Netizen

Monday, July 30, 2012

Head In The Cloud: Google Drive

If Disqus can do it, maybe Dropbox can do it. (Adding Disqus To My Blog Was The Easiest Thing) But cloud storage is quite a central experience and so is going to get a lot of attention from the Big G. Blog commenting is a sideshow by comparison.

Dropbox: 2 GB. Google Drive: 5 GB. Microsoft SkyDrive: 25 GB. Microsoft is the clear winner!

Google's Drive Adds to a Complicated Cloud

After roughly six years of rumors, Google has finally launched its own cloud storage and syncing service, called Google Drive. The service offers five gigabytes of online file storage for free and includes software that automatically synchronizes files between Windows and Apple computers, Android phones, and Google's cloud. ..... Users can pay $2.49 a month for an extra 25 gigabytes of storage, or pay more for larger blocks up to a maximum of 16 terabytes. ..... The five gigabytes of storage that Google now offers is more than the two gigabytes that's standard with a free Dropbox account, although Dropbox runs several promotions that make it relatively easy for a user to get five gigabytes or more for free. Dropbox offers 50 gigabytes of storage for $9.99 per month; a Google Drive user can get 100 gigabytes for half that price..... Microsoft yesterday upgraded the capacity of its cloud storage service, SkyDrive, which integrates closely with its Windows Phone software and the upcoming Windows 8. Users of that service receive 25 gigabytes of storage for free, and can pay for more....... Google Drive .. It is meant to be a place where you can work with data and documents, not just store them. More than 30 types of document can be viewed from the Google Drive site, including many video and image formats, and office documents can be edited there, too. Computer vision algorithms make it possible to search text in any images uploaded to Google Drive ...... build "the Internet's file system." ..... intense competition between Google, Microsoft, Apple, and smaller companies such as Dropbox.

Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist...... Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items. .... regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader. .... Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology..... Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive.

Just like there is room for more than one email service, there is room for more than one cloud storage system. I am not thinking 2 GB versus 5 GB versus 25 GB. I am thinking 2 plus 5 plus 25.

Edit videos in Drive? Wow.

Personal Data For Personal Sale

New York Stock Exchange (Photo credit: inkwellmusings)

A Stock Exchange for Your Personal Data

Companies already make billions because they know our online habits. What if we could take a cut? ..... Today, people have no choice but to give away their personal information—sometimes in exchange for free networking on Twitter or searching on Google, but other times to third-party data-aggregation firms without realizing it at all...... something akin to a New York Stock Exchange for personal data. A trusted market operator could take a small cut of each transaction and help arrive at a realistic price for a sale. ..... fresh ideas and business models that promise users control over their privacy are gaining momentum. Startups like Personal and Singly are working on these challenges already. The World Economic Forum recently called an individual's data an emerging "asset class." .... Giving people control on a trustworthy market could encourage more and new kinds of data to be shared

I am a huge proponent of collecting and selling this data to make gigabit broadband free for every human being on the planet.

A Display Windscreen

Just don't be touching it.

Laser System Paints Information on the Road Ahead

Major carmakers in Detroit are also planning to integrate the technology into their vehicles by 2016 .... the lasers' pure, saturated colors result in more vivid images with a higher contrast ratio, so they are visible in daylight. ..... mobile connectivity is on the rise, and drivers need more and more information to be displayed in the least distracting way possible. That means the head-up display market for cars could be on the cusp of significant growth.

But then driverless cars don't really need these display windscreens. Well, I guess you could use it for entertainment purposes.

Quantum Dots

Quantum Dots Give Notebooks a New Glow

A layer of nanomaterial that gives a liquid-crystal display the rich range of colors usually possible only with more expensive technologies will be commercialized later this year by the materials giant 3M and Nanosys ..... Liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) .... organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) ..... their film—a sheet of plastic embedded with nanoscale spheres of indium-phosphide and cadmium quantum dots—makes it possible to match the color gamut of an OLED in an LCD ...... a typical high-end LCD provides only about 70 percent of the color range in a standard called Adobe RGB, while an LCD with this film provides the full gamut (as does an OLED display)

OLED quality displays at the price of LCDs.

Nanotech is seeping into traditional tech.

The Commandos Behind Facebook's Growth

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

If you are like me you though the massive growth happened on its own.

Chasing Facebook's Next Billion Users

The growth team was formed in late 2007, when Zuckerberg decided expansion was so important that it warranted a unit with its own resources. The site was approaching 100 million members, but its growth rate had cooled. ..... the growth team struck a deal with Google to let the search engine show Facebook profiles in its results. They also launched a feature called “People You May Know” ....... a companywide push to create a translation tool that let users in Spain, France, and Germany navigate the site in their native languages. Within two years of its creation, the team had expanded Facebook’s roster of users sevenfold, to 360 million. ..... a key to building more active members is spotting what she calls “magic moments.” That’s when a new user moves from thinking, “‘What the hell is this Facebook thing all about’ to ‘Aha! I understand, this is cool,’” says Gleit. Facebook tries to get users to experience this moment as early as possible by helping them find friends effortlessly. ...... her job entails wrangling with other teams at Facebook to highlight features on the site that improve engagement ..... “The next billions of people, we believe, are going to come through mobile” ...... governmental barriers like in China, and occasionally Vietnam, or competitive barriers like VKontakte in Russia ..... Quora, online storage company Dropbox, and Twitter now have their own growth teams