Articles about Cloud

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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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.

Virtualization as a concept has become one of the most important technologies to come about in the modern PC era. The benefits are many: IT administrators love virtualization because it cuts down on administration and data center size and the bookkeepers approve of it as it cuts down on IT costs. Many businesses aren't taking advantage of its full benefits, however.

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Google+ has done in about three weeks what took Facebook years -- reach 20 million (presumably) active users.

In May 2006, Facebook opened to the public, already with about 6 million active users (mainly from schools). The service reached 20 million active users 11 months later. Google announced the G+ service -- invite-only during early testing phase -- on June 28. But those invites trickled out at first. Three weeks later, Google+ already had 20 million subscribers, or so claims Pluser Leon Håland.

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LifeSize, the enterprise video conferencing company Logitech acquired in 2009, has made three major announcements today: a big acquisition, a new service, and a new piece of hardware.

The Acquisition

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That's the question raised by Amazon's new Kindle Textbook Rental service, announced today. Amazon claims 80-percent savings when renting rather than buying. Would you go for it?

Amazon says it has "tens of thousands" of e-textbooks available to rent for initial 30 day-periods with extensions that could go as little as one day more up to a total of 360 days. The rental program is available for Kindle ereaders or any device capable of running the Kindle software, including Android handsets or tablets, iPad, iPhone, Macs or PCs.

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For the past few days I've been hanging out in Jackson Hole with a bunch of geeks and one thing I've noticed over and over is how boring Twitter has gotten when compared to Google+.

Why has Twitter turned boring?

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You could spend real money for virtual goods on the farm, or earn merit badges for being an informed citizen instead. For free.

Late yesterday, Google announced "News Badges" -- more than 500 of them -- for readers of Google News. I was feeling crappy yesterday (still am today -- and I'm not looking for sympathy badges), otherwise you would have read this story last night. Maybe. I kind of chuckled about the whole concept and joked with other Betanews writers about it.

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Now Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg should worry. Google+ is scarcely two weeks old and invite-only but growing like a weed. Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen (not to be confused with Microsoft's cofounder of the same name) estimates the 10 million-user number based on a cunning surname analysis.

I wouldn't be surprised at the 10 million number. Over the weekend, I saw a sudden and stunning surge in people following me who aren't early-adopter techies. Many are friends who didn't receive invitations from me, by the way. Sorry guys.

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Early this afternoon, I trucked over to the Google search page, saw the doodle above and wondered: "Who's birthday is it? Who is Google celebrating today?" Doodles are fairly common commemorating special days. It's my birthday. What a funny coincidence it seemed, but wasn't. The Google doodle is for me.

Have you seen a personalized doodle like this before for you? It's new to me, and I'm thinking it all has to do with Google+ and new user profiles associated with it. I've been logged into Google on other birthdays but never noticed the doodle in the past.

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I should have followed Vic Gundotra, Google senior vice president of engineering, sooner on G+. Otherwise I wouldn't have missed his post about yesterday's Google+ glitch. One of the servers supporting the service ran out of disk space! He apologies for the resulting "spam".

"For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications", Gundotra writes. "Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes. We didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have".

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This weekend, I am embarking on a bold experiment, replacing another one started in April. I attempted to go Google-free and, as explained a few days ago, failed. What's that cliché? If you can't beat them, join them. So now I'm going all Google, or as nearly as humanly possible.

The goal is simple: Replace the majority of digital lifestyle products and services I now use with those provided by Google or enabled by them. In process, I'll be looking to answer a simple question: What is the Google lifestyle? Timing is impeccable. Google is undergoing a massive makeover that probably isn't coincidental to cofounder Larry Page becoming CEO (again). That lifestyle is changing, too.

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Something startling happened today. Either someone in Apple's PR department royally screwed up, or the landscape of iOS device users is dramatically different than I or many other people thought.

Last month, during the event announcing iOS 5, Scott Forstall, Apple senior vice president of iOS software, said: "For our stores we have more than 225 million accounts, all with credit cards and one-click purchasing". Forstall also said that Apple had sold 200 million iOS devices.

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A personal experience of mine makes me wonder about Google Apps and Google's ability to support it properly. I try to minimize complaining about my own vendors, but this incident was handled badly.

I had to pull rank to get an answer.

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"Modern" is not a word I would have ever used to describe how YouTube looks. The user interface remains dated, even after several refinements. But that may change, and quite dramatically. Google is in process of changing YouTube's look and feel in startling and refreshing ways. How this new experience comes to market depends in part on how users respond to it.

Today, as part of the ongoing TestTube project, Google opened "Cosmic Panda", which is described as "a new experimental experience for videos, playlists and channels". Hot damn, this thing is smokin'! My initial reaction is simply "Wow!"

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