The allure of Azure

It’s here! Microsoft have announced their own cloud to compete head on with the market already established by Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. It’s called Azure and it’s currently in a beta preview phase. Determined to get their product right, Ray Ozzie has said that they’ll be taking baby steps with the unveiling – for instance there’s no real details yet of pricing.

We must assume that it’s competitively priced at the very least, but I have reason to believe Microsoft will look beyond a competitor orientated strategy and penetrate the market through innovating out the platform in a series of focus strategies. Based on what I saw and heard at Future of Web Apps, I believe that this cloud will be the technology at the core of a much grander picture yet to be painted by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s approach to startups and emerging business is to assist and nurture those building themselves through the supply of technology, licences, advice and introductions. They’re less inclined to acquire a startup and instead build out the business, almost in partnership, so that the future brings more customers their way.

There’s more to this platform than Microsoft have unveiled. I’ve tried out Live Mesh which is an impressive syncing online desktop, and I hope that Azure will mean developers can add to this experience. Next week we can expect another announcement that will be directly targeted at startups and hopefully make clearer where Microsoft are going next with B2B online services. From there I hope we’ll be able to see how this might all start to change the end user experience in time to align with Windows 7 and other offerings.

FOWA London 2008

Last Friday I was extremely fortunate to attend the Future of Web Apps conference in London, hosted by Carsonified. Very many thanks to Ryan Carson and his superb team for putting on the event, but also to all those that attended and made the experience so memorable.

I was there to listen to and learn from the best in the industry. I’m trying to prepare a research proposal for my postgraduate dissertation (MSc International Business Management), so this was the prime opportunity to build a small rolodex of willing contacts who would be prepared to respond to some questions in a couple of months time. In short, I went to work, but I had a surprising amount of fun and gained much more than I expected.

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Here is an overview of the university sessions:

Inuda talk from Jon Markwell (Founder)

They’re a 5 man team of Ruby on Rails programmers. In a long weekend off, they hacked together HowSociable – a tool to rate a brand name’s presence on social networks and the blogosphere by giving the Coca Cola brand’s online presence the score of 1000 and then using this as a benchmark.

It was a story of how important word of mouth is to get a product out. This wasn’t marketed in any way, and wasn’t even announced except in a note on a wiki. The tool is useful and stood the test of time. Users have started to email feedback and feature requests, offering to pay for the service.

Ways they plan to monetise – premium account with black box so popularity can be recorded over time, page ads perhaps.

Myspace talk from Chris Thorpe (Developer Platform Evangelist)

Sustainable communities and how they are looking to change apps on the API so that they’re profitable over a longer period of time. Myspace are looking to get rid of apps that have a 2 minute shelf life and that never get used after their first use and viral marketing. To do this, they’re launching an app development competition – £10k up for grabs to put their app to work.

This talk was important from a strategic HRM perspective – they’re making workers and outside coders hungry to write apps for them with rivalry and competition.

Marketing was also a big issue because the current system of small, cheap and nasty virally marketed apps has been recognised as not sustainable, not profitable, and actually pushing away end users from the service. The marketing isn’t appealing enough, and users have developed immunities to these style apps.

The competition, then, looks to address and manage these two business problems – spurring coders into fresh ideas on marketable apps.

Microsoft talk from Bindi Karia (VC/Emerging Business Lead)

“Start-up and stay up with Microsoft”

Microsoft take a different approach to Google and prefer to partner with startups than acquire them. Team provides contacts, technologies, licenses, business consultancy and advice, and sometimes cash.

Partnering offers more opportunities for business later on, adding more b2b as well as end users of a product. Partnering also ensures that products are made under Microsoft supervision yet with the fresh eyes staying outside of the company’s influence: allows workers to do what they are best at, innovation goes further.

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There was a lot to take in from the stalls being run by various SaaS and PaaS providers, startups and others. I had a great time in both the Sun and Microsoft lounges, especially the demo of the Microsoft Surface, which you can see a video or two of on my Qik account. I took the following notes from the stalls around the expo floor:

BookingBug.com is a startup looking to sell their service to small businesses such as plumbers, electricians and so forth. They aim to be a classifieds but with an inbuilt calendar system so that when the business logs in, they can see customer requests for service, and choose to accept that booking. Helps small businesses to manage their time, and customers to see when the business is available for service. Good idea, but how likely are they to get businesses signed up?

Swirrl.com is a wiki service being bootstrapped. They’ve been live for a couple of weeks. 2 man team, very friendly. I was unable to see the difference between this and other wiki services like WetPaint, but I know nothing about programming and real technical workings, so perhaps there’s more to this than meets the eye. Very straight forward freemium business model with 3 levels of paying packages. I can see small and medium enterprises using this as a work and collaboration solution, but due to the quantity of similar wiki services mass or larger scale adoption not happening. I’m sure they’ve thought through the technical side of scaling it, but where’s the unique selling feature that would make everyone jump and grab at it? I definitely do want to give this a try though.

Adknowledge is an ad solutions company, looking to take on Google and Yahoo! with their pay per click system for advertisers. As well as trying to appeal to advertisers, they offer ad solutions up to publishers. They have funding from Technology Crossover Ventures, and can’t really go wrong with their ad business, it just seems that there’s a lot of competition in this arena already. I’d like to talk to them a lot more about monetising through ads and how the model can grow.

AbilityNet provide services for disabled people to enhance their interaction with technology. They’re a not-for-profit charity, backed by Microsoft and others.

Salesforce.com were demonstrating force.com platform as a service which is an incredibly powerful system. Looking around their stall, they demonstrated their services for other businesses, providing sales, crm, marketing, channel management, analytics, customisation, integration, and an app exchange market place. The marketplace was what impressed me the most, a place to trade in apps, it looked so simple and functional. The guys were extremely helpful with answering my questions and I’ll definitely be getting in touch with them at a later stage.

Anish Kapoor (CEO and Founder) from yuuguu demonstrated his cross platform remote assistance technology. Has an installed client for the desktop that launches the request, and then a web portal viewing for the support. Features integration with Google Talk, so the request can take place through your buddy list. This can be sold to consumers and businesses, although I came away confused as to who was the main focus. With services out there like LogMeIn and remote assistance built into Windows Live Messenger, will this take off?

Cmypitch.com is a way for startups to record themselves pitching their company, be rated and advised by other startups on their pitch, and then viewed by potential investors. I take this to be a way of removing the nerve racking experience of pitching that would take place in an office, and maybe saving some time and money for both sides. It’s more than that though: they are another social network, but with a business and video podcasting spin. I assume that businesses will have to pay to be listed in the directory, else there seems to be no way for the site to make money. Nice idea, and I hope it gets adopted by companies to make them more transparent to the community.

Veedow.com is all about “shopping without searching”. I was told to think of StumbleUpon clashed with Amazon. My answer to which is why not partner with StumbleUpon? I assume this will monetise by transaction percentage, and probably ads too.

Skimbit lets you research and compile your research into one page and then share this page with others, a little like delicious bookmarking, but aimed more at collaboration. It’s a nice idea, but I felt it filled a very small niche in the market, and that there are a bunch of other ways I could put together a similar result. I do think that there’s a ton of directions this product offering could be taken. At the moment it reminds me of instapaper, which I used for about 5 minutes and then realised that I saved a lot of time just leaving articles sat in my Google Reader and it was one less page to visit. Skim-in-a-box is great because it lets you put their service into full swing through your own site, a white label service. This and ads on their main site would seem to be monetising sorted.

Empressr is a competitor to SlideRocket. I didn’t get to chat to anyone from their team, so I was just left to guess about it from posters and leaflets.

GoodBarry is a webhost that make running your ebusiness a lot simpler. They have made the complete package of services and tools so that a business can be run through a backend web portal. The demo was impressive, and I’m sure they will attract a lot of customers who are looking to set up an online business but lack time and tech knowledge to do so. The interface was exceptionally clean and very quick to learn your way around. I really liked the live feed of usage, that’s a neat feature. As standard it lets you keep on top of every element to your business and produces stats on everything from page hits to revenue.

Fav.or.it is a blog aggregator, that to me seemed like cheating: it’s like turning your rss feed reader into a blog. You can import content through certain tags, feeds etc and add commentary, or just leave it to gather and publish all that info. What I like is that commenting through the interface actually posts the comment back to the original site that the article came from. Revenue comes from ads by Google, and they’re proudly powered by Sun who had brought a surf machine and internet cafe to the expo for everyone to enjoy.

These are the stalls I got to see, the people I got to speak to, and the interesting leaflets I picked up. Time flew, and as everyone began to pack up, the focus turned to the live taping of Diggnation. Congratulations to Alex and Heather on getting engaged! I had such fun watching this, meeting new people and drinking Google Beers. Marketing genius – provide free beer and people will love your brand. A couple of rounds at Fox bar run by Digg and Facebook finished a thoroughly enjoyable and productive day. Many thanks again to all those that made it happen!

Options? Great… Pick one!

The Microhoo situation has made some considerable developments since I last posted on the subject. Sadly though Jerry and his board haven’t made their minds up yet, but that’s justified to an extent now that so many interesting options have presented themselves. Next Tuesday we’ll get to see Yahoo’s earnings report which will (hopefully) give everyone a big clue as to where this is going. Of course other Q1 numbers that will prove interesting are those of AOL – rumoured to be down to the tune of 25-30%. Platform A is being streamlined, which has a short term cost cutting win and could be used to adjust the compatibility of the team for any longer term aspirations such as say a merger with Yahoo!

AOL’s moves as of late have been focused on turnaround. First Bebo was acquired for $850 million, allowing AOL to own a social network and have access to a lot of users. This huge jigsaw puzzle piece will give AOL what it needs over the next few years to allow it to compete with the big players on the Internet. Combined with Platform A, it means they can keep everything that’s ad revenue based in house which is much more respectable than just outsourcing to Google; aka admitting defeat or Yahoo’s great idea. Platform A has taken on Verizon’s web and mobile properties, offering AOL a real opportunity to lead innovation on how to target ads at the mobile internet and its ever increasing number of users. Ultimately whoever gets this right first will hit the jackpot, and the brain power Google has at its disposal makes competition high, so teaming with Verizon on this journey boosts AOL’s chances of success.

Next up, relationships have been built to boost usability and accessibility of AIM, but in this field allowing Google to merge GTalk contacts with AIM buddies is not admitting defeat to Google. It’s a sensible move because it keeps hold of those users that were slowly discovering that the switching costs of going to Google might actually be cheaper and more efficient; as well as being in line with the trend wave of opening up access for communication through web2.0’s like Meebo.

On April 15th, Sphere announced it had been bought buy AOL. Sphere started as a blog search engine that would compete directly with giants like Technorati and Google Blog Search, but it rapidly differentiated itself by becoming a related content engine. In short, it allowed blogging to link itself and search through the big news media sites, generating related stories from big news sites when viewing a blog. This acquisition will now sit squarely inside AOL’s content sites. AOL has been doing a good job of keeping these content sites fresh and relevant, with their recent launch of a women’s lifestyle site for example. There have been other acquisition moves that have made important differences to AOL’s sites and using Platform A ads on them, such as Goowy Media the widget makers and Perfiliate Technologies the Internet marketing specialists. The complete chain looks something like this:

AOL Content sites –> Bebo and public blogging of content –> Platform A ads generate revenue –> Back to start

As dumbed down as this might seem, it’s important to realise that AOL were lacking some of these critical elements (or components of these elements) only a few years ago; and that if they’ve got their heads sewn on properly, they’ll figure out how to make something of the mobile web. At least there’s a clear path that cash is flowing in, and it’s an encouraging direction. But it seems to me that there are two thought patterns or objectives at work inside the top management think-tank. The first objective shows us we have a company that’s trying to pull off this turn around and stand on its own two feet, whilst the opposing decision makers want to see AOL sold to Yahoo! (or anyone that will realistically buy them) to make some cash for TimeWarner.

Does no one else see the problem with this? Right now, having two objectives creates no conflict as they are both achieved by boosting the company’s size, revenue… essentially every method you have of measuring the success of a company. The problem arises when Yahoo! caves to M$’s persistence and leaves AOL out in the cold, or when something similarly devastating takes place in an environment outside of AOL’s control. We are going to see top management fighting it out over which path is right for them, with little or no consideration for the end user.

Digital Nomad… the conclusion

At the last LUG meet, I presented my findings from the Digital Nomad project I undertook, along with wifi encryption hacking (in theory). This project was started because of hard disk failure, complete paranoia at ever losing anything, and curiosity – can you JUST use a browser and some cunning Web2.0 offerings to run your life? (See Running your life and BACKUP posts) It has now officially concluded and I’m very proud to say the answer is YES! I gave myself bonus points for services that are free or dirt cheap.

Here’s the full list of services that come with the MLED “I like this” seal of approval:

Google Docs: If you have a Gmail account, utilise all the associated features to the fullest. You can put almost all your eggs in this one basket – Google provide blogging, reading, email, calendar, docs & spreads, photos, and they even have had a stab at social networking. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The best news is that Google Gears is being extended to include Google Docs, making this even more suited to serious and/or business needs. Gears lets you continue everything off-line, essentially your work is backed up and collaborated/shared as soon as you go online. Big thumbs up for Google.

Zoho: Google’s offerings have this superb competitor. They seem to be leading the way on some of their innovations, I’ve not found better or an alternative. This is very seriously geared towards businesses, and they do charge for heavy usage. Features that look particularly note worthy are Invoice, Projects, CRM and DB & Reports products. I have stopped using this suite because Google is too convenient and easy for me, but if you’re seriously looking to undertake a shift to the web-centric domain, do NOT ignore Zoho.

Scribd: The YouTube of documents. At the end of this year, I’ll probably upload some of my notes to actually participate in the sharing. This site has a great store of docs, white papers and articles and uses ads to monetise. I have found it immensely helpful as a resource so far, but it’s not quite like Wikipedia in terms of quick access to general knowledge. It’s the opposite angle to document making Web2.0 suites – it wants you to upload all your old notes and documents for sharing in the cloud, rather than providing you with a way to make new ones. They have an API and some interesting ways of embedding documents, presumably aimed more at journalists. I could see some potential uses for this as documents backup and hosting technical manuals.

Seeqpod: If my mp3 player is not pumping beats into my brain, then Seeqpod is how I now get at music. It’s superb. You can build playlists or just randomly search/stumble your way around tunes.

Flickr: Yahoo! did good. I absolutely love Flickr, and it is serves as a backup as well as a way of publicly displaying photos for me. I have forked out for a pro account so that I can freely display and store as much as I dare. A lot of people use Facebook for photos, but I’m not in favour of this as it cuts down images, doesn’t quite have the same freedom as “sets” and “collections”. But lets face it, Flickr is designed specifically for photos, whereas Facebook is now something of a joke where I now get spammed by silly application invitations.

Liquid Planner: Worth a click if you’re a manager. As the title might suggest, it makes planning easy and fluid. I have yet to properly start using this, so I can’t really give too much feedback on how it handles, but the account I have, the interface, and the feature list are all very impressive. A lot of people talk, blog about, and use Basecamp for business, and based on its popularity alone I recommend it in the same breath. I’ve not tried it though, so it’s not properly featuring in this list.

Jungle Disk: Storage and backup pleasure. Uses Amazon S3 at the moment, and should another company like M$ or Google release an alternative then I’m sure the company will explore using those as a back-end. They’re working on version 2.0 of the software which is already cross platform and superb. They’ve just taken on a new worker and announced a bundle of features that they plan on adding.

Meebo: Messaging made easy. I have messaging accounts on Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Jabber and I’m looking into AIM now that they’ve partnered with Meebo and started to crawl back into the spotlight. Before I used Pidgin to unite all those accounts in one window, but now I use Meebo because it does the same but inside a browser. As a bonus, they have some products that they’re constantly adding to and updating, my favourite so far being the Meebo Me blog plugin —->

Netvibes: Homepage 2.0 and they’re French! This makes the perfect home page as you can literally put anything in a widget, so I no longer have to visit MySpace and wade through ads to check my messages, nor do I have to visit online comic pages. I’m probably missing out on half the features they have because I honestly haven’t found time to explore, but it’s certainly very powerful and worth looking at.

Blist: I got an email from them yesterday saying they’ve added social features – i.e. proper collaboration and sharing with permissions. This is a superb place to work on and collaborate on databases, and more specialised than Zoho’s offering I think.

Remember the Milk!: A reminders plugin for Gmail that sits where relevant text ads would normally be in the right hand column. This is incredibly useful for both simple and comprehensive to do lists. There’s also a plugin for Google Calendar that I haven’t explored because it provides text message reminders just like Google Calendar does, and I was worried that I’d get the two confused or conflicting.

I Want Sandy: My new PA! Remember the Milk! has passed by for me now because I Want Sandy acts fairly human and allows you to add entries to task lists and a calendar via text message, texting you back with reminders. UK residents need to communicate with the service via Twitter at the moment because it doesn’t have phone support for networks other than O2 UK and T-Mobile UK (I think). Twitter is the future, so even if your phone network is supported out of the box, grab a Twitter account anyway.

The concept of Digital Nomad is something I’ve come to both enjoy and rely upon, but with the good comes some disadvantages. Whilst you have a free (£/$/€) set of apps that you can access on literally any internet connected device, it limits you to such devices. Being permanently connected can prove costly in certain areas of the world! Additionally, I think it’ll be a long while yet before professional and specialist tools such as video, music and photo editing suites reach the internet platform. So don’t throw out your computer and bulky software suites yet, there’s still a few years of life needed from them. But what this project has shown is that being on a public terminal or a friend’s laptop shouldn’t slow you down if you’ve got the right service accounts.

For Kluggers: here is the link to the wifi hacking tutorial I discussed at the meet.

AOL’s turnaround strategy

AOL has been a company that has seen some slowdown recently. I wouldn’t go so far as to compare them to Yahoo! but lets face it – if they hadn’t had a drastic re-think about where they’re going, AOL were headed for being bought out.

So what have we seen from them recently that proves this new thinking? An entry on the Meeblog announced that Meebo were entering an alliance with AOL. Today Kevin Rose pownce-messaged a Digg story about AOL and their purchase of the social network Bebo for $850 million.

At the moment in the web 2.0 domain, we are seeing the tech giants looking to lower their costs and continue with their organic growth, while smaller firms and startups rush around like mad things trying to innovate the industry. The balance of this rain forest should hold up through the coming recession as the big players look to take on their favourite picks of those inventive startups.

What we have seen from AOL has been their top management frozen, satisfied with their position and not really pushing the company on to new heights. What has resulted has seen other firms like Google and Facebook enter the market and start to gobble up the revenue. Mention of the name AOL to me conjures the image of a company matured and resistant to change.

So it comes as a great relief to me to see that they appear to be concerned about their profitability – seeking alliances and acquisitions. With such a large company here, the “Big Bang” instant turn around is much less of an option, reassuringly they pursue something of a market adaptation strategy which will allow them to evolve and rejuvenate. After all, we all remember AOL as that company that gave away CDs with free internet and a bundle of warez that slowed down your Windows machine to a grinding pace.

Bring it on AOL! Let’s see your offering in this age of web 2.0 and beyond, we await your contribution to the revolution. Take your time though, because incremental change is surely the way to secure your longevity.

Recession around the corner? Doom doom doom… or not.

I read a great article in the Financial Times yesterday about the fear of recession, which must currently be hovering above the heads of everyone over in Silicon Valley. Just in the same way that in 2000 the tech giants tried to play down the likelihood of one taking place, we see even more alarming evidence through this constant dominance game play that’s taking place. The ‘Microhoo’ frenzy, the deeply complex politics that surrounded the 700 mhz auction, the ways in which different companies did or didn’t roll out all/some of their products at CES or the mobile device conference, talk and rumours that float around forums and blogs of mergers and alliances: these all have seeds of worry sewn into them, that to many are beginning to look like more than just the regular state of play.

My view is one of “so what?” because we passed through one recession at the start of the millennium and the other side of it has seen some awe-inspiring innovation. If this next one does happen, I hope it makes some of the giants think about consolidating their positions and looking to longer term and more sustainable strategies. And I really hope that some of the startups that hit the scene as it kicks off make it through to the other side so that we get to see the innovation boom on the up-curve. It would suck to be a founder and watch your idea drown because of bad timing.

The last recession came after the crazy boom/bubble of the dotcom. What is this one following? Certainly innovation in the PC makers domain, and what’s cool for them is that the revenues and cash flows of these companies is much higher and more stable than it was for the poor dotcoms that had to pass the rigors of the 2000 recession.

I’m not worrying for companies like HP and Cisco who have provided commentary on what they see on the horizon, because I’m optimistic any slump will be short lived. It will force some of the giants that have been toying with acquisitions to stop, take stock, evaluate their position, and develop inwardly – ensuring the integration and compatibility of the services that all their subsidiaries provide is adequate to move forwards once the other side of the recession is reached.

Really the biggest sector that will feel the heat of a potential recession is the advertising, search and social networking world. The Facebook craze has passed, and people are just waking up to the quantity of personal data that’s been created in the mean time, which is causing concern and making many review their use of social networking services. Facebook are fast becoming yesterday’s news because everything that everyone was really looking forward to with the company has happened – they have launched; half the online world has signed up; a platform/API has been launched; applications have come into our lives, annoyed us, and been tossed into an optional second page of our profiles or plainly deleted; Microsoft has bought a slice of the ad revenue cake (hello M$, what are you doing with this??); a program caused scandal with our personal data and shocked a realisation as to how open our details are to the world; and now we just wait for … what?

Google have spent their time since 2000 just growing and buying, almost in a whimsical way. They, for me, have been the most fun to watch in an acquisitions and general game play sense. They’ve definitely got the assets to chide them through this possible period, but what’s going to be their first move on the other side? I’m frantically waiting for Google to shock me. I’d be really pleasantly surprised if they could release an Amazon S3 rival and an Apple mobile device running their own OS on their own network. When you think of all it’s achieved, it’s amazing to think that their core business is still search and advertising. I’m looking to Google for a solution that keeps both consumers and businesses connected to the Cloud wherever they are and whenever they need to be. Someone wrote an article today that I got in the GigaOm daily email saying they believe Google should buy Adobe to gain their resources and knowledge, but they were looking more closely at AIR. Surely though, the potential that that kind of acquisition has is more complex and incredible than just AIR, but it’s a good point. Microsoft, too, would benefit greatly from adding Adobe to their portfolio.

Whatever way you look at it, if you’re a decision maker in the valley right now you should be looking to cut costs and push for the greatest possible market share. Startups – if you haven’t already, get your venture funding on speed dial. If today’s article in The Guardian is to be believed, the “Queue for the soup kitchen may start here”.

Who’s running your life?

Firefox has gone over the 500 million downloads mark! That’s a fantastic achievement for Mozilla, and their CEO recently got interviewed on the GigaOm show. In tribute, I’m getting together one of those text widget button bookmarks saying Firefox to put in the sidebar of this WordPress blog. I love the way that blogs let you express yourself and add another routine to your life. And it’s the internet running your life that I want to talk about…

I decided that I should have a try at moving everything in my life on to the internet, which I would usually run locally on a PC. What I mean by that is moving the operation of functions like email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, messaging, file storage (media – photos, music, videos) and of course blogging onto the internet, thus eliminating the need for software such as MS Office. I even managed to find a great set of tools for To Do lists and I discovered that Blogger makes an excellent Paste Bin for code snippets because you can post by email, as well as make it private and not worry about anyone else finding it.

The immediate problem I’ve come across is that I have no decent program yet for image editing such as for websites, and I found myself looking back to the local install of Gimp. I’m holding out for a porting of Photoshop onto Linux, an article appeared on Slashdot not so long ago about this. Also, whilst sharing music and videos is easy, editing and producing them is still far far away from being any good with a Web 2.0 program (if anyone knows one, PLEASE comment with it!). But the good news is I did find a lot of ways to move most core functions onto the internet.

Email, Documents and everything else I would usually do in Office all initially got taken over by Google’s Apps for me. Then in addition, for more advanced or professional looking projects, I used an account with Zoho, as it’s packed out with lots of fantastic features and forms an excellent Office suite. On a side note, please Yahoo! once you’ve sorted out this acquisition issue, can you please buy Zoho or at least affiliate! Those apps are fantastic for creating documents, but if you read my last post about document and data backup and storage, then I really suggest using Jungle Disk for data and Scribd for documents.

For project management I strongly recommend where Liquid Planner are going, as after an enjoyable learning curve I’ve come to realise where they’re taking computer assisted project management.

Media sharing and storage is really easy, there’s a ton of video upload sites – Youtube.com/Google Video and Stage6.com being my two favourites for videos.

I now exclusively listen to music streamed across the internet. I use Seeqpod.com all the time where I can create playlists and save them onto the account; but I have given SkreemR.com a go, and I really liked that too. These music services are great because I find myself either wanting to listen to a whole album as background noise while working, or wanting to just quickly find a track I’ve heard and save it for later; both of which are easy and possible with Seeqpod. The next step for these services will come when they port onto mp3 players that have inbuilt wifi like the iPod touch. I can’t WAIT for this to happen!

For photos sharing and storage, I use Facebook.com (personal and close friends) and Flickr.com (public) the most and find the simple rotation tools useful for quick snaps, but you’ll need a locally installed piece of software for editing to Photoshop level.

I really enjoyed what Remember the Milk has to offer consumers as a Gmail plugin that requires installation of an extension to good old Firefox. It creates an extra column on the right hand side of your Gmail inbox (where there’s usually relevant text ads) that shows all your tasks in a very simple to use and easy to glance at and understand To Do list. I’ve found it addictive, and have adopted it as the primary tool for managing my time. There’s also a plugin that fits into Google Calendar which I’m desperate to try but haven’t yet because it also uses text messaging to remind you about events and I’m worried about it potentially conflicting with the weekly text message repeats I am already running in Google Calendar. Google – hint hint, buy Remember The Milk!

Lastly, who can forget Netvibes.com and their fantastically simple way of tying most of the things I’ve mentioned (even Zoho) into one website. Netvibes is now my homepage, as it saves me a lot of time checking all the different sites that I’ve widgeted in there. It even lets you capture web comics! I really hate checking MySpace and Hotmail, as they’re both sites that I barely ever get contacted with, but sometimes I do and the message will be important and a real pain to miss. MySpace in particular has the most horrific browsing experience possible, so being able to just peek at Netvibes and see its status is a massive relief.

I’d really like a site such as Netvibes to work on making an online life a real possibility by continuing with their integration and accumulation of all the internet services that you might need to use into one page, or at least tabbed pages of widgets that almost feels like a WebOS like Orca. (Note: this is closing down and beta accounts have moved to StartForce)It’s just a case of learning how to get the best out of these WebOS’s, web apps and portals, figuring out which works best for you personally, and learning to overcome your reflex of using a locally installed piece of software.

I’m really getting excited about the potential that Web 2.0 seems to have, and the limit seems to be entrepreneurial imagination. The only concern is security; as if the password on your Netvibes (or WebOS) account is weak and someone gains access then they have access to all areas of your life. And ultimately, let’s face it, anything that you put onto the Internet is going to get picked up by everyone’s Big Brother and/or the Chinese.

I’ve just picked up on something called Yoics, and I’m going to go figure out what it is…

UPDATE: I had one of those nagging doubts in the back of my mind while writing this entry, and I kicked myself when I realised just now what super obvious and essential tool I missed – Meebo. In the same way I’ve switched entirely to Seeqpod for music, Meebo now runs all my instant messaging. I know Pidgin is great for having all the protocols, but it still requires an install: although kudos to the team for making it cross platform. Anyway, as you can see from the side bar —> I’m a very big fan of Meebo, and I use it every day. Meebo’s one of those free services that you’re so reliant upon that I’d definitely be prepared to pay for it.

Also, Stage6.com have announced that they’re closing down. Who’s going to replace them? Stage6 had the perfect compromise of speed and quality unlike most of its rivals.

BACKUP! BACKUP! EVERYBODY BACKUP!

Why is it that no one seems to think about doing this? What if there was a flood or a fire, and your server/desktop got destroyed? How screwed would you be, personally and/or professionally? Tekzilla did a great episode not too long ago that gave a really simplified consumers guide on backing up your files, both in Windows and on Mac.

For me: my photos, personal details like banking records, documents and presentations past and present, chat logs, saved histories, preferences and bookmarks. These are what matter to me the most in terms of my digital life. We’re all really lucky at this stage in digital evolution as we’ve already been blessed with reliable online services that can reduce not only the need for high storage capacity on our computers but also the worry that we face answering that question – what if a hard disk just stopped working?

For example, Google handle my email, and I’m safe in the knowledge that I can access that on any internet-connected machine and it have the exact same user interface to it and thanks to its insane storage, I’m not limited on attachment sizes or concerned about deleting items. Looking at the two accounts I have with Google, personal and public, they are both now over the 6gig size, which I find impressive. Even more incredible is that I’ve managed to fill up 4%. I use Google over other mainstream email accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail just because I prefer the simple interface that seems to me to load a lot faster on slower connections. I have also been impressed by the ease with which you can use Google’s Partnerpages – they take over the running of email on your domain and also give you the full suite of Google Apps.

But we’ve progressed beyond mere email now with web services. Online storage looks to allow us simple uploading of photos, video, and music and a lot of those services also provide a social network dimension that allows the sharing of all this data. Having ads served to me is a price I happily pay for using the services of Facebook, Flickr, Youtube etc. But what if you want something that I’m going to define as “more hardcore” – no ads, bomb-proof reliability, and the sky being the limit on capacity?

A lot of companies have launched themselves on Amazon’s S3 service, using it as their storage back end. I believe this to be genius, as it means that these companies can be paying their fees to Amazon, outsourcing the cost of setting up and maintaining the servers to them, leaving ‘Mr. Web 2.0 Entrepreneur’ free to focus on an innovative front end. There are two examples of such companies that I am going to explore: Jungle Disk and Scribd.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have just recently made the total switch over to Ubuntu Linux. Whilst Canonical and the open community that contribute to Ubuntu are doing a phenomenal job of increasing compatibility and function, it’s still a nuisance that so many programs and services are locked in on providing solely for Windows and/or Mac users. An example of this is Carbonite, who provide a highly recommended online backup service to Windows users. So some folks at my LUG did some research and came up with a short list of linux compatible online storage services, of which my favourite stands as Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk is not only available for Windows, Mac and Linux but also lets you install a program to a usb pen that’s compatible with all three OS’s and will backup in just the same way as on your own machine. Their Why it’s better page accurately outlines their best features, but what wowed me the most was the section on “Pay only for what you use, with no minimums”. This feature is something that’s part and parcel of S3, which is why I really like what Amazon are offering to other companies that can be passed on as a sensible option for all end consumers.

Scribd takes on a much more user-friendly community approach to its use of S3. It markets itself as the ‘Youtube of documents’. Users can upload documents, with unlimited storage, and they share these documents. This free consumer community side will prove to be a very useful tool for education and I look forward to watching this grow. It’s had excellent press so far, and they’ve done the most sensible thing in creating a platform including API so that it can take on a much more commercial business market. I’ve already signed myself and a couple of friends up to the API, who each have very specialised knowledge in certain fields and have been looking for a straightforward way to publish their work while being able to monetise in a controlled fashion. Scribd will embed ads into your documents and then the ad revenue is split between them and you. Obviously with this business model, they can quickly jump to the absolute front of the race, provide a collection of widget options, and with this embedded ads system pioneer the use of widget ads.

Next I’d like to see more competition in the S3 market to drive innovation, as always. Someone should develop another S3 style service because I feel front end operations are already suitably saturated with some great companies like Jungle Disk and Scribd. Let’s see some more of the tech giants offering web 2.0 startups the backbone systems to launch their ideas from, and ultimately it should also do something for internet infrastructure in the process which can only be seen as a good thing.

Someone up there loves me right now…

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve encountered a situation where I’ve thought to myself, wow, I wish this type of tool existed because that would be extremely useful right now. Then, as though some invisible genie was sat behind me granting my every wish, I would log on and find just that tool had been launched and hit the media.

The latest example of this that I’m super excited about is Scribd. Man, Web 2.0 sure loves to leave out its final vowel when naming. Anyway, this startup has followed in YouTube’s footsteps, but looks to create a community around sharing papers.

I’m excited by this because there’s a lot of white papers that float around, those from TechRepublic have had the most interesting titles to me recently, and this service will greatly encourage the circulation of these whilst still allowing them to be monetised. Some of the charges for white papers out there are quite insane, and I hope that by adopting Scribd’s platform, the people that produce such white papers will feel much better about opening up their distribution to a wider audience (and for free). This is certainly the perfect way for freelancers who are specialists in certain fields to publish and promote their work while earning from ad revenue.

More findings later…