Lumira Cloud supposedly gives SAP an answer to the recent explosion in the cloud-based, self-service data visualization offerings. The HTML5-built BI service comes with a “monthly” subscription fee (albeit one that can only be ordered in annual chunks) and lets its users publish and share data visualizations with one another for viewing or editing on desktop or mobile devices.

SAP Lumira Cloud appears to be more an Dropbox-ish add-on for the desktop version of Lumira than a cloud-based replacement, but it does also allow the creation of datasets from Excel documents. The service, which integrates with on-premise data and naturally supports HANA, can also be used to share SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio files and SAP Crystal Reports documents.

This release appears to be the culmination of what SAP has been previously referring to as “project Photon” – supposedly the company’s “true departmental self-service BI offering.” The issue here, of course, is the monumental and somewhat confusing nature of the company’s portfolio. After all, doesn’t SAP already do this SME-courting, departmental analytics stuff through its BusinessObjects BI OnDemand product?

Try visiting at least one of the BI OnDemand product pages and you’ll be taken through to the Lumira page. Look at the Lumira Cloud FAQs and you’ll be told that BI OnDemand will continue to run “in parallel” to Lumira Cloud, but also that OnDemand customers can contact their account representative “to discuss the best timing and strategy” for migrating to the new service.

Perhaps this less-than-clear situation presages a simplification of SAP’s portfolio – no doubt more will be revealed at the company’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference this week. If it doesn’t, customers in search of next-generation data visualization tools have many far more straightforward options to check out.

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Details other than that are sparse but in a blog post the company said it hopes to draw developers and partners wanting to learn about the “Dropbox Platform” and to meet the engineering and design team behind the Dropbox APIs.

Dropbox now modestly claims “more than 100 million users” and has caused considerable angst among IT heavyweights including Microsoft and IBM, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Microsoft launched SkyDrive — which as of Monday claims 250 million users – in part to catch some of that Dropbox lightning in a bottle.

IBM forbid the use of Dropbox by its employees, citing security concerns. In fact, many IT staffs across the board view Dropbox and other consumer-grade storage services with anxiety. Their worst nightmare is that employees will send and store sensitive corporate data to this public service. Dropbox has become the epitome of shadow IT.

Those concerns sparked an explosion of startups angling to be the “Dropbox of the Enterprise.

Dropbox has been making moves to make its business version more IT friendly. But the vast bulk of the company’s hundred million users are no doubt on the consumer service.

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Mailbox is now delivering more than 100 million messages per day, and the app is now ready to handle the traffic of opening the app to everyone, the company said in a release. “We believe we can now confidently handle new users as they sign up, so we’ve pulled down the reservation system.”

Waiting in a virtual line to get access to Mailbox seemed like part of the company’s strategy around gathering attention, so it will be interesting to see if customers are still enamored with Mailbox if anyone can sign up.

The company provides an email client that is focused on different gestures that allow users to manage and sort email. The company has also released a few updates to the app, which is available in the iTunes store. Om Malik’s sources put the pricetag on the Mailbox acquisition north of $50 million and one person put it closer to $100 million.

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So, if you’re an upstart in this business with serious security chops, how do you set yourself apart? Do what Tresorit is doing, and offer a bounty to any hacker who can breach your cryptography.

Tresorit was founded in 2011, received $1.7 million in funding last year from Euroventures and nine private investors, and is now freshly out of closed beta, with its storage being based on Azure. The firm has strong security cred as a spinoff of Hungarian security outfit CrySys Lab, which was responsible for identifying the notorious Duqu worm. And Tresorit is so sure of itself that, from April 15th, it will offer a $10,000 reward to any hacker that busts its cryptography.

“We’re positioning ourselves as an enterprise or small and medium business solution, but right now we’re targeting consumers too, because we need to reach credibility,” CEO István Lám explained to me. “That’s why we’re starting this campaign where we offer $10,000 to the first one who can hack this encryption.”

Crypto challenge

One issue with some  Tresorit rivals, such as Mega and Wuala, is that they use something called “convergent encryption”, which essentially means they can deduplicate the stuff their customers are storing on their systems. In the case of Mega, whose customers frequently use the service for storing movie files (entirely legally, of course), this helps avoid a situation where the same multi-gigabyte file is stored thousands of times, thereby keeping down Mega’s costs.

Some security specialists are wary of this approach because they fear it can undermine user privacy.

“If 10,000 people upload the same movie to Mega, they only have to store one file,” Lám said. “That leaks information about who has the same file – you can track one [piece of] information from another. So, from the very beginning, we dropped the idea of convergent crypto because that’s simply unacceptable for us.”

Of course, Tresorit is ultimately going for a somewhat different user base; one that demands secrecy but that isn’t necessarily going to be uploading dozens of bulky movies. As such, while Mega famously offers 50GB of free storage, Tresorit’s free option maxes out at 5GB…

… Although, if you’re reading this before 23:59 GMT on May 20th 2013, you can get a free 50GB Tresorit account for life by signing up here. Just thought I’d mention that. Anyway…

In terms of business-friendly features, Tresorit uses public key cryptography to establish keys between people, so users can share access to files without sharing passwords. There are no master keys for bosses, but Lám said the company will soon introduce a “threshold cryptography” system, where at least two managers will need to be present in order to decrypt and open an employee’s account.

Right now the client is only available for Windows, but OS X, iOS and Android versions will arrive before June, as will the first paid-for premium Tresorit accounts. Lám declined to reveal the pricing or capacity for these accounts ahead of that launch.

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It’s working with identity management experts — Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify and Symplified — to bring SSO to those users. And, in case it’s not clear that Dropbox wants to attract business users, it’s re-christening Dropbox Teams as Dropbox for Business. Got it? Good.

IT admins can already integrate Dropbox with Microsoft Active Directory, the directory services scheme used by many companies, to automate the creation and removal of Dropbox for Teams accounts from an existing directory. But until now (well, actually until next month, when it comes online) it did not support SSO.

Dropbox is the undisputed king of consumer-focused file-share-and-sync — as of November it claimed more than 100 million users. It is far from clear, however, how many of those users graduate from the free to the paid consumer service. Nor does the company provide numbers of Dropbox for Teams, er, for Business users, which costs $795 per year for 5 users plus $125 for every additional user. But it does say that Dropbox is used in 95 percent of all Fortune 500 companies.

As we all know by now, people sho use a given service at home like to use it at work, which means that the 95 percent figure is credible. We also hear about Fortune 500 companies — including IBM – prohibiting the use of such consumer-focused products (including Dropbox specifically), and that’s the trend that Dropbox is trying to nip in the bud here.

Earlier this year, Dropbox added a more IT-friendly console that lets admins restrict access and transfer of company documents and helps them track user activity.

Sujay Jaswa, VP of business development for Dropbox, said the company does not see Dropbox competing with SkyDrive — which Microsoft has tied tightly into Office and Windows — nor with Box, which would love to be the Dropbox of the Enterprise. “We just want to build the kinds of features people love,” he said.

But anyone outside of Dropbox would say that it is definitely contending with Microsoft, Box and the Google Apps-and-Drive tandem in business accounts.

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The new version of BoxCryptor is more explicitly aimed at teams. It includes new features such as the ability to share file access permissions without sharing private passwords, and to share files with entire teams with a single click. BoxCryptor 2 also does away with the original version’s mapping of files to folders, a system that meant every folder and project required the setting-up of a new BoxCryptor drive – now, there’s just one drive.

Another compliance-friendly new feature for businesses is the option to have a master key covering everything encrypted by employees, just in case someone leaves suddenly or goes rogue.

The update comes as BoxCryptor finds itself up against an increasing range of rivals such as Viivo and DigitalQuick. CipherCloud closed a $30 million investment round last December, and Symantec is also now in the Dropbox encryption game. In short, everyone’s clicked that consumer cloud services will be used in business, like it or not, and their consumer-grade security leaves a market opportunity for more serious users.

According to BoxCryptor CEO Andrea Wittek, the full version of BoxCryptor 2 will come out sometime this quarter. The technical preview, launched on Tuesday, can be downloaded for Windows and Android.

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I hit up the Podcast Gallery website earlier today and took it for a spin. In short: I’ll be using this for both my audio and video podcast needs going forward on all of my devices. It doesn’t hurt that I have a fair amount of storage available to me in both Dropbox and Google Drive of course. Here’s Podcast Gallery’s creator, Amit Agarwal, explaining how Podcast Gallery works:

About the only feature I see missing — and I’ve already pitched it to Agarwal — is the ability to subscribe to a show and have it automatically upload new episodes to my cloud storage.

Yes, podcast subscription is a primary feature in any podcatcher, but I still see value in Podcast Gallery. The ability to watch or hear a podcast through a browser on nearly any device is a big plus. I’ve already streamed several audio and video episodes on an iPhone 5. And the Google Drive integration is perfect for Chromebook users; you can even set the media files to be available offline so they sync to your Chrome OS device.

One potential holdup for some: to save favorite podcasts to your collection requires you to sign in via Facebook or Twitter. Some folks won’t use a service that is connected to a social network. Surprisingly, you can’t sign in with a Google account, which would actually make sense, given the Google Drive integration. Regardless, Podcast Gallery is a handy and refreshing take on podcatchers that smartly bridges mobile, desktop and the cloud.

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Here’s the full request description, which is an API to allow for extensions to integrate directly in the Chrome OS file manager:

The basic idea is to allow an extension behave as a ‘drive’ in the file manager app in ChromeOS. Currently the file manager has “Downloads” and “Drive” in the left column, and additional USB flash drives and temporary zip archives will appear. The extension will appear here and provide the list of files through the new API.

I’m already using Dropbox and Amazon’s Cloud Drive on the Chromebook Pixel, but it’s not an integrated experience. The Dropbox extension for example, is simply a link to the Dropbox website where I can then download, upload or modify files through the browser page. Sending files to Dropbox isn’t done through the Chrome OS file manager, making for a clunky experience.

If the request is approved and developed, however, the native file manager in Chrome OS would look something like this image found on the OMG!Chrome! enthusiast site.

Will Google’s Chromium team open up the Chrome OS file manager to other competing cloud storage services? From a business standpoint, it could shy away from such a request, but if it wants Chrome OS to be a serious competitor to traditional operating systems, I think it has to allow for this. I’ll be keeping an eye on the request going forward in hopes of an approval.

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In this business, you can’t count on anything having longevity. To avoid new services that are likely to get shut down within a few years, you’d have to avoid every new tech product. Products and services lasting more than a few years are the exception, not the rule.

Fair enough! Except I didn’t say that.

This is what I said: It is hard to trust Google anymore to make rational and consumer centric decisions. I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business. Their main business is advertising and search — regardless of whatever nonsense you might read. They will sacrifice anything and everything to keep those businesses intact. Sure, they embraced mobile advertising and mobile search, but that’s just the same business on a different device.

I am far more likely to believe in and use products that are the main focus of the company behind them. Online storage? Dropbox. Time-shifting web content? Pocket or Instapaper. Short form communication? Twitter. Baby pictures and wedding photos to make single people miserable (or happy for being single)? Facebook.

The point is that a company whose main focus is a specific service or a singular product, like Evernote, is far more likely to focus its energies to build a business around it and keep it around. And if in seven years (or seven months) they fail — hell, at least they went down trying.

Our company pays thousands of dollars for Google Apps and the reason we do is because it is a business for Google and it makes good business sense. I have no problem paying for Instapaper or Pocket or Dropbox or Skype or anything that helps me do my job. And if anything that starts out free (Dropbox did) and then wants me to pay for it (like Evernote), I don’t hesitate upgrading. Why? Because I want these guys to be around.

As the Google Reader example shows (and as Chris Wetherell told me in an interview), Google didn’t even try with Reader. It never gave us an option to pay, even though Google is willing to offer some paid services when it makes sense, like multiseat licenses for Google Apps.

As Marco said, in the end it’s always business. It’s just not Google’s business, so perhaps that is why we should shift our energies and attention to services whose business is the apps they want us to use.

That said, I don’t think Marco is that far off from my way of thinking. He wrote, “Investing too heavily in someone else’s proprietary system for too long rarely ends gracefully, but when it bites us, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.”

Isn’t that what I am saying? Albeit, with a lot more emotion?

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So how much did Dropbox pay for Mailbox? My sources are putting the number at north of $50 million. At least one source claimed that the final amount was a lot closer to $100 million. My sources say that the company was in talks with Yahoo but it was bested by Facebook, who in turn was beaten to the punch by Dropbox. Dropbox is valued at about $4 billion and has become an active acquirer of small teams and tiny startups.

Given that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Orchestra had previously raised $5.3 million (from Charles River Ventures, CrunchFund and others) at a valuation that was somewhere between $15-to-$20 million, the $50 million (or higher) is a hefty return for its investors, considering that the company was a long way from becoming a real legitimate business.

Dropbox’s desire to become a bigger platform have been known for a while, but the company has yet to provide any concrete information about how well it is doing as it tried to become become our online hub.

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