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Comcast launches app store for biz customers

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 18:14:32 +0000

Comcast opened Upware, an app store featuring nine services for its small and mid-sized business customers on Wednesday. The app store isn’t a new idea, but it’s one that will bring in a new line of revenue for the ISP and serve one of its fastest growing customer bases.

Comcast’s business services brought in $2.4 billion in 2012, up 34 percent from the previous year. That’s only 6 percent of the company’s cable sales, but it’s growing at almost 6 times the pace of total sales. And those customers were asking Comcast for choices on document storage, security and other resources, which led to the ISP building Upware.

While spokesman Charlie Douglas declined to give specific financial details associated with the app store, he did say it would be a revenue-generating service for Comcast. It will also be great for the partners who will have their services listed for Comcast’s business customers. Those companies so far include:

Data Backup – Carbonite, DigitalSafe and Mozy.
Data Security – Norton and Websense.
Collaboration – Box, Microsoft, Soonr and YouSendIt (see disclosure.)

This is a good example of how a service provider can add value for its end users — value that it can monetize beyond a monthly broadband fee. Comcast has been pretty aggressive about adding connected home products on the residential side as well as beefing up it’s pay TV service to compete more with web-based on-demand services.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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Who’ll do data integration 2.0?

Derrick Harris — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:04:50 +0000

With so many remote workers using so many different cloud-based services to manage every aspect of their jobs — documents, projects, expenses, you name it — it’s possible that companies are losing access to lots of valuable information. That means there’s a business opportunity for someone willing to step up and solve the problem.

Ivan Koon, CEO of YouSendIt, noted that the problem has been around for 30 years and has been largely solved for legacy business software by companies such as Informatica. That company and its ilk have made loads of money doing things such as ETL (extract, transform, load) and data integration. The challenge now is doing it for the new breed of tools that boost worker productivity but can make it very difficult to port or integrate data among services.

The alternative is that businesses go back to using single-vendor stacks or stop using such a hodgepodge of services, but neither is going to happen. Soonr CEO Martin Frid-Neilsen said U.S. workers are champions of productivity, and we’ll use whatever helps us work better and faster, expecting IT to worry about it later.

Prospecting about who might step up to fill the void of bringing together these myriad data sources, Mavenlink CTO Roger Neel suggested the early contenders might be the new breed of cloud-based backup services. These companies aren’t just storing bits and bytes, he noted, but actually are adding rhyme and reason to storing data, and could take it further.

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File sync service Soonr gets team-based collaboration features

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:05:11 +0000

It seems that the team at cloud file sync and backup company Soonr have been busy. Last month, we wrote about Soonr’s iPad app, which brings cloud-based MS Office document editing to the device. The company has now launched Soonr Teaming to add team-based collaborative features to the service. Users can form teams to work together virtually and access and edit files from anywhere. Members can be assigned to projects to create these Project Teams, while users can grant file permissions to the individuals in each team. Subscribing to the company’s overall collaboration offering, Soonr Workplace provides cloud-based collaboration, file backup and storage, and the ever-convenient mobile access.

You can download Soonr via iTunes or from the Android Market and subscriptions come with a 30-day free trail. Prices have increased slightly since we last covered the service, but the company has added the new collaboration features and more storage space. Premium accounts are now $9.95 per month for three users with 25 GB of storage (a price increase of $2 per month, but providing 15 GB more storage), while Soonr Pro is $29.95 per month for five users and 100 GB of storage (a price increase of $10 per month, but 60 GB more storage). You can also now customize the Pro service to include more storage space or more users and the site instantly calculates your monthly cost.

Soonr supports Mac and Windows, and a variety of mobile devices including Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. You can also access Soonr via your iPad or an Android (Honeycomb) tablet.

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4 tips (and a hack) to make your iPad work-worthy

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:02:59 +0000

Reading Darrell’s recent post 7 iPad Habits of Highly Effective Remote Workers prompted me to look more closely at how I can really do work on my iPad.

I have to admit, I’m still not convinced that the iPad will be my laptop replacement. However, with the help of the Apple wireless keyboard and some other peripherals and apps, it can come close. Here are some tips to make your iPad work-worthy.

1. Make audio calls via VoiP. Audio calls via Skype on the iPad work like a dream. Just plug in the earbuds that you usually use for your iPhone, fire up the Skype app and make your audio calls. There are other VoiP apps that will work on the iPad without charging fees, such as Viber, but they require that the other person also has the same software on her device. You can even use Google Voice on the iPad, albeit with a little extra elbow grease.

2. Editing images and video. You can get digital photos and videos directly from your cameras using the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit, which comes with a USB adapter and SD Card Reader. I was a little skeptical about using the iPad touchscreen for editing images, but after downloading and trying the free PhotoPad by ZAGG, I’ve found it makes it fairly easy to manipulate images, including color and contrast adjustments, rotating and sizing, adding color fills, and even treating images with filters. You can also get Adobe Photoshop Express for free if you’re already familiar with Photoshop.

For video, an app like Splice can help you do some basic video editing (including combining photos and video) for free, or there’s Splice Pro for $1.99. For more editing oomph, you can go for iMovie for $4.99, although it requires a front-facing camera on your device (so iPad 2, iPhone 4 or 4th-generation iPod touch only).

3. Recording voice memos and podcasts. There are a variety of voice memo–recording solutions you can use on your iPad using its built-in microphone, including Voice Memos for iPad by KendiTech, which is similar to the Voice Memos app on the iPhone. For 99 cents, you get the basic version; for an additional 99 cents via an in-app purchase, you get the ability to trim your memos, email memos and download to your computer via USB. The export button makes your memos available via iTunes File Sharing. QuickVoice is another iPad option to record and email audio clips up to 5 MB in size for free. The $2.99 to upgrade to QuickVoice Pro can handle up to 20 MB clips. You can record and export audio clips via iTunes for free using iRecorder voice memos.

If you want more editing features, try GarageBand ($4.99). Although it features instruments, you can use it for podcasting as well.

Here’s a little voice recording hack I learned from a fellow podcaster: You can use the Camera Connection Kit and USB adapter to plug in a lightweight USB microphone to your iPad to increase the quality of your voice recordings. Using a USB mic also helps to cut down on background noise that the built-in iPad mic might pick up.

When I tried to use my high-end Rode Podcaster microphone, my iPad told me it required too much power, so it did not work. But when I plugged in the Konami microphone from my Wii Glee Karaoke game, it worked pretty well. A quick search online reveals that some podcasters use the Blue Microphone Yeti with their iPads.

3. Powering slide presentations. If you’re looking to connect your iPad (or iPhone or iPod) to a standard LCD projector or other VGA-compatible display, you can purchase the Apple VGA adaptor for $29. You can also opt to invest in a handy, super-portable projector, such as the MicroVision ShowWX Laser Pico Projector, starting around $199, or the Mili Pro 2.0 Projector, for around $369.95. To make sure that your PowerPoint presentations are easily accessible on your iPad, check out MightyMeeting, an app that I wrote about recently. Thanks to a recent update, you can also now control your Keynote slideshow presentations on the iPad using an iPhone or iPod touch.

4. Editing Microsoft Office docs. For an app that provides combined file storage with Microsoft Office document editing, check out Soonr, which I wrote about recently. Alternatively, you can also use other file storage/sync solutions, such as Dropbox and SugarSync, and combine them with editing apps like QuickOffice and Documents To Go to provide similar functionality.

What apps, peripherals and hacks have you tried to make your iPad work-worthy?

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user KillR-B

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