ReadWriteWeb

The problem with SaaS services being delivered from different clouds is that they may as well be from different worlds. Enterprise resource planning software from SAP catalogs human resources that also happen to be addressed by customer relationship management software from Salesforce.com. But their data was designed to be driven in their respective clouds.

It may be becoming a fact of everyday life that any problem created by virtue of a cloud-based service must be resolved by a cloud-based service. This is where Informatica steps in, offering integration as a service (though thankfully without yet another "-aaS"). Today, the company announced the full availability of its winter 2012 release of Cloud Connection services for Salesforce, SAP, Oracle EBS, and other products, as part of its ongoing evolution of Informatica Cloud.

Dropbox, the online file sync and sharing service, was recently named 5th in a list of the The World's Most Valuable Startups by Business Insider. To put that in context, the only 4 companies ranked above Dropbox were (in order of valuation): Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter. Dropbox was listed above the likes of Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hulu and Tumblr. Business Insider estimated the value of Dropbox at $4 billion, based on its latest funding round at the end of August.

But let's face it, this valuation of Dropbox cannot be relied on. That $4 billion is mostly derived from fat cat VCs competing for a hot deal. It's far more important to ask: who is using Dropbox currently and is there anything in the use cases that justifies such a high valuation? So I asked the tech-savvy RWW community just that.

The current Internet era is characterized by multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets, Internet TVs, netbooks, laptops, and of course the good old PC. One of the key services needed in this multi-device online world is reliable synchronization. Yet faulty or not-quite-optimal sync is one of the problems I experience the most these days.

Just before I started writing this, I was attempting to sync data from the online note-taking app Evernote. I had made some notes on my iPad Evernote app while in a cafe, where I didn't have Internet connectivity (I'm a premium subscriber to Evernote, so I have offline access to my data). When I attempted to sync up that content to my Evernote desktop app in my home office, it didn't immediately update. I refreshed... then again... no sync. Perplexed, I moved onto another activity and then checked again 5 minutes later. By then the changes had synced up, but the delay was disconcerting.

Users of desktop-to-cloud synchronization service Nomadesk can now edit files in the cloud with Zoho. Nomadesk users can right-click on a document, spreadsheet or presentation on the web-based Nomadesk dashboard and click "edit" to open the file in Zoho. Changes are then synchronized to the user's desktop.

The developer's version of the Google Chrome Web browser was updated this week to include the ability to sync your extensions. The new feature joins Chrome's other sync options, in place for some time (Bookmarks, Preferences and Themes), to more fully round out the browser's synchronization platform.

Memeo, the company behind a host of backup, sharing and synchronization tools and mobile applications, has just launched Memeo Connect 2.0, an updated version of its earlier desktop-to-cloud synchronization service for Google Docs.

Like its progenitor, Memeo Connect still offers drag-and-drop uploads, but in the latest release, the application's operating system integration has been dramatically improved. Most notably, your Google Docs folder now appears as a virtual drive that Memeo labels "GDrive", and, according to company representatives, the name is being used with Google's blessing.

Fresh on the heels of Firefox's latest beta, Google has also just released a new beta build of their Chrome web browser. In addition to a number of speed improvements, the most exciting thing about today's beta release is the inclusion of the Google Chrome synchronization framework. Although still in development, this technology allows Chrome users to sync their browser bookmarks across multiple computers without having to manually recreate them on each machine used.

MySpace just announced that its users will now be able to sync their status updates with their Twitter feeds. MySpace users will be able to send their status updates on MySpace directly to Twitter and will also be able to import their Twitter updates to their MySpace feeds. This is currently just a beta product, but MySpace will roll this service out globally over the coming weeks.

Within the next two weeks, Google will release a new development version of Google Chrome that will include the ability to sync bookmarks between different computers. As Tim Steele, a software engineer on the Chrome team explained in a message to the Chrome developer group, the synchronization will be managed through a Google account. Changes in one install will be reflected in another Chrome instance in real time thanks to the Chrome team's use of the Google Talk servers as the messaging backend for this service.

In order to compete with the iPhone, you not only have to have a multi-touch interface and a slew of apps, you also have to offer the music and media that the iPhone provides thanks to its ability to sync with iTunes. For Google's Android mobile OS, the music comes courtesy of Amazon's MP3 Store which is preloaded on G1 phones. But more recently, Palm seemingly trumped Android when they revealed how their new Pre smartphone would bring music to the device: it pretends to be an iPod. Apple surely couldn't have been happy about that news and today, they're letting the world know. The Cupertino-based company has just issued a thinly veiled threat to owners of "unsupported third-party digital media players," stating that the players may not work with newer versions of iTunes. Yep, Palm Pre, they're looking at you.