Cloud

Apple is a company that, generally speaking, likes to keep itself to itself -- but that's not to say it doesn't like to keep its finger on the pulse and learn about what others are talking about. This is demonstrated perfectly by the company's latest purchase. This time around Apple has invested a reported $200 million in Topsy Labs, a social media analytics firm that specializes in monitoring trends on Twitter.

Topsy has access to every single tweet sent since Twitter inception back in 2006, making it the most extensive database of the micro-blogging service. The information available through Topsy is the sort of data that would prove immensely useful to advertisers, but at this stage it is not clear just how Apple intends to use the information. Topsy Labs' tool can be used to monitor trends on Twitter, check the topics that are being discussed, as well as determining the success and impact of online campaigns.

U.S. Thanksgiving Day comes late this year for retailers, but makes more time for Google to count its blessings and to offer gratitude for them. Oh, they are bountiful, and there is still another month of them to come. The year 2013 will be remembered as one of the finest in Google history. The company has so much to be thankful for, I could have trebled the list.

But for succinctness, I whittle down to those things that mean more than others or that otherwise would be overlooked in the typical yearly review. The list goes from that for which Google should be least thankful to most. Gobble. Gobble.

The growth in popularity of cloud-based applications has brought new challenges for system admins. Rather than a single set of systems in one place a company's computing may now be spread across a number of platforms and locations.

With the announcement of its new Advanced Cloud Management product ScaleXtreme aims to give its customers a broad set of server, application and service management tools on a single platform.

CRM data is the life blood of any sales-based business so it's important to look after it. That's doubly true if you're contemplating moving your CRM activity to the cloud. In order to address this, Texas-based backup and recovery specialist Spanning Cloud Apps is expanding its product range to cover the most popular cloud CRM package Salesforce.com.

Unlike other solutions Spanning Backup for Salesforce is embedded within the main Salesforce user interface. This means that backup and recovery options can be reviewed without leaving the package and key activities shared directly to Chatter feeds.

Cloud storage locker MediaFire has announced the availability of its desktop sync clients for Windows PCs and Macs. The new apps, currently in beta, arrive alongside a revamped web interface that is designed to make editing, sharing and viewing files much easier. The service is currently offering both free (10 GB of storage) and paid plans (Pro and Business), which can take advantage of the new round of changes.

The base MediaFire Pro account includes 100 GB of cloud storage, and currently costs $24.99 per year (50 percent off from the usual $49.99). The company has given us 15 MediaFire Pro account redemption codes to give away to BetaNews readers, providing each winner with 100 GB of cloud storage for a year.

While Microsoft has its own mobile operating system with Windows Phone 8, the company generously supports its competitor's products too. After all, with its own OS having such a small user base comparatively, it would be insane not to.

Back in June, the company's flagship non-OS software, Office 365, was released for Apple's iOS to the surprise of many. Today, while less of a surprise, Microsoft announces some major changes to its cloud-storage SkyDrive app.

I'm a Surface Pro user; that I won't deny. I also own an iPad -- it's an old iPad 2, but it still does the job. It may not have the fancy 'more pixels than you can see without the aid of a microscope' display of newer models, but it's perfectly functional. However I'd still pick the Surface over Apple's tablet for just about everything. I'll admit I was tempted by the idea of an iPad Air when it was launched, but after thinking it over a little, I decided to stick with the old model and continue to enjoy my Surface Pro.

But the time will come when I am in the market for a new tablet. Having had my attention flagged by the iPad Air, it would seem that it would be a toss-up between the Surface 2 (Pro or regular) and Apple's offering. However much I think about it, I still find myself falling on the side of the Surface. Why? Several reasons:

Dropbox, one of the leading services for cloud storage, has been making recent inroads to become business and IT-friendly. The company boasts that its business user-base has doubled since 2012, and now reaches over four million customers. To keep that fire stoked, Dropbox now announces a new partnership with Salesforce.

"Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Salesforce to bring great technology to the enterprise and help users connect with customers in a whole new way", says the company's Ari Friedland.

Email is often cited as being the killer application that made the internet take off, and there's no denying it has changed the way the world does business. But using email for business means keeping an archive so that you have a record of conversations. Over time that archive can become substantial and take up a lot of expensive disk space so storing it in the cloud begins to look like an attractive solution.

To help with moving mail to the cloud Metalogix is launching its Total Email Management and Migration product for Amazon Web Services. It delivers a complete service for mail archiving, backup, security, migration and continuity in the cloud.

Successful sales strategy is dependent on understanding the customer. But for small and medium businesses building up the kind of intelligence database needed can be time consuming and take staff away from the task of actually selling. It can be many months before the implementation of a traditional sales intelligence platform bears fruit.

Software company InsightSquared has used the Dreamforce 2013 conference to launch the latest version of its analytics tool aimed at helping smaller enterprises stay competitive. Designed to work with the Salesforce CRM application, InsightSquared 3.0 has been put together based on feedback from experienced CEOs, along with sales and marketing professionals, in order to provide best practice reports and drive effective sales management.

It would be a strange week if Google didn’t steal a few headlines, and this week saw the introduction of new quick actions to Gmail as well as the launch of a series of online tools to help with the aftermath of the Philippines typhoon. Changes were also made to attachments in Gmail so it is now possible to download files directly to Google Drive. After the launch of the Nexus 5 -- which Brian was not blown away by -- Google also started to roll out Android 4.4 to Nexus tablets -- Mihaita was on hand with a guide to manually upgrading for anyone who did not want to wait for the OTA update to arrive. The news wasn't so good for the Chromebook 11 which was taken off sale after problems with overheating chargers. Google won a court battle after a judge ruled that the scanning of books is not illegal.

This week it was revealed that while BitTorrent still accounts for a large proportion of web traffic, and usage has actually increased in Europe, in the States there has been a drop in traffic. Anyone who seeks entertainment through other channels will be pleased by the fact that Roku streaming boxes can now be used to access Disney and ESPN channels. The Netflix channel was also updated with a new look.

Following the lead of US airlines, the European Commission gives the go-ahead for the use of 3G and 4G services during flights.  The Commission is permitting the use of UMTS and LTE data connections on aircraft above altitudes of 3,000 meters in the European Union (EU). Up until now, only 2G (GSM) usage has been allowed and the decision paves the way for passengers to make use of high speed data connections, although the decision about whether to permit this on individual flights lies with airlines.

The Commission's announcement makes it clear that the decision does not translate into an automatic right for passengers to use data connections, at least partly because aircraft need to be adapted.

Backing up data can often seem like a chore and is something which isn't always top of the agenda, especially for smaller businesses. New research commissioned by cloud backup and disaster recovery company Intronis shows that a high percentage of small and medium businesses are at risk of major data loss that could put them out of business.

The results show that most SMBs go to managed services providers (MSPs) -- 83 percent of which are SMBs themselves with less than 99 employees -- for their IT services. More worrying is that they often don't buy backup and data recovery until after suffering a detrimental loss of data.

Cloud storage and sharing service Dropbox has been looking to grow its footprint in the business industry, adding Dropbox for Business, along with a steady stream of new features for the service. Now the company is attempting to consolidate its enterprise efforts with those for home users.

"On one hand, people wanted to access their personal stuff at work; meanwhile, IT admins wanted to keep company data separate and free of personal files. Both needs were real, but people had to choose between two Dropboxes", claims the company.

It seems like everything is shifting to the cloud at the moment and that places additional pressures on network management. LogicMonitor, maker of a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring solution, is aiming to ease the burden by offering free NetFlow traffic monitoring in order to enhance its usability by service providers.

NetFlow (the collective name for NetFlow, sFlow and JFlow) is an industry-standard protocol for monitoring network traffic. LogicMonitor's Collector receives data from network devices and sends it to the cloud for analysis and storage, keeping down the load on local servers. A number of off-the-shelf performance metrics are available including data flows, bandwidth and application use. This NetFlow functionality is being offered free to LogicMonitor's customers for at least the remainder of 2013.