An unseasonably wintery and very cold London played host on the 30th November to the Business Cloud Summit 2010, sponsored this year by, amongst others, IntraLinks, Microsoft, CSC, NetSuite, RightNow and Success Factors and attended by several hundred senior IT professionals, analysts and commentators drawn from a broad base of industries, the public sector, media and professional bodies.

This is the second year of the summit, one of the largest vendor independent cloud gatherings in the UK, a forum that serves the purpose of inter-industry networking as much as it reports out trends and discusses issues and, of course, provides a showcase for the propositions of the leading software authors and service providers in the space.

I’ve always enjoyed visiting Philadelphia. I lived there at one time and while it is quite awhile ago, I still get a rush when I disembark at 30th Street Station. This time I was visiting Philadelphia for AIIM’s Info 360 Conference. So aside from a nostalgic trip, what did I think of the conference?

What can be inferred from this headline that an IT trade publication recently ran about a study conducted by Microsoft and Indiana University: “SaaS Apps May Leak Data Even When Encrypted, Study Says”?

1. There was a study conducted on SaaS apps leaking data.
2. The study stated that SaaS apps leak data.
3. The study says SaaS apps do not sufficiently protect data.                      
4. A combination of options one, two and three.
5. The study primarily pinpointed security threats to misconfigured Web applications depending on data they process.

This past summer, websites all over the Internet banded together to defeat a terrible scourge that was "stifling innovation," "awful," and "restricting." This scourge was not the work of hackers, anti-competitive behavior, or hardware failure. This scourge was Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), one of the most downloaded web browsers in the history of the Internet.

The ‘Kill IE6' movement received so much notoriety that it made the front page of CNN. In tech circles, blogs like Mashable led the charge with the article IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On. Within that article, author Ben Parr states that "15 to 25 percent of the world's browsing [is] done in a browser created in the digital Stone Age (aka 2001)."