Live Blog WWW2008: Kai-Fu Lee of Google Greater China on cloud computing

I'm now sitting in the opening keynote of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) here in Beijing, adjacent to the newly opened Olympic Stadium.

The first presentation is by Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China. He's talking about "cloud computing," the general term for developing ways to turn our computer lives into something not tied to any single device.

So far, he's been outlining what cloud computing is, something that he admits is not news to anyone in this room full of industry and academic researchers, and highlighting all of Google's already deployed cloud components -- Gmail, Google Documents, Picasa, etc.

Now he's talking about the power of distributed computing for operations such as search that, as he said "are very hard to do with one computer, or even a very powerful computer." He added, "A cloud computer should have at its disposal a virtually infinite amount of disk, an infinite amount of processing power."

More to come... Follow me on Twitter at gwbstr. E-mail sinobyte@gwbstr.com if you're here and would like to get in touch!