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Archive for the ‘apps’ Category
The race to the cloud is heating up, and the last week has seen some pretty big cloud-related news from two of the largest technology companies in the world.
Microsoft SkyDrive
Like other major
names in the tech industry, Microsoft has moved to the cloud with SkyDrive, an
online storage service that is the meat of its cloud computing services (think: Amazon Web Services). Just yesterday, Microsoft rolled out some impressive
new apps for SkyDrive that may prove to be a breakthrough moment for the
company, at least in the cloud.
Perhaps the biggest revelation was desktop integration with Windows and Mac (although only the OS X Lion version).
In a move that is highly reminiscent of Dropbox, users will be able to access and save files in SkyDrive as if it were just any other folder on their computers, and everything they put in there will be automatically backed up in the cloud, safe and sound, as well as synced to other computers with access to the account.
A new preview application will allow Windows users to access, browse and stream files using a remote PC.
Microsoft also updated its mobile apps for iOS and Windows Phones, as well as launching a SkyDrive iPad application.
One major downside to this update is that the company is drastically reducing the amount of free storage it offers, from 25 GB to a paltry 7 GB. But maybe it’s not that bad, as Microsoft claims that less than 0.1 percent of current SkyDrive users actually use more than 7 GB. Plus, current customers who are using over 4 GB of storage will be upgraded to 25 GB for free, and new users will obviously be able to buy more storage, with a starting package that runs just $10 a year for 20 GB.
Google Drive
Google has also announced Google Drive, the company's first major attempt to bring its brand into the cloud.
After a long period of speculation, Google finally came clean with its announcement of Drive, which will work pretty much like SkyDrive, AWS and most other cloud services.
Users will be able to create, share, collaborate on and, of course, store all kinds of content in Drive, including photos, videos, documents, PDFs and more. This content will be available from basically anywhere, as Drive can be installed on both Macs and PCs, along with an app for Android mobile devices; the iOS version is in development.
Google has built Google Docs right into Drive to make it easy for users to create and work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. All shared content will allow users to add and reply to comments on anything (including image or video files), and Drive will notify them when other users comment on shared items.
And, no surprise, Google built in some handy search features, allowing users to search for keywords and filter results by file type, owner and other considerations. The service will even be able to recognize text in scanned documents with Opitical Character Recognition technology.
Drive is another component of Google's attempts to create a seamless experience for users across all facets of the Web, and it integrates nicely into other Google properties like Google+ and Gmail. It will also work with third-party applications for faxing documents, editing videos and more. These apps can be installed in the Chrome Web Store, with more additions on the way.
To start, users will get 5 GB of free storage. From there, they can upgrade to 25 GB for $2.49 a month, 100 GB for $4.99 a month or 1 TB for $49.99 a month. Paid accounts will also automatically expand a user's Gmail storage to 25 GB.
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Five Productivity Apps for the Chrome Browser
posted by AllisonH @ 4:00 PM
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Apps are hard to escape these days.
Not only do they take up the screens of our smartphones and tablets, but they can also be downloaded on social networks and browsers too.
And finding really useful apps can be like digging for gold. So we decided to do the digging for you.
Check out this list of productivity apps for your Google Chrome browser:
BookedIN Appointment Scheduler
This is an appointment scheduling app for small businesses. Users just need to sign up for a free account and list their business' services. Then, BookedIn advertises the services on a public webpage that is created for the participating business. Clients can then book their appointments online. Features include a free public webpage for booking appointments, an online calendar, a client database, appointment reminders, a BookedIN button that can be added to websites, and more.
The name of this app pretty much says it all. It can capture visible content from a tab, a region of a webpage or a whole page, and save it as a PNG image. Users can also edit the captured image before saving it, by adding highlights or text. Furthermore, the app recognizes horizontal scrolls and detects floating objects so it can avoid capturing them multiple times if the whole page capture requires scrolling.
This app allows Chrome browser users to make presentations. The presentations can be accessed anywhere, including from iPhones and iPads because the software includes an HTML5 viewer. Slides can include audio and videos, and can be shared through links or embedded on a website or a blog. Additionally, users can measure impact and audience engagement through presentation analytics.
This photo editor allows anyone to change-up photos, from basic edits to complex effects. It includes more than 30 rich editing tools, a large database of image effects, blend mode, layers and more. Users can utilize this tool to create business cards and letterheads, build a PowerPoint slide background, create unique labels, crop photos or craft designs.
This app allows its users to critique their own, or someone else’s Web pages. It features tools for analyzing the gray scale of a site, intersections of a site, the color contrast of a site and more. Although this tool isn’t nearly as effective as testing different design elements on your page through A and B or multivariate testing solutions, it can, however, provide some insight into classic design principles.
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You can find an app store on just about any platform now-a-days, and LinkedIn is no exception.
LinkedIn Applications are designed to enrich a user’s profile, but for those of you that haven’t rummaged through the networking site’s apps, here are a few that have caught our attention:
Show off your blog content! This app syncs WordPress blog posts with LinkedIn profiles. Additionally, blog posts can be filtered with a LinkedIn tag, in order to make sure content is relevant to the LinkedIn’s professional community.
Share presentations and documents within the LinkedIn network. This app allows users to upload content such as portfolios, resumes, conference talks, PDFs, marketing and sales presentations. The app supports many different formats and allows YouTube videos and audio to be embedded into presentations. It is available and can sync with both LinkedIn and Facebook social networks.
This is a great app for resume building. It allows users to showcase creative work by uploading their portfolio to the Behance Network, which is a free online platform for creative professionals. Then, users can create an unlimited number of multimedia projects and select which ones are displayed on their profile.
The Google Presentation app allows users to showcase presentations directly on LinkedIn profiles. Users can either upload a Powerpoint file or use Google’s free online application to create a presentation. The app presents a great avenue for visually displaying professional accomplishments.
Find out what your peers have been reading. This app allows LinkedIn users to share their favorite books with each other. Once the app is installed, users can add books that they are currently reading, planning to read and have already read.
Huddle Worspaces enables different workspaces to be created for different groups of connections. By separating connections, LinkedIn users can choose to share specific content with specific people. This app is great for teams that are working together to exchange documents and ideas.
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Consumer Behavior Driven By Mobile Apps
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 7:21 AM
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The debate regarding mobile apps versus Web consumption is getting hotter and hotter – and clearer and clearer. The rate of adoption, according to Mobile analytics firm Flurry, is outpacing both the PC revolution of the 80's and the Internet boom of the 90's.
Since 2007, in fact, more than 500 million iOS and Android smartphones and tablets have been activates and by the end of 2012, Flurry estimates that the cumulative number of those devices actives will surpass 1 billion.
What's even more impressive is that roughly 40 billion applications have already been downloaded from the App Store and Android Market. In the summer of of 2011, Flurry's published a report on how the average smartphone user began spending more time in their mobile apps than they do browsing the Web. Flurry just updated its data and found that the usage gap just keeps getting bigger.
Interactive consumption has continued to change over the last 18 months between the Web and mobile native apps according to Flurry. The chart from Flurry above indicates that smartphone and tablet users now spend over 90 minutes each day using applications while time spend on the Web has shrunk. What this means is that users are replacing their website usage with applications. The growth is slowing however. The time spend in mobile apps rose 23 percent from December 2010 to June 2011 but just over 15% from June 2011 to December 2011.
More on Flurry Analytics from Website Magazine:
- Flurry's Web Analytics Tool Gets Update
- A Flurry of Analytics Data for Mobile Apps
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Wouldn't it be nice if you could develop that next killer app in the cloud? Well you can! Cloud content service Brightcove has made App Cloud, an end-to-end platform for the development, deployment and operation of native apps for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, available to the general public.
App Cloud combines an open HTML5 Web development model with "intelligent" cloud services to accelerate app development, optimize performance, measure effectiveness, and enable dynamic updates to installed apps. Developers use HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and the App Cloud software development kit (SDK) to create apps.
“The App Cloud beta program has been very well received over the past few months, and we have been impressed by the quality, breadth and creativity of the apps developed by our beta users,” said Ashley Streb, Vice President of Technology at Brightcove. “Now, any organization can take advantage of App Cloud to easily build, deliver, and manage dynamic, custom content apps across multiple devices for a superior end user experience.”
Brightcove indicated that more than 1,200 individual users have participated in the App Cloud beta testing program and several App Cloud-powered apps are currently available for download through the iTunes App Store and Google's Android Market including apps from the U.S. Department of State and Lifetime Networks.
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