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Posts Tagged ‘glide’

Later today at CES, Glide will be debuting its extension for the Google Chrome browser, which it claims turns the software program into a full operating system. The extension, which is also available for Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox 3.0+, can already be downloaded here.

What Glide does is extend the most popular Internet browsers with a suite of applications that can interact with multiple remote Windows, Mac and Linux desktops and mobile platforms.

These tools include a rights-based file management system, a word processor, presentation app, photo editor, e-mail client, drawing tool, contact manager, calendar and more. When the extension is installed, you’ll see a bunch of new options upon clicking the new Glide icon in the toolbar, but you’ll need to register first.

The Glide extension for Google Chrome also equips the browser with needed file synchronization and automated file format translation features. On top of that, Glide’s solution comes with 20GB of free storage, and doesn’t include ads.

I’ve been playing around with the OS / extension for about half an hour, and the biggest take-away as far as I’m concerned is that while Glide comes with a host of features and applications, the interface is clunky and not aligned with the browser experience very well. If this is the future of convergence between operating systems and the Web, I don’t want it.

Glide is free for up to 6 users, and offers a premium version with 50 GB of storage and support for up to 25 users for $4.95 per month (or 49.95 per year).

Glide is bold enough to state that its extension for Google Chrome effectively one-ups Google’s own, recently announced but unreleased Chrome OS because it supports virtually any device and platform today whereas Google Chrome OS will only run on a limited number of devices.

In the first half of 2010, Glide expects to ship a bootable version of the Glide OS for Netbooks, making it possible to launch the Glide OS at startup. The company aims to provide netbooks with a unified desktop, file management system and a suite of native versions of the Glide Application Suite.

If the experience is anything remotely like the one I’m having with the Chrome extension, I’ll stick to Jolicloud, thanks.

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Businesses and brands have already caught onto the immense power of the social stream that runs through Twitter and Facebook to track the pulse of conversations around consumers. Both tech giants and startups are competing to provide enterprise-friendly, social platforms to businesses that combine both collaboration and social media monitoring. Socialtext and CubeTree offer compelling social collaboration offerings to the enterprise. And Salesforce.com recently entered the market with a new, more social version of its Service Cloud, and also debuted its take on a social platform for the enterprise, Chatter. Now Jive Software, a Sequoia-backed company that develops an all-in-one social enterprise software is acquiring Filtrbox, a startup that provides tools for social media monitoring, to boost its offering. You may remember Filtrbox as a Class of 2007 alum of incubator TechStars. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jive says that Filtrbox’s social media real-time monitoring technologies will be absorbed into Jive’s platform to help businesses and brands harness the power of the real-time web from within Jive’s collaborative software. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive combines computing with social collaboration. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. The company, which is profitable, recently launched integration with Microsoft SharePoint, letting Jive users easily access data and content from the CMS into Jive’s software.

Filtrbox, which raised $1.4 million in funding last February, allows users to monitor thousands of content sources, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. After inputting the terms they’d like to keep track of, Filtrbox can send them continuous updates, weeding out duplicates (you can also choose to receive periodic digests). Filtrbox prioritizes feeds and dials the “noise” up or down to sift through information from social media blogs and other sites. It uses intelligence to adjust rankings based on how the user interacts with the data, and offers the ability to analyze the trends and influencers in an enterprise’s market.

Jive says that one of the advantages of Filtrbox’s technology is that it has a scalable architecture that enables enterprises to process large volumes of social intelligence faster and at a lower cost. This isn’t the first acquisition for Jive, the company bought online calendar software developer Jotlet last year.

Jive is wise to boost its offerings as it is going to be competing with Salesforce’s Chatter and other social offerings. But the company is ready for the fight. Jive recently raised $12 million from Sequoia Capital and also expanded its operations to Silicon Valley with a new Palo Alto office.

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The GlideTV Navigator is a $150 wireless remote control for use with home theater PC setups. The large-ish center trackpad area is surrounded by various buttons while the outside of the remote features media, search, power, and volume controls.

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GlideTV: Thumb-friendly HTPC remote

If you need proof that the stream makes complex services more accessible, take a look at Glide Engage. Launched last week, Glide Engage is a stream front-end for the Glide, a Web OS which offers a suite of integrated Web Apps including docs, spreadsheets, photo and music uploading and sharing, calendar, email, Website creation and collaboration tools. Glide can be overwhelming. There is a lot there. But it has attracted its own loyal following of about one million registered users.

With Glide Engage, the various features of the Glide OS become available on an as-needed basis and gives a better entry point for the service. At first glance, Glide Engage is a micro-messaging service on steroids. You can follow (”engage” with) other people in Glide, add comments to your stream, share links and files, create discussion groups and bring different media and people into online meeting spaces. In the left-hand column you can also set up news alerts and see the latest articles being shared on Glide about those topics.

What makes Glide particularly interesting is that it is also a Twitter client. You can import your Twitter stream and read it within Engage like you can with other Web-based Twitter apps. You can Tweet out messages, but also add links to photos, documents, playable music files and videos which bring people back into Glide. Imagine if Seesmic or Tweetdeck hosted their own photos, videos, and other shared files, and had a Web productivity and communication suite as well.

The Twitter functionality is very limited at this point. You can reply to a message or retweet it, and find some information about the person whose Twitter message you are looking at. And when you send a Tweet, you get redirected to Twitter. All of this is a work in progress and will improve over time. To the extent that Glide Engage can extend its OS capabilities to Twitter, the more interesting it will become. Soon, you should be able to create Twitter groups and send out links to Glide’s collaboration spaces, which let multiple people look at photos, videos, documents, and videos in an online meeting environment.

Glide also allows you to assign rights to each file you share, so a document or photo can be shared in view-only mode or you can give others editing privileges. These privileges can be changed on a message-by-message basis. The overall user interface could still use some simplification and isn’t as zippy as other stream reader apps (and I am not sure why the logo looks like a flaming IE logo crashing into the water), but Glide Engage also has some novel features worth exploring.

Glide is built on a sophisticated syncing engine, which means that it can share all of these files on mobile phones as well. It will release an Android app for Glide Engage next week on August 18, followed by BlackBerry, and Windows. The company will do an iPhone app at some point, but since this syncing capability competes with Apple’s MobileMe, it wants to establish Glide Engage on other mobile platforms first.

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I’ve been opining for a while now that web-based applications and services are going to become more and more a part of our everyday computing experience. You can create documents, chat, even play Quake all from the comfort of your web browser. There’s a growing segment of web based operating systems , too, which strive to give you a consistent experience regardless of the underlying system you use to connect to it.

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Glide: an operating system for the web

Quick Version: In short, the FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player Solution from Seagate was made for a caveman if cavemen been around in 1999 when people actually used the DivX codec and only used Windows machines. Not to be completely unfair, but if you’re an avid reader of CrunchGear or a savvy BitTorrenter then this definitely isn’t what you’re looking for. Extended Version: That being said, the FreeAgent Theater might be for the consumer who is just getting into converting their own DVD collection, and who also wants to share photos and music

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Review: Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player Solution + 250GB FreeAgent Go and Dock

Remember modems?

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File transfers via soundwave