Symantec posts Norton 360 v6 beta

From here: http://betanews.com/2011/10/08/symantec-posts-norton-360-v6-beta/

By Mike Williams

Symantec has revealed the first public beta of Norton 360 6.0, the company’s do-everything security suite.

The Norton site claim this build offers “our best protection and performance ever” and “improved local or secure online backups”. If you’re familiar with the package you’ll see it’s also had a few interface tweaks, but there are no other specifics regarding new features available just yet.

Despite the suite’s beta status, all the other standard Norton 360 features appear to be present and correct: a strong and configurable antivirus engine; an intelligent firewall; a capable spam filter; quality password management; identity protection, local and online backup, PC optimization tools and more.

And while betas tend to use more system resources than the finished product, this one is already more lightweight than some of the competition, consuming around 100MB of RAM when scanning and only around 16MB when idle.

Of course it is still a very early version and is sure to contain bugs, so you shouldn’t install the beta on anything that isn’t fully backed up. But if that’s not a problem, then the Norton 360 6.0 beta is available for download now.

ElephantDrive- Ask, and Ye Shall Receive: Introducing Our New Personal Plans!

From here: http://blog.elephantdrive.com/2011/10/05/ask-and-ye-shall-receive-introducing-our-new-personal-plans/

ElephantDrive Nation,

You spoke, we listened. Since inception, our Home Plans have garnered a lot of interest and many of you have written in asking for differently sized plans, better tailored to your actual storage.  Today, we are proud to introduce our brand new lineup of Personal Plans. We now offer a variety of options, ranging from 100GB to as high 2TB (need more?  just write to us).   You can now select the one that best suits your storage needs. We’ve kept our prices highly competitive and still offer the following great features:

• Covers up to 3 devices
• Easy-to-use file sending
• Automatic backups
• Maintain version history for 30 days
• Military grade encryption
• Access files from anywhere

We also continue to offer the 15-day free trial for any new users who signs up for a Personal Plan.

Better yet, the ElephantDrive engineering team is continuing to nerd out.  They are working hard to improve the service and value we bring to our users. Pretty soon, we will be rolling out with an exciting big feature and our first mobile app. Stay tuned!

ElephantDrive Team

ElephantDrive is One of Top 10 Innovative Tools for Online Business

Found here: http://www.top10tag.com/top-ten-tools-for-online-business/

For most small business owners, limited resources are the biggest challenge. It takes a lot of juggling and stretching in daily operations to keep the costs down and stick to a strict budget. But when you are faced with limited resources, that’s when it pays to be resourceful.

If a part or all of your business is operated online, there are many free or inexpensive online services that will keep your operating costs low. Here is our selection of the top 10 innovative tools for online business. Check them out and see if they can be of use to you.

1. iContact

   One of the most essential tools for growing your online business is email marketing. We all know that a happy customer will most likely be a returning customer. With this in mind, make sure you capitalize on your client base and keep in touch with your customers.

   iContact is the ultimate email marketing management tool. It is an inexpensive solution that offers effective creation and management of email marketing campaigns. Regardless of your campaigns’ size or customer list, whether it is aimed for blogs, newsletters, email campaigns or RSS feeds, the products and services of iContact can be modified to suit your particular needs.

   Using iContact is simple and easy. You can you manage your list of subscribers and your email response with a single account. You can build recipient lists by location, interest categories, or other criteria so you can target your programs to specific contacts. You can choose from a selection of professionally designed templates to keep your customers engaged, or create your own designs. iContact is friendly with the email service providers and its reputation allows you to send big numbers of emails without your email being blacklisted.

   
   

2. SendGrid

   Speaking of email as a marketing medium and main business communication tool, you have to consider that on average, more than 20 percent of all email sent by Web applications either goes missing or ends up in a spam filter — never to be seen by your customers.

   The solution to this is SendGrid. It’s a cloud-based email service that delivers emails on behalf of companies to increase their email deliverability.

   Sendgrid isn’t a utility for everyone. You will know exactly when you need to use it – when your emails keeps falling or you start receiving spam messages from your own domain.

   Setup is simple, once you change the SMTP all your emails will be sent through Sendgrid. One great feature is the detailed stats that show you the number of people who actually opened your emails. This is a really powerful tool which can help you optimize your emails to increase conversions.

    

3. HootSuite

   Another essential tool for online business is HootSuite, the premium management platform for social network marketing. It lets you consolidate all your accounts from different social networks so you can simultaneously view all the live streams and post a message to all of them with just one click. Staying on top of your social streams requires a lot of repetitious work and can be time consuming, and HootSuite is not just a time-saver, but a very useful tool that lets you use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audience, and distribute targeted messages across multiple channels.

   HootSuite free account lets you link to your networks and build a screen that displays up to five of your primary social streams, choosing from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace, Foursquare, and mixi. Upgrading to HootSuite Pro at the very reasonable price of $5.99/month gives you much more flexibility, including unlimited social network feeds and RSS/Atom auto-updating; the ability to bring in a collaborative partner; one free (limited) report; and many more reporting tools.

    

4. Huddle

   Huddle is a secure online collaboration tool that lets users work together on projects in real time, despite distance.  Designed with the modern workplace in mind, it helps users easily exchange information with its many different features. It is a business tool ideally suited for those who are often on the go and need an easy to use online working environment, that can be accessed remotely. There are no downloads involved, so it can be used from any Internet-connected computer.

   Huddle offers a free, ad-supported account for those who only need its basic functionality, which includes: 100 megabytes of free online storage. Superb file management. Simple interface. Video tutorials. Options to integrate Web, audio, and video conferencing. With the ability to manage projects, store files, schedule and hold meetings, and facilitate communication through wikis and forums, Huddle’s free online service provides small businesses many useful organizational tools. Different packs with advanced features are offered and they go from $8 per month to $200 per month.

    

5. OctoMobi

   More and more people are using mobile devices to access the Web, and most of us have experienced the frustration of trying to view a website that was built for a computer on our mobile device.

   OctoMobi is a great tool for building mobile websites, and the best of all – it requires no technical expertise. Literally anyone can use it to create ‘web apps’, quickly and effectively.

   Octomobi uses the latest in mobile web technology, such as HTML5, QR Codes and the Jquery Mobile framework. The company aims to empower personal and business users to develop a professional mobile web presence quickly and cost-effectively. It is available in both free and paid versions.

   

6. Volusion

   If you run a website that sells services or products directly to the customer, you need a shopping cart to process payments. Volusion is a powerful, versatile and SEO optimized shopping cart solution. It also comes with Easy Editor, a plugin which allows you to create new content pages for your e-commerce website quickly and easily.

   One of the many advantages of Volusion is that it is truly an all-in-one shopping cart solution. With it, you will not have to spend extra money on other products to integrate or improve its functionality. It will organize your stock, keep track of your customers, provide you with many different payment options, etc. All in all, Volusion is great tool for any e-commerce website, and its pricing is reasonable. There are monthly plans ranging from $25 to $149.

    

7. ScribeSeo

   For an online business, visibility in search engine results is of crucial importance. But SEO services are expensive and if you try to do it on your own you’ll find that SEO is incredibly complex and time consuming. The solution is ScribeSeo, an award-winning online tool that helps you easily optimize your pages for search engines.

   ScribeSEO is a plugin that works with WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, in that it sends the text body, title, and meta-description to Scribe SEO’s servers in order to generate an evaluation and provide feedback. This is done for a reason: SEO changes constantly, and ScribeSeo plugin is always updated to keep up with search engine rankings. Scribe is an excellent plugin that can be used by anyone. It will not improve your content, but it will make it more SEO friendly.

   Unfortunately, Scribe SEO is not free. You can choose from four different plans: Starter ($17 per month), Publisher ($27 per month), Professional ($47 per month), and Advanced ($97 per month).  Only the Starter plan is limited to a single website, all other Scribe SEO plans can be used on unlimited websites.

    

8. Elephant Drive

   Online storage has become increasingly popular in recent years. It is effectively replacing external peripherals as the primary choice for backing up important files and documents.

   Elephant Drive is a great online backup and storage solution. What sets it apart from other similar services is that it is ultra secure and reliable. This is due to to the fact that Elephant Drive is powered by Amazon Web Services. That is also what helps to make ElephantDrive so affordable. The free account will give you 2GB free online data storage. And if you need more storage space there are many different account options available. (You can get 100 GB space for less than $10 per month).

   Although Elephant Drive is used primarily as an online backup tool, it has also found a purpose  as a remote access service/collaboration tool. The service runs on both Windows and Mac platforms, and allows users to create simple automated rules for protecting data by moving it into an ElephantDrive account.

   
   

9. Reputation.Com

   Customer reviews can help your business grow or destroy it completely. If you run an online business, you know that most people search for reviews before they purchase anything online. Sites like Insiderpages™, TripAdvisor, Google Places and Citysearch have millions of visitors each month, any one of which could post a negative review of your business — an unhappy client or even a vicious competitor.

   Reputation.Com lets you monitor the Web for inaccurate or misleading reviews. Your business’ aggregated reviews are displayed in an easy-to-use dashboard. You receive automatic email alerts when new reviews of your business are posted anywhere on the Internet. You can easily request reviews from current customers and keep track of your review requests.

   If your business is already suffering from negative reviews, Reputation.Com can suppress those from search results, help you create and control your content and protect your private data.

    

10. SeeksAdmin

    SeeksAdmin is a US based service that offers high quality outsourcing of customer support. They will handle your server administration, and outsource help desk, live chat, and email customer service.

    If you need dedicated staff, SeeksAdmin lets you hire your own expert in a particular field. Their outsourced customer support is provided 24/7 and is fully branded under your company’s name.

Apple to Launch iCloud on October 12

Breakthrough Set of Free Cloud Services Includes iTunes in the Cloud, Photo Stream & Documents in the Cloud

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apple® today announced that iCloud®, a breakthrough set of free cloud services, including iTunes® in the Cloud, Photo Stream and Documents in the Cloud, that work seamlessly with your iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch®, Mac® or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices, will be available on October 12. iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, contacts, calendars, documents and more, keeping them up to date across all your devices. When content changes on one device, all your other devices are updated automatically and wirelessly.

“iCloud is the easiest way to manage your content, because iCloud does it all for you and goes far beyond anything available today”

“iCloud is the easiest way to manage your content, because iCloud does it all for you and goes far beyond anything available today,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “You don’t have to think about syncing your devices, because it happens automatically, and it is free.”

iTunes in the Cloud lets you automatically download new music purchases to all your devices, so you can buy a song on your iPad and find it waiting for you on your iPhone―no syncing required. iTunes in the Cloud also lets you download your previously purchased iTunes content, including music and TV shows to your devices at no additional cost.* Since iCloud stores your previously purchased iTunes history, you can see what you’ve bought no matter which device you bought it on, and since you already own the content, you can play it on your devices or simply tap the iCloud icon to download it to store and play later.

In addition, iTunes Match℠ scans the songs in your music library, including music not purchased on iTunes, and matches them to the more than 20 million songs available on the iTunes Store®, offering them in high-quality, DRM-free 256 kbps AAC encoding. Any unmatched songs are uploaded to iCloud so you can play songs, albums or playlists from your music library on your devices.

iCloud’s innovative Photo Stream service lets you take a photo on one device and have it automatically appear on your other devices. A photo you take on your iPhone is sent to iCloud and automatically pushed to your iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC. You can even view your Photo Stream album on your Apple TV®. iCloud also automatically pushes a copy of the photos you’ve imported from your digital camera over Wi-Fi or Ethernet, so you can view them on your other devices. iCloud manages your Photo Stream efficiently, showing your last 1000 photos so you don’t run out of storage space.

iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud keeps your documents up to date across all your devices, automatically, so you don’t have to. For example, if you create a document using Pages® on your iPad, that document is automatically sent to iCloud. When you use Pages on another iOS device, you can open the same document with your latest changes and pick up editing or reading right where you left off. Apple’s iWork® apps for iOS, Pages, Numbers® and Keynote® will take advantage of iCloud storage, and Apple is also offering developers the APIs they need to enable their apps to work seamlessly with Documents in the Cloud.

iCloud lets you see your App Store™ and iBookstore℠ purchase history and download those apps and books to any of your devices at any time. Purchased apps and books can be automatically downloaded to your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. Simply tap the iCloud icon and download your purchased apps and books to any of your iOS devices at no additional cost.

iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up your most important information to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi whenever your iOS device is connected to a power source. Once you plug it in, everything is backed up quickly and efficiently. iCloud already stores your purchased music, TV shows, apps, books and Photo Stream; iCloud Backup takes care of everything else, backing up your photos and video in the Camera Roll, device settings, app data, home screen and app organization, messages and ringtones. iCloud Backup can even help you set up a new iOS device or restore the information on one you already own.**

iCloud works seamlessly with your Contacts, Calendar and Mail, so you can share calendars with friends and family, and your ad-free Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inboxes and folders are kept up to date across your iOS devices and computers, and with icloud.com you have easy web access to your Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find My iPhone and iWork documents.

The Find My iPhone app can help you if one of your devices is missing. Just use the free Find My iPhone app on another device, or sign in at icloud.com from a computer to see your missing iPhone, iPad or iPod touch on a map, display a message, and remotely lock or wipe your missing device. Find My iPhone now lets you locate a missing Mac running OS X Lion.

Find My Friends is a new app available as a free download from the App Store that lets you easily share your location with people who are important to you. Friends and family appear on a map so you can quickly see where they are. Find My Friends also lets you temporarily share your location with a group of friends, whether it’s for a couple of hours for a dinner or a couple of days on a camping trip; when the time is up, the sharing ends. With Find My Friends, you get a notification every time you get a new friend request and if you give them permission, they can see your location. With a simple tap you can hide your location. Parental controls help you manage how your child uses Find My Friends.

iCloud will be available concurrently with iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, which includes over 200 new features including Notification Center, an innovative way to easily view and manage notifications in one place without interruption; iMessage™, a new messaging service that lets you easily send text messages, photos and videos between all iOS 5 users; and Newsstand, a new way to purchase and organize your newspaper and magazine subscriptions.

Pricing & Availability

iCloud will be available on October 12 as a free download to iPhone, iPad or iPod touch users running iOS 5 or a Mac running OS X Lion with a valid Apple ID. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, TV shows, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit. iTunes Match will be available starting in the US later this month for $24.99 a year. Using iCloud with a PC requires Windows Vista or Windows 7; Outlook 2010 or 2007 is recommended for accessing contacts and calendars. Additional iCloud storage upgrades are available to purchase starting at $20 a year for 10GB, $40 a year for 20GB and $100 a year for 50GB.

iOS 5 will be available as a free software update for iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad and iPod touch (third and fourth generation) customers, allowing them to experience the amazing new features.

*iCloud is available worldwide. iTunes in the Cloud varies by country. iTunes Match and TV shows are US-only. iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match may be used on up to 10 devices with the same Apple ID.

**Backup of purchased music is not available in all countries. Backup of purchased TV shows is US only. A purchased item may be unavailable to be restored if it is no longer in the iTunes Store, App Store or iBookstore.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information visit Apple’s PR website (www.apple.com/pr), or call Apple’s Media Helpline at (408) 974-2042.

© 2011 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, iCloud, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, iTunes Match, iTunes Store, Apple TV, Pages, iWork, Numbers, Keynote, App Store, iBookstore and iMessage are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50017261&lang=en

Contacts

Apple
Simon Pope, 408-974-0457
spope@apple.com
Tom Neumayr, 408-974-1972
tneumayr@apple.com

Marketing lessons from Dropbox: A Q&A with CEO Drew Houston

  Submitted by macslocum    
Posted Apr 19 2010 05:38 AM

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Dropbox, an online storage and synchronization tool, has a clever marketing hook. The free version quietly entangles with your workflow until you reach the 2GB cap, and by that point it’s almost too easy to convert from free to paid. (I speak from experience.)

Seeing as Dropbox has acquired more than 4 million users in two years, it would appear its process is working. I got in touch with Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO and a speaker at next month’s Web 2.0 Expo, to pick his brain for marketing tips. Highlights from that discussion are featured below.
Target the right community with a custom message

Mac Slocum: What types of marketing has Dropbox used?

Drew Houston: The first thing that most early web startups say is, “Let’s launch and buy up some AdWords.” The results from paid search were disappointing for us, though. It makes sense in a lot of other markets, but search is a tool for harvesting demand, not creating it.

Out of necessity, we made a short video demonstrating Dropbox and launched it on Digg. We were pretty thoughtful about showing a video to that audience. Everyone on the early team had visited sites like Digg and understood how Internet memes work.

To the casual observer, the Dropbox demo video looked like a normal product demonstration, but we put in about a dozen Easter eggs that were tailored for the Digg audience. References to Tay Zonday and “Chocolate Rain,” and allusions to “Office Space” and XKCD. It was a tongue-in-cheek nod to that crowd, and it kicked off a chain reaction. Within 24 hours, it had more than 10,000 Diggs. It drove hundreds of thousands of people to the website. Our beta waiting list went from 5,000 people to 75,000 people literally overnight. It totally blew us away.

Note: here’s the video.

MS: Have you created similar videos for other communities?

DH: That was the first experiment. We thought the way we would reach critical mass was to really target a specific early adopter audience that hangs out in places like Digg and Reddit and Slashdot. So there were no obvious other communities that would talk to each other and spread Dropbox around the way that audience did.

People ask what sort of fairy dust they can sprinkle on their product videos. But success comes from really understanding and being part of that community. People can tell when you’re pandering. The lack of authenticity hurts.
Simplify your message, then simplify some more

MS: Dropbox’s web presence is direct and no-frills. Did you have that clarity of purpose from the beginning?

DH: In the beginning, we didn’t. In some of our early pitches to angel investors we’d rattle off a laundry list of features and say, “Hey, it’ll back up your files. It’ll sync them. You can share stuff. You can collaborate.” And people’s eyes would glaze over because it’s hard for them to conceptualize.

To some extent, we did the same thing on our home page. We had the logo and a link to the video and then we had a smorgasbord of bullet points: it slices, it dices, it cuts your hair. We did this in the hopes that people coming to the page would see one or two of those things and decide that Dropbox was something that they want.

We did some split testing on our home page. What we found is that designs that are simpler, have a very clear call to action, and don’t extol all the virtues of the product, converted much better than anything more elaborate. You can see that today: Here’s Dropbox; here’s a concept video; download it.

We’ve found it’s a lot more effective to find one hook that people can easily understand. That gets people in the door. Once you have that relationship with a customer, then you have all kinds of opportunities to educate them over time as to everything else that the product can do. There’s too much cognitive friction if you try to cram all of those things up front.

MS: How do you turn customers into evangelists?

DH: For us, it starts with having a good product and making sure that the experience is as simple and as elegant as we possibly can make it. People react positively when they find something that’s helpful. The element of pleasant surprise is a big factor. It causes people to exceed that threshold where they’re so happy about something that they’re willing to tell their friends about it.
From free to paid

MS: Dropbox has a pretty significant free offering (2GB). How did you arrive at that amount?

DH: We were a little bit bounded by the norms in the marketplace. On the free side, I think Gmail got a lot of mileage out of having orders of magnitude more storage than some of their competitors. We knew we couldn’t do that. We had also noticed a trend where there’s always some startup giving away 50 gigs or 100 gigs or a terabyte of free space and then folding a year later. We didn’t want people to think this was totally unsustainable. There are also limits on how much you can give away if you want people to actually convert.

What we wanted was for this to be something people could engage with over time and that delivered real value from the beginning. If Dropbox is something that becomes part of your life, then there’s a natural progression to using more space. Eventually you’ll put more in there than is accommodated by just the two gigs.

MS: When do customers typically convert from free to paid?

People either decide early on that Dropbox is going to work for them, or it’s something that’s gradual and they naturally exceed their storage threshold. So there’s two peaks: one at the very beginning and then one later in the progression of usage.

MS: It seems to me that we’ll look back on this current period and see third-party services, like Amazon’s S3, as the key to a lot of startup innovation. How have these types of platforms helped Dropbox?

Having S3 really let us experiment cheaply with the idea and verify that there was a market. Otherwise, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars we would have needed to spend upfront just to get off the ground. That’s actually one of the things that I pointed to as the reason why Dropbox was a viable idea back in 2007, even though there had been dozens of other products that addressed the same umbrella of needs. The ability to cheaply ramp up storage was a huge thing for us.
Web 2.0 Expo preview

MS: What will you be covering in your Web 2.0 Expo session?

DH: I’ll be teaming up with Adam Smith. He’s one of the founders of Xobni and a good friend of mine. Xobni is another company that acquired millions of users in the first couple of years. And it did it even though it was a download and even though it was something that people didn’t really know they were looking for.

With the Expo session, we’re really trying to give people nuts and bolts tactics they can use to leverage whatever mechanism or channel that works best for them. For example, how do you get started without spending $10,000 per month for PR, or having a huge AdWords spend, or praying for coverage on TechCrunch? It’s going to be a narrative of what we tried, what worked for us and what didn’t.

Note: This interview was condensed and edited.

Cloud comparison: Apple iCloud vs. Google vs. Windows Live

BY: MARIN PEREZ, INTOMOBILE
MONDAY, OCTOBER 3RD, 2011 AT 12:05 PM

“The cloud” has long been a buzzword in the tech scene but it has become an ever-important part of our daily computing lives and Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone Mango all have deep integration with the cloud, but use it in slightly different ways. Let’s take a look at how each of the major operating systems bring the cloud into your lives.

Apple iCloud

The Approach: The cloud pushes content to your device.

Apple’s iCloud system will debut with iOS 5and Apple was very clear during its introduction that this won’t just be a hard drive in the sky. Instead, iCloud aims to make it easier for you to get all of your content to your Apple products without have to manually transfer things over.

This means that Apple’s iCloud will sync your music, apps pictures, videos, iBooks and other content between your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac without the need for wires. You simply sign up for iCloud when you’re setting up your device and you’re ready to go. While this approach may be different than some of the competitors, the end user is likely going to like iCloud a lot for many reasons.

First of all, this gets rid of a lot of the headaches of switching between Apple devices. If you buy something on your iPhone and want it on your iPad, you can go to the App Store, hit the Purchased tab and then download those apps to the tablet (different versions may cost more though). The iPhone 4 has been a very popular camera but transferring over photos can be a friction point but with iCloud, users will be able to use iCloud to transfer these over-the-air with Photostream and even push it to something like the Apple TV without wires. Other iCloud apps will include Mail, Contacts, iBooks, Documents and Apple will eventually open this up to third-party developers.

The Apple iCloud system will also let you cut the cord when setting up your new device, as you won’t have to plug it into a computer and boot up iTunes. Instead, you simply enter your Apple ID, go through a few menus and you’re off and running. The iCloud system will also enable a daily backup (over WiFi) and it comes with 5 GB of free storage. While that may not seem like that much, your iTunes content and photos don’t count against that limit, so it’s actually a decent amount of space.

Verdict: Apple iCloud will be very appealing to mainstream customers.

Google Android

The Approach: Store it all in the cloud, access from device.

Google has been miles ahead of Apple in terms of cloud services on Android and it makes a lot of sense, as Google is an Internet software company and Apple is not. From day one, you have been able to set up an Android phone by signing into a Google account and all of your settings and contacts would “auto-magically” push to your device. We’re immune to it at this point but if you keep a lot of contacts with Google’s system, it’s actually quite amazing how easy it is to set up your Android phone. Further improvements include syncing your apps, WiFi settings and more just by signing in with a Google account.

Google is not even close to being done, as it continues to push the cloud capabilities of Android. It introduced Google Music earlier this year and this lets you upload 20,000 tracks to its servers and access these through an Android app or through your browser for streaming music. If you’re going to be in a place where you won’t have connections (like an airplane), you can pin tracks to your device and store these for local playbacks. Apple’s iCloud appears to be content to just push your already-purchased songs to your new device but it’s unclear when, if ever, Apple’s service will have streaming capabilities.

The web-based Android Market is another example of how Google utilizes the cloud to provide a better experience for Android users, as this enables you to browse, discover and buy apps on a computer and then have it automatically pushed to the device of your choosing. This is a somewhat small feature that doesn’t get mentioned often but it is a truly innovative feature that can only really be found on Android.

If you use the Google+ app, you’ll be able to have all of your photos automatically be stored in the cloud and rumors still persist of a GDrive, which would be a full out Dropbox competitor but with Google’s scale and clout behind it. Google’s mobile cloud integration is already quite stellar and look for it to continue to improve as things like Google Music and Google+ (maybe) become integrated into the full OS. While Google isn’t making a mainstream marketing push like Apple is with iCloud, you can rest assured that Android will always have access to great cloud services.

Verdict: Best mobile cloud operating system around and should continue to be for a while.

Microsoft Windows Live

The Approach: Store in cloud, Windows Live is your new ID.

Microsoft is also very familiar with cloud computing and it has improved the cloud capabilities of its mobile software with the release of Windows Phone Mango. Like Android, you could always sign in or create a Windows Live account on Windows Phone and it would pull in all of your associated information.

Windows Phone Mango now has system-wide tie-ins with Twitter and LinkedIn to go along with the built-in Facebook connection and this really makes a big impact on your People hub, as its easier to keep track of your connections across all of the social networks. This also transforms your Me tile into a social networking aggregate app which gives you one place to update all of your social networks (except for Google+).

Microsoft’s Skydrive is quietly a great service because it offers nearly anyone 25 GB of free cloud storage and it is deeply integrated into Windows Phone Mango. This means you can set your camera to have it automatically upload all of your photos to the online backup, as well as access pictures, documents and more on your phone. The tie-in is very slick and it makes getting content from this online backup as simple as if you were accessing on-board content.

Like Google’s Android, cloud computing also powers the voice-to-text services on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform and it also powers a few other improvements to the Bing search app in Mango. There’s now a music-recognition service that’s similar to Shazam and a visual search engine in Bing which are made possible by the platform’s cloud powers.

Moving forward, Microsoft is going to place a larger emphasis on having your Windows Live ID be a major component in your computing life. With the upcoming Windows 8, you’ll be able to sign in with your Windows Live ID and it will automatically set up your device with all your apps and content. The cloud will also power continual computing between your desktop and phone by automatically syncing things like mail, contacts and calendar. The Windows Phone app store is now available online but you can’t push apps to your device yet but I’d expect that to eventually happen.

Verdict: Microsoft’s cloud services are strong if maybe a half-step behind Google, look for Windows Phone to continue to have robust cloud support.

About The Author

Marin Perez

Marin Perez has torture tested cell phones and smartphones for industry leaders like CNET and InformationWeek. He remembers when 4G was just a screen on PowerPoint presentations and is fascinated with the amount of innovation out there. Marin has spent a lot of time with BlackBerry and Android but he finally broke down a bought an iPhone to see what all the hype’s about. He also has too many tablets.

Mozy Ships Hard Drives to Users to Upload their Content

Found here: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220227/Mozy_ships_hard_drives_to_cloud_backup_customers

By Lucas Mearian
September 23, 2011 08:55 AM ET3 Comments
Computerworld – In an attempt to spur adoption of its MozyPro cloud backup service, Mozy today shipped external hard drives to many of its small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers to speed initial system backups.

The new service, called Mozy Data Shuttle, is not dissimilar to what many enterprises do when creating offsite backups: the initial full backup is made to local hard drives, and then those drives are shipped to a disaster recovery site where the data is ingested by a storage array or tape library.

Mozy’s Data Shuttle consists of a bright green 2TB Iomega hard drive with both USB 2.0 and eSATA connectivity.

After a customer orders the service, Mozy ships a hard drive to the customer. As soon as the hard drive is connected to a system, it prompts the MozyPro customer to perform a full, encrypted backup of the system. The customer can then use a pre-printed shipping label to ship the drive back to Mozy, where the data is downloaded onto its servers.

As soon as the Data Shuttle drive is unplugged from a customer’s system, incremental backups of the system data are automatically sent to Mozy’s data center. When the backup drive’s data is downloaded, it is automatically joined with the incremental backups to create a full data copy.

“In the last 12 months, more and more people [have been] opening up to backing up data to the cloud. At the same time, the amount of data in organizations has grown. Those two things converging is what prompted us to bring out this service,” said Gytis Barzdukas, director of product management at Mozy.

Barzdukas said about two-thirds of Mozy’s business comes from SMB customers. When a growing number of those customers reported having at least 100GB of data to store, this became a barrier to backing up online because it was taking weeks to complete in some cases.

“While their data was growing, their network bandwidth wasn’t necessarily staying on par,” he said.

Mozy is targeting organizations with 100GB to 8TB of data or with five to 30 desktop users.

Jamie McKenzie, Mozy’s Data Shuttle product manager, said the service can handle up to four 2TB-drives for ingestion at a time.

Each drive has two layers of encryption. The first encryption key can be chosen by the customer either through a default key or by creating a unique personal key. Then the Data Shuttle drive generates a second encryption key used for additional security while the drive is in transit. This one-time key is used to unlock the encrypted data so that Mozy can then store the customer’s data at rest.

Mozy never has both keys, so it is unable to see a customer’s data.

The retail price for the first Data Shuttle drive is $275, and $100 for each additional drive, according to Barzdukas.