UPDATED 12:28 EDT / JUNE 29 2012

This Week in the Cloud: All About End-Users

A lot of the main highlights from the past few days can be traced back to the personal cloud rather than the enterprise, and although the latter category is still very much adequately represented it’s good to spice up the main theme every now and then.

The heart of consumer coverage centered on Google I/O, where the company made a number of big announcements much to the delight of fans and bloggers. Google debuted Nexus 7 and Nexus Q: one a tablet that’s running on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and the second a smooth black sphere that connects to your device and streams digital content.

Jelly Bean features enhancements to the way you tap and swipe, in addition to a major UI improvement. It’s coupled by an update to Google Play and a reworked developer toolkit that makes it easier for app creators to include online functionality.

Beyond Google came an announcement from Box, unveiling the first alliance between a major cloud service (itself) and a torrent solution. The thinking behind the partnership with Boxopus was to allow users to download much larger files than the previous limits, but the whole thing was called off by Box just a few days later due to privacy concerns.

In the enterprise, VDI was the big trending topic this week. Pano Logic unveiled a cloud system  that allows users to access web-based business apps via particularly minimalistic and equally cost effective box – a thin client taken to a whole other level.

Not long before that Piston Cloud revealed its plans for desktop virtualization as well. Via a partnership with GridCentric, the company integrated memory-reducing technology into its OpenStack distribution to create what is touted as the first truly viable VDI solution based on the open-source cloud OS.


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