At a press event in NYC, just hours after Mayer officially announced the company’s acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo unveiled a completely revamp Flickr – complete with a fresh UI redesign and a whole hell of a lot of storage.

The latter is probably the most significant news to come out of the announcement. Starting today, you now have a free terabyte of space. That’s huge. As Yahoo says, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.” That’s approximately 873,813 4.0 megapixel photos, 436,906 8mp photos, or 218,453 16mp photos. This upgraded storage also means that you can house longer videos on Flickr – 3 minutes at 1080p per video.

The interface has received a massive upgrade as well, as Flickr has done away with most of the white space on the site to give users a truly immersive photo experience.

“We want Flickr to be the most amazing community and place for you to share your photos. So, we’re also revealing a beautiful new design that puts photos at the heart of your Flickr experience, where they should always be. Whether it’s a sweeping landscape or a family portrait, we want every photo to be at its most spectacular,” says Flickr’s Markus Spiering. “Your homepage is now a gateway to everything you care about, and all the photos Flickr has to offer. Our new Activity Feed combines your friends’ recent uploads with activity on your own photos, and all in a beautiful design that lets you share and interact right on the page.”

The individual photo pages have been improved to highlight the image in high-res, pushing the photo information below the fold.

There are also some new paid options for the service – for $49.99 a year you can get rid of all the ads on the site, and for $499.99 you can snag 2TB of storage.

Flickr also unveiled a new Android app, which brings it up to speed with the iOS upgrade the service received a few months ago.

“The world is going mobile, and in December we took the first big step to send Flickr wherever you go with a new and beloved iPhone app. Our brand new Android app pushes the boundaries on beauty even further. We designed it with your needs in mind: how you interact, how you share, and how you view photos when you’re on the go.”

The new site is live, as is the new Android app. Check it out.

One of the upcoming features is single sign-on (SSO). Dropbox’s Anand Subramani explains:

SSO works behind the scenes to let users sign in just once to a central identity provider, like Active Directory, and securely access all their business apps, like Dropbox. With SSO, companies can put their existing trusted identity provider in charge of the authentication process.

For users, SSO means ease — one fewer password to remember and one fewer step to get to your work. Once logged in to your system, there’s no need to sign in to Dropbox separately. For IT admins, SSO means additional security and administrative management. Single sign-on gives you complete ownership of the authentication process and works with your company’s existing password policies. It also easily ties into the existing Dropbox provisioning and de-provisioning API to provide further Active Directory integration.

The company is working with various identity providers on single sign-on. These include Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified. The feature is coming next month. It will take advantage of the industry standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).

Dropbox claims to be used by 2 million businesses and 95% of the Fortune 500.

“By bringing Dropbox to Yahoo! Mail, it’ll now be easier for you to send, receive, share and manage your attachments,” says Yahoo in a blog post.

Dropbox’s Joshua Jenkins says, “Email attachments can be tricky: they’ve got file size limits, you can’t keep them updated, and when you add people to a thread, attachments are the first to get left behind. he Yahoo! Mail team decided to fix this—by integrating with Dropbox!”

“Since this integration is Dropbox-powered, you can even send that big album of vacation pics without worrying about the 25 MB file limit,” he says. “Plus, it’s easy to save any photo, video, or doc in your Yahoo! Mail straight to your Dropbox, where you can get to it from anywhere.”

If you don’t already use Dropbox, you can click on any attachment in Yahoo Mail, select “Save All,” then “Save to Dropbox,” and it will give you instructions for setting up an account. Otherwise, you can just start using it.

You can send new attachments from Dropbox in Yahoo Mail by selecting the dropdown next to the paperclip icon, and hit “Share from Dropbox”. For large files, you can drag and drop the attachment into email, but send it through Dropbox.

The integration is available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

1E100 appears to be the first to have mentioned the product in a Google+ update. They found Google notes in the code of Google Drive pointing to an notes-like icon, then found a new Google Account Service named “Portal,” which when signed in, added a new service called “Google Keep,” though it has since been removed.

Android Police points to this hint about the service in an official Google+ post back in July. Notice the “Add to Google Keep” link in the second image.

Google240 days ago

When you're on the go, Instant Preview on mobile can help you find what you're looking for faster. Say that you're at the grocery store, searching for [cheese party ideas] and want to find a website that has photographs, as well as written tips, to give you inspiration. On the search results page, you can tap on the magnifying glass next to any search result to see a webpage preview.  When you see a preview that you'd like to explore more, simply tap on it and you'll be taken directly to the website.  This feature is available for Android (2.2+) and iOS (4.0+) devices across 38 languages. 

#searchtip  

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Android Police was able to grab a screen cap of the desktop version of Google Keep before it was taken down (reports indicate an Android app is on the table as well).

Of course just because Google is working on something does not mean it will come to fruition. The company is constantly experimenting with and testing new ideas, but don’t be surprised if Google makes an announcement about this sometime in the near future.

“You’ll see the new preview automatically if you open a photo, video, or PDF,” explains Google Drive engineer Ian Kilpatrick. “To see a preview of a Google document, right-click on the file name and select “preview.” Once the preview window is open, you can click on the arrows on either side to flip to other files. And right from within the preview, you can watch video files or scroll through multi-page documents.”

“You can select and copy text from the preview — even for a PDF or Microsoft Word document — or use the zoom buttons to see a file in more detail,” he adds. “Each file preview also gives you one-click access to share, download, print or open a file for editing.”

The feature is in the process of rolling out to Rapid Release users.

In a new update to the Google Drive Android app, users can now stream video files.

“Photos, videos, contacts, files…everything,” Bump says in a blog post. “There’s no setup at all — just go to http://bu.mp on your computer, open Bump on your phone, and bump the spacebar key! Bump is now your unlimited USB flash drive that is always with you!”

“No one ever says ‘I sure look forward to syncing my phone with my computer!’,” the company adds. “We want to change that. Because really, it’s the year 2013 — we have self-driving cars, private space exploration, 3d printers — but most folks have a hard time getting a video taken on their phone over to their laptop. And who doesn’t have a slight twinge of anxiety each time they press ‘sync’ that the contacts on their phone will be overwritten with outdated contacts on their computer? It should be congnitively simpler.”

Back in May, Bump launched the ability to transfer photos from your phone to the desktop. That was the only kind of file it worked with, and you could only do it from the phone to the computer, and not from the computer to the phone. Today’s announcement is a significant extension of what was available in the past.

According to the company, the number of users of the web version of Bump has grown 50% in the last two months. This should go along way toward growing that number by a lot more.

A 512GB version is already shipping, and the 1TB version will be available at an unspecified date later in 2013.

The company says it’s the largest capacity USB 3.0 Flash drive in the world, and it’s also the fastest in the Kingston family.

“Our new DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 allows users to store their entire digital world on a portable USB 3.0 Flash drive,” said Andrew Ewing, Flash memory business manager, Kingston. “The large capacity and fast USB 3.0 transfer speeds allow users to save time as they can access, edit and transfer applications or files such as HD movies directly from the drive without any performance lag.”

These drives are compatible with Windows 8, 7, Vista, and XP, and with Mac OS X v.10.6, + and Linux v. 2.6x+.

Here are the specs from the company’s announcement:

Highest capacities: uncompromised data storage to carry your digital world on a portable USB drive
Highest performance: unparalleled speeds to save time while transferring content rich data
Zinc alloy metal casing: resilient protection for data in a cutting-edge design
HyperX valet keychain: exclusive accessory for a stylish twist to portable storage
Guaranteed: five-year warranty and free technical support for added peace of mind
Speed USB 3.0: 240MB/s read and 160MB/s write
USB 2.0: 30MB/s read and 30MB/s write

Operating Temperature: 32°F to 140°F (0°C to 60°C)
Storage Temperature: -4°F to 185°F (-20°C to 85°C)
USB 3.0: latest USB standard guarantees backwards compatibility with USB 2.0

The company also launched the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Generation 3 USB 3.0 Flash drive, which has been redesigned with a sleek and slim new case and features fast transfer speeds for moving high resolution images, music libraries and HD video files.

“USB 3.0 is becoming more mainstream as it is standard on most motherboards and PCs shipping today,” said Ewing. “We are working hard to make sure we improve the speed and design of our USB 3.0 Flash drives to stay competitive as demand grows in the market. DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 G3 is a perfect example of this evolution.”

Here are the specs on that one:

Capacities: 32GB, 64GB
Speed: USB 3.0 up to 150MB/s Read, 70MB/s Write
USB 2.0 up to 30MB/s Read, 20MB/s Write

Operating Temperature: 32°F to 140°F (0°C to 60°C)
Storage Temperature: -4°F to 185°F (-20°C to 85°C)

More CES 2013 coverage here.

The coalition has started a campaign to “remove the need for ‘paper’ from paperwork,” and will be promoting this initiative throughout the year via email and other unspecified activities.

“According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the average US office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year,” the coalition says on its about page. “In 2010, the amount of paper recovered for recycling averaged 334 pounds for each person living in the US, according to the American Forest & Paper Association.”

Google has its own blog post about its participation in the coalition.

“Google Drive makes it easy to keep all your stuff in the cloud and access it anywhere — so you don’t have to carry around paper copies wherever you go,” says product marketing manager Meredith Blackwell. “There are also other great apps that can help you get things done in the cloud – no printer required. This year, Google Drive is part of the Paperless Coalition, a group of organizations and products that help you live completely in a paper-free world. So whether you’re an expense reporter, invoice tracker, file hoarder, or note jotter, you can do it all without using paper.”

The Paperless2013.org site has a pledge that you can sign (electronically) and commit to going paperless, should you choose to do so.

Once installed, it places a Drive icon in the upper right-hand corner of your browser, and whenever you’re viewing a file, you can simply click it to save it to Drive. It also adds such an option to the right click menu.

It works with images, images of entire pages, HTML source code and web archives (.mht).

“After you save using the extension, you’ll see options to immediately open the file in Drive, rename it, or view it in your Drive list, where you can do things like add it to a folder or share it with others,” says product manager Josh Hudgins.

“There are also a few new ways to work with images you’re already storing in Drive,” he adds. “You can now zoom by scrolling or using the new ‘fit to page’ and 100% buttons. And if you have something to say about a specific part of an image, you can select a region and add a comment to it.”

Google clearly wants to push people more and more into the cloud (specifically, Google’s cloud), and more Drive integration into its other products is a good way to do this. They also recently launched some much needed Drive integration for Gmail.

The addition of Drive search results to Google search has proven extremely helpful in my experience. I think once this leaves the limited phase, people are going to love the feature.

According to Amazon, it enables customers to “dramatically” increase the speed of query performance when analyzing any size data set, with the same SQL-based BI tools they’re already using.

“With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes and scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year – one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to customers today,” the company said in an announcement.

Amazon Web Services VP of Database Services, Raju Gulabani, said, “Over the past two years, one of the most frequent requests we’ve heard from customers is for AWS to build a data warehouse service. Enterprises are tired of paying such high prices for their data warehouses and smaller companies can’t afford to analyze the vast amount of data they collect (often throwing away 95% of their data). This frustrates customers as they know the cloud has made it easier and less expensive than ever to collect, store, and analyze data.”

“Amazon Redshift not only significantly lowers the cost of a data warehouse, but also makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data very quickly,” he added. “While actual performance will vary based on each customers’ specific query requirements, our internal tests have shown over 10 times performance improvement when compared to standard relational data warehouses. Having the ability to quickly analyze petabytes of data at a low cost changes the game for our customers.”

Participants in the private beta program include Netflix, Flipboard, NASA/JPL and Schumacher Group.

Kurt Brown, Director of Data Science & Engineering Platform at Netflix, said, “At Netflix, we deliver personalized recommendations for our millions of subscribers by analyzing large volumes of data, and are always looking for ways to improve our service. We’re very excited about the cost-disruptive and cloud-based model of Amazon Redshift. It’s sure to shake up the data warehousing industry.”

Erik Selberg, Manager of the Amazon.com Data Warehouse team, added, “The Amazon Enterprise Data Warehouse manages petabytes of data for every group at Amazon. We are seeing significant performance improvements leveraging Amazon Redshift over our current multi-million dollar data warehouse. Some multi-hour queries finish in under an hour, and some queries that took 5-10 minutes on our current data warehouse are now returning in seconds with Amazon Redshift. Early estimates show the cost of Amazon Redshift will be well under 1/10th the cost of our existing solution. Amazon Redshift is providing us with a cost-effective way to scale with our growing data analysis needs.”

Amazon reportedly also announced today that it has dropped the pricing for its S3 storage service by about 25%

Earlier this week, Google announced some new features, lower prices and extended data center accessibility for its cloud platform, including a price reduction for its Cloud Storage offering, and the introduction of a limited preview of Durable Reduced Availability storage, which provides a lower price storage option for users. More on all of that here.