This week you’ll have likely come across two new acronyms: SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). They are new powers being discussed in the US congress which will give content owners the power to shut down any website that is facilitating or involved in piracy online at any level.

The problem…

There’s no doubt that piracy is a massive problem, and if left unchecked, is likely to get worse. Major TV companies and record companies are lobbying the US government tackle the problem. They’re demanding that the US government gives them the ability to shut down sites that are involved in this complex and illicit crime. The major problem with SOPA isn’t what it’s set out to try and do, but the way it’s been implemented.

The end of a free internet?

Traditionally, the web has been the one place where censorship doesn’t get a look in. That ethos changing goes against the Internet’s fundamental principles. This week many of the world’s most-loved websites went dark in protest to the bills, which would have the power to censor the Internet. For many opponents the Internet can’t be policed, and shouldn’t be policed, in such a scatter-gun approach. There’s no doubt that Wikipedia, who went dark for 24 hours, are in no way supporting piracy – but are fearful of what might happen once a country takes it upon themselves to be the world’s police online. If SOPA passes, all an IP owner would need to do is send a letter to his company of choice in the US — be it Google, PayPal, the ISP, even Visa or MasterCard — and have it claim a “good faith belief” that the target site in question has infringing content on it. The recipient of said “belief” would have just five days to either comply with the order, or challenge it in court.

Who’s making money out of piracy?

Interestingly despite lack of any working legislation Megaupload was shutdown by the FBI for wide scale piracy today – which leads us to ask the question: do we even need SOPA & PIPA? Well, sites like Megaupload have always stated that they are not involved in piracy and do not condone its users uploading copyrighted material. But, according to the FBI they know full well what their services are being used for. The FBI has stated that their business model is a simple one: the more their users upload files to be shared for free, the more money they make, by selling unlimited downloads for their service.

The main problem with Megaupload is that the money they’re making from the service never filters down the labels, studios or content creators. Sites like the Pirate Bay are the same. Although, they never shared content for the purpose of making money, they do it because the believe that everything in the public domain should be shared freely without any recourse. Megaupload, on the otherhand, have taken this model one step further: they’ve monetised it. Profiteering of illegal downloads to such a degree that they are making colossal amounts of money, money that should be going to content creators.

What’s wrong with our current laws?

At the moment piracy is so widespread and happening in so many countries’ that the current laws only allows for content owners to go after the downloader, and not the facilitator. If Universal Studios or the MPAA tried to sue everyone who has watched a downloaded TV show or film this would obviously be incredibly impractical and the legal bills would be astronomical. It has worked, and people have been prosecuted, but it will never solve the problem.

Essentially, both the SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) will allow content owners to go after the sites that are profiteering from the downloading of illegal files. This, at the moment, would mean many of the world’s leading filesharing locker sites would be in the firing line. Sites like Mediafire and Megaupload (which got shutdown today) would almost certainly be shutdown or blocked, even if many of its users are using the sites in a legal way. It has always been argued by these websites that it would be impossible to know the exact origin of all files and content on its servers, so they essentially work from a position of ignorance. With SOPA and PIPA they would no longer be able to say: “Well, we just didn’t know”. The main issue many have taken with SOPA and PIPA is the collateral damage these new powers would create. How would it effect small internet startups? Many opponents aren’t in favour of piracy, but, want a free and open internet – something SOPA & PIPA would threaten. If you happened to mention an infringing link, video, or torrent on a site or service you happen to use, the said service would be legally obliged to remove it. Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, YouTube, you name it — everywhere on the web that has feet in the US would be at risk of some form of internet censorship.

Will SOPA & PIPA solve piracy?

It’s doesn’t take a genius to recognise that no amount of legislation will solve piracy, for many internet savy people a new pragmatic approach is needed. If technology start-up companies like Spotify or Netflix can wean illegal downloaders off sites like Megaupload & Pirate Bay, and into legitimate channels of distribution then eventually illegal downloading would be significantly reduced overtime. It’s clear that throughout the world consumers feel that they aren’t getting value for money, or, in many cases, aren’t able to get the content they want, at a time they want, for a fair price. And if no one will give them this, the choice is a simple one: get it for free.

What other approaches could work?

Services like Spotify & Netflix have proved so popular that it’s clear that many people are willing to pay for content, but at a price and model they’re happy with. Quite often when you buy a CD only a fraction of the money actually goes to the artist. If the royalty system was overhauled and labels and studios were more open to new ways of delivering content and sharing the spoils – then we wouldn’t be in the state we’re in at the moment.

The archaic way some content providers are run means they’ve been playing catch-up with a digital revolution, and instead of embracing it, they’re still fighting it. The two sides will have to focus on creating a proper and fair process by which criminal websites are appropriately policed, while ensuring adequate protection for those who are wrongly or unfairly accused.

Intellectual property has always been a bit of a minefield online – to think that you can shut down a site down and solve piracy is looking at the problem through rose-tinted glasses. As soon as one is shut, ten will reappear, that is until the demand is diverted to legal channels. This legislation will simply push piracy even further underground. SOPA has been halted, at least temporarily, following opposition from the White House, while PIPA is still under consideration by the US Senate.

One thing for sure is this won’t be the last time you have heard of SOPA, PIPA or online piracy.

Will SOPA & PIPA Actually Stop Online Piracy ? is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Web-based CRM Systems are becoming an essential feature of all business marketing plans as a way of keeping your myriads of client data up-to-date, and by keeping track of which marketing campaigns work well and which ones bomb.

While implementing a CRM is all well and good to discuss, getting into a meeting room with a CRM company, hearing their exciting pitch and fainting when they tell you the cost of personalising their software to your company is something most businesses, particularly small businesses, prefer to avoid.

An alternative to buying your own CRM System is to go to the cloud. Online CRMs work well for small businesses because they’re easy to implement, cost-effective and you don’t need your own massive servers to store all of your growing data- they keep it all for you via the inter-webs.

It will still take a bit of time to get all your data uploaded, but once that’s done you’re ready to send flyers to all your contacts over the age of 60, email all your contacts over the age of 25 and Facebook all of your contacts over the age of 9.

Payment-wise there are usually various amounts you can pay per month or per year, depending on how in-depth you’d like your cloud-based service.

Usually online CRM companies will charge you per user, so it’s important you initially figure out who in your team is likely to hang around for the next few years. If someone in your company who is a nominated subscriber does leave, it’s usually no drama to change over the name on your account, or simply pretend to be them Facebook-hack style.

So if you’re sold on a software as a service (SaaS) solution, what are the best online CRM companies out there?

5. WiredContact.co.uk

WiredContact is a UK-based hosted CRM company that prides itself on UK-based support whenever you need to get in touch with them.

Its service offers the usual CRM tools such as managing and reporting on leads, sales opportunities, the activities of all of your sales reps and reports on your won / lost / pending ratios.

A nice touch to WiredConnect’s service is that you can easily tailor your interface to suit your business. By providing standard HTML-based templates you can alter the look and feel of your platform and choose from a range of custom views to suit your eccentric tastes.

Unlike some other CRM providers, WiredConnect will let you use your own servers to host data if you prefer which is one way to keep your fees down.

The more licences your company buys, the lower the cost for each licence, so 1-4 licences will set you back around £278 per user, per year, but 10+ licences will cost a noticeably less £174 per user, per year.

4. Lunar CRM

Lunar CRM may not be the biggest online CRM name in the business, but it’s local based in Coventry rather than California, and it’s small enough to still provide quite a personalised service as opposed to bigger US online CRM providers like ZohoCRM (which on a side note, I’ve not included in this list due to its ridiculous extra storage costs)

While it’s small, Lunar CRM offers a product to rival the big boys with the ability to compare suppliers and their product performance, breakdown your relationship with different customers and see which staff are doing a cracking job at selling ice to the Eskimos.

If something off the shelf isn’t exactly what your business needs, Lunar CRM can also design and build a bespoke system to fit your difficult needs, and also offers technical support 24/7.

Because they’re so boutique, you will have to contact them directly for a quote but we hear they’re priced in a similar vein to Salesforce.

3. SugarCRM

SugarCRM is one of those Californian-based companies, but has a UK branch Sugar UK supporting its service across the Atlantic. Sugar UK has engineers based in picturesque Surrey so support time differences won’t be a problem.

If you’re looking at a bit of a combo package, SugarCRM is an online CRM system that can bundle a VoIP phone system to integrate your company’s communication with customers directly into SugarCRM.

This means you can access features including click-to-dial and recorded-call logging. It also saves you money on an expensive PBX with everything hosted and managed on the network.

There are three different editions you can subscribe to, starting with the “Community” plan which is at the very reasonable cost of free. You do get what you pay for though and for a CRM system comparable to others on the market, you will probably want the next cheapest “Professional” plan at £235 per user per month.

For the extra cash you will get features like manual Outlook integration, sales forecasting, market analysis and field-level security. If you pay around double that amount for the “Enterprise” plan, you get some cool Android, iPhone and Blackberry apps at your fingertips plus a few other nifty features.

2. Open CRM

Open CRM is another online system option for your business, and what makes this company interesting is that regardless of your subscription level, all customers have access to all of Open CRM’s available features.

There is no disabled functionality so you’re never compelled to upgrade your account, or change your business strategy to fit within a set of limiting features so often associated with a cheap-option plan.

What Open CRM has going for it is incredibly competitive pricing. Ten users each with 10GB data storage and a ridiculous 2TB file storage will set you back £125 per month or £1500 per annum. Compared to big guns Salesforce.com, 10 users with 1GB data storage and 6GB file storage starts at £450 a month or £5400 per year.

While that may seem like an unnecessary amount of storage, the guys over at Open CRM take the view that as a business your storage needs will only ever grow, so any additional storage costs should be considered from the start.

If you somehow find your terabytes a bit too limiting, you can increase your data storage allocation with an additional 500GB for £15 per month, or 1TB for £25.00 per month, or if you’ve got high-res videos of every single person in your database, an extra 1.5TB will set you back £32.00.

1. Salesforce.com

One company that has done a very good job getting itself known in the market is Salesforce. The fact that its targeted marketing works so well is indicative of how good their systems are.

Apart from its standard CRM offerings, Salesforce.com has a number of cloud apps and platforms to help businesses keep on top of the game when it comes to interacting with potential customers.

It provides a private social network for your business called “Chatter”, a means to monitor your social media engagement called “Radian6”, as well as the world’s first enterprise cloud database, creatively called “Database.com”.

Salesforce.com has a swag of impressive clients making use of its services including O2, Boots, Confused.com and even the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.

For an entry-level very basic system, you only need to fork out £10.20 per user, per month, but the £45 per user per month offers a wealth more of the standard CRM options your business will most likely benefit from.

Top Five Web-Based CRM Systems for UK Business is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

The main idea behind the opening of the store is to increase awareness about various Google products especially its Chromebook. According to the company blog, “Many things in life, like football and rock music, are best experienced in person. Chromebooks are no exception.”

GOogle is producing Chromebook in collaboration with Samsung and the ultrabook runs on Google’s home grown operating System, Chrome. The laptop is mainly cloud based and the data is stored on Google’s cloud system. Currently the store sells only Samsung Chromebook as the other Chromebook with Acer has not yet been released in teh UK.

At 285 sq. feet, the Chromestore is not quite Apple Store, however, it is quite good for a dry run. The company is planning to draw its future store expansion strategy based on the performance of these beta stores. This store is expected to remain operational until December, when its performance will be vetted. According to CNET, Google is also planning to open one more store on October 7, while a few more will be unveiled over the course of next few months.

The company is already running such stores in the US, however, it did not specify whether the company would be expanding its retail venture into other countries as well.

Google Opens Chromestore in London is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

First off, Amazon is trying to lure new customers by offering unlimited music space. However, it would be applicable only for the limited time. However, if you buy your music from Amazon MP3 music store, then you can keep your purchases on Cloud Drive for free and these items would not be counted against your storage quota. Amazon has also released its Cloud Player for iPad. So now, you can access your Amazon music library from your iPad as well. Earlier, the library was accessible through Android devices and PCs. Cloud Player is now compatible with Safari browser too.

Amazon had launched its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player in March this year and with the latest updates, these services are now accessible through Android devices, PCs and Apple devices. It offers 5 GB of free space and if you have bigger library then you can opt for paid plans starting from $20 a year.

Amazon Augments Cloud Drive: Provides Unlimited Music Storage Space is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Well mac users will be able to use their fancy Thunderbolt ports for more than just a display port for the first time this week as Promise Pegasus has shipped the first in a line of external RAID hard drives.

And Apple has release the 2m cable and the necessary firmware update to allow you to transfer files at speeds that was only a pipe dream as of a few weeks ago.

When Apple introduced the latest refresh to the MacBook Pro line-up a couple of months back, everyone got all excited about the new hardware’s Thunderbolt port.

Thunderbolt is Apple new transfer technology which blows USB 3.0 out of the water for both speed and expense from the looks of it.

The R4 is a four-bay external drive with 4TB and 8TB capacities and Promise Pegasus are also offering the R6 which is a six-bay versions and supports 6TB and 12TB capacities.

Apple and Intel have touted Thunderbolt as the next great PC-to-peripheral interconnect, with its 10Gbps theoretical maximum throughput. This trumps both eSATA (3Gbps) and USB 3.0 (5Gbps), plus Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained so monitors, hard drives, and other peripherals can be connected together to the single Thunderbolt connector on newer iMacs and MacBook Pros.

Apple’s $49 Thunderbolt cable is 6.6 feet in length and has a Thunderbolt connector on each end. Apple has stated that the new circuitry and interconnects for the new cables are part of the reason for their initial high price. Prices are expect to go down once more devices and cable manufacturers come out with product.

And if you’re lucky enough to own both a new MacBook Pro and an iMac, you can connect them together in Target Disk Mode. This lets you mount one computer as an external drive on the other, just like in the old FireWire Target Disk Mode.

The Thunderbolt cable, as well as a Thunderbolt software update for compatible Macs, is available now.

Apple Thunderbolt Cable And Devices Now Available is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

So were just digesting all the news from the WWDC from Apple. The main headline; no new hardware. But Apple did put on an impressive show with their new software focus. A future where all Apple devices talk to each and update themselves autumagically – all made possible through the iCloud which be free.

Their big announcement was left until the end and was unveiled by Steve Jobs himself. iCloud is a set of free services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store all of your content in iCloud.

When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it – it all just works.”

MobileMe has bitten the dust and has been re-architected and rewriteen to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users will now be able to share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push mail account is hosted at the me.com. And better still your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers.

The App Store and iBookstore are getting the iCloud lick of paint too, now when you download an app or book on one device it will seamlessly and automagically will be on your other devices too. This has been something users have been asking for a while now.

In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.

Steve Jobs went on to explain iCloud backup next. It will backup you devices over the Wi-Fi so when you change handset all you have to do is sign in and the iCloud will transfer all apps, music, books, camera roll, device settings and app data. So your devices will always mirror each other, even if you happen change one of them. In theory it sound amazing.

iCloud Storage does a similar job but for all documents created using iCloud Storage API’s. And will then push them to all your device. When you edit a document one device it updates on your other devices. This will apply for Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Users will get 5GB free storage for their mail, documents and backup. Users will be able to buy even more storage, with details announced when iCloud ships this fall.

Photostream is a new service that aims to push all photos taken or imported to all your devices and computers. You will be able to store 1,000 photos on each device so they can viewed or moves to an album where they will be save forever. Once a album has been save it will automatically be stored on a users Mac or PC – . iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, which is plenty of time to connect your devices to iCloud and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi.

One of the most exciting announcements from Apple was how iCloud will work with iTunes. It will let you download previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS device at no charge (up to 10 devices, the first for the music industry. And in the future all music purchases will can be downloaded automatically to all your devices.

No more buying tracks and not be able to listen to it on your family of devices – you’ll be able to have it on all devices through iTunes and the cloud. But if you download an album on your iTunes on Mac you can already put it on your iPhone, Shuffle and iPad as far as were aware – so were not entirely sure about the merits of this functionality. Of course if you buy from your device you can’t do this. But the iCloud does all this automatically and seamlessly.

The interesting part comes now. Steve Jobs announced that they will launch iTunes Match, a service that replaces your music collection with AAC DRM-free version if Apple can match it to one of their tracks from 18 million strong song collection. Apparently it is done in minutes rather than weeks.

iTunes Match will be available this fall for a $24.99 annual fee. Apple today is releasing a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud, without iTunes Match, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3. iTunes in the Cloud will support all iPhones that iOS 5 supports this fall.

Apple is ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers, including the third recently completed in Maiden, NC. Apple has invested over $500 million in its Maiden data center to support the expected customer demand for the free iCloud services.

So Apple’s WWDC was a bit of disappointment from my perspective, call me old-fashioned but if there’s nothing new or shiny then it’s not that exciting. iCloud is a good move for Apple. But personally, I don’t use documents or anything like that, I only ever buy CD’s or buy music from stores that has nothing to do with iTunes. So for some it won’t make a blind bit of difference. And it’s only available in the US for the time being. And there’s no sign of Apple data centres in Europe yet so how long we have to wait is unclear.

What do you think of the WWDC announcements ? Excited ? Or totally underwhelmed ? Let us know below.

WWDC 2011: iCloud – Steve Jobs Shows Off The Future Of Cloud Computing is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

According to the rumors, iCloud is going to be much more than just music storage or streaming service. Dubbed as ‘Digital locker’, the cloud was expected to store your iTunes music so that you can access it from any internet enabled device. You may wonder why one of the world’ most innovative companies did not think of this earlier. Cloud storage would effectively means that you do not splurge on devices with bigger storage. You also do not need to re-download content.

But Apple is planning to take it a notch higher and is going to turn it into an online repository of all your content such as videos and photos. But, do not expect the price of your devices to drop since they won’t need to have bigger storage capacity. The success of Cloud depends on the connectivity available to you especially mobile coverage.

Somehow, it looks like the tech companies and carrier companies are moving in opposite direction in this regard. While more and more tech companies are urging you to put your data online, while carrier companies are doing away with their unlimited data plans. Carrier companies are also throttling the speed after a limit. While capped data plans will increase the cost of storing data, since in most of the cases you will be paying for a chunk of cloud as well, the slow speed is likely to negatively impact the whole experience as well. Further, recent PSN security breach and Amazon outage have also put a question mark on the robustness of current cloud infrastructure. So, how successful Apple is going to be? Only time will tell.

Apple to Launch Cloud Service and Name it iCloud: Would You Put All Your Data Online? is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Around Five years back, Amazon started its public cloud services, where is lent out its server space to outside companies.  Since then, the business had been thriving for Amazon and it has plenty of corporate clients ranging from industry bigwigs like Netflix to hot startups like FourSquare. Not only that, but the business’s success led to an increased interest in cloud computing and now many big tech companies have entered the fray.

So far, Cloud Computing had been praised for its virtues. With public cloud computing, small (or big) companies do not need to worry about maintaining their own data centers and they can simply outsource the task to cloud company. But Amazon’s data center failure has again put the spotlight on oft-debated question of efficiency and security proposition of using a third party storage system. The user companies, especially the smaller ones, now need to ask themselves whether the trade off is worth it. This question is especially important for the companies which do not back up their data on multiple servers at different places.

This week had been especially bad for the data centers. Apart from Amazon outage, these massive data centers have also been panned by Greenpeace for their enormous appetite for energy. Greenpeace also slammed the data centers for relying on dirty sources of energy like coal. Cloud computing and massive data centers are fast becoming mainstream, however, to make them truly acceptable to all and sundry, the cloud computing pioneer need to work towards solving these issues. It also raises the question that if corporate clients are not safe depositing their data in public digital vault, then how safe is it for common retail consumers?

Amazon Still Struggling with its Data Center: Puts a Question Mark on Future of Data Computing is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

The new service is expected to add a new dimension to Apple’s iTunes. It will let the users access their iTunes library from any internet connected device, so the company is essentially providing you with a digital locker where you can keep your music collection. However, Apple is not the first company to offer this service as Amazon has already conquered the front. Amazon launched its digital locker service about a month back.

Though, Apple is trailing behind Amazon, but it still managed to beat Google. Apparently, Google yet has to sign a deal with any record label and Apple has already won approval from Warner Music. This deal will open the doors to a rich music library with major artists such as Green Day, Flo Rida and Linkin’ Park. Reportedly, the company has signed a deal with one another major record label, though its name has not been disclosed.

The fact that Apple has signed new deals with record labels show that its new music service is going to be more than just a repository of user uploaded media. For letting its users upload their media to the remote server and then retrieve the media, Apple did not need new license from record labels. It could have followed Amazon’s trail, which claimed that it did not need new license for its cloud music service. So with the new agreements, we expect Apple to come up with a multi functional streaming service. For more updates on this service, keep watching this space.

Apple Endorses Cloud Computing: Works Towards Streaming Music Service is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

But when we see the 100^th 3D TV and Millionth ‘iPad Killer’ it can start to get a bit stagnant.

Step in IoSafe, the disaster-proof data storage device company.

Their latest hard drive is so rugged it’s been branded “an aircraft blackbox for mobile data”.

-The hard drive boasts a titanium alloy enclosure which is crush-resistant up to 5,000 lbs
-Allows usage at up to 30,000 feet
-Can stay immersed in water for up to 3 days
- Shields data from continuous exposure to UV, sand, dust, rain, salt, fog, ice or freezing rain for up to 24 hours.
-Gravity wise it can survive drops onto concrete up to 20 feet.
-It can also stay immersed in diesel fuel, oils, hydraulic fluids and aircraft fuels to a 12-inch depth.

Spec wise, the hard drive offers up to 250 GB to 1TB of data storage for HDD and 256 GB -512 GB for SSD.

Possibly the biggest target audience (bar the military) for this device, Journalists were requested to blast the thing with shotgun rounds to show its impressive hardiness during the electronics convention.

10 rounds of Winchester Expert Game Load Steel ammo from a Remington 12-guage shotgun could not destroy the data.

So there you go, CES is cool again and if you keep breaking your hard drive and losing your data, then give IoSafe a call.

Source: ibitimes

Meet the new IoSafe hard drive. Bulletproof, waterproof, chemicalproof. is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com