Articles about Cloud

Smartphone operating systems and their related app stores effectively cut the mobile network operator out of the value chain, but mobile browsers are giving carriers a foot in the door.

Mobile carriers continue to attempt their own branded app stores to break into the app store goldrush. Just today, Japanese network operator NEC Biglobe launched Andronavi in the United States, saying that it's a better app store than Google's Android Market because it provides reviews and detailed information specifically from the Japanese audience.

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So, you thought Apple's 10 billion application downloads was a big number? Gartner says mobile users will download 17.7 billion applications from mobile app stores this year, a 117 percent year-over-year increase. Get this: 185 billion mobile apps downloaded from app stores by 2014. You believe that? I sure as hell don't. The mobile market is yet too volatile to forecast anything, but these analysts keep trying and keep changing their predictions every couple of months. Surely the "psychic reader" down the street could do no worse and charge much less money doing so.

I nitpick because, despite mobile apps early gains, the browser may yet prove to be the better way to consume mobile applications than specialized ones downloaded from app stores. Search as a utility looks to be the killer app for mobile devices, in part because of how differently people use cell phones than, say, PCs. The person who might spend hours in front of a PC, spends seconds or minutes at a time on a smartphone (though many more interactions). Phone behavior is more contextual and personal, where utility, such as finding the nearest Starbucks or playing Angry Birds while waiting for the bus, matters more.

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Amazon on Tuesday debuted a new bulk e-mail solution for businesses and developers as part of its web services offering. According to the company, Amazon SES is intended to take out the complexity of sending large amounts of e-mail for smaller businesses while ensuring delivery in a timely manner.

Users would receive their first gigabyte of data transfer at no charge, and would be free to those who use Amazon Web Service's EC2 cloud or Elastic Beanstalk application-management service as long as it falls within their bandwidth allocations. 2,000 e-mails per day would be covered under the free plan.

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Google on Tuesday announced that existing Google Voice users can port their phone numbers over to the Google Voice service for a one-time fee of $20. Previously, users could only be assigned new numbers for the service, and not bring their existing number with them like they can between telephone companies.

"One of the most frequent requests we hear from people who use (or want to use) Google Voice is that they'd like to get all of Google Voice's features without having to give up their long-time phone numbers," said Google Software Engineer Robert Dong in the Google Voice blog today.

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What do CIOs care most about? Cloud computing, says Gartner. They see the cloud as opportunity to freeing up resources that will be reinvested in future growth. Gartner released the findings of its 2011 CIO Agenda survey on Friday.

According to Gartner, the typical IT organization invests two-thirds of its budget to daily operations. Moving to the cloud will fee up between 35 percent to a whopping 50 percent of operational and infrastructure resources for reallocation elsewhere.

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Monday, Google announced it will be rolling out its "Cloud Print" mobile Gmail feature over the next few days to U.S. users. Cloud Print lets users pair their Google ID with various printers, and then send print jobs from anywhere the user has a connection.

In mobile Gmail's options menu, there is now a button simply marked "print" which lets the user send a print job to his Cloud Print tray from his Android or iOS mobile device. From here, the user can select the destination printer and begin printing the contents of selected emails, and .pdf or .doc attachments. This is an incredibly useful feature, as it eliminates the need for printer drivers for mobile devices.

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I don't know how I missed this one: Google has taken iframe embedding out of beta and quietly made it the default choice. I noticed yesterday, when looking to embed a video here at Betanews. The default had been Adobe Flash with iframe embedding optional and labeled beta; where iframe was placed in the embed options there now is "use old embed code," meaning Flash. I've been embedding with the iframe code for months so Betanews readers using iPads or smartphones could watch embedded YouTube videos. Based on forum chatter, Google made the change as recently as four days ago.

Technically, the player isn't Flash-free. It's more like Flash is no longer required. Videos can stream in Flash or HTML5 video depending on the player detected. For reasons that don't make much sense from a consumer experience perspective, YouTube videos using the new embed code won't play on Safari without Flash installed (presumably other browsers, but I haven't yet tested). YouTube detects the browser and presents notice that Flash is necessary to play the video. It's not. YouTube is blocking HTML5 streamed content. Changing the browser's identification to "Mobile Safari -- iPad" solves the problem. But why is that necessary?

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The Web apps that are easiest to find happen to be the ones that duplicate the functionality of software packed into operating systems (clock, calculator, notepad, etc.), so they really don't have much to offer users in terms of value. But there are actually quite a few Web apps that approximate the functionality of some of the most-purchased third-party desktop software, and are free, to boot.

Here, we take a look at the Web's best alternatives to the most popular boxed software on Amazon.com.

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Microsoft announced the worldwide availability of its Dynamics CRM Online on Monday. The software is the cloud-based version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and will be released globally both in on-premises and partner-hosted versions on February 28.

Dynamics CRM Online first launched in 2008 (after shedding its original "Live" moniker) to compete in the burgeoning business of cloud-based Customer Relationship Management software where Salesforce and Oracle also sought to establish dominance.

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In what could be viewed as a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Google on Friday announced that it had modified its Google Apps service agreements to promise users 99.9 percent uptime. In addition, it removed wording that accounted for planned or scheduled downtime as part of the service reliability promise.

"Unlike most providers, we don't plan for our users to be down, even when we're upgrading our services or maintaining our systems," Enterprise Product Management Director Matthew Glotzbach said. He said Google would be the first company to eliminate maintenance window clauses from its service contracts.

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Would someone please stop the "Twilight Zone" music from playing. I'm hearing it now following today's Google bombshell (Yes, there is other news besides Verizon iPhone): Chrome will soon no longer support the H.264 codec. Google supports Flash Video, but Apple has abandoned it. Apple supports H.264, and Google is giving it up. Someone pinch me when there is something resembling sanity among these companies' positions. Perhaps Firefox can save us all and our online video streaming. No, wait! Mozilla also spurns H.264. Well, gulp, Internet Explorer anyone?

Apple's Flash abandonment is nutty enough, at least in the here and now, given how widely Adobe's technology is used on the Web. H.264 also is pervasive, making Google's plan as out of touch, from a user experience perspective. Then there is Google's support for Flash to consider. Am I missing something or isn't H.264 a primary Flash codec?

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Wavy Gravy famously used to say, "We are all bozos on the bus, so we might as well enjoy the ride," meaning none of us really knows what we're doing. We do the best we can, try to look cool and hope nobody notices when we screw up, when it'd be so much easier to simply admit we're all just trying to figure it out, and let our mistakes hang out for all to see, so others don't have to make the same mistakes. You've got to take chances, and that's what I've done by moving from the safety and familiarity of the desktop to the cloud.

Let me start by letting you know I'm a total bozo when it comes to this cloud thing. I think we all are. It's so new, nobody really knows how to do it all right, and many people are afraid to try. Will their stuff be safe? What if there is no Internet connection? So I'm putting on my red rubber nose and diving into the cloud for everyone to see -- hope you enjoy the ride.

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Settling into the cloud is taking longer than I expected, as I try to root out enough applications to make up for what I used locally on my last laptop -- the 11.6-inch MacBook Air. The simple reality: There aren't enough good applications yet, or perhaps I'm just too slow finding them. Strangely, if I were living in a different cloud -- from smartphone or tablet -- I could choose from plenty of apps and many of them would be better than those available on the PC (the difference, of course, being something running locally and connected versus something running in the browser that must be connected).

I got a stronger-bitter sweet taste of the difference between the clouds on the evening of Day 5, when I bought the Nexus S smartphone running Gingerbread (aka Android 2.3) from the local Best Buy Mobile.

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Wednesday, the mapping component of Microsoft's search engine Bing got another significant UX upgrade and new features for both the desktop and mobile versions of the service.

Last August, a new style of the Bing Maps was unveiled, which focused on providing a cleaner visual experience for users. Today, that new style has been updated even further with subtle changes to color contrast and brightness, as well as to the density of information and size of text to help in overall legibility and usability.

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Though it is primarily known as a social networking site, Facebook is actually one of the top destinations for photo sharing, and a new user profile design change unveiled Monday ups the visibility of Facebook photos and encourages users to share personal information in a more visual way.

Two years ago, Facebook came forward with some staggering figures about the photo sharing taking place on its sites, which amounted to between 2-3 Terabytes of photos being updated daily with a peak of 300,000 images per second. Facebook would serve about 15 billion photos, and the storage dedicated just to photography amounted to more than a petabyte.

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