The Apple iCloud

On June 6th Apple’s CEO  -Steve Jobs – took to the stage at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and launched the latest products from Apple. The product that has had the greatest interest and impact is the new iCloud service – but what is it, what does it offer and is there anything similar out there for Windows PC users?

So what IS the iCloud? 
iCloud is web based storage supplied by Apple for use by Apple devices, iPods, iPhones, iMacs, iPads etc and the idea is that, rather than storing your “stuff” on on one iDevice – which makes it difficult to access from your other iDevices, you store everything in the iCloud which then makes it available to every other iDevice that you own.

From the outside, this is not a lot different to a lot of cloud based services but it’s the way that the iCloud deals with music that sets it apart. Yes, you can store your documents created in Pages, spreadsheets created in Numbers and presentations created in Keynote. You can store your contacts, your calendar and your email – all of which are great ideas -and hopefully your iCloud won’t crash and corrupt all those critical email conversations you’ve had as you work towards winning that multi-million £ contract but what set’s the iCloud apart is the ability for you to store your purchased music there and make it available to all of your iDevices.

No longer will you curse because you’re in the mood to listen to some Scandinavian death-punk-folk-symphonic-rock and your collection is on your iPad and you only have your iPhone with you, it’s no longer a problem. Simply go on-line and download the tracks you want from your iCloud.

Of course, it helps if you have an unlimited bandwidth contract with your mobile phone provider – or find yourself a nearby W-Fi Hotspot. But it will take me months to upload all of my music from my PC in to my iCloud I hear you cry. However,  iCloud is FAR smarter than that.

Provided you have bought your music from iTunes then any new purchases will automatically be pushed to all of your iDevices and you can access your iTunes purchase history so that what will happen is that you will pull the music directly from your iTunes account at Apple, you won’t have to upload your music collection at all. And it gets cleverer – if some of your legitimately purchased music was not bought from iTunes then iTunes Match [$24.99 PA] will automatically check these tunes and if they are available through the iTunes store then they will be automatically added to your iCloud music library – clever, huh?

Photo Stream
As soon as your take a picture on your iDevice, or import one taken with another device or stored elsewhere, it’s automatically uploaded to your iCloud and pushed down to your other iDevices the next time they connect. The Photo Stream service holds a rolling collection of your last 1,000 pictures and iCloud stores them for 30 days – giving you plenty of time to download and save your favourite pictures to your preferred iDevices  

Apps and eBooks
Because you have downloaded these through the iTunes store [both free and paid-for], Apps and eBooks are treated in exactly the same way as your music collection which means that your eBooks and Apps are only an Internet connection away, no matter what iDevice you are using and new purchases are automatically pushed out to your iDevice the next time an iCloud connection is made.

The remainder of the iCloud service is an unexciting 5Gb on-line storage service that can be used to store contacts, calendar, email and documents – all be it at no cost to yourself – currently -but let’s not forget that Apple’s track record is chequered here, the original Apple cloud service, MobileMe, started out free [as .Mac and iTools] and ended up at  £60 PA for a personal account and £91 for a family account, although this did provide you with up to 40Gb of on-line storage 

The Windows Option
Currently the Apple iCloud is pretty hard to beat. Yes, you can do similar things on other computing platforms but nothing that works so easily across such a wide variety of formats and media.

The Windows Live service provides you with 25Gb of free cloud storage through Windows SkyDrive and the same account also gives you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote so this could class as document synchronization and DropBox offers 2Gb of storage that cleverly synchronizes across your PC, laptop, tablet, netbook, SmartPhone etc and this is upgradeable to 50Gb for $9.99 per month.

 
Spotify Unlimited [£4.99 per month] and Spotify Premium [£9.99 per month] provide you with unlimited access to 13m songs [iTunes has 18m] that can be played on your PC and transfered to your MP3 player [Unlimited] and the Premium account also makes this available on your phone – although you’ll need a good data contract to stream the music, so downloading via your home broadband may be the best route to go down.

So, although Windows users can do similar things to iCloud subscribers, it’s not as straightforward and no where near as convenient and therefore, despite some negativity being evident in the media, I think that iCloud is pretty good. No, it’s not perfect but, like most Apple products, it’s well thought out and will be very easy to use which will only help Apple to sell more iDevices and, of course, I’m certain that iCloud 2 can’t be too far away – to address all those little hiccups that the roll out of iCloud 1 has brought to light.

Phew, made it to Bush House, Bristol via Templemeads and Bristol IT. Saw lots of rain thru windows but dodged the drops whilst walking

The recently reported cyber attack on gmail has been called a ‘Spear Phishing’ attack – but what is ‘Spear Phishing’?

First, we need to understand ‘phishing’.

We’ve all had them  - the email that purports to be from a financial institution claiming that your account will be frozen unless you verify your date. These emails contain a link to a web page that looks like the home page of the financial organisation in question although the reality is that this page is a clone.

The intention is to trick you in to trying to log-on to ‘your account’.  However, the reality is that when try to log-in, all that happens is that you are linked across to another page, typically a cloned ‘Error’ page that then links to the real page of the financial institution whilst your secure access data is emailed to the creator of the original email – et voila – they have access to your bank account.

A ‘Spear Phishing’ attack takes a regular attack but rather then send the email out indiscriminately, the attacker chooses his targets with care and only sends his attack to specific individuals in whom the attacker has an interest, members of governments, for example.

Make sure that you’re not a victim – just ignore all emails that purport to have come from a financial organisation requesting that you log-in, they have all agreed that they will never ask for this type of information in this way.

 If you recieve an email and believe it to be genuine, don’t click on any link, either telephone your bank or go to their website by typing the web address in to your browser and log-in to check the information that way.

Off to The Red Lion in Salisbury later – presenting on Social Media for businesses – http://ping.fm/qAGws if you’re looking for something to do

Just tweaking my presentation for this afternoon’s “Wiltshire – Open for Business” event in Devizes http://bit.ly/mrXeqs

Do you know the World’s top 10 brands? Well, have a guess then see ow close you are http://ping.fm/3oJxr

13 tips on writing better copy http://ping.fm/rEUrM The 14th is to employ a copy writer

Have a few minutes to spare but left your Rubik’s cube at home? Don’t worry, you can DL a virtual one http://ping.fm/vOhRc

OK, apart from the reference to a fairly obscure UK pub rock band in the title, what will you do if the lights go out and your PC crashes, or you get one of those viruses that corrupts or deletes your data when you are in the middle of writing that all important quote, dissertation, report, financial review or other business critical article? Your first reaction might be one of disbelief, shock or horror but those amongst you who have a data back-up strategy will be far calmer than those without and this email is aimed at those without any form of back-up strategy.

When you examine the number of things that can happen that may corrupt our data the list is quite eye opening. Yes, we know about viruses, about PC crashes and simple power failures but did you know that your fridge, central heating or near-by thunderstorm can cause data corruption?

When domestic thermostats switch on or off they can create a spike of electricity that is many thousands of volts and if your PC is on the same circuit then this spike can easily corrupt data on a hard drive, as can lightning strikes which can send a similar pulse down power cables and phone lines – which is why it is always recommended to unplug computer and communications equipment in a thunderstorm – and note the reference to unplugging not simply switching off.

Think of what’s at risk – your emails, all of them, contact details, business financial, outstanding payment information, quotations, work – anything that you use your PC for is at risk. The former Government Department that focused on business, the DTI – Department for Trade and industry – once carried out a a survey in to data loss and the results were quite shocking, over 60% of businesses who suffered a significant loss of data were out of business within 12 months of the loss occurring.

So what should you be doing?

You need to examine how business critical the information on your computer is and what the imapct will be on your business should you suffer a loss of data. If the risk is high then you need to put a plan in to place to ensure that in the event of a loss of data that you can get your business back up and running very quickly.

The ideal back-up solution is one which backs up your data regularly and where the medium selected is robust and stored off-site. Now, let’s break that down a little.

Regularly – this is based on the way that you work. If you sit at your PC one day a week to update business accounts, records etc then you only need to back-up once a week. If you use your PC on a daily basis then you really should consider backing up every day, or even more frequently.

What medium should you choose? There’s loads to choose from, Saving to CDs and DVDs, USB memory sticks internal and external hard drives, data tapes, even backing up to the cloud [Internet]. Each media has advantages and drawbacks and so care should be taken when creating your back-up strategy, however makeuseof.com.com have put a simple guide together and if you are not backing up your business data can I recommend that you read their guide, “The Backup and Restore Guide” that’s free to download.

That will get you started and I’ll be writing a more detailed paper on data backup later this year.

And talking of that fairly obscure UK pub rock band, there’s no prizes but feel free to email or Tweet me [www.twitter.com/andypoulton] if you know who it is.

Keep Taking the Tablet – Pt 1, Acquisition

Well, it’s been nearly a month since the arrival of my Archos 10.1 tablet device and I thought I’d bring you all up to speed with my decision-making process and review the tablet at the same time.

When Apple released the iPad I don’t think anyone expected the uptake to be as fast as it was. Bearing in mind that the iPad is a premium priced product, from £449 for the cheapest, the sales towered above those of the iPhone when it was first launched and  totally outstripped supply.

Although it took quite a while for real competitors to the iPhone to hit the market, it quickly became obvious there would soon be a flood of “me too” tablet products keen to leap on the bandwagon – and so it was, less than 9 months after the iPad’s launch the first serious competitors began to reach the market and so I felt the time was right to explore and see what was available.

LG had released their Galaxy Tab – too expensive and tied to a mobile phone contract, Dell had released the “Streak” although with a 5″ screen I felt this to be more of a large phone rather than something that might be of real use and Next had released a device costing £189 – which, by all accounts, was far less than good.

However, I little bit of research brought up a number of options, all within my budget of £300 – there were the Viewsonic 10″ and 7″ tablets, the Archos 10.1, the Advent Vega and the Toshiba Folio.

Taking everything in to account, including reputation, the Toshiba was in pole position and the Advent Vega – despite an interesting specification and very strong price was at the bottom of the pile – after all, who wants to buy their IT from PC World [Advent being one of their "house" brands]

For all of the shortlisted tablets, supply was a major issue. It was the run up to Christmas, supplies were very limited and demand was outstripping supply. None the less, I made my mind up and decided to go with the Tosh.

I had a lucky escape – the day before I was due to place my order, the Tosh was withdrawn – apparently the software was buggy and the device so unstable as to be almost unusable – so it was back to the drawing board.

Despite my previous comment about PC World, the Vega it probably had the best hardware specification and the lowest price and so I tried to find stock. It was rarer than rocking horse poo and was quickly excluded for this reason alone.

With the money burning a hole [OK, it wasn't my money but that made it even worse] I retrenched and looked at plan B [that's the option not the singer]. The Viewsonic looked interesting but, in the end, did not shout my name as loudly as the Archos 10.1 – so named because its screen is 10.1″ from corner to corner. Damn, these French are just so creative with their product names.

Anyway, decision made, supplier chosen, the order was placed with Simply Electronics – whose website advertised availability. Then the supplier, Simply Electronics seemed to mis-place the order, and although the order was chased and chased and various tales were forthcoming, of the tablet there was no site – so the order was cancelled and new supply was sought.

This time around Amazon claimed that they had 2 in stock – so the order was placed and with Amazon’s usual ruthless efficiency, was shipped the following day.

3 days later the Archos 10.1 was in my hands. I’ve now had it for about a month and feel that a review is in order.