Now all these numbers (except the revenue figure) are self-reported, so take them with a grain of salt, still, it’s undeniable that Dropbox is hugely popular and unpaid use of the service is booming.

But that doesn’t mean consumers are blind to the downside of cloud storage. Fixya, a popular consumer Q&A site, surveyed its 25 million readers about cloud file sharing and sync sites, netted 50,000 responses, and came up with the top issues for each in its new cloud storage report.

For Dropbox, 40 percent of respondents cited security concerns first and foremost. There was an issue earlier this year when hackers were able to access some Dropbox user accounts.  Fixya said there’ s not too much users can do in this case, but that those using Dropbox to store personal photos and entertainment files should not be discouraged but should also “steer clear” of using Dropbox to store financial documents.

.

Box, which positions itself as an enterprise-friendly secure solution got dinged for file upload speeds and security issues by 25 percent of respondents. The company is clearly aware of this issue — it launched a half dozen local endpoints around the world earlier this fall to address that issue.

The odd thing about this picture is that market researcher  IDC estimates that the total market for these solutions was only $213.4 million in 2011 and company has no plans to make a forecast this year. If that 2011  number is accurate,  there are an awful lot of players — at including Microsoft with Skydrive, Google with Google Drive and Apple with iCloud chasing what looks to be a pretty puny profit opportunity. Cloud file-store-and-sync looks an awful lot like a loss leader.

Dell tries to gussy up a bad week with Gale acquisition

Dell, the former PC kingpin which is trying to manage a fraught transition from PC and server hardware maker to a provider of cloud infrastructure and services, had a tough week, reporting on Thursday that its earnings fell a whopping 47 percent for its third quarter. It cited  plunging PC sales and weakness in other businesses as well.

Marketwatch reported that most of the company’s businesses– storage, services, software as well as PCs — all saw sales declines year-over year. Server and networking revenue were the exception, rising 11 percent.

The following day, Dell announced plans to acquire  Gale Technologies, a provider of  infrastructure automation software that works across on-premises and hybrid clouds to provide user self-service capabilities. Gale will be part of Dell’s brand new Enterprise Systems & Solutions unit to be headed by Dario Zamarian, who had headed Dell’s Networking business.

As Om has written here, Dell and arch-rival HP are in the hot seat as they try to redefine themselves and prove their continued relevance in a world where huge webscale powers like Facebook, Amazon and Google are looking for the lowest cost hardware and — in Facebook’s case — building that hardware itself as it disclosed at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference last month.

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FixYa CEO Yaniv Bensadon told me during a recent phone conversation that it was much easier to explain many device defects visually. That’s why he came up with the idea to leverage mobile phone cameras. “Show me what your problem is and I will show you the solution,” Bensadon said, adding that this will also help to grow FixYa’s video inventory beyond the iPhone app. “As soon as a question is posted, it’s gonna appear on the site,” he explained.

But the real goal of the new iPhone app and its video capturing capabilities is to grow FixYa’s mobile usage. The service currently attracts about 30 million users a month, 20 percent of which come from mobile. Bensadon is especially enthusiastic about the prospects of monetizing mobile users.

FixYa’s plan to make money with mobile comes down to one key issue: Even with videos, users won’t always be able to fix their appliances themselves. That’s why the app is going to give them recommendations for local retailers and service providers, complete with a click-to-call option. FixYa is piloting this option in California, where it started to build a local sales team, and it is looking to expand click-to-call to other regions early next year. “We see it as a huge opportunity,” Bensadon told me.

FixYa was founded in 2005 in Israel, and relocated its main office to the Bay Area in 2007. The company received a total of $8 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Pitango Venture Capital.

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There’s been a growth in entrepreneurs and startups trying to build a business off of so-called e-cycling in 2010, but consumers still don’t seem all that more interested in making the effort. Maybe it’s just about knowing the options. So, here they are: where (and how) to recycle and resell your old gadgets.

1. Gazelle. Founded in 2006, web-based gadget reseller and recycler Gazelle specializes in helping resell or recycle your gadgets. The user enters the gadget make/model into the web site and Gazelle spits back a quote for how much it’s willing to give you in exchange for your product. For example, a broken early model iPhone goes for $10, while a newish iPhone that works perfectly can go for around $400.

You have to ship your own gadget to Gazelle, but the company provides printable labels to help with shipping fees and then the company sends you a check or PayPal reimbursement. Gazelle sells off most gadgets it can make money on over eBay or Amazon, while certain items it receives in bulk it can sell off to wholesalers. Anything that can’t be resold, Gazelle recycles it.

The barrier to this business model is the time it takes to bring the gadget to the post office. But if you remember that you should be recycling all your old gadgets anyways, it helps ease that time commitment. The company is backed by venture firms Venrock, Rockport Capital, and Physic Ventures and was formerly called Second Rotation. Gazelle says they’ve processed over 100,000 gadgets.

2. Fixing Gadgets via Fixya. Before you resell/recycle it, perhaps you can fix it. Fixya is an online community that can help you troubleshoot software and hardware problems. Users can post a question for free, but can also pay rewards or small fees to boost the chances of getting a quality response from the community. This seems hit or miss to me. I posted a free query earlier today and still haven’t heard back.

3. BuyMyTronics. With an almost identical business model to Gazelle, BuyMyTronics looks to buy your gadgets and resell them. With its VC funds, Gazelle should try to acquire ByMyTronics.

4. ecoATM. Startup ecoATM does pretty much what its name implies: It places ATM-style kiosks in stores that can collect old cell phones and gadgets and offer users incentives, coupons and in-store credit in exchange. The company won our Green:Net startup competition and more recently received an investment from Coinstar, which hopes to make money off it in the same way it’s making bank off of its coin-counter machines, or the Redbox DVD kiosks. The benefit of this model is that it’s so easy to grab your broken phone and drop it in a kiosk at your local grocery while you’re shopping. Now they just need more locations.

5. Resell It Yourself. After looking over these newcomers above, it’s clear that there’s a market for reselling older gadgets. It just takes a little time and knowhow. If you want to put in the time, place your item on eBay, Amazon or Craigslist yourself and give it a spin. Mind the learning curve.

6. Look Locally. The Electronic Industries Alliance E-Cycling site compiles a list of nationwide e-cyclers by zip code. There’s a lot of non profits and local organizations that can direct you to a spot in your community where you can recycle larger objects like computers and home electronics.

7. ReCellular. There’s a decent business around old cell phones in particular. ABI Research estimates that by 2012 the recycling of cell phones will generate some $3 billion in revenue. ReCellular is one of the oldest and most established in the U.S. and acts as both a place for selling and buying of older and refurbished cell phones.

8. Company Options. One of the reasons there’s been a lack of electronics recycling in the U.S. is because the manufacturers themselves haven’t been aggressively pushing recycling options like they have in countries in Europe. Perhaps this will change one day. A couple of years ago, the EPA created a program that brought together 11 large companies: Best Buy, Office Depot and Staples; service carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint; and manufacturers Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG, all of whom are supposed to work together to make recycling easier for consumers.

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Frequent commenter and fellow mobile enthusiast, TaxMan wrote something interesting on his blog and it coincides with something I pointed out earlier today. Namely: we have so many more portable device choices than we did a short time ago. Instead of selling his original Samsung Q1 UMPC, TaxMan decided to take the Linux plunge, something I did with Ubuntu in 2006 with mixed results.It just goes to show you what a little Googling and elbow grease can do. TaxMan has the Gutsy Gibbon release of Ubuntu installed and unlike my failed efforts, he has the touchscreen working as well!“After much tweaking and re-reading of the instructions I posted in an earlier post, I got the touchscreen working. The callibration isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for onscreen navigation and light text entry using the on-screen keyboard.”He has links to the instructions right on his site and he now has his Sierra Wireless 875U AirCard working as well. If this type of solution appeals to you, you’ll want to hit up his recent posts for the info. Nice job!

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FixYa — This site is made up of a community of users who can help people figure out what’s wrong with their appliances and digital gadgets, and hopefully get them back up and running, avoiding the pain and ecological damage of a trip to the landfill. FixYa recently raised $6 million to keep it up and running.

Partstore.com — Don’t want to throw it away, but you’re missing a key part? Head to Partstore.com, where you can find everything from old washing machine knobs to replacement bulbs for your televisions. It looks like customer reviews of the site are pretty uneven, so I’d keep the orders small, for now.

BuyMyTronics.com — If a hands-on approach isn’t your thang, the BuyMyTronics site might be the way to go. I’m someone who’s had pieces of a broken hair dryer sitting on her counter for a week after taking it apart for repairs, so I admit I’m all about recycling rather than fixing. BuyMyTronics accepts game consoles, cell phones, laptops, iPods and cameras and resells them for you.

SecondRotation — Much like BuyMyTronics, SecondRotation wants to provide a home for your old gadgets by hooking up buyers and sellers, but it only deals in cell phones and game consoles. I’ve sent a couple of phones to SecondRotation and was pleased at how easy it was. SecondRotation raised $4.4 million in January, so maybe recycling and reuse can entice venture investors.

PDAParts.com — This site specializes in parts and repair advice for smart phones and personal digital assistants. But if the site’s instructions aren’t enough for you, just send them your phone or PDA and have them either repair it for you. They’ll also sell it on your behalf.

The web has a ton of places for help on broken gadgets ranging from product forums to repair videos on YouTube. If you can’t fix it and no one wants to buy it, then package that device up and see if one of the consumer electronics stores will recycle it for you. Ideally, you can keep a good thing going for a bit longer, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and buy a new device. As someone who is still using a 5-year-old iPod can attest, it can be cool to be obsolete. OK, maybe not cool, but definitely green.

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TimeDriver, a new application making its debut at DEMO today, is designed for folks who have to make multiple one-on-one appointments with different people across pre-determined available blocks of time.

If you’ve ever scheduled your own appointment at QuestDiagnostics or Sears Portrait Studio, then you may be familiar with the technology behind TimeDriver. TimeTrade System’s TimeTrade Enterprise Scheduling Application (TESA) is an enterprise leader for managing individual appointment scheduling on a large scale. Their new application for the individual user, TimeDriver, uses the same technology as TESA but strips away all the complexity, leaving a very simple interface focusing on a single resource…the user.

TimeDriver connects with existing calendars in Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, wisely not forcing the user to adapt to a new calendaring tool. The web interface works in all major browsers on both Mac and PC. Support for Salesforce and Lotus Notes for calendar connectivity is coming soon.

The idea is that you indicate what window of time you have available and the blocks of time you’ll take for your appointments.

The application then generates a link for participants to schedule their appointment with you. Once they’ve committed to a block, that time is immediately unavailable to everyone else, but your overall calendar is never publicly shared. The same link can go to multiple recipients or can be published on a website, making it a viable e-marketing tool.

TimeDriver will launch with a beta version (Windows only) in a few weeks, with a general roll-out that will include Mac support targeted for the second quarter of this year.

This looks like it could be a useful tool for the web workers who are frustrated waiting for clients to get back to them to confirm appointment times. You might also want to look at TimeBridge which offers a similar solution.

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Late last night, Google released the long-awaited Mac OS X version of their popular Google Desktop application, enabling Mac users to break away from Apple’s bundled Spotlight application and use the familiar Google interface to search local documents, e-mail, Web history and GMail archives from their Web browser. While the PC version, out for more than 30 months already, is more full-featured, including Widgets and a Dock-like news sidebar, the Mac version of Google Desktop offers the same level of index and search functionality.

Available from Google’s Mac software downloads page, the software is, as you would expect, very easy to get going. Download the .dmg file, expand it and click the application installer. The Google Updater application will download the needed application, and start the process of indexing. In addition to installing in your Applications folder, Google Desktop offers you a menubar icon and the option of installing in the Dock.

Then, the app really goes to work, crawling your local hard drive as if it were the World Wide Web. Almost three hours into the process, my own PowerBook hard drive is still crunching away, and the index reports more than 50,000 files are indexed so far. But from the very first file, you can search from Google Desktop – either by hitting the Command key twice in succession to bring up a floating app bar, or by selecting “Open Desktop Homepage” from the menubar icon. The desktop homepage button looks like Google.com, only with your Desktop being one of the available resources to query.

Floating Toolbar Search for the Term Backup

Instead of search results from Web sites around the globe, Google Desktop segments your own local results into categories of “E-mail”, “Web history”, “files”, “media” and “other”. In the two-plus years I’ve used the PC version, e-mail is 90% of what I search, with “files” taking the other 10%. Of course, that’s mainly because Microsoft Outlook doesn’t have the excellent search functionality already present in Apple’s Mail, and tons of .PST fields can be a beast, but I digress.

Google Indexing in Progress: Status

For me, I find Spotlight isn’t as intuitive as Google Desktop, and keyword searching is comparatively arduous. Google Desktop for the Mac is one of the very few applications available for Windows and not Mac that I’d really wanted, and it’s finally here. Download it today, and you’ll wonder how you functioned without it.

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