Webware

The hottest hotspots in New York...for nerds.

(Credit: Sam Lessin)

Just how powerful can the data behind a location-based application be? Extremely.

Earlier this month, the second annual Internet Week New York took place, and Dropio founder and certifiable data nerd Sam Lessin crunched a bunch of numbers based on what his contacts on urban navigation and friend-finding service Foursquare were doing. Lessin was working with a group of fewer than 100 contacts, almost all of whom are involved in the tech and new-media industries (this is the scene that birthed Foursquare and its predecessor Dodgeball, after all), and yet it's a fascinating peek at just how much this kind of data can reveal. He's posted it on his personal file "drop" on Dropio.

Lessin trawled through the data to find what time people checked into coffee shops in the morning (and whether they were doing this earlier or later on a given day), how much people "lost steam" over the course of a party- and conference-filled week, and how much the most popular gatherings actually matched up to the Internet Week New York official schedule. As it turns out, the hottest parties were impromptu, unofficial gatherings at the Standard Hotel and, um, Sing Sing Karaoke.

Obviously, this isn't perfect. Foursquare updates are voluntary, which means that data can't say a thing about what people are doing when they aren't telling the app about it. The presence of an app like Foursquare, too, can also skew social activity: word about the massive impromptu party at the Standard Hotel bar, for example, spread when the Foursquare check-ins started snowballing.

But when you have enough people participating--which, as of yet, Foursquare does not--the critical mass starts to correct some of those issues. It's a fascinating sneak peek at what sort of value this data could have down the road.

What we can also look forward to: pretty infographics, Orwellian privacy concerns. Eek.

Web storage and collaboration tool Dropio has just put out a useful new way to control who can access files by using Facebook Connect. Called "friend lock," the system uses your list of Facebook friends as a simple directory that you can pick and choose from to create a white list of approved contacts.

Once you've logged in with your Facebook credentials and pick the people who you want to be able to have access, you can fire off invites that show up in their Facebook in-boxes. You can also set it up to publish a note to your Facebook wall whenever you add or update a file within that storage drop (just like it can do with Twitter). Then, if one of your approved friends sees it, he or she can click on it in your news feed to hop right to it.

Here's a quick video of how it works:

This is one of the neater uses of Facebook Connect to come out thus far. Most services that have implemented it have simply used it as a way to let people skip registration and bounce data back to their news feeds. In this case, it's giving users a very high level of control over contact management outside of Facebook's walls.

Web storage provider and collaboration tool Box.net has launched three new features aimed at giving its business users more customization, and simpler ways to set up collaborative workflow.

The first is tasks, which are action items you can assign to specific files. To start with, the service gives you three actions (approve, update, and review) that can be applied to yourself or someone else. Say, for example, I have an article I'm writing and saving in Box. When I'm done with it, I can assign my boss to either review or approve it. The same goes for updating something like a list of phone numbers or e-mails; I can send that out to multiple collaborators, telling them to add the information in the context of an action that can be kept track of.

You can choose from one of three premade tasks, or make your own.

When anyone finishes a task, the service gives them the option to add a customized response. That message gets sent to the person or group who assigned it, while crossing out the original task request that lets you track who did what during or after a project. What isn't saved, however, are any custom tasks you've created in case you want to reuse them on other projects at a later date.

Along with the addition of tasks, business users now have the option to brand Box's workspace with a company logo and color scheme. Any other users in your team will see this when they use the service, as will anyone you've given file-reading privileges to.

Secondary to this, Box is now letting business users create what it's calling "global" folders, which get their own URL that the creator can choose. Similar to what Dropio provides, this is a permanent place where anyone can get at whatever files are there, as long as they have the URL. They can also subscribe to the folder and get e-mail notifications as soon as new files are added. Unlike Dropio, however this cannot be done via RSS--you have to sign up for it using your Box.net credentials.

These new features continue to round out Box, which is smartly trying to break out of being perceived as a place for users to dump their files. With tasks, branding, and the recently released Web document editor, it's getting much closer to being a do-everything-in-the-cloud service.

If you're sharing a folder with its own vanity URL you can change the way it looks to others as well.

(Credit: CNET)

On Thursday, Web storage provider Dropio took its presentation tool Presentio out of private beta and opened it up to all users. Similar to the recently launched, real-time activity view found in its collaborative storage folders (or "drops" as the service calls them), the new tool gives users a simple set of controls to present those files to others.

It's effectively like watching someone else's screen as they navigate around the storage folder. If they open a file, you see it straight away. If they jump to a certain page in a PDF or PowerPoint presentation, you see it too. The same goes for music and movies, which play right in the browser using Dropio's integrated file-viewing tools.

Presentio also comes with a few handy features, like the capability to hand the presenter controls off to another person. There's also a free conference line that you can call into, along with a chat room that pops out from the bottom of the screen (which can also be found in Drops where real-time collaboration is turned on).

What I like about this tool, and more so than others, is that it's assuming that you're already using the storage service to stash your files. You can move files you already have stashed on Dropio, or very quickly upload new ones, then get straight to business. It's just taking that extra step out of when it's time to present to others.

Here's a quick run through of how it works by Dropio's founder Sam Lessin:

This is the new Dropio interface with a chat pop-up at the bottom.

(Credit: Dropio)

When Facebook announced that its news feed would turn into a real-time "stream" of updates and media, it became clear that the Twitter-like model of fast-moving information flow was gaining a real foothold in the dot-com world.

Now, file-sharing service Dropio has opted to turn its "drops"--the pages where people can drag and drop any number of multimedia files and then password-protect them--into streams optimized for collaborative work. If you're working in one of them, it updates instantly for all users.

There's also a new feature, much like in Google Docs, Zoho, and other collaboration tools, which lets all members looking at a given "drop" chat with one another. Dropio has also turned on access to drops from third-party chat clients with Jabber support, like Adium and Pidgin.

But founder and CEO Sam Lessin said that he doesn't see the collaboration-focused new development as bringing Dropio, which turned on Twitter support last summer, in competition with the Web's numerous productivity-suite applications.

"We're still not interested in, and we're not competing in the 'let's open up a document and edit it together in real time' space," Lessin said to CNET News. "I've yet to see...a normal workflow where you want to do that. The workflow for us is much more along the lines of opening up a pipe between 15 people who are collaborating or 100 people who are in a conference audience and let them collaborate around the event."

A more direct competitor, he said, would be the 37Signals product Campfire.

Dropio has launched a new applet called Playlistio that allows users to post music to the cloud in just three clicks. According to the company, users can find the file, upload it to the cloud, and stream it anywhere they can find a Web hookup and connect to Dropio. And with the help of the company's new Apple App store application, Droppler, users can even stream their Playlistio songs through their iPhone. The free applet is available now.

Google announced Tuesday that it has launched a new skills qualification program. Dubbed Google Analytics Individual Qualification, the new feature will allow users to demonstrate proficiency in Google Analytics.

According to the company, it will provide a free online course that covers Web analytics techniques, as well as Google Analytics implementation and administration. The company hopes that businesses will require their IT professionals to take the course and become more skilled in Web analytics. And in the process, Google is hoping that its qualification will join a laundry list of others that IT professionals are encouraged to have.

Shoeboxed, an online receipt depository, has partnered with FreshBooks that will allow users to export their receipts directly to the online invoicing company. Any Shoeboxed customer can have their receipts scanned into the service and export them to FreshBooks. No fee will be charged, but to use the new Shoeboxed feature, users will need to register for both sites.

Online customer review site PowerReviews announced Monday that it has moved from a subsidized pricing model to a paid subscription model with monthly subscription fees. The company also announced that it has launched a new service called AnswerBox, which is a question and answer tool that allows knowledgeable customers and staff to address questions posed by shoppers. The new tool and revenue model, which was designed to help it survive the economic downturn, are live now on the company's site.

In other PowerReviews news, the company has also announced that it's working with eBay's ProStores, a customizable online store service, to provide access to its customer ratings for ProStores' merchants. The service will be available for free for 30 days and after that period, the customer will be given a limited-time 15 percent discount off the standard $80 per month charge.

A look at the new Dropio home page.

(Credit: Dropio)

Dropio, a file-sharing start-up that lets you easily toss anything from photos to phone calls in a "drop" (kind of like a virtual storage cabinet), has launched a new look.

The redesign makes the site look a little slicker, and certainly accentuates Dropio's "easy to use" mantra. It's also clearly a consumer-oriented product now--in comparison, the old design looks like a back-end content management system. That's good, because the company hopes to appeal to Luddites as well as techies. (For a business model, Dropio offers premium accounts that get rid of the 100MB free account storage limit.)

Feature-wise, it's pretty much the same, but Dropio's team has said that it's "about a thousand times more customizable and useful" thanks to a newly reorganized dashboard. They also say that the speed of the site should also be a notch higher.

With AOL-owned Xdrive on the auction block, competing cloud storage providers are scrapping together all sorts of plans to woo these potential paying customers to their services. Two in particular, Dropio and Box.net, have set up simple escape hatches wherein Xdrive users can simply plug in their account credentials and have their data piped over.

There's a catch, though: both services have free storage caps well beneath Xdrive's generous 5GB. In the case of Dropio, that cap is 100MB. To supplement this, the service is offering Xdrive users a special premium drop, which bumps up the cap to 1GB. Normally these premium chunks of storage cost $10 a pop, and only keep for a year's time (read: subscription service).

Likewise, Box.net's free cutoff cap is 1GB. If a user wants more space than that they'll need to upgrade to a higher plan, which starts at $7.95 per month to get that same 5GB users had back on Xdrive.

So to summarize, if you're an Xdrive user looking to jettison your data to someplace besides a hard drive, either of these services is really great, but they'll cost you. The 5GB equivalent will be $40 in Dropio (for your first year, then $50 after that), and $95.40 for a year in Box.net. If you're willing to stick to 1GB, Box.net is the better deal, since you won't have to pay $10 when free premium credit from Dropio expires. You could also just throw caution to the wind, and go all-out with 50GB of ad-supported online storage from Adrive.

Online storage provider Dropio has a cool new feature for its users today, allowing them to tap into Twitter to post updates every time they add files to one of their storage folders. Dropio's architecture is based around folders (called "drops") so after plugging in your Twitter log-in to any specific drop it will broadcast changes every time files are added or removed.

What makes this feature particularly useful is that you can assign it to specific drops but not all of them at once, meaning if you want to keep some files and uploads private you don't have to blanket that information out into the Twitter community. It also works with any file type supported by Dropio, including messages left by phone using Dropio's free voice recording tool.

Users who would prefer not to use Twitter as a broadcasting service can also subscribe to alerts via SMS. You can plug in any numbers you'd like alerts sent to (per drop) and it will send out a link every time one is added. If you feel like saving your wallet from SMS charges there's an RSS feed per drop as well.

Also new and notable is support for one of my favorite browser add-ons PicLens. If you've got the plug-in installed hitting the PicLens button in the top right corner of your drop will display all the files in a giant wall, which is a more more enjoyable way to parse through folders full of pictures, videos and audio.

To see a video of the Twitter integration in action you can go here. Below is a shot of what your Tweets will look like. It took about 30 seconds for it to process mine from upload to tweet, which isn't too shoddy.

Dropio users can now drop in their Twitter credentials and have any updates sent out to their Twitter account. This is on a per drop basis, so you can tweak certain folders to broadcast, while others don't.

(Credit: CNET Networks)