Samsung announced on Wednesday that it has acquired mSpot, a cloud-based content company formed in 2004. Until now, mSpot offered music storage with streaming playback and also movie rentals for various mobile platforms. The purchase is likely to bolster Samsung’s Media Hub for content and storage. Read more »
Cloud Engines’ Pogoplug Team software creates “on-site storage clouds” using existing PCs or servers in a way it claims is far cheaper than the various Dropboxes for the enterprise. Authorized remote workers can access folders or files as needed. Read more »
Cloud storage vendor Nirvanix will use $25 million in in Series C funding round led by new investor Khosla Ventures to add to its engineering staff and expand global sales and marketing coverage. Read more »
Google Drive joins a crowded field that’s polarizing between consumer and corporate offerings. Google is big enough to try to service both customer bases, but its lack of focus leaves a lot of room for competitors to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Symform, a company that brings peer-to-peer technology to bear on the cloud storage problem, netted $11 million in a new Series B investment round led by WestRiver Capital and including OVP and Longworth Venture Partners. Erik Anderson of WestRiver Capital joins the Symform Board of Directors. Read more »
As Google Drive hits the cloud storage market like a gale force wind, Box continues to push itself as the cloud storage supplier for business. Box has refined its API to ease integration with third-party software and allied itself with New York-based incubators. Read more »
Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, said even with the long-awaited arrival of Google Drive, he still doesn’t see Google as a competitor. That’s because he sees Box as more of a collaboration platform that happens to have storage making Microsoft more of a rival. Read more »
German service Boxcryptor allows you to protect sensitive data on popular cloud services — and now tweaks made to its Android client pave the way for the app to support Box.net as well as Dropbox. Read more »
And the latest entry into the cloud storage sweepstakes is … LogMeIn, the company that built its business with its easy-to-use remote access service. The company hopes to woo both consumers and businesses with a beta of its Cubby service, said LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon. Read more »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In a bid to build market share, Egynte is offering “paying” Box customers free storage for the rest of the year. Box claims 10 million customers, but it’s unclear how many of them actually pay for their service. Read more »
U2 superstars Bono and the Edge pony up some cash in Dropbox’s most recent funding round. But the cloud storage company shouldn’t get too cocky: Bono’s track record in tech investments hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. Read more »
If you spend a lot of time writing in the margins of reports or filling out endless forms, there’s something you should know: You should be using a tablet for all of these things. Here are four iPad apps to get you on your way. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
You’d think at this stage of the game, most computer users would be savvy enough to have a data backup plan in place. But you’d be wrong. That’s why every storage, disaster recovery, backup vendor on the planet has glommed onto World Backup Day. Read more »
The storage wars continue with Box calling in the cavalry. The business-oriented cloud storage vendor aggregated 30-plus applications to be accessed from mobile devices and used with Box’s flagship service. But Box is not alone — there are dozens of rivals in the fight. Read more »
Basho, a startup that’s already jumped into the NoSQL database deep end, just released cloud-based storage services built on that NoSQL foundation. Expect the competition to be fierce: RiakCS joins a huge pool of cloud storage offerings from everyone from Amazon to Zettanet. Read more »
More businesses are putting at least some data in the cloud and a growing pack of vendors is fighting for that business. The latest entry is Egnyte’s updated hybrid cloud offering which supports up to 10B files and 10,000 concurrent users per account. Read more »
It seems like every cloud storage company really, really want to be the Dropbox of the enterprise when it grows up. It’ s easy to see why. Dropbox, which now claims 50 million users, is the sweetheart of the cloud storage, file-share-and-sync world. Read more »
Amazon isn’t the only cloud power slicing storage prices. On Tuesday Google cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. With this move and new front-end storage partners, Google appears to be making a serious play for enterprise storage. Read more »
Wal-Mart is looking to use its leverage in Hollywood to accelerate the movie industry’s move to cloud-based storage and digital commerce. In the process, it could steal a march on other providers of cloud-based media lockers like Apple, Google and Amazon, whose platforms to date are ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As Dropbox launches a new photo upload capability to make it easier to move digital photos from smartphones to the cloud, the debate as to whether Dropbox itself is the next big disruptor or just a feature to be acquired or co-opted flares anew. Read more »
When Amazon Web Services launched AWS Storage Gateway last month, the move seemed logical, almost expected. Carlos Escapa, CEO of VirtualSharp Software, argues that the real challenge lies not in restoring data, but in recovering services when disaster strikes. Read more »
With new products from a variety of players like Google and Isis comes a potentially confusing year as the term “mobile wallet” gets thrown around repeatedly. What exactly is the “mobile wallet”? Here are some important definitions for those looking to make a move in the space. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Microsoft isn’t taking the cloud storage challenge lying down. The company plans to build tight links between its Windows 8 and its SkyDrive cloud storage, making it easy for users running Windows 8 on tablets, PCs or phones to put their digital stuff on SkyDrive. Read more »
SpiderOak says its new Nimbus.io cloud storage service will offer consumers and businesses a cheaper way to keep their data archives. Yes, cheaper than Amazon S3. The service, to go live later this quarter, will be available as a commercial product and open-source project. Read more »
VC power player Kleiner Perkins is reportedly considering a new fund that will be dedicated to cloud computing companies. Whether or not it follows through, KPCB has already backed big-time cloud plays including Zynga and brought a former Twitter exec in as senior partner. Read more »
Microsoft’s ambitious Windows Azure cloud is many things — it’s a full-fledged PaaS for developers. But beneath that, it is also a huge pool of foundational storage infrastructure for rent. And in that arena, it could be the only real competitor to Amazon. Read more »
Google is getting ready to launch its very own cloud storage product, and the actual launch could happen very soon: Code referencing the Goole Drive has already popped up in Google Docs, where users can soon add shared items to their own Drive. Read more »
Google is close to announcing its own long-rumored cloud storage service for consumers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The new Google Drive — which would offer some storage free — would compete head on with existing services like Dropbox. Read more »
In its bid to stay the high-volume, low-margin provider of cloud storage, Amazon cut prices on standard S3 storage, according to the Amazon Web Services website. The price changes — good for the U.S. region — are retroactive to February 1. Read more »
App developer Readdle has been busy lately. A big update arrived recently for its PDF Expert software for iPad, and now the company is also launching a new note-taking and PDF annotation app called Remarks. Here’s a hands on look at what the app offers users. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is rolling out a new feature called Storage Gateway that lets companies upload data to its cloud-storage services directly from their on-premise storage systems. This should enable cloud cloud backup and cloud bursting without worries about latency as data traverses the Internet. Read more »
Cloud storage vendor Symform netted $2 million in venture funding from new backer Westfield Capital, which joined existing investors OVP Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners to bring total funding for this Series A round to $7.5 million. Read more »
It’s not surprising that Box CEO Aaron Levie says CIOs are ready to approve big corporate cloud storage deals. But it is somewhat surprising that outside experts with no dog in this fight agree that cloud storage is coming to the enterprise. Read more »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last year, venture capital investment in “true” cloud computing companies constituted more than a quarter of overall Internet deal volume and more than a third of Internet investment dollars, according to new research from CB Insights. Read more »
Whether you got an online backup subscription as a holiday gift or just decided it’s time to have your backup offsite, it’s a good idea to keep your data protected, and one that never goes out of style. Here’s the right way to get started. Read more »
Ask Box.net CEO Aaron Levie about his company’s cloud storage business, and you’ll hear a long, excited answer that probably won’t include the word “storage” at all. He’ll talk about sharing, collaboration and universal access — anything but the core storage infrastructure that makes Box’s service possible. Read more »
A recent survey suggests that “mobile computing appears to be a driving force behind cloud adoption in enterprises.” While the cloud clearly plays a role in making mobile devices as valuable to the enterprise as they are, it may be too much to suggest that mobiles ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Microsoft’s SkyDrive is coming to an iPhone near you, the company said this week. A new app means that iPhone users can store and access their personal photos, files and documents in SkyDrive as opposed to, say, Apple’s own iCloud. Read more »
