Articles about Cloud

Microsoft has announced the availability of a SkyDrive app for Xbox 360 consoles, giving users the ability to display content stored in the cloud service on any connected TV or monitor.

The Xbox 360 is designed as a content consuming device, and the SkyDrive experience on the console reflects this. According to the software giant, the app focuses on photo and video sharing, as well as playing slide shows, with no mention of productivity. It's fair to assume that Microsoft plans to keep the content editing features for newer devices running Windows Phone or Windows 8/RT.

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Sixth in a series. Every seven days we look at some of the best new app releases for Windows 8. This week's releases include Amazon and Nascar official applications, as well as a selection of mostly media-orientated offerings.

Microsoft has added a top-paid category to select localized stores that displays top-rated paid applications. It is likely that this will be rolled out eventually to all stores.

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Business plans and marketing plans present a unique challenge because they contain both qualitative and quantitative data that mingle in the same document. Unlike a spreadsheet, where different cells can be set up to affect each other, a business plan's text summaries of numerical data often have to be updated by hand whenever figures are changed. It can be quite a time-consuming process, and small business owners often do not have the time nor the financial resources to devote to this task. This is why Enloop exists.

Enloop offers, to use the silly "aaS" nomenclature, Business Plans-as-a-Service. It has different subscription tiers ranging from free to $39.99 per month which give its users access to its exclusive business plan creation technologies.

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Google has announced that one of its cloud-based services, Apps for Business, will no longer offer a free tier. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search leader now asks customers to pay a yearly fee for the service, which includes Google's popular Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Calendar specially designed for private enterprise deployment.

Citing growing business needs, such as requests for "24/7 customer support and larger inboxes", Google considers the premium Apps for Business version is a better option, and as a result eliminated the free variant from its portfolio.

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On Thursday, Google senior vice president Vic Gundotra announced the launch of Google+ Communities, a new feature which allows users to join and create interest groups on Google's social network.

Google+ Communities rolls out today and in typical social networking fashion, it will allow both private and public membership options. Users will be able to plan events, start hangouts and share Web content with fellow community members. Categories have been implemented to improve navigability and searchability.

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At face value, Podio is a very tough product to describe. Parent company, Citrix, describes it as an "online work platform", which tends to be fairly accurate, but is a definite understatement. Podio has the social likeness of Google+ or Facebook, but don't think Yammer here (Podio politely offers sociability -- it doesn't force it down your throat.) Podio leverages a powerful cloud-based CRM platform that is highly customizable, a la Salesforce. Yet it also happens to integrate useful tabular functionality and spreadsheet importing/exporting to and from Excel. So what the heck exactly is Podio?

After one month of living personally and professionally on Podio, one thing I can say is I know what it isn't. It's not a platform for those looking for a simple cookie cutter solution to a single problem. The product is targeted towards companies small and large willing to invest a little time to get a lot in return. That return, more specifically, is functionality and flexibility. Podio tosses out the "800 pound gorilla" approach to software and instead offers a different perspective: you build it, and they will come.

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Can Google get further into the business world by combining Apps and the popular Play store? We are about to find out because the company has announced just that approach. Google has been making inroads for sometime now with the information technology crowd thanks to its Apps offering and, with some high profile conquests in the corporate and government realm, has made real progress against Microsoft and the powerful Office 365 offering. Now Google is taking a mobile approach in hopes of getting even more attention from big business.

In this case the search giant is looking to its growing Android success and the attached Play store to get a better foothold. The company has announced a new "Private Channel"  for the Play store that will allow for the distribution of internal mobile apps.

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Do you remember Napster? Not the paid streaming music service sold last year to Rhapsody, but the original peer-to-peer music sharing service that was hugely popular from 1999-2001 when it went down in a legal ball of flames over copyright infringement. Well something Napster-like is emerging from Amoeba Music, the huge pre-owned music and video stores in Berkeley, San Francisco and Los Angeles and some musicians and vinyl junkies are up in arms about it, though I can’t understand why.

Napster was a peer-to-peer service that allowed people to share their music collections online. Amoeba's Vinyl Vaults service is similar in that the company rips tracks from old records as they come into the stores then throws them up on a webpage where they can be downloaded, but not for free. Amoeba charges money.

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Bitdefender has released 60-Second Virus Scanner, a cloud-based malware hunter which aims to provide an extra layer of security protection for your PC.

And at first glance this seems to work well. Installation is speedy; there were no conflicts with existing security software in our first tests; and the program really did complete its scan in only 60 seconds.

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Nexus devices are largely sold out this holiday season. Supply can't meet demand, particularly the new smartphone. But one Google gadget is missing altogether, pulled before official sales started. I've got Nexus Q, and you should be able to have one, too. The entertainment device is quirky, but I like it. Surely there is stock sitting around in some warehouse somewhere. Sell it out, Google. Give geeks something else to clamor for and recover some of the development and manufacturing costs.

The sphere-shaped device is a remarkable product, and changes fundamental concepts about digitally-delivered entertainment. Users stream music or movies from the cloud, using Android smartphone or tablet as remote control. The approach solves a fundamental end-user problem with digital content: Simple sharing.

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Well, the Apple-copycats are at it again. The iPad and iPhone creator made something of holding specialized media events, and generating lots of buzz and rumors around them. Perhaps it's no coincidence that more tech companies follow Apple's lead, by suddenly announcing a media event, days ahead of time, with scant details. It's Adobe's turn. I just got an email about a December 11 virtual "Create Now Live" media event to "announce major updates to Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Photoshop".

Interested parties can sign up at Adobe's Facebook event page. The show starts at 1 pm EST next Tuesday. Forgive my poo pooing Adobe, but I don't expect the kind of online rumor chatter Apple gets. That said, given recent tablet app updates and Creative Cloud opened for business more than half a year ago, time is right for something from Adobe.

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When you need to know more about the websites someone is visiting (you want to make sure your kids haven’t been straying on the darker side of the web, say) then checking their cookies has always been one option. But the information you’ll get is often very limited, maybe just to a domain name, and so won’t always be particularly useful.

Google Analytics Cookie Cruncher may be able to help, though, by focusing on Google Analytics cookies. These contain much more data, and in a standard format, so with just a little work you may be able to see the sites someone has browsed, the search keywords used to locate them, the date and time of the last two visits, and the number of times a site has been visited in total.

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Microsoft would like everyone on the planet to adopt Office 365 and in doing so, move to subscription pricing. Customers get access to their stuff anytime, anywhere and on anything, while Microsoft sees consistent revenue stream and everyone using the newest features. But that's not happening soon. So for the majority of businesses presumably continuing with what the company describes as "on-premises versions", Office 2013 desktop and server software is now available for purchase.

Office 2013, Exchange Server 2013, Lync Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, Project 2013 and Visio 2013 are immediately available to volume-license subscribers. Everyone else must wait. "Broad availability of the new Office through retail and online channels is planned for the first quarter of 2013", Microsoft's Sanjay Manchanda says. The company released a trial version to MSDN and TechNet subscribers.

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The iPad's flagship newspaper is finished. Today News Corp. promised what some of us in the media long hoped for. Big boss Rupert Murdoch will take The Daily out back of the barn and shoot it in the head on December 15, putting the godawful digital rag, its editors and the few readers out of their misery. Thus ends the iPad's big, publishing experiment. In ruins.

What a mess it is, too. News Corp. spent $30 million just to launch The Daily, which debuted in February 2011 on iPad. Apple joined the revelry that made the then less-than-year-old device seemingly legitimate -- a truly compelling platform for digital publishing. But News Corp's. digital newspaper stumbled right at the start. Early users complained about constant crashes and slow updates. The Daily promised ongoing content updates to the app, but they proved to be too much -- even after new versions released. Fundamentally, however, The Daily's failure is about editorial content.

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If you live in the Dublin area, or are looking to move there, cloud storage service Dropbox may have a job for you. This morning the company announced it will be opening its first foreign office and has chosen Dublin, Ireland as the location. Until now, despite having customers in more than 200 different countries, the company's operations were all handled via its offices in San Francisco.

Aside from the obvious job creation benefits, Mitra Lohrasbpour writes that there will be numerous upsides for customers as well, including user support in more languages and extended hours of support for Dropbox for Teams.

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