Moto X from Motorola -Google and Motorola have promised to redefine what smartphones can do – 1 August we will see!
Motorola has called it, “The first smartphone designed, engineered, and assembled in the USA.”
Motorola will follow the lead of the iPhone and later the Samsung Galaxy S series by producing one phone with the same brand name across all international wireless carriers.

Motorola has always been really good at managing the power on the device. Motorola has also been really good at managing ultra-low-power sensors–e.g. gyroscope and the accelerometer–and keeping those on all the time so that the device knows different use states. So it knows it’s in my pocket right now. It knows when I take it out of my pocket I might want to do something. I might want to take a picture, so it knows to fire up the camera. So it anticipates my needs in a much more powerful way… But, more important, imagine you’re in the car. The device will know–whether it’s on or off–that it’s traveling at 60 miles per hour. It’s going to act differently so you can interact with it safely.”

In its first big ad, Motorola said the Moto X will be “The first smartphone that you can design yourself. Because today you should have the freedom to design the things in your life to be as unique you are.” However, it appears that Motorola’s customization options may be more cosmetic.

Google’s mandate when it bought Motorola was to “take it back to its roots in innovation” Two new seamless authentication options that could see their way into a future version of the Moto X and other Motorola phones:
1. An electronic tattoo (non-permanent),
2. A non-toxic swallowable pill that turns your whole body into an authentication token.

Many vendors are pressing for a move to the cloud and many enterprises prefer the private cloud models,

In practise it seems that IT is struggling to deliver. with a majority of private cloud pilots not going well.

Technology, can be improved but the major factors that are cause private cloud projects to falter are non-technical factors similar to those that affect other projects like erp implementation.

1.Success metrics – most private cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts are focused almost exclusively on technical validation. While the IT team proves to itself that it can deploy a private cloud, users and developers are measuring it against services already available in the market. Failing to demonstrate a better services value proposition will not build internal momentum. Pilots need to include business success metrics as well as technical.
2.Inertia – so why aren’t the metrics defined correctly? Because in many cases enterprise IT just sees cloud in a fundamentally different light. As noted in posts by James Staten at Forrester and Giri Fox at Rightscale, enterprise IT tends to see cloud as the next logical step in the evolution of infrastructure and virtualization. The focus is on demonstrating robustness, stability and change control, the enterprise IT comfort zone. The factors that business users really care about like usability and provisioning time are not the proejct drivers.
3.Lack of vision – CIOs have to answer the long-term question of where they’re best positioned to compete for business budget dollars, and whether it really makes sense for IT to be in the IaaS business. Without a clear ITaaS vision, it’s hard for business users and developers to get excited about internally provided services they believe they can get from Amazon, Rackspace, Google or Microsoft today. IT’s vision may be to provide hybrid or “multi-cloud” environments, but can they articulate what that means and why business users should care.
4.Motivation and commitment – Private clouds seem like a good way for IT to come up the cloud learning curve while leveraging existing hardware and infrastructure and to show that “we’re doing something with cloud”. Is enterprise IT fully up to the paradigm shift brought about by cloud?,

A CIO’s private cloud competes in the market against AWS and others. While security, compliance and performance factors may enable IT maintain their internal “monopoly” through mandated use of private clouds, they have the burden of proof.

The arguments in favour of Private clouds vs Public clouds altered signifcantly in June. Te Obama administration found itself embroiled in another pair of scandals. First, The Guardian reported that the NSA has been collecting the call records of millions of Verizon customers (later reports say that AT&T and Sprint Nextel are also involved). Second The Washington Post reported that “the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.” The result of these revelations was deep discussion throughout the traditional media, blogosphere, and other social media about the desired limits of government power to intercept and analyze private communications. Whatever your opinion on the politics and civil liberties issues, one thing is for sure — the revelations about the PRISM program are going to change the way people look at public clouds.

As for public versus private cloud, does it matter where the data resides?. If the government asks for the data and has a court order, even data that resides on a private cloud needs to be provided. Of course, having data in different countries “may” enable corporations to avoid being hauled to court by the US government.. So the question of absolute data privacy does not exist. It is the same with all governments around the world. If they think their country is at danger, the government in charge has an obligation to do everything to protect its citizens. As such, it do not see how PRISM program should or will impact the design to go private or public cloud. The question is rather, where should your data reside if you do not want the US government to have access to it. I would say, there are very few countries in the world where this “may” be possible. But then, do you really want your data to reside in those countries?

Google Translate,now supports handwritten translation in 45 different languages.

Go to the Google Translate page, select the language you’re working with, and go to the menu on the bottom left of the input window and select the pencil icon. Write out what you’re trying to translate, and Google will interpret. Useful for translating notes or symbols from character-based languages if you don’t know how to actually type the word on your keyboard.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39071
This guide assists Lync Server administrators in setting up Lync-Skype connectivity

Since the end of May 2013 Skype and Lync customers around the world are now able to connect with each other from across these platforms. With Lync-Skype connectivity, Skype users can reach a broader contacts who are useLync, Microsoft’s unified communications platform, to connect them into organizations of all sizes. Lync provides a consistent, single client experience for presence, instant messaging, voice, video and meetings for business productivity and is owned by over 90 of the Fortune Global 100 companies.

All you need to connect with your contacts on Lync is the latest Skype client, available from Skype.com, and a Microsoft account. Connectivity is currently supported by Windows and Mac desktop clients, with more options coming soon as other clients are updated.