AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual OnMobile Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging mobile companies that are creating new business opportunities in the high-growth mobile markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

For a fresh perspective on data center obsolescence check out The Coming Colocation Crunch by Nemertes Principal Analyst Ted Ritter writing for Data Center Knowledge this week (Jan 18, 2012):

“Nemertes Research predicts a shortage of colocation space in the U.S. beginning this year, growing to a $1.9 billion facilities gap by 2015.”

Despite some skepticism from industry analysts about the ability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors to deliver viable business intelligence (BI) solutions a few years ago, today’s Cloud-based analytic tools are increasingly demonstrating that they can quickly generate tangible benefits to organizations of all sizes, especially mid-market companies.

The growing interest in Cloud-based analytics is easy to understand given the escalating pressures facing businesses contending with rising customer expectations and intensifying competitive. Businesses not only have to synthesize a widening array of internal and external data sources, they must also make timely and useful analysis available to an increasingly dispersed workforce so they can make better day-to-day business decisions.

A year ago, I published a series of 10 predictions regarding how the Cloud Computing marketplace would evolve in 2011 in E-Commerce Times. Here’s a recap and assessment of my predictions:

Despite numerous market research forecasts predicting that small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) would be in the vanguard of adopting today’s rapidly expanding array of Cloud-based services, the truth is that most mid-sized businesses have been slow to join the migration to these ‘on-demand’ alternatives.

In too many cases, it has been hesitancy or even overt resistance among IT decision-makers within mid-sized businesses which has let to these organizations staying away from Cloud services.

For months I’ve been preoccupied with Lew’s Law, or the theory that IT expenses over time will track to the cost of electricity (versus hardware, peoplepower, etc.) authored by Cisco Cloud CTO Lew Tucker and shared in early 2010 with the then-billowing Infrastructure 2.0 Working Group.

After watching an SAP webcast shared by Reese Jones via Facebook on The Coming Age of Abundance, it occurred to me that the near future will be driven by smaller companies producing more electrons per employee via larger and more efficient data centers.  You can skip the theatrical intro and head to the discussion at about 40 minutes in for the most inspired content, although the entire discussion is worthwhile.

Giggo is a bilingual group-buying platform focused on the U.S. Latino market as well as those that embrace the Latino culture. Currently, Giggo offers bilingual hyper-local daily deals for U.S. Spanish speakers. For merchants, Giggo has developed two apps. First is a tool for Spanish-speaking merchants to generate creative ads. Giggo's second app is a merchant application that makes Web presence management simple. Giggo's ad generation tool leverages social media to enable merchants (and others) to try various ad formats.

Gogobeans is a content-sharing solution bridging the gap between the Internet and mobile worlds. Gogobeans Digital Locker and social networking tools give customers easy solutions to managing their growing digital world. Beans are the symbol that represents each and every item of content customers have in their locker.

Each Bean is the same size in a user's private Internet world, even if the content it represents is a single line of text or a full-length feature movie.