Under-the-radar collaboration suite Wiggio has managed to rack up a million users by courting college students looking for a low-effort tool and by insisting that the product be simple enough for a fourth grader to use. Now they’re piloting a paid premium version. Read more »
Well that didn’t take long. Cloud storage security firms such as Boxcryptor, who were all about Dropbox and Box.net, are suddenly racing to add support for Google and Microsoft’s heavyweight offerings. 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 »
Google’s much awaited Drive has arrived. Sign-up and get 5 GB free. While they are a competitor for the likes of Dropbox and Box.net, the real target for Google might be Microsoft and its Sharepoint service, as company is harping on collaboration-and-sharing as its core features. Read more »
Dropbox is launching a new easy link sharing service, that allows you to share documents, photos and videos over the web, without having ta dropbox account. With Google rumored to be launching its online storage service soon, this is a nice counterpunch by Dropbox 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 »
Media issues like advertising and discovery along with commerce dominated the activity in social and real-time Web technologies during the first quarter. Google raised some hackles, Facebook responded to demands from traditional advertisers, and Yahoo got a new chief executive. Read more in the full report. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Computing in the business market will change radically in the coming years thanks to mobility, apps and a shift toward tablets. Here we gather a survey of GigaOM Pro readers to examine the future of enterprise mobility. 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 »
OwnCloud 2012 service lets IT pros move and manage corporate data in their cloud of choice while giving end users a “Dropbox-like” experience, according to OwnCloud CEO Markus Rex. The software supports WIndows, Linux and Mac desktops and iOS and Android mobile devices. 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 »
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 »
The mythical and much rumored Google’s online storage service, Google Drive, might finally make an appearance in coming weeks according to well placed sources tell us. Google is going to offer 1 Gb of storage space for free, but will charge for more storage. Read more »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT combine to create another force that overwhelms IT departments: complexity, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and related challenges for IT staff. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
With more than 45 million users already connected to his company’s cloud storage service, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston knows he has an infrastructure challenge ahead of him. That, Houston says, is a big reason Dropbox bought Cove, which brings with it Facebook engineering cred. Read more »
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 »
Cloud collaboration software company Huddle is launching a new sync option for its hundreds of thousands of business users — centered on a smart matching algorithm that makes sure you only get the files you need Read more »
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 »
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 rumored to be launching an online storage drive, long after companies like Dropbox and Microsoft have launched their own offerings. The late rollout is a sign that Google is devoting too much energy to being social and less focus on enhancing Android OS. 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 »
Much of today’s business communication activity still happens in email, but that presents a problem for the current on-the-go workforce. This report, based on a recent survey of business managers, highlights some of the problematic areas around business content collaboration and provides options for working through them. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The freemium business model propelled the phenomenal growth of Dropbox and Evernote, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Future Simple’s Uzi Shmilovici helps you decide if freemium is a good fit for your company and, if it is, how to make it work for you. Read more »
Not only were the authorities able to shut down MegaUpload and arrest its founders without either SOPA or PIPA, but the facts of the case raise even more red flags about what the government would be able to do to similar services under those proposed laws. 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 »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. 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 »
BitTorrent’s new Share app offers users a way to privately share files of unlimited file size with others without paying for a cloud storage service. The company is currently using S3 to cache files, but wants to eventually move to its own P2P cloud service. Read more »
Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
