The Cloud Computing World Forum, scheduled to take place on October 22, will outline why Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service are ideal solutions for the small business sector, during its one day conference in London.

The event will take place the 22nd of October at 76 Portland Place and feature among others, a presentation from Mike Spink, Research Director for Gartner, who will discuss why the Cloud is perfect for SMBs.

Mr. Spink explained, ”The promise of Cloud Computing creates a tremendous opportunity for SMB’s to revisit their IT strategy and critical planning assumptions. As the market evolves and matures, Cloud Computing will become a viable and cost-effective alternative to on-premises IT for an increasing percentage of requirements.”

Mark Johnstone, MD of organizers Point Zero Media noted, ”It’s our intention with this event to make business aware of the possibilities of Cloud Computing and SaaS. This technology is available to everyone and could be of huge benefit to the SMB. We hope the event will provide insight to some of these businesses whilst also giving them the opportunity to network and meet with likeminded professionals and peers.”

Key speakers at the event will include:

- Evangelos Kotsovinos, VP of Hosting, Morgan Stanley
- Dr Pamal Sharma, CIO – UK and Ireland, General Motors
- Kostas Tsatsaris, CTO and Director, Strategy and Architecture, HM Revenue and Customs
- Keith Misson, Business Director, Group IT, Aviva
- Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and Strategy Director, Huddle
- Simon Abrahams, EMEA Head of Product Marketing, Rackspace
- Euan Semple, Freelance Consultant/Former Director of Knowledge Management, BBC
- Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum
- Robin Daniels, Sr Manager, Product Marketing, Salesforce.com
- Tim Mather, Author, Cloud Computing and Privacy
- David Terrar, CEO, D2C
- Mike Spink, Senior Analyst, Gartner

The event will also feature an intimate exhibition and networking area available to all attendees and provide great networking opportunities with industry leaders, presenting opportunities to meet and do business with likeminded individuals who have an interest in cloud computing.

To register, please visit: www.cloudwf.com or call +44 (0) 845 519 1230. For further information on the event, please contact Mark Johnstone at +44 (0) 845 519 1230 or email mark@pointzeromedia.com.

The Cloud Computing World Forum began as a way for professionals to learn and discuss the future development and integration of cloud services and will feature key decision makers from all of the cloud service providers. The conference will address the current state of the cloud computing market, the business value of the cloud, deployment strategies and integration techniques, and security and privacy issues, as well as look into what the future holds from cloud service providers.

Posted by Admin on September 30th, 2009 | No Comments

On-demand social media, video player and widget platform, KickApps, has been added to GoDaddy’s Hosting Connection service, to enable customers to easily add social and media capabilities to websites.

Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps explained ”Today’s web has evolved dramatically from static and boring destinations that do little to truly engage a website’s audience or a company’s customers. Using KickApps’ solutions for social and media applications, any small business or organization can cost-effectively reinvent their website with meaningful results. Our offering to Go Daddy customers is a message to small businesses and non-commercial organizations around the world that they too can take advantage of everything that today’s web has to offer.”

Under the agreement, GoDaddy’s hosting customers will be eligible for special offers and pricing on KickApps solutions. The KickApps solution lowers the barriers to adoption of social and media applications on websites for small businesses, organizations and individuals seeking to engage customers and unite people and content to build a resourceful and trustworthy community.

Social media has evolved from being a novel way for people to connect online to a meaningful vehicle for driving deeper customer relationships, growing online audiences, raising awareness about critical issues and organizing online, as well as creating new revenue and donation opportunities. With KickApps, small businesses and non-commercial organizations can easily create highly engaging social, interactive, distributed, and data-informed websites. Using the same simple-to-use drag-and-drop online applications that are used by numerous global brands, small business owners and non-profits can deploy their own KickApps powered social networks, custom video players, photo and video sharing, blogs, message boards and widgets on their websites.

Alexa Raad, CEO, .ORG, The Public Interest Registry added, ”The strength of a community�comes from its ability�to transform ideas into action through shared activities. Social media tools�power up�web addresses to�create dynamic relationships fastern. We are excited to see Go Daddy and KickApps partner to offer comprehensive tools and resources to the .ORG community.”

Go Daddy hosting clients use Hosting Connection to install an extensive list of popular applications for their websites with a single click, including Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. The addition of KickApps adds the industry’s leading self-service hosted social and media platform to its catalog of essential tools for creating websites. As a one-stop-shop for hosting needs, Go Daddy’s hosting services provide generous disk space amounts and bandwidth, 24/7/365 Customer Support, world-class data centers and a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%.

Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of Go Daddy remarked, ”Go Daddy is all about doing things easily and affordably. That’s why we created Hosting Connection. It’s just one more way we provide our customers an easy solution for their needs. Adding KickApps to the lineup gives our customers even greater flexibility to get their site just how they want it.”

Selected by BusinessWeek readers as Best of the Web 2008, KickApps provides brands, enterprises and web publishers with solutions that enable social, interactive, dynamic, distributed and data-informed web experiences. KickApps solutions consist of a suite of hosted social and media applications and services that are used by some of the world’s largest websites and brands to grow and engage their online audiences and foster deeper relationships with customers. Clients include: Special Olympics, CW Television, Guinness World Records, HBO, Cinemax, Cox Television, the Phoenix Suns, the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers and thousands of other sites.

GoDaddy is a provider of services designed to enable individuals and businesses to establish, maintain and evolve an online presence. GoDaddy provides a variety of domain name registration plans and web site design and hosting packages, as well as a broad array of on-demand services. These include products such as SSL Certificates, Domains by Proxy private registration, ecommerce web site hosting, blog templates and blog software, podcast packages and online photo hosting. The GoDaddy Group, Inc. has more than 34 million domain names under management. GoDaddy registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second. GoDaddy.com is the world’s No. 1 domain name registrar according to Name Intelligence, Inc. GoDaddy.com is also the largest paid hosting provider in the world, according to Netcraft Ltd. During 2007, The GoDaddy Group registered more than one-third of all domain names registered in the top six generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, including .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .mobi.

Posted by Admin on April 1st, 2009 | 1 Comment