Yuntaa Launches Virtual Desktop for File Management

Yuntaa is an online desktop application that lets you store and share your digital media from a central location. Yuntaa is a hosting service.

With this service, you can upload your images, music and videos, share items with the community, and manage all of your files. Yuntaa is designed to mimic your desktop, granting you a few desktop widgets and easy access to your files.

The Yuntaa Manager is a downloadable application that lets you drag and drop items from your computer to Yuntaa, and also select files from your hard drive to be backed up on the site. These files can be automatically updated with the sync function and scheduled to occur on a regular basis.

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Windows Live Folders (beta)

You dreamt about "desktop" remote storage: here it is. They even planned on syncing the remote file folders with the local ones thru FolderShare.
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Originally called “Live Drive” Live Folders is getting off the ground before the rumored GDrive. The service is being launched into a managed beta which will give a select group of testers 500MB of free online storage space.

Users can upload files via a webform or through an ActiveX control. Once on the system, files can be marked public, private, or be shared with other Live users by user name or through email by permalink. Files will be download only since Microsoft doesn’t have an office web suite yet.

Microsoft already has plans to incorporate file syncing into the storage cloud powered by FolderShare, which they acquired back in 2005, stepping on the toes of quite a few startups along the way.

Mobile & Social Networking combined

I like the pun!
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Cellfish Media, a spin-off company from media company Lagardère (publisher of Elle magazine) has launched Cellfish.com, a social network and destination portal centered on users sharing music, videos and art between their PCs and mobile devices.

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Folders for Google docs; soon to be released in Gmail?

Interesting post from techcrunch.
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Google has announced an update to Google Docs and Spreadsheets that includes improved features and support for folders. Folders are the biggest change. Google has not abandoned tagging and yet the inclusion of folders would indicate that Google is finally listening to the millions of people who prefer folders in preference to tagging.

The question I do have is what about Gmail? Without hopefully causing a flurry of people telling me how wonderful tagging is, I’m one of those people who download my email from Gmail into a desktop based email client, and I do so only due to the lack of folders in Gmail. Hopefully the inclusion of folders in Google Docs is a sign of future functionality in Gmail.

No Download Required: 30+ Apps That Are Killing Microsoft

Cut&paste of a post about "WEB3.0".

(original post here)

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With Google acquiring a Powerpoint-like tool to bulk up its impressive web office suite, and hundreds of startups releasing everything from web based word processors to complete operating systems, Microsoft is under fire. Sure, the company remains buoyant for now, but 5 years down the line, Microsoft may be struggling if it hasn’t adapted to this new world of web-based, ad-supported software. This week, we tested some of the services that are nibbling away at Microsoft’s dominance, with Google leading the charge.

Target: Microsoft Word

Google Docs - Google’s word processor, attached to your Google account, integrated into other Google apps.

Buzzword - Simple word processor built off of Adobe’s Flex, currently in private beta.

Writeboard - by 37signals, designed to be used by multiple users, focus on sharing and collaboration.

ThinkFree - basically Microsoft Word online.

Target: Microsoft Excel

Google Spreadsheet - not as good as Excel, but a decent spreadsheet app for basic needs, again integrated into other Google apps.

Zoho Sheet - like Excel but with way less features.

EditGrid - Not an Excel replacement, has graphing, extensive collaboration features.

ThinkFree Calc - Basically Excel online.

Target: PowerPoint

Empressr - Lets you import many types of media including Flash, also embeddable…impressive results.

Zoho Show - very simple creator, the results don’t look very great, but good for quick and simple presentations.

Google Presentations - Not out yet, but Google is going to release a general presentation editor sometime soon (this summer)

Spresent - A flash based editor that makes flash based presentations, they look decent and it has Flickr integration.

Target: Outlook

Gmail - Google’s mail client that has Google search built in, has about 3 GB of storage, can be customized to your domain, free for up to 25 users.

Yahoo Mail - Yahoo’s mail client with unlimited storage, new client very quick.

Zoho Mail - email client, free for individuals, for pay with groups. Has collaborative features.

Zimbra - Web based email client, adopted by ISPs for their clients, has a calendar, and document storage, even integrated VoIP, for a price.

Target: Outlook Calendar

Google Calendar - basic calendar app that integrates with Gmail.

Yahoo! Calendar - basic calendar app that integrates with Yahoo Mail

Kiko - Calendar startup originally owned by the founders of Justin.tv, sold on eBay and now owned by Tucows, lots a great features like RSS import, and contact management.

30boxes - Wonderfully simple calendar. Was one of the hottest in this space until Google Calendar launched and stole some of the thunder from the startups.

Target: Windows Live Messenger

Meebo - web based chat that supports Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Jabber. Recently added chat rooms.

eBuddy - supports MSN, Yahoo, and AIM, has a mobile site.

Google Talk - in Gmail there is a Gtalk client that has all the features of the regular Google Talk client for the desktop. There’s also a version on the personalized homepage.

Campfire - like IRC, except better looking and with file sharing, integrated into the other 37signals apps.

Target: Movie Maker (and others)

Movie Maker is free, so Microsoft won’t lose money here. But users will be spending less time with desktop apps once online video editing becomes more feasible (we don’t think it’s satisfactory yet). Less people using these apps on the desktop would mean less incentive for Windows developers to build for that platform.
JumpCut - iMovie in your browser, lets you edit other people’s videos too.

MotionBox - doesn’t let you edit other people’s videos, but still a fully featured editor.

YouTube Remixer - Currently in Beta, powered by Adobe, results don’t look great, but it’s a start.

Eyespot - not really designed to be an editor, more of a remix and mashup maker, currently has a deal with Starwars to let fans make mashups.

Target: Windows??

OK, so nobody is abandoning their OS anytime soon, but web-based desktops and operating systems, if successful, will mean people spend less time on their real desktops and more time moving files around out in the cloud.
DesktopOnDemand - 1GB of storage, has web browser (you can download so it’s not useless), email client, word processor, spreadsheet editor, IM client, media player and other apps.

Nivio - 5GB of storage, basically Windows in your browser.

AjaxWindows - A webOS built in ajax, has lots of apps, has about 1GB of storage. Seems to be password protected at the time of writing.EyeOS - Open source web OS, enables anyone to collaborate and expand it, for example, make apps.

More (from comments)

Nice online substitute for Microsoft Money is http://moneytrackin.com/

Web 3.0 : the best of both worlds

With all the noise around Google Apps, some would argue that online, DHTML-based applications are poised to replace traditional desktop applications ("rich clients"). Well, I don't agree.

The web (i.e. the Internet + a web browser) is a fantastic tool to navigate through information, no doubt about that. But it was never meant to be a platform or operating system to run full blown applications.

The requirements of Internet-based applications
My belief is that, in order to be actually useable, Internet-based applications must meet the following requirements:

1. Automatic deployment over the Internet. The application can run entirely on the server, be cached transparently on the client, or be installed automatically on the client with a confirmation dialog box (Java applets, ActiveX controls)
2. Communication with the Internet. The application must be able to communication with servers or services over the Internet, to access or store information as well as access computing resources if required.
3. Robust user interface, preferably compatible with that of the client platform
4. Offline support. The application must run while disconnected from the Internet.
5. Efficiency. The user experience must not be degraded by the inherent slowness of the Internet, nor by an over-simplification of the user interface sometimes imposed by web technologies.
6. Integration with the client platform. Applications must be able to access the local file system, printers and other devices, and intergrate seemlessly with the client OS (indexing, window management, drag&drop,...)
7. Robustness and security. Unfortunately, most current technologies employed to develop RIAs are not designed for robustness (JavaScript, DOM) nor security (AJAX, REST).
   

The limitations of the browser

Here's a (partial) list of the limitations of the browser as an application platform:

• HTML is a relatively poor presentation framework. Sure, it can do text, tables and bitmaps. But it cannot do simple things such as rounded table corners. Not to mention shadows, translucency, or 3D effects...


• HTML itself is meant for static pages. DHTML adds some level of dynamicity, as evidenced by the myriad of DHTML- or even AJAX-based web sites. But the programming model is not even fully standardized, and the primary programming language, JavaScript, is antiquated (it's not even object-oriented).


• The business and navigation logic must be implemented on the server side. This would actually be a good idea if: (1) you never needed more than one open window (2) there was no "back" button in web browsers! Sure, you can work around both, but to the detriment of useablility in some cases. This is due to the web's disconnected, request-based approach.


• Within the browser, you have no access to the rest of the computer (such as the file system). While this looks like a good idea to protect your system from viruses and the like, it's actually a major limitation of you want to store information on your computer (such as in your "My documents" folder) or interact with other, non-web-based applications or the OS itself.


• Naturally, if you're not actually connected to the Internet, your web application is not accessible (remember that laptop sales outnumber desktop sales...)


• Finally, the web is inheritently slow - especially request round-trips because of network latency. So displaying any new information, or responding to the simplest of actions, can take up to several seconds. Of course, you can take Google's approach and multiply the number of servers and distribute them all over the world (so that they're closest to the user), but not everbody has Google's deep pockets!

Attempts to solve these issues

Many of these limitations have already been identified, and a few players are trying to address them in what they call "Rich Internet Application" frameworks:

• Adobe with AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), which relies on Flash for rendering and UI, Flex for client/server communication, and ECMAScript for programming
• Microsoft with Silverlight, which includes a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation for rendering and UI, an API for client/server (and local) communication, and the .NET Common Language Runtime for programming.
• Sun with JavaFX

Google is taking a different approach with Google Gears, which tries to solve some of the issues listed above for DHTML/AJAX web applications. Right now, it includes:

• a local database
• a JavaScript API to communicate with a server (in an AJAX way)
• a database synchronization API

Its primary goal is to enable offline use of web-based applications. It does not try to resolve the other issues, such as the limitations of HTML, DOM or the JavaScript language.

And the winner is...

It's clearly too early to tell which of these technologies (or new approaches yet to come) will dominate the market for internet-based application platforms.
But what is almost certain is that we will see a lot of internet-based applications released by a lot of different vendors long before the platform war settles down.