I recently wrote an article about Opera 10 – which is currently in development – and got a lot of backlash from readers.

According to about 70 comments which were published, I downplayed Opera’s importance as a browser and as an innovator.

Jon says:

I agree with N_P. To say Opera has stagnated because it has not brought true innovation is just wrong. For one, they were the first to introduce a system like “speed-dial” which you describe as being familiar to rival browsers who were simply emulating Opera’s innovation.

I left the Opera camp a long time ago, at least 4 years, and according to some, I’ve missed the mark completely when I said Opera didn’t bring true innovation these past years.

You are wrong, then. Firefox’s awesome bar? Ripped off from Opera. Chrome and Safari’s top sites feature? Ripped off from Opera. And so it continues… Just look at the feature list for Safari 4. It’s like looking at a list of existing Opera features!

Thomas Ford, Communications Manager at Opera, contacted me after a day or so with some clarifications. We continued our conversation, and, as a result, I’ve got some interesting bits of information which I’m going to share with you.

A lot of the comments raise different points, but I’d like to highlight a few that they didn’t. I won’t take issue with you saying there isn’t much new in the labs release. That’s fair. The labs release of Opera 10 with Turbo is essentially to showcase that technology only. It certainly isn’t a complete representation of Opera 10.

Thomas then goes on to point out an interesting aspect about the Opera Turbo technology:

One important thing about Turbo though is that it is different from Opera Mini technology. Where Opera Mini’s OBML is actually a transcoding technology, Opera Turbo is a compression technology. They have fundamentally the same client-server architecture, but they work quite differently. Opera Mini translates the code from the Web into OBML then spits it out on the handset. Opera Turbo simply compresses things. It doesn’t transcode. This means you can use technologies like Ajax which are broken in the transcoding process.

I replied shortly:

Truth be said, I’ve lost my faith in Opera a while ago and I didn’t give Opera Turbo enough time when I wrote the review, which was clearly pointed out by the comments.

Referring to ads integrated into the browser interface, one of the main reasons I gave up on Opera years ago:

Totally fair. I think the ads turned a lot of people off. We faced a problem. We used to be a paid product, then wanted to release a free version. Of course, we had engineers to pay and our mobile business had yet to really take off. So the ads were a necessary evil to make enough money to keep operating. I think that was in 2000 or so. In 2005 we were able to go free through the same monetization strategy Firefox uses (Google search).
I think there are a lot of users who went through the same thing with Opera. Convincing them to try us again is a challenge, but I think we’re trying even harder now.

How would you feel about releasing the Opera code into under GPL, like Mozilla did with Firefox? What are the benefits for keeping the source code closed?

It’s actually something that has come up a lot. I should point out that some things we do are open source. We released Opera Dragonfly (our developer tools) under a BSD license and we’ve released a bunch of open developer libraries.
But in terms of releasing the browser core under a GPL or other OS license, the benefit isn’t necessarily there for us. We make a significant amount of revenue from licensing the browser. Since we have only one core (the same browser core is at the center of Opera on desktop, on mobile and on TVs, etc), we would give away a lot of our competitive advantage.
Our CEO I think had a decent answer to the question. He’s a computer scientist by training and has worked on open source projects before. Here’s an interview that might be interesting if you have the time.
You raise a valid question and it’s definitely something we can’t rule out for the future as our company evolves. Overall though, I think our resources are best spent trying to bring open standards to the Web to improve interoperability.

If Mozilla comes out with a decent competitor for Opera Mobile, they showed some alpha code recently, what would your response be to that situation? It would probably cut a whole lot of your revenues from OEMs.

In practice OEMs and network operators expect many things from a Web browser. Often it requires a great deal of customization to meet their demands. No two OEMs or operators have the same demands so it makes the mobile browser space quite different to the PC browser space.
I don’t think that it necessarily would cut into our revenues. Currently there are several Windows Mobile browsers already available. Even with those competitors we have been able to grow our revenues every quarter.
Mozilla does present a more formidable competitor due to its brand recognition and pre-existing user base. I guess we’ll have to see how it plays out. I’d like to think we add value to operators and OEMs through close collaboration and partnership and thus would continue to earn their business.

To conclude, I think Opera 10 is definitely worth another review when it reaches Release Candidate status.

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.

As you’d expect from a web 2.0 start-up – the interface is clean and simple. Let’s look at it tab by tab and check out the functionality of each one.

Dashboard allows you to track:

• Overdue or upcoming assignments and exams.
• Lists your classes along with the current average for each.
• Recent notes or files that have been uploaded.

The Dashboard makes it extremely easy to stay on top of everything you have to do with a glance. Isn’t it better than your Sticky Notes?

• Next up we have the Assignments tab which only shows, you’ve guessed it, upcoming and completed assignments with grades attached.

• Exams tab let’s you set up detailed reminders, with both SMS and email support for notifications.
• The Notes tab contains a rudimentary word processor, more likely a text box. It is a big downside for those who are used to process their text to highlight ideas and important aspects. It has revisions which means you won’t lose any changes – if you’re not happy with the outcome – just revert to the previous edit.
• The text editor is Markdown enabled which means:

[…] a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). –a Daring Fireball project.

• Calendar tab, let’s you see – in a manner similar to Google Calendar – your assignments and exams. It is iCal format compatible so you won’t have any problems importing your current calendar.
• The best part yet, the Files tab let’s you upload/download any kind of file you might want to use, PDF, Word, JPG, you name it.

TrackClass is completely free and available for everyone to use. If you want to organize your student life TrackClass is the way to do it, it is for normal people. Of course, if you’re a geek, you could always use the Google Apps suite to achieve the same result, it has more features – but you won’t get cohesion and a one stop shop for all of your needs.

As always, I look forward to your comments – what do you use, and what do you think about TrackClass.

YawnLog

YawnLog, by far the cutest startup I’ve had the chance to review, helps you quickly set up an account and monitor your sleep – how many hours you slept the past week, you even have to make up for lost sleep if you stay up late on Saturdays… You can rate your sleep – and then compare it to how others in your area did or just observe how final exams take a toll on your rest. And it sure is a cool pickup line: “Hey Dear, did you see my YawnLog yesterday? That was hell of a party.”

And the guys behind YawnLog sure do have a sense of humor – the whole press release is written in that official lingo with spiced phrases like ‘after a breakneck 24 hours development, YawnLog was released’ or [launched to] ‘an assembled audience at the annual SleepDex ‘09 conference.’

Greg Marra, founder and CEO of YawnLog, was inspired to create the product by his own study habits. “As a college student,” he explained during questions at the public launch of the site, “I find myself frequently staying up late . . . . I wanted a way to collect informatics on my own sleep habits so I could better learn how stress affects my sleep schedule.” He figured if he could make use of a tool for monitoring his sleep, others could as well.

Here’s a screenshot of my stats:

Get in touch with your sheep and sleep at YawnLog.

RadioBeta

RadioBeta allows you to listen to radio stations around the globe, create your playlists, all with a easy to use, intuitive design. The site is public and free to listen to, you don’t even need an account. If you ever wondered what the French are listening to, now’s your chance to find out. There’s not much you can say about this service other than its great, free and not many people know about it. The founders are pretty big on electronic music, so you might want to take a look at their blog, which is filled with music recommendations and videos from concerts all around the world. Check it out at RadioBeta.

Here’s a screenshot:

Jinni

It’s no magic but it works like nothing else. If you’re a movie buff like me – you always wanted an easy way to browse movies and get recommendations based on what you like. Jinni does just that, with a Google style search engine interface.

Although it is in private beta, you can sign up for an invite on the homepage. You need to create a profile for best results, but that should take you more than 10 minutes; then you’re free to search for movies and get awesome recommendations based on your tastes and previously watched movies.

It meshes information from around the web, bringing reviews, ratings, complete information about cast and set, pictures and video. You can rate the movie and choose whether or not you want to see more like that one.

And as a nice bonus – if you invite your friends to the service you get a chance to win a brand new iPod Touch. You can’t beat that!

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?

Gist – as its name suggests – helps you get the essence about your contacts, greatly improving my workflow these past days. Its algorithm sorted out all the duplicate contacts, a part which more than a few other apps have failed, and mashed everything together – pulling information from social networks, email and even news articles, and ranking the importance of one contact by the number of conversations and the date of the last contact.

By using this process it prioritizes news items in the Gist dashboard – grouped by Company and People – it gives you a sense of what’s happening right now  in your network of people and companies, putting you up-to-speed about the topics you care about. And the best part this service is that you don’t have do the legwork to make it work, just sign in, input your accounts and sit back.

Other notable features are:

• Attachments box which lists recent documents that you’ve received – don’t need to hunt them down anymore.
• Links box shows you recent incoming links – handy if you’re doing research on something or need to reference the link often.
• Syncs with the Outlook Calendar – and soon with Google Calendar.
• Import contacts in .CSV format.
• Manually adjust the importance of a person or add details.

This service is certainly angled at the work/business types – and is a must-have for anyone working with people, like public relations representatives, journalists keeping track of their sources or a company keeping track of its clients.

Gist is currently in private beta, and a lot of features are not yet implemented. Robert from the Gist team assures me that support for more email providers, Twitter and Mac OS X Mail app is on the roadmap. In my tests Gist was stable – no crashes or unexpected behavior; the user interface is simple and easy to use. I still feel a bit queasy about handing over my Gmail credentials, but their Privacy Policy is solid; they clearly state that they won’t share this information and once you delete your account, it is gone, not like Facebook who keeps you account dormant until you manually request deletion.

A downside to Gist is that it doesn’t have an offline mode like Google Reader or Gmail; if you don’t have an internet connection you’re out of luck.

I strongly recommend this service once it officially launches and invite everyone interested to keep an eye on their blog – which is riddled with interesting information about APIs, coding frameworks and announcements regarding the service.

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.

In this article we’re going to take a closer look at the service, deconstructing its features and weaknesses. Plus, for those not lucky enough to live in one of the officially accepted countries, we describe a simple way to circumvent the protection and gain immediate access.

The Selection: Is it enough?

The current music selection will not impress a hard-core audiophile, or fans of Britney Spears – but it certainly will satisfy the needs of most casual listeners and even the more pretentious ears of an indie-lover; Spotify features bands such as Decemberists, The National, Atlas Sound, CSS, The Shins, Feist and many others.

Nobody is arguing that the current song count is significantly lower than the catalogs of any major seller – the fact that it is completely free is what’s so compelling about this service.

Initially, I was deeply worried about bitrate quality, which thankfully is 192kbpps, and interruptions, but none happened. The team notes on the blog:

However, we want to make sure that everyone who uses Spotify gets the same fast, uninterrupted experience so providing a stable service is our priority. If growth happens too fast and it starts affecting quality we may have to re-instate the invitation system, hopefully this won’t happen. –UK launch of the service

It’s notable that for 9,99 pounds/month you can get the premium service – ad-free listening – and some cool extras such as pre-release songs and concert tickets:

Mikael Wiehe, sogwriter and driving force of Hoola Bandoola Band, has another solo album, Sånger från en inställd skiljsmässa, which is now available for pre-listen.

[…]and get to be one of the first to hear the new Morrissey album. –From Spotify blog

They’ve signed deals with all the major labels(EMI, Universal, AMG), and adding more music at a fast pace:

We’re currently adding about 10,000 tracks a day from our current deals. – from the Spotify blog

The application: Simplicity in its purest form

You’ll be impressed with the sheer simplicity of the Spotify desktop application – and its similarities to iTunes, Songbird or Banshee. It clocks in at a mere 2,4 MB download.

Although is incredibly small – it has all the basics covered: playlists as easy as drag and drop, an very easy to use Radio feature, saved searches, easy navigation and search.

The Radio feature is a killer one: with two clicks you can find the right music for a romantic evening, peaceful reading, or just going back in time to rediscover old classics.

Another utility I found for Spotify is quickly previewing songs – recommended from friends or iTunes’ Genius – full length quality preview of the whole album before deciding if I want it or not.

Conclusion

If you’re going to ask, I’m going to tell you that I hate not having control over my data, be it music, photos or documents, but you can’t help noticing that everything is slowly moving away to the cloud – which ultimately might be better, or worse.

If there’s something I’m not quite sure about it’s this bit of information posted on their website:

We ’ve got a far greater range of targeting than you’ll find in offline or even most digital media – starting with demographic, location and mood. Of course, detailed tracking and reporting comes as a given.

I don’t like being tracked – unless it’s Last.fm – and I certainly don’t like that they don’t mention it prominently during signup.

Spotify is a must-have in my book and definitely worth watching in the future. That being said, you should visit spotify.com/en/get-started/ and sign up. If you’re not living in one of the accepted countries, use a proxy that supports SSL and maps your location to the UK or Sweden. It’s easy to set up a proxy in Firefox using the Options menu:

Don’t forget to share in the comments your take on Spotify and other cool services(and music) you’ve discovered in this space.