Cloud

The launch of the iPhone 5, and the fuss that’s being made over it (wow, 2 million sales in 24 hours) shows once again how far IT is embedded in every part of our lives. How lost would we be without any of the electronic kit and systems we so depend on? Even your toaster likely has a microprocessor embedded in it. And all of that makes us very vulnerable in ways that were almost totally unknown to our grandfathers. It’s not the natural world that has changed. It’s us.

You may remember that a few weeks ago there were widely publicized warnings of a solar storm which, in the end, had limited effects. And no doubt this caused many people to think that solar storms are never what you might call a real and serious problem. But consider this: 153 years ago, beginning on August 28th 1859, a super space storm occurred of such proportions as to make Hurricane Katrina look like a minor inconvenience.

Last year Venkat Panchapakesan, Google Vice President of Engineering announced the company's plan to limit support to modern browsers across Google Apps. To support modern web apps, support for browsers not supporting technologies like HTML5 had to be discontinued. Examples given at that time included desktop notifications or drag-and-drop file uploading, which both require browsers supporting HTML5.

For that reason, Google made the decision to support only the current and previous major version of a web browser. When a new major version of a browser gets released, support for the third oldest version gets discontinued automatically.

From Justin Bieber to Selena Gomez, Rihanna to Barack Obama, just about everyone is using Instagram to share photos these days. And if you’d like to get a closer look at the contents of any particular account then all you need is a copy of the Free Instagram Downloader.

To get started, just click “Input User Name” and enter the user name of the account you’re interested in. If no-one comes to mind, try MTV, say, or perhaps TaylorSwift.

I understand companies need to refresh their identities from time to time. I have no problem with that. But I don’t get why any firm would want to swap a recognizable logo for a worse alternative. Microsoft did it last month, and now eBay has decided to follow suit and replace its jumbled multi-colored logo for a straighter, thinner version.

The new design, which is going to start appearing across the site this fall, is apparently intended to "reflect a dynamic future", but mostly succeeds in being blander, and more Google-like. And it’s possible that some people might not even notice it’s changed since the colors remain the same.

Apple is on my mind again, with the company hosting a big media event tomorrow presumably to unveil iPhone 5. I'm not seriously thinking about buying the smartphone, certainly not sight unseen. I'm super satisfied with Galaxy Nexus -- if not, I'd move to a LTE Android, perhaps HTC One X or Samsung Galaxy S III. Rather, iPhone 5 is good time to assess my personal Apple boycott, where I sold off all my fruit-logo gear in protest of patent bullying.

Until July, I was a long-time Apple user, starting with the December 1998 purchase of the original Bondi Blue iMac. Then about six months ago, Apple's persistent competition-by-litigation tactics finally made me mad. I also had grown sick of Apple media bias that borders on the insane. How crazy? Yesterday, Washington Post explained "How Apple’s iPhone 5 could singlehandedly rescue the US economy". Bad is worse -- today, extending this economic lift to US presidential elections, Nextgov (a product of the National Journal Group) asserts: "How the iPhone 5 could help re-elect Obama". These are people I really don't want to associate with. (Say doesn't the president use BlackBerry?)

As a long-time Windows user, as well as software developer, I have pondered about what would make Windows 8 and the new modern UI (aka. Metro) a success. Microsoft can spit and polish the operating system, but people will interact more with applications. As good as Windows 8 might be, it won't satisfy if the apps aren't good enough.

That's why I believe Microsoft needs to rethink Windows Store. One isn't enough for Windows 8. There needs to be a second Signature store that offers only the highest-quality apps, however few they be. I'll explain.

Microsoft's "Bing It On" marketing campaign is brilliantly conceived, but don't believe the results. The search comparisons leave out the most important piece of information: Location. Another: relationship. In my blind testing Google and Microsoft searches using Bing It On, the comparison is blind at worst, near-sighted at best.

Bing It On is something like the Coke-Pepsi taste tests from the 1970s. People try both without knowing which is which and say which they like better. Here they blind test Bing and Google, with results presented side-by-side, left and right. But because the tests are anonymous, identity and location are missing elements, or they are for me. Also, both services now offer social graph search, which also is missing when tabulating the comparison. But wait! What about news or image searches, which I often do? Blogs and other sources? It's this richness the comparison lacks, so the taste is bland not sweet. As such, I find the comparison to be fundamentally flawed.

If you had to name your favorite three search engines, which would they be? It is almost certain that Google would make the list, and that some Internet users may have trouble naming more than one or two as they rely solely on a single search engine for all of their searches.

Bing may be on that list, although it is less likely that people from outside the United States will name the search engine, as its localized results are not really on pair with its English results. Tech savvy users may name DuckDuckGo or Ixquick, two niche search engines that promise better privacy and unfiltered results that do not put users into a filter bubble. Regional search engines, Chinese Baidu for instance, may also be added to the list by people from those regions.

Consumer and enterprise cloud storage company Pogoplug on Thursday announced it has integrated Amazon Glacier long-term archival storage into the Pogoplug service. In its usual fashion, Pogoplug mirrors content from your local drives in the cloud and makes them accessible through a Web interface and mobile apps. Now, with Glacier integration, PogoPlug can also back content up to cold storage at the same time.

This announcement comes just two weeks after Amazon Web Services announced Glacier, making Pogoplug the first consumer cloud service to integrate with Amazon's new offering.

I’m a big fan of SharePoint. I’ve worked with it for years, right back to SharePoint 2001. It does a lot of things very very well (Since you ask -- document management, collaborative working, and increasingly social networking functionality). However, SharePoint also does lots of things, its feature set is simply huge. Not all of these features are as mature as others, and as a result it is easy for SharePoint systems to end up feeling a bit mixed and matched. Some things work well, some less so, and some should have been avoided altogether.

It is often as important to know what not to do with SharePoint, as it is to know what to do. So, with that in mind, here are 3 things you should avoid with SharePoint:

To celebrate Chrome's fourth-anniversary -- well, in beta -- we're asking readers if and why they use Google's browser. The search and information giant released the first public test build, for Windows, on Sept. 1, 2008, with the one-oh release following just three months later. For a company renown for perpetual betas (wasn't it five years for Gmail), the rapid push to release build was uncharacteristic -- and foreshadowing. As Martin Brinkmann explains, Google set a rapid-release cycle -- new versions about every six weeks -- that transformed web browser development.

Yesterday, Tim Conneally told his personal story about using Chrome, starting from the beta. I would like to hear your story, too. You can comment to this post, or, better, email me -- joe at betanews.com. I'd like more than a comment, but your story to which we can put your byline, bio and photo.

iPhone, iPod and iPad users who take advantage of the streaming capabilities the BBC’s iPlayer app now have a new feature to play with -- the ability to download programs and store them on your phone or tablet for up to a month. This is a move that will be welcomed by travellers as it opens up the chance of downloading a batch of programs at home over a Wi-Fi connection to avoid racking up expensive data usage bills while away from home.

There is promise of an Android version of the updated app in the pipeline, but for the time being this is something that can only be enjoyed by iOS users. The newly added offline mode is a great addition to the app, which had already been updated to allow for programs to be streamed over a data connections as well as when connected to Wi-Fi. While the change is undoubtedly beneficial, it does come with limitations.

Dropbox has announced a major update to its pre-release Experimental Edition backup and sync software. Dropbox Experimental Edition 1.5.27 has been rebuilt using Python 2.7 (the current stable build, Dropbox 1.4.17, is based on Python 2.5).

Dropbox describes the result as “a Dropbox client that is faster to run, and easier for us to develop new features”. By way of example, version 1.5.27 includes a number of major new features, largely aimed at OS X users.

Amazon Appstore, the retail giant's marketplace for Android applications, has finally opened for business in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, a whopping 17 months after it first launched in the US.

Jim Adkins, vice president of Amazon Appstore, says of the marketplace’s overseas expansion: "Customers in the US have purchased millions of apps, games, in-app items and subscriptions since the store launched last year, and we’ve received great feedback about discovery features like Free App of the Day. We evaluate and test games and apps before making them available in the Appstore so we ensure customers have a great experience with the games and apps they purchase. Amazon has spent years developing innovative features that help customers find and discover the products that are right for them and have applied that know-how to the Amazon Appstore. We’re delighted to extend that experience to our European customers".

Add this one to the Smart column. Earlier today, Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure Mobile Services, initially for Windows 8 apps, with support planned for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The concept is a natural extension of Azure as development platform. Hey, why should Microsoft let Amazon and Google build out the infrastructure enabling the cloud-connected device era to trample the PC?

For now, the new service is available in a "public preview", during which time the first 10 Windows 8 apps are free. Developers who don't have an Azure account can create a 90-day free trial one.