Cloud computing

NEW YORK--Industry consortia are pervasive. But they often don't amount to much -- a spate of press releases, a series of progressively less energetic meetings making little progress, and the eventual fade to black. And even most successful consortia tend to be about vendors cooperating on specific standards and technologies. Important, but very limited in scope.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has been an exception. It announced in October of 2010 with a membership including more than 70 global IT leaders, representing $50 billion dollars in annual IT spend. Intel has been the organizing force and is the … Read more

Amazon.com's free Cloud Player app is now available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices via Apple's App Store.

The app lets you stream or download music stored in your Amazon cloud to your Apple devices. You can also play music already saved on your device and create your own playlists.

Filling up your Amazon cloud with music requires you to first download Amazon's browser-based Cloud Player and the MP3 uploader. After those are installed, you can view your cloud space and upload music directly from your computer. You can also store any music that you … Read more

Google's Chrome OS just got vastly more useful, with two new Chrome OS devices announced today -- a Chromebook laptop and Chromebox desktop from Samsung that clear up performance problems that sullied last year's debut of the browser-based operating system.

I found the first-generation Chromebooks usable but painfully slow. Unshackled from slow hardware, though, Chrome OS now can stand on its own merits.

So how does it stand up? After a week of testing Samsung's new $329 Series 3 Chromebox and $449 Series 5 550 Chromebook, which go on sale today, I think the new Chrome OS … Read more

Google has released the Android version of an overhauled Google+ app, part of the company's attempt to move to a "simpler, more beautiful Google," in the words of Vic Gundotra, the company's senior vice president of engineering.

The new app catches up with the iOS Google+ app that Google released a couple of weeks ago with a new visually rich, photo-first interface. And in some ways it surpasses it, for example in its support for tablets.

Google trails Facebook by far when it comes to the magnitude of membership on the overt social-network Google+ site, but … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Most discussions about where computing is and where it's going end up touching on three big themes: mobility, big data, and cloud computing. Yesterday's MIT Sloan CIO Symposium was no exception, whether those precise terms were used or not.

Perhaps the most striking example of just how rapidly mobile devices are forcing IT organizations to adapt came from Scott Griffith, the CEO of Zipcar, who said that "60 percent of interactions are now through an Android or an iPhone." He also noted that essentially BlackBerry's entire share had shifted to Android over a … Read more

Early discussion of cloud computing focused on the public option. In fact, the economic concept of computing delivered as a sort of utility by mega service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft was at the core of the original cloud-computing concept.

As it turns out though, these public clouds are hardly the only form that cloud computing has taken. Computing is more complicated than a true utility like electricity. For this and other reasons, private and hybrid clouds -- which use computers and other IT resources controlled by a single organization -- have evolved to become an important part … Read more

Google Drive is handy for mobile devices and conventional computers, but it's just arrived on another class of devices where it's potentially a lot more transformative: Chrome OS.

Google built Google Drive into the latest developer release of Chrome OS version 20.0.1116.0, said Chrome team member Danielle Drew in a blog post today.

Google Drive synchronizes files across multiple devices and with Google's own servers; a file copied or saved into the folder on a personal computer or uploaded to the Google Drive Web site is then accessible on other devices. It's tightly … Read more

Dropbox users who find it a hassle getting photos off their camera and onto their online storage site now have a way to avoid the middleman.

The new Dropbox 1.4 software for Windows, OS X, or Linux can automatically upload photos not just from a camera, but from a smartphone, tablet, SD card, and just about any other gadget that houses your images.

How can Dropbox users set this up? Here's how it works in Windows:

First, install the new version of Dropbox. Then right-click the Dropbox icon in the System tray and select Preferences. You should see … Read more

Microsoft giveth, and it taketh away. At least, that's how it looks with the latest incarnation of the SkyDrive online storage service.

Unveiled this week, the preview of the new SkyDrive kicks in several improvements over its Web-based predecessor.

The old SkyDrive Web site separates documents that you upload from those synced via Live Mesh, creating a limited and clumsy workspace. The new preview edition ensures that all files are stored in one place, whether they're uploaded or synced from your PC.

You can now view and open all your SkyDrive files directly from Windows Explorer, eliminating the … Read more