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.”
Just over a year ago Matthews Etc. Internet Services spun out Cloudmanic Labs, a company focusing on software as a service solutions for medium and small businesses. Well, it took just over a year for us to get our new site up and branded with our new name but its done and here we are. Just been crazy busy.
Matthews Etc. Internet Services has focused for many years on being a one stop shop for small and medium size businesses when it comes to their web presents (or just about any technological need). Times have changed. Some of the basic phone calls we use to get have gone away…..”Could you install a CMS system for us”, “Can you install a blog for us”. We are now getting calls like “I have this amazing web application idea I want to take to market could you help us do this”. This is for the better. People are getting more educated on how to install and manage basic websites and they are are starting to realize running software on the web is way better. The last reason we love this shift is we are truly passionate about moving desktop applications from the native computer to the cloud. So no more Matthews Etc. Internet Services has it use to be. Matthews Etc. Internet Services is still around and will be maintaining past clients and will be supporting Cloudmanic Labs at an IT level.
Cloudmanic Labs is as it sounds a group focused on innovating web technologies to further the growth of moving software to the clouds. Everyday, we are looking at how we can help businesses focus on the business and less on the IT needs. Don’t worry we are still based in Portland, Oregon!
Cloudmanic.com is in a very simple state right now but we plan to keep it up to date with what we are up to. If you are a current client nothing has changed, we are still the same old consulting firm you have grown to know and love. If you are a new client, we are welcoming new business everyday give us a call or an email and we can see what we can do to help you. If you are a business bookmark our blog for updates on our up and coming software as a service products….coming in early 2010.
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