Apple May End Mobile Phone Contract Era - NREN opportunity

[More evidence that Apple is working on software configurable SIMs that will eventually will break the Homer/Bart Simpson stranglehold the carriers have over consumers.

Cool new app to protect on line privacy - Unhosted with Federated Identity

Whenever you post content to the web (images, text, video, music...), it is kept on the servers of that particular application. This means that your online data is stored in centralized servers belonging to various companies, meaning it's not really yours any more.

Open Flow in the real world: Carriers, clouds and follow the sun/wind networks

[It is exciting to see the concept of software controlled networks pioneered by CANARIE and CRC (UCLP) and other researchers such as Nick Mckeown at Stanford starting to gain momentum.

Apple's strategy to bypass carriers - opportunity for R&E networks to build their own national wireless broadband networks

[Telcos and cablecos are probably the most conservative and least innovative companies in the world.

The future of university CIOs and IT departments

[In this age of financial crises and shrinking budgets, universities and research institutes are going to be under increasing pressure to reduce costs.

So long computer overlords - how clouds can liberate research and transform discovery

[Here is an excellent presentation by Ian Foster on how clouds and grids can liberate researchers from traditional IT research tasks.

Internet 2 project to broker commercial cloud services to universities

[Here is an excellent presentation by Steve Wallace on an Internet 2 pilot project to broker commercial and private cloud services to universities.

Great example of commercial cloud for research - research data lifcycle management as a service

[Here is another great example of how the research community can leverage commercial cloud services to develop pressing solutions for the preservation, archiving and provenance of scientific data.

Should funding councils mandate the use of commercial clouds re: - white house announcement

[The recent press release from the White House Office Science Technology Policy highlghts an important and growing trend in research and science around the world.

Wifi - the cell network for the rest of us

[Universities around the world continue to face a financial crunch as governments slash funding  in order to restrain huge debt loads.

The network as a service - why bandwidth on demand is not enough

[Inder Monga, Guy Roberts and Tomohiro Kudoh recently gave an excellent presentation at the Terena conference on abstracting network functionalities as services

How collaboration works or does not work on the Internet - Open Science

[Great TED video on open science and what kinds of open collaboration work - BSA]

Open Science on the Internet

How can the Internet help spread scientific discoveries?

R&E network JANET to broker cloud services for research at UK universities

[I am pleased to see that JANET and SURFnet are once again at the forefront of some very innovative new services such as national wireless and now brokering cloud services.

Some excellent papers on Future of R&E networks

[Here are several pointers to some excellent presentations and papers on future of R&E networks.

NLR to provide national personal genome health services - exciting new opportunity for R&E networks

[It has been rumored for months, but yesterday’s announcement from NLR is a real game changer. Personal health services, in particular personal genome sequencing and data storage are going to generate huge volumes of data for R&E networks.