In a perfect world, MobileMe would be free. I mean, after you pay an insane amount of money for a computer and expensive display adapters, they could at least thank you with a free MobileME account. But, no sir. They want to scam you for your very last dime, but it won’t work this time.

MobileME offers cloud services for Mac, Windows and iPhone/iPod touch. You get your email (a @me.com e-mail address), contacts and calendar in sync on all platforms, iDisk online storage repository, a web gallery to publish photos from iPhoto/Aperture or iPhone and movies from iMovie, iWeb publishing space, Back to My Mac feature and a web interface to access all your data. All these features share in common only 20 GB of space.

I have to admit that the tight and elegant integration with the Mac and the plethora of features it offers, makes MobileME a great service. But it is not worth 99$.

Mail

Mac

Set up Mail to use your Gmail account with IMAP. You get 7+ GB of space, 20 MB attachment limit, labels (folders) and the possibility to gather all your mail from other POP3 accounts.

Windows

I’d say skip Outlook all together and stick to Gmail’s web interface, but if you like Outlook, configure it to use Gmail with IMAP.

Linux

Use your favorite e-mail client and configure it for your Gmail IMAP account.

iPhone

You can use Gmail IMAP but you don’t have PUSH mail (I wonder why Yahoo Mail has PUSH, but Gmail does not). For PUSH, you can configure an Yahoo account or a free Mail2Web Exchange account and have your Gmail account mark as read and forward all incoming mail to one of these accounts. To reply, use your Gmail account.

Web

Gmail’s interface is simple, clean and functional. The big difference from other email systems is its threaded conversations. Many times I wanted to quit Apple Mail for Gmail’s web interface.

Calendar

Mac

iCal can be synced to your Google Calendars using the CalDAV protocol. Use this nifty application for easy setup.

Windows

Use Google’s Calendar Sync tool for Outlook or get a free Plaxo account and install the Plaxo Toolbar for Microsoft Outlook to sync your Google Calendars.

Linux

You can use Evolution’s built in support for Google Calendar or use Thunderbird + Lightning Calendar extension + Provider for Google Calendar extension.

iPhone

You can do it the offline-way by syncing the calendar when you connect the iPhone to iTunes or over the air, where you have some viable options:

- NuevaSync is a web-based solution that creates a Microsoft Exchange account you can connect to, so there is nothing to install on your iPhone. There is a security threat, because all your Google data goes through NuevaSync’s servers. Also, note that all your calendar events on your iPhone will be wiped and replaced with Google Calendar’s events. The iPhone allows only one Microsoft Exchange account, so if you already used Mail2Web for push Gmail then you need to choose another solution for Calendar Syncing.

- NemusSync is a Cydia/Installer application, so you can install it only on a jail-broken iPhone. It can sync your Google Calendar with iPhone’s Calendar on demand. It supports multiple calendars and multiple Google Accounts.

- SaiSuke is $10 iTunes Store separate calendaring application, where syncing to your Google Calendar is a breeze. It is actually better than iPhone’s built-in Calendar app because it offers many extra views.

Web

I consider Google Calendar’s web-interface better than iCal or Outlook. The Quick Add feature that lets you type natural language sentences is very useful.

Contacts

Mac

You can enable Address Book to sync to your Gmail Contacts fairly easily if you’ve connected an iPhone or an iPod touch to your Mac before. If not, you need to follow these instructions to get the Sync with Google option to appear in Address Book’s preferences.

Windows

Use a Plaxo account with the Plaxo Outlook Toolbar to sync with Outlook Contacts.

Linux

You can use Evolution’s built in support for Google Contacts or use Thunderbird + Zindus extension .

iPhone

You can try the offline way with syncing to iTunes or over the air with NuevaSync’s free Exchange account.

Web

Google Contacts separates your contacts in to two groups: My Contacts and Suggested Contacts. Suggested contacts contains people you e-mailed frequently.

iDisk

Mac

Use Dropbox. You get a Dropbox folder in your Documents folder. Everything you drop here will be uploaded into the cloud (you get 2 GB for the free account) and from there downloaded to all your computers where you install Dropbox.

If you drop a file in the Public sub folder of Dropbox, with a right click on that file you get a public link that you can share over email or IM.  If you use Dropbox to sync other computers, you cannot specify which files in the Dropbox folder you want to be synced, so don’t forget to delete those large files you uploaded just for sharing purposes.

Windows

You can use Dropbox or Syncplicity. Syncplicity has more features than Dropbox: it allows any folder to be synced online, you can specify if a folder should only be backed up online or also be synced to other computers with Sycnplicity installed  and when you open Syncplicity on another computer you are asked if you want to download the synced folders. The free Syncplicty account has 2GB of space, but if you invite three friends you get one extra GB for each.

If 2 GB is not enough you can always use GDrive shell extension, which turns a Google Account in to a drive that appears in Windows Explorer.
You can also use Gladinet Cloud Desktop to map your Google Docs into a folder inside Gladinet Drive that appears in Explorer.

Linux

Use DropBox.

Web

Both Dropbox and Sincplicty offer web interfaces for easy access to your important files and allows uploading of new files.

WebGallery

Mac

You have several options:

- the Dropbox Gallery feature. Just drop a folder with photos inside the Photos subfolder in Dropbox and a web gallery is automatically created. Just right-click to get the url. All the photos are resized to 640 by 480 and the web gallery is pretty dull looking with only one standard view.

- iPhoto with Picasa WebAlbums plugin. Picasa WebAlbums offers a tone of features (including face recognition for automatically tagging your friends) but just 1GB of space.

- iPhoto with Flickr plugin. Flickr offers 100 MB a month of traffic. (You have a $24.95/year unlimited storage PRO plan)

Windows

Use Dropbox, Picasa with Picasa WebAlbums or get a Flickr Uploader.

Linux

Same as Windows.

iPhone

Use the free Shozu app to upload your pictures to Picasa WebAlbums or Flickr. You can also use the AirMe app to instantly upload the snapshots you take with the camera. If everything else fails you can send the pictures by mail to your Flickr account, but they will be downscaled by the iPhone.

Web

Both Picasa and Flickr web interfaces are great for uploading, organizing and sharing your photos. Of course there are other photo sharing websites, like Zoomr, that offer unlimited storage space, but they have limited upload options.

Back to My Mac

Mac

Use Windows Live Sync to access any files on your computer and Screen Sharing over internet for remote work.

Windows

Use Windows Live Sync (or Hamachi and simple file sharing) and TightVNC.

Linux

FTP and VNC.

If you’ve used some of these alternatives for MobileMe or you know some more (only free) please tell us in the comments.

Stay Relevant

Times are changing as we rapidly move to an increasingly connected world. Companies everywhere are doing their best to stay relevant. But not all succeed.

I can imagine a whiteboard – and the three core people standing around it in the meeting room. The question popped:

How can we stay relevant? It’s no longer about physical access to media – everything is connected to the internet.

It was a good question to ask because CD swapping wasn’t going to work forever. CD sales are going down quarter after quarter, as the RIAA keeps telling us. They blame piracy, we say it’s evolution. People are buying music online and that’s nothing new.

We need a music store. With a large catalog, about 6 million songs. And a social network.

But that was already done: iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Rhapsody, and the list goes on. The same goes for social networks, with Last.fm leading the pack. The only way to bring in people to your service is to provide a better experience, for less money.

Another trend widely discussed by tech pundits are netbooks, are selling like there’s no tomorrow: Most of the time people are on the internet, checking mail, reading, chatting even doing work on the road.

Can you notice what’s missing from that list? That’s when Lala was born:

Your music library online, available from any computer.

Moving to the Cloud

The Lala Music Mover comes as a free download once you sign up. It’s a small application that sits quietly in your taskbar and uploads your songs to Lala:

• Fast song matching reads the metadata from your songs, and matches it to Lala’s catalog. If Lala has the song it is automatically added to your online library, no questions asked. It doesn’t even matter if you downloaded the songs via P2P. It matched 1,947 songs in 53 minutes, with processor usage never jumping the 30% limit.
• Brute-Force uploads the songs it can’t find in Lala’s catalog to the server. This takes some time depending on the server load and your bandwidth.

Lala Music Mover works both on Mac and Windows – never crashed or sucked up all the CPU cycles. Settings like default download folder, downloading/uploading are clearly laid out.

Once you uploaded your library you can access it online and play it through the flash player. A nice touch, you also have access to your playlists.

You’ll notice however that ratings – which are stored in the proprietary .itl file in iTunes – are not imported.

Music Store and Social Network

• Clean interface, easy to navigate and find artists, songs.
• Recommendations based on what you and your friends are listening.
• Listen to whole albums/songs for free once. 10 cents for unlimited web-plays, 99 cents for DRM-free MP3 download. The web-play counts toward the mp3 purchase.
• Songs are encoded at 256 kbps VBR or 320 kbps CBR.

Conclusion

The only caveat I find to this service as a whole, is that it’s not available outside of the United States. Yes, the geo-ip tracking can be tricked, but I’m not sure how legal that is. We contacted John Kuch, but unfortunately he was out of the office and could only be available via phone. Hopefully we’ll get him on an interview after the holidays.

Considering the large 6 million song catalog, integration with media players, the high quality encoding and cloud availability, I would strongly recommend this service. Visit Lala.com.