Webware

Google is finally launching its general-purpose cloud storage service. It's late to market, but it doesn't matter. Google's the juggernaut. It will easily steamroll the pesky small-fry, like Dropbox.

Or will it? Google has not conquered every market it's entered. See social networking, or photo sharing, or blogging. In the consumer cloud storage market, there are serious, well-established, and highly valued companies already up and running. Can Google compete? Is it right for you? Let's compare it to the existing grid of storage providers.

Google Drive To review: Google Drive offers 5GB of free storage, … Read more

First there was Personal Capital, the "Mint for rich people" that gives users a clear look at their financial information, and, for those who invest $100,000 or more, access to financial advice and trading.

Then there was Wealthfront, which also gives people a dashboard for their investments and which will manage the money you put in, as long as you put in more than $5,000.

And now there's FutureAdvisor, which uses the same Modern Portfolio Theory that most advisers and algorithms use to pick investment vehicles. You tell it about your accounts, your age, your … Read more

Wikia is on a tear. But when this company's wikis start paying attention to the world around you, they're really going to take off.

Traffic for the topic-specific wiki platform grew 50 percent last year to 851 million page views a month, Wikia CEO Craig Palmer told me yesterday.

The traffic growth, he says, mostly comes from game and entertainment sites. Wikia is stealing growth from IGN and has hired two execs from there as well. Hilary Goldstein, former editor in chief of IGN Games, is now Wikia's gaming category manager. Eric Moro was editor in chief … Read more

Online storage is becoming a commodity offering. So you'd think that it'd be simple to buy and use, like an external hard disk. Not so much.

Storage companies are jockeying for position in this market by adding features and complexity. The latest: The backup product Mozy (a subsidiary of EMC) is getting a synchronized folder product that works a lot like Dropbox.

Called Stash, it's a shared folder that will draw space from a user's Mozy account. So if you're using 20 gigabytes for backup in a 50GB Mozy account, you'll be able to … Read more

Nick Hughes, the CEO of Seconds, has the best VC pickup line I've ever heard: "Last year, 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the U.S., and not one reached a local business."

That's a lot of cheddar.

He continues: "Texting is becoming the predominant mode of communication, but we cannot send or receive short messages with local merchants." Hence his business, Seconds, which opens up the SMS channel between merchants and consumers.

Running on the Twilio communications platform, Seconds gives merchants SMS numbers and a console that lets them manage communication with … Read more

Can't decide which TV, camera, or car to buy? Advice from friends too unreliable? Advice from expert reviewers (hello!) too soft? If you're the kind of person who likes to make purchase decisions based only on rigorous research, you might love Sortable.

Sortable is a product selection service that enables you to filter and sort a list of products based on criteria it extracts from published data. If you're looking for a camera, you can specify your price range, and then drill in by camera type, by brand, by video capability, and so on, down to some … Read more

Social Folders is one of the most potentially useful new services I've seen in a while. It's software for your PC or Mac that connects to your online social accounts and automatically mirrors new files you post online back to your hard disk.

Apple Photo Stream users know how this goes: you take a picture with your mobile device, and then later, when you're back at your computer, there it is, automatically. You don't have to transfer the image manually, you don't have to worry about copying it off your mobile, and if you have … Read more

Here's a case where a free app is better than a paid one.

There are dozens of to-list apps available for every operating system. I've tried many of them and even paid (too much) for the stunning Mac and iOS versions of Things. But I have since settled on the free, ultra-cross-platform product Wunderlist, and it's what I recommend whenever anyone asks me, "How do you keep track of stuff?"

What about Siri? No, thanks. Too iPhone-focused.

Wunderlist may not be able to listen to you, but it is simple. It lets you create multiple … Read more

Did Apple kick the ball into its own goal with its campaign against Flash?

By forcing Web developers, and ultimately Adobe, out of the Flash business, Apple made HTML5 apps better. That's good for Safari users, but it's also good for users on other Web platforms, like Android. If there's a truly good universal platform for online apps, it stands to reason that the smart developer will build apps for it, since this way the app will be available to the largest number of users. Right?

Furthermore, now that Adobe has HTML5 religion, the company is releasing … Read more