Amazon right now officially launched its Kindle Cloud Reader, a web app that lets individuals browse their Kindle books on the iPad and other devices — and make Amazon purchases from inside the app. Amazon’s Cloud Reader lets you read your Kindle books, immediately, on Amazon’s cloud. It support the Chrome browser on Mac/PC/Linux/Chromebook, Safari on Mac/PC and iPad. Support for further browsers is coming soon, says Amazon.

TechCrunch explains it’s a internet-based version of their Kindle eBook reader app (above). It enables you to read your books from the cloud or to download your books for offline reading thanks to the magic of HTML-five.

Capabilities of Kindle Cloud Reader incorporate:

• Instant access to all of your books
• Begin reading over 950,000 Kindle books instantly inside your browser
• An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and commence reading them instantly
• New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad’s touch interface
• Your present book is automatically created available for offline use, and you can select to save a book for reading offline at any time
• Obtain automatic software updates without having the require to download new computer software
• Pick any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and far more
• View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you’ve produced on other Kindle apps or on Kindle
• Sync your final page read across your Kindle and no cost Kindle apps so you can usually choose up where you left off

The success of the $ 250 Color Nook has stimulated speculation of the expected color Kindle that would most likely use Amazon’s Android App Store, Amazon’s Music Cloud service and Amazon’s Instant Video Download store. The new EPUB-three spec for ebooks supports HTML-5 with embedded audio and video.

Downloading audio and video directly to a Color Kindle reader is the problem. The Kindle’s built-in 3G connection from AT&T was only designed for text-based ebooks — not web surfing. That implies a Color Kindle ought to use WiFi or subscribe to a monthly information service. Downloading a movie on a Kindle would call for some flavor of 𔄜G”.

Here are some other speculations:

• A 7″ and 10″ versions are rumored, with the 10″ supporting HD video
• At $ 199 for a 7″ color model it would be a loss leader, but could make it back on content.
• May have Kindle-like keyboard and page turning buttons.
• Evolving support for E-Pub3 for multimedia ebooks.
• Packaged information plans from numerous carriers.
• Streaming Netflix-like video would also be available through landline/WiFi connections.
• Packaged with Newspaper and Magazine subscriptions (and color display ads).

Samsung’s Celox has an interesting set of functions. The Android 2.3 telephone has a four.5-inch Super AMOLED display with 800𴦸 screen resolution, a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 chipset and runs on TD-LTE in the 2.6 GHz band. Takes a assortment of USB peripherals. A lower-end color Kindle may possibly use 3G connectivity with WiFi. The cloud has the content. WiFi supplies the link.

If multi-media books and magazines are the future, Amazon is ready to go.

dailywireless.org

When you find out the reason that Amazon was able to beat Google Music and a cloud-based iTunes to market, you might be a bit surprised. See, those other services have been talked about for months upon months, with the main reason we haven’t seen them launched stemming from licensing issues between the companies wishing to instate cloud-based music services and record labels still sour over the demise of physical music sales. Amazon’s cloud music locker seemed to spring up out of no where, so what’s the deal? Turns out Amazon didn’t even bother to get the proper licensing before launching their service, and record labels, as you could imagine, aren’t all that happy about it.

In fact, Amazon didn’t even bother to get in touch with record labels until last week and decided to go ahead and launch their new service while terms of licensing were still being negotiated. It’s a bold move, one that may end up costing the retailer in the long run. A Sony Music spokesperson said, “We hope that they’ll reach a new license deal, but we’re keeping all of our legal options open.”

Perhaps some heat from the music industry and potentially being sued by the RIAA or individual record labels is a small price to pay to leapfrog Google and Apple, the two companies expected to dominate these area of digital media distribution.

[via Reuters]

AT&T chief Randall Stephenson, at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday said that the next wave of growth in the wireless industry will be led by a combination of mobile broadband and cloud computing. Stephenson says customers should be able to buy an application once, and have it work across many different devices – using cloud-based web apps.

Stephenson pointed to texting, which was originally a walled garden whereby users could only text people on the same network. Once interoperability was introduced, however, “demand just skyrocketed and created a business model for companies like Twitter.”

The average customer is OS, device, and network agnostic, he said. They want something seamless and that’s “a perfect example of how this cloud computing and mobile Internet are going to provide a very powerful force” for growth.

“There’s a tidal wave coming … that’s being carried by these 4G networks and cloud computing environments,” Stephenson said. “We as an industry can try to control this tide … but customers are going to do what they want. Our objective is to create a seamless and open environment.”

Mobisante wants to change the way ultrasound is delivered, reports TechFlash. Mobisante uses cell phones and existing wireless networks to transmit ultrasound images from patients in remote areas to hospitals. Here’s Chutani explaining how the technology works on a recent CNN news segment.

Cloud-based processing can now provide supercomputer power to mobile devices.

Elemental’s Cloud processing uses Amazon Web services for GPU processing in the cloud.

There are now over 10,000 medical apps in the App Store; a big jump from the 1,544 apps last year. Houston Neal narrowed it down to a list of the 70 best apps on his “Best Medical iPhone Apps for Doctors and Med Students” website.

Microwave chips aren’t just for communications anymore. They enable new sensor applications.

Imagine an Intel i7 handheld with Nvidia GPUs in a couple years. Like Wordlens for doctors. Nanoscience and metamaterials are opening new worlds.

Amazon’s new cloud application, Elastic Beanstalk, manages cloud applications automatically. Developers simply upload their application and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing and auto-scaling.
Perhaps the time has come for an open source competition to Amazon’s Cloud Service, with hooks and interfaces for a variety of mobile phone applications. It would be handy for apps that require, say image processing or a large data mining component.

Open source resource mapping projects like Oregon Explorer (www.oregonexplorer.info) and Willamette Basin Explorer (willametteexplorer.info) can make databases, created by government silos, available to everyone using the expertise of Oregon State’s Open Source Lab. OpenOceanMap (ohloh.net) is an ambitious project to break the ties of traditional geo-spatial data collection and develop a truly cross platform, Open Source, and transportable decision support tool. Their Gulf Project demo shows the utility of combining open source data bases.

Amazon’s Cloud is being used for Ocean Observatories. The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is the home of world-class hosting services for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, Drupal, and more than 50 other leading open source software projects

View full post on dailywireless.org

Last year I wrote that the SugarSync cloud storage and sharing service arrived for S60 5th Edition. I was recently sent a note from the SugarSync folks that a version was just released for S60 3rd Edition devices. There are something like 390 million Symbian handsets around the world so there is still a rather large market for apps.

SugarSync gives you 5GB for free with options to upgrade to more storage as well. With SugarSync you can access, manage, and share documents, photos, music, and more stored in the cloud. SugarSync works with Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices too so you get a truly cross platform experience.

You can find SugarSync at the Ovi Store for free. I will need to try it out on the Nokia E73 Mode.

View full post on Nokia Experts

INQ has recently announced two Facebook centered devices recently dubbed the INQ Cloud Touch and Cloud Q.  The folks over at Engadget happened to get their hands on the Cloud Touch.  The device is candy bar styled and has an “HTC Wildfire like” form factor and feel to it, according to the reviewer.  The device will come with Android 2.2 along with its oversize Facebook widget which can take up a whole screen of its own.  Along with various software elements, the device will incorporate Spotify Premium and come with Fluency, the typing prediction engine that mans the SwiftKey keyboard.  The Cloud Touch is definitely shooting for “easy on your pocket” mode with its scaled down specs.  But according to the reviewer, it runs just as good as any device with a typical 1 GHz Snapdragon.   Read More…

INQ Cloud Touch Gets Previewed (The Facebook Phone)

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Does the simple lack-luster Facebook app on your phone leave you wanting more? Want Facebook chat without downloading another app? Music streamed from your computer to your phone (via Spotify only available in overseas at this time)?

If any of those ideas ever appealed to you, you’re in luck. The elusive “Facebook phone” has been revealed, although Facebook does not officially endorse the device. Nevertheless  it’s still here and packed full of all sorts of socially integrated features. From keeping track of your most talked to friends, to keeping track of posted media, to streaming music from your home computer via Spotify(not available it US at this time), this phone is specifically engineered for all you social deviants.

Although the INQ Cloud Touch will not grace the states for some time, the assimilated features are more than interesting. Check out for yourself in the hands-on videos below, thanks to TechCruchTV and All Things Digital.

Source: TechCruchTV – All Things Digital

View full post on AndroidSPIN

The UK’s mobile operator O2, a subsidiary of Spanish broadband and telecommunications provider Telefónica, which is big in Europe and Latin America, is planning to deploy 13,000 Wi-Fi hotspots over the next two years — with free internet access.

Initially the hotspots will be available in 450, O2-owned sites, reports the BBC, but will be expanded to other locations, including shops and restaurants. The network won’t just be for O2 customers: anyone with a mobile phone will be able to sign up and use the service, reports The Register. Free internet access will be paid for by venue advertising.

O2 already offers its premium subscribers access to hotspots run by The Cloud and BT OpenZone. That totals around 7,500 hotspots. Those deals will remain in place while O2 deploys its new free-to-all Wi-Fi network.

O2 Wi-Fi, will eventually replace the mobile operator’s existing 450 O2 Cloud hotspots, the company said in its announcement on Wednesday. It has promised that by 2013, it will at least double the number of existing premium hotspots offered by BT OpenZone and The Cloud, or close to 13,000, according to the company.

BT’s OpenZone and Fon networks are currently the biggest networks in the UK. BT’s Fon network offers WiFi connections that piggyback on BT home broadband networks. But O2 said that its competing service would offer “premium public hotspots, as opposed to using residential connections with limited bandwidth” – a swipe at FON. The Cloud claims to have around 22,000 hotspots internationally, while Virgin Media is also toying with the idea of creating a nationwide wi-fi network, reports the BBC.

Users wanting to take advantage will need to provide a mobile phone number, from any network, which will be confirmed with a text message. O2 then links the number to the MAC code (unique identity) of the handset, enabling it to automatically authorize future connections as well as spotting when the customer enters a hotspot area – enabling the delivery of advertising by text message or MMS. O2 says it expects venues hosting the service will pay for it, so targeted advertising is just a sideline, said the company.

View full post on dailywireless.org

TechCrunch and Bloomberg have been suggesting that a couple of “facebook phone” are being developed, and one of which is being made by INQ. Just recently, INQ placed a mobile phone spec sheet to the FCC for Bluetooth certification, which it now has as well. That handset name is the INQ Cloud Touch, and speculation is now that this is the first of at least 2 facebook phones we’ll see in the near future. The INQ Cloud Touch is described as:

An Android smartphone built to make messaging faster and smarter. It’s designed around the way people naturally communicate and has Facebook built into its core. The homescreen features multiple entry points to different Facebook functions, while a dynamic widget displays a feed of status updates, albums, videos and photos.

The mockup shown above displays a touchscreen with full QWERTY, which was one of the designs rumored by Bloomberg. As far as we know, this device will be running Android as well, which allows them to play with a custom UI, allowing all kinds of facebook features. Which carrier(s) will get this device is unknown, but a European launch may be likely as it would be home turf for INQ out of London. AT&T has also been rumored to provide the facebook phone in the US, but no details or confirmation have been given by any party. We’re sure to hear something soon though now that this has made its way to the web.

INQ Cloud Touch is Facebook Phone running Android

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

At CES, NEC has unveiled a hinged Android tablet with dual screens. NEC is not specifying if this is an all-work or all-fun tablet, it’s kind of in between. They suggest that it could make a great e-reader, a digital notebook for students, or whatever developers come up with. The “Cloud” part of the “Cloud Communicator” name means that NEC thinks the LT-W would be great for generic cloud services, but really, it’s just an Android 2.1 tablet with WiFi, Bluetooth, and optional 3G — there’s nothing special in here that makes it particularly well-adapted for magically pulling data out of the cloud.

As for the “Cloud Communicator” part of this tablet’s moniker, NEC is saying that this tablet would be great for generic cloud services. Other details on the LT-W; it’s running Android 2.1, interacts with a stylus, supports Wi-Fi connectivity, and optional 3G connectivity.

NEC dual-screen Android Cloud Communicator LT-W tablet first look

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Are you ready to embrace the cloud? Gird your loins, for Google’s Cr-48, Chrome OS Notebook, laptop prototype or whatever else you want to call it is itching to drag you kicking and screaming up to the cloud and into it.

Google’s Cr-48 is, as many Google projects are, a brazen experiment in laptoppery that’s so crazy it just might work. Might not, either. For the Cr-48 — or whatever it ends up being called -– is really a notebook only in the sense that it has a keyboard and a hinge which lets it fold in half.

The sell here is that the Cr-48 runs Google’s new and long-anticipated Chrome OS. Based on a skeletal Linux build, it is virtually instant-on and instant-off, and its simplicity is hard to overstate. That’s because Chrome OS really is almost nothing but the Chrome web browser.

When you turn on the Cr-48, it drops you right into the Chrome browser, with a handful of icons which are really shortcuts to web pages. Anything you can do on the web -– with Chrome on Linux, anyway -– you can do on the Cr-48. Flash, JavaScript, whatever, it’s all possible, but of course, Google would prefer you stick to Gmail, YouTube, Picasa and the like. Google’s services are tightly integrated with the Cr-48, to the point where you’re asked for your Google ID when you turn on the machine for the first time.

And be assured: None of this will work if you’re not online. The Cr-48 supports every kind of Wi-Fi, and it packs a Verizon WWAN system with a killer hook: Users get 100 MB of free bandwidth every month. That’s not much, but it can get you through the dead zone between Starbuckses. (Additional bandwidth costs up to $50 for 5 GB a month.) It won’t, however, do you any good on an airplane without Gogo: You can open a few cached web pages on the Cr-48, but mostly it’s a 3.6-pound brick when you’re offline.

Under the hood the Cr-48 has netbook guts: a 1.66-GHz Atom CPU, 2 GB of RAM and integrated graphics, all powering a 12.1-inch, 1280 x 800 screen. Battery life is impressive: at least 8 hours with the wireless on (because you’d never turn it off). You also get a sole USB port (for input peripherals mainly) and VGA output. And there’s a grainy webcam.

Sure looks like a laptop. But is it really? Consider the evidence: The 16-GB SSD drive is not user-accessible, and you can’t store any files on the machine. Want to type a letter? You’ll need to go to Google Docs (which, oddly, is not a default icon). Want to write an e-mail? You’ll have to visit Gmail. Want to view a picture or video on your camera’s SD card? Well, er, you’ll have to upload it to the web from someone else’s real computer: The Cr-48’s SD slot is nonfunctional. Remember: You are not allowed to access local files, period!

Hackers are surely going to start finding a way to mod these things to overcome their limitations –- I tricked the machine into downloading a Firefox setup file, but had no way to open it — but for now the Cr-48 is really more of a tablet masquerading as a laptop. It even has its own app store, already full of the usual suspects. Weatherbug FTW!

WIRED Caps-lock key re-imagined as a search button. Nifty instant-on capabilities. Beautiful, bright display. Epic battery life.

TIRED Useless without wireless connection; only moderately useful with one. Requires massive buy-in to the Googleverse. Printing via cloud connection to another PC is erratic at best. Touchpad — “it’s all one big button” — requires lots of retraining. Keyboard feels clammy.

See Also:

• Five Things Google’s Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook
• Chrome OS Netbooks For Under $400, Says Google
• Google Chrome OS Not Ready for Primetime Yet
• Google’s Sexy Nexus One Pushes Android to New Limits
• Google’s Newest Android Device Makes a Giant Leap Forward

View full post on Product Reviews | Wired.com

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou said Thursday that Intel will continue its support for Taiwan’s development of WiMAX, after a meeting with Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini in Taipei.

Ma said the government has released six licenses for WiMAX operators and has invested US$220 million in developing related technologies and applications.

An apparent lack of communication between Intel and the Taiwan government over the closing of Intel’s WiMax Program Office in Taiwan erupted into a media shit storm this summer.

Intel insists it was all a misunderstanding. VMAX launched their commercial WiMAX network in Taiwan in March, and now covers more than 3 million people.

VMax expects to spend around $47 million to expand its wireless broadband services in Taipei through 2010. VMax is also offering mobile access through taxi fleet operators in the Taipei area. The number of taxis having a WiMax-enabled device from VMax may increase to 5,000 at the end of 2010 and to 20,000 a year later.

Five of Taiwan’s licensed WiMAX operators – Global Mobile, First International Telecom (Fitel), Vmax Telecom, Tatung Telecom and Far EasTone Telecommunications (FET) are rolling out WiMAX services in Taiwan.

Global Mobile, Vmax and FITEL won licenses for northern Taiwan, while Far EasTone, Tatung and Vastar Cable TV System won licenses for the south. FITEL expected to have 52 Mobile WiMAX base stations operating in Taipei City by the beginning of June. The Fitel deployment is part of the massive M-Taiwan project to unwire the country. Fitel, headed by Charlie Wu, operates a Japanese-style PHS system — personal handyphone system.

VMax expects 40,000 subscribers to its service by end-2010, which may increase to 80,000 in 2011. VMax started its WiMax network on Jan. 26, 2010, covering 85% of Taipei City.

The WiMAX Forum hopes that Clear, in the United States, UQ in Japan, KT in South Korea, VMAX in Taiwan and Packet One of Indonesia, among others, will hang in there and that India will come around.

It may be an uphill battle.

The last, best hope of “4G” spectrum is now going up for auction. Available frequencies in the 2.5-2.7 Ghz band and the “digitial dividend” spectrum, using (now freed-up) broadcast television frequencies are the battle ground.

Traditional cellular carriers now see a TD-LTE standard emerging for the unpaired frequency slots, and appear to have the bucks and the motivation to bid and win TD-LTE solutions.

Separately this week, visiting Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini announced a series of new and expanded partnerships with Taiwan’s government.

Intel announced plans to team up with Taiwan on a cloud computing initiative, setting up a multi-million dollar Internet computing research laboratory there.

Intel said it will work with the island’s National Science Council and a leading Taiwanese university to establish a “cloud computing” research centre with an estimated cost of 23.5 million US dollars over the next three to five years. Intel did not specify the amount it plans to spend.

Intel’s cloud computing initiative uses Internet-based computing resources, sharing software and providing computer power on demand.

Intel’s Cloud 2015 vision has three key elements: a “federated” cloud that allows enterprises to share data across internal and external clouds; an “automated” network that automatically allows the secure movement of applications and resources to significantly improve energy efficiency in data centers; and PC and device-savvy “client-aware” clouds that know what types of applications, commands and processing should take place in the cloud or on your notebook, smartphone or other device – thus taking a user and specific device’s unique features into account to fully optimize an online experience.

Related Dailywireless articles include; WiMAX: Good News, Bad News, Qualcomm India: For Sale?, Qualcomm Gets Indian Partners, Vendors Scramble for Indian Backhaul, India’s Broadband Auction: It’s Done, Yota: Planetary LTE Swap, Yota Dumps WiMAX, WiMAX Forum: Not Dead Yet, WiMAX Forum: In Trouble?, Russian WiMAX, Battle for Britain, European 2.5 GHz Auctions & the Global Market, BT’s European WiMAX Plan, WiMAX Roundup, Australia Unwired, India 2nd Largest Mobile Market, Intel: $500M for M-Taiwan, AT&T: More Transpacific Cable, Satphones: Merger Ahead?, Malaysian WiMAX: Now or Never, WiMAX Auctions: NZ & Hong Kong, and Cellular Penetration: Half the World.

View full post on dailywireless.org

If you’re not using a BlackBerry Torch, Curve 3G 9330 or a Bold 9650 running on BlackBerry 6 this might interest you. Bolt, has updated their 3rd party web browser with some great new features to make browsing on BlackBerry devices a better overall experience. The list of changes is as follows:

• New Advanced Desktop Features – Along with the ability to perfectly render Web pages as they were meant to be seen from a PC, BOLT also offers tabbed browsing, password manager, advanced downloading and uploading capabilities and now advanced inline text entry and editing allowing people to enter and edit text directly in Web page forms without opening up a separate text editing window.
• Backed up in the Cloud – BOLT 2.3’s new favorites backup feature stores a user’s bookmarks on BOLT’s servers, allowing them to be restored if a user ever needs to change phones for any reason.
• New Mobile Widgets – BOLT widgets let people using any mobile phone take part in the mobile apps revolution. Bolt 2.3′s widget gallery features weather, Wikipedia, and dictionary widgets, along with an improved Twitter widget and a brand new Facebook widget.

In addition to all of the above, Bolt has also added HTML 5 which adds to their already existing flash support. In some ways, this places Bolt ahead of browsers out there including the new WebKit browser loaded onto BlackBerry 6 devices. Thanks Josh!

• Click Here To Download Bolt For Your BlackBerry Smartphone Today>>

CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Bolt Browser updated to v2.30 – adds HTML5 support, cloud backup and more

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A new iPad application offers a sophisticated approach to cloud computing

View full post on Macworld

Do you have a Symbian S60 5th Edition device and longingly look at your iPhone and Android brethren thinking you could have a backup, sync, and cloud sharing service like Dropbox, Zumodrive, or SugarSync on your beloved device? Well, I have some excellent news for you then as SugarSync just announced their Symbian client that is available now for free and includes 2GB of cloud data capacity. We do have the Ovi Files client and it is decent, but services like SugarSync offer even more functionality that is cross platform and provides better access support.

With SugarSync for Symbian you can edit documents (with supported Symbian apps) and have the files synced back to the cloud. Documents, photos, music, video, and other file types can be shared, managed, and accessed with SugarSync. I have been looking at several different cloud storage and sharing solutions and now that SugarSync has a Symbian client I have decided they are the service I will be going with for all of my devices moving forward.

Simply point your S60 5th Edition web browser to www.sugarsync.com/symbian and download the free client. You can also purchase higher capacity on the servers with 30GB plans starting at just $4.99/month, but you do get 2GB for free to try out too. They also have a referral program that lets you increase your capacity between 500MB to 10GB of storage when a friend is referred by you.

You can access your SugarSync storage drive via a web browser or iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile device too.

View full post on Nokia Experts

An often overlooked addition to Android 2.2 is Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM), which enables developers to push small data messages to the phone.  This is the brains behind Chrome to Phone, a Chrome extension which allows the user to send links and other information to their Android device right from their browser.  The process works as follows:

1. The Android Application registers with the C2DM service and gets a device registration ID for the user. It sends this registration ID along with the user’s account name to the AppEngine server.
2. The AppEngine server authenticates the user account and stores the mapping from account name to device registration ID.
3. The Chrome Extension accesses the URL and page title for the current tab, and POSTs it to the AppEngine server.
4. The AppEngine server authenticates the user and looks up the corresponding device registration ID for the user account name. It then HTTP POSTs the URL and title to Google’s C2DM servers, which subsequently route the message to the device, resulting in an Intent broadcast.
5. The Android application is woken by its Intent receiver. The Android application then routes the URL to the appropriate application via a new Intent (e.g. browser, dialer, or Google Maps).

Again, this requires Android 2.2, so for all of you who are officially/unofficially running Froyo, you can download both the Chrome extension and the Android APK here.

Chrome to Phone powered by Android Cloud to Device Messaging

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Meraki today announced new management tools for its meshed network Wi-Fi products that enable, fast, reliable connectivity.

Meraki has added bandwidth shaping, diagnostics and spectrum analysis to the packet processing engine, embedded on each Meraki access point.

Management of a Meraki network can be hosted by Meraki’s “cloud controller”, and managed nearly anywhere by a Web browser. Meraki’s controller functions on a hosted server, simplifying WLAN deployment and operations.

• The new Meraki Traffic Shaper shows wireless traffic on each node of the Wi-Fi network.
  

  Meraki Traffic Shaper shows users how much bandwidth is being used by what service. Traffic shaping allows priority of email or Skype calls, for example, above YouTube videos. Meraki has developed a packet engine with several hundred “signatures,” to identify the kind of traffic passing through the hotspot.

• Meraki’s Auto RF with Spectrum Analysis is another new feature. It will be available free-of-charge to all Meraki enterprise customers beginning September 30.
  

  Meraki’s Auto RF provides automated spectrum analysis for identifying rogue 802.11 access points, or interference in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Meraki will automatically recommend (or implement) changes in channel settings and transmit power levels to optimize client connections. Meraki says it does full-time analysis at no penalty to servicing wireless clients.

• Meraki now features additional Wi-Fi diagnostic tools: including a site survey and coverage testing tool called Wi-Fi Stumbler, that also works on an Android phone to scan and locate access points.

  Client Insight, runs on a Windows PC or Mac and tracks client Wi-Fi performance over time.

Management through The Cloud makes WiFi management easy and inexpensive — and Meraki’s new software releases are free.

While Aruba Networks, Cisco, Ruckus Wireless, Trapezenetworks and Xirrus use controllers to monitor Wi-Fi access points, nobody puts it all together as neatly as Meraki, thanks in large part to their Hybrid Cloud Architecture.

View full post on dailywireless.org

SugarSync has released the lastest version of their cloud storage and synching application for BlackBerry. SugarSync v1.5 now includes the ability to stream music direct from their servers to your BlackBerry device. This is of course i addition to the other added features for the app as noted in the press release:

SugarSync for BlackBerry features the ability to remotely access, open and easily share your computer files, including documents, photos and more stored in a SugarSync account. With an appropriate document editor, files can be edited as well and synced back.

With the new version, people may stream non-DRM protected music – synced from their computers to the cloud – directly to their BlackBerry handheld device, and save local storage for favorite tunes, photos, videos, and more. The built-in music player enables people to play full sets, not just single songs.

The new version also includes email auto-complete, a time-saver feature which allows people to even more quickly share a files with colleagues or friends, as well as performance enhancements and bug fixes.

Lately, I have become quite a fan of cloud storage applications. With SugarSync adding music streaming to the list of offerings, it will push them beyond other services such as Evernote. When you sign up, you get 2GB of storage allocated to you for free with larger packages available for purchase starting at only $4.99/mnth.

• Download The Latest Version Of SugarSync Via BlackBerry App World>>

CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. SugarSync v1.5 adds streaming music to their cloud storage and synch app for BlackBerry

View full post on CrackBerry.com blogs

A national network of ocean observatories (final network design pdf) begins streaming environmental sensor data in March 2012 and researchers world-wide will be able to use the data stored and processed using computing clouds operated by Amazon Web Services.

CENIC and Pacific NorthWest GigaPoP (PNWGP) today announced two 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for the use of CENIC’s members in California, as well as PNWGP’s multistate K-20 research and education community.

CENIC owns, operates, and manages the ultra-high-performance California Research & Education Network (CalREN), an Internet-based network comprising nearly 3,000 miles of fiber-optic cable that stretches throughout California and the state’s entire K-20 public education system.

The 10 Gbps connections enable out-of-the-box, server-based computation from any computer on the CalREN network in California.

California is not the only state that will benefit, however. Nearly all of the major research institutions and many other schools and colleges in Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Idaho and Hawaii, will automatically get direct high-performance access through the Pacific NorthWest GigaPoP.

Among the first users to benefit from access to Amazon Web Services will be researchers participating in the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), originally conceived by UW professor John Delany. The University of California, San Diego is building the information technology and telecommunications infrastructure that will bring ocean and atmospheric sensor data from the observatories and make them available to environmental researchers around the country and throughout the world.

“We always envisioned cloud computing as a key component of our implementation strategy,” said John Orcutt, OOI CI Principal Investigator and a professor of geophysics at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “At our core we are a sensor network, and with streaming data from sensors, we need both continual and periodic computation, including elasticity to deal with a highly variable demand.”

Tom DeFanti leads Calit2′s five-year collaboration to develop 3D, high-resolution displays, as well as teleconferencing, networking, computation, and storage. “21st century discovery will be driven by the automated analysis of massive amounts of sensor data captured from the world around us,” said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering and Director of the eScience Institute at UW.

Both UW and UC San Diego are involved in the $400 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, and its Cyberinfrastructure group – led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography and based in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) – determined that cloud computing and remote storage would reduce the need for capital expenditures.

The OOI will monitor and forecast environmental changes in the oceans on global, regional and coastal scales. Scientists will be able to extrapolate from data gathered by an array of more than 50 diverse sensor types and other scientific instruments that will communicate through permanently installed seafloor cables and satellite telemetry. Scientists will then be able to share data with their colleagues around the world via OOI’s networked cyberinfrastructure, which is being implemented by a team of computer scientists, engineers and geophysicists.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 is a web service. It provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 features a simple web service interface that allows a researcher to obtain and configure the massive compute resources that innovative research requires.

Amazon Web Services is offering Cluster Compute Instances specifically for the needs of HPC users. Cluster Compute Instance consists of a pair of quad-core Intel Nehalem X5570 processors. They look much like EC2 instances on the interface end but have been specifically engineered to pack more CPU punch.

Related Dailywireless articles include; Ocean Observatory Gets Funded, Ocean Observatories: The Ultimate Splash Page, The 100 Gbps Backbone, 66 Broadband Grants Awarded, Mobile Supercomputing Access, Plug and Play Environmental Sensor Nets, Tracking Tour de France , Microsoft’s WhiteFi: Wi-Fi Using Whitespaces, Mobile Supercomputing, The Platform, Google Ocean Unveiled, Wireless River Monitoring, Shipboard AIS Gets a Satellite Swarm, Emergency Mapping, Cascadia Peril ‘09, Swine Flu Gets Social, Tracking Soldiers, Mapping Relief, Wildfire, MIT’s CarTel, Volcano Sensor Net, Alaskan Volcano Monitored, California Wildfires Networked, Fish Net, Wireless River Monitoring, Remote Ocean Viewer, Wireless Recon Airplanes, Mt St Helens Erupts, On Mt. Saint Helens and Global Tsunami Warning System Announced.

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A character called “Milo” made an appearance today at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England. The BBC reports that Milo will react to a person’s emotions, body movements and voice when working in conjunction with Microsoft’s upcoming Kinect video game device. Here’s a look.

The technology is the brainchild of veteran UK games designer Peter Molyneux.

“I want to introduce a new revolution in storytelling,” he told TED attendees. “His mind is based in the cloud,” he told the audience. “As millions of people use it, Milo will get smarter.”

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Cloud computing, accessing computing storage and processing remotely, rather than from a local computer or server, is getting big time support from Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Azure appliance, was announced this morning at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., where the company is meeting with the thousands of partners who resell, deploy and support its products. Microsoft says it plans to let businesses and partners run Windows Azure in their own data centers.

Microsoft launched Windows Azure commercially earlier this year, running Azure servers in its own data centers.

Cloud computing can use software that lives on the Internet rather than on desktop computers. But companies are slow to move their data from their own servers to Microsoft’s data centers, explains the Seattle Times. With the new Azure Platform appliance, Microsoft hopes to create a stepping stone to the Microsoft cloud. Theoretically, it could save companies the cost of managing and running servers since it can be stored on servers Microsoft runs.

Microsoft is playing catchup to Amazon Web Services, Google’s App Engine, Rackspace Cloud and others.

Cloud computing represents a change from Microsoft’s traditional PC and computer server software, raising the risk of cannibalizing those businesses, but Ballmer said this morning that he believes “smart” local machines such as Windows PCs will continue to play a key role, working in conjunction with cloud-computing services.

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Product: Office Web Apps

Manufacturer: Microsoft

Wired Rating: 7

With Office 2010, Microsoft has taken an important (and inevitable) step into internet-stored media. That’s right; MS is all up in the cloud now.

In addition to releasing its new native Office suite, which gives you the option to save your files on the Intertubes, Microsoft has rolled out free, lightweight web versions of Office apps accessible through Windows Live.

We took several Office apps for a test ride: Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The verdict? For the most part, this is a decent web suite that works well with the native Office apps, though it’s still a little unrefined.

Word on the Web

In your Windows Live account, you can share and access Office web app media through your “SkyDrive.” Viewing a Word document looks fine in the browser, but when you choose to edit the doc, you lose some formatting. Paragraph indentations were lost, creating leaning towers of confusing text. Microsoft acknowledged this issue and said a fix is in the works.

Other formatting, such as bolded or italicized text remains, too. You also lose some graphics (we noticed several graphs were MIA) and some highlights are inaccurate. If there’s a missing element, the Word web app inserts a small symbol to represent it.

The Office web apps behave very differently from Google Docs, in which all writing and editing is done inside the browser with collaboration occurring in real time. Microsoft designed Office 2010, so most of the fancy formatting work is done inside the native app. The idea is you and your cohorts can apply light edits using the web apps in the browser.

Collaboration doesn’t occur in real time, either. Instead, you mark a document as ready for editing, or you restrict it to avoid interruptions. That’s basically an efficient way to take turns co-authoring a document online.

Both Microsoft Word 2010 and Windows Live are crammed with too many options, and getting the online-sharing option started took more steps than an AA meeting. Because of the lack of paragraph indentations, our preferred workflow for co-authoring a document is still to compose it in real time using Google Docs, then to format it inside Microsoft Word.

PowerPoint Online

The PowerPoint web app is actually pretty good at retaining fidelity of a presentation created with native PowerPoint. Graphics, formatting and various fonts remain the same when editing inside the browser.

The major element missing from the web version of PowerPoint is the ability to add multimedia elements, like audio or video files, inside a presentation. Still, most would do the majority of their presentation creation inside the native PowerPoint app, and the ability to edit slides in a browser should be very useful for road warriors.

The coolest online-sharing feature for PowerPoint — real-time broadcasting — lives inside the native app, not the browser version. In PowerPoint 2010, you can share your slideshow online just by sending someone a URL. And if there’s no projector in the room you can just send around a URL and everybody can view the presentation live on their laptop or smartphone

Excel Web App

Again, Excel loses some graphical elements compared to the spreadsheets made with the native app, but this seems less important when most of your editing should consist of lightweight number crunching, inserting new columns and so on — all of which work fine in the web app. When you’re saving to your Skydrive on the web, Excel notifies you about the elements that won’t be viewable in the internet version, which is quite helpful.

Excel web app spreadsheets look faithful compared to those created natively. Shaded boxes remained; rows and columns look proportionately correct. Like Word’s web app, Excel online can’t display rich 3-D graphs or other complex graphics, but it does denote missing elements with the aforementioned symbols.

Well, Should I Get This?

Given its price ($0), the Office web suite is compelling. Though purchasing Office 2010 ($500) would certainly complement the web suite, it’s not necessary if all you need are the basic functions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Many will feel tempted to compare the Office web apps with Google Docs head to head, but the two suites behave very differently. Office web apps are designed for those who need to make stylized edits to their documents — think students writing essays, or job seekers preparing résumés. Google Docs is for those who care only about accessing and sharing data, not about looks (cough, bloggers).

WIRED Free! Most basic functionality works fantastically. PowerPoint presentations and Excel documents look very faithful compared to their native counterparts.

TIRED Windows Live interface is inundating and boring. No paragraph indents in Word (yet).

View full post on Wired Product Reviews

The next Apple TV may run the iPhone OS and – eventually – apps, says Josh Topolosky at Engadget. The $229 Apple TV lets users purchase or rent HD movies and stream iTunes content to their set top boxes. But it hasn’t caught on. Too expensive and limited.

The next iteration from Apple is rumored to be a $99 screenless, diskless iPhone which streams 1080p content from the Internet or a Time Capsule network drive. The next-gen Apple TV will reportedly be about the size of an iPhone and will come with only 16GB of flash memory. It’s all about streaming content from the cloud.

It will compete with existing boxes such as Roku, Boxee Box, and future ones based on Google TV.

Google TV combines TiVo-like navigation and search with Web access and over the air television. Sony will be making TVs and Blu-Ray players based on it while Logitech will have a standalone box and accessories. Google TV will be based on version 2.1 of Google’s Android operating system, and will place the Chrome Web browser on Web-connected televisions from Sony. Best Buy is expected to begin selling it this fall. It supports Flash, runs third-party apps from the Android marketplace, and is built around a special Intel Atom CPU.

Of course Yahoo’s Connected TV platform hasn’t set the world on fire – yet.

Pay TV remains popular with consumers, according to Compete analysis of research by the Convergence Consulting Group (below).

Cable television in the United States is generally a monopoly franchise business, with 62 million basic video customers and 43 million Digital Video Customers by the end of 2009. Consumer revenue totaled 90 Billion in 2009 with advertising revenue totalling $24 billion last year.

According to the A.C. Nielsen, 56% of Americans pay for cable TV, with the average American watching more than 4 hours of TV each day.

Netflix says that their DVD-by-mail shipment business will continue to grow for another few years as more brick-and-mortar video stores and rental shops close and people transition to Netflix for DVD and Blu-Ray rentals, but they expect to see a that part of the business start to recede around 2013 after which streaming video will start to replace physical discs.

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Google plans to go head to head with Amazon’s popular S3 cloud storage service with the new Google Storage for Developers. Like S3, Google’s new service offers developers a cheap, scalable way to store data online.

While it isn’t exactly the fabled “GDrive,” Google Storage for Developers certainly lays the groundwork for Google to create a user-friendly online storage service.

Google Storage for Developers offers a RESTful API, backups across multiple data centers and even has support for storing large files up to hundreds of gigabytes in size.

Google Storage for Developers is currently an experimental Google Labs project. For now the service is available by invitation only and limited to U.S. developers. You can head over to the sign up page to request an invite which will give you access to 100GB of data storage and 300GB per month of data-transfer bandwidth.

After your application hits those limits a pay-as-you-go scheme kicks in. The pricing is roughly analogous to Amazon’s S3 service. Google’s version will run you 17 cents per GB per month for simple storage, 10 cents per GB for uploading data and 15 to 30 cents per GB for downloads. There’s also a fee for the number of requests — $.01 per 1000 PUT, POST or LIST requests and $0.01 per 10,000 requests using GET or HEAD.

Unfortunately that’s just different enough from Amazon’s pricing structure (which decreases the per GB price as your usage goes up) that it’s hard to say which is cheaper. At first glance Amazon’s S3 service looks marginally cheaper for storage, but in the end the total cost — and which is cheaper — will vary depending on the nature of your web app and how you use either storage service.

Hopefully, now that there’s some competition in the cloud storage space, both services will eventually become even cheaper.

Google does offer some extra tools that Amazon doesn’t have — the BigQuery API and the Prediction API.

According the Google Code announcement, BigQuery is designed to explore the history of your data, and the more interesting Prediction API gives you access to Google’s machine learning algorithms which are designed to “make your apps more intelligent.”

The Prediction API can help make real-time decisions “such as recommending products, assessing user sentiment from blogs and tweets, routing messages or assessing suspicious activities,” says the Google Code blog.

For now there is no charge for using the extra APIs, though noting that in the announcement seems to indicate that, when Google Storage for Developers moves out of Labs, there will be an additional charge.

Because Google Storage for Developers is a beta Labs project, you won’t want to switch from Amazon’s services just yet, but if you’d like to take Google Storage for Developers for spin, head over to the sign up page and request an invite.

See Also:

• Google Cuts Online Storage Pricing, Fuels Anticipation for Cheap Cloud-Based OS
• Dropbox API Lets You Add Cloud Storage to Your Apps
• The Fabled GDrive May Soon See the Light of Day

View full post on Webmonkey

Photo by Michael Lonergan

This is probably the first picture of a cloud that we’ve featured on GeekDad — I’ll be honest, I didn’t check the archives. But doesn’t this cloud bear an amazing resemblance to the head of a certain aged, Grover-voiced Jedi Master?

Thanks to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, for pointing this out.

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