Goodbye Fax, Hello Personal Cloud | Cloudline | Wired.com

Goodbye Fax, Hello Personal Cloud | Cloudline | Wired.com

Back in February my son lost control of his car and landed in the hospital. Fortunately he has recovered from his injuries. And fortunately we have health insurance. So everything’s OK. However, I’m still — six months later — trying to untangle the bureaucratic mess that ensued.

There are multiple insurance providers (auto, health) and healthcare providers (hospital, clinic) involved in this game. None of them talk to each other directly. They all emit tokens, in the form of images of documents, that the consumer — me in this case — has to decode and route.

Read More

Cloud to overtake PCs by 2014, predicts Gartner

Cloud to overtake PCs by 2014, predicts Gartner

Cloud Storage Race – Dropbox, Google Drive, Box

by BOJANA

in APPLICATIONS

Even though cloud storage market is almost completely populated at this moment, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box seem to be the biggest players in the race. Different providers might offer various features but these three remain synonyms for cloud storage.

• Read: Cloud storage benefits for Small businesses

Features that all cloud storage services have in common are: folder syncing across multiple devices, file sharing and online backup. Pricing plans and storage space differ from provider to provider and it becomes increasingly difficult to choose only one of them. However, these three big names seem to constantly be in the race. I’m not including Skydrive from Microsoft for now and will be covering it at later stage, whenWindows 8 will officially launched the final version. For now, lets quickly look into some of the features of Dropbox, box and Google drive.

Dropbox Vs. Google Drive vs Box cloud storage:

Dropbox:

Dropbox is the leading consumer-oriented cloud storage with 50 million registered users. This number is mostly reached through its referral program – 500 MB bonus storage in free account and 1 GB in premium accounts for each new user that accepts your invite. This was basically the word of mouth marketing for Dropbox. Its simple interface and intuitive features were enough to gain users’ attention, especially among those that are not particularly tech savvy. The simplicity is probably the most notable feature of Dropbox, but this doesn’t mean it’s poor in functions.

The best thing about Skydrive is their huge user base and it supports multiple platform. Being one of the popular and oldest cloud storage here, they have a huge advantage but now with launch of Google drive and skydrive, and leaked Dropbox password, we can expect other free cloud storage services to take a leap.

Sign up for Dropbox

Google Drive:

Google Drive’s adoption was very smooth among Gmail users. It somehow came as the missing piece of a puzzle for those who were using Gmail and Google Docs for years. Though it entered cloud storage race quite late, Google Drive was able to gain plenty of faithful users. In the first 48h after launch it reached 5 million downloads.

By the end of June that number doubled. Even though it was long rumored that GDrive would be Dropbox killer, it actually didn’t take over many Dropbox users. Rather, it remained the choice of faithful Google fans because of its excellent integration with G Docs and Gmail. If you are an iPad user, you will love to use Google drive on it. It might take little time to get use to Google drive, but by converting docs.google.com to Google drive, Google got their initial user base without any sweat.  If you have not yet started with Google drive, you can quickly grab a free account from here using your existing Google login.

BOX:

Box cannot actually be compared to these two because its focus is mostly enterprise market. Box is a big name with more than 11 million users and 120,000 businesses and this number continues to grow. Box constantly improves its services and seeks new ways to penetrate different markets. Recently they announced opening the offices in Europe and enhanced collaboration with the partners – they introduced free storage on HP desktops and assigned free Box accounts to LGAndroid device buyers. But what exactly makes Box enterprise market favorite? Though their free account is obviously poor with features, the premium accounts allow creating online workspaces by syncing any folder with contents, comments and discussions, task assignment and many others. Besides this they have a great pro pricing plan.

You can also check out Pingdom comparison of Dropbox vs Google drive vs box vs Skydrive here.

All three big companies have different weapons to conquer particular segments of the market. It is expected that Gmail users would prefer Google Drive, but the real battle is for the platform agnostic ones. As more users start moving to the cloud their expectations from the services grow. Even though all providers give their best to improve their services it is still hard to announce a single winner.

This is a guest post by Bojana from Encrypted file storage, if you would like to write for CallingAllGeeks, check our guest posting guidelines.

Read more: http://www.callingallgeeks.org/48609/cloud-storage-race-dropbox-google-drive-box/#ixzz25BaSZnCS 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives

Podcast and Internet Radio FAQs - Telegraph

Hi,

A very useful information for online Radio listeners.

I thought you'd like this:
Read more

Podcast and Internet Radio FAQs - Telegraph
How to hear Pete Naughton's weekly downloadable podcasts and live Internet radio station picks.

---

This email is a direct message from a friend who wants to share an item of interest with you.
This email message is powered by Gigya's sharing technology. If you no longer wish to receive messages that are sent via Gigya's service, please click here to remove your email address.
Gigya Inc., 2513 E. Charleston Rd Suite 200, Mountain View, CA 94043.