Now that Vivek Kundra, the former chief technology officer for Washington, D.C, has become America's first CIO, it is interesting to look at his pronouncements on cloud computing. (He's not America's CTO remember, that appointment's yet to be announced.) Wall Street Journal blogger Amy Schatz notes that Kundra is best known "for overhauling the D.C. government’s tech system and replacing it with one that provides real-time data for the mayor and his deputies about where money is being spent."

Schatz also notes that the D.C. government also started putting more information online after he took over, and it is this aspect of Kundra that the Journal's Ben Worthen also underlined when he quoted an earlier Wall Street Journal article about Kundra in which he said:

"I’m all about the cloud computing notion. I look at my lifestyle, and I want access to information wherever I am. I am killing projects that don’t investigate software as a service first."

Kundra even sponsored a contest last year for programmers to come up with new ways of using D.C. data in iPhone and Internet applications, so it should be an interesting few years for America, with its brand new 34-year old CIO.

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