Honestly? It’s not like I was going anywhere. I mean, my entire life seems to be managed by Google these days, and it only seemed right to upgrade and support a company that usually treats me so nicely …well, except when their Exchange ActiveSync isn’t working properly, but sheesh! It’s free! How can I complain without seeming completely ungrateful?

Anyway. This was waiting in my inbox this afternoon, and it was a pleasant surprise. Thank you Google, you are pretty darn cool.

Seagate was kind enough to send me both the FreeAgent Go and the FreeAgent DockStar to review and the continue using. I’m quite impressed with the combination which now allows me to access over 600GB of content from anywhere in the world.

Here is a quick unboxing video…

If you’ve been paying attention to T-Mobile’s problems with Sidekick backups this week, it’s probably made you think at least a little bit about how you back up your own mobile data.  Of course, given the Sidekick’s problems, it’s also possible that you may be a little tentative about the cloud at the moment.

If you’re willing to give the cloud a chance, then Best Buy’s new venture may be of interest.  In conjunction with Dashwire, Best Buy is introducing its own cloud backup service, called mIQ.  mIQ works with Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian S60 operating systems.  The service goes active today (October 12), and you can sign up for a free account with 1 GB of storage.  If you purchase your phone at Best Buy, the blue shirts will install it on your phone in-store via Best Buy Mobile’s Walk Out Working program.

According to the mIQ website, “mIQ takes the content on your phone and automatically pushes it to a private account on the web. From that point on, what you do on the phone will instantly update on the web and what you do on the web will instantly update on your phone – without you having to ever think about it.” In addition to backing up contacts and calendar data, mIQ also includes enhanced text messaging, photo and video storage and organization, and connectivity to Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr, and Twitter.

For more information, check out mIQ’s website.

If Apple has taught me anything lately it is that any company can go from warm, welcoming underdog to Microsoft-esque arrogance after a period of growth and market domination. Still, while I have no illusions about Google’s “goodness”, I could not help but be impressed with how they responded to yesterday’s outage.

They did, in fact, display a degree of maturity and integrity that is all to lacking in most corners of the world these days. How so?

1. They responded almost immediately.

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s (Gmail) servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline. Continue Reading

Opera, maker of the Opera web browser, has just announced Opera Unite – a feature that turns your web browser into a web server with one click. It’s hard to categorize, but the description makes it sound like a mash up of P2P, social networking, file transfer, internet relay chat, instant messaging and cloud-based technologies. Which, I think, basically means that they want to run the internet off of your computer.

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At first glance Dell Remote Access looks like any other remote access product on the market. You open a portal Page, my.dellremoteaccess.com, login and you will see a list of the devices on the same network as the computer running Dell Remote Access.

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Back in the day, before the introduction of Google Docs, ThinkFree Office was the only really usable online office suite. ThinkFree is still one of the more fully-featured offerings out there, but all that robustness comes at a price. While Google Docs and Zoho are entirely browser based and take seconds to load, the ThinkFree apps run on Java and can take up to several minutes to download – not very efficient if all you want to do is view a document.

Uni Paper is their solution to that particular problem. It’s a Flash-based document viewer, similar to Adobe’s Flash Paper. Once you’ve finished editing your document, click publish and you’ll get a chunk of code that lets you embed your document within a web page. Websites like Scribd offer something similar, but they’re biased towards document publishing, whereas ThinkFree is focused on document creation and collaboration. The online component is free, but you’ll need to purchase the full office suite if you want to work offline. Google Docs offers similar functionality, so it’s really a matter of preference; Flash versus HTML embedding, and features versus speed.

Click here to see this article as a Uni Paper document.

If you knew me, then you’d probably know that I’m a proponent of the cloud and cloud computing. I have replaced native, client-side apps when I could. An example of this is the icon of Google Docs, which always stays in the Dock on my MacBook Pro, as I use it in place of Word for Mac or Pages. For spreadsheeting, I use Google Sheets. Except for presentations, which I still feel more at ease editing in my copy of Keynote ‘09.

The reason I simply love cloud computing, is simple. Everyone only needs relatively weak connections, and a broadband connection. Heck, sometimes even something weaker can be utilized. But the point is, you could run something like Google Docs almost as well on a 5-year old computer as you could run it on a Mac Pro.

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Whew.  WHAT a week.  For those who don’t know, the Central Ohio area where I live had a huge problem with the remnants of Ike.  Last Sunday, we experienced sustained tropical force winds and gusts to hurricane force.  Needless to say, many houses were damaged, trees broken and infrastructure affected.  This includes the Cable infrastructure as well as the phone infrastructure.  While my house never lost power, we had sporadic cable through the week.  Even 6 days later, we had the cable drop out for hours as the power company took down the power that affects the distribution points along Time Warner’s network to make repairs.

The world seems to be moving to the cloud.  Applications such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Zoho and others make it easy to get to your data from anywhere.  Anywhere so long as you have a connection.  Fortunately, data I really needed for the moment wasn’t on the cloud.  It was on my desktop.  Does this mean cloud computing is a failure?  I don’t think so.  Continue Reading

Sugarsync is a popular program that allows you to sync data from mulitple computers via the web. Typically this data could be MP3 music files, pictures, movies, etc. These types of sync programs are not new. Microsoft offes a free program called Foldershare which operates on both PC and Mac platforms and does a lot of what Sugarsync does but keeps all synchronization on local computers – requiring that they remain to serve data to the other computers looking to synchronize. The interesting feature that Sugarsync offers is to store sync’ed files offline on its own servers. This may raise privacy issues but means that mobile devices have access to the information even when a desktop computer is turned off. Sugarsync provides 24 hour remote access to your files. View, share and access them on any computer or phone. Unfortunately none of this comes without cost. After a 45 day free trial – 10 GB of storage is $24.99 while the more realistic 60 GB plan is $99 per year. Clients are available for Windows Mobile, Blackberry and now iPhone 2.x

Sugarsync for iPhone

[Ed. note - Updated 05/22, see end of article.]

After my MacBook drama last week at Mobius, I decided it might be worthwhile to check into over-the-air backup solutions for my personal data. I use rsync via the Mac Terminal as one of my Gear Diary backup solutions, but never thought it necessary to do it for my personal stuff…until now.

One solution that a friend recommended was Mozy, which just so happens to give a 2GB free account so you can see if it will work for you. Today I signed up to try it out…

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Ever forget a file on your office computer and have to drive back during rush hour traffic just to retrieve it? I’ve had this happen, though not since I started using a free service to access and control my PC desktop remotely. It’s called LogMeIn and it’s similar to GotoMyPC – except free. The host computer has to be on Windows can be either Windows or Mac but the computer remotely connecting in can be on any computer connected to the Internet – even web-enabled Pocket PC devices. About the only limitation that I’ve found is that it doesn’t support file transfers – which is easy to circumvent by emailing yourself files from the remote computer.
Here’s a description of the service from their web site:

LogMeIn lets you access your Windows PC from anywhere in the world. All you need is a computer connected to the Internet. You see your Target PC’s full desktop and control everything on it—applications, network files, email, printing—without the hassle of further downloads or installations. You can even share files that are too large for email. There’s no need to lug around a laptop, because LogMeIn lets you access your PC from an internet cafe, an airport, or a hotel business center. You can even print documents you’ve accessed remotely.

Link: LogMeIn.com
Link: LogMeIn for Mac (thanks ebert79 for the heads up on this link)