The Wall Street Journal has revived rumors about Google launching a cloud storage service called Drive. The comparison everybody wants to make is to Dropbox. The thinking is that Google will challenge everyone's favorite start-up by releasing a native desktop and mobile Drive app with the same syncing features Dropbox users know and love.
Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they've always conformed to the understanding of "The Cloud" that has prevailed at the time. If it's not like Apple's iCloud, which is integrated into Apple's devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don't. There's room for a third, stand-out option here.
Former chief information officer of the United States Vivek Kundra is joining Salesforce as its executive vice president for emerging markets. Kundra, who was the first ever CIO of the U.S., left the position in the summer of 2011 to join Harvard's Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with a six-month fellowship. He joins Salesforce at a time when cloud computing is ready to be pushed across the world, a job he is specifically suited for.
Evernote has expanded its read-later browser extension, Clearly, to Firefox. The extension first launched on Chrome in November. Clearly slides in a cleaned-up view of Web articles without ads or navigation, making content more pleasant to read. It automatically turns multi-page articles to single pages.
It's also a content shifting tool. Clicking the Evernote elephant icon in the sidebar saves the cleaned up version to your Evernote account so it can be read on all devices. The article viewer also comes with three themes, and beyond that, all the fonts, colors and alignments can be customized.
Personal cloud storage is all the rage these days. Dropbox continues to be one of the most buzzed-about startups and its enterprise-focused counterpart Box is making moves toward the consumer market as well. For music files, Google, Amazon and Apple all offer cloud-based storage lockers and iOS allows syncing of other types of content via iCloud.
iPhone owners not satisfied with the available options now have a new one in Microsoft's SkyDrive, which launched its first iOS app today. The four-year-old service has been available to Windows users on the desktop and Windows Phone platform for some time. Today, it starts to branch out onto other platforms.
Personal cloud provider Box is updating its iPad and iPhone applications today with new capabilities that should help propel the company as one of the premier storage solutions for mobile devices. The iOS apps have an all-new code base that Box promises will make the apps faster, more stable and easier to navigate.
Evernote has announced two new apps to help you remember what you ate and the names of the people you are eating with, dubbed Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. The two new apps were released at LeWeb in Paris Wednesday morning. While neither of these new apps are incredibly original, both go to show that Evernote wants to become the destination for all the notes you ever want to take in your life, from a memorable meal to an interesting person. We explore Evernote Food and Hello below.
The media and news industry, after 10 years of disruption and economic torture, finally thought that it had gotten a step ahead. Publishers were in on the ground floor when the tablet revolution started with products ready to go even before Steve Jobs introduced us to the original iPad. The marriage of tablets to publishing would be a boon for everybody.
The honeymoon has not been sweet.
Publishers did not have the tools to create fully functional magazines from the very start. Sure, they were nice looking, but that was about it. Over the last two years, though, publishers and developers have created dynamic tools that allow the news media to create apps that do not just meet user expectations, but go beyond them.
A Boston-based company is creating a system to make the workforce more accountable and eliminate inefficiencies, starting with the restaurant industry. Objective Logistics works through a restaurant's point-of-sale system to create data points. These are fed into a cloud to make your waiter or waitress more accountable and make the restaurant more money.
Google Ventures thought it was a good idea. Along with Atlas Ventures, Objective Logistics raised a $1.5 million seed round this morning to further expand its reach and capabilities. The use-case scenarios are endless.
A few recent legal developments affecting U.S. online privacy have rightfully troubled privacy advocates and civil libertarians on American soil. In addition to the Patriot Act's relaxed regulation of law enforcement's access to private data, recent court rulings have made it clear that U.S. authorities can secretly request data from tech companies without the user ever knowing.
If this seems objectionable from the standpoint of U.S. citizens, imagine how it looks to outsiders who are storing their data there. Some European companies who do business with U.S. technology companies are concerned enough to start looking elsewhere for infrastructure.
The next version of Microsoft's still dominant PC operating system, Windows 8, "represents an incredible opportunity to bring the benefits of the personal cloud to billions of PC users." That's according to a blog post written by the Group Program Managers for SkyDrive, Microsoft's consumer cloud product.
When it was launched back in August 2007, SkyDrive was described as "a personal 'harddrive' on the internet". It's now a major player in the consumer cloud market, competing with other big guns like Apple's iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive. Also SkyDrive competes with innovative startups like Dropbox and SugarSync. The Microsoft blog post presents some statistics about the consumer cloud market, along with big claims for its future.
