Tim Anderson: "One of the features, which failed in the CES demo, is that a PC which is in hibernation can be woken up through wi-fi to deliver your content on demand:

"As long as the main PC is in sleep (standby/hibernation) mode, Acer Always Connect technology can wake it up through Wi-Fi® so media can be retrieved via a mobile device.

"This whole thing would work better if the cloud, rather than the home PC, were the central repository of data. A PC or notebook sitting at home is unreliable. It has a frail hard drive. It might be a laptop on battery power, and the battery might expire. The home broadband connection might fail – and most home connections are much slower uploading to the internet than downloading from it.

"Another question: if you one of the professionals Acer refers to, will you want to put your faith in AcerCloud for showing documents at your business meeting?"

Not looking good for Dropbox: "I've spent a bunch of time talking to entrepreneurs who are building companies in and around the cloud storage space. It's not a space I like very much because I don't think we'll be using files in the cloud. Now Dropbox is a brilliant company and an amazing service and they are doing very well, but will we need a service like Dropbox when everything is in the cloud? I don't think so."

David Pogue tries to use a Google Chromebook as his main computer; fails. In itself, this shouldn't be regarded as surprising.

Here's Microsoft's cloud offering, getting a proper launch later this month. Does it entice you?

"Office 365 will allow businesses to deploy the latest Office software from Microsoft whether it’s on the desktop, online or via the cloud. Office 365 provides Office 2010, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync all Online in a cloud-based service. <br />
<br />
"The service is a full browser-based solution that incorporates webmail, collaboration and document management. The entry-level package, Office 365 for Small Businesses, provides Office Web Apps, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync online with an external website for $6 per user, per month. Larger businesses can take advantage of Office 365 for Enterprise. The package is $24 a user, per month and will include email, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, web portals, extranets, voiceconferencing and videoconferencing. <br />
<br />
"The Enterprise package also includes pay-as-you-go access to Office Professional Plus."<br />
<br />
You have to have Office first. This isn't some price-reducing move by Microsoft.

"Office 365 will allow businesses to deploy the latest Office software from Microsoft whether it’s on the desktop, online or via the cloud. Office 365 provides Office 2010, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync all Online in a cloud-based service. <br />
<br />
"The service is a full browser-based solution that incorporates webmail, collaboration and document management. The entry-level package, Office 365 for Small Businesses, provides Office Web Apps, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync online with an external website for $6 per user, per month. Larger businesses can take advantage of Office 365 for Enterprise. The package is $24 a user, per month and will include email, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, web portals, extranets, voiceconferencing and videoconferencing. <br />
<br />
"The Enterprise package also includes pay-as-you-go access to Office Professional Plus."<br />
<br />
You have to have Office first. This isn't some price-reducing move by Microsoft.

"Apple’s success in licensing labels means that Apple iCloud, or whatever it ends up being called, will let you mirror your local music collection to Apple’s servers in minutes rather than days.<br />
"Mainstream users determine the future, and they have neither the time nor inclination to upload thousands of songs over a period of days in order to set up a music locker. And when they acquire new music, they don’t want to repeat a miniature version of that process each time."

"Winston-Salem tested out Google Apps and Gmail on these [600 out of 2700] deskless workers as a way to evaluate Google's cloud service without having to make the full commitment.<br />
<br />
'Nothing was wrong with Google Apps,' says Newman. 'Gmail is a rich environment, and customer support was good. But we were not willing to replace Office with Google Docs, and the cost of having Google Apps and Office client was too much for us.'"<br />
<br />
The interesting understory (if that's a word) possibly being that Microsoft had to cut its price to win the contract over Google. Hard otherwise to understand how it would be too expensive to have Google Apps and Office, and yet cheaper to have Sharepoint and Office.<br />
<br />
Which, by the way, will integrate with the council-approved mobile phones: BlackBerry.. and iPhones.

Interesting interview with the guy who made Google Apps happen, and now wants ChromeOS to happen.

Answered by Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer. So it's a pretty full answer.

"A one-week examination of Office 365’s beta by the CRN Test Center finds much more than just a simple, online suite of productivity tools. Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) has turned the heart and soul of day-to-day computing over to the cloud in a manner that every enterprise, business or government entity can access in a meaningful way."<br />
<br />
Interesting.