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Florian's docx reader is now available for iOS high-touch devices.  Extreme fidelity for reading/viewing native docx documents.  I hope he is working on a Chrome eXtension version!!!!   The world urgently needs WEB ready - Web view-able docx business documents.   Conversion of docx to HTML sucks.   The ultimate Visual Document system would enable users to work entirely in the native document format of the authoring system.  Florian's reader can do this, but so far he's limited to iOS.  Seems to me that the exploding sync-share-store market sector (DropBox, Box, Egnyte, SugarSync, etc) really need native document viewers that are HTM5 browser ready. " Naverage Reader HD Features: ... Designed for business documents. View your business document in an unbelievable quality. .....Tracked Changes Support. View text insertions, text deletions and comments on your iPad. ..... Layout Fidelity. Headers and footers, footnotes, tables, paragraph numbering, frames, graphics layout optimized for business documents. .....Font Embedding. Corporate fonts on your iPad. .docx-compatible. Compatible with the new Microsoft® Word format (.docx)."

Good discussion, but it really deserves a more in-depth thrashing.  The basic concept is that a perfect storm of mobility, cloud-computing and HTML5-JavaScript has set the stage for a major, massive shift in application development.  The shift from C++ to Java is now being replaced by a greater shift from Java and C++ to JavaScript-JSON-HTML5. Interesting, but i continue to insist that the greater "Perfect Storm" triggered in 2008, is causing a platform shift from client/server computing to full on, must have "cloud-computing".   There are three major "waves"; platform shifts in the history of computing at work here.  The first wave was "Mainframe computing", otherwise known as server/terminal.  The second wave was that of "client/server" computing, where the Windows desktop eventually came to totally dominate and control the "client" side of the client/server equation. The third wave began with the Internet, and the dominance of the WWW protocols, interfaces, methods and formats.  The Web provides the foundation for the third great Wave of Cloud-Computing. The Perfect Storm of 2008 lit the fuse of the third Wave of computing.  Key to the 2008 Perfect Storm is the world wide financial collapse that put enormous pressure on businesses to cut cost and improve productivity; to do more with less, or die.  The survival maxim quickly became do more with less people - which is the most effective form of "productivity".  The nature of the collapse itself, and the kind of centralized, all powerful bailout-fascists governments that rose during the financial collapse, guaranteed that labor costs would rise dramatically while also being "uncertain".  Think government controlled healthcare. The other aspects of the 2008 Perfect Storm are mobility, HTML5, cloud-computing platform availability, and, the ISO standardization of "tagged" PDF.   The mobility bomb kicked off in late 2007, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone.  No further explanation needed :) Th

"The new iPhone is here - but is Apple in danger of delivering too little with its latest upgrade? This is an excellent in depth review of the iPhone 5, By Gareth Beavis  September 27th 2012 ..... 8 COMMENTS Moatly the iPhone 5 is compared to the Smasung Galaxy 3, and the HTC One X. HTC wins the form factor and feel award. Samsung beats the iPhone in near everything else. Both the HTC and Samasung use Quad Core Processors. The iPhone 5, although greatly improved over the i4, uses a dual core processor. Some highlightes for the iPhone 5: ...... Photo stitching ....... Siri In most things the iPhone is "average". Where it really shines is an improvement to the iPhone 4 !!!!! Some serious drawbacks: ......... No Google Maps !!!! AAnd the new Apple Maps are a JOKE ......... The core Contact-Calling-Email system is native and quite outside of the Google Apps. No sync PAGE 1 OF 14 : Introduction and design The excitement of the rumor mill, the titillation of every leaked photo led to higher than ever levels of expectation for the iPhone 5, and while the announcement was greeted with some derision at the lack of perceived headline improvements, the record sales tell an entirely different story. Given the underwhelming changes to the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5 really needs to re-energize customers to prove Apple can repeat the game-changing trick it managed with the iPhone 4. So is the Apple iPhone 5 the greatest smartphone ever, one that will finally see Apple ascend to the top spot in our 20 best mobile phones chart? Or is it a case of too little, too late?"

Wow!  30GB free.  250 file formats with a "universal translation engine".  And HTML5. excerpt: "You can't have convergence unless you have the ability to translate files across different platforms and devices," Donald Leka, TransMedia's CEO, told Macworld. "There's a war between the big tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and these compatibility issues are not going to go away." Glide also lets you share any documents or media in your account with other users or the public. And with new desktop clients for Mac and PC that can sync a local folder up to your cloud storage space, Glide is taking on popular competitors like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Apple's own iDisk. Glide is free to use in desktop browsers and on the iPad, and free accounts get 30GB of space to start. Premium accounts offer 250GB of space for $50 per year.

The Barcelona World Mobility Conference is under way, and Microsoft is making a show of force.  They are hitting with features that support both "Social Network Hubs" (People Hub) and "Productivity Hubs" (Office Hub).  The key to Microsoft's Windows 7 Smartphone success is not that of new and exciting features competitive with Apple and Google smartphones.  No, the key feature that Microsoft owns is that of integration into legacy desktop productivity business systems based on the MSOffice productivity platform, and, more importantly, integration into the emerging Web centered but proprietary Microsoft Business Productivity Platform.  Stay tuned. excerpt on the new Windows 7 feature set:  The Office Hub lets you easily sync your documents between your phone and your PC. Office Hub comes with OneNote, for notetaking, Documents and Sharepoint for presentation collaboration. Users will also have access to an Outlook Mail application which gives similar features, like flagging important e-mails, that you'd find on the desktop version.

MailBrowser is incredible!  Watchout DropBox, this takes the whole sync and collaboration on attached documents to a new level. Also: gCalendar ext gMail Checker Plus MailBrowser ext GleeBox Google Quick Scroll (shows search results on page) IE Tab for Chrome (renders IE specific Web Pages in Chrome) Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (no waiting for Adobe or PowerPoint Reader) Forecastfox Weather Fastest Chrome: research aid for wikipedia and google search Apture Highlights:   better research than Fastest Chrome

SMEStorage provides provide a cloud storage gateway in which file meta-data is synchronised, but all files continue to reside on the original storage platform. In this way SMEStorage can offer value added services and clients to existing cloud storage providers, whilst also providing a single cloud file system which enables files from many different cloud storage providers to be managed in one cloud file tree. SMEStorage provide services to individual users, and also to corporate users via its Organisation 'FileServer in the Cloud' platform offering, which combines file sharing, user management and collaboration features.

If this doesn't make Florian weep, nothing can! Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available worldwide. This plugin for Microsoft Office is available to anyone with a Google Account, and brings multi-person collaboration to the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that you may still need from time to time. The plugin syncs your work through Google's cloud, so everyone can contribute to the same version of a file at the same time. Learning the benefits of web-powered collaboration will help more people make a faster transition to 100% web collaboration tools.

OSS GitHub CloudStack Project.  A p2Web network framework for cloud computing sync-share-store with Jabber

DropBox the startup that makes cloud backup and syncing incredibly easy, is cash-flow positive, on track to generate $100 million in revenue this year and could be worth $1-2 billion, Fortune reports. Dropbox has a good freemium business model. The first 2 gigabytes of data are free, and after that you pay a monthly fee. If you've used Dropbox and gotten the benefits for months and have hit your 2 gig limit, are you going to take all your files off Dropbox? More likely you'll pay up. Importantly, Dropbox's margins should improve over time since it is based in the cloud, where costs are going down all the time. Add in its smart marketing (if you refer someone, both you and your friend get free space) and Dropbox has all the ingredients of a rocketship company. According to Fortune, Dropbox, founded in 2007, has had 10x year-over-year growth. Naturally, since Dropbox is doing very well and is in a hot sector--cloud computing--there are speculations that someone like Google or Amazon could snap it up.

I'm not convinced that iCloud will eliminate Windows, MAC and Linux desktops.  I've been using DropBox, SyncDocs, Live.com while testing a number of backup-store-synch-share file services. IMHO, it's all about the apps that act on your data.  And these can come from the desktop, the Browser, or the device.  The best app platform for Cloud hosted data seems to be moving towards HTML5-JS.  Not Win32, .NET, C#, Java or Cocoa (iOS).  And Google clearly has he best platform of integrated services and API's.  They are best positioned to win the Cloud Wars if HTM5-JS and Native Client can close the deal on Cloud apps.  IMHO. excerpt: Apple's announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function - killing Microsoft. Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device - just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer. This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

A Complete Document Management System packaged as a server appliance.  Still needs wiki-WORD sync-share-collaborate.  Still needs portable "native client" docx viewer/editor with fixed/flow/flock options. Good solution for SMB:  instead of trusting business documents to a Cloud provider, they can purchase the Treeno DMS-Cloud appliance and do it themselves. Treeno Document Vault 2.0 - document management appliance. The new Treeno Document Vault is designed specifically for the small to medium sized business. It is a completely self-contained plug-and-play document management server appliance. Treeno's EDM solutions include document, imaging, email and document workflow management. Treeno Software's mission is to provide their customers with operational workflow efficiencies and measureable return on investment (ROI) through the fast installation and implementation of their fully secure, highly reliable, and easy-to-use, web-based Enterprise Document Management (EDM) Solution. For more information on Treeno Software, please visit www.treenosoftware.com

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?

Digital Daily is carrying John Paczkowski's point-by-point twitter stream of the Google Apps Event. Fascinating stuff. Especially Dave Girouard's comments comparing Google Apps to MSOffice. One highlight of the event seems to be the announcement of a Google OutLook integration app. Sounds like something similar to what Zimbra did a few years ago prior to the $350 million acquisition by Yahoo! Zimbra perfected an integration into desktop Outlook comparable to the Exchange - Outlook channel. If Google Apps Sync for Outlook integration is a s good as the event demo, they would still have to crack into MSOffice to compete with the MSOffice-SharePoint-MOSS integration channel. Some interesting comments from Google Enterprise customers, Genentech, Morgans Hotel Group, and Avago ....... At an event in San Francisco, Google is expected to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft (MSFT) Office, something the company desperately needs to do if it wants to make deeper inroads in the enterprise area. As Girouard himself admitted last week, Apps still has a ways to go. "Gmail is really the best email application in the world for consumers or business users, and we can prove that very well," he said. "Calendar is also very good, and probably almost at the level of Gmail. But the word processing, spreadsheets and other products are much less mature. They're a couple of years old at the most, and we still have a lot of work to do."

With Documents To Go for the Google Android platform you get read, write, create and sync support for Word and Excel 2007 (OpenXML formatted) documents, support for receiving and sending attachments through Gmail and other applications (including the free RoadSync Exchange beta client, open password protected files, and view Word documents with track changes so you can see what others have done to your document. ZDNet reviewer Mathew Miller also recommends that people check out the details of the DataViz Intact Technology to see how documents will be handled to maintain file formatting and structure throughout the process of editing. There are two YouTube Video demonstations of "Documents to Go" running on an Android. ........ No collaborative editing with MSOffice desktops, but this is outstanding stuff.

I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha

This official app is free, syncs your history across devices, and brings you the newest model improvements from OpenAI. With ChatGPT in your pocket, you'll find: Instant answers; Tailored advice; Creative inspiration; Professional input; Learning opportunities.

50GB free.  $9.95 /mo for $500GB + 1TB bandwidth.  WOW!! Full encryption with private key exchange using secure messaging.  Awesome Cloud Drive service, excerpt: "Right now, Mega is still a barebones file sharing service, but the company has massive plans for the future. Snooping around on their site reveals their plans for going much further than just file sharing. A post on their blog - dated January 18th - details the features that were cut from launch but will be added soon. There are also apps for mobile platforms already underway, with the company planning to support all major platforms in the near future and allow uploading from them. The blog details a secure email component (probably the part we can't get working) that will be added, secure instant messaging and the ability for non-Mega users to send large files to those with a Mega account (for example, for printing files at a print shop). It doesn't stop there, though, the company also says they're planning on-site word processing, calendar and spreadsheet applications (watch out, Google Docs!) as well as a Dropbox-esque client for Windows, Linux and Mac. They also say that there are plans in the works for allowing users to run Mega as an appliance on their own machine, though there aren't many details on that in the post. In another place on the site, Mega promises that in the near future they will be offering secure video calling and traditional calling as well. Talk about trying to take over the world."

Excellent interview from 2010. Still worth reading. excerpt: "In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his Cupertino office. "I mean, Steve friggin' Jobs," remembers Houston, now 28. "How do you even prepare for that?" When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: "I know what you do." What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs' pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn't selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius). Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. "He said we were a feature, not a product," says Houston. Courteously, Jobs spent the next half hour waxing on over tea about his return to Apple, and why not to trust investors, as the duo-or more accurately, Houston, who plays Penn to Ferdowsi's mute Teller-peppered him with questions. When Jobs later followed up with a suggestion to meet at Dropbox's San Francisco office, Houston proposed that they instead meet in Silicon Valley. "Why let the enemy get a taste?" he now shrugs cockily. Instead, Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud, and specifically knocked Dropbox as a half-attempt to solve the Internet's messiest dilemma: How do you get all your files, from all your devices, into one place? Houston's reaction was less cocky: "Oh, s-t." The next day he shot a missive to his staff: "We have one of the fastest-growing companies in the world," it b