Articles about Cloud

Today, Microsoft dropped the other ball during the second big BUILD developer conference keynote. The company is releasing Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and Windows Server 8 Developer Preview. The software will be available for MSDN subscribers.

Yesterday, Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows & Windows Live division, formally unveiled Windows 8, which is available in a developer preview you can download now. Today, Jason Zander, vice president for the Visual Studio team, connected the dots to developing apps supporting Azure services also connected to Windows Phone 7.5. He created the Windows 8 Metro-style game pictured above.

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That's the takeaway from Gartner, which has released a forecast for Social CRM. While the market is expected to generate $1 billion in revenue next year, there are more than 100 vendors competing, the majority of which are unprofitable or take in less than $1 million. The market is growing, but it's too small for the number of participants. Social CRM accounts for just 5 percent of the total client-relationship management market.

The problem is customer adoption. "Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as a series of experiments and tactical purchases", Adam Sarner, Gartner research director, says in a statement. "Few have a social CRM strategy or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results. Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of applications for different purposes.

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One of the nice bonuses of the HP TouchPad is that it comes with a lifetime 50GB cloud storage account from Box for free. This is exactly ten times more storage than they offer standard users on their free tier.

With the sudden discontinuation of the TouchPad and the subsequent liquidation of all stock, this little bonus looks a lot sweeter, but we wondered if Box could pull out of the deal due to behind-the-scenes agreements and arrangements.

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It's a strange question given the alternatives, but it must be asked. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka reports $5/month for 50 songs will be the going rate for Research in Motion's rumored BlackBerry Music Service.

You can stop laughing now. Please. Someone will hear.

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Microsoft joins Amazon and other online services providers who have suffered cloud outages. I'm surprised. Sincerely.

I figured if any company could do the cloud right, it would be Microsoft -- right as in 365 days up time. Damn, if this was a leap year, that could be an excuse. :)

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I would have picked eBay. But according to ComScore, Amazon is leader, with 20.4 percent global Internet population reach in June -- 16.2 percent for eBay. The analyst group lumps together auctions and retail, so looked at that way it's not surprising. What perhaps is unexpected -- Apple ranks fourth -- 9.7 percent share, with 135 million unique visitors.

Auction sites had 1.39 billion unique visitors, 282 million of them to Amazon and 223.5 million from eBay.

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Web-based file storage and content sharing service Box.net on Thursday unveiled three new apps for the tablet world: one for Android Honeycomb, one for BlackBerry PlayBook, and one for HTML5-compatible browsers. These new products bring Box to essentially all mobile platforms in some way and round out its app offerings which already included iOS, Android, and WebOS.

Like Amazon has done with its Kindle e-book platform, Box is attempting to attain what it calls "mobile ubiquity," or a meaningful presence on any mobile device that comes along, irrespective of platform.

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Well, so much for Facebook's 750 million active users as a competitive advantage.

IDC's quarterly survey of mobile developers couldn't have come at a better time for Google, soon after its Plus service opened on an invite-only beta basis. Developers -- 2,012 surveyed from July 20-22 -- are enthusiastic about Google+. "Two-thirds of respondents believe that Google can catch up to Facebook in social with Google+", according to the report.

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Sync is the killer application for the connected world, an assertion I've been making for about six years now. With iCloud, Apple has the chance to catch up sync ground lost after becoming an early leader and falling away.

Late yesterday, iCloud launched in beta to developers. The service is slated to release this autumn, presumably concurrent with iPhone 5 and iOS 5.

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Are you a Small Business Owner? Are you looking to Improve Responsiveness while Reducing Costs? Dell can help!

By incorporating server management, disaster recovery and storage provisioning, Dell drives complexity out of virtualization with business-ready configurations with Intel Technology. Learn more here: http://content.dell.com/us/en/business/smb-by-technology-virtualization.aspx?dgc=BA&cid=69785&lid=1768606

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Editor's note: This article was commissioned by Dell. To learn more about Dell's solutions for improving responsiveness while reducing costs with virtualization, please visit Dell's site by clicking here.

As hardware power increased over the years IT pros used to wonder about what we'd do with all that capacity, but no longer. Virtualization has enabled everyone, from SMBs to enterprise IT, to get better utilization out of their hardware and make management easier too.

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Would you like to take advantage of Google's worldwide network of fast proxy servers, not to mention their coding expertise? Now you can, and for free, just by signing up for a service of theirs.

Two years ago Google released the Page Speed Browser Extensions for Chrome and Firefox. These gave web developers performance analysis on their pages to help them optimize their sites based on a set of best practices developed by Google.

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Nielsen has a new study out looking at how Americans use Hulu and Netflix. What I found surprising -- 1 percent of the 12,000 respondents say they use Apple TV or Google TV to watch Hulu. The service isn't supported on either device, last time I checked. So who are these people?

Well, they could be bleeding edge consumers who have hacked the boxes. But I expect for the most part it's erroneous reporting. People don't always know what to answer or what they've got.

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This week, the two largest open-source browser developers are drawing more attention to HTML5, and what software developers and web designers can do with it. For Google, it's a delightful HTML5 showcase, while Mozilla will directly engage developers in a one-hour, live briefing. (Before, any commenters cry Apple foul, my measure of "largest" is market share -- there Chrome and Firefox lead Safari on personal computers.)

Mozilla has announced the participants, date and time for its first Ask MDN event, which will take place via Twitter.

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Cloud-based file sync and sharing solutions are not exactly thin on the ground, as any user of Wuala, AVG LiveKive, Dropbox, SugarSync and SpiderOak will tell you. That's why being able to stand out from the crowd is especially important in this cramped marketplace.

YouSendIt has carved a unique niche for itself by offering services you won't find in rival products, such as its "Send a file" service and options for annotating selected documents with text, images and even an electronically scrawled signature. Until recently, much of this functionality was restricted to your web browser, but YouSendIt has just released two new free apps for Windows and iPhone to accompany its existing YouSendIt Express application, which runs on both Windows and Mac.

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