Foursquare is rolling out its service in 15 European cities today. This list includes many large cities on the continent, and also many of the hottest tourist destinations.

I think they have a great business model for the US.  It will be interesting to see if Czechs take to the concept.  My guess is yes.  It will certainly start with the more touristy locales.  But should grow nicely from there.  A very interesting company to watch……

A majority of executives polled by Deloitte (60.9 percent) believe cloud computing will be a transformative technology in the industry and can drive financial benefits, or at least be useful for certain kinds of enterprise services.

Until I read the second sentence:

The executives were polled recently during the Deloitte webcast, “Cloud Computing in the Enterprise: Not If, But When and How?”

Talk about gaming a poll….. Next up, 89% of barbers believe people wait too long to get their hair cut!

Enjoy.

A trusted source claims Microsoft is gradually unplugging its corporate phones and transitioning many employees to Lenovo ThinkPads running Microsoft Office Communicator. Is Unified Communications about to invade Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus?

And once all employees are on a soft phone, the sky is the limit for supporting applications.   Companies can begin to truly leverage the power of SIP.  Companies  like salesforce or SugarCRM should benefit nicely, as companies will look to better capture information gleaned from customer or partner calls.

A few, high profile companies like Microsoft making this move should greatly accelerate the trend.  I wonder if my kids’ kids will even know what a telephone is?

EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company today announced that Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has made a financial investment in EnterpriseDB as part of a partnership aimed at increasing enterprise adoption of open source IT infrastructure.

IBM is also an investor in EnterpriseDB.  They are fast becoming the main alternative to MySQL.  Oracle’s moves to control MySQL should greatly benefit other open source players, as well.  And Red Hat is smart to ensure they have options.

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.

As noted, it’s a big win for open source.  The momentum builds….

It’s all about consulting. Many solution providers I talk to are deeply apprehensive about cloud computing because they fear it will marginalize them as customers simply align with one of the public cloud behemoths like Amazon or Google. But it’s not so simple – nor frightening. Customers will very likely use public cloud providers, but determining what they need from a business process and technology capabilities perspective is not something Google’s going to help them with.

I think this is exactly right.  And this favors the business consultants:  Deloitte, Accenture, AT Kearney, etc.  And it’s a huge risk to those mid-tiered VAR’s who specialize on complex, hugely technical, enterprise implementations.  There will always be the need for on-site integration, even when the solution is delivered in the cloud.  But the days of high priced technical consultants, familiar with the proprietary nuances of one enterprise software package, are slowing coming to an end.

This transformation in how solutions are delivered won’t happen overnight.  In fact, it will probably take longer than most people now assume.  Companies are very conservative, after all.  And there are still a lot of issues to work out (security, for example).  But the trend is clear, and VAR’s need to address it now, before it’s too late.

Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com and Cisco have announced a partnership to offer a combined solution to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud.

There seem to be a lot of companies in orbit around Salesforce:  technology partners like Cisco, system integrators like IBM, VARs, etc.  Everyone wants to be close to the  hottest “cloud computing company” in the galaxy.  But I’ve yet to speak to anyone who is actually making decent money through the partnership.   Outside of Salesforce themselves, of course, who are doing quite nicely…..

“It has changed the culture of our company,” Roberts said. Comcast has for a while now been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers.

And it’s not just Twitter:

They also use Facebook and some of the other networks.

And while it’s great that Comcast is embracing new communication channels with customers, it’s no substitute for, well, providing quality products and services at reasonable prices.  As the author of the article notes:

The real problem Comcast has is that their product and all other forms of service are simply not up to par, to put it nicely (I often put it much less nicely on Twitter).

And here’s an example of Comcast’s customer service in action (from the comments):

Yes, the Comcast twitter team responded to my complaints. They even got techs to come out and help me a day early. BUT there were 8 techs who came out over five days and each one started from scratch because there was no record of what the others had done.

Classic.  Making noise on Twitter is relatively easy.   Training personnel, reengineering support processes, and investing in systems to allow for seamless handoffs is a bit harder.