Hi everyone, and welcome back!

I like writing about technology, but sometimes get frustrated about covering pure tech, it's fantastic to write stories about how technology is being applied to real world scenarios to drive outcomes for businesses and people.

One of the specific areas I'm interested in is technology as it relates to the travel and aviation industry. Partly that's just self-interest, I travel a ludicrous amount so using tech to make the experience better for all travellers helps me also. But it's also a fascinating sector to observe. I contribute to the RunwayGirlNetwork blog and have had a couple of stories there in the past month.

I looked at how iBeacons, location-aware sensors, are being used to make airports more efficient and positive places for travellers to spend time. Dubai airport, in particular, is doing some interesting stuff in the space. I also wrote about European airline Ryanair that is doing a lot of work on its mobile application strategy as it sees more and more of its customers wanting to use mobile apps for their airline interactions. Also in the airline sector, I went deeper into the story of Dubai airport and looked how it is using big data to revolutionize the design of its new airport.

While we're on the subject of applying technology to existing industries and situations, I wrote a story about how GE, best known for making huge industrial machines, is rapidly moving to be a software vendor - it's food for thought for those in other traditional sectors. And I took a look at how the Internet of Things is being used to make sea transportation safer and more efficient.

As I've said before, perhaps my most satisfying time (apart from hanging out with the family, obviously) is helping existing organizations think about what their operation would look like when seen through a software lens - software is making some big changes in the world and it is fun to be able to have a small part in helping those happen.

Finally, since it's all about balance in life, here's a gratuitous photo of my eldest son and I on a run in the mountains a couple of weeks ago. A bit different from the sweltering heat of New Orleans where I'm writing this newsletter from.

Enjoy!

So, onto some of my more popular posts for the month...

Here's an interesting piece of technology that will be useful for those organizations with lots of data trapped in legacy databases. SlashDB literally allows you to wrap your aging database and create a website or even an API from it . Imagine the mobile and web opportunities that this opens up!

This month was, like most months at the moment, a big one for finding rounds. We had business intelligence vendor Confluent and PaaS vendor Apprenda both pick up $24M. Distil scored itself $21M while Sysdig raised some money for its container visibility offering. Perennial dark horse Digital Ocean, the fastest growing player in the cloud hosting space, picked up some more cash itself.

A recurring theme of mine is one of amazement at Amazon Web Services. Amazon's cloud division really is a powerhouse of innovation. A couple of newsy bits from them this month. Firstly, the announcement that they're now offering an API management service, likely to be competitive with Apigee, 3Scale and Akana . Then the announcement that AWS is now going to offer a mobile crash reporting service - this one was something of a disappointment as AWS' service is only going to support Android and FireOS for a start.

Actually, while we're talking about AWS, it's worth looking at the company within the context of Amazon's recent quarterly earnings report. I raised the question of whether there is any stopping this juggernaut.

CenturyLink is perhaps the best example of a telco that is learning to innovate and they're at it again. The company introduced a raft of announcements aimed at broadening its hybrid cloud (in fact, hybrid IT generally) story. 

Has the world gone mad? Google has long taken advatnatge of open source technologies, but hasn't been well known to support the open source community in return. Given that Google has its own, proprietary cloud platform, it was a little shocking to see that Google has joined the OpenStack Foundation - what's actually going on here?

While we're on the subject of foundations, this month saw not yet more developments as the number of open soruce foundations proliferates greatly. Linux gathered the masses to create the Cloud Native Container Foundation , and only the day after the Open Container Initiative came out with some of its own news. So what is really going on in foundation land - it took a look to see.

All that is bad about activist investors - Citrix looks set, under pressure from one particular shareholder, to carve off all of its forward-looking products and instead ride a lucrative but essentially doomed business downhill . Sad really.

Thanks for reading,

Ben