9 Cloud Services For Families

Prior to the advent of cloud computing, the market for family software was fairly limited due to the high costs of development.  And file storage was typically limited to local hard drives on home PCs and laptops. Today, families are often managed like a small business with their own network, shared data, and a collection of applications to run their busy lives. Below are some of the hottest cloud applications and services that savvy families are leveraging to stay connected.

Calendar

When it comes to family calendars, it’s hard to beat the features offered by iCal and Google Calendar, both enabling multiple family members to maintain both individual and shared calendars. But for those who want to explore alternatives- check out Mynd. When Mynd sees you have an event coming up, it warns you how much driving time you will need in light of traffic patterns. It lets you know the weather at the time of the meeting so you can adjust plans if need be.

Essential information

Send your kitchen junk drawer to the Cloud. AboutOne is a self-dubbed “family management system” that helps parents manage everything from precious memories to household information. The random data that you have scattered in drawers, folders and cabinets in your house can now be consolidated in a secure place online. For rest of the services see the original post here

Microsoft launches hotline for startups in India

This may be a first for startups anywhere in the world. Microsoft Ventures in India has launched a hotline for Indian entrepreneurs to get real-time professional advice on their business and technical queries.

A team of four professionals trained by Microsoft will staff the hotline called JumpStart, which will address queries related to accounting and taxation, legal, understanding term sheets and technology. Some queries will be handled by the four-member team, while others will be routed to experts who will offer necessary interventions within 48 hours.

The toll free number — 18002002114 — is open to entrepreneurs during business hours from Monday through Friday and will initially support Hindi and English languages. Microsoft Ventures expects 15-20 calls in the first few days and believes the number could rise to 500-1,000 a month.

Kattayil Rajinish Menon, director of Microsoft Ventures in India, said, "Sometimes answering even simple questions about how to get started or which service provider to contact can really help startups avoid delays and cost overruns. While JumpStart cannot promise the success of a startup's business, it can definitely help by educating entrepreneurs how to get started quickly by providing information on the vast resources available today." For complete post see here

Microsoft, University of Nairobi launch cloud computing academic research

The University of Nairobi (UoN) with the support of Microsoft and the Kenya ICT Authority has released a baseline survey on cloud computing and its impact in Kenya, showing 57 per cent of respondents adopted cloud technology in either 2010 or 2011.

More organizations utilised pure private cloud (39 per cent) compared to utilising a public cloud (22 per cent).

“We are seeing widespread adoption of cloud-based email services and productivity tools like Office 365, which enable “always-on” access to emails and files from virtually anywhere. Businesses are also running CRM, HR, accounting and custom enterprise applications in the cloud. Cloud computing can benefit governments in three areas:  increasing national competitiveness, enhancing citizen services and driving down costs.” said Microsoft country manager Kunle Awosika. For complete post see here

Cloud Security New Approaches

Cloud Computing growth is always affected by security concerns. Here is interesting papers toward that 

New Approaches to Cloud Security 

Evolving Threats Demand :New Approaches To Security

Google Blocks U. of Illinois at Chicago From Emailing Its Own Students

The University of Illinois at Chicago recently found itself living a modern nightmare: Google’s automated cybersecurity regime mistook the university as the culprit in a spam attack on the university’s students and began blocking university email accounts from sending messages to Gmail users.

The blocking went on for more than two weeks, and the affected Gmail users included 13,000 of the university’s own students. University officials describe those two weeks as a Kafkaesque state of limbo.

On March 27, 12 days after Google blacklisted the university’s domain, university officials wrote on an academic computing blog: “We have followed the instructions they have posted online on how to resolve this issue, but there is no indication on what happens once they receive the request.”

“Experience from other sites that have encountered this issue range from days to weeks,” the officials wrote. “The only recourse is to wait until they stop blacklisting uic.edu, which happens on its own, but not on a set schedule.”

Google officials told The Chronicle on Monday that the issue had now been resolved. But the university’s two-week struggle highlights the hazards that come with relying on an outside company—especially one that depends heavily on automated processes—to deliver messages to students. For complete post see here