Last week the Google Apps Marketplace opened for business. It is a facility for third party developers to add functionality and features to Google Apps, which is a service the web giant offers to business that allow said organizations to harness the power of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is an emerging concept that encourages people to do all their work on the web, instead of desktop computers, and in this case instead of corporate servers or expensive Microsoft Outlook/Exchange/Office systems.

Google Apps combines a number of different services, like gmail for web, google docs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, calendar, web site publishing, basically all the informational/software needs you would require to run the basics of the company.

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics were the first games that took place "in the cloud." While it would be too easy to say that they were "The Social Media Olympics", that does not describe the breadth and comprehensiveness by which technology dramatically changed the way everyone interacted with the games.

Social media is for many people already old news, and what's novel about these Olympics, what made it possible, was the pervasiveness of cloud computing, the concept that frees us from our personal computer, frees us from a single television channel, to be able to interact with the games anywhere, anytime, and anyway we choose.

There's really no division between official broadcaster and even official sponsors, the olympics are so transcendent they permeate our society for two weeks, kind of like a cloud.

One of the impacts of the rise of cloud computing is the dominance of real-time media. The way in which compelling moments flash through the cloud like lightning with echoes that roar like Thunder.

Sidney Crosby's gold medal winning goal was a great example of this. The moment the puck when into the net an electric current surged across the country (across the world) firing human bodies up with emotion. The thundering echo produced by this strike could be heard by those not directly connected.