After much anticipation and hype the Gdrive seems to be on its way, or so the WSJ reports.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on any specific online storage plans beyond what it already offers as part of its email and other services. But she said in a statement that “storage is an important component of making Web [applications] fit easily into consumers’ and business users’ lives.”

Most companies, from small businesses to big giants are moving their environments online to make documentation/presentations or whatever else may be needed available to their employees, wherever they may be whenever they want.

As I said in a previous post Google is pushing its online productivity suite and a shared online storage could definitely give an additional boost to the entire system.
The online storage is one of the few reasons why I use .Mac, the second rationale behind the choice is that the interface is just brilliant, the iDisk is mounted as a file system and directly accessible from my Finder.

In my opinion if Google really wants to make the Gdisk a must have for small/big businesses a client software to access the data is vital – not because it works better, but because it is a step final users have to go through to get used to online storage solutions. Most people don’t, and won’t for a while, use Writely or Google’s new PowerPoint-ish software – they’ll keep creating documents in their local environment and the sensation of accessing a local drive to save their work will make them feel somewhat more secure.

For its office components to attract big businesses Google still has do a great deal of work on the corporate accounts handling side – being able to organize accounts in groups and set different access permissions on a Gdisk’s folders would be a great start.
Another useful additional feature, which as I understand is due sometime soon, is offline availability of the applications. An internet connection is not always available and an entire company can’t just stop working because IT people in the basement are messing around with routers.

Having said that it’s not only functionality-related issues Google has to address but also privacy and security questions. If they want more of our data to be stored on their servers, and with Gdisk it wouldn’t only be images and documents but all sort of data we may not want other people to see, we expect Google to have some pretty satisfactory answers ready – Especially when we’re talking about reserved and potentially vital information its business customers save in the cloud.

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Does the blogging world revolve around the US? This blog statistics seem to confirm it.

I had a look at the statistics for both my blog and other websites I work on (charts below) and it would seem that most of the internet traffic for blogs is generated by the US. Everything stopped for thanksgiving. There’s no denying that even in Europe we’ve seen the internet boom and the whirlwind of activity and startups ensuing from it, but the traffic, the user-base, seems to be still mostly US based.

Are we European still a bit behind in terms of internet-mentality? With China being still pretty much behind a great-wall internet-wise and broadband connections not being quite as readily available in most areas of Asia as they are in the west is the only big “market” the US?

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Amazon has finally launched its E-Book reader, Kindle, available now for 399 $ with access to 88,000 books including 100 of the 112 New York Times best sellers.

The entire idea sounds pretty exciting, especially considering that the big A will pick up all the “phone bills” for its Whispernet service, which is based on Sprint’s EVDO.

Whispernet allows Kindle owners to wirelessly shop the Kindle Store, dowload and receive content and works out the box — no setup required. Newspaper subscriptions cost $5.99 to $14.99 per month and Kindle Magazines cost between $1.25 and $3.49 per month — each is available for a free 2 week trial. Oddly, blogs will cost you $0.99 per month to subscribe. Just running down the specs again: internal storage for 200 titles (more via SD expansion), 10.3 ounces.

Today Seth Goding was advocating Amazon’s debut in the publishing world, or rather, virtual publishing.

I love the idea and fully recognize its potential, definitely the future, I’m afraid not mine. I love reading books, I do read every night and love my collection, which I always display proudly on my shelf. Not quite so proudly right now because I have exceeded the amount of avilable space and have started piling books all over the place, but I’m working on that.

Update: GigaOm has an interesting article I completely agree with. Inexpensive ebook reader and earn money through the books. Whoever is likely to buy an ebook reader is certainly not looking to a technology packed gizmo.

Update: Kindle hardware features

• It doesn’t use a generic RSS aggregator — it’s Amazon-selected blogs only (and they “want every blog they can get”). Blogs that are aggregated by the Kindle get a revenue share with Amazon, since it costs money to get those publications.
• The side scroller is, as we expected, a polarized PNLCD (pneumatic LCD). It looks amazing.
• It’s SD only, not SDHC.
• It uses the Kindle file format (which is a variant of structured HTML), but also accepts Word and PDF files (but only via email since they need to be converted by Amazon), Mobi, HTML, plaintext, and image files like JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Sorry, no RTF.
• Oh yes, it supports Audible! Oh, and a little, unused file format called MP3.
• It has a user-replaceable, 1530mAh battery
• You can bind five or six devices to a single account, and share books you’ve purchased to those accounts. There’s no simultaneous reading lock, so if you and your significant other are on the same Amazon account you can both read the same book at the same time on your Kindles.
• Amazon is also releasing the Digital Text Platform, which allows users to upload their own content to the Kindle store for sale and download.
• The $9.99 price point is the sweet spot, but there are books for sale from the Gutenberg project for under $1 (if you don’t want to download them for free yourself), and upwards of that quoted $10 price point as well.
• Amazon wouldn’t say who makes the device, just that “it’s an OEM in China.”

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The internet-payments-king is set to officially launch a new Secure Card service tomorrow. Thanks to a deal with MasterCard PayPal will be able to generate a “temporary” credit card number for each of your payments so that you won’t have to give away any private information.

The software apparently works only on Windows and puts a small credit-card icon in your task-bar. Whenever you feel like generating a new card all you have to do is double-click on the icon and a new window will pop up with all the details you need (ie number, expiration data, CVV). The software for windows also goes to all the trouble of automatically filling in any ecommerce form you may be presented – this, obviously, only if you use IE.

“From a merchant’s perspective this looks like any other MasterCard transaction,” said Chris George, director of financial products for PayPal. “And it’s just another PayPal purchase to the customer.”

This is PayPal’s answer to the Google checkout system, which tries to make you shopping online easy by directly storing your personal details and automatically authorizing payments with partner merchants. My vote goes to PayPal, and apparently most people agree with me if we look at the data.

In the third quarter ended September, transactions through Web merchants grew 61 percent to $5.38 billion from a year ago, while overall PayPal transaction volume grew 34 percent to $12.22 billion over the same period.

The idea is absolutely great and they have apparently been testing it in private-beta mode for about a year.

The quirk, oh yeah, there is one. As I said before, the software is for windows, with IE plugin. Redmond says thank you.
I say WTF. I am a mac/linux user, can’t you just see your way clear to give me full access to the service? You are a web company. Born and grown on the web, why do you start developing client applications in 2007?

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Last month Valleywag reported that Facebook employees are allowed to see all members’ profile, even if set as private, through a super-user access, which already raises some privacy questions. Apparently the social network has now taken its loose privacy policy one step further.

A poster on the AR-15 Forums, a firearms-enthusiasts website, says her bosses asked Facebook for permission to see her profile – which was set to private – needless to say Facebook docilely complied.
Facebook privacy policy clearly states that they might share your profile if asked by law enforcement or a private litigant armed with a court order.

We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.

Now from what I’ve heard this woman’s boss had no court order or any real reasons to ask for access to his employee’s profile. Said profile apparently contained some photos of the woman holding firearm, which she legally detained and acquired during her own time.

This really is worrying. Facebook clearly wanted to avoid lawsuits or any legal problem which may ensue but I feel this is hardly good for its “interests or property”. Such a Chinese-ish data sharing policy is certainly not something Facebook’s users want to deal with or be worried about.

Tthis is a big hit for the entire social-networks category. Certainly before joining the next hip community I’ll make sure to read its privacy policy carefully and that it will treat its customers data gingerly.

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Google takes yet another step in its battle against Microsoft for domination of the corporate environment.

The software giant has recently released a set of APIs which will make migration from a Microsoft/any-other-system-you-may-use to Gmail incredibly simple.

“We’ve provided developer documentation and sample code that allows developers to build extremely sophisticated mail migration tools, some of which can be run by administrators to migrate centralized mail and some of which can be run by end-users to migrate mail from the desktop,” — Gabe Cohen, Google Apps product manager.

I couldn’t find any data about the usage of Google documents around. I expect the uptake of the application to be extremely high among non-corporate users. However, It seems that it will take a bit longer for small businesses and startups to get used to the service and start using it. Especially considering that most users have been educated in a Microsoft-ruled environment their entire professional life.

Google had previously released another set of tools to allow users and system administrators to migrate from most IMAP-based e-mail systems to Google Gmail.

Furthermore, as much as this set of APIs is a very interesting development, I hardly see a big corporation spending a considerable amount of dough and development time to migrate its entire system, similarly it’s going to be even harder for small business find the time and money to dedicate to this. Don’t take me to seriously now though. Companies like Capgemini, with 80,000 employees are in fact putting a first toe in the water and using Google Apps for some of its employees.

Nevertheless I’m sure all sort of open-source/free applications will sprout all over the internet to let disgruntled Outlook users switch to Gmail.

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