Seagate to acquire Evault

Seagate, the pioneer in storage devices is buying a privately held company called Evault. Evault specializes in providing online or remote backup with disaster recovery and continuous data protection. CDP services are attaractive to small and mid size companies which cannot afford to spend on infrastructure and personal on DRP. The Asian tsunami, Sep11th and the hurricanes cycles in the US have made DRP planning critical to every business.

In 2005, Seagate bought Mirra, a provider of digital-content protection products for the home and small businesses. Seagate also has acquired Action Front, a data recovery company.

"This is really planting the seeds for a market that I think is pretty exciting," said Brian Dexheimer, a Seagate executive vice president.

Once having acquired EVault, Seagate intends to offer services in the areas of data recovery, online backup and recovery, and archiving for small and midsize businesses.

"[Small businesses] need a backup and data recovery service, and data compliance. It is not different than the kind of services SunGard offers" for larger outfits, Seagate chief executive Bill Watkins said. "[Services are] not going to replace my core, but we think it is a high-growth area."

With companies like Salesforce offering hosted CRM solutions, Google aiming at email and office productivity solutions and Seagate offering remote backup and recovery, we can see more and more businesses getting comfortable with the SaaS paradigm. SMB's can concentrate on their core business and operate with skeletal IT staff.

On the home user side, there are companies like Box.net, carbonite offering remote storage and backup solutions. We can add the amazon S3, rumored live drive and Gdrive to the mix. This development validates the market in remote storage and we can see more action on this front in 2007.

Google AJAX Api limitations

Google is focusing on AJAX API and discontinuing the SOAP API.Google AJAX Api limits the number of results to a max of eight results per query . If the users want to view more results, they are diverted to Google.com. Pagination and providing a way for users to view more than eight search results without leaving the site is the most requested feature. Displaying just 8 results severely limits any serious use of the AJAX Api. So far, google is not been responding. Perhaps its a business decision or the feature is difficult to support, other wise Google has been quick in responding to feature requests.

A recent post by a user on google-Ajax search forum sums it up pretty nice

I keep seeing people ask for more than 8 results and pagination.
Please keep in mind that it is not a technical issue why Google hasn't
added this feature...it's a sound business decision on Google's part.
The AJAX Search API is designed to ultimately drive more traffic to
Google. By giving sites the ability to display every single result
would cause other users to visit Google less often.

Google is too smart of a company to create a bunch of mini-googles that
could ultimately drive traffic away from the parent site.

There is a feature request listed on the issue tracker and no fix is planned for this issue.

More about it here.

Google apps for your domain

Google has launced Google Apps for your domain. Customers can register domains with Godaddy for $10/year and get started. It comes with Gmail, Calendar, Google Chat and Google pages. Once the account is setup, customers can add upto 200 users to the domain. This can serve the email needs of small size companies.

The product has a long way to go before it can be used by running a corporate website. Google page creator is an immature product and it doesn't serve any purpose. Few things that I hope google would add to Google Apps

• FTP Publishing in Google page creator. Its overwhelming to upload large number of files one at a time. This is a basic requirement for creating any serious website.
• Integration with Blogger.
• Integration with Picasa Web
• Integration with Google docs ? Its strange that it is not integrated !!

Google patent search

Google has launched a new feature called Google Patent Search, which lets you search for US Patents. Having tried the USPTO patent search, Google patent search is a vast improvement. On the USPTO website, its difficult to view the patent drawings ( have to install quicktime for viewing images). Google is hosting the patent information, including the images and are very easy to navigate. Not all patents granted are listed, so this search is not comprehensive and not recommended for people who are planning on filing a patent anytime in the future.

Google Patent Search is currently available in English, and it includes only U.S. patents. We’re always looking to extend our products and services to users worldwide, and we hope to continue to expand the patent offices we cover and the language interfaces available.

This will put paid patent search providers out of business. For inventors, this is a great tool for re-search and help them with their filings.

Socialtext launches offline capability

After Zoho, its now the turn of Socialtext to introduce "offline editing" capability.

Like the TiddlyWiki software on which it's based, Socialtext Unplugged relies on JavaScript to make the Web pages into self-contained applications. "It merges the document paradigm with the Web paradigm of computing," Ruston says.
Thus users can visit a Socialtext Unplugged page, edit it, and save it using only a Web browser. And upon re-establishing an Internet connection, changes can be synced to a server-based wiki.

AirtelCallhome sucks big time

Bharti telecom has launched a service competing with Reliance’s “Reliance Call India” India calling service called “Airtel Call home”.Reliance is very popular with Indian Expats/NRI's and they use this service for calling India on a regular basis. Using the reliance service costs 12.9 cents per minute to call any number in India. Airtel is offering the same service at 7.9 cents per minute.

There is an introductory limited time offer from Airtel, offering double the minutes on the first purchase.

Now comes the interesting part. To say that their website sucks is an under-statement. The website is full of bugs and not a single page works. Registration will take hours if not days. Once registered, users cannot login. If you are lucky few who can login then none of the pages inside will work. After registering it doesn’t tell you how you can use the service or mail you the user id and password. You have to call the call center, wait for hours to be connected and then ask them to mail you your user ID and Password. If you want to complain about the service and try to use the contact us page, even that doesn't work. The whole thing is one big convoluted mess and who ever designed/developed the website should be shown the door right away.
Stick to Reliance, unless you are interested in undergoing Chinese water torture at the hands of Bharti.
Update: Reliance India Call slashes it rates to 7.9c for India calling. It is matching the Airtel offer with double the talke time till Jan 31st (Thanks Sudheer)

Google Checkout and Firerfox

Google Checkout doesn't seem to work with Firefox. Have been trying to use Google Checkout for purchasing a compact flash card on buy.com and after clicking on the "google checkout" link, nothing happens. There was an $1 debit on my credit card though, which is sitting in pending transaction. Been struggling with this for the past one week and eventually I tried using Internet Explorer. The transaction went through without any hassles. Perhaps this is an issue with buy.com , because I am sure Google would do everything possible to ensure cross browser compatibility. To think about it Buy.com or Google just said "No thank you" to 15% of their holiday shoppers. They are lucky that I came back using IE, since this item was sold off on Amazon.

Note: Have turned on comment moderation, to take care of some comment spam.