Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, plans to add online storage to its menu of services later this year.
The storage service, called CloudFS, is available to a limited number of customers in a closed beta test and will enter more a more widespread public beta test sometime later this year, the company said.
Developers and businesses can sign up to take part in the initial beta service now.
CloudFS gives developers access to almost unlimited amounts of storage for 15 cents per gigabyte, including replicated copies of backed-up data.
(Credit:
Mosso)
Mosso in February launched an online service called The Hosted Cloud that so far offers e-mail hosting and managed hosting services.
As Gordon Haff wrote at the time, Mosso takes a slightly different approach than other online service providers:
The core concept behind Mosso's Hosting Cloud is that many Web-based applications or sites are built up using largely common stacks of technologies such as PHP and MySQL databases. Mosso takes advantage of this fact by providing the means to provision applications running on one of these common stacks. Mosso is effectively offering cloud computing at a level of abstraction more akin to that of a Web hosting provider.
Haff notes that "Mosso takes care of patching and updating the operating system and other software stack components...it's a bit different than what's generally discussed in the context of cloud computing."
CloudFS will be accessible via the REST Web services API, and language-specific APIs such as those supported by .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby and Python, the company said.
Thumbplay, a sales hub for mobile ringtones, videos, and games, will announce tomorrow at the CTIA conference in San Francisco, California, that it has also become a free database for user-generated content.
Account-holders can upload and store media from either their cell phone or computer to their Thumbplay "locker." From there, they can send images and clips to friends via SMS or e-mail. Users can also download content from fellow Thumplay members for free, and grab code to affix the image on any personal Web page that accepts HTML embedding. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a way to assimilate another user's contribution into your personal media gallery. UPDATE: They can, however, be stored in a separate folder for favorites.
Thumbplay will also reveal two upcoming Facebook apps, whose presence will complete the circle of what is essentially a free storage and sharing service with some social networking characteristics.
The first of these is Thumbplay Share, which will display photos from your personal locker and automatically update them when you add a new image to Thumbplay.com. Photo Portal does the reverse, allowing users to send photos from Facebook albums to any cell phone.
The apps won't be publicly available until an unspecified date later this week, though Thumbplay's President and CEO, Are Traasdahl, stopped by CNET's San Francisco office to demonstrate. They look pretty effective so far, but more word on that when I get a chance to try them out in the wild.
- prev
- 1
- next
