Articles about Cloud

MobileMe's expected refresh was notably absent from Apple's event Wednesday announcing the debut of the iPad 2, however Cupertino may be working behind the scenes to make a revamp of the cloud service part of a larger push towards streaming content.

Sources have told Bloomberg that Apple is currently in negotiations with several record labels including Universal, Sony, Warner, and EMI with hopes that an agreement could be reached by midyear. Apple wants the labels to allow unlimited access to their content across multiple devices.

Continue reading →

Few people give a second thought to files and data stored in the cloud, but just like local data, it is important to backup online information. The recent problems suffered by Google Gmail highlights the importance of ensuring that your online data is safeguarded, and BackupGoo provides a quick and easy way to back up your Google account in its entirety.

After providing your Google username and password, the application is able to access your account and can then be used to download your emails, documents, calendars, contacts and more. If you do not use all of Google's services -- not everyone has a need for Google Docs, for instance -- you can select precisely what you would like to backup and where the files should be stored on your hard drive.

Continue reading →

My March started off badly today.

When I was a school kid in Maine, teachers said that if March roared in like a lion, meaning snowy stormy, it would go out like a lamb -- and vice versa. I got the storm in a faulty Snow Leopard rather than the Lion. This morning my 11.6-inch MacBook Air crashed and wouldn't reboot. If not for moving my computing life to the cloud, I would have lost an important day of productivity and lots of valuable data.

Continue reading →

Google said late Monday that it would have e-mail access restored to those who found themselves locked out of their accounts due to a glitch in a storage update applied to Gmail servers on Sunday. The company noticed the update was malfunctioning and pulled it before it could cause additional trouble.

As opposed to the .08% of all Gmail users affected, Google revised that number down to .02%. This translates to about 34,000 or so locked out of their accounts, versus the 136,000 originally thought to be affected.

Continue reading →

Google was still working to restore access to its Gmail e-mail service to a handful of customers on Monday, a day after an outage prevented a few users from accessing their e-mails. A message posted to the Google Apps status page at 10:40pm Eastern Sunday said engineers were "working to restore full access," and full access would be restored in the "near future."

No update had been provided as to if the issue had been fully resolved, although the company noted the issue affected only .08% of the total Gmail user base.

Continue reading →

Betanews welcomes reader contributions. Here, Eric Neumann responds to two February 21st posts by Joe Wilcox -- "iPad is not a PC" and "5 reasons Macs will never outsell PCs." If you would like to submit a post, please email joewilcox at gmail dot com.

Being a business IT professional, I have been watching with great interest and excitement the emergence of the iOS model of computing and cloud movements hitting the personal and now commercial computing worlds. However, I must add that initially I have also viewed these big changes with fear; as recently as 2006, my career was purely based on the SME IT status quo of on-premise Microsoft and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stacks.

Continue reading →

In the race to offer Microsoft Office functionality in the cloud, Google has beaten its rival getting a product out of development beta and into production release. Today Google announced global availability of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which went into beta late last year. The technology builds off Google acquisition of DocVerse.

Microsoft is working on its own solution, Office 365, which is beta testing and is expected to go v1 sometime this year. For now, Google can claim first to market advantage as it looks to convert more Office users to its cloud services. The cloud is increasingly important to Microsoft. Last year, COO Kevin Turner said that 70 percent of cloud wins are new customers.

Continue reading →

Who owns your mobile/online identity? Stated differently: Who owns your mobile relationships?

I've been thinking more about both questions since learning last night that Google is pulling Facebook contact sync with delivery of Android 2.3.3 to Nexus S smartphones. In a statement, a Google spokesperson described the feature removal as "special-case handling of Facebook contacts" for "Nexus S and future lead devices." Google's reasoning: Facebook doesn't allow exporting of contact data to other services. There is no "reciprocity." Maybe, but there is more going on here than the openness, or not, of contact syncing. Google is prepping for a larger battle, particularly with Facebook, over who controls your online identity, particularly as it roams from PC to mobile devices.

Continue reading →

One of Amazon's best values is its Prime service, which costs $79 a year. For that fee, buyers get free two-day shipping or overnight packages for $3.99 per item. Today, Amazon added something more: free streaming of 5,000 movies or TV shows. Or so the retailer claims. I only see 1,688 movies and 484 TV shows currently available on Amazon Instant Video.

Amazon offers a surpringly good selection, too; that is sure to give Netflix some unexpected and needed competition in the streaming market, and Prime is a better value. Netflix charges $7.99 per month (before taxes) for movie and TV show streaming, or minimum $95.88 a year. Not only does Prime cost less but it offers more in the aforementioned shipping costs -- and there's something else: Amazon allows the sharing of Prime among four accounts in the household. If, say, you're a college student with roomies sharing Primes, the value just got whole lots better.

Continue reading →

Well, that didn't take long. One day after Apple dropped its subscription plan bomb on suspicious publishers, Google officially countered with One Pass. Google strips out the onerous restrictions Apple imposes. It's a brilliant marketing response, and aptly timed with new Android tablets like the HTC Flyer, Motorola XOOM and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 going on sale within weeks. More significantly, the program isn't restricted to mobile devices. Can you say Internet?

Apple's subscription plan places many restrictions on publishers. Apple takes a 30-percent commission on all sales, requiring publishers to offer prices the same or lower in-app as elsewhere; that hugely limits promotions, for example. Apple's plan would prevent publishers from making in-app subscriptions free as a benefit to existing subscribers elsewhere (e.g., consumers pay more because of Apple policies). Publishers will likely loose access to vital customer data, since Apple is requiring an option that lets subscribers opt-in to this disclosure.

Continue reading →

It's safe to say that cloud computing can handle the extraordinary. The Internet as a storage medium has dozens of possibilities, and boundaries are constantly being pushed to link up the cloud to your desktop: get lightning fast protection against the latest threats (Panda Cloud AntiVirus), synchronise files and folders between multiple computers effortlessly (Windows Live Mesh or IDriveSync), collaborate remotely (TeamDrive) or just have quick and easy access to various cloud-based storage providers (Gladinet Cloud Desktop).

Sometimes though, you don't want to push boundaries. If you're the kind of person who likes to share files -- images, video or documents -- with friends, family or co-workers, then we have a cloud-based solution that is simple, neat and quick. There's nothing particularly revolutionary or sophisticated involved, just a neat, tidy and effortless solution. Say hello to CloudApp.

Continue reading →

I gave up on Internet Explorer way back at IE7. As a user interface developer, the CSS and JavaScript workarounds created way too much unnecessary work. So I turned my attention to the next best thing at that time, which was FireFox. It was the most standards-compliant browser on the market at that time. Its plugins (e.g., FireBug) made my work easier and much more enjoyable. So as I spent more time with it as a developer guess what happened? I also became a regular user.

The IE9 Release Candidate, which Microsoft posted today, may change all that again. IE9 is the first Microsoft browser in years that has me excited about UI development. Finally, I can see a future void of the many CSS hacks necessary to get a page to play nice with IE. There are five features in this release candidate I am excited about as a UI developer.

Continue reading →

Sparrow, the minimalist mail application for Mac, has left beta and been officially released through the Mac App Store for an introductory price of $9.99. It offers a streamlined user interface through a window that pops up from the program's Dock icon, cutting out the clutter and delivering an unfussed experience to collecting, reading and sending mail.

Version 1.0 currently only supports Gmail accounts -- support for other mobile providers, including Mobile Me, AOL and Yahoo!, along with general IMAP accounts is promised for version 1.1, which is about to undergo private beta testing.

Continue reading →

After much anticipation, the BBC has released a dedicated app for accessing its iPlayer service. A dedicated app has been promised for some time and the iPad version closely resembles the desktop version of the software. Using the BBC iPlayer app it is possible to access live television and radio broadcasts as well as programs from the last seven days.

Video quality is very high, and it is perhaps for this reason that BBC iPlayer can only be used over a WiFi connection. The lack of 3G support may also be down to the fact that there is not an iPhone version of the app available, but bearing in mind the file sizes involved, the connectivity issue may be a good thing for anyone using a limit data tariff.

Continue reading →

Especially in retrospect, Internet Explorer really did used to suck. Even though browsers were all about standards from the beginning, Microsoft used to think of it purely as a vehicle for pushing proprietary features. Not anymore. IE9 Release Candidate is available, today, and things really are different.

Microsoft's public relations and technical docs for IE9 are all about high performance, security and safety and a high level of standards compliance. It's too early to tell if it really is as good at these characteristics as they say it is, but they are at the very least saying the right things.

Continue reading →