cloud computing

Adobe Systems plans to release high-end photo-editing software for tablets. The new app would be a close relative to Adobe's Lightroom software for PCs and serve as a cloud-connected companion to the program.

Tom Hogarty, Adobe's group product manager for Lightroom, demonstrated an early prototype version of the app Wednesday on the Grid, an online show from Photoshop guru Scott Kelby.

Adobe has done a good job with PC-centric photography software, but the company needs to better incorporate Internet connectivity and mobile devices into photography workflow, Hogarty said.

"We need to take that story beyond the desktop. … Read more

I'm a cloud-computing, Chrome OS fanboy for the most part. But today was one of of those days I was glad to have old-school Mac and Windows PCs lying around my home office.

I'm no power user, but Google Docs suits me for word processing, while Google Sheets works fine for creating spreadsheets. However, when it comes to importing and editing files from the incumbent power, Microsoft Office, Google just isn't meeting even my low-end needs.

Google handles such documents -- in either the older .doc and .xls formats, and the newer .docx and .xlsx formats -- … Read more

Online storage provider RapidShare is expanding what it offers for its free service -- but it's also scrapped its earlier unlimited plan, even for customers who paid in advance for a longer-term period.

The Swiss company, with more than 50 employees, more than a thousand servers, and the capacity to store several petabytes of user data, announced the change March 12. Paying customers get a choice between a 250GB plan costing 10 euros ($12.96) a month and a 500GB plan costing 20 euros a month. The previous unlimited-storage option vanishes Wednesday.

The change reflects a reality for cloud … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--People save 1 billion files every day to Dropbox's online storage service, Chief Executive Drew Houston said today at the Mobile World Congress show here.

In addition, the company's 100 million users tap into the service with 500 million devices, he said. The statistics shows major growth for a company founded in 2007 when today's high-end smartphones only just were emerging.

When the company started, Dropbox could synchronize people's data among PCs, but now of course it helps bridge the gaps to smartphones, tablets, and presumably other Internet-connected devices of the future. The company has … Read more

Cloud Sherpas, a startup that helps customers move to Google Apps and Salesforce.com, raised $40 million in second-round funding and acquired a rival, CloudTrigger.

The 350-employee company plans to use the money to fuel further acquisitions and to expand its existing business, a move that it expects will increase 2013 revenue to $100 million.

First-round investors Columbia Capital and Delta-V Capital invested in the second round as well, and new investors Greenspring Associates and Queensland Investment Corporation joined. Cloud Sherpas didn't disclose the company valuation. It's raised $80 million in total so far.

Acquisition is par for the course at Cloud Sherpas. … Read more

This year, the shift away from desktop software toward cloud-based apps and services really took hold. More people are managing and sharing documents with Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365, they're storing photos and music in iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive, and they're turning to online music services such as Spotify and Pandora. E-mail is quickly becoming a cloud-only affair: Microsoft launched cloud-based Outlook.com even as venerable desktop e-mail apps like Mozilla's Thunderbird and Sparrow disappeared forever in 2012. And why buy boxed tax-prep software when the same capabilities are available in-browser from the same … Read more

European data stored in the "cloud" could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe's strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.

A research paper written by legal experts at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law and titled "Cloud Computing in Higher Education and Research Institutions and the USA Patriot Act" supports previous reports that the antiterror Patriot Act could theoretically be used by U.S. law enforcement to bypass strict European privacy laws to acquire citizen data within the European Union.

The Patriot Act, … Read more

Consumer cloud-based services are turning out to be one of the biggest hits of 2012, based on a new report from market intelligence firm IHS iSuppli.

The number of personal subscriptions to online storage services is set to surpass previous projections. The number of subscriptions worldwide already toppled 375 million within the first half of 2012. The original forecast for the entire calendar year was just 500 million.

Subscriptions to cloud services -- free or paid -- are expected to jump even higher to 625 million globally in 2013.

But considering the pace already seen in 2012 and the growing … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is getting into the personal cloud storage game with the introduction of its own Atom processor-based storage solutions aimed towards both consumers and small businesses.

Essentially, these are network-attached storage appliances powered by either the Intel Atom D2550 or D2500 processors for securing, backing up and sharing content through the cloud. The cloud technology comes in through an exposed HTML IP address (with a secure log-in), and the end user can access that IP address either through a regular desktop browser or it can look like a drive.

Intel said it has been focused on developing reference architectures … Read more