cloud computing's where the money's at

At a beer festival, a friendly stranger asked me what things he should invest in, assuming that since I do trendspotting I must also know how to work the stock market. Right.

Well, what I told him to watch for the expansion of cloud computing and for opportunities to invest in that arena. He had no clue what I was talking about. I said that given that people are creating endlessly larger amounts of digital data, much like we need trash dumps to store our garbage, we need spaces to store our digital junk. At this point we buy gigs or terabytes of external storage space to keep all of our stuff. Eventually though, the average Joe will be annoyed that he doesn't have his external with him when out and about or that he has multiple externals that he has to search through for one darn file. Joe will begin to wonder why all of his files aren't accessible in the way that his emails on Gmail (who uses cloud-computing) are. He will head to services like iDrive who do remote data backup or cloud computing.

I was proud of my prediction today when I read in a Wired Magazine article, "The Good Enough Revolution," that Microsoft is moving into cloud computing. Apparently Office 2010 will be largely cloud-based. To add to it's cloud-computing operations, Google is developing a cloud-based operating system that will work in tandem with the company's Chrome browser.

Who knows? Maybe I could do alright in the stock market game.