Storage: The World Series is over and the NFL playoffs are yet to begin, so perhaps you gamblers out there would like try your luck at betting on the future of storage? Okay, okay. This is more akin to playing the stock market than calling your bookie, but startup Storage Markets aims to bring the predictive market approach to storage, Mario Apicella reports in this post. "As an honorary trader, I can testify that Storage Markets is fun and addictive, which should motivate more people with storage expertise to join and keep the transactions going," Apicella writes.

Best of the blogs: Jon Udell finds himself redesigning one of Edward Tufte's data tables, and wondering how his version could work more interactively on the Web and how more people could conduct such changes. "Can web collaboration address these scaling problems? Maybe. We have lots of good ingredients: social networks for images, code, and documentation. Time to get cooking!" Scaling the Tufte effect.

The news beat: Microsoft says that its Office Live service will emerge from beta testing come November 15 and bring a few new features along for the ride. SPEC.org forms a working group to build benchmarks for virtualization software. And Hewlett-Packard details its first c-Class line of storage devices to tap the blade form factor and to make SANs a reality for smaller companies.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 31, 2006 07:26 AM