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SugarSync is one of several companies competing these days to benefit from the disruptions in the market created by the new ways that people organize and share information from the any number of devices they use in their day. That's a fundamental shift that is happening as people move beyond the desktop as a place to keep their documents, their media and their productivity applications. Sponsor Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud. SugarSync's latest hosting numbers are revealing as they demonstrate how much data people are storing online. SugarSync reports that in the past year, the amount of data added to the SugarSync data centers went from an average of 1 terabyte of data to 5 terabytes of information. In total, the company now hosts two petaybtes of information. What's fueling this growth? The customers may provide some clue. About 33 percent of customers are from outside the United States. Mobile devices are far more predominant outside the U.S. It makes sense tht people would need an alternative place to store infromation besides their smart phone or netbook. In light of the booming mobile device market, SugarSync, Dropbox and a host of other services are companies that seem like it would make most sense to develop mobile apps. That appears to be true. In the past 18 months, Sugar Sync has released apps for the Android, BlackBerry and iPad. Services like SugarSync show how the data we create will become part of a personal cloud network. These services lay the grounwork for a new generation of personal and business offerings that work with users to create data as a service opportunities. That's down the road a bit but people do want so share. And they want to share outside the borders of a social network. Personal clouds could be a means to do that. Discuss
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SugarSync: 2 Petabytes and Counting - Welcome to the Personal Cloud
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Earlier this week, Microsoft launched its Facebook connected online office suite Docs.com . Docs offers online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can also choose to share these documents with their Facebook friends. Overall, Docs falls somewhat short of being a replacement for a desktop office suite. Even though it offers a better interface than Google Docs and Zoho , its functionality often feels deliberately crippled in order to push users to use (and buy) Microsoft Office. Sponsor Word Web App Among the three tools in Docs, the Word web app comes the closest to fulfilling its promises. While it isn't ready for managing highly complex documents, it's more than sufficient for editing standard text documents collaboratively. The Word web app includes all the basic editing features one would expect from a stripped-down version of Word, but you can't add footnotes, for example, or insert tables from your Excel files. Thankfully, though, Word will not strip any of these features out of the file. Once you download the file or open it up in Word, your footnotes and will reappear. This ability of Word to keep a document's formatting shows that Microsoft deliberately chose not to support these features in the web app. Excel Web App Among all of the apps, the Excel app is the most basic of the three apps included in the suite. It can only read documents in Microsoft's Office 2007 format, for example, while all the other tools also support older formats. That, by itself, could be a show-stopper for some users, but the most egregious omission here is that there is no graphical interface for entering a formula. Instead, you have to type every formula by hand, which is a slow and error-prone process. The good news, though, is that the Excel web app can read all the formulas in imported files. It's clear, though, that the app is only really meant for editing existing documents and not for creating new ones. PowerPoint Web App The PowerPoint web app did a nice job at opening every PowerPoint file we threw at it. When it comes to editing, however, the app is also very stripped down. You can use it to create a basic outline of your presentation or change the order of your slieds, for example, but you can't add floating images, backgrounds and resize text and image fields. You can, however, add and edit SmartArt clips. Bugs While the whole office suite ran very well in all the browsers we tested (except for Safari on the iPad, which displayed the documents just fine but crashed when we tried to edit), Microsoft still has to fix before Docs can become a run-away hit. While Docs has no issues importing most Microsoft Office documents, editing uploaded documents can be tricky. If you set Microsoft Office on the desktop to track the changes you make to a document, for example, the web apps will refuse to let you edit the document. We also ran unto issues with image uploads, which, at times, didn't finish. Docs also often complained that the images we tried to upload were not compatible with Docs, even though they were just standard JPEGs. Verdict Microsoft clearly wants users to see Docs as an addition to the traditional Microsoft Office desktop suite and not as a replacement for Office. After using Docs for a while it quickly becomes obvious that a lot of the limitations Microsoft imposed are not due to the fact that Docs runs in the browser, but simply due to the fact that Microsoft didn't want to include them. While Microsoft is partnering with Facebook on this project, Docs feels like it is stuck between two worlds: the new reality of how people collaborate and share content online - and Microsoft's intent to preserve its old revenue streams for as long as possible. To some degree, Docs feels similar to Apple's office suite for the iPad . While Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPad are sufficient for most basic tasks and hold a lot of promise, users with more than the most basic needs will come away frustrated. Discuss
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Hands-On With Microsoft Docs.com
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SnapLogic has launched its "snap" store - a service that uses a RESTful architecture to integrate third-party applications into enterprise environments. A RESTful architecture allows companies to leverage light weight, web oriented architectures to bring data in from any source. Sponsor SnapLogic calls its service a data flow to build services with information from the Web and SaaS applications. The snaps may be used for the desktop, a public or private cloud. The SnapLogic Store consists of a network of applications that "snap," into an enterprise without the need for custom integration. It's designed to serve the people who traditionally have had to code by hand. It acts as a reusable framework. Developers with particular forms of expertise can build custom applications that are certified by SnapLogic and offered for sale in the SnapStore. Snap developers receive 70% of the proceeds from the sale of Snaps, without having to pay an annual listing fee. Discuss
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SnapLogic Opens Store For Third Party App Integration
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Sugar CRM is launching a new user interface as part of Sugar 6. It comes with a focus on what is becoming a prerequisite: an emphasis on speed, search and deeper integration with third party applications and mobile devices. The speed issue is one that SaaS providers always seek to mitigate as they want the service to seem as responsive as if it were worked on the desktop. Sponsor To do this, Sugar CRM is providing a revamped set up that when completed is supposed to be optimized for speed and designed for the experience that comes with using a social network. It includes a new, global search, another effort to optimize the experience for the end user. Search is becoming increasingly critical as more data is available for integration with third party apps. Sugar CRM will strengthen its search with an open-source engine such as Lucene . SugarCRM is paying close attention to the user experience, knowing it is a key to acceptance among users of CRM environments. SugarCRM also includes native application support for the iPhone Android and the Blackberry. The company has also introduced a native app for the iPad. Application integration is the hallmark of the emerging social CRM application. SugarCRM fits with LinkedIn, Hoovers and Jigsaw through its Cloud Connectors service, which connects third-party data service. SugarCRM also works with Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel. But can't this all become a bit overwhelming? All this data flowing into one CRM environment means that the customer needs to think carefully how to organize, discover and share what comes into the network. That's why it makes sense that a search and potentially analytics component will become standards for services like SugarCRM. It's also why SugarCRM has a certain advantage. Open-source platforms will thrive in the data deluge to come. Third-party services become critical as components that make sense of internal and external information. It's just a matter of how those applications are applied so customers can get relevant information that they need for the opportunity at hand. Discuss
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SugarCRM: Speed, Search and the Data Deluge
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Norway-based browser company Opera has announced it will be available at the iTunes app store for download into Apple products. "Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store," the company announced . "Opera Mini will be available as a free download within 24 hours, depending on market." Sponsor Opera is a significant mobile player and the ability to tap the iPhone and iPod markets may boost that play. Opera has broken the 100 million user mark but lags on the desktop. Prior to this, as ReadWriteWeb has noted, the iPhone has remained off-limits for any browser besides Apple's own Safari. Their early February notice that they would be developing for the iPhone was thought possibly be primarily a public relations act. Not so. Features include the following. Easy to sync phone with computer Speed Dial gets user to a website with a single tap Address field with auto-completion Tabs allow for multitasking with several Web pages Bookmarks easily managed and accessed If Opera sells, and works well, for iPhone and iPod Touch users, perhaps other browsers will make their way into the orchard. Discuss
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Opera in iTunes
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