Hard to believe but it’s already July and almost time for HostingCon 2010. Austin, Texas will be buzzing from July 19-21 with full days of exhibits and speakers. This years conference is focused on “Piloting Into the Cloud – Setting a Course for the Future” with lots of information about how the web hosting industry will be effected.

Keynote speakers are Lydia Leong (Gartner) – Trends emerging across the Internet infrastructure services industry (it isn’t just the “cloud”.), Andy Rhodes (Dell) – Total cost of ownership for a scalable infrastructure and Serguei Beloussov (Parallels) – A NEW vision with hosts on how to launch new services, improve existing services, and reduce churn in their businesses..

New speakers at the conference include thought-leaders from HP, Cisco, VMWare, Gartner, Dell, Digital Realty Trust, The United States Defense Information Systems Agency, and many more. Highlights include speakers Douglas Hanna (A Small Orange), Michele Martin (Green Geeks) and Micheal Joffe (Microsoft).

To see the schedule and speaker bios go to their Website. HostingCon is also on Twitter, Facebookand LinkedIn so you can interact with those attending.

This is the sixth year of HostingCon and they are expecting over 1,500 people from over 30 different countries. Expect to see the latest news, ideas and technology presented, as well as lots of opportunities to mingle and network. Hope to see you there!

This Tuesday Google threatened to shut down all of their operations in the People’s Republic of China. The reason is that they discovered a very advanced cyber attack against Chinese human rights activists.

According to Google, Chinese “cyber spies” hit the company, along with at least 20 other companies whose identity has not been revealed. The purpose of the attack apparently was to gain access to email accounts belonging to activists all over the world.

The company said that they now are looking over their business in China and that they’ve made the decision to no longer filter search results in China.

Many bloggers claim that Google’s filter in China already is long gone, or at least that it’s gotten a lot softer. When searching for the Tiananmen Square while in China you apparently get a much broader set of results than you used to.

China is still to respond to the threats made by Google. The Chinese authorities are “looking for more information” regarding the alleged attacks, according to a Chinese official.

What can one make out of all this? It’s difficult since Google once in a time agreed to allow very strange censorships, at least according to me, in China but I think it’s a good thing that they now finally decided to take a stand against pointless ruling by “Big Brother”. What do you say? What’s the best thing Google can do now?

Microsoft and Yahoo recently released details regarding a web search and advertising revenues alliance, all according to Reuters.

The alliance is going to be complex (as expected when dealing with two giants) but the companies will for example split the revenues coming from online advertising and Yahoo will use Microsoft’s search engine Bing on their sites. Yahoo will be the company in charge of managing the revenues from the advertising on a global scale.

“Through this partnership with Yahoo we will be able to create innovative search functions, add value to our clients as well as providing consumers with an alternative to a market that is dominated by one single company”, says Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive at Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer obviously refers to Google, who is getting increasingly dominating on the search engine market. With this alliance Yahoo and Microsoft are stepping up their position in the battle against their enemy Google.

The alliance can lead to around 500 million dollars in increased revenues per year, according to a press release in Reuters.

“This deal means a lot for Yahoo, for our users and for the industry as a whole. I believe that it creates opportunities for a new era of innovation and development on the Internet”, says Carol Bartz, Chief Executive at Yahoo.

The contract will tie the two companies together for a period of ten years. This arrangement was preceded by an 18 months long attempt from Microsoft to get Yahoo to join them in the battle against Google. I for one am looking forward to see how all of this will present itself in the future. Beating Google is not the easiest of tasks.

The next big thing to look out for seems to be Google Wave, a soon to be released real-time communication platform which has been under construction for about two years now. When the platform hits the public is difficult to say so I guess that we just have to settle with “sometime later this year”. With every new release from the major web companies follows a heap of info, tending to make it all a bit overwhelming. To clarify what Google Wave is all about I thought that it was about time that I wrote a little something about it.

As mentioned is Google Wave a real-time communication platform and it combines everything from email, social networking (for example FaceBook), instant messaging and wikis. In other words: you will get access to all of this and much more through a one in-browser client. Want to share files with your friends and colleagues at work? Yes, you guessed right – Google Wave is a tool that can help you with this. Some of the features that are included are: drag and drop file sharing, wiki functionality, real-time, embeddability on your blog or website, playback and natural language which means that the wave corrects your language.

As with most new hypes nowadays do Google Wave come with its own lingo. Yes, you will yet again have to learn a couple of terms if you want to be in the “it crowd”. A wave means a specific threaded conversation. A wavelet is part of the mentioned thread bit it is just a small part of the larger picture. A Blip is the smallest part of the conversation, being a single line of a conversation.

This was just a short walkthrough but other things that could be worth reading up on are wave gadgets, robots and wave embeds. If you have the time you can check out the video below. In my opinion is Google Wave one of the most exciting things happening on the web this year and I look forward to seeing it in all its glory when it gets released.