IF YOU鈥橵E ever posted a picture on Facebook, sent an email using Gmail or bought a book on Amazon, you鈥檙e already a cloud user. But that鈥檚 just the start, says Christopher Barnatt, who brings admirable clarity to this thoroughly nebulous topic. Barnatt gives a detailed guide to the cloud, including a useful list of sites where you can try it for yourself. He argues persuasively that businesses that ignore it do so at their peril: the financial and environmental costs of running their own computer centres will be just too great. And he paints a fascinating, if relentlessly optimistic, vision of the cloud-enabled future.
Expect reality to be augmented by cloud-connected contact lenses, while anything ever captured on camera 鈥� and that includes you and just about everyone else 鈥� will be instantly tracked using powerful image-based search engines. Jump aboard, the future鈥檚 coming and it鈥檚 cloud-shaped.
A Brief Guide To Cloud Computing
Constable
