Webware

Omniture, a company that provides integrated Web analytics and marketing services, announced on Tuesday that its SiteCatalyst measurement tool will now work with native iPhone applications. According to the company, developers and marketers can use App Measurement for iPhone to gain analytics data in real time. The tool will be available in January 2009.

Social online-storage company Wuala on Tuesday announced that it has launched an application programming interface that will allow third-party developers to create applications for the service. The company also said its users can now make selected files available to the community through a link to each file on the user's account. The API and the new features are available now.

Mapping company Rand McNally announced on Tuesday that it has enhanced its Web site with its More Roads-Better Directions initiative. The new service will provide users with driving directions to more than a million more home addresses and 22,000 more miles of roads. The company is using data from Navteq and Tele Atlas, but it claims that it's working with local municipalities to improve its service and find roads that are not included in maps by those providers.

DailyMe, a company that collects news stories on a slew of topics from around the Web, says it will make its various content feeds available through Amazon.com Kindle e-book reader. According to the company, Kindle users will be able to subscribe to the organization's home improvement content, along with top stories and book reviews. The feeds are available now on the Kindle.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced on Tuesday that they have developed a new tool called ContextMiner that allows users to automate the process of collecting links of online videos and blogs. The researchers claim that its tool collects metadata and extracts embedded video to provide users with the number of views a respective video has attracted and what sites are linking to the clip.

You probably already know that you can take that desktop computer you leave on all the time and use its spare computing power to look for extraterrestrial intelligence or a cure for cancer. Swell. But suppose you're not so much into saving the world? Suppose you want to just save your data? Or make a few bucks? Check out these three services that use your PC's storage and bandwidth to serve you--not the world.

Wuala. This is a cloud storage service that you can use to save files for backup or sharing. But on Wuala, the cloud is made up of the hard disk on your PC plus those on other Wuala users' computers. Data on the Wuala network is distributed in tiny, encrypted, redundant slices among users, so no one can see another person's data. The more space you set aside on your PC for Wuala storage, the more free storage you get on the Wuala network. You can buy your way in if you don't want to share. Although I am very skeptical about relying on the "social grid" for storage, the price can't be beat. We covered the company during its closed testing period; the service is opening up to the public today.

CrashPlan. This is another storage play, but with a strong focus on backup. Unlike services like Mozy and Carbonite, where you pay a fee for access to centralized backup servers, with Crashplan your backup exists on the PC of someone you know (and vice versa; you can back up your mom at your house and set her machine to back up on yours). Since the Crashplan company doesn't have to pay for either storage or bandwidth, it can offer a lower-cost service: a $50 one-time license sets you up; most online backup services charge a monthly fee. Since our previous coverage, CrashPlan has added new features like Web access to your files, business accounts, and a "seeded backup" option: you do your first backup on a spare drive on your local machine, then install the drive on a friend's computer across town, after which only file additions and changes need to be transmitted.

Gomez. Unlike the previous two products, which employ your unused hard disk capacity, Gomez pays you for borrowing your bandwidth. The company evaluates response times and performance of major Web sites, which are its clients, using real-world computers on real consumer Internet connections. To do this, it installs software on end users' machines, and when these users are not using their PCs, the software on them hits the test servers and reports on the speed of access. Users don't get to see the data, and Gomez has no access to users' traffic (or so the company says). The big benefit: Cash. The testing happens when you're not using your PC--like when you're asleep--and you get paid for the bandwidth rental. Company spokespeople say most people make only a few bucks a month but some earn up to $45 a month from the service. Could be a good way to repay yourself for your Internet connection. (I'm going to see if it will work on my always-on Windows Home Server.) Note that if the Gomez network already has enough users in your area, your PC might not get much test work, and you won't make a lot of money.

From the save-the-planet perspective, I'm not sure it makes good sense to leave a computer on just so you can use services like these that use up your idle resources. But if you have computers you're going to leave on anyway, your math may show that it is more cost-effective to pay the added electricity bill in exchange for a lower cost of online storage, or income from the test service.

Wuala is a new company with a compelling story for Web users: If you want to share files--music, videos, anything--with your friends and family, it will let you do it for free, with no file-size or bandwidth limits.

The catch: You get 1GB of storage for free. Beyond that, you get access to free storage in proportion to the amount of storage from your own hard drive that you share with the Wuala community.

You add files to your Wuala drive by dragging them into the app.

Wuala uses a "mesh" of hard drives from all its users. Everything you share gets sliced into 500 or so pieces and the distributed in tiny bits, and redundancy, to thousands of other users. When you, or someone you're sharing the file with, wants to load or play a file, it's pulled in from users, BitTorrent-like.

It's not easy to build a reliable storage network based on end-user PCs, which tend to be online only sporadically, and with poor upstream bandwidth. Wuala rewards its users that stay online: The amount of storage users have access to is equal to the amount of storage from their own drives that they've set aside for the Wuala network, multiplied by the average percentage of time that their machine is online. In other words, if you're sharing 20GB of your hard disk, and your PC is on 50 percent of the time, you'll be able to use 10GB of space on the Wuala network. PCs that are network-connected less than 20 percent of the time cannot share their space at all.

All files you put up on the network are replicated extensively, so you'll always be able to get the data that you've uploaded. CEO Dominik Grolimund assured me. We had a nice talk about the mechanics of his network's security, redundancy, and reliability that I won't replay here, other than to say that if Wuala doesn't work as reliably as traditional centralized storage, it's going to be a very short-lived start-up.

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