It looks like Google wants to have the cloud to itself. In March, the company decreased prices for Google Drive and it is hoping to annihilate its main competitors, namely Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive. The battle for cloud supremacy has just started, and Google has once again turned the market upside down. The company slashed prices by 80%; users have 15 GB at their disposal in Google Drive Cloud Storage, which they can use for free. If you subscribe for 100 GB, you will be paying $1.99 rather than $4.99, and for 1 TB the price is $9.99/month instead of $49.99. OneDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive As opposite to OneDrive and Dropbox, Google’s storage services are incredibly inexpensive. Many users agree that the company is absolutely crazy for reducing the prices, yet they’re certainly not complaining. Surprisingly, Dropbox has higher fees than OneDrive; it charges... (more)

[Update] Swiss Bank Closes Assange’s Account

PostFinance, the Swiss Post Office bank, has closed the account that WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange opened after PayPal late Friday closed the one the renegade site has been using to collect donations. The Swiss Post bank said Monday morning that it found "Assange provided false information regarding his place of residence when opening the account." The statement on the bank's web site adds that "The Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process. Assange entered Geneva as his domicile. Upon inspection, this information was found to be incorrect. Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance. For this reason, PostFinance is entitled to close his account. If there is any indication that the information provided ... (more)

The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem

In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem. I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing. Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites of the companies themselves. Omissions to this Top 250 list should be sent to me via Twitter (twitter.com/jg21) and I will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this newly expanded rou... (more)

Cloud Computing Can Revitalize Your Career as Software Developer

Everyone knows that the longevity and ultimate success of a platform lies in the developers willing to create on that platform. Creating a healthy developer ecosystem in which both the developer and the platform vendor can grow and prosper is very important. No one knows this better than Microsoft. It has long been their mantra that “developers, developers, developers” are the key to success. With most of the new large scale websites and platforms being launched on open source platforms and now the cloud, this is becoming even more important. 4th International Cloud Computing Expo attracted more than 50 sponsors and exhibitors and expo floor was visited by more than 2,250 delegates in Santa Clara, CA If you just do some casual research, it is easy to see that the largest and most heavily trafficked sites on the web are written in languages such as PHP, Ruby on Rails ... (more)

Opinion: Who Made Amazon the Judge of What's Legal on the Web?

[This post originally appeared on Joseph Galarneau's blog and is republished here in Cloud Computing Journal (www.CloudComputingJournal.com) by kind permission of the author.] When you visit Newsweek.com, the words you read started their journey milliseconds earlier from an Amazon.com datacenter somewhere in northern Virginia. And if you visited Wikileaks.org earlier this week, the bytes comprising leaked U.S. embassy cables would have traveled a similar path from Amazon servers based in northern California or Ireland. While WikiLeaks and Newsweek are very different organizations, we both relied on the 21st century equivalent of the printing press – cloud computing – to distribute our information. Amazon shut off WikiLeaks servers Wednesday, citing the company’s violation of Amazon rules, coincidentally at the same time government officials called for similar action... (more)

XIRSYS Launches WebRTC Hosting Service

XirSys, a California-based tech company recently launched by the founders of Influxis, officially announced today that it is now providing cloud accounts for developers interested in testing the BETA services for their WebRTC hosting platform. WebRTC Journal ▸Home WebRTC is being touted as the leading disruptive communication technology, as it will allow people to communicate conveniently through their HTML5 compatible browsers in real-time, without any plugins. However, there are some real world challenges to overcome in order for users to properly connect to one another, such as traversing complex firewalls and configuring reliable and scalable STUN and TURN servers; that's where XirSys comes in. Register FREE for WebRTC Summit here ▸ http://bit.ly/1exOL9h WebRTC Journal ▸Home XirSys provides the infrastructure which enables businesses to deploy global WebRTC app... (more)

Does Software AG Get SOA?

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 44. Our topic this week on BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, and it is the week of July 13, 2009, centers on Software AG's bid to acquire IDS Scheer for about $320 million. We'll look into why this could be a big business process management (BPM) deal, not only for Software AG, but also for the service-oriented architecture (SOA) competitive landscape that is fast moving, as we saw from Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Another topic for our panel this week is the seemingly inevitable trend toward Web oriented architecture (WOA), most notably supported by Google's announcement of the Google Chrome operating system (OS). Will the popularity of devices like netbooks and smartphones accelerate the obsolescence of full-fledged fat clients, and what can Google hope to do further t... (more)

Dolphin Announces Open API With Over 50 Add-ons Including Dropbox and Wikipedia

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/28/12 -- GOOGLE I/O -- Dolphin Browser, the most popular third-party browser on Android and iOS and only Gesture and Voice enabled browser, today announced the launch of Dolphin Garage, which opens the Dolphin Browser API to allow for third-party development. Dolphin also announced four new Add-ons from Dropbox, Pocket, Evernote and Wikipedia that show off Dolphin Garage's powerful capabilities. In addition, Dolphin Garage also supports Web apps based on Adobe's PhoneGap, which enable faster HTML5 Web app deployment. Dolphin Garage gives developers access to more than 150 Dolphin internal APIs including various browser user interface interactions, while also providing a runtime sandbox environment to allow developers to create their own experiences within Dolphin Browser. Powered by Dolphin Garage, users can now seamlessly exp... (more)

Step-by-Step: Build a SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud on Windows Azure

My good friend and colleague, Tommy Patterson, recently blogged about leveraging the Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) preview offering to build a FREE lab environment in the Cloud.  You can read Tommy’s step-by-step article at: Building FREE Lab VMs in the Microsoft Cloud What about a SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud? Now that SharePoint Server 2013 has been released, I frequently get asked about ways in which a SharePoint 2013 lab environment can be easily built for studying, testing and/or performing a proof-of-concept.  You could certainly build this lab environment on your own hardware, but due to the level of SharePoint 2013 hardware requirements, a lot of us may not have sufficient spare hardware to implement an on-premise lab environment. This makes a great scenario for leveraging our Windows Azure FREE 90-day Trial Offer to build a free lab en... (more)

[Flashback to 2008] Is Google the Elephant in the Cloud?

While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing. The article, written by Stephen T. Arnold, concludes that: "Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement....[T]his patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot." Stephen E. Arnold, who blogs at arnoldit.com, monitors search, content p... (more)

Google Announces Chrome Operating System

Recently Google announced that it is creating a Cloud OS called Google Chrome OS. They describe it as an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks and will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. In a post on the Google Blog they shed some light on the proposed Google OS. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work. Google Ch... (more)