Tech Friday (on Monday) – iCloud & Skype
Unless you have been living under a technological rock the last couple of weeks you, by no doubt, know that the biggest news in tech the last few weeks is the announcement of the not very well-kept iCloud by Apple. It was rumored to be coming for more than a few weeks and even the week before Jobs came back from his medical leave for apparently one day to make the announcement, semi official announcements were being made straight from Apple and company. As of this past week, the cat is officially out of the bag at this point, but we are still left wondering about as much as we were before the announcement took place to be honest.
At this point about what we know is that it is a cloud based storage. As we have seen from Google and Amazon it is primarily being aimed at having access to music files anywhere that you have access to the internet without necessarily having to have a specific device along with you. Also, just like Amazon and Google they are pushing that it will do so much more than just music files and should be the one stop place to store your information of any sort, including documents, development code, videos and anything else you can think of possibly wanting to be able to access anywhere you are currently located. One plus that Apple does have on the music front is an agreement to do this with the blessing of the major recording labels, which Google and Amazon do not have at this time.
Personally, the music storage combined with on demand player from any web browser is the only thing I see in any of these offerings that really makes good sense at this point. After all, Dropbox long ago became the front-runner in here is a folder and whatever I put it is stored in the cloud. Further that information in cloud is synchronized to my other devices while I sleep and is available anytime I want. Further, it does it well and without any effort on my part. Granted, the 2GB is small, but going to 50GB is about the same as all these services are charging. (I will admit to using Amazon Cloud right now for an extra backup and handy player, but it is not required).
Interesting enough, recently announced and available for the those of us using Linux is KDE development called ownCloud. I have not had a chance to test it out yet, but it looks very promising allowing the end-user to have a much great degree of control of your own data and even set up your own personal cloud server for such things. Expect more on this front at a later date to be sure.
Also in the news the past week – Skype – again. This time it was an interesting twist of things. I think, in anticipation of what might could happen a developer announced the nearing completion of reverse engineering Skype. In the announcement it was opening up the idea to be developed as an open source code based type project and was looking for others to join in on the fun. There was a lot of skepticism about could it be done legally with out infringing on the intellectual rights held by Skype. All of that was kind of moot though, as Skype came back with in days asking for a cease and desist, which was apparently honored by the original developer doing the reverse engineering.
** – Image is KDE ownCloud development group logo.
