With the wide choice of cloud services available it can be all too easy for business data to become fragmented with different parts of the organization using different services.

Database connectivity solutions provider Devart has announced the release of Skyvia 3.0, a free online service that can integrate cloud data from different sources and in this latest version provide cloud backup too.

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Last week Amazon.com was the first of the large cloud service companies other than Rackspace to finally break out revenue and expenses for its cloud operation. The market was cheered by news that Amazon Web Services (AWS) last quarter made an operating profit of $265 million with an operating profit margin of 19.6 percent. AWS, which many thought was running at break-even or possibly at a loss, turns out to be for Amazon a $5 billion business generating a third of the company’s total profits. That’s good, right? Not if it establishes a benchmark for typical-to-good cloud service provider performance. In fact it suggests that some companies -- IBM especially -- are going to have a very difficult time finding success in the cloud.

First let’s look at the Amazon numbers and define a couple terms. The company announced total AWS sales, operating profit, and operating profit margins for the last four quarters. Sales are, well, sales, while operating profit is supposed to be sales minus all expenses except interest and taxes (called EBIT -- Earnings Before Interest and Taxes). Amazon does pay interest on debt, though it pays very little in taxes. Since tax rates, especially, vary a lot from country to country, EBIT is used to help normalize operating results for comparing one multinational business with another.

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After more than 18 months of intense development, open source 2D animation tool Synfig Studio has at last hit version 1.0.

The release brings a pile of professional features, including a complete bone system with automatic shape deformation, a new cutout tool, a dynamics converter with automatic friction effects, a bitmap painting engine, initial support for bitmap frame-by-frame animation, and more.

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Facebook’s Messenger app has over 600 million users. Facebook-owned WhatsApp has over 800 million monthly active users. One would wonder why the social juggernaut maintains two instant messaging clients. The company has started to answer this question. While WhatsApp remains a standalone IM, Facebook is aggressively growing its Messenger app. Recently, the company opened the app to developers, and added the ability to easily transfer money to friends, and today, the company is introducing free video calls.

The video calling option has been one of the most anticipated features in Messenger's mobile apps. For those who can recall, Facebook introduced the video calling feature in its Messenger web app in 2011. The company had then partnered with Microsoft to use Skype technology to facilitate the video calling. Things changed in 2013 when Facebook dumped Skype’s technology -- which required users to install an additional plug-in -- for its homegrown video calling features that didn’t require users to download and install any extras.

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If there be ghosts, Tim Cook should expect sleepless nights ahead. Surely Steve Jobs can't stand to be so overshadowed by his successor, who takes Apple where the cofounder couldn't: Massive earnings and margins. Today, after the closing bell, the company reported yet another ridiculously blow-out quarter, largely lifted by iPhone. If the smartphone market ever collapses, Apple Armageddon will follow. In the present, momentum is unstoppable.

Some perspective: Apple's net income was more than two-and-half times Microsoft's during the same time period (calendar Q1 2015) -- and 3.8 times that of Google. To reiterate, those comparisons are put-in-the-bank profits, not revenues. By the numbers: $58 billion in sales, $13.6 billion net income, and $2.33 earnings per share. Wall Street consensus was $56 billion revenue and $2.16 EPS. Year over year, revenue rose 26.6 percent and net sales by 33 percent.

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Wristwatches aren't cool anymore, although wrist-worn wearables are. What I mean to say is, a traditional wristwatch for telling time is an outdated technology mostly reserved for the AARP crowd. Sure, some people, myself sometimes included, wear them as a fashion accessory (like jewelry), but smartphones have rendered dedicated timepieces obsolete.

It is for this reason that I find it curious that people desire a wrist-worn wearable smartwatch to look like their grandpa's watch. Why can't it look like an all-new thing? It's reminiscent of when some companies designed CD players to look like old-time radios or when Chrysler released the godawful PT Cruiser. If you are stuck in the past, the LG Watch Urbane may be just for you; it is an Android Wear smartwatch that doesn't look like one.

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Saturday afternoon, new Apple Watch owner Ken Lecomte posted a frightening photo to Google+: His device with shattered screen. The spider-spray pattern is eerily familiar -- one seen so many times -- like an iPhone clumsily dropped to floor or pavement. The fruit-logo company boasts about the gadget being a wrist computer, but should it be as easily breakable as the other that customers carry?

We wanted to find out. BetaNews proactively contacted Lecomte for his full story and additional photos, which in part authenticate the breakage. His claim is serious: That the strap came undone as he pulled hands from pocket, flinging the smartwatch to destruction. BetaNews takes allegations like this seriously, which is why rather than repost or reshare his photo, as others have done, we contacted the alleged victim, who wants to prevent others from meeting the same fate. His local Apple Store quoted $229 to fix the $349 Sport watch.

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The terrible repercussions of the earthquake in Nepal and the aftershocks continue to be felt. With thousands of people yet to be accounted for, Google and Facebook have already launched services to help connect with people in the affected areas.

Now Microsoft has entered the fray, offering free Skype calls to both landlines and mobiles in Nepal. Starting immediately, Skype users can make calls from within Nepal, or place them to the country regardless of whether they have any credit.

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Got a spare patent or two lying around, gathering dust and cluttering the place up? Google might be interested in taking those patents off your hands in return for cold, hard cash. Today the search giant announces details of the Patent Purchase Promotion which will run for two weeks in May.

The move is an attempt to "remove friction from the patent market", with the added benefit for Google that it will help the company to expand its patent portfolio. The online patent-selling portal will run from May 8 to May 22 and has been designed to be accessible to smaller players.

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While enthusiasts move away from SATA-based solid state drives for faster (and more expensive) options, most consumers are perfectly fine with the standard option for now. In fact, it is a great time to be in the market for SATA SSDs, as larger capacity drives are becoming more affordable.

I just reviewed the SATA Samsung 850 EVO; a drive I like very much. While I appreciate Samsung's optional (and apparently, controversial) rapid mode and conservative design, there are people who are not fans of either. Kingston is a company known for quality, and its HyperX division is no exception. Today, that company releases the sexily-named Savage -- a traditional SATA SSD with an awe-inspiring and ostentatious design. If you like bling, the red aluminum will certainly get your motor running.

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The days of blissful ignorance are over. With consumers increasingly aware of the security and protection issues relating to their data, companies have been forced to become more transparent. Already the majority of states in the US have passed legislation requiring companies to notify customers when data breaches occur and efforts are also underway to strengthen similar laws across the EU.

Notifying consumers of data breaches is an important consideration in retaining trust but there is an equally important point to bear in mind. Sharing the related breach data to improve endpoint security will be crucial in giving businesses the best chance of repelling future threats. It will also help to limit the reputational and financial damage that such attacks can cause. After all, it is the application, not the notification that will help the enterprise gain the upper hand.

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The likes of Julian Assange's WikiLeaks have set the standard for blowing the lid on huge stories based on tips from anonymous sources. Whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden have brought to public attention stories which would otherwise have been kept hidden from the public, and it has been with the help of newspapers such as the Guardian that this information has been disseminated around the world.

Other newspapers are keen to ride on the coattails of those blazing a trail in the world of investigative journalism, and the latest to join the party is The Sun. Today, Murdoch-owned News Corp's newspaper and website launches SecureDrop -- a way for whistle-blowers to anonymously leave tip-offs that can be further investigated.

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Every week the technology world holds its breath with anticipation as the latest tech giants make new strides into the mobile payments sector. After years of low consumer take-up of services like Google Wallet and Square, the launch of Apple Pay last year was hailed as a pivotal moment, signaling the time when mobile payments would finally go mainstream.

With mega players like Facebook and Microsoft now joining the peer-to-peer money sending and digital payments fray, even sceptics are wondering if 2015 might truly be "The Year of Mobile Payments". Yet what many don’t realize is that these services are already lagging 10 years behind.  The rest of the world is paying attention to a different mobile payments phenomenon -- one that’s been taking place thousands of miles away. Last month, global telecoms body GSMA revealed that the number of active users of Mobile Money -- a service which enables users to send and receive money from basic mobile phones without requiring a bank account or payment card -- had doubled from 2013 to reach 103 million globally.

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According to a new survey by application delivery company OutSystems, 43 percent of respondents rate apps or sites that are mobile friendly as critical to their plans in 2015. The way in which Google has changed how it weights mobile-friendly sites is presumably a driving factor.

The survey conducted with content specialist TechValidate talked to 200 IT decision makers worldwide and focused on the business and technical priorities and challenges that IT organizations face in building applications in today's complex development landscape.

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Restaurants, malls, trains, hotels: it can feel as though Wi-Fi is everywhere these days. Until you’re traveling, when you can still spend an age trying to find a network, only to find it’s password-protected or the local winner of Slowest Wi-Fi 2015.

WiMAN is a free Wi-Fi manager for Android and iOS which can display a map of all your local Wi-Fi networks, along with estimates of distance (x minutes by foot/ car), and flagging them as "verified" (another wiMAN user has connected), "authentication provided" (another user has connected but you need a user name/ password) or "not verified" (no-one has connected yet).

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