG exec Ro Seogho as saying that these Google TVs will ship in the US from May 21st

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Cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution

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As an IT community we are still stuck in the past relative to the strategic nature of cloud. Many of us are looking at the adoption of cloud as just another technology, and are leaving the decisions on how to adopt, own, and manage the cloud up to engineers

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If Facebook Could Enter China, Here Are Some Of The Hurdles

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Editor’s note:  Henry Fong is CEO of Yodo1 .

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