iTwin Private Cloud

Storing information on the Internet makes some people nervous. It makes us nervous too. So how about having a private cloud?

A “cloud” in computer talk is a storage place for information. Commercial ones for corporations and government tend to be huge. The “my-Ditto” is a book-sized box that can act as your own private cloud. It can handle up to four terabytes of storage if you pay $370 for the maximum capacity. Less capacity costs appropriately less. It has its own Internet address, which means you can access it from any device that can connect to the Internet.

Four terabytes is a lot of storage, more than 4,000 gigabytes. For comparison, our laptop holds 219 gigabytes which is less than a fourth of a terabyte, and we’ve never filled it up. The my-Ditto storage drive comes with a coded USB key. Instead of taking the box with you, which would be fairly heavy and mildly bulky, just take the key. When you plug that key into another computer it provides access to the box back home. Or use the my-Ditto iPhone/iPad app. You set your own user name and password.

My-Ditto, works with Windows or Mac and won an award at MacWorld 2011. If you supply the disk drives, my-Ditto sells for $110, otherwise, it starts at $150 for 500 gigabytes. (Note: In nearly any remote storage device of this type, you can supply your own disk drives to go inside it; they should be SATA drives.)
A similar device is called the iTwin, and won an award from Popular Science magazine. It can set up a connection between two computers, wherever they are, when a coded USB key is plugged into each one and they’re both connected to the Internet.

As files move between the two computers, they are encrypted. The iTwin is $99 and can access whatever you have on two computer hard drives plus any attached extra storage. However, unlike my-Ditto, both computers must be on. Another difference (which strikes us as minor), is that iTwin can’t stream data to an Xbox or Playstation, but my-Ditto can.

The cost for Google Small Business Apps is $50 per user per year, and includes such things as 25 gigabytes of email storage per user, online calendars, spreadsheets, data recovery, voice and video chat. That’s $450 a year for nine people, which is the number of people in our new friend’s real estate firm. She’s paying $1485 a year for InfoStreet.

Of course sometimes it’s worthwhile dealing with a small company. Our new acquaintance liked InfoStreet’s “portal” or landing page, which includes a link to an employee directory, customer relationship management tools and other stuff. She also liked the free training webinar that allowed her and her team to ask lots of questions to get up to speed.

But if we were in business, we’d do a free trial of Google Apps first. They have webinars too. You’ll find lots of info at smb.gonegoogle.com. Or go to google.com/apps/business look under “latest news” for info on the training sessions. We’d also try Salesforce.com. Their “group edition” is $15 per user per month.

By the way, five zettabytes equals one “googol,” which is 10 to the 100th power. That’s a one followed by 100 zeroes. Yes, that’s how Google got its name.

A survey by Manpower Group found that 84 percent of all employees plan to look for a new job in 2011. That doesn’t mean they’ll all get one, especially in this economy, but those that do are likely to leave behind a big load of digital flotsam and jetsam.

Employees who move to another firm typically don’t leave notes for the new guy or gal, and their old archived email gets lost or is difficult to recover. (We have been asked many times by new employees to identify ourselves and offer proof of our press status, even at companies where we were the first to ever write about that firm, when they were small and insignificant.)ema

Another survey estimated that the Internet sends and receives about three million emails a second. Put those two surveys together and there is probably a lot of old employee email to look through just so the new employee can get up to date. As a practical matter, we’ve found that the new employee never gets completely up to date.

The leading company for handling this problem is Salesforce.com. They’re a contact management company, which simply means they keep track of all your business and personal contacts and even suggest new ones. This information all exists in the cloud, as they say, meaning it resides on their servers and can be accessed from anywhere. The cost is a low $5 a month per user. Salesforce works with Microsoft Outlook and Google’s Gmail.

We recently came across a competitor from England, with a more limited program called “Mail Manager.” This has a one-time cost of $182 per user and handles the email problem instead of total contact tracking. The program works only with Microsoft Outlook, the most common email program.

While Salesforce exists in the cloud i.e. the company’s own servers, Mail Manager resides on your computers. It places email in folders in suggested locations automatically if you wish. You can open these messages years from now, without the Mail Manager program, because they’re saved in Outlook’s “msg” format. The search function is excellent. Besides searching by date or key-word, the program will search for similar spellings, including misspellings and foreign variants. The program also has a screen grabber and mark-up tool, so you can add screen snapshots and notes without leaving Outlook. Mail Manager has a 30-day free trial; go to Oasys-software.com.

Unlike any other computer, this one will operate entirely in the Google cloud. There will be no maintenance chores like installing or uninstalling programs; no anti-virus or anti-spyware program will be required. When you open the lid, the computer will boot up and if you’re within range of any Wi-Fi service or cell phone tower, you will instantly be on the Internet and in the cloud.

Everything you use the computer for (except a doorstop) will take place online using Google’s Chrome web browser, which has 120 million users right now on ordinary computers. We are among those, because we like the Chrome web browser better than Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. It’s faster and has a near perfect safety record. (In a computer security conference in San Francisco last year, local hackers were invited to try and break into protected operating systems and succeeded with all of them except Chrome.)

Everybody seems to like the system but early reviewers have given the prototypes of the new laptops mixed grades. The trackpad is so bad, some say, that you’ll need to plug in a mouse. Instead of a “caps lock” key, you get a search key, which you might hit by accident. You can download files, but the size of the drive is unknown so far. And although it’s fairly thin, it weighs four pounds, which is heavy these days, especially compared to the MacBook Air. All this is correctible, of course, since there are still months to go before release. The new laptop is expected to cost $300, so you could buy three of them for less than the $1,000 Mac Air.

What can you do with the C-48 besides everything you’re doing now? Take a look at the new Chrome Web Store, at chrome.google.com/webstore, and you’ll see hundreds of applications already there in a dozen categories. You don’t have to have a C-48 computer to use them, by the way; any Internet-connected device will do.

Evernote includes free notebooks from sites like Epicurious.com

Evernote is a free program for note taking. You can get it at Evernote.com and it’s hugely popular. We always used Microsoft Word for taking notes, but now we’re tuning in to Evernote’s advantages.

You can create as many “notebooks” as you like. Each one is a collection of related notes: thoughts that pop into your head, ideas for work or play, clips from articles and things you see on the web. When you see something on the web and want to add it to a note book, you can clip it by copying and pasting. Highlight a passage with your mouse, then right-click to choose “copy.” Then go to your notebook, right-click and choose “paste.”  The Chrome and Firefox web browsers offer an extension you can load to make this even easier. In Internet Explorer, click “Tools” and “Add to Evernote.”

Evernote works with Windows, Macs, and smart phones like iPhone, Blackberry and Android. You can load it onto as many computers, phones, pads and gadgets you want, and when you open it up on any of those devices, you automatically have access all of your notebooks after you’ve signed in.  Click “the trunk” to add sample notebooks, like Epicurious.com’s collection of the best hamburger recipes, complete with magazine-quality photos. (They don’t all use beef.) We also liked the crafts notebooks from Make Magazine and the photography collections from “My Modern Metropolis.”

Naturally, we loaded “Ron’s Evernote Tips” from the trunk. We have no idea who Ron is, but the Evernote founder, Phil Libin, is a gadget guy. We read that he takes 26 pounds worth of tech stuff in a backpack wherever he goes. This includes a laptop, two tablets, a DSLR camera, two lenses, two headsets, several cell phones and a few other gadgets.

One of Ron’s tips for conventions and other meetings, is to snap a picture of a person with your cell phone or camera and another shot of their name tag. If they don’t have a name tag, ask them to hold up their business card.  Drag the photos into your notebook.  Evernote will make all the text in the image searchable so now you can have a face to go with the name. Create a separate notebook for contacts, or tag them to make them easier to find. If you search for something, you can save your search to find it faster the next time.

Like Google Docs, you can share your notebooks with others and invite them to collaborate.  You can also integrate Evernote with Twitter to save your best tweets in a notebook. Use Evernote to record audio clips and voice memos. You can email notes from a cell phone to a personalized Evernote address. You can snap photos of whiteboards and use Evernote to search the text.

Most people do most of their activities online now, through an always-on broadband connection. But they also have an operating system such as Windows or Apple to maintain. This can be a hassle, as anyone who’s struggled with anti-virus and anti-spyware software will tell you. When everything takes place online, your apps update themselves automatically and you don’t have maintenance chores.

What can you do online besides everything you’re doing there now? To find out, take a look at the new Chrome Web Store, launching today. There are hundreds of apps already there in a dozen categories. You don’t have to own a Chrome-enabled computer to use them. Any  Internet-connected device will do. In music, we saw things we’d never heard of, like “Toddler Jukebox” and “Beat Petite.” We tried out “Listube,” an online music player and “Wordico,” a word game. However, Listube didn’t work so well. The Tchaikovsky music we were playing stuttered and stopped. This has never happened  to us with any other online music service, including Pandora, Rhapsody and Slacker. So obviously, not all the apps are ready for prime time. On the other hand, the PBS Kids video player worked great.

A PogoPlug is a device that lets you share files online without incurring fees for online storage. You start by storing stuff on any kind of external drive and then plugging them into the PogoPlug. Then go to my.pogoplug.com on the web to view and share your files. Click on a file, folder, or album, and enter the email addresses of the person you want to share it with. The recipient doesn’t need to “register;” to get the file, they just click the link.

Both the basic and pro versions of PogoPlug are $99, for either Windows or Mac. The only difference is the pro version has slots for four USB flash drives. You can use multiple flash drives on either version, though, simply by adding more USB ports with a hub. These simply plug into one USB port and then add extra sockets, much like adding sockets to an electrical outlet. The hubs are cheap.

Microsoft has been around for 35 years and dominated the desktop for most of that time. Google’s goal isn’t to dominate the desktop, because they don’t care what kind of computer you use. With their new cloud-based operating system, Chrome, everything you do takes place online.

This can be good and bad. It’s good if you like to turn on a machine and instantly be online. You won’t need anti-virus programs or other maintenance stuff; because everything you use will be updated for you.  It’s bad if your Internet connection goes down or slows to a crawl. A new book, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Google Chrome & Chrome OS,” by Paul McFedries, $17 from idiotsguides.com, sorts it all out.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for the new Chrome operating system to use this book. It’s just as good a guide to the online services Google already offers, such as word processing, slideshows and spreadsheets. We use Google Docs for anything important, since once it’s in the cloud, we can find it from any computer, no matter where we are. We use folder options to keep everything organized. Click “Create new” to start a new presentation, drawing, form, spreadsheet or folder. Click “from template” to start with something someone else has designed.

After installing the software on two laptops, a desktop and a miniature computer called an “ultraportable,” we inserted the flash drive on one and immediately saw links to all the others. Now, we can be anywhere and use the programs back home. The bad news is we can no longer pretend we’re on a vacation trip and are out of touch with our equipment; the good news is we don’t have to travel with a laptop (they’re heavy).

There’s a free version of LogMeIn at logmein.com. LogMeIn Ignition costs $40, and it’s a bit handier, because you don’t have to type in a user name and password for each computer, tablet or phone you want to control. Your passwords are encrypted and you just click.

By the way, we can’t recommend the tiny Windows XP computer we used to test LogMeIn. It’s called the Umid “Mbook BZ,” and it’s just a little bigger than a wallet. It looks great and worked fine with LogMeIn but the screen is so tiny we could barely read it. The keyboard matched that. Joy’s typing slowed from about 100 words per minute to ten. She had to enlarge the font in Word documents just to be able to see the words. Of course that meant there were fewer words to each displayed page. Bob’s son, however, loves the Mbook. He says it’s just right when you need to work standing up in a crowded room, and it fits in his pocket. It has a built-in webcam, so with Skype or some similar Internet phone service, you can use it as a video phone. It also connects to a projector. You can get a Umid Mbook BZ at dynamism.com for $549. Not cheap.