Need-to-know vocab for surviving and thriving in the digital business world

Illustrations by Rodrigo López Orozco

Cloud Computing

| kloud kom•pyoot•ing |

noun

You can put the umbrella away for now, because those strange looking clouds forming overhead aren’t full of rain or snow, but instead a new information technology paradigm. Cloud computing, the loose term applied to any IT solution that doesn’t use in-house resources, is quickly changing the way we deliver and store information online by providing businesses with easy access to an off-site network of computational and information management resources. If that doesn’t make sense, think of it as the IT world’s answer to the electrical grid, a shared infrastructure that’s always on, always accessible and monetized on a per-use basis.

Gmail, the popular free email hosting service provided by Google, demonstrates the virtues of this new way to store and manage data. Rather than having your email tied to a particular server or computer and constrained by its physical limitations, Gmail allows users to read and send emails from wherever they please. That information is stored on Google’s infrastructure in the “cloud,” one that provides users with both the safety of non-physical storage – no need to worry about overheated hard-drives or spilled cups of coffee destroying valuable data – and the nearly infinite amount of space created by its economies of computational scale.

Local Connection: VrStorm Inc.

VrStorm is one of the first companies in Canada to build its business directly and deliberately around the provision of cloud-oriented services. In essence, the Edmonton-based company acts as the power plant of the cloud world, providing computational time and data storage services as well as the back-end tools that entrepreneurs and value-added resellers can then rebrand and sell.

Crowdsourcing

| kroud • sohr•sing |

noun

Crowdsourcing, the process by which a job traditionally performed by an individual or small team is outsourced to a large, undefined group of interested people, might be a relatively new process in the world of business, but it’s modelled on an idea that’s been around for centuries. In 1714, the British government offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could reliably determine the longitude of a ship at sea, a creative use of crowdsourcing that ultimately gave it an all-important advantage in the navigation of the open seas and the exploration of key trade and commerce routes.

Nearly 300 years later, entrepreneurs and established companies are using the same concept in order to exploit their own economic opportunities. Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp Inc., struggling with a dangerous combination of labour trouble, high mining costs and generally anxious shareholders, turned to crowdsourcing to help turn its own fortunes around. Then CEO Rob McEwen took the unprecedented step of publishing the geological data of his company’s 22,260-hectare Red Lake Gold Mine on the web and ran a contest with $575,000 in prize money that encouraged participants to tell his company where to look for gold. His faith in the wisdom of the crowd was rewarded, too, as approximately 110 possible targets were identified, with over 80 per cent of those leading to meaningful gold discoveries.

Local Connection: Chaordix

Calgary-based Chaordix partnered recently with PricewaterhouseCoopers on a project called “Canada’s Digital Compass” that sought to collect ideas on how Canada could best lead in a global digital economy. The search attracted over 100 participants and 30 submissions, from which three outstanding ideas were selected.

The Mobile Internet

| moh•bile in•ter•net |

noun

Not yet five years old, the mobile Internet’s fortunes are growing exponentially, as evidenced by the hockey stick-like growth pattern in mobile data traffic enabled through smart phones.

High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) networks have been rolled out across the country to cope with the growing number of BlackBerry and iPhone users and their growing data needs. Rogers jumped to an early lead in mobile broadband but Bell and Telus have since caught up, and faster protocols like LTE and WiMax are slowly starting to gain ground as well.

The demand for mobile data is only going to go up in the near future, as handset makers continue to release new and improved products and mobile Internetproviders augment and upgrade their networks.

Local Connection: Shaw Communications Inc.

Details about Shaw’s wireless network plans are hard to come by, but it’s clear that the company intends to become a player in the industry. The company spent roughly $189.5 million on wireless capacity in 2008, buying them a place at the once-exclusive wireless table. Expect them to formally take their seat by the end of 2011.

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