How Cloud Computing Is Threatening Traditional Telco The standard AT&T small business phone plan (unlimited local and long-distance calling) costs about $50 per month in most areas of the US. The plan comes with a basic set of features—e.g., call waiting, caller ID, and call forwarding—but does not include advanced features, such as voicemail transcription, voicemail and email mailbox integration. Neither does it include the ability to use your phone service anywhere there’s an Internet connection. Unlimited calling for $50 per month certainly beats the era of $0.20 per minute long distance, but it’s nothing compared to what the cloud
Smart Phones
Cloud Start-up: StearClear Starts Your Car When You Can’t More often than not, when you’re too intoxicated to drive and the designated driver is more or less in the same condition (or you went drinking alone), the sensible thing to do is to take a taxi back home. Unfortunately, most of the time this leads to your car either being towed away, stolen, broken into or missing a couple of tires by the time you manage to get back to it in more-or-less driver-ready condition. While there are a lot of designated driver services all over the place (if you don’t look,
No Smartphone? Never Fear – Apps For All Are (Hopefully Soon) Here Explicating the trendiness and popularity of intelligent mobile devices these days, smartphones such as the iPhone and Android smack of technological superiority. They flaunt generously sized display touch screens; only they are entitled to the Internet-surfing speed and power of the 4G network; those who shell out the big bucks to buy them can also enjoy new video conferencing features, such as FaceTime on the iPhone. But easily the clearest indicator of status change between a smartphone and a lesser “dumb phone” entity is the capacity to delve
Cloud Computing Gets Top Billing at Consumer Electronics Show People pessimistic about the world economy can take heart from the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at Las Vegas, Nevada. Not only was the largest trade show in the Americas bigger than ever, it also managed to attract a record number of visitors. Over 153,000 footfalls were recorded over four days in January, flocking to stalls spread across 1.86 million square feet, or the equivalent of 32 football fields. And importantly for our readers, cloud computing had top billing at the show. While cloud computing has often been promoted as a
Cloud Apps of the Week The New York Times has proclaimed Google Music as one of the best cloud applications released for Android phone devices last year. That the music service is offered free of charge helps explain its selection, and also locates Google Music right at home among the other applications in the Google family, all available gratis (GMail, Google Docs, et cetera). But like those other apps, comprehensive features also distinguish Google Music: users can transfer 20,000 of their tracks to the cloud via the app, which also immediately and wirelessly synchronizes what they upload to their Android.
Infographic: iPhone Users Care About Security Too… Source: ColumnFiveMedia
The Cloud and Babies: Parents and Umbrellas I was a member of the first generation of humanity to grow up with computers. We surfed the web as babes, toddlers turning HTML into child’s play. The infants of the 2010s will be the first to mature alongside technology’s own robust, promising infant: cloud computing. What to make of this realization? I did a little research to determine my thoughts. Let’s begin with the heartwarming. HP’s official blog, Data Central, wrote a clever piece last year on Kenyan babies, the cloud, and President Clinton. It revealed how the President’s Health Access Initiative partnered with
Amazon Announces: Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Notifications can now be sent as text messages to cell phones, smart phones or any other device that supports SMS. Amazon CloudWatch users who monitor their applications running on AWS services can receive
