Articles about Cloud

It seems to be a big day for cloud storage. Earlier Google added additional functionality to its Drive product. Now Box has an update of its own, though this new release is geared towards the mobile crowd, bringing more storage to those on iOS devices.

Additional cloud storage isn't all that's included, though. "We've overhauled our app to make it super-fast, simpler to use and more immersive. The result, we believe, is the best content viewing and collaboration experience available today for your iOS device".

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Cloud storage has become the norm these days, with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all offering services. It's even built right into Windows 8.1 and Office 2013, and many other apps are adding various integrations.

Now Google is announcing an update to Drive, which brings new, and much needed functionality to its offering. The service allows for easy collaboration on projects, but until now, it was difficult to track the various changes being made.

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Over this past weekend Dropbox went down, and thanks to all of the recent news about companies being hacked, the worst was feared. But those unconfirmed reports have proven to be false, as the cloud storage service has set the record straight.

The real truth behind the incident turns out to be much more mundane. In fact, it was simply a scheduled maintenance that went wrong. "On Friday at 5:30 PM PT, we had a planned maintenance scheduled to upgrade the OS on some of our machines. During this process, the upgrade script checks to make sure there is no active data on the machine before installing the new OS. A subtle bug in the script caused the command to reinstall a small number of active machines. Unfortunately, some master-slave pairs were impacted which resulted in the site going down".

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Dealing with copyrighted material online has long been something of a legal minefield. Whatever your moral position on enjoying copyrighted movies, music, and other content without paying for it, there is usually little argument about whether or not it is actually illegal.

While downloading copyrighted movies from FTP servers, via BitTorrent, or using other means is widely regarded as breaking the law, things are not seen in quite such black and white terms when it comes to streaming content.

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Technology giant IBM has announced that it's to invest more than $1 billion to create a new business unit for Watson, the supercomputer that beat human contestants on the TV quiz Jeopardy.

The new Watson Group will be headed by Michael Rhodin, previously senior vice president of the company’s software solutions group. The unit will be based in New York and have around 2,000 employees.

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Here is my first of two prediction columns for 2014. There’s just too much for it all to fit in one column. My neighbor and good friend Avram Miller wrote a predictions column this year that’s quite good and you might want to read it before this one. We discuss some of the same things though of course Avram and I occasionally agree to disagree.

This column is mainly about business predictions for 2014 while the follow-up column will be more about products and technologies.

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According to a study by New York-based risk management specialist Continuity Software, measurement and analysis is the key to achieving IT excellence.

Based on results from a number of sectors including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and retail, the study underlines the importance of operational analytics in meeting performance targets.

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Journal Communications, Inc. (Journal) is a successful century-old media company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. Our company owns and operates 34 radio stations and 15 television stations. We produce 20 print publications including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. For many years, our IT infrastructure for all of those media stations and papers functioned as separate entities. Our small team relied on long personnel-hours, hard work and dedication to keep everything running -- and functioning on time. As the company grew, however, we realized that this was not a sustainable model.

Originally, we had 17 implementations and multiple versions of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint with multiple servers for each of our locations, most of which were not backed up or redundant. The company managed for years without significant problems, but we knew there was a better way.  As a newspaper and media company, it’s important for us to maintain the highest levels of efficiency and accuracy in all of our IT and business processes. To accomplish this, we needed the most effective operational approach we could use -- for total reliability across a disparate infrastructure.

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Not all tech news is about Consumer Electronics Show 2014 this week. Today, Vimeo unveiled a new video player that puts preference on HTML5 streaming and provides content creators with fresh tools. Alongside the default codec choice, two benefits stand out: Improved performance, with videos loading claimed 50-percent faster, and support for in-app transactions.

The latter feature extends video-on-demand capabilities. "The addition of in-player transaction support allows creators even further control, by making any embedded Vimeo player a point of sale -- be it on a creator's own website or any page across the web", Kerry Taylor, Vimeo CEO, explains. "Since launching the Vimeo On Demand platform last year, we've continued to add new features that empower filmmakers to sell directly to their audiences on their own terms".

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It was a great 2013 for SOASTA. Out of the global $1.2 trillion dollars’ worth of business conducted online in 2013 across the globe, SOASTA, an established leader in website and app testing through the cloud, is trusted with protecting 10 percent of that figure -- or $150 billion. Based on the hundreds of brands SOASTA worked with and the challenges faced last year, here are five predictions that are pretty clear as we go into 2014. Hint: Simplify, the User Experience, and M-commerce will be buzz words for successful enterprises and e-commerce vendors.

My top five predictions for 2014 are as follows:

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Cloud backup and sync provider Dropbox has released a major new stable build for desktop with the launch of Dropbox 2.6.2 FINAL for Windows, Mac and Linux. Version 2.6’s headline new feature is brand new, redesigned installers for Windows and Mac platforms, but there are some useful functional improvements too.

The redesigned installer aims to make the process as simple as possible, automatically downloading and installing the new version with significantly less user interaction than previously.

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As you’ll have noticed by now, the BetaNews writers have been making tech-based resolutions for the New Year. This is something I did last year, and revisiting my post for the first time since I originally wrote it, I discovered what I suspected would be the case -- I failed miserably across the board.

I said I would embrace Google+, but I haven’t. I’ve followed some people, and used Google’s social network slightly more, but embraced it? Nope. I said I’d change my passwords. I changed maybe two. I claimed I’d sort out my inbox. It was 79 percent full (8GB) then. It’s 74 percent full (11.19GB) now, so that’s a big fat fail. I said I’d learn to love Windows 8. I never did. I do really like Windows 8.1 though, so I'll claim that as a win. I stated I’d move my data to the cloud, and learn to program. I think you can guess how well those panned out. While a lot of my files are stored in the cloud, I still have multiple local copies of everything, and I haven’t programmed so much as a single line of code. So for this year’s list, I’m going to choose resolutions I believe I can actually achieve.

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You'll have noticed by now that my colleagues here are all busy promising to clean up their tech acts for the coming year. But I'm not going to do that.

I don't generally make resolutions anyhow -- it saves having to come up with excuses later -- so instead here's what I won’t be changing in 2014.

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It's inevitable that at this time of year tech companies and analysts like to try to grab headlines with their predictions for the coming 12 months. Security specialist Kaspersky Lab is no exception, and guaranteed to make waves is its forecast of the collapse of the internet as we know it.

This, it says, will be driven by pressure to break the web up into national segments. So far this has only applied to counties like China with its Great Firewall, but other nations including Russia have planned legislation to prohibit the use of foreign services. In November, Germany announced that all communications between the German authorities would be fully locked within the country. Brazil too has announced its plans to build an alternative internet channel so as not to use the one that goes through Florida.

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Yesterday my colleague Mihaita Bamburic presented his list of the year’s top tech products, which included some obvious big choices, most notably Windows 8.1, iPad Air, Surface 2 and the Xbox One.

My list could easily be a carbon copy of his, after all the biggest tech products are hits for a reason, and despite not being a fan of Windows 8, I really like its successor, and would happily own both the iPad Air and Surface 2 if funds allowed. But I wanted to approach my selection slightly differently by avoiding products which featured on Mihaita’s list, and focusing on items I’ve bought (or been sent) and have used extensively. These are the tech products I’ve really appreciated the most this year.

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