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We’re seeing a few glimpses from Mix10 of what Windows Phone 7 Series will look like for the enterprise. Perhaps most compelling is the continued emphasis on creating an experience more so than an enterprise “phone.” It appears that Microsoft has learned a lesson that is more apparent every day. People want smartphones as much for personal use as for business use. Sponsor But Microsoft is saying little about what it does plan for the enterprise with its Windows Phone 7 Series. They say more is to come in the next few weeks but clearly the emphasis is on the consumer market, not the enterprise. Network World did a little sniffing around Mix10 and did get a few tidbits of what we should expect: Windows Phone 7 is no longer enterprise-centric but the user experience is still catching the fancy of independent software vendors that want to sell it into the business market. The iPhone and Google Android are proof enough that people will find relevance for smartphones in the enterprise even if the devices are meant primarily for consumers. A developer community is ready and waiting to make applications for Windows Phone 7. Developers can create applications within a development environment they understand. Network World notes: “Visual Studio programmers can drag and drop controls onto a Windows Phone surface, bring in existing Silverlight libraries or Azure cloud projects, and wire them up to data sources, behaviors and services, just like they do when writing software for a Windows PC.” Microsoft is expected to offer a secure area within its Marketplace to accomodate enterprise applications. The intention wold be to provide a place where enterprise customers could download company specific software or the framework for their own marketplace. This would provide IT administrators with ways to administer applications within the enterprise. It’s uncertain what security features will become part of Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has historically provided Microsoft Exchange Active Sync which enables Windows Mobile devices the ability to sync with Microsoft Exchange. Actice Sync has offered a number of security features such as remote data wipe and encrypted connections. Will this rich security framework be kept intact? With such a consumer focus, it’s uncertain what will come of it. Windows Phone 7 includes an Office Hub, allowing people to create and edit Microsoft Office documents. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making Sharepoint a mobile site. Windows Phone 7 will integrate with Microsoft Exchange. It appears users may set up tiles within Windows Phone 7 to edit and share Sharepoint documents. It appears that Microsoft may not necessarily have to focus on the enterprise. Its rich user experience may be enough to get people interested. Core enterprise features will only help give Windows Phone 7 a chance to compete more effectively. Discuss

The world’s second Internet of Things Conference is scheduled to take place at the end of November in Tokyo. The deadline for papers was just extended to June 1 – which gave us an idea. Conference planners have put together a list of suggested topics for papers . We took that list and then rounded up our ongoing reporting and analysis for each of the eight topics as a way to help you understand how vast and far reaching IoT will end up being. Sponsor ‘Green by Internet of Things / Green of Internet of Things Technology’ Our recent list of 6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home , looked at the IoT from a domestic standpoint. From handling toxic waste, to watershed management, to building design, to transportation, to the smart energy grid, a whole new green way of thinking is going to be made possible by IoT. ‘Future sustainable technologies linking the physical and virtual world’ Different industries have have already been able to increase the efficiency of freight shipping by using sensors to tell them the location and condition of their product in real-time. This includes FedEx’s SenseAware , which is designed to constantly keep track of the vital signs of all its packages. In future posts we’ll be covering IoT-driven growth in the fields of virtual factories, digital cities, agriculture and forest management. ‘Novel services and applications to facilitate environmental responsibility’ Did you hear about the guy who wired his house up to a Twitter account so that it alerted him whenever an appliance was used? Following that experiment, Matt Morey figured out a way to use iobridge to turn that one-way Twitter alert system into a two-way system that makes it possible to turn appliances on and off via Twitter. These ideas, which may seem novel at first, signal the direction towards the development of whole new industries. ‘Emerging Internet of Things business models and process changes’ Companies as large as IBM have invested heavily in IoT. It has a website called Smarter Planet , which is dedicated to “smarter solutions,” of which they say they’ve already developed 12,00 hundred. We’ve also written about ThingD, which is creating a registry of things, as well as REZZ.IT, which is building a business based on the idea that “things have a network and their own audience.” ‘Communication systems and network architectures for the IoT’ Pachube is the IotT business that has earned the most coverage and analysis from us. Pachube is a service that stores and shares real-time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments. MQTT , which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, is also noteworthy. It is “a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world.” More recently, Google launched an API for PowerMeter , which allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. Also worth mention is our article on Arrayent that aims to be the “Cisco of small things” – which is basically middleware for companies wanting to connect their products to the Internet. In particular it’s targeting smartphones. ‘Experience reports from the introduction and operation of networked things in areas such as healthcare, logistics & transport’ IoT is still so new that we have only just begun to see the results of research. But with RFID, for example (which is one of the more mature IoT technologies), we’ve reported on how there have been challenges that limit predicted growth. There’s also still impediment to to the viable use of IofT-like location-based services . ‘Emerging applications and interaction paradigms for everyday citizens’ From preventing lost luggage , to the latest IoT gadgets , telling the story of what a person’s everyday daily life is an integral part of IoT. Most notable is the presentation by Carnegie Mellon professor and ex-imagineer Jesse Schell, who describes how sensors in everything may one day mean the sensor in your toothbrush gives you online gaming points if you brush for the full three minutes. He also envisions sensors that track if you are watching TV commercials and again rewards you with online gaming points. Core to Schell’s ideas is the belief that these incentives may seem a bit creepy, but they have potential to help us create a less corrupted, more accountable and ethical world. ‘Social impacts and consequences: security, privacy, opportunities and risks’ In our What The Internet of Things Means For You series we covered privacy issues related to the use of RFID and barcode readers. The latest reports show how advertisement, RFID and geolocation have combined to raise serious privacy concerns. Additionally, location-based data can be a threat to personal privacy in the context of how the U.S. congress has started to draft location-based privacy protection laws. Are you going to the Tokyo for Internet of Things Conference? What do you hope to learn there? Let us know in the comments, or by emailing tips@readwriteweb.com , what we should be discussing in the months leading up to the event. Discuss

McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The centrial IT group had the vision to automate “the last mile” of IT planning, the budget approval process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it’s a ritual that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the cost of budgeting, and making it faster and smarter by understanding the assets, services, and service delivery of IT. Budgeting can be painful because it can be in slow-motion. Contrast this with the real-time controls of such as VMware V-Motion and Amazon’s web service console and we see a great linkup for driving process change through budgeting. And driving budgeting by cloud and virtualization. We took a look at McKesson’s journey and the service catalog functions of NewScale , an IT services catalog company. Sponsor McKesson: Let’s Start with Less Meetings and Less 5mb Spreadsheets NewScale has customers like McKesson and Charles Schwab and competitors like HP, IBM, Tivoli. The company has been growing its customer base and helping stable-state enterprises to leverage Service Management. And that leads directly into cloud procurement. We tracked the use case at McKesson, where the company landed at the service desk in the cloud as a means to the end in their journey to build a low-impact budget process . We see a lot of benefit in this approach, where if successful, it would mean that the advantages to go with commodity pre-approved services dramatically improves the timing and effort of procurement. This is a lever that gives Finance a significant hand in the IT spend. Since cloud and virtualization offerings can be spun-up with service call, the cloud is well positioned to be there as budgeting and approval processes are automated. In phase one, the company reported significant progress in moving processes towards the service catalog. One click vs. Fill Out the Form In the end, the move towards enterprise standards may be won over simplicity. Is it less clicks to provision. This means connecting the dots between processes, systems, software, teams, and policy. To EC2, or to EC2 through Official Channels: That is the Question IT services management comes into the picture and could make a difference in how the business and technical contributors of organizations are rewarded for moving to a standard platform. Information Technology Infrastructure Library is tool set that has been given to IT managers to try to wrap standard language around IT service management. It gives the enterprise a common way to manage processes for IT and track the changes involved in building and operating systems. Services platforms like Amazon and Salesforce can be considered IT disinter-mediation. We all know a IT leader out there somewhere who is funding their project by credit card out in the cloud. IT, of course, knows this also (especially since they are likely watching your network traffic). One part of the service management offering is making it even easier than Amazon. Carrot, vs. stick. Service catalog management has the promise when it wraps things like Amazon’s EC2, or VMwares offerings, gives the enterprise a way to get the same service from the web. And, with budget approval and IT approval baked in, the carrot is there. All of IT moves towards transparency and IT processes as being measured as processes. In the ITIL community, there is discussion of the next layer of the library moving towards service delivery in the move towards ITIL Version 3. It’s easy to see that “provision server” becomes fully automated. Soon, all the IT functions below it become invisible. We see this as a future cloud inflection point, where instead of there “cloud services”, we are all in one. Zen Mashup What has been your experience in mashing ITIL, ITIL Service Delivery in your environment? Do your IT services flow like water? Discuss

What is the effect of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems on cloud computing? Well, there have been quite a few if you look at where Sun’s best and brightest have moved on to in the past few months. Tim Bray is the latest Sun star to move on. You may know Bray as the co-founder of XML. Eve Maler is also a co-founder of XML. She had worked with Bray for many years until her departure from Sun last Spring to join PayPal. Eve as many of you many know, is one of the leaders in developing identity standards and initiatives. Sponsor Perhaps the clearest example is evident at Rackspace where five developers from Sun were recently hired to work on Drizzle, a heavy duty system for high scaling applications in the cloud: When it’s ready, Drizzle will be a modular system that’s aware of the infrastructure around it. It does, and will run well in hardware rich multi-core environments with design focused on maximum concurrency and performance. No attempt will be made to support 32-bit systems, obscure data types, language encodings or collations. The full power of C++ will be leveraged, and the system internals will be simple and easy to maintain. The system and its protocol are designed to be both scalable and high performance. According to Rackspace, the service will “keep the good and remove the bad,” from MySQL. And here is where we see the power of open-source. We interviewed Bray today. He pointed out that open-source is developed outside the walls of the company. So, in the midst of corporate upheaval, developers can move onto new places and not face any interruption in their work. That’s exactly what we see with the Drizzle team: It feels like Oracle has lost a huge opportunity in the open-source community. The lucky ones are the companies that are picking up these talented people with faith that the open-source way represents the future of cloud computing. Discuss

Google Analytics offers site owners an easy and free way to gather highly detailed analytics about their websites’ visitors. A lot of people, however, don’t feel comfortable with the idea that Google can track their every move on the Internet. After all, even if you don’t use any Google product yourself, you will still send personal data about yourself to Google through programs like Google Analytics. According to an announcement the Google Analytics team just posted on its blog, you will soon have the option to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Sponsor How Will This Work? It still remains to be seen how this opt out feature will actually work. According to Google, the Google Analytics team wants to offer a “global browser based plugin.” This is a very vague statement and given that there is no standard for browser plugins, it remains to be seen how Google will implement this. It is also worth noting that a lot of users probably don’t know how to install a plugin. Those users who care about being tracked by Google Analytics will likely know how to do this, but it is probably in Google’s best interest to explain this opt out procedure in great detail. Google plans to make these plugins available globally in the coming weeks. Will this Make Stats Useless? If opting out of Google Analytics becomes a widespread phenomenon, this could have wide-reaching consequences for site owners. After all, having detailed analytics about your visitors allows site owners and publishers to tweak their marketing efforts . What About Other Analytics Tools? It will also be interesting to see how other analytics firms will react to this. While Google Analytics is probably one of the most often used analytics services, other companies like Clicktale , Sitemeter and Woopra also collect large amounts of data from Internet users. Those users who want to opt out of Google Analytics will surely also want to opt out of other programs as well. Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village Discuss