Many internet giants have offered cloud storage service. From the most popular dropbox to skydrive and the new google drive, they all offered the similar service. In case you're looking for such service and need to compare a bit, let's check out the top 3 cloud storage providers and choose a suitable one.

Free storage size comparison

• Free size – Only 2GB free as default, but we can increase it by inviting friends, the total size can be up to 18GB (500 MB per referral)
• Google Drive – 5GB free as default.
• SkyDrive – The free size already upgraded to 7GB till present, the previous offer is 25GB.

Paid storage size comparison

If you think the free storage is not enough, they all provide upgrade plan with a fee. Let's take the 100GB size for instance. $60/yr is required for Google Drive, SkyDrive needs $50/yr and $199/yr from Dropbox!! So you see the Dropbox is the most expensive platform.

Note: If you're gmail user and applied the Google Drive paid service, your gmail account size will be upgraded to 25GB.

File Synchronization

We can synchronize our computer folders to their cloud drives. With Dropbox and Google Drive we have the option about what files we would like to synchronize. Although Microsoft announced they like to make things as simple as possible, we don't have the option to choose what folders we like to synchronize on Skydrive.

Platform support

Here's the interesting thing. While Microsoft and Google design their mobile device Apps, their apps are not compatible with each other. But they both are compatible with IOS. Dropbox is the only platform with both Linux and Blackberry compatible.

Internal file reader comparison

The Skydrive took advantages of many MS products like MS Office. Users can even edit documents inside a browser using Office 365 and even edit documents in groups or share links to files publicly or privately. Similar features are available with Dropbox. How about Google drive? the GDrive is probably the most brilliant one. It can open 30 different file types inside the web browser and can even open Photoshop files even if you don’t have Photoshop files on your machine. It even has an Evernote like OCR scanning feature, which scans text from an image.

Speed comparison

Probably because of the new of Google Drive, with 100MB shared bandwidth, the uploading of 300MB files completed in 10 minutes with GDrive while SkyDrive is around 50% completed and 30% for Dropbox.

However, being the most popular and biggest cloud drive provider, the dropbox has great tech advantages. In the testing, google drive will duplicate the uploading while dropbox not. The GDrive has more advantage in overall bandwidth. From overall  comparison, Google Drive is a powerful competitor to Dropbox.

For quick view, here's a table about the main features among Google Drive, Skydrive and Dropbox

No matter the wordpress core software or free blog platform, it's always the primary considration for many people who like to put up a website in quick time. From some reports, the wordpress powers over 70 millions of websites on the globe. Have you ever thought who supports wordpress and the entire backend team? Recently I found the following and think it's necessary to share with you all in case you're not aware of it yet.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is a quiet Web powerhouse.

WordPress now powers 70 million sites, up from 35 million sites a year ago. Almost half of the biggest blogs in the world are hosted by WordPress.com or run on their own versions of the open-source WordPress platform.

The company is profitable, and expects to bring in $45 million in revenue this year, according to CEO Toni Schneider and founder Matt Mullenweg.

The majority of Automattic revenue comes from premium subscription services, and that’s supplemented by a “VIP” enterprise publisher business — in total, there are half a million paying customers — as well as a recently launched advertising revenue-sharing network.

Now Automattic, which has long been a distributed, flat company run by the two-man team of Schneider and Mullenweg, is bringing some outside executives into the ranks.

New CFO Stuart West, who was most recently an executive-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, had also been at Wikimedia, Kno, Tivo and InfoSpace.

West will be in charge of all things financial and operational. “When you see this much usage, you know there’s an extraordinary revenue opportunity,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Paul Sieminski, previously of Gunderson Dettmer, will become Automattic’s first general counsel.

Automattic is not your normal Silicon Valley Web start-up, between its commitment to and grounding in open source, its workforce distributed around the world (the company currently has no office, though it’s planning to open a new San Francisco headquarters soon), and its relative lack of interest in tech trends.

For instance, way after the rise of Tumblr and the rest of the social Web, WordPress.com last year added its first social features, to tie its blogs, bloggers and readers together into a network.

The company was slow to get social because it was more focused on expanding its blogging tools into a more general publishing platform, and also because of its general commitment to openness over walled gardens, Mullenweg said.

Meanwhile, Schneider said mobile usage has grown dramatically in the past year (is there any site or app for which that’s not true?), with a 500 percent increase in the number of mobile views and amount of content created from mobile devices.

What’s next for Automattic is tighter integration into social networks and a more seamless set of tools across different devices, the two said.

“We march a little to our own beat, and sometimes it’s out of sync with Silicon Valley — and that’s been to our advantage and disadvantage,” Schneider said. “We don’t get sucked into the latest thing, while some of our competitors are distracted by the latest shiny object. The disadvantage is sometimes we’re against the grain of what everyone else is excited about, and people ask ‘Why don’t you have x yet?’ — but we go at our own pace.”

One other way Automattic is unusual is its incredibly low rate of staff attrition. Mullenweg said that the company currently has 106 employees — and it has only ever hired 118 people.

Read the original article at Allthingsd

More and more people stay longger on social network websites like facebook, twitter. Because of this, the online sellers are trying various methods to promote their products/services on those networks. A perfect idea is important to archive success, but if we can pick up a perfect time to send out the ideas it will return twice value with less work.

Email Marketing

Email is the traditional and basic marketing tricks. Regardless any kind spam email, do you know when people open email box in a day? Here's a graphic analysis

The above graphic stats is the research of English people, it shows the golden times for email marketing is 10:00AM – 17:00PM from Tuesday to Thursday.

Blog Marketing

What's the time for people to read blog? Let's see this graphic

The answer is most people read blog news at breakfest time around 8:00AM

Facebook Marketing

Facebook is the largest social network site, it's pretty essential to learn about people's activity on it. Here's the facebook acivity graphic

It shows the perfect marketing time on FB is 7:00AM – 12:00AM and 19:00PM – 21:00PM. The research also shows people are more active from Friday to Sunday. So make sure to handle your marketing campaign correctly and spend each penny on right place.

Now turns to Twitter. What's the best time for twitter marketing? The answer is 12:00PM – 20:00PM, From Wednesday to Friday

The mobile device marketing is new but fast growing business, the time for mobile marketing is very similar to twitter. Most people connect to mobile during 12:00PM – 20:00PM.

Cloud computing is popularily deployed by many IT groups and everyone would like to catch up with the up to date technologies. In cloud computing industry, amazon is definitely doing leadership because of their powerful system and popular business. But who is ranked NO.2 and 3 and the rest? After a bit research we found the following ranking. Hope you get a general idea about the current status.

Amazon Web Services is, by all accounts, the largest cloud service provider by far, although good luck finding third-party numbers to verify that. Amazon, like most of the big cloud providers, doesn’t disclose much about current or planned data centers.

New research from Accenture analyst Huan Liu estimates that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) runs on a whopping 450,000 servers. Amazon does not break out AWS revenue, but some say it could already be a billion dollar business.

So, stipulating AWS as No. 1, here are seven cloud rivals that could give it a run for its money over the next few years.

1: Rackspace:  While Rackspace encompasses managed services and pure hosting businesses, it’s also a major cloud provider with actual, paying customers.  Measuring by revenue and VMs, Rackspace currently has a lock on the No. 2 slot by a wide margin, said Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. As one data point, Rackspace public cloud revenue rose to $189 million in fiscal year 2011, up from $100M the previous year. Going forward, that business should only grow as Rackspace brings more OpenStack implementations online.

2: Google:  If you’re talking number of physical servers, Google could already be the biggest cloud player. As for paying customers? That’s harder to discern. Google is one of the few companies that can (and does) invest in the pure computing firepower to contend with AWS. If you count all that Google Apps and Gmail storage, then Google’s obviously a huge player. The Google App Engine platform-as-a-service is still around but isn’t a factor for business developers.

3: Microsoft:  Two-year-old Windows Azure has big capacity, but actual traction is unclear — but it is clear Microsoft is going for the gusto. Microsoft just launched an Azure-focused startup accelerator in Israel to help boost demand. Next week, it is expected to announce timing for the first of its ERP products — actually the first of any of its major products — to run on Azure. And, going forward, Microsoft Azure’s embrace of Hadoop could attract more of the next-generation big-data workloads that the cloud vendors compete for.

4: IBM:  IBM SmartCloud is coming up fast on AWS and Rackspace even now, according to one cloud storage expert. That news surprised me but probably shouldn’t have, given IBM’s size and resources. And face it: IBM knows data centers. Like Microsoft, it is bringing Hadoop into its cloud with its InfoSphere BigInsights service.

5: Hewlett-Packard:  HP’s been all over the map on cloud plans, promising an Azure-based implementation a few years ago that has gone nowhere and more recently standing up an OpenStack-based public cloud. Zorawar “Biri” Singh, SVP for HP cloud services, told the New York Times last week that HP’s cloud will add features and capabilities beyond what AWS provides.  HP has also said it wants to challenge AWS for the hearts and minds of cloud developers. HP has had its share of woes lately, but it’s still a tech power, and provided the cloud is a priority with new management, it would be hard to rule out.

6: VMware: VMware’s vCloud already runs a ton of clouds for third-party providers, and the company’s Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service is gaining traction. All of that plus the Mozy cloud storage service, which VMware manages for parent EMC, means that the company — which dominates server virtualization inside the firewall — is gaining a pretty impressive toehold in the cloud beyond as well.

7: Facebook: Don’t laugh. It’s a wildcard, but Facebook is putting serious sweat into data centers. And it’s applying lessons learned to the Open Compute Project, which aims to apply open source development to hardware design. With more than 800 million users, Facebook knows a thing or two about cloud infrastructure. True, Facebook doesn’t offer cloud services now, but then again, Amazon used to just sell books. Facebook could evolve into many things. GigaOM’s Derrick Harris has already suggested that Facebook could be your next software vendor.

Scrappy competitors could make a play, but…

“To compete with AWS you would need three things: Billions to invest, the wherewithal to manage technology on a massive scale and freedom from legacy constraints. Google and Microsoft surely have the money as well as the technology chops, but both are constrained by commitments to their valuable core businesses. Who might come in to compete out of the blue? Maybe Facebook, if they were looking for another line of business,” said Robert Shear, president of Greystone Solutions, a Boston consultancy that uses AWS for most of its development and deployment work. “My guess is that AWS will keep on growing until they bump up against anti-trust limitations in the US and the EU.”

So there you have it: seven contenders who could duke it out for the No. 2 spot in cloud services over time — and maybe even battle AWS for the top spot. Who am I missing here?

Original article posted on this Gigaom page