SugarSync is one of several companies competing these days to benefit from the disruptions in the market created by the new ways that people organize and share information from the any number of devices they use in their day.

That’s a fundamental shift that is happening as people move beyond the desktop as a place to keep their documents, their media and their productivity applications.

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Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud.

SugarSync’s latest hosting numbers are revealing as they demonstrate how much data people are storing online.

SugarSync reports that in the past year, the amount of data added to the SugarSync data centers went from an average of 1 terabyte of data to 5 terabytes of information. In total, the company now hosts two petaybtes of information.

What’s fueling this growth? The customers may provide some clue. About 33 percent of customers are from outside the United States. Mobile devices are far more predominant outside the U.S. It makes sense tht people would need an alternative place to store infromation besides their smart phone or netbook.

In light of the booming mobile device market, SugarSync, Dropbox and a host of other services are companies that seem like it would make most sense to develop mobile apps. That appears to be true. In the past 18 months, Sugar Sync has released apps for the Android, BlackBerry and iPad.

Services like SugarSync show how the data we create will become part of a personal cloud network. These services lay the grounwork for a new generation of personal and business offerings that work with users to create data as a service opportunities.

That’s down the road a bit but people do want so share. And they want to share outside the borders of a social network. Personal clouds could be a means to do that.

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The guardians of the Linux Kernel Archive, repository for the source code for the Linux open source operating system, turned the code for Google’s Android phone out the door last year. The guardians felt they were getting too little cooperation from Google and too few patches from its engineers.

However, at the Linux Collaboration Summit, taking place today and tomorrow in San Francisco, Google has apparently broached the topic of bringing it all back home.

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Both Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, and Chris DiBona, open source and public sector engineering manager for Google, reportedly believe it will be done. DiBona, however, told a reporter that he believed the restoration would be a “multi-year process.”

DiBona even told ZDNet’s Paula Rooney that Google was hiring two engineers just to work on the kernel.

He dismissed worries over forking and fragmentation, “noting that smart phone operating system code is not all appropriate for the operating system kernel.” In fact, that seems to lie at the kernel of the fuss over the kernel, the fact that Google, he says, is shipping millions of Androids per day. The exigencies of the profit-driven corporation and the clean code values of the guardians don’t seem like they will ever fit together seamlessly.

Top photo by Paolo Massi
Bottom photo by Seth Rasmussen

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Redmond, Washington’s Microvision, producers of miniaturized technologies, announced it has made its first big sale of its PicoP laser projection display engine.

The unidentified customer “plans to embed the PicoP engine inside a high-end mobile media player for release in late 2010 and plans to announce its launch at that time.” It is worth noting that the company has made technology designed to be used by the iPod and iPhone.

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In early March, the company announced that their SHOWWX projector, powered by the engine, was available for sale to customers in the United States at $549.99.

The pico projector uses laser light to produce high resolution, WVGA (848 X 480) images of up to 200 inches at a 5000:1 contrast ratio, which Microvision claims is five times higher than any of its competition. The projector can be attached to a computer or smart phone. It uses no focusing knobs or optics.

The company hopes to see a broad spectrum of personal and professional technology devices using the engine and projector.

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The news may be about the iPad this weekend but it’s the cloud that will hover hot over Apple by the Fall and in many respects challenge its hegemony over how we store and share music and video.

According to CNET, that’s about the time of year that it looks like Apple will unveil its cloud-based music service.

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In the meantime we are seeing a number of storage services emerge for the iPad that could be used for people to store their music and other media. Yesterday, we looked at the Box.net app. Dropbox has an iPad app as does SugarSync.

And then there are the forces that are not tethered to the iPad at all.

Last week, Canonical started a public beta for its cloud-based music service.

Most cloud-based services allow you to store your own music in the cloud. With Canonical, you purchase your music through its music store that syncs with your device and your own personal cloud. That means you control your

Apple appears to be looking at a similar strategy, allowing consumers to store music and movies in the cloud, albeit the media being that from the major labels and even more so, the studios. Will they go for it? Well, a long time ago, perhaps, but with the options available, the studios, have far more possibilities to pursue.

But how can the Apple strategy work in a cloud built on open-source? Apple’s Fair Play digital rights management software is intended to keep music, movies and other entertainment locked down so it can not be shared. It’s in contrast to the open-nature of cloud computing that we see with services that allow for online storage lockers. People will find ways to store and organize data in the way they wish. That makes sense for a number of reasons:

• People have media on multiple devices. Keeping it in the cloud makes it easier to access.
• Syncing to the cloud makes sense. Cables? Dongles? That’s old school. You can update a file in the cloud and see that same update on your smart phone.
• If a number of people have their own personal clouds than that means we can share, right? Yes it does!

It’s that last point that must give Apple a bit of a chill. For years, iTunes seemed like the only option. But Apple has locked down its hardware, software and the content. In league with the labels and studios, Apple has used DRM to get its leverage at the expense of us all.

Will that strategy continue to work? Well, it’s going to take a while but all these storage providers know that those home videos can bloat a hard drive pretty fast.

Or maybe just maybe, Steve will put the screws back in the iPad, give us the schematics and let us all see what we really can do with that tablet.

He’ll then thank Cory Doctorow for waking him up and sure enough we’ll all wonder if we had just fallen into a hot tub time machine.

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One of the emerging trends of the Mobile Web is using your phone to interact with the real world. We’re not just talking about ‘checking in’ to locations, either. There’s a world of more practical functionality that hasn’t yet ramped up in the West – using your phone as a payment device (for example mobile ticketing), getting special offers from retailers, downloading data from the Web via ’smart posters’ on the street, and more.

A key technology driving some of these interactions is NFC, which was one of Gartner’s 8 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2010. It’s a technology that you ought to become familiar with; whether you’re a technologist, a marketer, or a consumer looking to make the best use of your smart phone (and aren’t we all!). So in this post we give you an overview of what to expect from NFC.

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What NFC is & Why You Should Care

As we explained earlier this year, NFC (Near Field Communication) is a short-range communication technology for mobile phones. It’s similar to Bluetooth and has a range of about 10 centimeters. There are three main use cases, according to its Wikipedia entry:

1. Card emulation: the NFC device behaves like an existing contactless card;
2. Reader mode: the NFC device is active and reads a passive RFID tag, for example for interactive advertising;
3. P2P mode: two NFC devices are communicating together and exchanging information.

Using the phone to emulate a smart card means that it can be a deployed as a payment device (similar to a credit card), identity card, security device, and more. This type of functionality is already common in Asia, but it hasn’t yet taken off in the States.

Using the phone as a reader allows the phone to interact with RFID-enabled objects in the real world, for example posters embedded with chips that connect to mobile web sites or applications.

NFC in Mobile Phones & Services

For these use cases to become a widespread reality, an NFC chip must be pre installed in most mobile devices. According to Dan Butcher from Mobile Commerce Daily, this probably won’t happen until 2011 at the earliest.

One issue is that NFC is not a current feature of the iPhone or Android, the tools of choice for many Web early adopters. However one handset manufacturer is showing the way with NFC: Nokia. Its Nokia 6131 NFC phone can be used as a credit card, travel card, loyalty card and a "multi-purpose smart card."

Along with NFC handsets, NFC-enabled services will arise for applications such as mobile payments. As BusinessWeek reported recently, Alcatel-Lucent has announced a new mobile payment hosting service for mobile operators, in partnership with payments systems specialists Clear2Pay and PingPing. However, the article noted that other emerging mobile payment services aren’t using NFC – including Nokia Money and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s new business Square (our review).

NFC Has its Issues, But Also The Momentum…

There are issues with NFC, perhaps the biggest being its limited range. In order for NFC to work, you need to hold your mobile phone close to the RFID tag or reader device. An alternative that has a longer range is DASH7, which we’ll review in an upcoming post.

However NFC holds the most promise for delivering contactless mobile payments to consumers, along with other real world use cases.

Image credit: nicolasnova

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Panda Security is reporting a second incident of malware on Vodafone’s HTC Magic, a Google Android smart phone. it provide a clear example for how smartphones are prime targets to become botnets once connected to a user’s personal computer.

The incidents provide real-world examples of how companies can inadvertently spread malware. It also raises questions about the quality assurance testing done by manufacturers and the carriers.

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After the first discovery earlier this month, Vodafone said it was an isolated incident. But two days later the company announced the HTC Magic would be discontinued. Vodafone also deleted questions about the issue from its forums.

A Panda employee discovered the “Mariposa,” virus after connecting it via USB her PC. Her Panda Cloud Anti-Virus software detected the malicious code, revealing that the smart phone was infected and spreading the virus to the PC.

Mariposa is a program that turns infected machines into botnets. it has infected more than 13 million computers, stealing credit card and bank log-in information.

In the second incident, an IT security expert who had bought the phone learned about the virus discovery. He decided to test his phone, using AVG anti-virus protection. Sure enough, his device also showed it had malware on it.

According to Panda Security:

This guy had also purchased an HTC Magic direct from Vodafone’s official website the same week as my co-worker. He hadn’t connected the phone to his PC yet, but as soon as he saw the news hurried back home, plugged it in via USB and scanned its memory card with both MalwareBytes and AVG Free. Lo and behold, Mariposa emerged again, exactly in the same way as in our original finding.

The HTC Magic has historically been sold in Europe.

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IBM is extending its cloud infrastructure to the IBM Cloud and enhancing its offering with commercial- and enterprise-grade test and development services with a broad reach of partners and collaborative approaches. The effort follows its launch in November of a test-and-development cloud-based service. With this announcement, IBM is laying the foundation for a cloud ecosystem that will differentiate the company from Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of the news is that PayPal is joining IBM as a partner to offer services to enterprise clients. This puts IBM on a a direct trajectory into the heart of the market – with Amazon in its sights. By partnering with PayPal, IBM is laying the framework for more transaction-oriented services with smart phone customers the prime target for applications developed in its partner community.

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Even more significantly, this is Paypal’s first major foray into cloud computing. The company will work with IBM Labs to develop commerce systems for developers. The developers will primarily be creating their own applications, which will be sold across a PayPal platform, providing a complete set of services for building, selling and distributing.

IBM also announced partnerships with Novell, Red Hat and others that will enhance its platform as a base for enterprise-grade services such as cloud security and cloud management.

The initiative extends to the private cloud, where IBM will also offer services such as test, development and tools that fulfill the scope of a virtual ecosystem on a private data network.

Of real interest to us is the company’s offering of a collaborative network on IBM developerWorks that will act as a learning hub for IT managers about the various elements that make up the IBM Cloud.

We’ll have more in a followup post today.

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Google Apps is making it a bit more enticing for companies of all sizes to adopt its service for the Blackberry smart phone.

In a post this morning on the Google Enterprise blog, the group announced Google Apps Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server has doubled the number of Blackberry phones it can support. This effectively allows larger enterprises to place more users on fewer servers.

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Google is also offering the capability to host multiple Google App accounts, broadening the number of users that can be supported.

In August, Google Apps launched its integration with Blackberry. The most significant aspect of the integration is the syncing capabilities. Google Apps Connector provides access to Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts from the built-in BlackBerry applications.

Email, folders and contacts are all synchronized between Google Apps and the Blackberry application.

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