For the most part, though, the outrage over the outages and downtimes suffered in cloud computing are overblown. Even when they last for hours, there are few cases where complete data loss has occurred (e.g. Google Docs comes back up, but your data store is wiped clean)...well, unless you count Ma.gnolia.

But Gladinet seems to tap into that primal fear that comes with the loss of control accompanying cloud computing; the fear that your precious data will one day be lost to the ether. O.K. sure, that's not all the software does. It also connects your computers together so you can share files, provides a platform for different cloud services to interact with each other, and provides tools for easily moving your local data to the cloud. Yet, out of all its features, the fact that you can keep PC and cloud in sync - with a local backup for safekeeping - is probably one of the service's biggest selling points.

Is that the future of cloud computing, though? A combined cloud/PC experience? Or will cloud computing eventually make our hard drives, filled with locally stored files, obsolete? With the rise of netbook computing and mobile computing, it seems that the transition has been directly influenced by the number of web/mobile apps that now replace what local software once provided.

So where does that leave a software program like Gladinet? Is it a useful platform for hybrid computing? Or just a transitional piece holding us over until the cloud is all we use?

Many people have made cases for Twitter as a tool for business. Here at ReadWriteWeb for example, we told you how Twitter can be used for journalism. We've posted about how companies were using Twitter for customer service and how PR professionals could use it for pitching purposes. The Twitter Fan Wiki is also keeping track of other Twitter usage cases that go beyond simply having conversations.

Despite this growing perception that Twitter can be actually be useful, we haven't seen business applications that make Twitter an essential part of their program...until now.

Project Management Via Twitter

The online project management system Joint Contact has just been updated to allow its members to Twitter their project statuses and other project-related messages - a task normally relegated to email. But email isn't always the right tool for the job - Twittering is faster, simpler, and thanks the the 140-character limit, the messages stay short and to the point. Twitter is also available on a number of devices from computers to PDAs, but unlike email, Twitter also works over SMS, so even those team members without a data plan on their phone can receive Twitter messages about the project when they're away from their computer.

In the Joint Contact online software, project members can post entries from discussion groups directly into Twitter - the subject line of a discussion group doubles as a tweet. Members can also update their work status via Twitter, too.

Twitter in Joint Contact

As far as the actual software itself, Joint Contact looks pretty standard. It allows you to manage tasks, documents, images, contact lists, online discussions, and team announcements in a way that's similar to how Basecamp works.

Twitter Replaces Email

What's most interesting about this recent update to Joint Contact is that it's a great example of how email can be replaced by social media tools. We know that the younger generation communicates via social media - most often on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook - often only using email to communicate with the "old people." We also discussed whether or not email was in danger not too long ago, and received a slew of comments debating this hot topic.

Whether or not you believe that email is danger, you have to admit, email is broken - our inboxes are so overloaded that a non-profit organization IORG has been recently been formed to research solutions to this problem. Well, here's one idea - replace email with other services (like Twitter) when possible to lighten the load on the inbox. For this innovative concept alone, we wish Joint Contact success.

Project Management in DreamFactory

With the availability of DreamFactory on QuickBase, the suite is now available on four different cloudware platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce App Exchange, WebEx, and now QuickBase. The company is now working on making DreamFactory available on Google App Engine, too.

Learning Iceberg is relatively easy - Byrne says "20 minutes and you can be a programmer" - I'd argue it's a bit more than that if you haven't ever been exposed to any programming concepts, but it's far from impossible. To get you started, there's a vast and well-documented training section available from Iceberg's web site, which includes free sample applications, step-by-step guides, screenshots, diagrams, videos, and more.

Build an App in 3 Minutes

As far as what you can build with Iceberg, it's really up to you. Although the focus is on business applications, like CRM or PM tools, you can interface with anything that offers up a web service. For enterprise environments, instead of using Iceberg as a service, I.T. departments can download and use Iceberg offline, behind the firewall, to work with their in-house servers, like Windows SQL server for example.

For companies making an investment in using Iceberg, the team will even go a step further than just providing the service, but will also work with the business to help them with the process of building and customizing their apps. Several of the companies out of the 2000 or so downloads Iceberg has had to date have had this type of assistance, including companies that have moved from Zoho's CRM to their own personalized version.

Today, Iceberg is revving up to a new version: Iceberg 2.1. In this latest iteration, there are new features like a getting started wizard that makes creating applications as simple as answering simple questions about their business needs. They've also added a bug tracker, a more flexible interface, and a new embed feature that lets you "mashup" snippets from any web site or widget right into your form or application.

Google Maps Mashed Up in Form

They've also introduced what they're calling their first "killer app," a project management application for any design/development agency. With this app, users can manage projects, get intelligent estimates based on history, interact with clients, view charts, and more. Unlike with Basecamp, for example, emails are built into the system, you can automatically track and refer to all the communication about the project with ease.

Email functionality in Iceberg's PM App

If you've already written off Iceberg as just another business/enterprise app and therefore not for you, then you're missing the bigger picture. Of course, Iceberg is offering tools for business - that's where the money is - but it's also offering tools for the everyman/novice programmer. Want to build the next great Twitter app?  You can use Iceberg for that...but you can also use it to build the next Twitter, too.

If you want to try Iceberg today, you can download it from this link here for a special deal. The download includes 5 licenses, but if you choose to tell your friends about Iceberg, then you can get access to 2 more free licenses, as will your friends.

Bergman begins by notating that Goodwill already has the only non-profit online auction site at ShopGoodwill.com, a site that provides another avenue to sell the organization's donated items, which fund its charitable works. The site, with 35,000 daily visitors, is a popular online destination for bargain hunters who are looking for alternatives to eBay.

Additionally, Goodwill has just launched, MyGoodwill, located at www.goodwill.org/group/my/home. This site is a new collaboration portal offering e-learning and best practices for Goodwill's employees and members of affiliate organizations worldwide. Using concepts and methodologies similar to social networks, Goodwill allows its MyGoodwill members to collaborate with communities of their peers in order gain access to specific knowledge and resources. The portal was created with open source software, a decision that Goodwill made based on the functionality, capability, and maturity of the open source model, but primarily, the cost savings it provided.

MyGoodwill Login Page

The public web site for Goodwill Industries also recently partnered with SpatialPoint to provide geo-spatial mapping capabilities to help visitors locate the nearest store and donation center. Powered by Google Maps, the store locator is available from locator.goodwill.org.

Internally, Goodwill is focused on "going green." They are looking into consolidation and virtualization technologies for their data center, but they are also focused on their new business unit that is dealing primarily with donated computer equipment. Goodwill receives tens of thousands of donated PCs, only some of which are worthy of reselling. For the rest, Goodwill is taking the computers through a de-manufacturing process, working with partners to make sure that the computers are either e-cycled or that they are broken down into components that can then be resold and reused.

With these latest offerings, specifically the online portal, Goodwill shows itself to be yet another example of how web technologies are finding their way into the enterprise. Instead of sneaking in web apps via the backdoor, Goodwill has chosen to control the type of interactions they want their employees to focus on via a portal whose primary focus is knowledge-sharing.

Bergman definitely sees the value in innovation, commenting, "Last year, Goodwill helped a million people find vocational services and get back into the workforce and technology was a major driver for that."

What's WorkLight?

The WorkLight software is a secure, scalable, server-based application that is what allows workers to view their enterprise data in any of a number of web applications and forms, both inside and outside the firewall.

The WorkLight server, which would run in the customer's own data center, previously only worked on Linux platforms, but a Windows version is now available. (Note: their web site has not yet been updated with this information.) The architecture used to build WorkLight is standard Java and a J2EE framework, so it can be deployed on any J2EE-compliant platform.

How It Works

To extract the data from the enterprise applications and/or other internal data sources, WorkLight uses application "adapters." These adapters can be for common interfaces, like SQL or web services, or can be designed for specific applications. The software comes with many standard application adapters "out of the box," but an included API allows for custom-built adapter creation. Once the adapters are connected to the data sources, configuration is done, programming-free, via XML documents.

The company's employees can then display the data through tools like RSS, web-based homepages, desktop gadgets, social bookmarks, application mashups, and more. In total, WorkLight works with fourteen consumer technologies: MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, Netvibes, Microsoft Live, Yahoo widgets, Apple Dashboard, Google Desktop, Windows Vista Sidebar, del.icio.us, RSS, Google Gears, and Adobe AIR.

WorkLight Gadget Accessing SAP Data

Solutions

The company, WorkLight, Inc., has developed four specific solutions using their WorkLight software:

• WorkLight for the Enterprise: This product is a scalable server-based application that can be customized for the business to deliver the enterprise data via tools like RSS, widgets, gadgets, personalized homepages, social bookmarking, and more.
• WorkLight for Retail Banks: Designed to allow retail banks to deliver personalized data to their customers, this product uses tools like RSS, widgets/gadgets, personalized homepages, and IM to communicate information like account balances and transactions to the bank's customers.
• WorkLight for SAP: Similar to WorkLight for the Enterprise, WorkLight for SAP lets employees perform SAP-related business tasks using the same types of tools as WorkLight Enterprise.
• WorkBook: This ingenious solution is a secure enterprise overlay for Facebook. This product combines Facebook's capabilities with the controls that need to be in place in a corporate environment. Employees can use WorkBook to find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share them with authorized colleagues, get updates on status changes, and get general company news. With the WorkBook overlay, there's no danger of information leaking outside the organization or access being granted to unauthorized personnel.

WorkLight's WorkBook application

So, It's Secure?

The WorkLight solution provides security functionality so the enterprise data stays safe. WorkLight securely integrates the data with web-based aggregators, so no data is being stored on 3rd party servers. SSL encryption is used while the data is in transit and several different authentication methods are supported, including HTTP basic, form-based, multi-factor, or the company's existing authentication schemes can be used, like single sign-on. The cached data on the WorkLight servers can be encrypted, if desired, and user requests for information are logged with time stamps, user info, and identifiers of the data accessed.

Conclusion

With WorkLight's customized tools, businesses could increase employee productivity since the staff would either already know how to use the social applications and tools or would be able to learn them quicker than the traditional enterprise applications. Companies that choose to embrace this growing trend will ultimately be one step ahead of their competitors. Says Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO, where WorkLight was on display in December of '07, "We are breaking away from putting technology at the center and we are putting people at the center who have the authority to influence technology." WorkLight is certainly proof of this new shift.

iPaper has been designed to be a new web-based document viewer that is "more like a YouTube video than it is like a PDF." Says Trip Adler, Scribd co-founder and CEO, "Documents formats like PDF and Doc were designed before the Web was as pervasive as it is today...In 2008, everything is online and most documents are created to be shared in some way over the Internet. We designed iPaper as an online standard that brings the best of existing formats straight into the browser."

The iPaper application, at only 100 KB, is 1/1000th the size of Adobe Acrobat Reader. The application supports Scribd's social features like emailing and embedding as well as a security system that allows content owners to protect their work without the use of DRM. Like PDFs, iPaper supports full text search, copy and paste, as well as zooming and various view modes.

iPaper Screenshot

Since the iPaper doesn't launch in a separate window, visitors stay on your web site. The format also offers some unique search engine optimization (SEO) features to increase the amount of traffic from Google and other search engines.

Beyond PDFs

However, iPaper isn't just a new way to view PDFs in a web browser. In addition to PDFs, the new format supports Microsoft Office documents, including Microsoft Word (.doc), Microsoft Excel (.xls), and Microsoft Powerpoint files (.ppt, .pps). Other supported files types are text (.txt), Adobe PostScript (.ps), OpenOffice Text Documents (.odt, .sxw), OpenOffice Presentations (.odp, .sxi), OpenOffice Spreadsheets (.ods, .sxc), OpenDocument formats, Rich Text (.rtf), JPEG images (.jpg, .jpeg), Portable Network Graphics (.png), and Graphic Image Format files (.gif).

Monetized Content

iPaper also allows content publishers to make money from their documents by the inclusion of contextually relevant ads. This optional feature uses ads that are powered by Google AdSense, making iPaper the first application to display AdSense in Flash. Unlike Adobe and Yahoo's recent move to put ads in PDFs, iPaper users don't need to have the latest version of Reader to see the ads - if the PDF is in iPaper format, the ads are there.

You can see an example of an iPaper with ads here.

Scribd Platform

Where Scribd.com allows anyone to publish to iPaper on the internet, the Scribd platform allows for the use of the iPaper format either internally or externally. There is an Scribd API for developers to use or non-programmers can use the provided embed code or take advantage of Scribd's new QuickSwitch tool.

The QuickSwitch tool lets anyone insert one line of code into a web page to convert every PDF on the site into an iPaper. To use QuickSwitch, you only need access to modify your HTML source code and a Scribd API account. You can then choose how the documents should be displayed: as fullscreen iPaper hosted on Scribd, as Scribd document page links, as embedded iPapers on the web page, or as a custom page with an embedded iPaper hosted on your site. Alternately, a Single Link Mode is available to allow Advanced Users to only convert a single document on the site into an iPaper.

Getting Started

If you already have a Scribd account, you can get started here, by signing in with your username and password. If you don't have a username and password, you can also sign up on that page for a Scribd API account.

PaaS?

You may have heard about SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), but what is PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)? According to David Mitchell, Founder and CTO at Bungee, cloud-based services like storage-as-a-service, CRM-as-a-service, and computing-as-a-Service are just the beginning of software and computing in the cloud. In order to be a true platform, all the systems and environments comprising the end-to-end lifecycle of developing, testing, deploying, and hosting web applications must be present. And when all of those items are present in the cloud, you have a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Bungee Connect

The Bungee Connect platform is Bungee Labs' implementation of this idea of cloud-based development. Unlike services that "dumb down" development so any user can build apps (think Yahoo Pipes, Popfly), Bungee Connect is meant for professional developers. The applications that Bungee Connect can be used to build are highly interactive, secure, and reliable desktop-like apps that can use multiple web services and databases in a single, on-demand environment.

Bungee Connect Builder Screenshot

Bungee apps can be embedded in other web applications and pages, SaaS solutions, or delivered as stand-alone web destinations. IT Managers can even securely web-enable their in-house apps on existing servers. An IT Manager who uses Bungee to bring an in-house web app to their mobile users only needs http/https enabled in their firewall, nothing more, and the only connection is to the Bungee Grid itself, not each and every end user.

Why Use Bungee's PaaS?

Since Bungee Connect is an end-to-end service, applications aren't built in one environment and deployed in another. Instead developing, debugging, testing, and deploying all occurs within the same environment, making application development faster...much faster.

WideLens

Bungee claims that their service can reduce time-to-market by as much as 80%. As a test, they developed a reference application called WideLens, an online calendaring app that connects to Microsoft Exchange calendar, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds. This app represents several different types of protocols and authentication schemes including WebDav, gData, SOAP, REST, and MySQL. WideLens connects to each source in real-time and presents users with live data. And while the app itself sounds incredibly useful, what's even more incredible about it is the time it took to build:

• 3 hours to integrate Salesforce
• 1 day to integrate facebook
• 13 weeks total development time, start-to-finish

WideLens Calendar Screenshot

Bungee Connect and all applications built with it can be accessed through Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari web browsers. They do not require any software download, installation, or plug-in.

Pricing

The service Bungee offers is free to use for development, collaboration, and test deployment. Developers only need pay when an app is used by others. Depending on usage, a cost of $2-5 per user per month is expected for heavily utilized business applications and only fractions of a cent for e-commerce transactions. During the public beta, all apps will be hosted for free.

Conclusion

Bungee's extensive feature list, which includes a single, on-demand environment, automated integration of web services, built-in team collaboration & testing, built-in scalability, reliability, and security, and a utility pricing model, make Bungee Connect a robust and ambitious new offering in cloud computing and development.

The only question that remains is whether developers trust the cloud enough to make a switch from their current set of trusted tools to a web-based platform.