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

• The most interesting tidbit this week was a webinar by testing guru James Whittaker on the future of testing. The most compelling part of the presentation was the notion that virtualization of end user computing environments will revolutionize the testing of software across thousands, if not million of different environments.

• The webinar is hosted on the uTest site, an interesting story in itself. They developed a web based infrastructure to point 10's of thousands of testers at software needing testing, with the work paid on a bugs found basis. Mr. Whittaker refers to this as "crowdsourcing" the testing process. BTW, uTest just got $5 Million in VC money. Someone thinks this idea is hot!

• Another fascinating tidbit was a slide show posted on TechCruch which connects the dots between Google's rather diverse number of business and technical initiatives, and makes a pretty good case why companies like Microsoft should fear Google. Just  to give you some idea of the shear scale of Google, they spend a million dollars a day for YouTube's bandwidth and it's estimated that Google will have over 2 million servers running by the end of 2008. Those are BIG numbers!

• Two industry consortiums launched testing tools this past week. The WC3 has an interesting tool that will help you assess how mobile friendly your web pages are, while a newly formed Web Services Test Forum launched a test site for helping assure interoperability between applications using web services to exchange information.

• I've previously blogged about Adobe's AIR initiative which allows off-line execution of web applications, but until a few days ago I hadn't heard of the Google Gears open source project, a similarly targeted initiative. While there is tremendous buzz around applications moving to the cloud,  Adobe AIR and Google Gears both target the assumption that the running applications in a standalone environment will continue to be important.

• ZDNet's editor in chief's recent post injects some reality into the buzz around cloud computing, contending that the cloud computing market is chump change through 2012 and that Microsoft is in no imminent danger of losing it's lock on the enterprise market for Office.

• Finally, a follow on post from GoogleWatch on the mystery traffic coming out of Google noted in my last post. No clear explanation in this post, but more fuel for the conspiracy theorists.

Jim