internet

The cloud storage and collaboration space is more competitive than ever before. Google recently rolled out its new cloud-based document and storage solution and faces competition not just from cloud companies such as Box and Dropbox, but from Apple, Microsoft and Amazon as well. Here’s a brief comparison of the big players:

Amazon Cloud Drive: 

• Storage: 5GB free (purchases from the Amazon MP3 Store don’t count towards storage limit)
• Mobile Integration: Cloud Player for Android, no official iOS app
• Desktop Integration: Amazon MP3 Uploader/Downloader for music
• Pricing: $1 a gigabyte per year
• Collaborative Editing: No
• File Size Limitations: 2GB

iCloud:

• Storage: 5GB free, 20GB is $40 a year, 50GB is $100 a year
• Mobile Integration: Built into iOS 5
• Desktop Integration: Mac OS X 10.7.x and Windows 7
• Pricing: $40/$100 a year
• Collaborative Editing: No
• File Size Limitations: No

Box:

• Storage: 5GB free, up to 50GB for personal accounts, 1TB for business and unlimited for eneterprise
• Mobile Integration: iOS, Android, and BlackBerry
• Desktop Integration: Mac, Windows, web
• Pricing: Personal accounts start at $9.99 a month for 25GB, business plans start at $15 a month (at least 3 users required)
• Collaborative Editing: Yes, more robust editing for business accounts
• File Size Limitations: 25MB – 100MB for free accounts, up to 2GB for business accounts, up to 2GB for business accounts

Dropbox:

• Storage: 2GB free and 500MB per referral, paid plans up to 100GB
• Mobile Integration: Android, iOS, BlackBerry
• Desktop Integration: Windows, Mac, Linux, web
• Pricing: $100 a year for 50GB, $200 a year for 100GB
• Collaborative Editing: No, but many cloud document services integrate with Dropbox
• File Size Limitations: None for desktop, 300MB for web uploads

Microsoft SkyDrive:

• Storage: 7GB free (25GB for users who signed up before April 22, 2012), Up to 100GB
• Mobile Integration: Official apps for Windows Phone 7 and iOS, unofficial Android apps, mobile web access
• Desktop Integration: Windows, Mac and web
• Pricing: Additional storage available for $0.50 a gigabyte, 100GB of additional storage is $50 a year.
• Collaborative Editing: Yes, with Office Live Web Apps
• File Size Limitations: 2GB (300 megabytes for web uploads)

Google Drive:

• Storage: 5GB free, up to 16TB
• Mobile Integration: Android, iOS (coming soon)
• Desktop Integration: Windows, Mac, web
• Pricing: $30 a year for 25GB, $60 a year for $100GB
• Collaborative Editing: Yes with Google Docs
• File Size Limitations: 10GB

A survey of the Center for european economic research (ZEW) in cooperation with Creditreform came to find that e-commerce is used rather for buying purposes than for sales. The survey concentrated on the association for sourcing of payment in advance.

Usually the term e-commerce refers to the selling and buying processes that are conducted via the internet.

The imbalance of selling and buying processes is especially apparent in the software and IT sector:

Nearly 64% of the companies working in the IT- and software sector say that they have ordered products and services on the internet last year. In contrast to that just 29% of these companies sold their products or services online. Mirna Sarbu, scientist at the ZEW announces: “The companies of the software- and IT-service branch are with 81% leading in buying via the internet.”

Considering the usage of e-commerce for selling products, providers of telecommunication services are leading. Nearly 58% of these corporations offer opportunities for their customers to buy their products online.

Generally the e-commerce processes peaked out in 2010. Market-leading companies like amazon, facebook, google or ebay as well as younger online-shops like zalando.de shape the online trading.

What experiences have you made regarding e-commerce? Feel free to leave a reply!

Based on: www.marktundmittelstand.de

Last Saturday, the first website ever celebrated its birthday and turned 20. Congratulations!

On 13 November 1990, the physicist Tim Berners-Lee from the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN in Switzerland released the website info.cern.ch.

Take a look at the original page!

How was the aim of this project defined? “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-areahypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”

According to worldwidewebsize, the web contains at least 2.95 billion pages by now – speaking about a large universe of documents! That is an impressive growth rate, right?

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