Cloud-based File Storage
Last weekend on Twitter, I saw a few tweets where a friend had lost a file, and try as she might, she could not find it on her machine, it was simply gone. There were lots of replies to her about the benefits of Apple’s Time Capsule and the Time Machine application, but she wasn’t on the Mac, so she was lost. There wasn’t a backup of the file made yet by her OS, she hadn’t emailed it to anyone yet, so it was just gone. (I use Gmail as a file backup service all of the time – don’t you?) That made me wonder about how many files are lost or damaged everyday, so I took an informal poll, and I was amazed how many people told me about their file woes.
A few days after that I was in the office where my developers work and I found myself standing at a whiteboard talking to some of them. I asked them what value they would place on a service designed to upload their files to a cloud based storage service. They asked for more information — so I described the service as if I was already using it.
I told them that the application would take any directories that they selected, and copy them to the net. Then it would take the files in those directories and copy them up too, as they edited them, keeping a repository of the files in a chronological fashion, just in case they needed one from yesterday, before they made a bunch of changes that they now regretted. Then they could retrieve these files from any computer connected to the Internet, including smartphones, and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).
They all agreed that they would pay for it. Especially if it was stored somewhere they trusted, like maybe Amazon’s S3, with Salesforce’s Force.com, or in the Google cloud.
There are products out there today that are doing this for us. Box, iBackup, iDrive and Mozy are all doing it on the consumer side, while corporations like Barracuda Networks, Intronis, and Symantec are just a few who run reputable services. So why hasn’t an operating system maker done this yet? Why hasn’t an OS just incorporated this as a part of the operating system? Are they gun-shy from the Microsoft lawsuits of the 1990s?
Someone will have to move past this. Perhaps Apple has this in mind with their me.com platform? Microsoft is building a credible cloud computing system in Azure, maybe we will see some of this technology spill into Windows 7? Is Google prepping an operating system built around Android? Any of these companies are capable of sweeping modern OSes into the next generation. Think OS 2.0.
Printing In The Cloud
While I have written about products here before, I haven’t really delved into the product review genre before. But this time I wanted to share more that a passing glance at a little bit of technology that gets it right. This week I finally made the last leap into the Wi-Fi world at home, with a Wi-Fi enabled printer. I know, it is horribly disheartening for you knowing that until just this week I was still tethered to a printer at home, but no more.
I unpacked the Epson Workforce 600 printer with one of my daughters, and I let her help me through the setup. It was easy and fast. I set it up on my Macbook and on the iMac as well. Printed some photos and a rather hefty PDF that I needed to scribble notes on.
I was impressed with the speed of the prints, the clarity, the vibrant colors, and the relative quiet too. It gives me a copier, fax machine and scanner with the printer — so it is going to fulfill all of my homeoffice needs. I will let you hit the link below for a full list of the capabilities that the Workforce 600 boasts, but one thing I want to focus on is photo printing.
I told the kids that I would let them print a few photos, so we found the ones we wanted in iPhoto, and in a few seconds the kids had the pix they wanted. Perfect.
As I was sitting on the couch, printing a file, when I had another idea. When my family comes out to the house they usually bring their laptops. (We are a fairly connected bunch of people.) They all have good digital cameras, digital video cameras and we all put those images on the Internet at various sites. So I wondered: how long until technology will get us to a point where just walking into a house with a Wi-Fi enabled printer and you have access to it. No install of drivers, no configuration; just seamless connectivity. Soon I think, soon.
Links:
Matt Williamson
twitter.com/mattwilliamson