Thanks TechCrunch for bringing us the Cloud Computing Round Table this Friday afternoon!

When it was announced that this cloud event was going to go on, those of us who couldn’t be there were concerned about our ability to catch it.

But in the passion and the inspiration of the Cloud and industry, they were able to get it streamed so folks like me in Chicago and folks across the world (to the tune of ~1500 watchers) were able to catch this great event.

A number of companies were showing off their products in the beginning and the clear winners were Veodia and Diomede Storage

Veodia—Video recording through the cloud.

Diomede Storage—Cheap, green storage with power-saving technologies at one tenth the cost of Amazon S3. Or so they claim..

They were judged, appropriately by this panel of judges:

Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
George Zachary, partner, Charles River Ventures
Geoff Ralston, CEO LaLa
David Bernstein, VP/General Manager, Cisco
David Kralik, Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich

And the interaction and discussion which ensued was enjoyed by all.  They did go easy and hard on some of the folks, but that is the game.

In all, the whole event was pretty active on Twitter as well with #tccloud as well as regular discussion and conversation.  Some of the more active folks discussing the event were myself, @cxi, @ashley_martin, @neerajKA, @missrogue, and @tekoppele

The ustream.tv livechat was pretty active as well! But none of us cached that for posterity!

One of the major questions was – Will this information be available for watching later, and the answer is Yes! The Cloud Computing Round Table is available here to watch.

So, if you were able to catch it, excellent! If not, I encourage you to watch it after the fact.

The panelists had some great talking points, and the discussions albeit very light were informative to the parties watching.

Special thanks to the Round Table of folks:

Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com

Thanks all of you who participated in the discussions… and I swear I’ll launch that Cloud blog when I have some free time… I just need 15 minutes ;)

Yep, that’s right!
So, I said that the Kindle was $399.00 before, well that story has changed! PRICE DROP!

Feels like the iPhone a bit! (So much that, I have contacted the Kindle folks to see if those of us who were early adopters are entitled to Kindle-Credit!) I’ll let you know if I see anything happen out of that.

Nonetheless, the further validation of this device as a useful and wonderful bookreader and more has been made by the market with a lowering of price! I’m sure competition, economics, recession and a number of things are to ’cause’, but it primarily says “We got something good going here and it works, so we can lower the price tag to make adoption even easier!”

Those of you who haven’t checked out the Kindle before, I encourage you to give it a shot and check it out!

If history has shown us anything, it isn’t going anywhere, and it’s only going to get better!

So, be sure to check out the Kindle here!