“We’re excited about the latest updates to IDrive,” said Raghu Kulkarni, founder and CEO of Pro Softnet Corp. “With a single account new customers can back up as many computers and mobile devices as they want and then view their files from any of those connected devices or on our website. Plus, the mobile app can now back up contacts, photos and videos and make them available online as well.”

“Many backup services offer ‘unlimited’ storage space for a single computer at a flat rate, like $50 per year per computer – it sounds like a good deal at first, but back up 100 GBs from that one computer and you pay $50/year, back up just 50 GBs and you still have to pay $50/year: that’s where they get you,” said Stephen Gold, Business Development Manager. “Not only that, ‘unlimited’ storage plans almost always have very limited file retention, meaning they automatically remove data from your backup after you delete the files from your computer, usually just 30 days later. The question is, ‘What use is a backup that doesn’t contain files you accidentally deleted, say, six months ago?’ On the other hand, IDrive allows people to actually use all of the online storage they are paying for.”

For those unfamiliar with IDrive’s stats, a quick run-down of their features:

IDrive also has a mobile app available so users can access their account and share files when they’re away from their computers. Users can back up contact information, photos and videos over a Wi-Fi or 3G connection to the IDrive cloud from iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices running iOS 4.0 or later as well as Google Android devices running 1.6 or later. The information is then made available via other connected computers and mobile devices as well as on the IDrive website.

The announcement was made yesterday in the Official Google Enterprise Blog. As explained by Kennith Jackson, the Deployment manager for Google Apps, NOAA was drawn towards Google’s product because, as you may assume, many of NOAA’s agents don’t exactly work inside office cubicles (kinda hard to figure out what’s going on out there in the seas and airspace when you’re stuck behind a desk, yeah?) and need to be able to reliably access “work information on mobile devices,” which Google knows a thing or two about. As Jackson explained:

The speed and ease of [NOAA] moving to Google Apps was an important factor in the agency’s decision to select Google. Moving 25,000 people to a new system is no small task. To move a group this size to a unified email platform in just six months is a remarkable achievement.

The rapid deployment resulted from a well-coordinated effort by NOAA employees, prime contractor ERT Inc., and Google partners Unisys and Tempus Nova. NOAA issued a request for proposals in January 2011 and made the award to ERT in June. The team put in place an aggressive schedule to have the system implemented by December and delivered on the plan. NOAA staff now have a set of modern tools like instant messaging, video chat, and real-time, multi-user document collaboration to help the people of NOAA work together more effectively. What’s more, NOAA estimates the cost to the taxpayer is approximately 50% less than developing a solution in-house.

It remains to be seen if other government agencies of any level will follow the lead of NOAA as the year stretches on. It’s kinda hard not to expect that at least a few more will jump aboard given NOAA’s adoption of Google Apps is a pretty stellar testimonial to what Google has to offer.

Aside from the general UI difference inherent to the phones, the app works very similarly on iPhones and Windows Phones. As of right now, the SkyDrive app is available everywhere that Microsoft offers the Windows Phone though they hope to make it available in more regions. No word yet if Android devices will be getting any SkyDrive app love, but that remains to be seen.

The SkyDrive team have provided some walk-through tutorial videos for both of the Windows Phone and iPhone.

At first glance, the SkyDrive app appears to be a suitable and competitive alternative to Apple’s iCloud as well as with third party apps like Evernote. Among the many file sharing cloud services out there, how many of you already do or are planning to make use of Microsoft’s SkyDrive app?

RIM finally confirmed the acquisition (though terms weren’t officially disclosed) in a blog post this morning. A message from Alan Brenner, SVP, BlackBerry Platform says:

Today we are pleased to announce that NewBay has joined Research In Motion (RIM). We’re excited that the NewBay team will be bringing their expertise in cloud-based digital content services to the BlackBerry platform.

NewBay’s LifeCache platform helps enable operators and device makers to deliver content across multiple, connected devices such as mobile phones, PCs and tablets.

A message on the NewBay site says:

Today we are delighted to share that NewBay has now become part of Research In Motion (RIM). This is a great opportunity to further expand our digital content cloud services offering. We will continue to enable operators and device makers worldwide to deliver a lifetime of content experiences across all connected devices such as mobiles, PCs, tablets and TVs.

Here’s what NewBay offers (via the company’s site):

The Irish Times, which broke the news earlier this month, reported that RIM would keep NewBay’s software development center in Dublin. The center, the report said, employs about 200 people, and marks RIM’s first presence in Ireland.

Of course, this would put them in direct competition with Apple’s iTunes store as well as Amazon.

According to the WSJ, Google might have to launch the service without having reached licensing agreements with the top three record labels. Apparently, the only label that Google is close to reaching a deal with to license their catalog in EMI, which is owned by CitiGroup. EMI is the 4th largest label and houses artists like Coldplay, Katy Perry, Pink Floyd and The Decemberists.

A few months ago, Google launched Google Music Beta – a cloud storage platform for all of your music. You don’t purchase new music on Music Beta, instead you upload the music you already own to the service and it allows you to listen to it anywhere, from any enabled device. It has some pretty awesome features like caching, which allows you to play back songs you’ve recently listened to even when offline. It also feature a Pandora-like function that builds playlists based on certain starter tracks. Apple tried this type of thing with the “Genius” feature on iTunes.

But Google had problems with gaining licensing agreements from the major record labels, which is why Music Beta launched without a music store.

If Google launches a music store, it will no doubt work alongside Google Music.

If this comes to fruition, Google will be entering a competitive area of cloud-centered music. Apple just launched iOS 5 with the iCloud, matching their ability to sell tracks from all the major labels with the ability to put it all in the cloud. Apple also offers a premium service, iTunes Match, that allows users to listen to all of their music, at any time, without having to manually upload each individual track to the cloud locker.

And of course you have Amazon, which introduced their cloud player back in March.

Do you think a Google Music Store could be successful? Let us know in the comments.

The companies compete in eBooks. They compete in online retail. Google product search has the ability to send consumers to a lot of sellers of products that Amazon no doubt would rather have people searching for on Amazon.com.

Google has Google Offers, Amazon has Amazon Local deals, and apparently that’s doing quite well.

Amazon is now in the tablet market. It runs Android, but Amazon’s version of Android. Amazon even has its own version of the Android Market. In terms of operating systems, the competition might soon even get more fierce as it’s rumored that Amazon wants to buy WebOS from HP.

With the Amazon Kindle Fire, the company’s tablet, Amazon appears to be going straight for Google’s Chrome jugular. Google has always touted Chrome’s speed, perhaps more than any other feature, but Amazon’s Silk browser, could give it a big run for its money, as it taps into Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud) to optimize the page loading experience. Amazon talks about this here:

Silk is only for the Kindle Fire for now, but how long do you think that will last? It’s not hard to envision this becoming a straight up competitor to Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.

This week, Google announced some new storage and App Engine offerings that will help it compete with Amazon Web Services. Specifically, Google’s bundle of announcements includes: new enterprise level services and support option for Google App Engine, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage with new features and a lower price, and new features for the Google Prediction API.

Google gives more details about each of these in a post on the Google Enterprise blog. “We are enabling our enterprise customers to build business solutions that take advantage of the computing power and scalability of Google’s cloud services without all the hassles of deployment of applications,” says Group Product Manager Jessie Jiang. “We have been making great progress on Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, and Prediction API. There is more to come, stay tuned.”

Suffice it to say, that while Google seemingly takes on every major tech and Internet company in one way or another (there may be a few exceptions….so far), it appears that Amazon and Google are well on their way to becoming bigger rivals than ever. It’s going to be fun to watch the different ways in which this competition manifests itself.

Hopefully businesses and consumers will ultimately be the biggest winners.

Update: Even as I was writing this, Google announced the Google Commerce Search Partner Program. It’s offering a reseller program to enable tech partners to roll Google Commerce Search into their solutions easily. Resellers will be expected to seek out opportunities to bring Google Commerce Search to existing or new retail clients, Google says. More on this here.

Update 2: Also some very interesting comments on Amazon vs. Google from a guy who used to work at Amazon and currently works at Google.

The Irish Times reports that NewBay staff were informed about the deal yesterday, and that “It is understood that RIM intends to keep NewBay’s software development centre in Dublin, which employs about 200 staff. It will be the first facility for the Canadian firm in Ireland.”

Here’s a quick look at some of the products NewBay offers (via the company site):

NewBay calls itself a “leader in digital content services, enabling operators and device makers to deliver a lifetime of content experiences across connected devices such as mobile, PCs, tablets and TVs.”

In other words, it sounds like a sensible acquisition for RIM as it struggles to compete with Apple and Google.

Were you under the impression that iCloud was a back up solution? Let us know.

For example, if you create a document on your iPhone, you can pull that same document up on your iPad through the iCloud. However, if you delete it on your iPhone, it cannot be retrieved on your iPad.

Anthony Palermo, the creator of online back up Dolly Drive, said that iCloud was “Apple’s introduction to services that go beyond your device.” His product, on the other hand, does serve as a cloud back up through Apple’s Time Machine.

“Dolly Drive is actually more than just the ability of backing up your information, [or] your computer to the cloud, it also has a framework to back up locally your drives, so that if you ever were to lose your hard drive, you can immediately connect an external hard drive and be up and running again,” he said.

He went on to explain that even though iCloud and Dolly Drive serve 2 very distinctive services, they are both critical to the needs of users. With iCloud, users can view their iTunes library from all their Mac and Apple devices, stream photos between devices, sync and store documents on devices, and see apps and app history on all devices.

Through Dolly Drive, users have a back up to all their computer files, if they want. Also, it backs up computer content automatically every hour and allows users to continue working even if their hard drive crashes.

“Our intent is to make sure that no matter what’s on your computer or where it’s at on your computer, it gets backed up,” said Palermo.

We asked him what he thought about Apple and Google’s very different approaches to the cloud. According to him, Apple wants to offer the best experience for their devices. Google, though, is focused on platforms and on a large-scale experience for users.

He also told us that he expects the value of the cloud to increase over the next several years.

“We’re going to see great things to come with the cloud in the next 5 years, and I think, at that point, younger, more experienced computer-savvy users will see the cloud as just a natural process of what they do as they sit down and work with their devices,” he added.

AppleInsider says it has learned that the company has actually begun adopting the iCloud name within “several products in currently under development”. The publication’s Kasper Jade reports:

According to people familiar with the matter, Apple is prepping beta versions of both iOS 5.0 and Mac OS X Lion ahead of its annual developers conference that integrate with a service dubbed “iCloud,” enabling users to sync and store much of the same information they currently can with the company’s existing MobileMe service, such as bookmarks, email, contacts and iCal events.

It would only make sense then, that developers will get a glimpse at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June, which has been advertised in the following manner:

“At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”

It was expected that iCloud would be used for a cloud-based music service to rival Amazon, Google, and others, but the lack of any music-based word in the name means a broader scope would indeed make sense. I would guess that the iTunes brand will be heavily involved in any music-related aspect of iCloud.

iCloud.com is rumored to have been purchased from Xcerion for around $4.5 million. It doesn’t appear it has actually changed hands yet, as it currently redirects to CloudMe. It could just be early in the transition.

When I say that the statement is “big” I mean it. I will post a few choice snippets here. First, a quick summary at the beginning:

The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations. In this document, we will refer to these as “stuck” volumes. This caused instances trying to use these affected volumes to also get “stuck” when they attempted to read or write to them. In order to restore these volumes and stabilize the EBS cluster in that Availability Zone, we disabled all control APIs (e.g. Create Volume, Attach Volume, Detach Volume, and Create Snapshot) for EBS in the affected Availability Zone for much of the duration of the event. For two periods during the first day of the issue, the degraded EBS cluster affected the EBS APIs and caused high error rates and latencies for EBS calls to these APIs across the entire US East Region. As with any complicated operational issue, this one was caused by several root causes interacting with one another and therefore gives us many opportunities to protect the service against any similar event reoccurring.

It then gets into an overview of the EBS system, and technical details of the outage and recovery, as well as the impact on the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Then it talks about prevention, which is probably the most important takeaway, considering businesses rely on Amazon to stay up and running:

The trigger for this event was a network configuration change. We will audit our change process and increase the automation to prevent this mistake from happening in the future. However, we focus on building software and services to survive failures. Much of the work that will come out of this event will be to further protect the EBS service in the face of a similar failure in the future.

We will be making a number of changes to prevent a cluster from getting into a re-mirroring storm in the future. With additional excess capacity, the degraded EBS cluster would have more quickly absorbed the large number of re-mirroring requests and avoided the re-mirroring storm. We now understand the amount of capacity needed for large recovery events and will be modifying our capacity planning and alarming so that we carry the additional safety capacity that is needed for large scale failures. We have already increased our capacity buffer significantly, and expect to have the requisite new capacity in place in a few weeks. We will also modify our retry logic in the EBS server nodes to prevent a cluster from getting into a re-mirroring storm. When a large interruption occurs, our retry logic will back off more aggressively and focus on re-establishing connectivity with previous replicas rather than futilely searching for new nodes with which to re-mirror. We have begun working through these changes and are confident we can address the root cause of the re-mirroring storm by modifying this logic. Finally, we have identified the source of the race condition that led to EBS node failure. We have a fix and will be testing it and deploying it to our clusters in the next couple of weeks. These changes provide us with three separate protections against having a repeat of this event.

Then, there’s plenty more about the impact to multiple availability zones and recovery, before Amazon addresses another big element of this story, which has come under significant fire from the media: the company’s lack of communication on the whole matter (something that seems to be a trend in the tech world these days):

In addition to the technical insights and improvements that will result from this event, we also identified improvements that need to be made in our customer communications. We would like our communications to be more frequent and contain more information. We understand that during an outage, customers want to know as many details as possible about what’s going on, how long it will take to fix, and what we are doing so that it doesn’t happen again. Most of the AWS team, including the entire senior leadership team, was directly involved in helping to coordinate, troubleshoot and resolve the event. Initially, our primary focus was on thinking through how to solve the operational problems for customers rather than on identifying root causes. We felt that that focusing our efforts on a solution and not the problem was the right thing to do for our customers, and that it helped us to return the services and our customers back to health more quickly. We updated customers when we had new information that we felt confident was accurate and refrained from speculating, knowing that once we had returned the services back to health that we would quickly transition to the data collection and analysis stage that would drive this post mortem.

We also can do a better job of making it easier for customers to tell if their resources have been impacted, and we are developing tools to allow you to see via the APIs if your instances are impaired.

Finally, the apology:

Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services. As with any significant operational issue, we will spend many hours over the coming days and weeks improving our understanding of the details of the various parts of this event and determining how to make changes to improve our services and processes.

The company was good enough to give affected customers a 10-day credit (equal to 100% of usage of EBS volumes, EC2 instances and RDS database instances that were running in the affected availability zone).