Near Birmingham in Britain, for instance, the cluster of car-industry service firms that grew up when that city was a force in the industry has become an important element in the development of Formula One and other specialist vehicle businesses.

ECONOMIST: Idea: Clustering | The

Another example of picking customers well is a home oil delivery service that seeks to win the business of a cluster of homeowners in a specific neighborhood who need deliveries on the same day.

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Three possibilities proposed by Cox: a "peer-to-peer" social network, a cluster of "virtual individual servers" running on a cloud service such as Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, and "hybrid decentralization, " a mix of the two approaches.

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Businesses are tired of hearing the tech industry squawk about whether this or that is a managed service or a faux cloud or a virtualized cumulonimbus cluster or a passing shower or black cloud of doom.

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