Hasta La Gadget!

Bitcasa made some serious waves when it hit the scene in December, offering bottomless cloud storage for $10 per-month or $99 for a full year. The service is now leaving beta, with the promised Mac and iOS apps in tow. And, just as icing on the cake, a Linux client is also on the way (and already available in alpha form). While going gold isn’t going to change a lot about Bitcasa in the short term, at least the company knows how to celebrate right — with steep discounts! Sign up for the service during the month of February and you’ll get a full year of Infinite Drive for $60 $69. You can sign up at the source and peruse the PR after the break. We’re already busy backing up our My Bloody Valentine bootlegs.

Update: As some of you have noticed, the price being advertised on the Bitcasa site is $69 for the year, not $59 as the press release states. We’ve updated the post to reflect the advertised cost and asked for a clarification.

Filed under: Storage, Internet

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Source: Bitcasa

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has been promising what’s almost a sort of renaissance through his Mega cloud storage service. Now that it’s open to the first wave of users, we have an inkling of what that strategy shift entails. Mega is currently just a simple-to-use parking place for data with a relatively large 50GB of storage in a free tier. However, it may grow quickly: there’s promises of Google Docs-style editing, instant messaging and mobile access, among other plans. Eventual paid plans will offer considerably more storage of between 500GB for €10 per month ($13) to 4TB for €30 ($40), albeit with a bandwidth cap of twice the storage at any given level. As such, Mega is mostly a bundle of potential — but it may stand out from the pack if ambition matches reality.

Filed under: Storage, Internet

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Source: TechCrunch

When the original iUSBport made its debut at CES last year it was called the CloudFTP. Since then, it changed its name and today it gained some new relatives — the iUSBport mini, 2 and HD. For those who aren’t familiar with the technology, it’s battery-powered file server that connects USB storage devices and streams their content over WiFi, and it can serve as an external battery for those devices, too.

The iUSBport2 looks much the same as the CloudFTP, but streams data at a 50 percent faster rate (30mbps) and can connect to up to 12 devices at a time or send out five simultaneous streams of 1080p video. It also packs two USB ports, a microSDXC slot, and a larger 3300mAH battery than its predecessor. Plus, it charges via micro-USB and has a small LCD display. Its cousin, the larger iUSBport HD, has the same capabilities and LCD status screen as the 2, but it’s larger chassis comes with a 2.5-inch HDD with up to 2TB of storage. It also has an SDXC card slot, one USB 3.0 port, and a 5,200mAH rechargeable cell. Lastly, there’s the iUSBport mini, which looks like an overgrown flash drive. It has single USB port — for connecting powered external HDDs — and microSD slot, and can connect up to eight devices or stream three 720p videos simultaneously. All three iUSBports will be available in Q1 of this year, with the HD starting at $160, the 2 costing $150 and the mini running $70.

Continue reading Hyper debuts iUSBport mini, 2 and HD cloud storage and streaming devices (hands-on)

Filed under: Storage

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Microsoft added a cloud storage feature to the Xbox 360 in its fall 2011 dashboard update, but today an outage has taken it offline for the last several hours and counting. As noted by Joystiq, trying to access your cloud saves is resulting in a 0x807b0198 error for many, although other parts of XBL like streaming video services and multiplayer gaming profiles are unaffected. For the moment, we were able to copy/move some of our saves from the cloud cache on our hard drive (Settings –> storage –> cloud storage) to the normal hard drive section, and access them from there. Your mileage may vary, but otherwise you’ll just need to keep an eye out the XBL dashboard status page to see when things are back to normal. There’s no word yet on when it will be fully restored, but a message there says engineers are working on a fix. We’re not missing the old “gamertag recovery” feature the cloud system replaced and upgraded, but any significant outage is certainly enough to make us think about keeping our saves backed up on a memory card in a safe place — just in case.

Update: We noticed our cloud saves were back online early Sunday although the status page indicated work was continuing, and now (3AM ET~ Monday) Major Nelson and Xbox Support have tweeted that the issues are resolved. Additionally, General Manager of Xbox Live Alex Garden said in a post on MN’s blog that the reason it took so long to restore was to ensure the integrity of all game saves. The small silver lining for those affected? A free month of Xbox Live Gold will be automatically added to their subscriptions.

Filed under: Gaming

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Via: Joystiq

Source: Xbox Live status, Xbox Support (Twitter), Major Nelson

Most of us would call the Dropbox mobile app very utilitarian, built for browsing files and not much else. It’s becoming more of a media viewer in its own right with its just-arrived Dropbox 2.0 for iOS users. The cloud storage service gains a dedicated Photos tab that takes advantage of all those automatic uploads from the past few months: the panel organizes photos by the time taken and offers an unintrusive full-screen mode for reliving memories. Hitting the major milestone has also given Dropbox an incentive to rework the interface as a whole, simplifying uploads to specific folders alongside removing the visual clutter. The developer hasn’t yet given Android the same treatment, although the company’s tendency to keep its major apps on an equal footing suggests it won’t be too long before everyone gets a clearer view of their images in the cloud.

Filed under: Storage, Internet, Mobile

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Via: Dropbox

Source: App Store