Cloud

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?