LiveBallot, based on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing system and developed by Democracy Live, allows voters who are overseas the chance to vote in a simple and easy way. The system has been in use since December for soldiers who are overseas, but will be used in the upcoming Florida primary.

This was accomplished with the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act which allows voters to cast their ballots through a simple web portal. Since voting began, over 1,200 Florida residents from 40 countries have cast their vote using the software.

Virginia just implemented the technology for their citizens who are overseas on January 20. This will let them be ready for the state’s March 6 Presidential Primary Election.

Beginning in late April, the software will also be rolled out to 13 counties in California who will be able to vote in the state’s June primary.

Washington State will roll out the LiveBallot platform this year for their voters with disabilities.

“These elections are a huge step forward for voters living or serving our country overseas,” Bryan Finney, President of Democracy Live said. “LiveBallot allows us to deliver secure voter-specific ballots through the web to any eligible voter, anywhere in the world. By cutting the ballot’s transit time in half, LiveBallot ensures that voters are able to access, vote and return their ballot in time for it to be counted.”

Microsoft’s role in this is their Azure technology ensuring that ballots are transferred securely no matter where in the world the citizen is.

“With LiveBallot, government officials have options that they’ve never had before,” Kim Nelson, Executive Director of eGovernment for Microsoft said. “Because of its scalability, reliability and low cost, the Windows Azure cloud solution makes sense. Elections officials are among the first to realize the benefits of cloud computing for their unique seasonal situations.”

The ad highlights this point, claiming that you can’t keep anything safe from aliens, including your Chromebook, but that at least your files will be safe, assuming aliens actually do attack, and destroy your Chomebook.

This has actually been one of the main points Google has made about Chrome OS from the beginning. It doesn’t matter how many times you break your Chromebooks, you can always get another one, and it will be as if nothing happened.

Google shared the new ad on Google+:

Specifically, he discussed how businesses can use Microsoft System Center 2012 to build and operate private clouds for business apps across both private and public cloud platforms.

“IT leaders tell me that private cloud computing promises to help them focus on innovation over maintenance, to streamline costs and to respond to the need for IT speed,” Nadella said. “We are delivering on that promise today. With System Center 2012, customers can move beyond the industry hype and speculation, and progress into the here and now of private cloud.”

The company put out the following infographic on “the private cloud”:

System Center 2012 is now available in a Release Candidate as a single, integrated private cloud management solution for the first time.

The solution, Symantec says, will enable organizations to “bridge the gap between business, legal and IT, reduce their risks and costs, and empower employees to work freely in a connected world.”

Customers will be able to choose between on-premise, cloud or hybrid delivery of such a solution. The company says that through the existing integrations between LiveOffice and the recently acquired Clearwell eDiscovery Platform, customers can export info from LiveOffice to the platform where it is collected along with info from Enterprise Vault and other data sources.

Symantec says the acquisition will also lead to tighter integration between archiving and Symantec.cloud’s email security and management features.

“What were once disparate issues — information management, eDiscovery, and data security — are rapidly coming together due to the explosion of electronically stored information and the on-premise and cloud-based technologies that deliver and disseminate it. Organizations are increasingly demanding that these issues be addressed in a unified way through information governance,” stated Brian Dye, VP, Information Intelligence Group at Symantec. “As a market leader for storage, eDiscovery and security, Symantec continues to enhance its offerings and deepen its commitment to provide the most comprehensive intelligent information governance solutions.”

The acquisition closed on Jan. 13.

Amazon Web Services is designed to make cloud computing easier for a wide variety of businesses – whether large, small, or the U.S. Treasury Department (yes, really). The addition of the ability to run Windows Server applications represents a significant expansion of the program for users who want to have more flexibility in the kinds of applications and operating systems they run on their AWS accounts.

[Source: Amazon]

The company announced today during CES that their support for Google TV targets future and current televisions with their instant-streaming technology. The entire OnLive library will be available to Google TV users which means that over 200 titles will be available instantly to anybody who uses the service.

The service will be bringing high-performance console-class title (i.e. PC games) to Google TV owners as well as their social features like Brag Clip, which allows players to capture 10-seconds of their greatest feats. The OnLive Viewer, which is just the social features of the service, is available now on Google TVs. Full OnLive service will be added to all current and future Google TVs soon.

Google TV is the latest tech to support the service with regular TVs already supporting OnLive through the company’s MicroConsole. The service is also available to PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones. It will soon be available on Blu-ray players, media streamers and set-top boxes.

The OnLive Desktop service, which essentially streams a virtual desktop to devices, will also be available to Google TV. This allows users to use PC applications like presentations and the sharing of photos and videos.

“OnLive integration into Google TV is a huge leap forward for videogames,” Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder and CEO, said. “Consumers have come to expect instant gratification with music, movies and video. Now, with OnLive, players in the US and soon in the UK can just as easily stream the highest-quality games to their Google TV devices for play instantly on demand, without discs or downloads.”

It’s only a matter of time before OnLive invades every platform imaginable. It’s a great service to have, but the constant, high-speed broadband connection required for the service is still one of its many downfalls. Once more homes have high-speed connections, OnLive as a service will truly take off. That’s not to say that they are doing poorly. With this latest integration into Google TVs, OnLive is preparing the future. Once it arrives, they’ll be ready.

Google says dozens of cloud-ready printers have been released by manufacturers like Epson, HP and Kodak. Back in March, it was announced that all HP e-print enabled printers were Cloud Print-friendly.

Google says developers have released “a flurry” of apps and extentsions to enable cloud printing from Android and iOS. Android apps include: Google Docs, Cloud Print BETA, PrinterShare Mobile Print, Cloud Printer and Easy Print. On iOS it’s PrintCentral Pro. On any mobile device, it’s Mobile Google Apps, The Web (any web page wher eyou see a “print” button with the Cloud Print logo), and Kodak Email Print.

I don’t know if that’s a “flurry,” but it’s certainly a start.

On Chrome OS, you can simpy use Cloud Print from Chrome. On Mac and Windows, there is Cloud Printer and again, the web.

“While developers and printer manufacturers have embraced GCP, we’ve also released a variety of improvements to the service,” says product manager Akshay Kannan. “You can now share and control access to your printers so your friends and family can use them too. With “Save to Google Docs,” it’s easy to save your online receipts and confirmation pages to an archive in the cloud. The management page has a new tablet-friendly design and a “Print” button so you can upload and print files to your cloud printers from anywhere.”

Webmasters can add the print button element to their site to printing.

“People with Chromebooks have always had access to the latest and greatest Google Cloud Print features, but today, we’ve reached a new milestone: starting with the latest release of Chrome, anyone using the browser on Windows, Mac and Linux will be able to print any webpage to Google Cloud Print,” says Kannan. “We’ve also turned on print preview for Chromebooks, so you’ll get the same familiar experience wherever you use Chrome.”

Google says Cloud Print will come to more Google products in the coming months.

Considering the amount of vitriol concerning Google Music‘s launch, you’d think the service completely reformatted and deleted everybody’s hard drive, or, at least, it was completely unusable. The funny thing is, Google Music is quite usable, if, for nothing else, the fact that it offers free cloud storage, and after watching Josh access files from his workstation computer — a Mac — the service works just fine, at least in regards to free cloud computing.

Sure, there are issues with not securing all of the major labels — Google has three of the four — and no, the service is not all that it can, and probably will be. That being said, it’s not the burning husk of wasted web code some are making it out to be, either. Unless, of course, you think this kind of criticism is valid instead of more Google bashing:

Tying a music store to a storage locker is not enough anymore. The technologies might be current, but the ideas behind Google Music are tired. An a la carte music store? A storage locker? MP3 lending? Guh. These concepts are all old. More to the point, they’re DONE. If, as a company, you’re going to improve on an existing product, well, that’s awesome. Thank you. But if you give us more of the same shit we’ve already had for years, we’d kindly ask you to leave Thunderdome. In a body bag.

Meanwhile, iCloud, which offers much of the same functionality as Google Music’s cloud storage, gets glowing write-ups, from the same publication the above blockquote was taken from, like these:

For some of us, iCloud means we’re never buying another computer, and for the rest of us, iCloud will be the end of computing as we have always known it… iCloud transforms our machines into little more than a variety of screens we’ll use to peek at data, in much the same way we use screens to peek in at TV shows. There’s nothing to learn, and nothing to manage. iCloud makes your computer and its file system completely unnecessary.

But because Google Music had the audacity to launch without, well, without being a complete iTunes killer, apparently, it isn’t that good, even though the service, by all accounts, works rather well.

Google Music offers free songs as well as those you can purchase, and after Josh downloaded “Bombs Over Baghdad,” you find the files are in the MP3 format, with 320 KBS playback rate. Oh, look, no proprietary software restrictions here, unless, of course, MP3s are no longer a universally supported file, which they are.

Of the more honest critiques I’ve read, Danny Sullivan’s comes to mind, but that’s because he finds the entire sharing process to be confusing. As far as accessing a Google Music file on your Android device and the confusion involved, I can’t speak to that, but Josh isn’t having much of a problem accessing these files on his workstation. One of Sullivan’s main complaints has to do with sharing music that was purchased outside of the Android Market:

I was fairly annoyed when I realized that songs already in my library, that hadn’t been purchased through Android Market, couldn’t be shared. There’s no good reason for this. All Google Music needs to do is match up songs to their pages in Android Market, and it could be done.

My counterpoint to that is, is song sharing that important of a feature? Does everyone in social network need to know you bought Rhinna’s new song? Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun turning others on to new artists and/or songs they haven’t heard before, but then again, it’s not the most crucial aspect of acquiring new music, at least to this writer.

With all of this in mind, is the criticism concerning Google Music a little overblown, thanks to the expectation level or is it right on the money?

In fact, all Android HTC phone owners are eligible for the upgrade, even though there’s some ambiguity about accessing the additional gigabytes. The storage upgrade was announced on HTC’s Twitter account with the following post:

Initially, the partnership called for new owners to receive the extra storage, but now, as HTC’s tweet reveals, the additional storage is available for all Android-powered HTC devices. The problem is, however, accessing the extra cloud space. There aren’t any steps to guide HTC owners, although, the company did try to address these questions on their Twitter stream:

Apparently, the upgrade is still on the upcoming list, because a quick trip to the Android Market page for the Dropbox app reveals it hasn’t been updated since August of 2011, which sounds like the updated app and the additional storage amount it offers isn’t quite ready for prime time. Unfortunately, the Twitter account for Dropbox doesn’t address the partnership or the upgrade, nor does the company blog, so that’s no help.

That being said, if the announcement has been publicly broadcast, it’s safe to say it’s on the way. It would be nice, however, if the upgrade being tweeted about was, you know, available the same time the tweets start flying.

Or not.

While the iCloud setup page returns a “cannot be found” message, the email discussed by Apple Insider looks legitimate. Apparently, one of their contributors received the invite yesterday, and although the linked contained within is not active, the potential for flexibility across Apple’s family of mobile devices is apparent. The thing is, in order to take advantage of what the service offers, you’ll need at least two devices with iTunes installed — or, at least two Apple devices — otherwise, you wouldn’t really be sharing the content, would you?

As for the email, a screenshot follows:

iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically. It’s the easiest way to manage your content. Because now you don’t have to.

Basically, you upload the files and docs to iCloud and from there, you’ll be able to access the content from any Apple device. Did you or anyone you know receive a similar email? If so, did you or the recipient gain access to the setup stage? Does iCloud sound like something you want to take advantage of?

Let us know what you think.