It’s been no secret among those who follow the online giant Google that it would eventually unleash a service offering online storage.  While there are countless competitive storage services (Jungle Disk (Etilities Forum), Dropbox, Mozy (Etilities Forum), IDrive, among many others, Google has never been one to let other companies have all the fun in a market segment.  Additionally, the growing capacity of Google’s own offerings such as Gmail makes a storage-centric service offering a logical next step for them.

However, recent discoveries buried in the files of other Google software packages indicate that such a release may soon be upon us. Dubbed “GDrive,” the unannounced service will apparently provide access to files you place on your GDrive from various platforms, including “your desktop, web browser, or cellular phone.”   While remote backup is a prime use for the service, the ability to keep some of your files in a universally-accessible storage container could start to decrease our reliance on USB thumb drives and other removable/portable media. Such an offering would be differentiated from competitors by leveraging the Google name and global infrastructure, as well as the purported mobile access to your files. At present, none of the major online storage providers have a mobile component, save for ordinary web-based access.

A word of caution to those that are chomping at the bit to use the pending GDrive service – you get what you pay for. In providing what will almost certainly be a free service, Google keeps tight and complete control of the service’s features and availability. As those that grew reliant on the Google Notebook service have learned, the 900-pound gorilla can take away whatever services it wants. In the case of Google Notebook, the service will no longer be under active development.

While Google Notebook users will retain access to the data they have already created, this kind of “lifeline” is not a guarantee. Should Google ever want to reclaim the countless terabytes of storage capacity for other purposes, GDrive would be the odds-on candidate for the chopping block. Other considerations include privacy; while Google would hopefully pledge not to access your files for any reason, potential users should carefully review the privacy policy for the service before entrusting critical information to it.

Would using a paid service alleviate these concerns? Unfortunately, the answer is only “maybe.” Paid services can fold just as quickly as the free ones. However, as a paying customer, you will almost certainly have more extensive rights, since you’ve entered into a sales contract for the services you use.

Regardless of whether you go for the “GDrive” option or not, the availability of such a convenient and free service will certainly cause paid offerings to boost their value to the customer as they strive to keep every subscription possible. Personally, I’ve used Jungle Disk for quite some time, and don’t plan on switching. Time will tell, of course, but I sleep better knowing that my backups are not reliant on the graciousness of a company that understandably has to answer to its shareholders before it does me.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Given the infamous head-to-head in between Comcast (Etilities Forum) and the FCC last year over the practice of bandwidth throttling based on traffic type, one might be surprised to hear that Cox Communications (Etilities Forum) is going down the very same road. Indeed the company announced on Tuesday a “Congestion Management” program that will essentially divide all traffic into two lanes: time-sensitive and non-time-sensitive. If you are using your bandwidth for non-time-sensitive transmissions, then Cox will slow them down. Time-sensitive traffic includes Web, Voip, Email, IM, Streaming and Games, while non-time-sensitive includes P2P (surprise surprise), Network Storage, FTP and Software Updates. Cox will begin experimenting this new policy in Kansas and Arkansas in February.

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©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Update #3 (2/4/2009): Well, it’s official – the House finally voted today to delay the Digital TV transition.  So anyone that actually NEEDS a converter box has four extra months to get it done.  However, see here to know if that’s you.  Hint: it probably isn’t.

Update #2 (1/31/2009): The senate has unanimously passed a new resolution delaying the DTV transition, but this one has a graduated 4-month phase-in period for broadcasters to adopt the new standard.  As this enters house voting, we’ll update this article again with any new developments.

Update #1 (01/29/09):  Just to complicate things a bit, the bill was rejected by the House yesterday. But this doesn’t mean that the bill will not be passed: it was brought to a vote on a fast track, meaning without a prior debate, and therefore needed 2/3rd of the votes to pass. Now that it’s been rejected, there will be a debate and likely another vote next week that will only need a simple majority to pass. The last vote was 258 to 168, and while that was not enough to pass the bill with a 2/3rd required majority, it would have been enough with a simple majority – which is all that is needed to pass the bill after more extensive debate.  More to come next week on this – we’ll update this post with a link to the follow-up article when it’s published.  We apologize for the error.

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 The US Senate has unanimously agreed to postpone the transition from Analog to Digital television, which was supposed to take place on February 17th, to June 12th. The is hope that these extra 4 months will allow the 6.5 million remaining households that are not currently DTV compatible to be ready. Of course this is not simply a matter of time, it also very much a matter of money.

The core of the problem with the transition is that the government had run out of money to issue coupons for the converter boxes to the households in need. $1.34 billions have already been spent on this, with 2.6 million requests for coupons still pending, according to the AP article. On top of that, the delay will cost broadcasters as much as $22 million since they had planned to end the analog transmissions by the deadline.

Furthermore, the whole point of mandating this transition to begin with was to free up valuable segments of the airwaves for wireless development. This delay will put a burden on the providers that are waiting for these segments. So while this is clearly a win for the Obama administration which had been lobbying for this delay for quite sometime, it will not be without repercussions for the businesses that are impacted by the transition.

In the meanwhile, if you still have questions regarding how this will affect you or what you need to do to be ready, check out our article on the facts and fiction of the transition, which will be just as relevant in June as it was two weeks ago.
©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

We routinely receive inquiries about the usefulness of land-lines and whether one should keep theirs.  More and more people these days are ditching their fixed phone and opting to stay in touch with friends and family via mobile phones or VoIP software such as Skype (Etilities Forum).  As far as we can tell working with our customers, the people opting to keep landlines tend to include families with young children, and elder individuals who need that quick and easy way to call 911 or other numbers during emergencies.  For my family, we primarily want to make sure there is always a phone line available for the babysitter to call us if something comes up.

For the rest of you who are willing to trade land-line for an alternative but find that your domicile lacks appropriate coverage to toss the fixed phone away, Verizon (Etilities Forum) just gave you one more reason to do so.  The company recently started offering a book-sized device to enhance and boost your wireless coverage indoors. This type of device is generally known as ‘femtocell’, and is being called the “Network Extender” by Verizon. It will run about $250 and, unlike competitor Sprint (Etilities Forum), Verizon will not charge a monthly fee for the use of the device.  Once plugged into to your local network, the booster enhances your signal around the house and gives you one more reason to save money.  For more information, see Verizon’s page on the Network Extender.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

When you hear that Microsoft starts laying people off, you just know that the hole we’re in is deep indeed. Businesses everywhere are reporting worse-than-forecasted quarters, and while Google seems to be doing better than most, there may be many painful quarters yet to come.

If you’re a small business, you’re always in need of applications that let your employees e-mail, chat, collaborate on documents and manage their time with a calendar. Google’s answer to this industry need is its application suite, which mostly targets individuals and small businesses. Initially, a company could create Google Apps accounts for up to 200 of its employees for free. Beyond that, they needed to buy Premier licenses at $50 per user per year, which also offers additional storage, guaranteed uptime and technical support.

However, since then the number of users per domain has dropped from 200 to just 50, which if you were a 200-employee business means that you’re not looking at $10,000 per year in licenses. This would likely make IT managers think twice before going to Google Apps as opposed to alternatives like Zoho or Office.

From an industry standpoint, this is a good indication that it is becoming increasingly harder for businsses to thrive on ad revenue alone. The web has a strong culture of wanting everything to be free, and even companies with huge marketing budgets find it hard to break even, for example with Microsoft losing almost $500 million last quarter with their online services. Now of course it can be argued that the mere online presence that results from these services is worth more than than the operating loss, but regardless, it’s likely a rather tough pill to swallow for the company.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Pandora (Etilities Forum), the popular internet radio service, has been struggling for some time with profitability issues. One of its biggest challenges is that it pays higher royalties than broadcast and satellite radio and therefore has to work harder than a lot of its competition just to stay afloat. Thus far, most of its revenue has come from visual ads next to the playlist. But typically, when you listen to music, it is playing in the background while you browse other pages, so it is likely that Pandora gets fewer ad clicks than your typical site.

In order to work around this problem, Pandora has started playing 15 second audio ad segments throughout its playlists. These are, for now, only airing every 10 to 20 songs, which comes out to every one to two hours provided you don’t do too much skipping. While this will no doubt be a turn-off for many users, 15 seconds of commercials every two hours most certainly beats any radio station, and given that you are still getting personalized stations that let you pause and skip tracks, it’s easy to see that you’re still getting a pretty good deal.

If you don’t want any ads whatsoever, Pandora has been offering a subscription service for $36 a year ($3/month). However, the fact that they are still investigating other avenues for generating revenue suggests that not many are signing up for it, which is of course the core of the problem: we always want all of the content in the world, playable anywhere, anytime, for free and without ever being hassled with ads. No wonder it’s tough to make a living trying to meet those expectations…

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

If there are two events that evidentially show the rapid pace of technology developments, they are the US Presidental Elections and each of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.  Each occurs only every four years, making it easy to compare the technology used “last time” with the latest and greatest.

At nearly every Olympic event, commentators discuss the newest materials used for ice skate blades and luge runners, or the latest running shoe and swimsuit technology.  We can even look outside the sports themselves to the TV tech:  many folks won’t forget the first time the “underwater” lane markers and lap/split stats were displayed at the 2004 Athens Games.  Even fewer can forget how that feature was spotlighted in Beijing last year, during the amazingly close finishes of Michael Phelps.

Similar leaps and bounds have advanced the news coverage during this Presidential election/inauguration, compared with those before it.  (Please note: this is not a political commentary, we’re just focusing on the technology!)

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