OpenOffice's graduation to a top-level project at Apache now clears he way for faster cloud innovation, especially as Microsoft Office 365's debut nears. Plans for "Cloud Apache OpenOffice" will be discussed at ApacheCon Europe in weeks...

Rackspace intros Cloud Block Storage powered by OpenStack with a solid state drive-based option for better performance rates.

Today cloud cost management company Cloudyn announced a new free service for calculating costs of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are sort of like cloud instances that you pay a retainer for: you pay an upfront fee, and can then pay a discounted rate if/when you use them. Amazon offers Reserved Instances at different rates depending on term of commitment — either one, two or three years. Cloudyn’s Reserved Instance Calculator will use predictions based on usage patterns to recommend optimal purchases. 

Within the next five years, there will be no 'cloud.' Just computing. Some will love it, others will fear it.