Skip to content

Posts from the ‘IT News’ Category

12
Oct

Flexing NoSQL: MongoDB in review | Data Management – InfoWorld

The NoSQL movement has spawned a slew of alternative data stores, all of which attempt to fill voids left by traditional relational database implementations. But while it’s easy to fit the various relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and so on) under a single categorical umbrella, the NoSQL world is much more diverse, and the NoSQL label is too general. NoSQL data stores such as MongoDB and Cassandra are so vastly different from each other that apples-to-apples comparisons are practically impossible. Thus, within the world of NoSQL, there are subcategories such as key-value stores, graph databases, and document-oriented stores.

Document-oriented stores, or document stores for short, aren’t new to the world of computing. Industry graybeards will quickly recognize Lotus Notes as one of the first successful NoSQL document stores from the late ’80s. Document stores encapsulate data into loosely defined documents, rather than tables with columns and rows. Implementations of the underlying document vary by data store, with some representing a document as XML and others as JSON, for instance.

[ Also on InfoWorld: NoSQL standouts: New databases for new applications | First look: Oracle NoSQL Database | Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ]

But in general, documents aren’t rigidly defined, and in fact they offer a high degree of flexibility when it comes to defining data. This flexibility has costs. For example, these data stores do not support SQL, instead supporting custom query languages better suited to the underlying document structure (such as XPath-like query languages for XML data stores). But the lack of rigidity in data definition has many benefits as well. In many cases, compared to traditional relational databases, the more flexible document stores enable faster iterative-style development where data requirements are evolving more rapidly than the pace of development.

MongoDB: Flexible, scalable NoSQL
In recent years, a number of document stores have come out and garnered a high degree of developer mind share. One of the most popular of these is MongoDB, an open source, schema-free document store written in C++ that boasts support for a wide array of programming languages, a SQL-like query language, and a number of intriguing features related to performance and scalability.

Out of the box, Mongo supports sharding, which permits horizontal scaling by divvying up a collection of documents across a cluster of nodes, thus making reads faster. What’s more, Mongo offers replication in two modes: master-slave and replica sets. In a replica set, there is no master node; instead, all nodes are copies of one another and there is no single point of failure. Replica sets therefore bring more fault tolerance to larger environments supporting massive amounts of data. These features and more don’t require an army of DBAs to implement, nor do they need massive hardware expenditures. Mongo can run on commodity hardware platforms, provided there is a healthy amount of memory.

Mongo is schema-less — it’ll store any document you decide to put into it. There is no upfront document definition requirement. Ultimately, documents are grouped into collections, which are akin to tables in a relational database. Collections can be defined on the fly as well. Documents are stored in a binary JSON format, dubbed BSON, and encapsulate data represented as name-value pairs (which are somewhat like columns and rows).

Flexing NoSQL: MongoDB in review | Data Management – InfoWorld.

25
May

NZ music streaming services compared | Stuff.co.nz

NZ music streaming services compared | Stuff.co.nz.

Spotify launched this week in Australia and New Zealand. It’s hugely popular overseas, but how does it compare to what else is on offer here in New Zealand?

RARA.COM

Rara.com is a relative newcomer to the New Zealand market, but because of its ability to cache music, it’s well worth a look. If you use Rara’s Android app, which costs a little extra, you can download songs over Wi-Fi and they’ll be cached on your phone. That means when you’re out and about roaming, you’ll be able to play back songs without downloading them again on 3G. You still get to listen to your music, and you save on mobile data costs.

Rara has millions of songs to choose from, but is missing a lot of key artists. One that particularly sticks out is Adele, who has been tearing up charts in New Zealand. Despite Rara being a New Zealand website, it’s also missing many local artists.

If you just want to listen to Rara music on the web, it’ll cost you $8 a month. But if you have an Android device, we recommend you add mobile functionality to your plan. It’ll cost you $14, but allow you to listen to your playlists when you’re on the go.

MUSIC UNLIMITED

Music Unlimited is Sony’s music streaming service, available on the web, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and on Android devices. There’s plenty of music available – Sony just says it’s “millions and millions” – and it incorporates Sony’s massive music catalogue, as well as a host of other artists and songs. You can try it for 30 days for free, but after that it’ll cost US$6 (NZ$7) per month for a basic subscription, which allows you to listen to unlimited music on multiple devices and create customised channels, amongst other things. The premium subscription costs US$14 (NZ$17) a month and grants users the ability to create playlists and listen to radio stations reserved for premium users.

The web-based Music Unlimited app is a bit clunky and slow, but most in-browser music players are. There are also a few notable artists missing from the music catalogue –  The Beatles, for instance, are nowhere to be seen. That said, Music Unlimited’s catalogue is considerably better than most.

Ad Feedback

Music Unlimited, like other streaming services, can cache your playlists so you can play them when you’re offline. 

SPOTIFY

Spotify is new to the New Zealand market, but it has a massive following overseas. This is likely because Spotify has two important things – a massive music catalogue, and a free service. The free service is ad-supported and grants unlimited access to the catalogue, but there are two subscription tiers which give you access to different features.

The major difference between free Spotify and the basic paid service, called Spotify Unlimited, is the fact that the ads are gone. Both the Free and Unlimited tiers are only available from your computer. The Premium service, however, allows you to access Spotify from a variety of different devices, including your mobile phone and tablet. It also enables an offline mode, so you can cache music and listen to it offline. The Unlimited service costs $7.49/month and the Premium service costs $13/month.

Spotify has heavy Facebook integration, so you can sign in through Facebook, see what your friends are listening to, and share what you’re listening to with your friends. But this is also where things become problematic – you actually need to have a Facebook account to sign up for Spotify. If you, like many people, are concerned about the privacy issues related to Facebook sharing, you might want to choose a different service.

RDIO

Rdio, a music streaming service from the people who brought you Skype, is a subscription service that gives you all the music you want, via one of two monthly plans. For $9 per month you get the service via your web browser (Flash required), plus the Windows and Mac OS X desktop clients. $14 per month gives you all that, plus access via the Rdio apps available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7. Unless you never leave your house or don’t own a compatible device, the extra $5 per month is a no-brainer.

Finding the music you’re after is a snap. Assuming, that is, you’re allowed to listen to it. Here is the only place Rdio fell flat on its face: thanks to the complexity of international music licensing, there is a tonne of content that we in New Zealand can see, but cannot play. In most of the other music streaming services, you simply can’t see the track in the music catalogue if it’s not available here.

Audio is heavily compressed over 3G to keep data costs down giving you something a little better than radio quality. You can also ‘sync’ music to the device, which gives you an offline copy you can listen to when you’re disconnected.

GROOVESHARK

Grooveshark has been available to New Zealanders for about three years now, and it’s free to us. Just type a song or artist into the searchbox on the website using your desktop browser or the browser on your phone or tablet, then hit play. It really is that simple.

Grooveshark has a wide range of music, and there are no audio adverts to interrupt your tunes. Aside from simply searching for a song, you can also tune into to predefined stations, based around a music category.

The best part of Grooveshark is that you don’t need an account to find music, listen to it, or even share it with your friends on Facebook. If you do create an account, however, you can favourite tracks, create playlists and get music recommended to you.

The two premium services – Grooveshark Plus (US$6 per month) and Grooveshark Anywhere ($9 per month) – allow you to download a desktop version of Grooveshark that lets you access playlists and favourites even if you’re not on the internet, and gives you unlimited playlists and favourites.

-PC World

22
Mar

Infinite Software

Infinite Software.

March 20, 2012, 7:51 AM — Seven years ago, developers behind Mambo, an open source software project for publishing websites, split over a dispute regarding control of the project. The project fork resulted in Joomla, a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content and sites.

Today, Joomla—the name is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word “Jumla,” which means “as a whole”—is one of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS), claiming that 2.7% of the Web is Joomla-based sites.

If you were to drop Joomla on a straight line with other popular open source CMS projects, it would fall somewhere between WordPress and Drupal. Joomla, which is offered under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.0, is more robust than WordPress, while Drupal is usually favored by those with a developer background.

“Joomla really fits nicely between WordPress and Drupal,” says Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a nonprofit organization that provides organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project.

“We’ve built a community and have a focus on reaching out to the average user and administrators of a website, but we also give under-the-hood tools to the developers and engineers trying to do something more complex,” he adds.

Joomla powers the Children’s Hospital Boston social intranet, providing a “Facebook-like” social environment and handling more than 2,500 concurrent users.

Joomla Jibes With Small to Mid-Sized Businesses

With such a large community and abundance of products and services, the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market is where this open source CMS is a strong contender. Small businesses like having access to thousands of add-ons that make it easy to extend basic website functionality.

“We’ve encouraged an economy around being able to productize add-ons. A small business can install a Joomla site by following a five-step tutorial on the Web, download the add-ons in a single zip file and end up with a professional site,” said Ozimek.

Ozimek said that small businesses typically use Joomla-based sites for standard brochure-like websites, to add functionality to communicate with customers using support ticketing or for ecommerce.

The SMB market is where Joomla earned its reputation, but now all eyes are on the enterprise and what Joomla can do there.

Joomla Makes Strides in the Enterprise

This year, the enterprise is the big picture evolution for Joomla. It’s still a core CMS offering but new focus gives developers tools to build any sort of Web application that goes well beyond the good old-fashioned Joomla site.

In the enterprise, open source CMS software is highly visible. Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst at 451 Research, said acceptance and availability of open source CMS projects has grown. Ten years ago open source CMS projects existed, but there wasn’t many options for a commercial entity for an enterprise to partner with for development and support. Today, this isn’t the case.

Reidy said that open source software in the enterprise does have benefits over proprietary software. “One benefit with open source is that you can download and try it on your own instead of going through a vendor-led process of RFP, proof-of-concept and demos,” she explains.

For Joomla, its enterprise push is backed by support from companies like Microsoft and eBay who have significantly enabled the Joomla community to push the boundaries beyond the SMB market.

“EBay has 16,000 employees running on an intranet system that was built using the Joomla CMS and Joomla framework. The system does social networking and grabs terabytes of data for eBay to run reports on,” said Ozimek. “Under the hood is a new generation of technology that allows developers to go beyond the basics of having a blog or brochure base website. “

One of the more recent enterprise Joomla deployments is a social networking Intranet for Children’s Hospital Boston, a Harvard medical school pediatric teaching hospital.

Sarah Mahoney, the hospital’s innovation community manager, looked at open source options because the proprietary system being used at the hospital prevented them from making much-needed upgrades.

http://www.itworld.com/software/260040/joomla-jumps-enterprise?source=ITWNLE_nlt_enterprise_apps_2012-03-21

28
Feb

The Samsung Galaxy S III Leaked! 1.5GHz, 4.8-inch 1080p Display, Ceramic Case | TechCrunch

galaxy-s-iii-bgr

Samsung previously made it known that the Galaxy S III would not be announced at Mobile World Congress.

But it leaked anyway. And it might steal the show. Forgot about the HTC One X and Sony Xperia U, the Samsung GSIII will be the Android phone to beat in 2012.

Inside the Galaxy S III is said to be a quad-core Samsung Exynos CPU running at 1.5GHz. It will power a 4.8-inch 16×9 display that’s reportedly a Blu-ray display — whatever that means. A 2MP resides in the front bezel while an 8MP is embedded around back. BGR doesn’t state the target carrier(s) but the phone will rock a 4G LTE radio. An unconfirmed rendering is pictured up top.

The case is reportedly made out of ceramic, which in a world of plastic and aluminum, is a fun change of pace. Ceramic feels great to the touch, can be very durable and since it’s comprised of mostly baked mud, it’s better for the environment. Plus, with ceramic, Apple can’t claim Samsung copied any of its products.

It will ship with Android 4.0 installed sometime later this year. Samsung previously stated that it would hold a launch event for the phone closer to its ship date. I’d expect the phone in late spring/early summer.

The Samsung Galaxy S III Leaked! 1.5GHz, 4.8-inch 1080p Display, Ceramic Case | TechCrunch.

16
Nov

Google Dart hits a bulls-eye for Web developers | Application Development – InfoWorld

 

When we first heard rumors of Dart, the new client-side Web programming language from Google, it was described as a “JavaScript killer,” aimed at replacing a language seen as “fundamentally flawed.” Those early reports spurred various reactions from the Web development community, ranging from unabashed excitement to bemused skepticism to worry that Google was trying to usurp the open JavaScript standard in true Microsoft fashion.

Google officially unveiled Dart this week, during a keynote address at the annual GoTo conference in Aarhus, Denmark. Thankfully, it seems to live up to much (though not all) of the hype, while falling far short of the worst fears. In fact, based on the documentation and tools released so far, Dart may be exactly what many client-side Web developers have been waiting for.

[ Get software development news and insights from InfoWorld's Developer World newsletter. | Sharpen your Java skills with the JavaWorld Enterprise Java newsletter. ]

Yet another Google language?
Some will doubtless say we’ve been here, done that. Not long ago, Google debuted a new language called Go, which was widely hailed as a “Java killer.” But aside from a few presentations at Google’s developer conference, we haven’t heard much about Go since it was first unveiled. Is Dart likely to fare any better?

Maybe. It’s important to realize that Go and Dart are parallel efforts, each with different goals. Go is a classic compiled language that outputs binaries as processor-native machine code. In that sense, it’s closer to C and C++ than to Java or dynamic languages such as JavaScript. Go is intended as a general-purpose and systems programming language with some modern features, such as garbage collection and baked-in support for parallelism.

Dart, on the other hand, is a VM-based language that seems to have much more in common with JavaScript than the initial reports would have us believe. One revelation from this week’s announcement was that Dart is intended to run not only in the browser but also on servers via a stand-alone VM, much like how Node.js enables JavaScript on servers. Still, most Dart code will probably be client-side, and for the time being, the way to run it is to compile it into JavaScript code that can be executed by modern Web browsers (including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari for now, with more to come).

So what’s the point? If Dart applications end up being executed as JavaScript code anyway, why not just code in JavaScript and cut out the middleman?

The answer lies in Google’s description of Dart as “a language for structured Web programming.” If you think about it, we’ve never had that before. Sure, there are plenty of server-side languages that allow you to build Web applications, but on the client we’re limited to JavaScript (or Flash with ActionScript, which is essentially the same thing). JavaScript began as a means of adding simple interactivity to Web pages and has mostly grown organically over the years. It was never designed for building modern, large-scale Web applications such as Google Docs. Dart aims to address some of JavaScript’s more troubling aspects in a way that preserves those aspects that have made it a success.

4
Nov

What is the best NoSQL database in terms of performance?

What is the best NoSQL database in terms of performance? 1 answer on Quora

What is the best NoSQL database in terms of performance?

31
Oct

Samsung surges past Apple in smartphones | Stuff.co.nz

Samsung surges past Apple in smartphones | Stuff.co.nz.

Samsung Electronics Co overtook Apple Inc as the world’s top smartphone maker in the July-September period with a 44 percent jump in shipments, and forecast strong sales in the current quarter in a clear warning to its rivals.

Samsung only entered the smartphone market in earnest last year, but its sales have skyrocketed thanks to a sleek production system that rapidly brings new products to market. Apple introduced its first iPhone in 2007.

“In the handset division, Samsung has no real rival models to challenge its products except for the iPhone 4S. Apple and Samsung will continue to dominate the market in the fourth quarter,” said Kim Hyun-joong, a fund manager at Midas Asset Management, which owns Samsung shares.

Profits from the South Korean firm’s telecoms division, announced on Friday, more than doubled from a year ago to a record 2.5 trillion won (NZ$2.8 billion) and accounted for 60 percent of Samsung’s total profit, offsetting a plunge in earnings from its bread-and-butter memory chips.

Shipments of smartphones jumped 44 percent from the preceding quarter to 27.8 million units, up nearly four times from a year ago, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Apple’s iPhone sales shrank by 16 percent to 17.1 million units in the third quarter. Samsung had 23.8 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter, 9 points higher than Apple. Samsung’s flagship Galaxy line of products is powered by Google’s Android software.

Apple sold fewer phones in the third quarter, missing street expectations for the first time in year, as customers held off buying iPhones until the October launch of the latest version.

The world’s biggest technology firm by revenue reported a 4.25 trillion won operating profit for the July-September quarter, broadly in line with its earlier estimate of 4.2 trillion won.

That was down from 4.9 trillion won a year ago but up from 3.8 trillion won in the preceding quarter.

Samsung said its fourth-quarter earnings could be better than the third, boosted by one-off gains from its $1.4 billion sale of its hard disk drive business to Seagate Technology.

“I am cautiously optimistic on the fourth quarter outlook at this point,” Robert Yi, head of Samsung’s investor relations, told analysts.

“Looking ahead into the fourth quarter, when industry demand is traditionally at its peak, Samsung expects sales of mobile devices to remain strong and flat-panel TV shipments to increase,” the company added in an earnings statement.

Apple, whose iPhone sales account for nearly half the firm’s total sales, reported a 40 percent gross margin, or the percentage of sales left after subtracting the cost of goods sold. Samsung’s phone division reported a 16.9 percent operating margin, which further takes account of marketing costs.

Nevertheless, Samsung faces challenges as the new iPhone introduced earlier this month is notching up strong sales.

Nokia is also fighting back with its first phones based on Microsoft’s Windows software. And Sony Corp announced on Thursday it would take full ownership of its mobile venture, Sony Ericsson, in a bid to exploit its music and video library.

Samsung has announced the launch of its Galaxy Note mobile device, adding to the flagship Galaxy lineup of products. The device, powered by Android, will square off against a series of new models released by Apple, Nokia and HTC Corp.

The iPhone, introduced in 2007 with the touchscreen template now adopted by its rivals, is still the gold standard in the smartphone market.

Samsung may not have come up with the concept, but it has adopted Apple’s breakthrough smartphone idea perhaps better than any other handset maker. It tries to offer the Apple experience at a better price with better functionality.

“Samsung’s rise has been driven by a blend of elegant hardware designs, popular Android services, memorable sub-brands and extensive global distribution,” said Alex Spektor at Strategy Analytics.

“Samsung has demonstrated that it is possible, at least in the short term, to differentiate and grow by using the Android ecosystem.”

Profits from Samsung’s chip business more than halved to 1.59 trillion won, but the division held up well as its relatively high exposure to lucrative mobile chips helped the firm offset a sharp plunge in prices of commodity computer memory chips.

Samsung was the sole profitable firm among major global dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip makers in the third quarter.

Second-ranked computer memory chip maker Hynix Semiconductor and Japan’s Elpida Memory swung to deep losses as prices of DRAM chips used in PCs tumbled about 50 percent in the third quarter.

Samsung’s chip business is also benefiting from strong demand for mobile processor chips used in Apple’s iPhone and iPad tablet as well as its own Galaxy smartphones.

Samsung expected demand for PCs to remain weak in the fourth quarter because of weak seasonality, while demand for mobile devices and servers will be relatively strong.

“I see some signs that chip prices have hit bottom as inventories are running out. However, we don’t yet know when the industry is going to pick up since macroeconomic uncertainties overshadow the demand outlook,” said Park Hyun, an analyst at Tong Yang Securities.

Samsung’s display business posted losses for a third consecutive quarter on weak demand for TVs and PCs.

But losses narrowed from the previous quarter, helped by strong earnings from the OLED display, which is widely expected to replace LCD as the next-generation flat-screen in mobile devices and TVs.

31
Oct

Icons Shorthand For Accessing Information | Stuff.co.nz

The web is full of inspired and beautiful icons, all competing for our attention like puppies in a pound.

Some icons are more recognisable than others: the ubiquitous Twitter bird, the ”f” in Facebook or the arcs of an RSS feed. So what are icons trying to tell us?

Looking at icons is like looking at book covers, says the director of app-development company Outware Mobile, Daniel Gorog.

”People can feel the richness of an app through the icon,” he says.

”If it’s just a boring, white icon with the name of the product, then that’s usually an indication of what’s in the app. A high-quality icon probably means it’s a high-quality app, in the user’s mind.”

But when we look for apps, we’re like wayward puppies: we don’t really know what we want and we need help.

Icons aren’t just pretty pictures designed to capture our attention. They have become our standard shorthand for accessing information, from websites to apps. People wouldn’t even know what a web-directory tree is any more. And why would we want to know when we can just click a pretty little button to take us where we want to go?

Good design is also about squeezing that brilliant idea into a tiny space. ”The icon is the first thing the user sees, so it has to convey a message – and that’s hard to do within a 57-by-57 pixel box,” Gorog says.

Don’t assume you can use a logo as an icon. Logos are often seen in a large size, so it’s hard to make them work as an icon, says art director Jesse West, of games developer Firemint.

”They can lose detail, which detracts from the quality,” he says. ”An icon is smaller than your thumbnail … Icons can range from 57, 72 to 114 pixels and many other sizes but they are all a similar physical size on the screen.”

The best icons look great, small or large, says the director and lead designer at app development company Bjango, Marc Edwards. ”Icons should be simple and recognisable at small sizes but very detailed at larger sizes,” he says. ”It’s a fine art to get the balance between simplicity and detail.

”On the Mac, the Finder’s sidebar is small but ScreenFlow is huge. On the iPhone and iPad, icons may be shown as small as 29 by 29 or as large as 144 by 144 pixels. The App Store requires 512 by 512.”

But icons can be updated. ”It’s not like you’re printing a million copies of a brochure and pulping it,” Gorog says.

Branding helps us find icons, even if we have the attention span of a puppy. People can create their own set of icons that reinforce the brand of their website, says social-media consultant Fred Schebesta, the founder of Hive Empire.

”You can give icons away for free in return for a link back to your website,” he says. ”Or you might offer something [such as] icon design or website design related to that topic of icons. This is a smart way of using icons to market yourself.

”Another approach is to interpret Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in your own branding to give a nice interpretation of their functionality. You can do creative things with the Twitter icon but stay closer to Facebook as users [are so familiar with it].

”Or use a plug-in like ShareThis [which lets people share content and can be used to drive traffic]. There are lots of WordPress plug-ins you can use as well.”

Schebesta says the Google+ button affects search-engine results and brings new people to the site. ”The new Google+ has set a design benchmark,” he says. ”It’s nicely set out and flat.”

So where is the best place on a webpage to put these icons? ”I’d favour big icons close to the top or the side of the page,” Schebesta says. ”I’m not a fan of small icons, which can look like ornaments. If [social-media icons] are at the top, people can see what other people think before they read the page.”

Woof. Slurp. We’ve found our water bowl.

via Icons Shorthand For Accessing Information | Stuff.co.nz.

21
Sep

Google Wallet goes live | ITworld

September 19, 2011, 5:41 PM —

flickr/Podknox

At long last, Google has launched its Google Wallet mobile payment application on Sprint Nexus S 4Gsmartphones.

Google Wallet, which Google first announced this past spring, utilizes near-field communications (NFC) technology to send very short-range signals to nearby NFC tags to complete payments — or as Google tells it, you’ll only have to tap your smartphone on a store’s credit card processor and you’re good to go. For now the application will only be available to use on the Sprint network with the Nexus S 4G device, although Google says the app should come to other Android-based devices on other wireless networks in the near future.

BACKGROUND: Google Wallet: 5 things you need to know

In its initial incarnation, Google Wallet lets you pay for merchandise using either a Citi MasterCard or a Google Prepaid Card that Google says “can be funded with any of your existing plastic credit cards.” Google is giving users a $10 bonus if they set up their own Google Prepaid Card by the end of the year. During its initial announcement of Google Wallet, Google said that it had lined up 15 big-name merchants that have embedded Google Wallet NFC capabilities onto their stores’ credit card processors, including RadioShack, American Eagle Outfitters, Subway, Macy’s, Foot Locker and Walgreens.

From a security standpoint, Google is emphasizing three of the application’s key features that will help you keep your virtual wallet secure. The first is a simple PIN that Google says you’ll need to enter before making any purchase; or put another way, the same basic security measure that you enact every time you pay with your debit card. Google has also created a separate chip for its Wallet called Secure Element that stores encrypted credit card data and that is separate from your smartphones memory and that the company says will “self-destruct” if anyone tampers with it. And finally, Google is also using MasterCard’s PayPass technology to encrypt your credit card information as it’s being sent from your phone to an NFC tag.

NFC payments have become a hot feature on smartphones ever since Google first enabled NFC technology on its Android operating system when it released its Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”) update last year. Online payment company PayPal has also developed an NFC-based mobile payment application that runs on the Google Nexus S smartphone.

Read more about anti-malware in Network World’s Anti-malware section.

1
Sep

Google Apps vs. Office 365 vs. Zoho Docs | ITworld

August 30, 2011, 11:36 AM — Now that Microsoft has launched Office 365, it is officially “game on” for online office productivity suites. Microsoft may enjoy a near-monopoly in the desktop office suite market, but online it faces established rivals in the form of Google Apps and Zoho Docs.

We evaluated these three productivity platforms to see how they compare. We examined the office tools themselves, along with their file storage, their consistency of formatting, how they work on mobile devices and in different Web browsers, and how much they cost.

All three platforms provide office basics such as word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. All three also have an email client, online file storage, real-time sharing and collaboration, and some measure of cross-platform availability.

Review: Google Apps

Review: Microsoft Office 365

Review: Zoho Docs

As capable as these three offerings are, though, none of them can truly match the features and flexibility of a locally installed desktop office suite such as Microsoft Office 2010, or the open-source Libre Office. Desktop suites also have the advantage of being able to function without relying on Internet connectivity.

Ultimately, the choice of which suite is best is a subjective determination that involves other factors such as which mobile platform or Web browser you use. Based on our scoring, though, Office 365 is the best overall value, with Google Apps running a close second.

Office Applications

Applications are the primary factor in selecting any office productivity suite–online or not. If the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, or other tools included in a suite don’t meet your needs or expectations, comparing them becomes pointless.

If you’re familiar with Office 2007 or Office 2010, you’ll probably feel most comfortable working in Office 365. The Web incarnations of the Office apps have stripped-down versions of their respective Ribbons, but Office 365 still has the same look and feel overall, and the core features are present.

Zoho has a comfortable-to-use layout as well. The various Zoho apps look and behave a lot like the pre-Ribbon Microsoft Office, particularly Office 2003. Zoho stands out, though, with unique and innovative features such as a drop-down formatting menu to enclose selected text with assorted quotation marks or brackets, and another that changes selected text to all caps, or simply capitalizes each word.

By comparison, Google Apps’ menu bars and features seem austere. People who prefer the old-school text-based menu bar may appreciate the Google Apps interface, but Google Apps is more limited in what it allows you to do, both in formatting and in functionality.

The Office 365 apps offer a more diverse selection of fonts and formatting styles than either Google Apps or Zoho does. More important, those fonts and styles will align with the fonts and styles available in the online apps’ desktop counterparts. You can open Office Web Apps inside the appropriate desktop-suite program with the click of a button, and the desktop Microsoft Office suite can save files to the online storage so that you can access them when you’re on the go and using the Web apps.

When it comes to spreadsheets, unfortunately, none of the three online packages really deliver the power and flexibility that spreadsheet gurus need. The Web-based tools are sufficient for basic purposes, but lack many advanced features. Office 365 beats the other two, though, in look and feel (especially for users familiar with the Excel 2010 desktop software), as well as in macros and formulas.

Winner: Office 365 Choosing a winner here is difficult, because it is largely a matter of opinion. The unique formatting options in Zoho make that package compelling, but we give the edge to Office 365 for its synchronicity with the look and feel of Microsoft Office.

Files and Storage

Zoho comes with a meager 1GB of online file storage; you can purchase an additional 5GB for $3 per user per month. The space allocated for Zoho email is separate from the data storage and is either 10GB or 15GB, depending on the service plan. Zoho limits you to 10MB file attachments on email, which could become an issue if you’re planning to use a document with lots of images, for example.

via Google Apps vs. Office 365 vs. Zoho Docs | ITworld.

« Older Entries