Google Docs, Zoho, Picnik, SnapLayout, Zude – just a few of the many successful online applications that can be accessed anywhere without the large cost of boxed versions. There might be some features missing, but this new breed of application has much to offer the user with free, portable, cross platform, accessible with no upgrades needed as a few of the benefits.
and now, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen says within 10 years, the company will be offering all of its applications online. His remarks come at a time when we see more and more companies offering online applications as an alternative to desktop products.
The likes of Picnik and PikiFX are emerging and growing the free online image editing space and have forced Adobe to quickly rethink their software strategy pushing them to develop a version of their popular Photoshop for online usage. Adobe still has no release date for Photoshop Express but realizes that the future of software lies with online versions and is working to deliver all of their applications via the web.
This really can’t be a case of “we told you so”, but when Amazon is selling music for 89 cents a track and DRM-free tracks seem suddenly to be fashionable as they were before the heady early days of Napster, it only makes sense. Apple is dropping the price of its DRM-free iTunes Plus music downloads to 99 cents apiece. Until now, the Plus tracks cost $1.29.
Ars Technica speculates that this move is driven by cost-competitiveness concerns, but we think the “risky” DRM-free experiment worked. After all, Apple said the Plus tracks were selling well, which proves the point that people don’t want third parties to govern their use of information, even if it costs them less to live with such restrictions. Come October 17, restrictions or not, it will just cost them less.
Laptop with a Mission does a great job of outlining the innovations and breakthroughs present in the OLPC. Lightweight construction. Low power consumption and innovative battery plus optional solar and pull-string power supplies. Great screen. Simple, integrated applications. Integrated programming environment that makes it easy to learn how to program. Mesh networking that allows a whole group to share an internet connection. But more than that, fresh thinking on just what kind of computer might help millions of people in poor countries to get online.
from Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music. Apparently, it’s a transcript of a talk he gave to some music industry people, and it’s solid gold for understanding what works on the Internet. Ian knows what works on the Internet, he built a lot of great working stuff until he hit music-industry-mandated DRM. So after too many years watching DRMed content bounce off users, he’s finally in a position to tell the music industry he’s not going to help them torture customers any more:
Im here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, Im not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, Ill be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I wont let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience.
Because of his background, Ian understands that what works on the Internet is what’s convenient: Inconvenient experiences dont have Web-scale potential. Here is his vision of what will succeed:
Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web. [...] But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to Aquarium Drunkard, click an MP3. If you dont get a 404, youll get a Save As? dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WEVE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.
Companies, Universities, Schools and pretty much everyone else are blocking or banning contents on the web that they deem inappropriate, questionable or distracting. The banning spree however goes sometimes to far and websites that should not be blocked are blocked as well.
There is a quick solution for accessing these – All it requires is some webspace on the Internet with php support. There’s a link to some free hosting solutions below, or you can pay about $6 and get your own domain name and some webspace for about $4 per month.
The advantage of your own domain name is that you will have an email account associated with it which you can normally use to check and send emails from using a webmailer. This is helpful if websites such as gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail are blocked in your network as well.
Accessing blocked websites:
You need to find a web proxy that is working. You could search the Internet for working ones (but these will probably be blocked anyway) or upload and use your own web proxy. The latter method has several advantages. It is unlikely that a proxy gets banned that is not causing lots of traffic. The difference between one user who is visiting blocked websites and dozens is noticeable. Additionally, the proxy will not get banned if the administrator decides to block a list of proxies that he found on the Internet. Yours will not be in that list because no one but you knows about it.
The PHP proxy script linked to at the end of this post just needs to be moved to the webserver, no installation is necessary on your part. Create a new directory on your webspace and make sure you name it inconspicuously, holidays or something like that.
It could be a good move to password protect that directory using a simply .htaccess file. You need to make sure that your hoster has that enabled. If he has use the Htaccess Password Generator to generate a password and protect the directory with the proxy.
Amazon now have a 99.9% guarantee for it’s S3 online storage service. However, there is already competition – Nirvanax, an online storage utility now in public beta, claims a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and another new utility startup, Flexiscale, is already promoting a 99.95% uptime guarantee.
This is a great – and early – example of one of the key advantages that computing utilities have over in-house computing operations: the utilities will compete directly with one another on critical performance standards, like reliability and security, as well as pricing. That competition promises to rapidly drive up standards and push down prices, to the benefit of the utilities’ customers.