WEB 2.0

                        The term Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site gives its users the free choice to interact or collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumer) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumer) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, hosted services and  web-applications.

   Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a "piece of jargon", precisely because he intended the Web in his vision as "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write". He called it the 'Read/Write Web'.

Characteristics:

    Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. By increasing what was already possible in "Web 1.0", they provide the user with more user-interface, software and storage facilities, all through their browser. This has been called "Network as platform" computing. Users can provide the data that is on a Web 2.0 site and exercise some control over that data. These sites may have an "Architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it.

Some of the most popular examples are:

• Gmail
• Google Maps
• Flickr
• Orkut
• Windows Live
• Facebook

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is an emerging computing technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth,In general..


* The cloud is a group of servers.
* A user interacts with the cloud without worrying about how it is implemented.
* The cloud company does all the magic

We use the cloud daily.
* Google
* Facebook
* Windows Live

Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities.

In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offerings employ the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, whereas others bill on a subscription basis. Sharing "perishable and intangible" computing power among multiple tenants can improve utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle (which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development)


2 types of clouds:

* SaaS- Software as a service. Software that exists on the cloud. For example, Google documents allows users to create, edit, and share spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations similar to powerpoint. Or, Facebook. All of which is stored on the cloud.

* HaaS- Hardware as a service. Allows anyone to purchase space on a cloud in which they can place applications, games, and almost any software that usually sits on one’s desktop. Now, those applications will run in the cloud instead of taking up space on your computer. Examples: Amazon ec2, SaleForce.com

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT GOOGLE

GOOGLE Inc is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search, and advertising technologies corporation.

Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.

The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys", while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates.

It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998.

The company's stated mission from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and twenty petabytes of user-generated data every day.

Ninety-nine percent of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs.

Google's original homepage had a simple design since its founders were not experienced in HTML, the language for designing web pages.

History:

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

The name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was to handle.

The first funding for Google was on August 1998 contribution of US$100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Brin and Page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much of their time from academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million.But he rejected the offer.