MediaValet, and its sister company VRX Studios, have been selected as one of three Finalists for the ‘Windows Azure Platform ISV Partner of the Year’ award in the ‘Emerging Technologies and Innovation Awards’ category of Microsoft’s 2011 IMPACT Awards.

The ninth annual IMPACT Awards recognize excellence within Microsoft’s partner community in Canada. The 2011 IMPACT Award finalists will be honoured at a gala event taking place on November 30th, 2011, in Toronto, ON.

Front-liners in cloud computing, such as Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft and many more, are investing heavily on massive cloud data centers that are 6 to 7 times more effective than the conventional enterprise data centers. Just how big is cloud data centers powering today’s cloud services?

Wikibon, a community of IT professionals, shows you how “big” cloud computing is in a yet-another-interesting-cloud-infographic. Firstly, the physical size of the cloud data centers themselves is enormous – a cloud data center is 11.5 times the size of a football field. Secondly, the size of cost and energy savings of the cloud data centers are also huge – 1,000 traditional data centers cost more than $3.3 million, whereas the same 1,000 cloud data centers cost less than $800,000.

Check out this cloud computing infographic (for the original size, please click on the image):

Our founder and CEO, David MacLaren, recently shared his cloud-computing experience with the 7,500 entrepreneurs, in 38 countries, that make up the global Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO). Writing for Overdrive, the official blog of EO, David shared his experience developing MediaValet on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-platform.

David’s main point in the article: Cloud-computing not only saves entrepreneurs time and money, but provides further benefits including scalability, accessibility, security, faster time to market and a significant reduction in upfront capital expenditures.

Barb Darrow, a contributing editor at the renowned technology publication, GigaOM, recently wrote an article about Microsoft’s Windows Azure and how Microsoft is fairing in the Cloud. She interviewed a number of industry experts including our founder and President, David MacLaren.

In speaking with Barb, David pointed out that we chose to build MediaValet on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-platform because most of our parent company’s customers already have Windows expertise and that Azure enables us to ‘tap into’ Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) as needed: “it takes two minutes to turn on CDN to light up 25 additional data centers around the world — all without calling (a company like) Akamai and telling them how we want it done.”