People pessimistic about the world economy can take heart from the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at Las Vegas, Nevada. Not only was the largest trade show in the Americas bigger than ever, it also managed to attract a record number of visitors. Over 153,000 footfalls were recorded over four days in January, flocking to stalls spread across 1.86 million square feet, or the equivalent of 32 football fields.

John T. Chambers, chief executive of Cisco Systems, made one of his classic bombastic predictions Wednesday, claiming that the world’s largest maker of computer networking equipment is poised to dominate the construction of cloud computing systems.

Members of the Cloud Standards CustomerCouncil (CSCC) have formed a new Security working group and are soliciting participation. The Security working group will be led by David E. Harris, Ph.D., Sr. Regulatory Compliance Architect, Boeing, and Ryan Kean, Director, Enterprise Platform Technical Services, The Kroger Co.

A panel of successful entrepreneurs are continuing to answer your questions on setting up and running small companies. Their latest answers are below.

External IT and Global Micro SA select MSPexcellence to build an indirect sales channel program to increase market adoption of cloud services with a network of certified Cloud Solutions Providers.Andover, MA February 09, 2012

The problem with turning over rocks is that there’s usually ugly stuff hiding underneath. You retro every 2 weeks and you list out all the stuff that isn’t working. You diligently collect all the deltas and turn those into actions. You collect all the actions from your retro’s and your post-mortems and you track them in a tool where they sit… forever.

Several years ago, WebKit began including experimental CSS features in the open source project. Because the features were not officially part of the CSS standard, the developers of WebKit added the prefix -webkit to the experimental stylesheet declarations. This ensured they worked only in WebKit. Now, years later, the CSS Working Group is trying to reverse the "damage" done to the web by sites that use WebKit-specific features, suggesting that if it does not happen, "it will kill our standardization process."

JSR 356 has been filed by Oracle : "Java API for WebSocket". The spec lead is Danny Coward and this JSR is scheduled for inclusion in Java EE 7

Java EE6 focused on developer productivity and includes numerous enhancements that are true game-changers. See what's new. In this session Pete and Dan will walk you through the key improvements, including those to EJB, Servlets, easy archive creation, Bean Validation (based on Hibernate Validator), JPA 2.0 criteria queries (thank you Hibernate) and the standardization of dependency injection (JSR 299 CDI). Through the use of a publicly available sample application, Pete and Dan will show you exactly how you can use these new features and hope to have a major impact on your daily life as an enterprise developer. [ * ] slides - http://portal.sliderocket.com/jboss/ee6-programming-webinar-jun-2011

Google's Cloud SQL offering for the Google AppEngine would simplify the process of moving existing applications to the Google AppEngine and gives developers the choice to freely move to their preferred web hosting provider.

This JSR will define a standard API for creating WebSocket applications. There is a wide range of web applications that rely on timely updates from a central server like stock tickers, live maps, chat applications, collaborative online tools and multiplayer web-based games. WebSocket offers solution to the problems of latency, scalability and performance associated with HTTP based solutions like polling, long-polling and HTTP-streaming. There is a lot of interest in the Java developer community in creating web applications for the Java platform that utilize WebSocket. Given that the definition of WebSocket protocol is a proposed standard, and that the major web browsers either support, or plan to support it in their next major release, the time is right for a standard Java API for WebSocket.