This past week I became aware of a series of new videos, this time produced by Corning Glass. The videos are titled A Day Made of Glass, A Day Made of Glass 2, and A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked. The videos feature a family of the future as they go through a day using computer devices that are totally integrated into their environments; environments made of glass and based on Gorilla Glass, which is used in most of the smartphones and tablets computers we use today.
As the narrator of A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked says at the culmination of the video "the story is about the way we will use technology and communicate in the future. A story about ubiquitous displays, open operating systems, shared applications, cloud media storage, and unlimited bandwidth." The emphasis on cloud media storage is mine, and brings us back to the topic of my last OnMouseClick, cloud computing.
Cloud computing is here today, and will become more and more prevalent in the future. Last week I mentioned DropBox, a easy to use, free cloud computing solution. There are hundreds of other such systems available for use and you are probably already using some of these systems, even if you are not aware of it. As mentioned in last weeks column, if you upload your photographs to photo sharing services you are using cloud computing. If you use Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail you are storing and accessing your email in the cloud. Anyone who uses Google Docs is cloud computing. Google Docs users upload documents such as word processor files, spreadsheets and presentations, which are then stored on Google servers and available for online editing from any computer.
Apple recently unveiled a new cloud based service, appropriately named iCloud, which allows users to backup iPhones and iPads online, and share documents across devices. The service offers a free 5 GB of storage to anyone with an Apple ID, and additional storage space is available for a fee.
Services exclusively offering cloud storage for hard drive drive backup are becoming increasing popular with both individuals and businesses. Theoretically, if you backup the data on your computer hard drive to a cloud storage service, you never have to worry about a hard drive crash, a power surge frying your computer, losing your laptop, or a disaster that destroys external backup drives. Companies that provide cloud backup generally store your computer files on multiple remote servers so that client files are available 24/7, even if one of the host servers is down for maintenance.
I say theoretically, because you have to be a smart consumer if you chose to backup your precious data to the cloud. A good place to start your research is an online article published by PC Magazine last August, Disaster-Proof Your Data with Online Backup. The article provides a good overview of cloud data storage, and reviews several of the popular services.
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