Backup Online With Jungle Disk

Are you backing up? You should be! If you’ve been looking for an affordable online backup storage space, you might want to give Jungle Disk a shot. This service lets you backup your computer to Amazon’s S3 storage platform quickly and easily.

Recently, Jungle Disk released version 2.0 of their software which debuted a brand-new UI which aims to make the setup of the service even more intuitive than it was before. The new version also now offers support for scheduling multiple backups and has improved performance for large directories and large cache sizes. A new "previous versions" feature lets you set minimum and maximum numbers of previous versions of select files and this option can be customized on a per-backup-job basis.

The pricing for Jungle Disk is very reasonable - you only pay for what you use - no minimum monthly fees or long-term commitment is required. There is a one time purchase fee of $20, but after that, the price for storage is $0.15 per GB and $.10 per GB of data uploaded and $0.17 per GB download. Upload and download requests are priced at $0.01 per 1000 uploads and $0.01 per 10,000 downloads. That’s darned cheap! There’s also an optional "Plus" service that lets you access your files from anywhere for only $1/month.

To learn more about Jungle Disk, go here.

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This article is from Channel 10, a Microsoft blog for tech enthusiasts. To subscribe to Channel 10, the link is http://on10.net/Feeds/RSS/. To subscribe just to my posts, the link is: http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/RSS/.

A company called Seriosity has introduced a new tool for email productivity, Attent, which attacks what they say is the main source of information overload: SENDERS! Yes, it’s the people sending email that are the real problem that need to be addressed, according to Attent, so they’ve come up with a system for businesses to implement which is supposed to make people stop and consider if something is worth emailing. 

With Attent, each employee is given a set amount of “Serios” per week, which are basically like virtual dollars. For each email you send, you can attach a certain number of Serios to it, depending on importance. More important emails are sent using more Serios. The system works as an Outlook plugin, and, since it only works with other people who also use Attent, the company would have to roll this out to everyone to make it an effective tool.

While this is an interesting idea, the reasoning behind this idea is that you can force people to email less by forcing them to calculate how much they can “afford” to email, and that seems to me a pretty much a knee-jerk reaction to dealing with info overload.

For one thing, Attent can’t stop people outside the company from emailing, so it only forces internal employees to turn to phone calls and face-to-face requests which may be even more disruptive than emails.

From personal experience, I found that a lot of people chose to email simply because email was the absolute fastest way to send out a request for help, a question, or to share a message with a large number of people. When this became a burden, such as it was at one of my I.T. jobs, the real cause that should have been addressed was why were people turning to email instead of using the tools to them at hand? Why were people sending emails instead of logging help desk tickets? Why were people sending emails instead of referring to online documentation? Why were people sending emails instead of doing the job themselves – which they had the ability and permissions to do, but not the know-how?

The problem that must be addressed in every company are the underlying causes that lead some people to use email far more than necessary – and use it first, without thinking things through. This tool, Attent, aims to do that, but without  deeper understanding about what’s wrong in the particular company.

For example, in my situation, implementing a I.T. support email address that directly posted items to the helpdesk instead of arriving in my inbox would have been a big help. Training people where to find the answers they need and how to use the tools we had in house would also have cut down on the emails. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have the authority to implement changes, because believe me, I would have!)

At another job of mine, where I did have authority to make changes, I spent a good part of a day out of the new hires’ week of training teaching the new employees about our in-house web resources – one of which was a SharePoint site. Even for those who had never been exposed to SharePoint, the majority were able to understand pretty quickly how they could use it and it definitely helped cut down on requests in the future as people weren’t emailing in basic questions like where to find a certain file or bit of information. They already knew where it was online.

Often businesses tend to overlook the value of training, but then they end up working harder due to the lack of training of their new employees. The value of real, instructor-led training is something every business needs to understand because, once in the thick of things, employees will never find the time to study user manuals or do research – everything becomes “I need an answer now.” The best time to reach employees and set out what the expectations are for them is at the very beginning of employment before they become reliant on using their preferred tools and processes that result in increased efficiency for them, but that decrease the overall efficiency of the company as a whole since they put the burden on other people who have mastered the use of the company’s informational systems.

Of course, training isn’t a panacea for the entirety of the information overload problem, but it’s certainly a better use of a company’s money that setting up a virtual economy where emails have a price tag associated with them, in my opinion.

For dealing with the remainder of the email, tools that add efficiency to the process of sorting through your inbox - like my business email add-on of choice, ClearContext - are really the way to go. Heavy use of filters, rules, and informational auto-responders can also help cut down on the flood. However, real solutions to today’s information overload problem are going to much more in-depth and complex than an Outlook plugin. Maybe IORG will come up with some answers for us.

(Image courtesy of Seriosity)

Get caught up with some of my latest posts from ReadWriteWeb:

I.T. 2.0: How Changing Technology is Having Big Impacts on Business

In case you haven’t heard yet - the I.T. world is changing. The rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as "Web 2.0" and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. This new movement is called Enterprise 2.0, and it’s no small shift. They’re even having a conference about it next week. But the change encompasses more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world - it also includes the movement of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mobile workforce, the rebirth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more…Keep Reading

SharePoint To Run Enterprise 2.0?

Nine companies are saying "yes," having recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology.

If there’s one thing that any I.T. pro knows it’s the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use, or services they’ve signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered, and, if worthy, purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure. SharePoint is no exception…Keep Reading

Adobe AIR Goes to Work: 6 Apps for the Corporate Desktop

By now, you’ve heard of Adobe AIR - the cross-OS runtime that lets you run rich internet applications on your desktop. We’ve covered several of our favorite apps in the past, as well as places to find new ones, but so far all we’ve seen are consumer applications. What about the business world? Will companies ever be using AIR apps on their desktops? As it turns out, many already do and they’re as easy to deploy as Adobe Reader…Keep Reading

The Next Generation of Bloggers

If you’re a blogger, think back and try to remember how you got introduced to blogging - did you start off with a MySpace blog or LJ journal? Maybe a tech-savvy friend set up WordPress for you and showed you how it worked? Or perhaps you just had to figure everything out all on your own? If you were in that last category, then you can really appreciate what Patrick DeVivo is trying to do with his latest project, The Youth Bloggers Network. This site is designed to be a center point of communication for young people who need support and encouragement as they try to enter the blogging world…Keep Reading

Can Twitter Be Saved?

If there’s anything Twitter can be counted on for, lately it’s been the service’s instability. The situation got so bad that avid twitterers have now gotten used to loading up istwitterdown.com in one of their browser tabs while debating whether FriendFeed was going to replace Twitter. As Twitter started the long, hard process of a rebuild, the team learned how to quickly adjust the load by disabling services when needed. Staying up through the WWDC keynote was a triumph that they thought was reason enough for celebration. Don’t be fooled though - they may have mastered how to shed load fast in order to stay afloat, but Twitter still has a long road ahead of them. Only now, they might have some help…Keep Reading

Information Overload: The Problem

This is post #1 of 2 posts on today’s information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect…Keep Reading

It’s been a hectic week. I’ve had my sister visiting me from Paraguay where she’s serving in the Peace Corps, so there hasn’t been as much time to delve into things like usual. (Case in point, as I began to write this last night she came in to ask where was that website to find album art for her iPod? AlbumArt.org I re-googled for her. Yes, her American splurge was a new iPod classic. Apparently there are only so many episodes of America’s Top Model dubbed in Spanish you can handle.)

However, I have run across some interesting things this week that I’m going to be trying shortly. Since I’m a little behind, feel free to comment with your thoughts on these items if you’ve already given them a whirl.

1. feedly+delicious: The new Google Reader synced-up start page, feedly, has integrated del.icio.us bookmarks. As long as you’re running feedly 1.0b3.2 and the latest add-on, you’re good to go.

2. PicLens 1.7 Launches: Firefox plugin PicLens launches their FF3 compatible plugin with new features like Return to PicLens, Discover, and Shop Amazon (read more about these here). This plugin really makes you feel like you’re surfing some futuristic version of the web with its 3D Wall and 3D Video Search features. So cool it’s almost scary.

3. Torrent Relay: Will the next generation of pirates use their mobile phones to steal music and movies? If so, TorrentRelay may be their tool of choice. The software takes existing torrent links and turns them into http links instead. Give that nearly everything supports http, downloading torrent while mobile may be a real possibility. MakeUseOf has a walkthrough.

4. Mento Goes Mobile: Thanks to this SocialGeeks podcast, I was intrigued enough to give Mento a look, but honestly haven’t transitioned there yet. And now they have a mobile website at m.mento.info. I’ve never been 100% satisfied with bookmarking services. I want a simpler service that presents itself like a Google search engine that I can query. Hasn’t been invented yet? Oh, and I have 6 Mento invites if you need one. (First come, first serve. I just need your email address).

5. Blackberry Media Sync: Whoa! Seriously? iTunes to Blackberry sync? NO FREAKING WAY.

Image Courtesy of Crackberry

6. Last.fm Integrated Open Source iTunes Competitor: With lots of features, this cross-platform media player called aTunes that’s built on Java is worth a look. Of course, without the iTunes music store, it could be harder to impulse shop…which may be a good thing.

7. Fox’s Private Social Network: OK, can’t demo this but want to! Fox is pairing with social networking service Passenger to launch a private community for giving feedback on programming and marketing. Since I love me some TV and tend to watch a lot of Fox shows (House, Terminator, Bones, SYTYCD, AI, Prison Break Family Guy, Simpsons, etc), I think I should qualify. It’s like HeyNielsen! for Fox shows.

8. Earth Album: Mashup Google and Flickr and explore the world with Earth Album, a simple service that mashes up flickr photos overtop a Google Map. It’s no Virtual Earth or Deep Earth, but it’s still a fun timekiller. (Thanks, Appscout).

9. MyBlogLog Connector: OK, back to work…MyBlogLog launches Connector, your own personal social directory. With this, you can find missing links in your social network. Connected to one person here but not there? Connector will then take you to their page so you can add them. Once direct authentication is supported, they say they’ll then include built-in friending. Now, that would rock.

Plurkair: Now that I have an Adobe AIR app, will I actually start Plurking? Is plurkit better? Do I even need to Plurk?

The only question now is where do I start?

A friend of mine recently asked me for my thoughts on Apple’s MobileMe. Apparently, he wasn’t aware of my big conflict of interest. However, after some time, I thought, why not? At the very least I can share my thoughts about why I won’t be using it, and why you probably will.

Mobile Me

For those of you who haven’t heard, MobileMe is Apple’s new sync/cloud storage platform. Whether you’re on your Mac, PC, iPhone, or iPod Touch, you can access your email, contacts, calendars (and via “push,” too). An online photo gallery and an “iDisk” are also available as online storage spaces for your files. Taken at face value, MobileMe sounds great, doesn’t it? And for many people, it will be. Like all Apple products, MobileMe’s UI is beautiful and easy to use, but MobileMe shares another trait with Apple products, too: it’s a tightly closed platform.

MobileMe will quickly lock you into Apple’s walled garden – and you’ll pay to get in there, too. For $99 you get 20 GB of storage or you can get the family pack for $149…per year. For every 20 extra GBs you need, you’ll also need another $50. And if you already use another email address, like your own domain or email from another free webmail provider like Gmail or Yahoo, you’ll have to give that up, too, or at least learn how to forward, because MobileMe requires an @me.com address.

Of course, if you’re already an Apple user with a Macbook, iPhone, iPod Touch, and whatever else Apple invents for you to buy, you’ve probably already signed up to be notified about MobileMe and are eagerly awaiting the day you can begin using it.

Live Mesh

Microsoft, on the other hand, like the nerdy, older guy in the Mac vs. PC commercials, has been busy coding a developer’s platform called Live Mesh that’s cool, but sort of secretive, too. I mean, with blog posts like this, it’s clear that they’re not even talking to the consumer anymore, so only true computer geeks are still listening. And that’s really too bad because, like all the complex tools that have come out of Microsoft throughout the years, Mesh could also be the next great thing if they could just hire a UI guy to slap some adorable little icons all over it.

OK, I jest. Don’t get me wrong – UI is very important stuff. Arguably, one of the most important things to the consumer these days. Yet it seems we’ve decidedly moved away from a time when caring about what was under the hood was important. Who builds their own PCs anymore? Who replaces their menus and file explorers with crazy, downloadable replacement programs? Who configures the heck out of their tools, applications, and settings so they have a truly personalized computing environment? I guess just me. I’m the one. Everyone else seems perfectly fine to deal with the lovely, yet homogenized world that Apple has created for them. And when something doesn’t work right - like, say, Flash on the iPhone, then it’s just somebody else’s fault.

Meanwhile, Live Mesh is being quietly ignored as the blogosphere drools over iPhone 2.0 (Yes, I’m getting one. That’s not the point). The point is, the blogosphere has given up on Microsoft. The Apple fans (check the comments) are downright terrifyingly vicious in their devotion. Hey, I love my Apple stuff, and if I was rich like you, I’d probably supplement my computing world with a bit more of it; but for now, I still believe there’s more to tech than just what comes out of Apple.

Anyway, back to Mesh. Since no one is bothering to explain it that well, here’s my go at it. It’s a platform not a service. It’s not a web app. It’s not a website where you go and upload files so you can say you offer “cloud computing.”

Or, even better, to quote Steve, “MobileMe could be "built" on Mesh. Unlikely of course, but the opposite isn’t true.” Or yes, even a service like Twitter could run on Mesh.

But for now, Mesh is about sync and access anywhere. I right-click a folder and choose “Add to Mesh.” Now it’s anywhere I have access to computer. A PC, but Mac and Mobile are still coming soon.

And it’s not some crazy proprietary .NET rehash, either. Says John Carroll, “they aren’t proposing protocols for data exchange that would be alien to most web developers. HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON are are standard protocols, and though FeedSync may be new-ish, it is an XML protocol based on ATOM and RSS…This is a real shift, in other words, for Microsoft. They are starting to realize that it is better to be the generalized platform used even on non-Microsoft platforms ”

So when Mesh doesn’t work on the iPhone, guess what? It’s not going to be because it wasn’t using the proper protocols. It will be because Steve Jobs didn’t want it to.

Anyway, if what I know about Mesh really happens one day, it will be totally cool. Revolutionary. But then we’re back to the secret thing again. Sigh.

So I await the tongue-lashing from my friends who will once again depress me by explaining in detail all the reasons why Mesh is going to fail.

They have no idea, but really Microsoft is either going to live up to this:

….or it will fail big-time, but for this round, there’s no gray area.

So, excuse me for hoping that they still have them in them to do the former.

Go here. I’ll wait.

You back?

Now tell me again how uncool all that Microsoft stuff is. Seriously.

DeepEarth is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a long time. I blogged about it on Channel 10 and one of the commenters pointed me to http://silverlight.idvsolutions.com which shows off DeepEarth in even a more incredible fashion than the original link I had posted.

DeepEarth came into existence thanks to an open source community effort that was meant to be a learning experience for the participants as to how to use the DeepZoom feature in Silverlight. Combine that with Virtual Earth and it’s pretty much insane.

As social media enthusiasts, we’re always playing with the latest shiny new objects – we’re blogging about them, tweaking them, and putting them through their paces. However, it’s rare that we find new web apps or services that we really fall in love with. When we do – you’ll know. We’ll talk about them so much that it becomes borderline ridiculous. Services like Twitter and FriendFeed for example, have gotten so much coverage in the blogosphere, that those who never drank the Kool-Aid have become decidedly sick of hearing about their awesomeness. However, as of today, I’ve started using two services that I immediately fell in love with. I’m not going to say they’re going to rival the blogosphere insanity that Twitter caused – they’re much too niche for that. But they are pretty amazing.

The services I’m referring to are Feedly and Xoopit. I’m not going to delve in and give thorough and exhausting reviews because they’ve both been reviewed to death, but I’ll give you the highlights.

Feedly

First up is Feedly, this service/Firefox plugin broke onto the scene Monday thanks to Louis Gray. The service is a social start page, but unlike web 1.0 start pages filled with widgets and lolcat pictures, Feedly focuses on leveraging your Google Reader subscriptions to present you the news. There are many different views of your feeds available – a magazine cover which uses your own reading habits to show off the most interesting stories; a what’s new page that combines recent updates with recommended stories from friends; the wall which integrates Twitter and FriendFeed updates as well as other news sources like Netvibes, My Yahoo! or “Best of” streams of news. With Feedly, you can annotate, share, tweet, recommend, email, and search (thanks to built in Google Search) items. But the craziest part is that Feedly is 100% synched up with Google Reader. Read it in Feedly and it’s marked as read in Google Reader. This is downright incredible to me and makes Feedly one of the best web apps I’ve seen in ages.

More on Feedly:

• The Last Podcast: Feedly: Bring Your Feeds Home
• Scribkin: Quick News From Around the Net

Xoopit

Also on my radar is Xoopit, which got covered by just about everyone today. Xoopit is essentially a Gmail search tool. With Xoopit, you can search for files, photos, and videos by means of yes, another Firefox plugin. In a Xoopit sidebar loaded right in your Gmail inbox, you can view all your media hidden deep in your mailbox. Xoopit also offers integration with other services on the social web like Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace, so you can easily share items with others.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with Xoopit – and one I didn’t see mentioned in any of today’s breathless reviews – Xoopit doesn’t currently support Firefox 3. Oops! Didn’t we all just download that yesterday? Yep, sure enough, no FF3. I found this out after downloading the plugin, of course. Script errors galore led me to the help page where I read that devastating news. 

However, they say that they’re working on FF3, and the service is so promising that I’ve subscribed to their blog in anticipation of the day they announce this has been fixed.

So today is Firefox’s big day: June 17th: Download Day. At Mozilla, they’ve set a goal to achieve the Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours. The number they want to reach is 5 million. As of 1 PM ET, the Firefox download page at www.getfirefox.com featured the new Firefox 3 web browser. (Prior to 1 PM, it was still Firefox 2).

Considering that they were preparing for a record-breaking day, you would think that they would have also prepared for this:

Despite what that error message says, I guarantee you my connection has not be interrupted. I think they’ve been overloaded.

So, if you’re just dying to get your hands on a new browser today, may I suggest a couple of alternatives instead?

Flock 2.0 is now out and it’s built on Firefox 3’s code base.

Opera 9.5 is new, too, and pretty slick.

UPDATE #1: getfirefox.com is pointing to Firefox 2 again. The Download Day page is displaying this:

UPDATE #2: Bwana McCall has posted direct download links.

Since the launch of FriendFeed rooms only weeks ago, the feature was widely adopted by the community. People have since created rooms around a topic, a blog, or even a live event, as with the WWDC keynote. However, one feature that a lot of people have been asking for is the ability to import feeds into a room automatically. Well, now you can – and not just RSS blog feeds, but also Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, or any other service FriendFeed offers. You can check it out in action here in the Obamamania room. Obviously, this new feature makes rooms that much more useful since the content shared in them can be automatically imported.

As soon as I read the news, I had an idea as to how I wanted to use this feature. One of my side projects that had to get dropped due to lack of time was a green technology blog. I’m still subscribed to several green tech feeds and I’m interested in following the green tech news, but I don’t have any time to write about it. Since I use Google Reader and I already have a tag for my top green tech items, I’m just going to import that feed into my new, Green Tech FriendFeed room. If you’re also interested in this subject, I encourage you to join and share your news too.

How will you be using FriendFeed’s rooms?

Flock, the Mozilla-based social browser, is now available in a newly released beta version, Flock 2.0. This latest version of the browser comes after a big round of funding - $15 million led by Fidelity Ventures, which has infused the company with energy and resources to keep plugging away at improvements to Flock. The company is also reporting a huge uptake in the number of users, with a 250%+ increase in users since January 2008. That may be due to their recent win of a 2008 Webby for Social Networking or them being listed at #6 on PC World’s 100 Best Products of 2008.

Because Flock is built on Firefox’s codebase, today’s release of Flock 2.0 brings with it the latest performance, security, and UI enhancements of Firefox 3, including faster page rendering with the Gecko 1.9 engine, reduced memory footprint, faster-running web apps like Google Mail and Zoho Office, malware detection and blocking, and site security that’s validated from the address bar.

In appearance, the new version of the browser offers a location bar that auto-completes like Firefox 3 based on user history and favorites. A new Favorites Manager combines favorites, tags, and history and the new Download Manager now lets you resume downloads after a restart.

What’s most noticeable about Flock 2.0 is that they’re now really trying to ease the transition for you by making you feel “more at home in the browser.” To do so, they’re using more OS-specific buttons and web forms, while also surfacing features like the session manager, so the browser seems more competitive with Firefox3.

They’ve also reworked both the Media Bar and the People Sidebar to make these things more intuitive. The Media Bar now lets you rename, organize, or delete streams easier than before and the Sidebar is now scalable – reducing its size doesn’t mean giving up tabs.

With every new release, I keep giving Flock another shot. As much as I love what they’re trying to do, they’ve yet to hit the sweet spot for me yet. (A FriendFeed sidebar would help, though).

What most people don’t realize though is that Flock can run a lot of Firefox extensions. Since I recently had to go through an extension refresh thanks to Firefox 3, this seems as good a time as any to give Flock another shot. Would you? Or have you given up on Flock already?

You can access Flock 2.0 from here: www.flock.com/beta/download