Reuters wrote an article about IBM’s effort Monday, calling on dozens of tech companies to promote standardization of “cloud” computing. Gartner is estimating the “cloud” market to be a $10 billion business in 2009, which is only a small portion of the $223 biliion business software market. Interestingly enough, some of the major players in the cloud arena, such as Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon, were not actively involved in IBM’s efforts and were not listed as companies supporting the initiative.

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Update:Skype’s new app is now available on the AppStore. Quick download and install, and so far the app is pretty quick and acts as expected. More info to come. /Update

Skype will be releasing their own iPhone app tomorrow, to be made available via the AppStore. This is long overdue, so says an iPhone owner who has been relying solely on Fring for VOIP calling from the iPhone (I had horrible time with Fring while in London in January).

So the drawbacks identified so far are:

· Wi-Fi only - no using AT&T’s 3G network to make free calls….well, not like it works all that well anyways
· No text messages - again, not on AT&T’s dime
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CrunchGear just released a post detailing a 24″ Dell monitor with 1920 x 1080 resolution for only $209 (w/ free shipping). The monitor is being sold direct by Dell too, so no worries about getting a bum monitor. It doesn’t have speakers, but I figure you’ve probably got sound covered if you’re looking for a 16 x 9 24″ hi-def monitor.

Definitely worth checking out.

Head over to the post

If you have an iPhone, you’ve likely heard about this game by now. Hero of Sparta is one of the games for the iPhone that truly exceeds expectations. If you want an action/adventure game that really shows off gaming on the iPhone, definitely check out Hero of Sparta (available on the AppStore for $5.99, was $9.99).

Check out the trailer on YouTube below:

Rumors are spreading wild and fast that LG and Apple are working out a $500 M deal. LG is said to be developing new OLED (organic LED) screens for the iPhone (likely new iPhone model) and MacBooks (can you say touchscreen?). I saw a Sony OLED TV at BestBuy a couple of weeks ago and the picture was incredible. Can’t wait to see what this would look like on an iPhone.

Oh yea, fingerprinting is supposed to be a non-issue with the OLED displays.

LG confirms Apple will have OLED…

and don’t forget to hit up Google results to read up on the rumors.

Everywhere I look these days, whether it’s DMNews, OMMA (MediaPost) or a random blog like the SitePoint article linked to below, Zappos is getting a ton of credit these days for their marketing practices. They were featured in Celebrity Apprentice a couple weeks back - the project was building a comic book super-hero for the brand.

You can check them out on Twitter as well.

SitePoint article: How Zappos does customer service and company culture