CIO Insight recently published a slideshow about application adoption trends over the next year. According to a recent survey from SnapLogic, of which over 110 CIOs and other top execs took part, CIOs and other senior tech executives continue to pursue BI, analytics, productivity/collaboration, financial, sales and social media tools, as they strive to integrate IT with their organization’s strategic objectives.

This is yet further proof that the BI/analytics space is hot right now, and more and more companies are realizing that business performance can be largely improved by leveraging these tools.

“BI, for certain, remains hot. But so are other apps, such as those that are Saas/cloud-driven.”

When SaaS was a new technology, software escrow was a popular inclusion in contracts. Is this is still the case? Should source code escrow exist in contracts between licensors and licensees?

What is escrow?

Normally you do not own or have any rights to the software (including source code) that you are accessing, under the terms of a regular SaaS agreement. This does not usually become an issue until technical problems start to arise, i.e. unexpected service interruptions, downtime, loss of application functionality and loss of data. This can add significant costs to your business and you remain reliant upon the software supplier to resolve these issues, unless you have an escrow agreement in place. Escrow is when the software source code is held by a third party – an escrow agent – on behalf of the customer and the supplier.

Today's cloud computing environment is relatively complex - so complex in fact, that it has motivated Gartner’s Global IT Council for Cloud Services to identify the six key rights (and one responsibility) to serve as a best-practices guideline for enterprises looking to deploy cloud-based solutions. The ultimate goal: to help cloud providers and their customers establish successful business relationships.

The recent report released by Gartner says all cloud services customers should have some basic rights to protect their interests. We’ll briefly outline their ideas :

A quick piece on the video editor encapsulated within YouTube's growing services - pretty cool option if your not savvy with Apple's products (iMovie/Final Cut Pro) or are just wanting to give video editing a try.

Up until now, if YouTube users wanted to combine multiple clips into a single video, they had to use offline editing tools. But YouTube recently rolled out cloud-based video editing tools, giving users a whole new way to remix their existing video assets online.

As detailed in the Google operating system blog, the new YouTube editor allows users to trim video, mix and match clips — even add music. And while the new offering won’t replace more robust video editing software — like Apple’s Final Cut Pro — it will enable users to combine their videos in new and interesting ways.

Companies From Texas to Missouri Rethink Tactics to Attract Talent as Competition Grows; Employing the Personal Pitch

The pickup in tech hiring is spreading beyond Silicon Valley, forcing companies outside the big tech center to rethink their recruiting tactics.

Companies in second-tier tech locations such as Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, N.C., had an easier time recruiting talented employees during the slump. But now that Silicon Valley firms have started aggressively hirig, and the general economy is improving, competition is stiffe"We've always had a bit of a competition for talent with Silicon Valley," says Julie Huls, president of the Austin Technology Council, a trade group of Austin-area technology executives. "As firms over there start to recover, we have to make sure we stay in the game."

Convio Inc., a 370-employee Austin-based maker of fundraising software, continued adding employees during the recession, hiring about 35 people last year. "We were able to recruit incredible people that we couldn't have gotten before the recession," says Angie McDermott, vice president of human resources.

That has gotten harder this year. Convio is planning to increase hiring and is looking for six engineers now. Employee referrals are a big source of new hires, so earlier this year, the firm started a program where employees can easily send Convio job openings to connections on their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. On Facebook, employees can install an application that lists a company's job openings.

The Colorado hotspot is the top U.S. destination for new tech companies largely because of a bottom-up revolution led by entrepreneurs

On a recent morning, a half-dozen young software engineers hunched over laptops at The Cup, a café on bustling Pearl Street in downtown Boulder. They were holding an informal meeting about a social networking app they're developing and seemed to be on a first-name basis with the parade of techies walking through the door.

An influx of entrepreneurs like these has changed the face of this Colorado city of 98,000, making it a destination for Internet startups. With the University of Colorado as an anchor and a backyard full of mountains as lifestyle bait, Boulder now has the highest concentration of software engineers per capita in the nation. It's second only to Silicon Valley in percentage of workers employed in tech, according to the American Electronics Assn. Best-selling author and urban development expert Richard Florida says it has the greatest concentration of the "creative class"—scientists, artists, engineers, and the like—in the U.S.