Just about everyone these days has a smartphone. To support our student’s needs for on-the-go information we recently launched http://m.tru.ca.

Simply enter this url in any smartphone browser to access a number of TRU campus services including TRU News and Events, Food Services Information, Wolf Pack sports updates,computer lab availability and wireless printers, campus maps and  Security contacts.

More services to come.

A piece on Finance 2.0 in Tech Crunch talks about new methods and technologies that will have a positive impact for the consumer and the merchant over the next few years. I say bring them on…

I’ve got my fingers crossed for the success of a new mobile payment application from Vancouver-based Modio that seems to just make sense for smartphone owners and merchants. All you need to do is download the Mobio app from the Apple App Store (I’m not sure about Blackberry support), load your payment details and start scanning.

What could be more convenient or secure than simply scanning a 2D bar-code like the following:

This one allows you to directly contribute to Habitat for Humanity’s Haitian Relief Fund but MobioID is involved with other charity work as well.

Expect to see these 2D bar codes everywhere from restaurant bills, to SkyTrain ads to websites. It’s a bit ironic that I’ve spent the last decade enabling and fussing over web payment functionality that effectively could be made obsolete by this simple technology. I think that counts as a breakthrough.

With TRU transacting about $30 million in credit card payments each year, this type of technology will be a boon to both students and the University.

Our Technology Services team at TRU has worked really hard to virtualize our data centre and our Client Services group has been planning virtual desktop environments for some time now. The business benefits of virtualization include reduced energy consumption, lowered costs, increased reliability and a reduction in the complexity of our IT environment. This supports our university mission and allows our faculty and researchers to continuously innovate. This innovation usually has nothing to do with our internal IT infrastructure.

I’ve been going on and on about how Cloud Computing will one day, very soon, move all our infrastructure skyward into the clouds, to be run “somewhere else.” Indeed, to many stakeholders, Cloud Computing has been sold as the final nail in the coffin of central IT. Whether that is true or not time will tell, all I know is, as a CIO, I have to move our organization into this new world.

Trouble was, I wasn’t clear on how to get there. This is starting to become clearer as I’m starting to realize what I want out of Cloud Computing.

1. I want server instances deployed for our customers quickly. 10 Minutes? 1 minute?
2. I want to be able to scale up and down on demand. Like all schools we have peak registration periods and some slower times in the summer. I want to be able to be able to dynamically scale processors, memory, and disk elastically as needed.
3. I want easy backup and restore. As time goes by, the servers and tapes become less important, the data more so. I want it protected without the cost and complexity of backup data centres in our organization.
4. I want all these ‘aaS’es to talk to each other. I need a common API and security framework to allow all the applications appearing as services to talk to each other.
5. I want control. I want to be able to manage hybrids of disposable and private clouds, I want to be able to move virtual cloud instances between service providers as necessary to reduce every IT administrator’s fear: vendor lock-in. Oh, and I want all the IP mapping to be easy.

I want the cloud environments of tomorrow to be as secure and reliable as the internal services we currently provide. Ultimately, the move to this cloud economy has nothing to do with CIO’s and internal IT departments as organizations start taking advantage of digital combinatorial innovation. But it’s up to us IT leaders s to Begin the Beguine.