ZumoDrive is easy to set up, but unfortunately, you can only upload files from Windows or Mac; Linux users will still be able to access the web interface but without any upload capability. The small installation program that helps you create an account and select your desired capacity. The free plan includes 1GB of storage, but you can go up to 500GB with premium accounts.

After you sign up, you’ll have a ZumoDrive icon in the notification area which will allow you to change settings and view the status of uploads.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with the upload speeds, topping at 200KB/s, which means you’ll have to wait a bit if you’re uploading a movie or pictures shot in RAW format. The same holds true if you want to upload your entire music library and use the iTunes integration.

An interesting feature specific to ZumoDrive, is that it caches frequently used files on your local disk – which means you can continue working even if an internet connection is not available. You can control how much space you want it to use by visiting the ZumoDrive Console.

ZumoDrive can also be used as a backup – if the hard drive in your laptop dies, you’ll still have the files if you uploaded them. It’s not very cost efficient though; Mozy’s Unlimited plan is 5$ whereas a 50GB plan for ZumoDrive is 11,99$.

Their iPhone application gives you about the same functionality of the web interface: view photos, listen to songs and read documents(Word, PowerPoint, Excel, .txt, .rtf).

I’ve found ZumoDrive useful in a couple of day-to-day situations, such as showing a colleague the revised presentation even though I forgot my flash drive and working in the lab using schematics saved on the iPhone/iPod touch application.

With Zumodrive, we help people store, access and share the bits of their life – their music, their memories and their ideas. People don’t want to think of where all this is stored and how to take it all with them on their various devices. They just want to know that it is all constantly protected, always accessible and easily shareable.  We have leveraged the cloud to make this more of a reality, and we would love to see cool netbooks where ZumoDrive could be added for a few more bucks with a click or two.  Would you be willing to pay a few more bucks to always have access to all your personal content? –Zumo Blog

I couldn’t get myself to pay for the premium service; the free option served my limited needs and I’d rather walk with my information stored on an IronKey, safely encrypted, not available to anyone who happened to pick up my iPod touch.

ZumoDrive has one advantage and disadvantage over Wixi: the iPhone application.

On one hand it doesn’t ask you for your password in order to access your files and on the other it provides great convenience over Wixi’s web app. I’m sure Wixi will get around to an iPhone application soon, if they want to stay competitive.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get a hold on the ZumoDrive team via email; I had prepared some interesting questions. I invite them to contact me via email. As always, I look forward to your comments and recommend you to try Zumo Drive and share with us your experiences.

Founded in early 2007, Wixi has continually added more functionality, and at this point is an quite amazing service. While being more Gamma than Beta, Wixi appears to be a feature complete service – allowing you to easily upload, manage, view and share media. I didn’t encounter any issues while using the service – no errors or freezes – and enjoyed reasonable fast uploads (200-300KB/s). I didn’t expect that a service using a mix of JavaScript and Flash will behave so consistent and snappy.

Wixi’s interface – clearly designed to appeal even the least computer-savvy users – resembles your desktop – windows, menus and, of course, a wallpaper of your choosing.

One of Wixi’s strong points is the ability to set access levels to files; private, friends or public. You wouldn’t want to share your final essay with the whole world, would you? Because you can pick individual people with which you want  to share a file or a folder, you can work together with your friends on a project, and not worry about sending each revision over email to the other participants.

Once you invited your friends to Wixi, you are automatically updated with their public activity via the Friends Activity Report. Arranged by media type, you could find pictures that your girlfriend took on the trip, or just as easily, the new school timetable posted by a colleague. Wixi has a lot of real-life uses that differentiate it from the other storage services – because of the tight integration with social aspects.

Social tools on the site allow users to interact with their friends online, across campus or across the globe, sharing a cool new song or photos of a recent vacation or family event. For those without access to their computers, Wixi offers long-distance access to media files. Registered members can also meet fellow users, browsing their Wixis, discovering new media and expanding their social circles.

Wixi also enables you to discover new content by simply browsing other people’s public ‘wixis’; if you find something you like, you can leave a message, save the file to your Wixi or request to be friends with that person.

Another interesting feature is ‘Web Channels’. Recently implemented, Web Channels lets you search, save and view content from YouTube, Daily Motion, Flickr, Hulu, CNN and MTV Music.

With offices in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and half a million dollars in funding, Wixi has set a high goal for itself, ‘a world-class community for millions of users’. Their goal is far from unattainable if they continue adding features, maintaining the service reliable and easy to use. Wixi certainly gets my thumbs up, with the same concerns I have for any cloud storage service: privacy and data safety.

You can sign up for free at wixi.com; the free option gives you 3GB of storage and just a couple of restrictions, such as streaming files under 100MB. The premium option removes al the restrictions and gives you unlimited storage.

The first 50 readers who send an email leave a comment on the blog will get an code for the premium service; If you want to say thanks, include in your email a cool service, website or software you’ve discovered or a topic you’d like me to cover. This will help me pick future stories according to your interests.

As always, I love hearing what you think, in the comments. Have you previously used Wixi or a similar service? What could be improved?

Reviewing all sorts of web 2.0 start-ups and more recently, cloud operating systems I’ve realized what Microsoft is so scared about. Microsoft is scared about losing marketshare; losing Outlook customers to webmail services such as GMail or Yahoo! Mail, losing Word and Excel customers to Zoho and Google Docs. The trend is more than obvious.

What is less obvious to end-users at this time is the existence of cloud operating systems, of which EyeOS, an open source solution, is the most advanced. EyeOS provides enough functionality to sustain a work environment, with productivity applications, integrated compatibility with Office documents and easy import/export of files. It doesn’t support Photoshop yet, but in a couple of years it might support Gimp, an open-source alternative to Photoshop.

The emergence of the ‘cloud computer’ metaphor urged, in my opinion, the creation of MinWin:

Its most recent and most well-known variation as a minimalistic, self-contained set of Windows components.

MinWin is Microsoft’s response to small Linux OS’s – and is significantly crippled compared to DamnSmallLinux, assuming that what I got from several sources was correct. Microsoft might just kill itself if this statement from Eric Traut is correct:

MinWin would not be offered as a stand-alone product, but would instead be used as the basis for future operating system releases.

As much as I like writing really long sentences, a diagram will better explain what I think will become a standard in the future. First of all, we have a low-powered netbook; this netbook comes preloaded with a very small operating system; this operating system loads the drivers for the hardware, such as networking and graphics and starts Mozilla Prism. Inside Prism will appear the login screen for Eye OS. You’d never know the difference by just looking at the computer.

Once connected to EyeOS, all the magic happens on the server side: checking email, viewing a movie or adding an appointment, all the processes take place on the server. The only requirement of this model is a decent internet connection; we already have some great wireless options at the moment: 3G, wireless 802.11n and soon WiMax.

End-users demand portability. Portability of document formats, data, music, pictures, their computer. You could have, and this is what is amazing, the power of a server machine in something as small as a MacBook Air. Why wouldn’t you want that extra power in your photo editing program?

Thin client computing is not new by far; first available in the late 1980’s, it was confined to corporate environments because of the lack of long range, high-speed connectivity. It had and still has some important benefits. For example, there are 3 computers in your household; when you’re working at your computer you can’t normally use the other two computers’ resources – but the server client architecture let’s you dynamically adjust performance; if you’re the only one connected you’ll get the power of 3 computers!

It will become increasingly hard to justify a product like Windows, as more and more advanced applications are coded and are available for free on EyeOS.

Like always with these kind of predictions, I could be right, or terribly wrong; while the benefits of this architecture are undeniable, nobody except John C. Dvorak, can be totally sure about this. But I do hope this will happen. Your comments are always welcomed and I really look forward to hearing what you think about cloud computing; how do you think it will improve your computing experience and your predictions.