There are a lot of sketch apps. I mean a lot. Layers, Brushes, iDraw, SketchBook Pro, SketchPad HD, SketchyPad, Draft, and Penultimate, to name a few. If you build in the concept of ideating, the list only grows longer, with apps like Evernote, MindNode, Adobe Ideas … well, I think we all get the point. It’s a saturated market. But a new app called Paper, by a promising new company named FiftyThree, is jumping right in. "There are many note taking applications which are useful, but boring," FiftyThree co-founder Georg Petschnigg tells Co.Design. "Then there are paint programs, that require a lot of skill to make something beautiful. Paper is where productivity and beauty come together." In this saturated marketplace, Paper stands out in a few ways. It’s free to download. It’s extraordinarily simple to use. And FiftyThree itself was co-founded by two of the incubation leads on the late Microsoft Courier project, Georg Petschnigg and Jon Harris (together, the entire FiftyThree team has developed Xbox controllers and laptops, created short films, and designed graphics for TED talks).

In other words, Paper is, at its heart, a small taste of what the Courier could have been. Well, the small taste that isn’t from the iPad’s other Courier-team-developed app, which also just released, called Taposé. "It was that humbling realization that when people ‘need to get creative,’ they’ll reach for a legal pad, whiteboard, or sticky note," Petschnigg tells Co.Design. "That’s pretty humbling for a team that made laptops, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office for a living! We realized that we use pen and paper like everyone else, because it is simple, beautiful, and lets you express your ideas freely. So we set out to bring some of that simplicity and beauty to software. We wanted a tool that works more like we think." I know what he means. The first thing I think about when loading Paper is actually 37signals’ competing product, Draft. Draft’s approach was to create a scribble app with extreme limitations—black pages, red and white inks—to free the user’s mind to focus on the idea.

The result was easy to use but far too clinical. There’s nothing less satisfying than looking back at an ugly idea. I paid $5 for Draft and used it once.Patio Furniture Station Sale Paper defines itself by restraint, too, but it doesn’t suck your creative soul to do so. Led Light Bulb For Ceiling FanBy paring down options, it sneaks in a niche that’s simpler and more satisfying to use than the heavy dashboards of both art and note-taking apps. Light Bulb Angel 4 PicsYou start with a page in a Moleskine journal. Rather than choose any color in the world, Paper offers just nine that coordinate. Then they use a metaphor that we all understand—it’s "paper" of course—to build out their pen (and pencil and watercolor tools, which are each unlocked through a $1.99 in-app purchase) that allow you to sketch in varying texture and intensity.

And to undo any action, you simply circle back with two fingers, like a jog wheel. The resulting app pulls out the wishy washy creative decisions behind sketching a quick flowchart. It’s like shopping for furniture within a single matching collection—maybe your living room will resemble someone else’s next door, but at least it will look good on its own. You can also create new notebooks, skinable with photos and patterns (a simple effect that looks fantastic on screen). And you can share sketches on your Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter accounts. But that’s about it. You can’t zoom into sketches, you can’t create layers, and the app’s home screen isn’t designed to support portrait mode, which is a bit ironic, as you’re supposed to be drawing in a portrait-based Moleskine. (But there’s nothing stopping you from just turning your iPad while sketching, as you would a piece of paper.) It’s interesting that, despite the rising ubiquity of the iPad and Android tablets, none is driven by that elusive killer content creation app. Paper isn’t that app. Rather, it seems like a warm-up lap from a team destined to do more.

That said, it’s a pretty darn good warm-up lap. I'd also like to receive special Fast Company offers"We're entering the second wave of cloud adoption," said John Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. "It's here to stay. The move is on." Rymer, who spoke this week at IBM's Relay 2015, debuted new Forrester research around the growth of "customer-centric" workloads and the rise of private enterprise clouds. According to Forrester's recent survey of 200 global IT decision makers (conducted on behalf of IBM), 38 percent of organizations have deployed systems of record (SOR) or systems of insight (SOI)—meaning data storage systems and the business intelligence tools used to analyze that data—in public clouds. According to Forrester, an average of 88 percent of those organizations plan to increase the number of applications and systems in which they build or migrate to cloud platforms over the next two years, with customer-focused technology such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and asset management services as the key drivers.

Rymer explained that because the cloud eliminated so many deployment issues (essentially letting companies create an account and start working right away at a low cost), it became the preferred environment very quickly. More than implementation, the trick now is managing that enterprise-scale cloud. "Customer-focused technology is all about speed; continuous integration and improvement," said Rymer. "When you are applying technology to win, serve, and retain customers, you are also in a tussle with them. Customers have immediate access to all kinds of insight that puts them in a very powerful position relative to you. They move very quickly and tastes change on a dime. You need to constantly be producing better insights, better apps, and new campaigns. Technology and products aren't the problem. Culture, organizational structure, and managing that platform are now the biggest limitations." IBM aims to facilitate that culture change and cloud migration for businesses, and then help companies manage the hybrid cloud architecture once it's there.

In his opening keynote, Steve Robinson, General Manager of the IBM Cloud Platform, called IBM's Bluemix suite of cloud app development services "an enterprise-grade innovation platform" in a world where hybrid cloud applications are increasingly becoming the norm for integrated digital businesses. Through Bluemix and the Bluemix Garage innovation centers in start-up ecosystems around the world, IBM is designing an infrastructure and support system to hold companies' collective hands as they shift and strike a flexible, scalable balance between different cloud deployment models. "Businesses will ask us, 'How do I do public cloud that keeps some of the enterprise attributes around it?' Bluemix can create a dedicated environment to carve out a virtualized space for a single client," said Robinson. Robinson said businesses also ask, "How do I connect the old with the new and do two-speed IT? How do I set up a secure connection from my mainframe to my cloud application? How about a tool that lets me mix my records with open data sets without jeopardizing the private data of my clients?"

Bluemix Local brings cloud attributes back behind the firewall, according to Robinson. Inside IBM Bluemix Garage and Lab Services Last week, IBM announced two new Bluemix services—Active Deploy and Event Hub—to automatically push software updates to cloud systems and to group multiple data streams together. Both play into IBM's role in facilitating a company's painless transition to the cloud. The services also comprise parts of Relay, IBM's mechanism for connecting to cloud systems for pushing upgrades and monitoring applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds as well as middleware, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. If Bluemix is the enabling technology in business cloud transitions, then Bluemix Garage represents the cultural aspect. Bluemix Garage is a start-up within IBM that was founded in April 2014. There are currently Garages in San Francisco, London, and Toronto, and the company has plans to launch new locations in Nice, France and Melbourne, Australia.

IBM also offers Bluemix Garage services online. These innovation labs work with businesses on getting their first cloud applications up and running—from brainstorming and piloting the idea to scaling it up. Damion Heredia, Vice President of Product Management and Design for IBM Bluemix and Marketplace, told PCMag the team has been breaking down the data services in IBM's Watson platform and incorporating them into Bluemix. IBM has added 30 machine learning, image and text recognition, and other cognitive and data tooling services over the past two months to analyze what Heredia called the "dark data" that traditional self-service tools can't unlock. "Business leaders are getting the sort of insights they couldn't get before, that they can then plug into their app and gain value from on their own," said Heredia. "In the Garage, from a business standpoint, you're so much more involved in the development experience. We teach what we call Design Thinking upfront, which brings the business users into the development at the table.

There's no more talking to developers only." The Garages function as grassroots outposts for hybrid cloud technology, melding Bluemix technology with cloud development experts, in a casual office setting. Heredia said when it comes to moving your business to a cloud environment (whether it's public, private, or hybrid), the size of the organization matters far less than the willingness to embrace the culture shift the cloud brings with it. "It's about selling an experience and the cultural change that goes with cloud adoption," said Heredia. "We have a ton of start-ups on our platform, whether it's gaming companies that want worldwide data replication at the lowest cost, to start-ups we're bringing through our Garages, to the Watson ecosystem bringing thousands of start-ups together using Watson services to build better apps. As long as they have the same goal in mind—developing faster, spending less on operations, and getting more people involved in building apps while maintaining safety and performance—it doesn't matter if they're a three-person start-up, a small innovation team, or a thousand-employee IT arm of a pharmaceutical corporation.