The cloud is beginning to see adoption in the enterprise, and the race is on for Amazon, traditional vendors, and other newcomers like Google. Pricing wars aside, Amazon is looking to redefine the cloud in order to drive mainstream adoption in the enterprise. This week SiliconANGLE’s premier production #theCUBE was in San Francisco for Amazon’s one-day AWS Summit, speaking with users like Flipboard, Cap Gemini, and Alfresco to hear firsthand what’s working with AWS, and whether or not it’s ready for prime time.

AWSSummit dominated the week that was, so lets see it and other top stories for the week.

AWS good for startups, but Flipboard sees many “staying in the cloud”

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In an interview with Flipboard’s Head of Operations, Joey Parsons, we learned that AWS is good for start-ups, but Parsons’ said that many companies will stay in the cloud. Flipboard has recognized and seized on the fact that we are steadily moving toward an all digital delivery of consumptive content.

Co-host Jeff Frick pointed out the criticism of AWS and other cloud provision services being most useful for a small start-up but that they become less economical as the company grows. Parsons responded saying, “It’s a calculated bet, but there is a lot of history of companies growing and staying in the cloud.”

AWS Summit should provide guidance for cloud companies

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For the last two years AWS has been growing at a phenomenal rate, with no sign that that growth is going to slow anytime soon. This year for the first time it is facing real competition from providers with the resources to match its own, in the form of IBM and potentially HP and the Google Compute Engine. At this weeks one-day summit, AWS addressed the elephant in the room, the cloud services market.

Is the Smart Home buzzing at SxSW 2014?

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SxSW had a cool feature this year, the Connected Home Developers Garage. The event host, iControl, invited our Senior Managing Editor Kristen Martin to an early look at their setup, demonstrating one of their partners’ solutions. Its partners include top brands like Comcast, ADT and Time Warner, which will be the gateway to mainstream adoption for the smart home. They all see the lucrative opportunity in consumer services that manage home systems like security cameras, door locks and the thermostat.

The Data Economy: What I learned at Cloudera Analyst Day

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Any start-up trying to commercialize Hadoop as their main line of business has two important challenges to tackle: 1) Deciding on and executing a business model (open core, services only, largely proprietary, etc.) and 2) Building a world-class company, from sales and support to marketing and HR. At Cloudera’s first-ever analyst meeting last week, the company spent an entire day educating the analyst community as to their progress in tackling both challenges. Here’s what Wikibon Analyst Jeffrey Kelly learned.

Bitcoin Weekly: IRS to tax bitcoins as property and more

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“Bitcoins will be taxed as property, not currency,” the IRS has made official in a policy statement when it comes to bitcoins and Federal taxes. No doubt this change will generate a very interesting media storm. Bitcoin exchange Kraken has submitted to a cryptographic audit for proof-of-reserves and passed, as well as become the recipient of $5 million in investment dollars. Oh, and MtGox is only missing 650k bitcoins now.

Google Flu Trends: A case of Big Data gone bad?

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Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but sadly Google Flu Trends has turned out to be a prime example of what can go wrong when you read too much into your Big Data. When Google Flu Trends first kicked off back in 2009, the search giant thought it was being rather crafty and had hit on a foolproof way to track outbreaks of influenza around the world. Well, it hasn’t. In 2012 researchers at the University of Washington stated that the site was around 25 percent less accurate than the CDC. More recently, in 2013, an article in Nature said that Google Flu Trends was overestimating influenza cases by around 50 percent.

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