Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

Cloud services are getting bigger and bigger, with media heavyweights like Amazon and Google throwing their versions into the competition. Although Google’s entry isn’t necessarily indicative of the next big thing — Buzz, anyone? — the cloud appears to be here to stay, mostly because of the safety it provides.

“The cloud has eliminated many of the worries about data integrity, security and availability,” said Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSPRING, a crowdsourcing marketplace. Kimbarovsky says cloud service providers “do a far better job protecting our data than we do in protecting our own data. Even the world’s most sophisticated companies would have difficulty matching the security, accuracy and availability provided by these top vendors.”

Whereas laptops can break down or get stolen, “most cloud providers have sophisticated data backups and redundancy in place,” said Frank Dale, president and CEO of Compendium, a cloud-based content marketing platform. “Solutions delivered through the cloud are updated automatically, so users always have the latest version.”

Read the full article on mediabistro.com to find out 3 more benefits of the cloud.

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SanDisk is best known for its flash storage hardware technology. The company is also interested in moving data between flash storage in Android devices and cloud services. SanDisk provides a free Android app to help with this kind of file movement.
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Image courtesy of Cloud Engines

I’ve long advocated storage solutions like Dropbox and Box.net for mobile users because of their low cost and ability to expand the amount of information one can access from mobile devices. Some people do not like the idea of storing their data on another company’s servers, and for those people Cloud Engines’ line of PogoPlug storage devices is an appealing alternative. Today Cloud Engines announced the PogoPlug Mobile, which is their newest personal cloud solution creates specifically for use with smartphones and tablets.
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Image courtesy of MacRumors

CNET and other sources report that Apple has signed deals with the four largest record companies that may include license to stream their music. They note that the service will start with a digital storage (locker) service and add streaming later.

Apple signs Universal Music to iCloud

That said, there are a lot of specifics that we do not know about: How much storage will be offered? What will it cost? What content can be stored? MacRumors notes a few pieces of pricing related information:

iCloud Free Trial, $25 Per Year, and Ads?

- A free trial will be offered to people who buy music from iTunes. This is the same strategy Amazon has applied to its CloudDrive service. Buying any album, including the 99 cent Lady Gaga MP3 album last week, gave the purchaser 20GB of storage for one year.

- The service will cost about $25 per year. However, no storage figure is associated with this price.

- Advertising will be involved with iCloud. There is no indication if this is in addition to the $25 annual fee or in place of it.

However, just as Google has had problems with its attempts to enter the Social Media arena, Apple’s Achiles Heel has been cloud services. Its Mobile Me offering is anemic at best (as was its predecessor .Mac). The iWorks.com beta to provide a cloud solution for its iWorks office suite is half-baked. And, getting data in and out of iPhones and iPads has essentially become the territory of services like Dropbox and SugarSync.

Will iCloud be the talk of the tech world next week because it is magical and revolutionary or because it is yet another Apple Cloud dud? We’ll find out in a few days.

In a recent article on the status of the could music battle between Amazon, Google and Apple, I tendered my opinion that victory wouldn’t be based on chronological order, but on a litany of factors. I also touched on the fact that Apple has a storied history of entering the market later than competitors with a superior product and almost immediately leaving said competitors to fight for a very distant second place. Well I’m not one who revels in saying ‘I told you so’ (that’s an absolute lie, I love it) but a recently unearthed patent application strongly suggests that Apple’s cloud-based music service could be a game changer.

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The Windows Azure Platform is part of Microsoft’s cloud strategy. It is similar to Amazon’s Web Services products to provide a virtual data center which includes everything from computational resources to database services to syncrhonization.

Microsoft announced toolkits to let mobile app developers access Azure platform resources. The toolkit is available for Apple iOS and Microsoft’s own Windows Phone now. The toolkit for Android will be released sometime during this summer.

Microsoft Announces Windows Azure Toolkits for iOS, Android and Windows Phone

Microsoft notes that online local-discount giant Groupon is already Windows Azure for their mobile solutions.

Video courtesy of microsoftlearning

Apple is reported to be in talks with record companies in a bid to ease out download restrictions on music from iTunes store. Currently when a user purchases a song, he is able to download it only once to his device. If Apple has its way, iTunes users will be able to download the songs that they have purchased multiple times and across multiple devices that they may own. This will relieve users from the mundane task of syncing music albums across different devices.

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Telecom giant Motorola is getting into the cloud storage game with the purchase of Y Combinator-backed cloud storage and cloud streaming company Zecter.

The three-and-a-half-year-old Zecter is best known for its ZumoDrive and ZumoCast services, which let users store and stream files to and from servers on the Internet, AKA “the cloud” of data.

Motorola did not say how much they paid for Zecter, but they bought the whole shebang; acquiring not only Zecter’s products, but also its founder David Zhao, who developed applications for Amazon.com before taking the startup plunge. It also mentioned that Zecter has around one million customers.

Motorola intends to integrate Zecter’s technology into its MOTOBLUR service, a user interface replacement for Android-based devices with a hefty social networking component. MOTOBLUR pushes notifications from various social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

“Consumers want seamless access to their content and media from wherever they are, while content providers want to ensure that content remains protected and secure,” said Motorola Mobility VP of software and services Christy Wyatt in a statement.

Motorola seems most interested in Zecter’s streaming technology. As part of the buyout, Motorola will be halting the distribution of ZumoCast software. Current ZumoCast users will be able to use the service as normal, but the company said that it would keep users informed about its “future plans” for the product. And almost as a footnote, Moto added that “The ZumoDrive solution will be unaffected.”

Drop.io is all about file-storage, sharing and making these easier tasks. Taking advantage of the cloud, Drop.io has build a new applet that makes it drop-dead simple to create a playlist that can be accessed via the web, anywhere and anytime. The new feature, rightly titled playlist.io, lets you take songs from your computer and add them to a playlist with a few clicks. This works with your iTunes songs as well.

Once you’ve created a playlist, you’re able to pull up your playlist.io on any computer or compatible mobile device that’s able to access the web. Music from existing Drop.io folders can also be added to your playlist, with drag-n-drop capabilities. As with anything sent to your Drop.io account, a playlist can be made private or can be shared with privacy settings.
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