A weekly summary of the more interesting technology trends to come across my desk...

• An almost complete draft of the USB 3.0 specification was recently released with deployment expected early in 2010. I'm not sure many devices today could use the full 5 gigabit per second speed of USB 3.0, but the speed of this I/O channel does open up interesting opportunities. Click here for more info on USB 3.0.

• There were two big announcements in the world of Cloud Computing. First, Amazon announced support for Windows in the EC2 cloud architecture. Secondly, Microsoft announced its Azure cloud computing architecture at this weeks PDC conference. Cloud computing is a transformational trend that will allow applications to be deployed in the cloud that can easily scale to vast audiences.

• Windows 7 was the other big topic at Microsoft's PDC Conference. One thing that caught my eye were some comments on the new Device Stage, particularly as it applied to printers and MFPs. This is supposedly a "new way" for customers to manage, explore, sync and do other things with devices. There will probably be more detailed info on this at WinHec.

• Silverlight has reached the terrible twos in its efforts to match Flash in both capabilities and deployment as outlined in a Microsoft Watch blog post.

• There were a number of interesting blog posts this week on the whole mobile computing front. eWeek blogger Darryl Taft discussed the serious problem of browser fragmentation in this space. Darryl also blogs about Nokia's perspective that phone will be the personal computing platform of the future. Finally a post from Brad Reed at NetworkWorld about Motorola's decision to limit its support of Mobile operating systems to Andriod and Windows Mobile. From a big picture perspective, the Apple iPhone and  Google Andriod development platforms are another transformational development in tech.

• Google indexing of the world now includes scanned PDF documents. Think of the zillions of scanned text documents that will now be readily searchable on Google!

• We have all heard about Web 2.0, which is all about social networking. How about Web 3.0? There is a great article about this future transformation of the Internet on Wikipedia. Check it out.

• Finally, there is a fascinating slide show on baselinemag.com about the 25 most disruptive forces in tech. Some were obvious like Google, others not so obvious such as Xerox's Lean Document Production process. Very thought provoking!

More next week..

Jim