Last week Verizon held its Verizon Developer Community (VDC) Conference in Las Vegas, where the company unveiled an updated and newly branded Verizon Apps store, which replaces the VCast app store. The Verizon Apps store includes improved search capabilities through a partnership with Chomp. Verizon certifies the apps in the store and is reducing the time necessary to test and install new applications to within two weeks. The Verizon Apps store will be accessible on Droid smartphones, and users can purchase apps and pay for them through their Verizon phone bill. Verizon is also creating a new private application store for businesses, which will include applications built by enterprises and third parties to address the specific needs of line of business workers within the organization. These enterprise app stores will provide yet another distribution channel for developers.

It is important to recognize that mobile application developers have a lot of choices regarding which mobile storefronts they use to distribute their applications, including the Android Market, the Apple App Store, and app stores from many other telecom operators and mobile device manufacturers. To capture the mindshare of developers and facilitate the success of the store, it is important to:

1) Provide marketing opportunities for developers. Competitive application stores include hundreds of thousands of applications, making it difficult for developers to get visibility for their applications. Developers also want to ensure their applications are seen by the correct user segments. Offering segmented marketing programs to ensure relevant users have visibility into the appropriate applications is a way to address this issue.

Commoditization and economies of scale drive cloud computing. We've seen before what commoditization means to the IT industry: It stimulates standardization and consolidation to serve a volume market. The success of x86-based CPUs, which dominate everything from data centers to high-performance computing, is a common example. In the software industry, commoditization raised standards and led to the commercial adoption of open source.

It is impossible to imagine a corporate data center without Linux. Even if it’s not used under the core applications, Linux is present in web servers, routers, firewalls, and storage appliances. Upcoming cloud computing providers face increasing price pressures and must therefore provide greater economies of scale than the majority of corporate data centers. They use Linux heavily as an operating system today.

But open source goes beyond Linux for cloud providers. Many providers of public cloud services (or the more local flavor of virtual private clouds) have realized that developing a full cloud computing management stack requires significant software development efforts. Some of the leading midrange cloud providers, such as Rackspace, as well as several cloud component vendors (such as cloud billing systems) support an open source initiative called OpenStack. The goal is to provide a full cloud management stack based on open source for cloud providers and large-scale corporate data centers, such as NASA. What a Linux distribution was for a traditional server, OpenStack is for a full cloud provider business model, regardless of privacy level — public, private, or virtual private.

LifeSize, a division of Logitech, has made an interesting set of announcements this morning. The three main points are:

• LifeSize Connections, a service that enables cloud-based videoconferencing.
• LifeSize Passport Connect, a very small codec/camera to video-enable remote/home offices.
• LifeSize has acquired Mirial,a developer of PC/smartphone mobile videoconferencing solutions.

What does this mean? Mobile, video-communicating, iWorkers will be able stay connected easily and affordably later this quarter when all of these components are generally available. Using the PC client, a very portable codec (about the size of a half-notebook at 8” x 5” x 1”) and camera, and a hosted bridging service, these iWorkers can connect to many standards-based, open video endpoints at HD resolutions. The required components are:

• LifeSize Connections service - $360/year.
• LifeSize Passport Connect codec and camera - $1,000 up front.
• Mirial ClearSea client account - $480/year (this is available today, and it worked well when I tried it).

I am starting a report looking at the social capabilities that will be of use to business and how those integrate (or don’t) with existing unified communications and collaborations solutions (UC&C). One truism that I am incorporating into my thinking is that engagement — users want to come back and use a tool because it was easy, useful, and (gasp) fun — will drive adoption, and thus penetration and ultimately business value. This seems to be the way that Mark Zuckerberg is thinking about Facebook growth as well. In his discussion of the integration with Skype yesterday, he posited that user volume is not the metric to watch for Facebook right now — despite its attainment of 750 million users. So what does Facebook see as its strategic imperative, and how does Skype help it attain that?

• It’s not the absolute number — it’s the ubiquity. If it is reasonable for people to find information or people on Skype, it will accelerate the momentum of adoption. Something Forrester has been saying since 2008.
• It’s not the people — it’s the activities you do jointly with the people. “Farmville,” “Friend,” “Group,” “Like,” “Stalk,” “Status,” and “Wall” are all words with new or special meaning to users because they describe what they do on Facebook. This is the engagement point from above — it’s not who you connect with, but what that connection enables you to do with them.