Articles about Cloud

Twenty-fifth in a series. The increase of new apps slowed down a little bit, falling under the 2,000 apps per week mark that was passed in the last three weeks. A total of 1,928 new apps found their way into the store this week. The total number of apps in the U.S. store is now 42,478, made up of 33,430 free apps and 9,048 paid ones. Free apps increased by 1,447 this week and paid ones by 481.

The core Bing apps received updates a couple of days ago. I won't rehash all that we previously reporting, only this much: Bing News supports custom RSS feeds now that you can add to the app so that you can add your own news sources to it. News also supports keyword-based news that you can add easily to the application.

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Up front I should confess that I love Amazon Prime. The service is a bit cheaper than Netflix for streaming movies and TV shows but brings along other perks such as free second-day shipping and a lending library for Kindle users. The retailer continues to add features and work with studios in an effort to provide more content to viewers.

Today Amazon releases pilot episodes for 14 new, original shows. We have known these were coming for some time, but the service waited until all pilots were ready and pushes them now as one giant release.

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Jolicloud may perhaps be the coolest cloud service you have not yet discovered. Created back in 2009, the company derived from Joli OS into a platform to access your cloud-based online life. It brings together everything you have stored on all of the various cloud services and, if you are like me, then that can be a wide net to cast.

The service finally adds search -- a feature long sought after by users. The company announces that it has "made it very easy to search anything you have in your Jolidrive: music, photos, documents, videos in your online storages but search can also help you find great content in all your favorite social services like Instagram, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Youtube and more".

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If you are unable to comment on BetaNews stories, our apologies, comment service Disqus suffers service problems this morning. A reader alerted me about 30 minutes ago. When I couldn't comment on any story, I had headed over to Disqus only to get an "unavailable" message.

"Disqus has been intermittently unavailable for the past few minutes, and we are working on a solution. We apologize for the disruption and appreciate your patience", according to the Status site, which I got to from a Tweet. BetaNews is one of many sites that relies on the service for comments.

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Microsoft has announced the general availability of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) support for Windows Azure. The software giant also unveiled a couple of new features for IaaS meant to beef up the company's cloud platform. Timing is interesting --Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services) Summit kicks off in New York tomorrow.

Windows Azure's IaaS support introduces the Virtual Machine and Virtual Network features, and "is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production apps", according to Microsoft's Scott Guthrie.

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With what I can only presume is wry sense of humor, Netflix's Anthony Park and Mark Watson post: "Since Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2021, we need to find a replacement some time within the next 8 years". Well, hell, that ought to be enough time. "We'd like to share some progress we've made towards our goal of moving to HTML5 video".

Last month, Netflix finally brought video streaming to the Samsung ARM Chromebook. I wondered if that might be the future for everything. Sure enough, Netflix confirms.

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Now here's a head-scratcher for your coffee break. Today, Google released a new tool that allows businesses to make Chrome their default while launching legacy browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer) for apps that need them. Strange thing: Chrome is outdated every 12 weeks.

As a marketing ploy to move IT organizations that have applications demanding some version of IE, Google exacts brilliance. But the Legacy Browser Support add-on defies one of the major reasons many businesses prefer Internet Explorer: Stable releases for long periods.

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"The era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments that IT will need to support", Van Baker, Gartner research vice president, says. The days of Windows as the applications and device hub are over.

The implications are huge for businesses, which must adapt to something else, too. While native mobile apps are all the rage today, their future is uncertain. Gartner forecasts that by 2016, more than half of those deployed will be hybrid, and that's good for any platform favoring HTML5, including Windows.

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Microsoft has updated Skype for Windows Phone 8, dropping the preview label associated with the app. Among the most noteworthy improvements, the stable version of the popular voice, video and text chatting application brings a change in message notifications and a number of bug fixes meant to improve the stability and overall functionality.

Skype for Windows Phone 8, which is now at version 2.5, introduces a new default setting for message notifications. After Microsoft announced that Messenger will be dropped and replaced with Skype, message notifications for Messenger friends are now enabled straight off the bat, likely to ensure a smooth transition to the new service.

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SugarSync, Inc has released SugarSync for iOS 4.0, a major new release for iPad and iPhone owners wishing access to their SugarSync cloud storage on the move. Version 4.0 features a major redesign designed to simplify syncing and sharing, plus integrates with other apps through the "Open in" feature.

The update also adds support for Device Filtering, a feature recently introduced in the SugarSync 2.0.9 desktop app for Windows and Mac, along with Cloud Search, and promises future support for folder labels.

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Google has changed many aspects of our mundane digital lives including how we search online, use an email service, communicate with folks around the world, and interact with our mobile devices. Now the company even wants to change how we talk about glasses.

Who could have imagined that in 2013 we would be discussing the hardware specifications of a pair of spectacles? Before Google Glass this was unimaginable, but as the search giant has just released the specs of its specs, things just got real. So what is the search giant's forthcoming device packing?

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Twenty-fourth in a series. Welcome to another greatest Windows 8 apps of the week. I'd like to use the introduction this week to address Windows Store issues that are getting out of hand. First, an increasing number of unofficial apps for popular services get released to Windows Store. You find Gmail, IMDB or Wikipedia apps that look and feel like official apps. The issue here is not trademark violations, at least not for end users, but potential security and privacy issues associated with those apps.

One of the apps, Gmail Touch, is no longer listed in the store. It is not clear if Microsoft, Google or another party is responsible for the removal of the app or why.

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ServicePower -- a mobile workforce management software provider -- is seeing more and more companies turning to a workforce model that relies on a mix of full-time employees, third-party contractors, and independent technicians being brought together and managed seamlessly in one place using the power of the cloud.

I chatted with Mark Duffin, CEO and president of ServicePower, about the changes he’s seen recently, the data his firm collects, and why cloud deployment has become so important to his company and its clients.

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They say nothing is certain but death and taxes. Google has experience avoiding the latter and wants you to plan for the former. While I can only assume that Google would prefer you stick around and use its services and click on the ads for as long as possible, the company has a Plan B. Despite the incredible attempts being made by both medical science and Ray Kurzweil, the search giant goes in another direction. Instead of memorializing you online as some sites allow you to plan for, Google prefers you simply plan what happens to your account when the Grim Reaper comes calling.

The company has released a new settings page so you choose what happens when your account becomes inactive. While Google will not actually come out and use the word "death", it certainly does an excellent job implying that this is what is meant -- perhaps the company did not consult with Mr. Kurzweil, its director of engineering and author of the book The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future.

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Microsoft announced GeoFlow at the SharePoint conference in November 2012 and today rolled out a public preview of the 3-D mashup that combines the Office spreadsheet app Excel with Bing maps to allow you to plot geographic and temporal data visually.

Microsoft Research claims that GeoFlow "enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through rich, 3-D data on a globe and fluid, cinematic guided tours—virtual cinematography moving through data". The app evolved out of the WorldWide Telescope project. "We built a gigantic virtual telescope, but to do so, we had to build an engine that could visualize the universe. If we can visualize the universe, we can visualize almost anything else", Microsoft Research principal researcher Curtis Wong explains.

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