Boydo's Tech Talk

For people seriously considering a Windows 8 tablet as their next tablet OS here is something that might sweeten the deal a bit.

While the iPad has built in viewing capabilities for Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slidepacks the ability to edit them as part of the base operating system is absent. The situation is the same with OneNote notebooks although you can download a free app from the App Store for iPhone or iPad that will allow you to view and edit notes up in SkyDrive. The Android side of things is a bit scant in terms of native support although you can also download the official Microsoft OneNote app from Microsoft.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft is going to offer native support for Office documents in Windows 8 tablets, particularly given the support in Windows Phone 7. You won’t get the entire suite though but you’ll get Office 15 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote which should cover most bases. I guess we won’t be seeing Outlook as  we know it but there will be a Metro mail app (perhaps called Outlook) that will be better designed and optimised for the touch interface.

While this might have benefits for consumers it should also have a positive influence for small businesses and enterprises still assessing what sort of tablet deployments they could potentially undertake. Sure, tablets may not necessarily be the best content creation devices but for smaller bouts and minor document modifications it’s probably not a bad thing having such capable versions of Office 15 in Windows 8 for ARM devices.

Here’s something that might interest those cloud storage enthusiasts out there or people wanting to check things out before migrating their data.

If you want to try out Bitcasa which touts as being able to provide “infinite storage on your desktop” then here’s you chance to get an account. Just click here to signup and check it out. Bitcasa promises to be a good cloud storage solution across your Windows, Mac and Linux machines as well as from the web when you are away from your computers. The claim of infinite storage is made possibly through the aggressive use of data deduplication up in the Bitcasa cloud.

It’s similar to dropbox but with security and encryption baked right in and it doesn’t sync files to your computer (it only caches them once you have downloaded them for the first time).

Anyway, check it out – it’s free for the time being but is expected to cost $10 a month for unlimited storage in the future.

Here’s a quick update for those users of SkyDrive out there (and that includes you too Windows Phone folk).

It seems that Microsoft will be uncapping the allowed storage for photos and documents for its SkyDrive cloud storage service. This could be seen as a form of response to Apple’s forthcoming iCloud service (which uses Windows Azure as part of its backend). However, for the regular Windows and Windows Live user this might not mean so much.

However, users of Windows Phone 7 will find this somewhat more useful as all your photos can be backed up to SkyDrive automatically upon capture (albeit a lower resolution version). Furthermore, Microsoft Office document storage on Windows Phone integrates directly with SkyDrive (which can be accessed within Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010 as well as the cut down Office Web Apps on the web.

It’s been a bit slow but Microsoft now has a reasonable response to Google Docs. With photos thrown into the mix, Microsoft might also have a competitor to Picasa. Maybe we are seeing Microsoft making a comeback?

This might have flown under the radar for a lot of people but Google has released its cloud music service (potentially in response to Amazon which released its fully functioning service recently). As you might know, Amazon caused a bit of an upset upon launching its service and delivering songs bought through its online store directly to its cloud storage platform. This not only caught the competition off guard but ruffled the feathers of the record companies.

So what does Google Music have to offer? More specifically, what doesn’t if offer?

Well, for starters, Google Music has no deals with the record companies which means you will have a limited selection of music but I guess it depends upon your definition of “limited”. If you happen to like everything in Google Music then you might not be as limited as someone else who has musical taste that is barely covered by the service.

Google Music is also only available for use in the USA (officially). Whilst you can get around the invitation request process by using a proxy attempting to download the Google Music app through official means is region locked. Manually installing the APK file on your Android device also has varying mileage across devices (not surprisingly it works on the Nexus S but it doesn’t work on my rooted Samsung Galaxy S running Gingerbread).

Google, the world is larger than the USA, damn it.

Also, in true Google form, the service is in beta. As to how long the beta period will carry on is anybody’s guess. Gmail took five years to shed its beta designation. Is this really a beta or something to cover Google should everything go pear-shaped with the music industry? Furthermore, it appears that Google will charge for this service at some point but I can hardly see this as a valuable proposition in its current form.

The bottom line is that Google has released a lame duck into the wild because it has failed to successfully negotiate with the music industry. Granted, that’s no minor feat but if there were industry backing we’d be seeing wider spread availability of the service and a wider range of music available.

Google may have just snatched defeat from the jaws of victory to bring a meaningful content ecosystem to its own Android platform but it looks like Amazon will do that job for them and reap the rewards. Unless Google gets a move on this could be another Google Wave that will be put out of its misery.

The tech heads amongst us would be aware of the rumours of cloud music services from Apple and Google making the rounds at the moment especially after Amazon fired the first shot in the last couple of weeks (and may have upset the record companies in the process over licensing agreements).

Apple already has the dominant platform when it comes to digital music whilst Google has failed to offer anything for Android. Instead, Google has relied upon the likes of Rhapsody and now Amazon (ironically) to provide streaming audio services for the masses. Google is lagging behind offering anything on par with the iTunes store with its Android Market and the issue with American Express cards only being accepted for applications developed by US residents still persists.

Not to single out Google, Microsoft has been offering its Zune Pass product with integration with Windows Phone 7 but one major drawback is that Microsoft has not been able to negotiate widespread availability of its subscription music service for countries outside of the USA, the UK and a handful of other countries.

Anyway, with smartphones becoming more commonplace with wider availability of 3G and Wi-Fi data it would seem that migration to cloud music is the next logical step (whether or not the record companies like it) with some notable benefits, including:

• offsite storage and backup of your content (negating the need for copious amounts of local storage and backup solutions),
• the elimination of the need to sync devices with your content (which can be very time consuming on the initial sync depending on the size of your collection).

However, there can be downsides to cloud solutions as well with the major one being locked into a cloud service as a result of using a particular mobile platform. It remains to be seen if Apple would make available any sort of iTunes cloud music service on anything other than iOS devices and Google with its Android platform. Conversely, it would remain to be seen if mobile platform owners lock out cloud services owned by competitors in the mobile space (although it would be expected that such moves would result in lawsuits).

There will still be people who find the cloud concept rather foreign in that they have come to expect something physical and/or tangible for their money (like a record, casette or a disc). As new generations embrace technology from increasingly younger ages and come to expect content anywhere at any time it makes sense that we just push bits around over networks on demand. Physical media is on the way out with the likes of Netflix in the USA being incredibly successful and YouTube being a popular medium that enables anyone to share their content with the rest of the world. Not only does this pose a problem for record companies but it also presents issues for manufacturers of disc players who stand to lose a revenue stream in the process.

At any rate, cloud music, cloud content and cloud storage may well take off in a big way this year so it will be interesting to see what unfolds.

Some people, such as myself, are not entirely and completed wedded to a single content and device ecosystem in that I have the Samsung Galaxy S as my mobile phone (an Android device for those unfamiliar with it), a Windows 7 custom built desktop  at home, a Windows 7 MSI Wind netbook and an Apple iPad as my intermediate device.

Putting aside the larger conundrum of automatic content synchronisation (i.e. music, video, podcasts, etc) something as simple as notes has been a bit of a challenge. I would have notes on my iPad that would only show up on my computer when I synced via iTunes (and vice-versa) and notes on my Android phone were stranded. I wasn’t keen on installing yet another piece of software on my computer to sync content so I went about looking for a cloud-based solution.

Luckily, I came across Evernote.

Evernote is a cross-platform solution that allows you to keep notes and notebooks up in the cloud which means that you can do away with cables and syncing software. Client software is available for a stack of devices, including:

• Android devices,
• Apple iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch,
• BlackBerry,
• Palm WebOS devices,
• Windows Mobile devices (but not Windows Phone 7).

Software is also available for Windows (XP and later) and MacOS X (10.5.8 and later) computers or you can use it from within a web browser. There is also a Firefox extension to capture those interesting things you come across on the web and, in a similar fashion, if your mobile device has a camera in it you can also capture photos directly into Evernote.

One concern that people may have is that using a cloud-based solution may be affected when no connection to the Internet is available. The great thing about Evernote is that you can also use your notes offline on your devices from the point it was last synced (apart from the web browser instance which does not cache notes).

If you’re interested in giving it a try you can do so for free which will give you give you the ability to create unlimited notes but with a restriction of 60MB of uploads per month, read only sharing and a limit on the what files can be synced whilst the premium version for US$5 a month (or $45 a year) either removes the restrictions or ups the limit. You can check out the plan comparison here. All plans include SSL encryption so that your notes are kept secure.

(Note: Evernote is in the midst of implementing full SSL security for free users in their latest client software over the last couple of months whilst usage of Evernote in your web browser will be protected by SSL).

As always, I recommend that you try before you buy where possible and, for the free plan, the price is right to give it a right go without risk.

As services in the cloud continue to proliferate it was only a matter of time before ground was broken with respect to gaming. OnLive has released its MicroConsole TV Adapter (a little box around the size of a thick smartphone) which provides wireless connectivity for up to four controllers as well as Bluetooth headsets, two USB ports (for keyboards, mice and other USB peripherals) in addition to HDMI, S/PDIF,component and regular analogue stereo ports. OnLive can also be used on smartphones and tablets including the iPhone and iPad.

OnLive has also signed up some big name publishers, including:

• Atari,
• Codemasters,
• Eidos Interactive,
• Electronic Arts,
• Sega,
• Take Two,
• Ubisoft.

So how is such a tiny capable of being able to run a game such Assassin’s Creed 2?

Essentially, the bulk of the processing is done up in the cloud which consists of five data centres located in North America. This processing includes both CPU and graphics with the client device (either the MicroConsole or software on a computer or smartphone) receiving data and a video stream. It probably goes without saying at this point that a broadband connection is absolutely necessary and, unless you live in North America, games will be somewhat laggy for us down under. Some games require a dedicated GPU for graphics whilst others can be virtualised across a farm of computers.

There are plans to roll out the service to certain parts of Europe (such as the UK, Belgium and Luxembourg) but availability elsewhere in the world is yet unannounced.

From a personal perspective I think it is still very much early days for something as ambitious as cloud-based gaming. Bandwidth and quality of service will be put to the test whilst more people may find that their download quotas may be insufficient for their needs. If it ever was released in Australia I don’t think I could seriously use the service (putting aside the current range of games) apart from a passing curiosity to see how well it would work. Of course, that’s not to say it won’t be successful but it could well be ahead of its time and in need of broadband speeds to catch up to make it work its best.

You can check out OnLive here if you want to know more about the service.

Back in June, I blogged about a great piece of software called Xmarks (previously known as Foxmarks when it was originally written as a plug-in for Firefox). In a nutshell, it allowed you to sync your bookmarks and your website credentials up to the cloud (over a secureand  encrypted connection) and then sync them down to your browsers across various computers. You also had the benefit of being able to get to your bookmarks online via the Xmarks website.

Unfortunately, Xmarks announced that they will be shutting down their service on 10th January, 2011. The company cited issues with sustaining its viability from a financial perspective and has attempted to find a buyer in order continue service. Significant hope was placed in a business model to monetise the service to come out of the woodwork as the service found legs but sadly that did not eventuate. The move is reminiscent of how Google terminated its browser sync plug-in for Firefox after what seemed to be quite a successful release.

To that end, Xmarks has lasted four years and has garnered a user base in the millions and stores over a billion bookmarks. Whilst this information could prove to be lucrative to various marketing and advertising companies, Xmarks has stated that they will not be selling the information and will destroy it upon closure of the service – an admirable approach.

So what can fill the void?

These days, modern browsers such as Chrome and Firefox include some sort of bookmark sync functionality but this does not solve the issue when attempting to sync between the various browsers (i.e. Firefox -> Chrome, Safari -> Internet Explorer, etc) either on the same computer or different computers. There are solutions such as LastPass that specifically take care of credential storage and automated form filling but not quite suited to general bookmark syncing. There are other more suitable options but none as popular as Xmarks.

So if you have been using Xmarks, brace yourself as you might be in for some pain later on down the track.

Are there some things that you have uploaded to a social medium that you don’t have stored anywhere else? Perhaps you are implicitly relying on Facebook and Twitter remaining operational so that all those funny comments, memorable photos, shared links and event calendars are not lost?

If you have been following this blog for a while, you would know how passionate I am about backing up precious data and how much I encourage others to do likewise. So if you’re feeling responsible or maybe a bit guilty or concerned that you haven’t done anything just yet, here’s your chance!

There’s a great service called Backupify which can backup your content located on stack of services, including (but not limited to):

• Blogger*,
• Delicious,
• Facebook*,
• Flickr,
• FriendFeed*,
• Gmail*,
• Google Calendar*,
• Google Contacts*,
• Google Docs,
• Hotmail*,
• Photobucket
• Picasa Web Albums*,
• Twitter,
• WordPress*.

* Backup for these services is currently in beta.

If you want to give it a shot, there is a free plan that includes 2GB of space but there are Premium and Business plans that offer 10GB and 25GB respectively for US$39.95 and US$59.95 each. There are differing capabilities between the plans such as the number of accounts per service you can backup, priority support or archive frequency. If you want to check out those details, click here.

The real question is what to do with the backups. The average punter wouldn’t know what to do with the SQL and XML files that embody the text portion of the backups. Granted, the XML files are quite readable (albeit as a plain text file unless your browser provides some collapsing hierarchy magic). The SQL files on the other hand are a no go zone unless you can actually read it. Even then, the SQL files are of limited use unless you are going to restore the data into your own database and are willing to change the syntax to suit.

That aside, Backupify is great for backing up all of those photos you upload straight from your phone. I don’t know about you but I have found it painful downloading each photo one by one from my albums. I’ve  wiped my phone before realising that I haven’t copied off all of the photos so going back to Facebook or Twitter has been my only recourse. Best of all, Backupify will do its stuff in the background without you having to do anything other that the initial setup.

At the end of the day, Backupify might give you that added peace of mind for the right price (free!).

If you use multiple computers you might find it annoying that you have to maintain your bookmarks across them all or having to re-enter your credentials to login to various websites. At home I use Firefox and Chrome as my primary browsers as well as a portable version of Firefox when I am out and about. Keeping these synchronised manually would be a time consuming activity.

Thankfully, there is a solution.

Xmarks is a sync plug-in for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari and is available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux (depending on the availability of each browser for each operating system). The first time of use will take a little while to sync your data (including bookmarks, passwords and even tabs) to Xmarks but once that is done, Xmarks will make incremental updates between the Xmarks mothership and your browsers.

Another great feature is the ability to login and view your bookmarks online at the Xmarks website. This means you can access and maintain your bookmarks from on other computers where installing software may not be practical. There is also the ability to search your bookmarks on the website to help you find less frequently access bookmarks that may be buried several folders deep.

For the security conscious, you can even run your own Foxmarks server with which to sync your browsers so that your bookmarks and passwords are guaranteed to be kept private (even though your passwords are encrypted in transit to and from the mothership using an AES 256-bit cipher).

I’ve use Xmarks since Google Browser Sync was put to sleep and it has not skipped a beat. I love the convenience of having my bookmarks synchronised across all of my computers and browsers. An added benefit is that your bookmarks and password are safely backed up in the cloud so even if you do lose all of your computers,  your backups don’t work or you reformat on a frequent basis your information is still retrievable.

Give it a shot, you’ve got nothing to lose except your data if you don’t!