Give us a call or send us an email. We love hearing about new concepts and how we can help and we love telling people what we do to better educate about what technology can do.
Want to know more about what cloud computing is? Check out this great post from our SkyLedger Team. They did a great job of simply explaining the basic concepts behind cloud based computing.
http://blog.skyledger.com/2010/09/does-that-cloud-look-like-the-internet-to-you/
It seems everyone is Apple Crazy these days. Even myself. I actually shudder at times when I think about purchasing a new device from HP or Dell. Microsoft is for bankers, lawyers, engineers, and maybe those guys that only like to play video games with a keyboard, not me. Is that really true?
In these difficult times, like you, I’m trying to get the most out of my money, and I’m not so sure Apple products are worth their steep price tag. For example, I can purchase a basic Inspiron 11z for $400, but a Macbook Air starts at $1500. There’s no doubt that the Macbook Air is a superior machine to the Inspiron 11z, but is it better by $1100?
I’ve done quite a bit of music and video production at the professional level, and I wouldn’t trade Logic Pro and Final Cut coupled with a quad-core Mac Pro for anything in certain cases. But when I’m outside the studio and editing room, I’m finding less and less of a reason to pay such high prices when more and more of my personal, and even professional life, exists solely online.
Safari is no reason to stay on an Apple machine, most serious Apple users don’t even use it. Firefox and Google Chrome seem to be the standards for industry professionals. Even the beauty that was iTunes is beginning to fade as people turn to services like Pandora, Last.fm, and Lala.com for their music entertainment needs.
Microsoft isn’t the only giant to topple anymore, and security risks are becoming more of a problem for Apple as they become more popular. Yet another issue resolved by storing data in The Cloud where a team of highly competitive trend-setters are making huge leaps forward in security and recovery.
It will be very interesting in the next two or three years to see if Apple can stay on top as consumers start realizing that brand identity isn’t as important as accessibility and cost.
With the cloud gaining so much traction it is about your browser not your hardware.
When we say “The Cloud” – we mean web-based systems that exist on the forefront of user-friendly technology in a way that rivals standard downloaded applications.
The Cloud is already responsible for three of the most widely used applications in the world: Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube. Each of these revolutionary platforms exist not as a program on your device, where the bulk of the content is stored in a limited fashion, but instead, these three platforms take advantage of the near-limitless capacity of the web.
No matter how much physical hard-drive storage you have, you will always find a way to fill it to capacity with data. And while nanotechnology is making great gains in the way we store data, those advancements come at a cost no small-to-mid size business can afford, certainly out of range for almost any individual.
Think about if your computer or mobile device had to store every email, every photo, and every video you ever viewed. Impossible, right? We’re already past the point of thinking that our content must be stored completely on our physical device.
But that’s not the only advantage to working within The Cloud.
24 hour service, available anywhere. As long as the Internet is available, your service is working, and if for a brief moment it isn’t, your aren’t paying for its recovery, unlike shackled systems that usually require in-house professionals.
The benefits don’t end there. Cloud-based systems are almost always cheaper, easier to access, and simplify user experience.
I’d be willing to wager that Google Docs, Calendars, and its Content Management are universally better than the narrow-focused programs your employer is currently using. And not only are they easier to learn and use, but they’re incredibly cheap when compared to the software licensing rights for standards programs that offer the exact same service, often with less features.
Aren’t convinced working in The Cloud is just as good as using standard applications? Then check out this video, showing how a web-based system mimics an application perfectly for iPhone:
With all that said, why are mobile apps the craze? Why are we writing sexy maintainable code for our web applications and writing unsexy hard to maintain compiled code for our mobile devices. Apple attempted to make the apps boom a web based boom when the iPhone first launched but the time was not right. With the growth of html5 we really hope more web apps pop up on mobile devices than compiled hard to maintain apps.
We are really excited about projects like jqtouch that are helping to bring web delivered applications to mobile devices easier, faster, and better than the compiled alternative. Take a look at the project here http://www.jqtouch.com/
The benefits, it seems, are almost endless. Don’t be afraid, embrace the change.
Below is a quote from Techcrunch’s coverage of the Google event highlighting their ChromeOs. We at Cloudmanic Labs are so excited about ChromeOs. Google is taking computing to a place we have been cheerleading for for years. There is no reason to ever store files locally or have some beefy file server in the back of the office ever again. Great work Google!!!!
“In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works. With security, because everything is a web app, we can do different things. No system is ever fully secure. With Chrome OS no user install binaries, so we can see bad things easier. We run completely inside the browser security model.”
As if you even had to ask! It describes us perfectly. The first part of the name is very easy. The cloud refers to running software on the cloud (AKA the Internet). For more info on what the cloud is check out Cloud Computing @ Wikipedia.org .
The second part is prefect as well. If you visit dictionary.com, “manic” is defined by “excitement, madness, insanity”. Each one of those words describe how we feel about writing software applications that run on the cloud (the Internet). We spend just about everyday or our live writing software as a service applications to run on the cloud. The pile of Mountain Dew bottle proves it!!!
Lastly, the labs part refers to our way of work. Everyday is a new experiment for us. “If I move this to over there will the application get faster?”, “If I use new new just out of beta plugin will our database be less bloated?”.
Hope you find the name as perfect as we do.
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