Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

DropBox announced Friday morning that it had fixed problems in its ability to serve clients storing images and files in their DropBox accounts, after a 15.5 hour outage.  At 7:09 a.m. Pacific, the team working on restoring the service tweeted, "Thanks all for your patience. We’re happy to let you know that all issues have now been fixed!" at @DropBoxOps. The ability to upload or synch files had been out since 3:30 p.m. Pacific Thursday.

DropBox first acknowledged the problem in a tweet at 3:26 p.m. Thursday, saying, "Client Syncing, and Uploading via the website, will be affected for approximately the next hour. Thank you for your patience." The next hour turned into a long one for many DropBox users…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

When Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt returned to Beijing Thursday from his controversial three-day "private visit" to North Korea he said that he told officials in Pyongyang that they must open the country up to Internet access or it would be "harder for them to catch up economically. We made that alternative very, very clear."

The Internet is only accessible to the government, military and universities. Its use is monitored. There’s a national intranet with an information portal. The Internet isn’t accessible through the country’s cellular network although Schmidt said it could be modified. Evidently it services about one million phones out of a population of about 25 million…

Grazed from DigitalHome. Author: Cliff Boodoosingh.

In an effort to give Canadian businesses a competitive digital technology edge, free cloud computing resources are being made available through a government-sponsored accelerator program. The Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) program is offered by CANARIE, operator of Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network and supported by tech firms Compute Canada and Cybera.

Hundreds of projects will be funded across Canada over the next three years. “Building or even paying for computing infrastructure can be a huge cost and time impediment for high-tech innovators. The DAIR program effectively removes that hurdle,” says Jim Roche, President and CEO of CANARIE…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

SecurEnvoy, a provider of tokenless authentication products, has partnered with PasswordBank to take tokenless, two-factor authentication to the cloud and provide it as a service to PasswordBank’s customers, complementing PasswordBank’s identity management solutions.

According to the companies, PasswordBank customers will be able to access cloud services including Google Apps (NASDAQ: GOOG), Microsoft Office 365 (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) through PasswordBank’s single sign-on platform and then use SMS messages for two-factor authentication. The goal is to provide business-grade security that doesn’t require end users to carry a physical token at all times. That physical token is, instead, their mobile phone or other mobile device (presumably saving them from the Batman utility belt look we were all so proud of in the ’90s)…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Google wiggled out of antitrust charges over its core search business in the US last week but its luck may not hold in Europe where Joaquín Almunia, the head of the European Commission’s antitrust unit, told the Financial Times Thursday that "We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic" to give its own vertical search services preferential treatment.

"They are monetizing this kind of business," he said, "the strong position they have in the general search market and this is not only a dominant position, I think – I fear – there is an abuse of this dominant position." He added that he’s not talking about Google’s sacred algorithms but "the way they present their own services."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

With the rise of cloud computing comes a rise in tools and models that estimate the cost benefit of the technology. Most are created and promoted by cloud providers that sell their services, and a few come from analysts and consulting organizations. Whatever their source, their ROI calculations are based on the same assumption: Cloud computing avoids hardware and software investments, and because you pay only for the resources you use, the cost of those resources should align directly with the amount you require.

Those assumptions sound great, but the resulting ROI calculations are drastic oversimplifications of the problems the cloud is there to solve. In fact, these ROI calculators confuse businesses about the real value of the cloud and mislead both IT and business units…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: John Peter.

Today due to the involvement of the cloud computing virtualization technology many companies and firms are gaining a lot form this technology. And obviously with this technology, it’s very easy to gain high-performance, flexibility and added resources for your business. Virtualization will with the help of shared servers provide data, software’s and other hardware resources to the system and the business. With this it completes every demand of the client at will.

And as we know cloud servers are charged on the basis of pay per use basis. The concept of cloud technology itself works on the method of virtualization. And every user can use them without concerning about the maintenance and proper management of the server because those are the problems of the cloud provider. All you need to do is to pay for the resources that are used by your company. Where you can avail these services?…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Editorial Staff.

Innovations in mobile and cloud computing, social technology and the use of "big data" present an emerging risk to organisations’ IT security, experts have warned. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), which is an EU advisory body, said that those technologies would increasingly provide the platform for "most of the innovation expected in the area of IT" and warned that with their emergence would come an associated increased cyber threat.

ENISA warned that the threat stemming from mobile computing comes from the fact that mobile communications take place over "poorly secured … or unsecured channels". It said that the software used for such systems were not the most "mature", and added that devices were vulnerable to being lost or stolen due to their "mobility". The very fact that they are universally popular also enhances the threat of the technology being exposed to hackers, the agency added…

Grazed from i-Programmer. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is one of those topics we all need to know about. However, this book concentrates on the ‘end user’ aspects of using online data storage rather than anything aimed at business or technical users. While it isn’t aimed at developers, it would be a good introduction to these aspects of the topic for any non-techie users or managers you need to work with.

Like all the Easy Steps titles, it is written in straightforward English, with lots of color illustrations. There are 15 short chapters, each covering an aspect of using the cloud or an app that lets you work with personal or ‘desktop’ level data in the cloud…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Bob Lewis.

Hot technology chatter, like most other business discussions, assumes business success comes from brilliant concepts, careful planning, and disciplined execution. I wonder if what actually happens is more of the million-monkeys-at-a-million-keyboards situation: If enough companies throw enough products and services into the marketplace, some will stick, even if the products and services are the result of random tossing, not superior thinking.

Way back in 1999 I proposed a simple set of criteria to bring order to the randomness when it comes to new information technology. According to the proposed model, three filters predict the success or failure of any new technology product:…