1TB Online, Free on the cloud.

There are plenty of online storage companies pedaling offering disk space online, but this is the first claiming 1TeraBytes (1000 Gigabytes) for a lifetime of spam? free.

So why is it important? Because Oosah is challenging the conventional economics of storage. It does have its limitations: file sizes are limited to 200MB per video and 9MB per audio file and like everything on the net you don't actually know where your files are so if you do try it, exercise the usual cautions and please feedback.

26.09.08 Update: If you do use the service, be aware the default setting for uploaded content is set to be publicly viewable. So make sure you uncheck the 'public' box to keep it private.

Is Chrome Googles new Gold?

We said in our first consumerisation webcast back at the end of 2007 that the war was in in the browser space. Today that belief was reaffirmed as Google beta launched their first Internet / Application Browser - Google Chrome.

Chrome redesigns the browser from the ground up, and is aimed at creating a user experience which is more conducive to supporting the growing raft of Web Applications.

If you want to understand the technical features in detail you can check out this award winning cartoon. If you're interested in testing out the beta you can download it (at your own risk) here. Posts on your experiences please!

Security on a Stick

One of the big challenges of connecting non-managed or personal PCs to the corporate network is security - amongst other things the risk of either bringing something nasty into the network or perhaps worse leaving sensitive corporate intellectual property in the public domain.  It's been one of the primary reasons why remote access has been limited to company managed devices.

One of the more novel approaches to solving the problem - is 'security on a stick'. These diminutive USB sticks, look like conventional USB storage devices but they actually contain an entire mini-Linux PC which monitor (antiviral, anti malware etc) and manage the security of whatever they're connected to according (in line with the corporate policy which has been predefined when the stick is set up).

Picture the scenario - you're traveling and don't have your PC at hand - in today's model you'd either need a Corporate blackberry or you'd need to borrow a colleagues PC to log in to your mail remotely. With 'security on a stick' you can confidently plug the USB drive in any PC in the lobby of a hotel, airport lounge or internet cafe - the stick scans the machine for viruses, then if it's clear create a secure VPN tunnel so that you can login safely and securely. Over the next couple of weeks we'll be exploring the security on a stick in more depth - in the meantime if want to know more check out this link.

Rumble in the Jungle

Turning unutilized assets into a profit stream is pretty smart - and that's exactly what Amazon is doing with their book selling infrastructure to create Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). S3 is an online storage web service offering unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Amazon charges fees for data stored and for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data.

So why might S3 be of interest? From a corporate perspective, a number of big companies are using S3 as a rapid development environment, to support cost effective experimentation and sand-boxing. As the model is a pure pay-per-use environment you only pay for what you use. There are no timely provision or sizing exercises to go through, so developers can do what they do best - develop.

S3 doesn't 'do' everything and should be approached cautiously as a serious alternative to professional data centers as it's not suited for most corporate apps. There are all the usual concerns around downtime, privacy etc. which is mostly out of your control - but many are willing to accept those risks in favour of the low costs.

Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services, up more than 30,000 from last quarter, according to Amazon’s recent quarterly earnings announcement.

If you want to get a hands on experience of Amazon's S3 service, I would recommend trying out http://www.jungledisk.com/ which is a cloud based storage company which uses the S3 service as a backend. It gives users unlimited amount of data storage for only USD 0.15 per gigabyte. If you want to read more on S3 - there's a good blog entry here.

Google Analytics is watching you ...

Thought you might be interested to know that you're not alone. I've now embedded a small amount of code into this page which means you're being watched....

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Going Public is the only way to get RSS Feeds ....

Techie interlude ...

Becomes apparent that you can't have a closed group blog and have RSS or Atom news feeds enabled. :(

The reason - RSS doesn't support authentication ..... yet. The full story below ....
http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/03/private-blogs-do-not-have-newsfeeds.html