Revealed: Confidence trick at heart of cloud computing May 20th 2008

See the confidence trick at the heart of cloud computing? Banking relies on a similar trick, but seems to (mostly) get away with it.

In part one of this article I introduced Phil Wainewright’s five layer PaaS model. Phil asked readers to say which layer they would prefer to use for building a SaaS application. Readers had cast 173 votes by May 15th.

In part two I looked at layer one: do-it-yourself and layer two: managed-hosting. Neither is suitable for SaaS ISVs. In part three I move up to PaaS layer three: cloud computing. Might this be more suitable for ISVs building SaaS solutions?

Cloud computing was the most popular choice of Phil’s readers. 27% said they would prefer it to develop a SaaS application. I wonder how many of them realise that cloud computing, just like banking, relies on a simple confidence trick…

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Jetting to Cuba: A bad idea for European SaaS ISVs? April 23rd 2008

Location still matters in the real world of laws, borders and trade disputes, as a recent example from Europe shows only too well.

While Cuba is a popular holiday spot for Europeans, a 46-year old trade ban puts Cuba off-limits to Americans. Strictly enforced laws prevent US companies from doing direct or indirect business with Cuba.

The US trade ban became a big problem for travel agent Tour & Marketing International. Although based in Spain, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) added them to a blacklist. Why? For selling Cuban holidays to Europeans (US citizens cannot travel to Cuba).

As a result, their US-based domain register blocked about 80 of their .com domains for Cuba-related websites. The domain register gave no notice and refused to transfer the domains (they must freeze all US-based assets).

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