Dan Costello and Christian Belady of Microsoft Global Foundation Services discuss the Chicago datacenter in a CNET video interview. Microsoft opened the facility in September, and are now using Container-based deployment simply plugged in to power and...

Its not often that a technology blog references VARIETY magazine, the Hollywood equivalent of the Scottish Daily Record. Anyway, shortly after announcing the edgy new “Family Guy” marketing strategy for Windows 7, it seems that the funniest show on the...

More on the burst of touch-enabled PCs entering the market alongside Windows 7. Windows 7 Driving Touchscreen Evolution -- Microsoft Windows 7 -- InformationWeek

After years in the wilderness, is it cool to be a PC again? In 2006 Apple’s Mac adverts cast the PC as an anachronism contrasting David Mitchell’s bumbling and confused PC user with Robert Webb’s tousle-haired trendy young Mac dude . Some 3 years later...

Veteran technology and business journalist Bill Magee returns from a meeting with Microsoft’s top cyber-crime spooks to highlight the bad guys increasing focus on Small and Medium businesses – SMBs in Scotland must think about protecting their passwords...

Food, clothing, shelter....and television. These seem to be the basic necessities for life, at least in those regions of the World with electricity supply. Studies have shown that homes seem to be happier when there is a telly in the corner of the living...

“Every little helps” according to Tesco’s and the nice lady rattling her Sally Army collection box. Unfortunately, in terms of our Ecology and Environment, that’s just not true. To change the post-industrial trends in fossil fuel dependency and carbon...

With global recession in the foreground threatening ruin for many in the developed World, it’s easy to forget other clear and present threats to commerce, society and our way of life. However, the growing threat of vandalism, crime and even espionage...

Last week a close friend and business associate finally went over to TWITTER. For a 40 year old with 3 kids to suddenly come out of the closet and start tweeting was a big shock. Although he claimed it was a valuable Digital Marketing tool for his new...

Is it me or are computers getting much cheaper these days? A side effect of consumer doom and gloom is very keen prices for all the technological paraphernalia that we can't live without. Despite our weak Sterling we can buy a lot of computing power and...

Happy New Year. Its getting harder to stay cheery these days. We've all tried to stay positive as the sub-prime crisis spawned the credit crunch which smothered the global economy. But its easy to lose heart as pensions and house prices tumble and mighty...

Mike Manos of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services has released some detail of ambitious plans for Microsoft's new generation of cloud compute infrastructure on his blog. This is the result of long painstaking multidisciplinary R&D from Dan Costello...

Cloud computing. Marketing pixie dust or IT Industry paradigm shift? The topic even had the Economist gushing about cloud computing's impact on business in their regular technology supplement in October. Analysts have wholeheartedly jumped on the bandwagon...

...as Private Frazer was prone to shout whenever Captain Mainwaring's home guard faced a crisis. Likewise I have long bored colleagues with prophecies of doom for those failing to embrace new business models enabled by "cloud computing". "Doom"...

The rumoured Morgan Stanley initiative to utilise the Pentland Firth's renewable energy capacity has broken cover in the Guardian - Working with Atlantis, a turbine manufacturer, their ambitious plan to power a 150MW datacentre will bypass national grid...

I note that Darren Johnstone , the developer driving force behind Solution Canvas and the exemplar Office Live Partner solution Justia , is back to the blog. Last time I spoke to Darren, he was very busy with a burgeoning order book for Sharepoint development...

In the 18th century the city of Glasgow amassed great wealth through trade with the New World. Opinions abound in the history books of why the Glasgow Tobacco Lords achieved a virtual monopoly on the weed trade, but it came down to one fundamentals- the...

Despite the tightening purse strings of the new Credit Crunch Austerity Britain, the Ferry family coffers were recently opened to purchase a new PC. Despite regular complaints from cost centre no.1, investment in mobile phones, MP3 players and other such...

Followers of the Trumpet know of my missionary zeal for Office Live. This at-a-stroke solution to web site and business applications for small businesses on blog and has won a strong following amongst Scotland's SME's with around 3500 sign-ups as of January...

Trends of consolidation can be seen in the migration of servers to fewer, larger more automated datacenter locations, and also in consolidation of the units within those datacenters. With the availability of advanced management tools and virtualisation...

The consolidation of Virtualisation vendors continues with Microsoft's annoucement of the acquisition of Kidaro . This follows Microsoft's acquisition of Calista Technologies, Citrix acquisition of XenSource and VMWare's acquisition of Thinstall . Kidaro...

Internet Villages International announced that they will constructing datacentres on their 140 acre site in Lockerbie. The announcement of the creation of more datacentre space is hardly newsworthy, but there are a few unusual aspects to this project...

The economy is clearly dependant on energy. Anything which impacts price or availability of oil, gas, coal or electricity has a profound effect on business, government, and society. When NPower raised consumer gas and electricity tariffs by on average...

Global datacentres are a focus of the IT press these days - for example the recent $500M investment in a 27MegaWatt datacenter in Dublin by Microsoft. It's now accepted that energy costs are a big issue for the IT industry, and that IT is a significant...

Iceland. Thoughts of bargain supermarket frozen turkey twizzlers, Viking epics, alternative rock band The Sugarcubes, may all be triggered when naming this barren and volcanic North Atlantic island nation. But soon Iceland may also be known as a world...