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Quanp, a new service from office electronics company Ricoh, has just launched a beta of their online storage system which offers an interesting twist to the usual backup services: a visual search tool that displays your data in 3D. The 3D viewer is actually a desktop application designed for Windows PCs, but Mac users aren't entirely out of luck - there is an online version of the service, too.

Collaboration tools and online storage applications offer many possibilities: online collaborative editing, synchronizing across computers, sharing multiple files and discussion boards, and sharing windows and documents on the spot, to name a few. The following review of major products in this space will help you choose the right collaboration tools for your needs.

Almost every piece of information we access today is stored somewhere in digital form--think iPod, YouTube, digital cameras, mobile phones, not to mention our personal and professional information spread across LinkedIn, social networking sites and blogs. It's difficult to imagine life without digital data in this information age. But who manages it? And, more importantly, who will preserve it?

In this month's edition of Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, Dr. Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, discusses the "data deluge" and offers a guide on how to manage and preserve your digital information.

If you have been on the Internet for long enough, you will surely remember the old MP3.com, which was first geared towards independent musicians, but later also allowed you to listen to your own music collection online. Lala, which launched yesterday, features a similar concept. It is first and foremost a music store with a unique sales pitch: pay 10 cents for the right to listen to a song online and between 79 and 89 cents on top of that for the DRM-free MP3 file. For a lot of users, however, the fact that Lala also clones MP3.com's online music locker will be the real attraction of this service.

Being able to access your files from anywhere and from any computer is one of the great conveniences of the always-on Internet. Online file storage has been around for quite a while, but the latest generation of services are so cheap and easy to use that there is almost no reason not to back some of your files up into the cloud. Most online storage providers also give you the ability to then share these files with your friends and colleagues. We selected the services on this list because they have a good track record of keeping your data safe while providing you easy access to your files from wherever you are.

Wuala puts a new twist on cloud storage. While typical cloud storage services move your data onto servers managed by the provider, Wuala also uses disk space on other members' computers. Files are encrypted on the user's own machine and the chopped up into little pieces and uploaded to Wuala's servers, as well as numerous other users' computers (Wuala calls this 'social grid storage') to provide a redundant storage solution. Wuala's local client is written in Java and runs on OSX, Windows, and Linux.

Photoshop Express, Adobe's online photo-editing and storage platform, was temporarily closed late last week as they performed maintenance and added some new features. We now get to see what those features are. In addition to the new tools and abilities they added, one of the most notable additions is the new Adobe AIR-based app, the Photoshop Express Uploader, which allows for uploading photos from any internet-connected computer.

Last year, we told you about PutPlace, an online application designed to help you manage all your digital media. PutPlace isn't just your usual file backup service, though - it also provides web access to your files while allowing you to track where you've stored those files online. That's because in addition to setting up files and folders to be backed up, you can also add "web places" to the PutPlace service, which lets PutPlace track where your files are online at web storage sites like flickr, for example.

DivShare, an online service for storing and sharing video, photos, music and documents, has had a security breach. The company announced on its blog tonight that "a malicious user" had accessed its database, "which included user e-mail addresses and other basic profile information." The startup states that "no financial information has been accessed by any unauthorized parties." After the Omnidrive troubles, it's yet another reminder that storing your files on a startup's servers is risky business.

After being in development for months, Box.net has officially released the beta of their new collaboration functionality. With this new feature, any Box.net user can invite collaborators to any folder in their account. The collaboration feature is also fully compatible with all the OpenBox services, which extends online collaboration beyond just word processor documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, like Google Docs currently offers.