cloud

Running out of space on your hard drive? Hey, even in these days of seemingly endless gigabytes, it happens.

Bitcasa is a new service that aims to supplant your hard drive with unlimited cloud storage. And by supplant I mean replace -- kind of.

I'll circle back on that in a minute. For now, consider this: a year of Bitcasa no-limit storage normally runs $99, but right now you can get a year of Bitcasa Infinite for $69. If that doesn't immediately butter your bacon, how about a 10GB Bitcasa account absolutely free?

Update: As eagle-eyed reader brotherj2k … Read more

The cloud may be the future of all things storage, but the present is more complicated: it can be expensive, potentially insecure, and you're left trusting a third party with all your data.

That's what inspired The Transporter, a Kickstarter project started by former employees of Drobo. Transporter aims for something more secure and distributed, while still being sharable. The concept largely works like Dropbox, with a Transporter folder that lives on your desktop and syncs with files stored on the physical Transporter drive (which resides someplace you designate). You can easily give others access to specific folders, … Read more

Jeff hasn't finished complaining about last year's Retina Display iPad yet and Apple went ahead and announced a new 128-gigabyte model for $799. But wait, haven't we been getting beaten in the head with Apple's cloudcentric messaging for the last two years? Why the push for local storage all of a sudden?

In pop culture news, we'll spend some of the first half talking about mistaken identities through the Internet and the "Catfish" show on MTV that just wrapped up its first season.

Some critics accused the episodes of being staged (like the film it was based on), but a casting application for Season 2 at least proves that the stories are staged at most, not entirely made up.… Read more

Box is poised to go public as soon as next year, following in the footsteps of other recent and successful Wall Street debuts for enterprise software companies.

The company's co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, told Bloomberg in an interview that Box is aiming to declare an initial public offering in 2014. He hinted that 2013 is still a possibility, but he described it as a "long shot."

Levie added that Box will "have to go public" as company leaders have no intention to be acquired by a larger competitor, perhaps Google or even Microsoft.

Expectations … Read more

Kim DotCom plans to launch his new site in two days, and users will get 50GB of storage for free, the infamous entrepreneur tweeted today.

DotCom also tweeted that his lawyers are working on giving former premium users their premium statuses on the new site but that the site "can't at this time."

50GB is a huge amount of free storage right off the bat. DotCom's tweet comes a day after another cloud storage service, MediaFire, announced it would be offering 50GB of free storage. Other storage services may offer as much -- or more -- … Read more

Back in August, I wrote about cloud-storage service MediaFire, which was offering a whopping 50GB of free space, no strings attached.

Well, there were strings in the form of certain limitations (see below), but it wasn't like you had to provide a credit-card number or start paying for the space after, say, six months.

Yesterday, the company unveiled MediaFire for Android, which joins the iOS version in giving you mobile access to your cloud drive. And new users still get 50GB of storage, free of charge.

Like other apps of its kind, MediaFire for Android lets you view documents … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Wireless audio at CES 2013 has been almost entirely dominated by the idea of streaming music directly from your smartphone, usually via Bluetooth.

Teenage Engineering's newly announced OD-11 is taking a different approach, which it calls the Cloud Speaker. The cubelike speaker actually borrows its design from Swedish audio engineer Stig Carlsson, whose original OD-11 in 1974 featured the same angled tweeter and woofer that directs sound out the the top of the speaker, rather than a more traditional front-facing design. The idea is to throw the sound into a room, without a defined sweet spot that standard … Read more

I share a lot of calendars with friends and family members using Apple's iCloud service. Every time someone adds an event to a shared calendar, I am bombarded with alerts across multiple iOS and OS X devices. It can get annoying. I don't so much mind the alerts on my iOS device, but I do mind them on OS X. Then recently, I stumbled upon the seemingly hidden preference to turn off shared calendar alerts in iCal. Here's where you can find it:

LAS VEGAS -- The future of privacy and the cloud occupied a sidestage at CES 2013 this morning, with one panelist comparing privacy lost to something else that can't be replaced.

"Getting your privacy back is like getting your virginity back," said Jim Reavis, Executive Director of the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance, from a room on the second floor of Las Vegas Convention Center North building. The on-stage conversation between Reavis and other privacy experts focused mainly on desired changes to how to make the nebulous concept of online privacy more user-friendly.

Sid Stamm, lead privacy engineer … Read more