Huddle, the startup that’s bringing simple tools for collaboration to huge companies around the world, has just sealed a sweet deal: $24 million in new venture capital.

This is Huddle’s third round of institutional funding. Jafco Ventures led the round, with participation from DAG Ventures and existing investors Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures.

“This is all about growth — international growth,” said Huddle co-founder and CEO Alastair Mitchell in a call with VentureBeat. “We operate in about 180 countries worldwide, and we’re getting such a huge demand from our customers.”

Outside the enterprise, many folks aren’t too aware of the Huddle brand. However, the company’s products have found homes at more than 100,000 organizations around the world, from NASA to Procter & Gamble. Huddle tells us its client list includes 80 percent of the Fortune 500.

In short, Huddle is going after (and successfully catching) the biggest of the big fish.

Mitchell said part of the $24 million will be used to expand Huddle’s offices in the UK as well as stateside in San Francisco and New York City. The startup plans to be 200 employees strong by the end of this year.

“We’re a pure enterprise platform for collaboration; we have over a million business users using our product — everything from media-type businesses to government organizations,” Mitchell continued.

“It’s driving huge revenue growth for us. If you think about it, you can grow really fast in a big organization, from hundreds of seats to thousands of seats within a year… and across the firewall, outside the organization, as well.”

While much of Huddle’s growth within large organizations has been due to viral, bottom-up adoption by small teams and early adopters, Mitchell said the startup is seeing a top-down adoption effect, particularly over the past two years. “Now, we’re also being pulled in by CIOs who want to change how their executives collaborate,” he said.

Currently, Huddle’s enterprise business is growing five-fold year-over-year.

A couple months ago, the startup launched Huddle Sync, an intelligent file synchronization tool that Mitchell called “a real first.” The tool made special allowances for large, complex teams’ collaboration needs.

“This year, basically, it’s all about the rollout of Huddle to larger and larger organizations and helping them work more seamlessly,” said Mitchell. “It means more platforms, more mobile devices … more easy ability to manage and work with thousands of people.”

This means better tools for more complex team structures, of course, and Mitchell said this will require the Huddle team to focus on the “intelligence engine,” that is, the part of Huddle that “works out what information needs to get to you, and it’s really magic how that works,” he said.

Huddle has raised $40 million in toto since its 2006 launch. “We’ve hit cash flow/break even several times, and this allows us to keep growing,” Mitchell concluded. “We’re driving great revenues at the moment.”

Image courtesy of iofoto, Shutterstock

Enterprise cloud storage startup Box has added a slew of updates to its main product, including universal administrator search, more mobile security features for iOS and Android, and multiple e-mail domain support, the company announced Thursday morning.

Box now has more than 11 million users across 120,000 businesses, with penetration in 82 percent of the Fortune 500. Its most recent customer wins include Netflix, Allergan, Avaya, Lennar, MGM Resorts, Stanford University, and Webcor Builders. The latest round of product updates will help the company further separate itself from more consumer-focused cloud storage options like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Google Drive. Box CEO Aaron Levie once even drew me a diagram to show how the company sections itself off versus competitors.

“We want users to be delighted at the same time we want IT to be happy and feel safe,” Box enterprise general manager Whitney Tidmarsh-Bouck told VentureBeat. “That experience is rare.”

The first major update is a new administrator console that offers enterprise-wide search. If you ever need to search across an entire organization for a specific file or folder, you can now do so. There’s also more granular permissions settings you can set as an admin that help set how files are shared inside and outside the company. “When your organization has multiple thousands of users, this is needed,” Tidmarsh-Bouck said.

Second, Box has added more granular mobile security features for Android, with an iOS update “coming soon.” Not only can IT admins add passcode locks for mobile users, but they can also turn offline access permission on and off.

Third, the company now has support for multiple e-mail domains. If you are a large company that owns many small companies, for example, you can now share and collaborate with Box even if your colleague uses a different domain. The company gave me the diagram below to help illustrate a business with multiple domains, saying that now team members who have “@pg.com” and “@crest.com” address can now more seamlessly collaborate.

Finally, Box has pushed out activity notification archiving that will specially target regulated industries like health care and finance. Box administrators can now log things like Box comments and tasks with already established monitoring systems.

Tidmarsh-Bouck said that the company has also modified its enterprise licensing agreement (ELA) to make it more flexible. There’s now pricing options that cover a multi-year contract, which can save an organization money and simplify the process of adding new accounts. If your organization wants to slowly roll out accounts, the new ELA agreement can cover a cheaper overall price per each new account.

Administrator search photo: Box

Like a Google Docs for computer-automated design (CAD), Sunglass is launching a cloud-based way to create, edit, and share 3D designs today — offering consumers an easier and cheaper alternative to traditional software like AutoCAD.

Sunglass co-founder Nitin Rao presented on-stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City today, where he discussed how the company could potentially revolutionize the $10 billion CAD industry.

“There are 10 million designers just like us looking to engage with each other in a flat world,” co-founder and CEO Kaustuv DeBiswas said in a statement today. “Products are now built for global consumption so why can’t they be designed via global collaboration?”

It used to be that only powerful desktops could run CAD software, and collaboration was a nightmare. But with Sunglass you could collaborate with just about anyone right from your web browser. All of the heavy-duty processing work happens on the company’s servers. It’s also compatible with over 40 file formats, so stubborn designers can still open up your projects in their preferred programs.

During his demonstration today, Rao showed off how you can design a bike using Sunglass (over conference Wi-Fi!), and the interface appeared to be silky smooth. There were also collaborators from India editing the bike at the same time. Using a broadcast feature, we were able to see a design a collaborator was working on after about 20 seconds of render time.

Since Sunglass is cloud-based, you also don’t need to wait for lengthy renders before showing off your 3D designs. You can plug a Sunglass embed code into any web page, which allows others to manipulate your designs without Adobe Flash (Sunglass is powered by WebGL and HTML5). The service also sports Dropbox integration for storing 3D files.

San Francisco-based Sunglass is also building an API to let designers share their most useful tools with others. The company is building the world’s first 3D app store to offer the tools. Previously, designers would have to buy entire software suites to gain access to a single tool. The company has developed its own tool for cloud-based streaming that can render 3D objects in about 45 seconds, proving the power of its API.

Microsoft has launched its second accelerator for cloud-related startups, the company announced today. This one is located in emerging tech startup hotbed Bangalore, India.

Ten startups will be selected and will start Sept. 3, 2012. For four months, they will get resources and have their shot to build a smart cloud product.

The new location comes just two months after Microsoft’s first-ever startup accelerator at Israel. Just like its Israeli endeavor, Microsoft’s Indian outpost will not offer straight up cash to its startups. Instead, they will get $60,000 in Windows Azure credit, space to work in, and access to mentors.

“Through this unique initiative, Microsoft is partnering with leading industry mentors to provide startups with the much-needed support they need to innovate and become successful businesses,” said Amit Chatterjee, Managing Director of Microsoft India R&D, in a statement. “We are not only providing them technical and business guidance and mentoring, but also connecting them to prospective VCs and investors. The success of this program will be measured by the success of these startups. Microsoft will have no stake in these companies.”

Any India-based startup that wants to take part in the accelerator can apply here.

Photo credit: Microsoft

Allison purchased his first home at the young age of 17 and found out quickly how much paperwork can complicate the process. I had a similar experience helping my mom buy a house a few years ago — paperwork was emailed, printed, signed, scanned, and emailed or faxed between at least three people. Trying to follow the paper trail would make anyone dizzy.

DotLoop tries to cut down on all physical paperwork by creating one space, called a loop, where people can collaborate on documents. Especially in the negotiation process, this cuts down on the time spent sending documents back and forth.

“A loop is a virtual workspace in real-time, [it's like] Google Docs but with more permissions and versioning,” said Allison in an interview with VentureBeat.

Real estate agents, loan officers, and home buyers can all access a document together to hammer out the details of the deal. Once everyone approves a contract or loan document, it can be printed, signed, and processed.

Document sharing is a popular feature seen in Google Docs and Zoho Writer, services used a lot in small businesses. DotLoop only serves the real estate industry and offers a secure place for sensitive document sharing. It plans to expand into other industries in the future.

“Our vision is bigger than real estate, [we want to] eliminate paperwork in all fields,” Allison noted.

With the funding, led by Trinity Ventures, DotLoop is launching a free version of its service for individual real estate agents. It’s been serving entire real estate firms until now. It is also moving west from its headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio to open an office in San Francisco.

Raining paperwork image via Shutterstock

Today, Salesforce is further beefing up its line of enterprise products with a new IM client and screensharing software.

The instant messaging comes via Chatter, Salesforce’s Facebook-like, Yammer-esque collaboration and task-management app. The IM client is cloud-based (so no need to download or install anything) and lets employees get down to business via one-on-one and group chats.

“People spend so much time setting up meetings,” said Salesforce SVP Kendall Collins in a phone call with VentureBeat. “You have all the people you work with in Chatter, and you’re kind of a single click away.”

The IM app lives inside Chatter, hanging out on the lower right corner of the screen, just like every other embedded IM program you’ve ever seen. It will be particularly familiar to users of Google Talk or Facebook Messenger, a fact that Collins makes no bones about.

“Facebook has shown the way,” he said. “Business apps are different, but not so different … In business, I just want to be able to ping people and ask them in-context things in the workplace every day.”

Users can also make lists for various teams or groups. For example, if Meghan, Heather, and I are working on a project called “Hazing the Intern,” I can set up a chat list and instantly draw my colleagues into a quick, no-fuss meeting.

Chat options appear in various places around Chatter, especially in the feed. Collins said relevance is key, so you’ll likely find chat options anywhere you’d see a task that might need real-time communication. For example, if Meghan posted a Hazing the Intern expense approval request in the feed, I could choose to chat with her directly about that request from that part of the interface.

“The most important thing was the context,” he said. “This is really tied into the core business.”

Chat features can also be built into other third-party apps that use Salesforce.

We asked whether end users, or “employees” as they’re known in the enterprise, would be willing to give up their current IM clients, but Collins said they don’t actually have to give anything up because they don’t have to actively adopt anything new.

“Everyone’s going to instantly have it,” he said. “They don’t have to download anything. It’s a ubiquitous, easy-to-use product. … People may have IM clients that they’re still using; for many customers, they’ll co-exist.”

And for leadership and management, Chatter IM solves the who’s-on-which-client problem. “Some of our customers are really anxious to move to this because they have some empoyees on one client and other employees on a second client,” said Collins. “They don’t have 100 percent coverage.”

Collins said the Chatter team is also spending a lot of time around archiving, discovery, and compliance. Prepare for Chatter IM compliance to launch right around Dreamforce.

As for screensharing, we’re sad to say that feature is coming as a limited pilot only starting in Q3 2012, and Collins couldn’t give us a general roll-out date. “We don’t have a target date; it’s really going to depend on the pilot,” he said. “We want to test it, get feedback, and continue to make it an amazing product.”

So far, much like the Chatter IM app, it’s comparable to other professional and consumer apps in its class, with an added focus on context. Screensharing is as simple as a drag-and-drop action inside Chatter IM.

Salesforce was founded in 1999 and went public in 2004. Currently, we’re told Chatter alone has 150,000 companies as clients.

Image courtesy of Andresr, Shutterstock

The company has identified  four main problems with teleconferences. First, of course, there’s dealing with the conference number itself, and then the authentication PIN number. Then there’s the problem of determining who is on the call, and the related issue — particularly on conference calls with larger groups — of knowing who is speaking. And finally, there’s the noise that inevitably interrupts when too many people are on speakerphone, or are taking the call in a busy location.

UberConference allows teleconferencers to dial a number (no PIN required), see who is calling in, and determine who is currently talking. The organizer can instantly tell when one or more participants are causing feedback or noise, and mute them. The organizer can even cut select participants out of sections of the call (UberConference calls it “earmuffing”) if needed for confidentiality reasons.

A particularly helpful feature is the ability to click on a participant and see their social overview, taken from popular networks: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. That’s a feature I’ve wanted often enough on calls with participants from multiple divisions or companies.

Currently, UberConference is free, but in the future the company will “offer a premium version of the service with more features and different pricing options.” The interface is simple and gorgeous, although you wonder how well it would scale for very large conference calls.

Walker is a serial entrepreneur. After selling GrandCentral to Google in 2007 for around $50 million, turning that service into Google Voice, and then spending some time as entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures, Walker left Google in mid-2011. He has not gone far, however; the incubator behind UberVoice, Firespotter Labs, is funded by Google Ventures.

GrandCentral was not Walker’s first internet telephony service, nor his first sale to an internet giant. Walker also ran DialPad in in the early 2000s, selling it to Yahoo in 2005. Obviously he can’t stay away from the telephony space.

Here’s a humorous look at the rational behind UberConference:

And, a more sober overview of the service itself:

Photo credit: Barnaby Kerr Photography

Sadly, a great number of television sets are currently suffering from bad user interfaces, which is something Motorola plans to change.

At The Cable Show industry event in Boston today, the company showed off its DreamGallery media concept that’s powered by Motorola’s Medios cloud service. Essentially, it’s a pretty way to navigate and share stuff on your television set in a way that currently isn’t possible — assuming that all future televisions will have internet connectivity.

DreamGallery focuses on making the television a cross-platform media center that works between computers/web browser, tablets, and smartphones. It will also serve to aggregate all the content from cable TV services, the internet, and Video-on-demand services (like Neflix), into a single location.

Motorola describes the DreamGallery with edgy catch phrases like “Your media your way” in its demo video, which we’ve embedded below.

The only thing that Motorola didn’t mention? What will end up happening to DreamGallery when Google swallows the company? I say this because Google kind of already has a division in place working on the future of television with its Android-based GoogleTV platform. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?)

Let us know what you think of the video in the comments section.

The problem with Facebook’s mobile app is that it doesn’t run games. The web-based site is built with Adobe Flash, but that runs poorly on mobile devices. As a result, Facebook can display its news feed and photos on its mobile app, but not the social games that are played by more than half of the social network’s users.

iSwifter plans to fix that with its own Facebook app that runs on tablets such as the iPad. iSwifter has created a game streaming technology that converts Flash games to video in a data center and then streams that video to the iPad. That enables users to play Flash games on the iPad. Now iSwifter is using Facebook’s own OpenGraph applications programming interface to create an app, TheWorx for Facebook, that duplicates the functions of the web-based Facebook on mobile, iSwifter chief executive Rajat Gupta told GamesBeat.

Facebook might not like being upstaged by Menlo Park, Calif.-based iSwifter, but Gupta says the social network should be happy because iSwifter’s app enables ads that run on the right-hand side of a Facebook page to be visible on the iPad. It can thus generate money for Facebook, which doesn’t yet have mobile ads on its own app.

It isn’t clear if Facebook will appreciate another company creating a Facebook app, but Gupta says that TheWorx for Facebook is really just another iPad application based on the OpenGraph API. In the video below, you can see that Zynga’s Slingo game, which doesn’t ordinarily run on the iPad, runs just fine in the iSwifter application. It will be interesting to see the reaction of Facebook, Zynga, and Apple. Gupta says that the app is a win for all of the companies involved.

When you activate TheWorx for Facebook app, you see what appears to be a normal Facebook page. But in the left-hand menu, there is an app hub tab. If you tap it with your finger, you’ll see all of the games you play on Facebook. If you tap on a game icon, the game will load and you’ll be able to play it with your fingers.

TheWorx for Facebook will debut in June. Gupta notes that Facebook’s recent filing to go public says that 4 percent of Facebook’s revenue comes from ads shown next to Zynga games.

“It’s clear that Facebook users are moving to mobile faster than even Facebook predicted,” says Gupta. “TheWorx is intended to benefit Facebook users who can’t play games on the Facebook iPad app or on the mobile Facebook site, as well as Facebook itself who doesn’t display their ads to these gaming users on mobile. And of course game developers should be happy too because their Facebook Flash games now come to the iPad with no porting required.”

iSwifter is funded by the incubator YouWeb and generated more than $10 million in revenue in the past year.

For a small Portland, Ore.-based startup, AppFog has managed to build a huge fan base.

AppFog offers a platform-as-a-service for developers building web applications. What that means in simple terms is that if you’ve got a program you want to write, AppFog will take care of setting up a virtual server, installing all the services you need, and getting everything ready so that all you have to do is drop in your code and get it running.

AppFog uses cloud-based services, primarily Amazon Web Services, under the hood, but provides a more straightforward, managed environment than cloud services offer. Its pricing is radically simpler, too.

And AppFog’s tens of thousands of customers are clearly passionate about the company. VentureBeat held an (admittedly unscientific) reader poll in the weeks leading up to Under the Radar, an event produced by DealMaker Media in Silicon Valley. There were 32 startups presenting at Under the Radar, and we asked readers to vote on their favorite.

We collected thousands of votes, and AppFog was neck-and-neck with cloud-based enterprise storage startup Zadara until the final hours. But in the end, AppFog won the contest.

The startup’s prize: A profile on VentureBeat. I interviewed AppFog founder and chief executive Lucas Carlson at the event, and after some delays, I’m posting it here. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, here is your reader’s choice winner:

VentureBeat: What is it that you guys do?

Lucas Carlson: We make developers lives easier. That’s our mission and our focus, it’s what we’re good at. We do that by creating a platform as a service that connects developers with infrastructure and services in seconds.

VB: What kinds of services?

Carlson: MySQL, Mongo, Reddis, memCache, anything new and cool that you’ve heard about. Instead of figuring out how to compile it and get it up and running and managing it if it crashes, we do all that for you, and we hook it all together and make it seamless.

VB: Isn’t that the premise of existing cloud-based services, like Amazon, where they get everything together and spin up a server for you and run whatever you want on it?

Carlson: Yes, and there’s a big difference between what Amazon’s doing and what we’re doing. Amazon thinks of it like resources and services, and you have to figure out how to tie it all together and keep track of everything. And once you do that, you’re bound to it — you can’t move off the platform and you have no choice.

Instead of thinking of it as resources, we’re thinking of it holistically, like applications. So we can understand from an application downwards, the entire stack, the entire status of the program, and how it’s running, and what services it needs. That gives us a unique ability to do things like snapshot an entire app with its services, keep backups of it, and transfer it to other cloud providers in order to do disaster recovery and other services.

VB: So my apps will still be running on Amazon, or Rackspace, or HP Cloud, but you’re just giving me the ability to manage that and make it easier to create what I need and deploy the apps that I want?

Carlson: And not only that, we’ve incorporated Cloud Foundry, which is an open-source library that you can actually contribute to, so you have a say, for the first time, in the application life cycle that it runs in.

VB: Who’s using this?

Carlson: Tens of thousands of developers. Developers are our customers, they’re our bread and butter. We built something for developers, by developers. We’re not looking to switch that focus — we just want to make sure that we help. Developers live everywhere. We have developers that live in enterprises, in small businesses, in startups, even individual developers.

VB: Is there a particular platform or language that your customer base uses?

Carlson: Our company has specialized in PHP, and that was the first language that we supported. So we have a strong following in the PHP community.

VB: Still used for many, many websites.

Carlson: About a third of all websites run PHP. But since then we have actually, through Cloud Foundry, expanded to support Java, Ruby, Node, .NET, and others.

VB: So what does it cost?

Carlson: It starts out completely free, and from there it scales up with their needs. You can go as cheap as $29 a month. Unlike other cloud providers, scaling up is a linear process, instead of jumping to become very expensive as you go.

VB: As a proportion of what I’m spending on Amazon Web Services, or Rackspace, what would I pay?

Carlson: It’s very difficult to say, because the way that those services charge is by the hour of server time. That makes sense if you’re analyzing DNA, but most mobile and web applications live for a very long time. So charging hourly, it’s very hard to calculate. Our system is charged monthly, pro rata, so if you need to add capacity, you just add it for the part of the month that you need it.

VB: How big are you as a company and how are you funded?

Carlson: We’ve raised $10 million in funding from Ignition and Madrona and First Round Capital in two rounds. We’re about 28 people and still growing very quickly. We’re based in Portland, Oregon.

VB: There are a bunch of people here from Portland.

Carlson: Portland is heating up. It’s actually a great place for building a company. It’s a lot cheaper and the talent is really high quality.

VB: So you guys won the reader’s choice award in our poll. I was sort of surprised to see all these people piling into the comments saying, “Vote for these guys.” How did you do it?

Carlson: Our mission is to make developers’ lives easier, and if developers are saying these things, I guess we’re doing a pretty good job with that.

VB: So you’re saying this is purely grass roots? You didn’t send out a tweet saying “Vote for us”?

Carlson: No, we did send out tweets. But the love we did not ask for, that was purely their own doing.

Photo by Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Former AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse will join cloud storage and file-sharing company YouSendIt as the new CEO, the company announced today.

Garlinghouse will replace Ivan Koon, who has previously served as YouSendIt’s CEO for six years. Garlinghouse was formerly AOL’s head of AOL’s Silicon Valley division and before that served as CEO of DialPad, which was acquired by Yahoo.

YouSendIt wants to be a major cloud storage player for businesses. But to do so, it will have to slug it out with Box, Egnyte, Accellion, and now Google with its Drive cloud storage product.

“YouSendIt is a rare gem — it has quietly built the leading business in this space by focusing on execution,” Garlinghouse said in a statement. “Used within a whopping 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and with more than 30 million registered users — the company is well positioned to continue its dramatic growth. YouSendIt has already demonstrated a track record of solid financial growth. I’m proud to lead YouSendIt into this next phase.”

Campbell, Calif.-based YouSendIt currently has 585,000 paid subscribers out of its 30 million users. The company says it generated a record revenue in 2011, and that it was up 61 percent year-over-year.

If you thought cloud companies lacked a sense of humor, think again. NetSuite’s SuiteWorld partner conference in San Francisco opened with a “Wayne’s World”-themed video, in which chief executive Zach Nelson (as Wayne) and founder Evan Goldberg (as Garth) talked about the company’s grand plans to change business software.

Those plans include a new e-commerce focused service, SuiteCommerce. Nelson unveiled the new “commerce as a service” offering, which manages online, mobile, and brick-and-motar transactions and customer interactions.

“We’re transforming how your business operates and how your business interacts with other businesses,” said Nelson. “Customers want to transact with several different devices and they want you to remember them across devices.”

SuiteCommerce includes enterprise resource planning services, customer-relationship management features, and support for global transactions NetSuite is also offering a SuiteCommerce API so it can integrate with a partner’s technology.

One the first companies to partner with the SuiteCommerce is mobile payments startup Square. NetSuite’s services will connect with Square Register, a mobile point of sale system using a cash register. On Square’s side, merchants will have a way to take payments and then they can use SuiteCommerce to manage sales and customer interactions.

“SuiteCommerce has support for any device, any business model, and it can modified for an ever-changing landscape,” Nelson noted. The hope is that any company can be the next Amazon, equipped with a full-featured online store.

NetSuite already has a strong e-commerce presence in its business, with 11.2 million products being managed on 2,800 websites run by the company, according to Nelson. Now it is branching out to manage online and in-store sales and reduce the “hairball” of communication that happens during every transaction. The company is also focusing on machine-to-machine business transactions, where humans aren’t involved.

“The human as a CRM system will be a thing of the past,” said Nelson in reference to the increasing use of machine to machine transactions.

NetSuites counts Evernote, Roku, Jawbone, and Airbnb as customers. Nelson also announced that SAP, a major competitor to NetSuite, has renewed its license with NetSuite to use its services for part of its business needs.

The company, founded in 1998 long before the likes of Salesforce, provides a suite of accounting, customer relationship management and other business software through the cloud. It calls it services ”enterprise resource planning” (ERP).

Photo: Sarah Mitroff/VentureBeat

If you’ve ever wanted to see how a single email travels from your account to someone else’s, Google has you covered with its new “Story of Send” site.

While the site appears to mostly be a push by Google to show off its green credentials, it is still cool in that it shows the actual process of something many of us do hundreds of times a week. Email travels from our computer browser over cables to Google’s data centers. There the email is copied, scanned for viruses, and sent back out over cables to the recipient’s email account.

Google Green team member Erin Reilly writes on Google’s blog:

“We’ve included videos and photos throughout the journey so you can explore certain areas more deeply. For example, if you’re curious what data center servers look like, we’ve included some photos. Or you can watch a video to learn about how we purchase clean energy from wind farms near our data centers. And because technology doesn’t always have to be serious, you might find a vampire or two lurking around or uncover other surprises on the journey.”

Check out the “Story of Send” video below:

Apple will soon unveil an update to its iCloud storage service that will add photo sharing and social features, the Wall Street Journal reports.

While Dropbox, Box, Microsoft, and Google have dominated the cloud storage conversation in recent months, Apple has mostly stayed out of comparisons because it offers the dumbest (maybe “easiest” is the right word) cloud storage. It syncs your media across all iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Macs, and PCs, but there is no way to manage what exactly goes where.

But with new functionality that is Apple is likely to announce at its WWDC conference on June 11, iCloud could take a leap forward with more fleshed-out features. First up will be easy photo sharing so others can access and download your photos. You’ll also be able to comment on these photos like you do on Facebook and other social sites.

The iCloud update will also reportedly let you sync notes and reminders using new web apps. That would tie iCloud with the release of iOS 6 and its many new features, including the dropping of Google Maps in favor of Apple’s own Maps software.

Let us know in the comments if you use iCloud now and if you’re looking forward to new features from the service.

The result of this merging of business and consumer applications is a new class of general and vertical apps that are as social as they are powerful. These new applications are increasingly easy to use, collaborative, and based in the cloud.

While IT managers may cringe each time they hear “can you help me connect my iPad to the company server,” here are seven reasons businesses should embrace the consumerization of IT.

1. Real-time communication
In their personal lives, people are becoming more and more accustomed to web-based communication channels outside of email. When people are used to FaceTime, chat, and instant messaging at home, the act of sending an email to a vendor, or even sending a fax to a lawyer, seems like an artifact from a different, and far slower, era. If I can chat with my friends on Facebook, why can’t I interact with co-workers on our CRM system? Why I can’t I have a secure instant message session with my lawyer?

The socialization of enterprise applications gives workers, clients, colleagues, customers, and vendors better tools to communicate in real time. These tighter communication loops should ultimately drive key performance goals for any business, including employee productivity, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

2. Greater accessibility
While traditional enterprise systems trap data in a single location, the cloud makes applications and business data available to more users on more devices in more locations. For employees, this can be a game changer, as the information they need is right at their fingertips – whether they’re at a client location, on route to a meeting, at home, or on vacation.

3. End-user buy-in
Ultimately the success of any technology initiative hinges on the ability to convince employees to actually use the software, device, or process. When employees clamor to bring their own tools into the workplace, there’s no risk that a new tool will sit idly by.  Throwing employees in front of a stodgy application is hardly a recipe for success. Rather, end users are more likely to use those tools that evoke the same look and feel of their friendly social networks and consumer apps.

4. Shorter end-user learning curve
A savvy workforce, familiar with its own favorite tools, can dive right into technology that leverages consumer elements in the corporate environment. Training costs go down, and employees can be productive with their new tools right out of the gate.

5. Affordability
Cloud-based applications shift the financial costs from the upfront capital expense of purchasing software licenses to an ongoing operating expense. When calculating the total cost of ownership, the benefits of cloud-based tools go beyond the cost of subscription vs. software seat to include: lower management costs, lower provisioning and upgrade hassles, and lower hardware costs. A 2009 report from Forrester Research concluded that Google Apps costs less than a third as much as on-premise email for equipping 15,000 employees with email.

6. Security
While data is often the chief concern holding businesses back from the cloud, web-hosted applications can actually increase data security, particularly for those small to mid-sized companies that don’t have proper in-house technical expertise or resources like a dedicated, lockable server room. In these cases, off-premise storage removes the company’s sensitive data from on-premise risks, such as access by cleaning staff, employee error, even physical threats like earthquake and fire.

7. Productivity
Consider for a moment who is behind the consumerization of IT. While Apple may benefit greatly as iPads and iPhones cross over to the enterprise, it’s the employee and not Apple who is pushing to use these devices for work. At the heart of this trend is the simple idea that employees know which tools can make their work day easier and, hopefully, happier.

The key question to ask is: If employees are asking to use their own tools so they can be more productive in the office or catch up on work after hours, is that such a scary prospect?

Jack Newton is CEO and co-founder of Clio, a Vancouver-based company that offers web-based practice management software for solo practitioners and small-to-medium sized law firms.

[Top image credit: Goodluz/Shutterstock]

Adobe’s anticipated Creative Cloud digital hub, with access to CS6 software and cloud storage, is now available for anyone who wants to give it a spin.

As we’ve noted before, Creative Cloud promises access to the latest version of Adobe’s staple program, Photoshop, as well as upgrades to Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash Pro, Fireworks, Premiere Pro, AfterEffects, Lightroom, Muse, Edge, and more. You also get 20GB of cloud storage with syncing options.

The service runs between $50 and $75 per month depending on whether you sign up for a full year or if you pay month-to-month. While that might sound a little high, buying a full license to the latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite runs between $1,300 and $2,600, depending on which programs you want.

The Creative Cloud subscription is a direct response to piracy of Adobe’s very expensive products. Design professionals who can’t get their employers to pay for it or strapped students who need the software for projects sometimes steal Adobe’s software via Torrent sites and file-sharing sites. But with Creative Cloud, Adobe hopes to get some of these would-be pirates to pay a more-affordable monthly subscription rather than steal the software.

Check out the pricing options below and let us know in the comments if you plan to sign up.

This sponsored post is produced by TiE.

Successes such as Instagram, has got the whole tech community up in restless excitement. At least 2 developers approached me the day the Instagram acquisition was announced. They needed to do something. If not here, surrounded by the startup frenzy in the Silicon Valley, then where else, they said.

This is the right time, the right economy, the right place and everyone wants a ride on the startup train. And TiEcon is the biggest Entrepreneurship Conference, which has something for everyone – from Entrepreneurs, Investors, to Engineers, Recruiters.

Entrepreneurship – What it takes

The rosy successes and all – there is a lot that goes into entrepreneurship. What people to hire, who to pick for your founding team, who to partner with, when & how much to take to market, when to raise funds and if you are lucky like Instagram & many others before, when & whether to sell. Do you have what it takes? The Entrepreneurship panel at this year’s TiEcon , gives you food for thought.

Entrepreneurship for Women

Entrepreneurship, is perfect for women! And here is why. For one, it destroys the myth of the Glass ceiling (A woman Entrepreneur – To be or not to be) exposes Gender socialization (Deborah Gruelfeld at TiEcon on Mastering the Body Language for Power and Influence) and only your technical, social and business skills are the ones on the line. There is no limit to your creativity.

What goes into making your startup a success

If you are on the entrepreneurial track, there are many things that go into making your startup, a success. Whether to bootstrap, or take money from Angels or VCs or How to take your product to market? A startup is about a team with the perfect complementary skill-sets. So how do you build your winning team or judge whether you are part of that winning startup team. Once your startup is off the ground, does it have the belts and buckles in place for the journey up the hockey stick curve? And well – if you are young, right out of or in school/college and wondering how you could start a company– there is the Young entrepreneur’s guide to getting started doling out advice on it, at the TiE Youth Forum.

For the Geeks in us

‘What if Im not an entrepreneur’, ‘What if I love coding and and, building things?’ Well, this year’s TiEcon fuels the developer’s passion and knowledge as well.

The Social Panels talk about the next frontiers in Social Gaming, how internet commerce has been impacted by Social media, and what the emerging trends and opportunities are in the Social space.

The Mobile panels talk about the latest mobile trends and opportunities. You could learn best practices from mobile companies for deployments in the enterprise space.

The Energy panels talk about the upcoming applications and emerging trends in energy fields, the hottest opportunities in the cleantech area, and the evolution of energy efficiency in the automobile sector.

The Life Sciences Panels talk about Medical device innovation in emerging markets, and opportunities in Mobile health.

The Cloud Panels talk about how Cloud & SAAS are being used in the real-world, emerging trends and opportunities in Cloud and how Consumerization in the Enterprise is driving opportunities in the Cloud.

What the Stars foretell

And that’s not all. This year’s TiEcon 2012 (May 18 – 19, 2012) also has some amazing Keynotes from Dr. Vishal Sikka, Head of Technology at SAP and Carlos Dominguez, Cisco SVP. In the Breakthrough Thinkers keynote, Dr. Deepak Chopra, talks about Prosperity and Leadership. And finally, Sam Pitroda tells the story of how innovation was ignited in India, which has led to the Internet revolution there and the new booming economy that we see there today.

And this isn’t all. At the TiEcon Expo you will find 100 or so startups displaying their latest products and innovations. And in the corridors of the convention, you will find endless opportunities to Network and talk to the smartest of entrepreneurs, investors, passionate developers who are on the cutting edge of technology. A boundless, priceless opportunity to connect, network, learn, grow and prosper…

Most companies use at least 4 different cloud services, according to a study by Cloudability, proof that the cloud has become a ubiquitous tool, whether chief information officers want it to be or not.

Cloudability (a provider of cost-management tools for cloud services) looked at data from its 3,200 customers in 80 different countries to gather this information that reaches back to 2005 — a time before “cloud” became a mainstream term for sharing and storage on the Internet. Today, companies are spending thousands of dollars to keep up with the technology, replacing on-premiss systems like customer-relationship management software and even local servers in favor of the Internet. Looking at the data, cloud really hockey-sticked in 2010. Prior to that, however, there were a few prominent cloud services: For instance, Mechanical Turk was released in 2005, Google Apps in 2006, and Github in 2008.

Today, 86 percent of companies use more than one type of cloud service, according to Cloudability’s data. The majority of those cloud services fall in the “hosting and computing category,” followed closely by storage needs. The data is surprising because of reservations that CIOs and chief security officers have about the cloud. Many are concerned that the cloud is not yet a safe place to store proprietary information, and could provide access to a company’s systems more easily. But as the technology evolves, more companies are jumping on board, solidifying the cloud as a core tool in businesses around the world.

Check out more about the cloud and how it is being used by companies all over the world:

Cloud server image via Shutterstock

Electronics giant Samsung has purchased streaming media startup mSpot, the companies announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the deal is rumored to be worth an estimated $8.8 million, according to South Korean news site Mael Business.

MSpot’s service functions similarly to Google Music or Amazon’s Cloud Player. Users can upload the digital media (music, movies, TV shows) stored on their computers into the cloud via an mSpot app. That media is then accessible on a handful of smart devices through mSpot’s app, which is available on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Google TV. Users get 5GB of storage for their media for free. The mSpot streaming music service also offers users a Pandora-style smart-radio functionality, while the video service is geared more towards making new movie purchases.

As part of the acquisition deal, Samsung will feature the mSpot app on its devices, including smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Strategically speaking, Samsung will likely develop the mSpot service as a way to compete more evenly with Apple, which offers a digital media store as well as plenty of streaming functionality via its iCloud service.

The move will also allow Samsung to steal attention away from the Google Play Store, which is easily integrated into Samsung devices running Google’s Android operating system. It will be interesting to see if Galaxy smartphones and tablet owners use the mSpot service instead of Google Play — and to see how Samsung plans to draw users away from Google Play to the mSpot service.

Founded in 2004, mSpot has previously raised $2.3 million from Trinity Ventures.

Apple is currently testing a notification system for its iCloud web service via iCloud.com, according to a MacRumors report.

The notifications look pretty much like they do on iPads and iPhones running iOS 5.0 or higher, and presumably, its how the notification system will look when it comes to the latest version of Apple’s operating system OS X Mountain Lion.

And while we know that the company really wants to push iCloud integration in the future, I’m curious if notifications on the iCloud site would be overkill. Sure, the notifications can handle calendar and email alerts, but why bother if you’re already using an iOS device to sync all of these things together.

If Apple were to add a news feed and support for iMessages to the iCloud site, it could make those notifications a worthy addition. However, it would also mean Apple was tiptoeing its way into building a social-media walled garden. Without social and news features, I’d have no reason to spend time on iCloud.com, and I’m guessing many others would feel the same.

At this point, the only clear takeaway is that Apple plans to make its customers use iCloud more often on the web. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Image via MacRumors

Cloud storage startup Dropbox will provide a generous 50GB of free storage to new owners of the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S III Android smartphone.

The move mimics Dropbox’s prior decision to team up with HTC to give owners of the HTC One X 25GB of free storage. But in this case, Samsung Galaxy S III owners are getting double the space. It’s also comparable to Box’s offer of 50GB free storage to any compatible Android device in a limited promotion, except Box targets businesses while Dropbox is mostly targeting consumers.

S III owners who take advantage of Dropbox’s promotion will get the free 50GB storage for two years, which is often how long many smartphone owners keep a phone before upgrading because of carriers’ two-year contracts.

The Galaxy S III smartphone will begin arriving in stores May 29.

Developing story. Refresh for updates.

Enterprise storage startup Nirvanix has raised $25 million in its third round funding, with a goal to bring enterprise cloud storage to the largest companies in the world.

Nirvanix offers its more than 1,200 customers across the globe access to the cloud storage in three forms, depending on their needs: public, hybrid, and private. The company claims it is the only one of its kind to offer and fully managed services with usage-based pricing. Basically, you pay for exactly what you use, rather than paying for a set amount of storage.

Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix, told us Nirvanix separates itself from cloud storage companies like Box because it stores much, much larger data sets with its nine data centers. The largest data set being stored for a single customer is 8.5 petabytes (for USC Digital Repository). Other customers storing huge amounts of data include NBCUniversal, Cerner Healthcare, and Advocate Healthcare.

“We have one customer who has more data stored with us than what Box is hosting in whole,” Genereux told us.

Genereux said the company is in “hyper-growth” mode and its next big step is opening an engineering facility in Boulder, Colo. that will act as the company’s second office outside its San Diego home. The company chose Boulder because it has a strong startup community and quality engineering talent.

The new funding round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, and Windward Ventures. Nirvanix has raised about $70 million to date, including the new round.

Nirvanix was founded in 2007 and now has 70 employees. Genereux said the company aims to double its employee number within a year.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Original photo: brainpencil/Shutterstock

Google added a whopping collection of 450 fonts to its online document service Google Docs today — thus freeing your text from years of enslavement by the likes of Arial, Courier New, and the universally reviled Comic Sans.

Well, you know what Comic Sans? We’ll just see how comical you are within a sea of equally goofy font options now available to co-workers, friends, and family members who have zero grasp of basic design principles.

Google Docs users can add the new font styles by clicking on the font menu in the tool bar and selecting the “Add fonts” option at the very bottom. From there you’ll see the entire menu of web fonts available, such as Economica, Princess Sofia, Jolly Lodger, Happy Monkey, Dynalight, Wallpoet, Lobster one, Lobster two, and Esteban. All of your chosen fonts are displayed alphabetically in a sidebar to the right. You can click the “X” to remove any font you don’t plan on using. That sidebar will then appear in the “font styles” tool bar when you’re working within a doc.

Even with all these fresh new font options, it’s possible that bland white document background isn’t doing for you anymore. Thankfully, Google has added over 60 new document templates for you to choose from.

The full list of Google Docs updates is listed below, via the Google Docs blog:

• Google Drive launched as a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all your stuff.
• There are now a few more options for inserting images in Docs, including inserting from Google Drive, searching for images from the LIFE Photo archive, or taking a snapshot with your webcam.
• Charts in spreadsheets now has support for minor gridlines and options to customize the formats of axis labels
• Accessibility in Docs got better with support for screenreaders in presentations and with the addition of NVDA to our list of supported screenreaders.
• From File > Page setup… you can now set the default page size for your new documents.
• It’s now easier for speakers of right-to-left languages by automatically showing bidirectional controls when you type in a language that might use them.
• Apps Script had many improvements, including
  • A new ScriptService for programmatically publishing your scripts and controlling when they run.
  • A new function to find the root folder of someone’s Drive.
  • An increase in the allowed attachment size in emails from 5MB to 25MB.
  • An increase in the size of docs files you can create from 2MB to 50MB.
• There are now over 60 new templates in our template gallery.

The company announced Wednesday that it is rolling out new Amazon Cloud Drive desktop applications for both Windows and Mac. The apps function very similarly to cloud-storage service competitor Dropbox’s desktop clients. Amazon’s Cloud Drive app allows you to seamlessly drag and drop files from your computer to the cloud with little work. Files are downloaded and uploaded in the background, but can be paused and restarted again should the need arise.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, which debuted last year, provides users with 5GB of storage for free. They can purchase more space at the rate of $1 per additional GB, per year.

With the recent launch of Google’s long-hyped cloud storage service Google Drive, Amazon will need every advantage to keep current Cloud Drive users from leaving. The new desktop apps also makes the Amazon Cloud Drive experience much more fluid, but nothing new in terms of what’s available by other competing services.

The new apps are available to download today on Amazon’s website, but you’ll need to sign up for the Cloud Drive service to gain the storage functionality.

Microsoft and cloud communications startup Twilio have signed a deal to bring Twilio’s APIs to developers who use Windows Azure, the two companies announced today.

Azure is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s data centers. Naturally, some of those companies and developers using Azure could benefit from the cloud-based phone and SMS technologies that Twilio offers. On top of API access, the deal will give Azure developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes. Interested developers can sign up here.

“In line with our commitment to serving developers, Windows Azure welcomes support from Twilio to make their voice and messaging APIs available on Windows Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, in a statement. “We’ve seen the innovation happening around Twilio, and we want to make it as easy as possible for Windows Azure developers to build great apps that use Twilio’s communications platform and take advantage of Windows Azure’s scalability, reliability, and flexibility.”

San Francisco-based Twilio has raised around $33 million to date, with its most recent funding totaling $17 million. Twilio recently revealed that part of that funding was humorously delivered via a touchtone term sheet created using Twilio’s API.

Cloud photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Big data startup Birst has raised $26 million in its fourth round of funding, with a goal accelerating growth and product development, the company announced today.

Birst is part of a relatively crowded field of business intelligence players including QlikTech, SAP, IBM, Oracle, GoodData, and Microstrategy. But Birst claims it only allocates “one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI,” while still being available as in SaaS form and on-premise. That sort of flexibility is quite attractive, and Birst can connect to multiple data sources, such as CRM, ERP, financial, and operational systems.

The new funding round was led by big dog VC firm Sequoia Capital with additional participation by prior investors Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures.

“This is an extraordinary time for us,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of Birst, in a statement. “We founded Birst to change the way the world used and interacted with BI and by pushing the envelope of possibility we are witnessing great success. This investment furthers Birst’s ability to continue to drive innovation and expand our solution to new markets and new audiences. We are thrilled to have world-class investors such as Sequoia Capital by our side.”

San Francisco-based Birst was founded in 2004 and has now raised a total of $46 million, including today’s funding.

Check out a video describing Birst’s dashboards below:

Google has graduated its message translation feature from Gmail Labs to all inboxes, as well as cutting some cool, helpful Labs features like Old Snakey and Mail Goggles, the company announced today.

During the past year, Google has been refining what it offers and getting rid of many of its side projects and products that never went anywhere. For example, last November it said good riddance to Wave, Knol, Search Timeline, and Google Gears. This appears to stem from CEO Larry Page trying to push the company to generate better revenue, which the company is doing well.

Google today is masking that it is killing lots of cool products in Gmail Labs by graduating its message translation to Gmail. When you get a message in another language, you’ll know be able to click on “Translate message” button.

“Since message translation was one of the most popular labs, we decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world,” Google wrote on its blog. “Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email. The next time you receive a message in a language other than your own, just click on Translate message in the header at the top of the message.”

While this is helpful addition, take a look at this list of fun and helpful features being expelled from Gmail Labs: “Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats, and SMS in Chat gadget.”

Google says these weren’t popular enough to stay, but frankly some of them were good. Mail Googles was a humorous way to stop you from “drunk e-mailing.” Inbox Preview let you see your inbox before it finished loading, which was great for slower connections. I’m sure there are others people will be missing too.

Translation picture: Helder Almeida/Shutterstock

Google’s BigQuery application has launched into general availability with an aim to help businesses crunch “big data” sets easier and cheaper than ever, the company said Tuesday.

BigQuery, as we previously detailed in November, gives companies of all sizes a powerful cloud-based tool to analyze data. Traditionally, crunching big data sets has taken more IT investment than simply spinning up and uploading data to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) program.

The SaaS software stands in stark contrast to open-source data software Hadoop and companies like Cloudera that help companies get a handle on Hadoop. It’s also quite different from on-premise data crunching software like HP-owned Vertica and IBM-owned Netezza.

Google product manager Ju-kay Kwek, who is overseeing the company’s big data efforts, told me companies that rely on data and business intelligence would likely prefer BigQuery over other options because it’s easier to set up and it costs less.

“On-premise options like Netezza and Vertica are fast and powerful, but they will cost you,” Kwek said. “And with Hadoop, you need more heads and you have to build out a custom Hadoop system.”

Kwek said one of Google’s largest advertising customers used BigQuery verus its own on-premise Hadoop cluster as a test to see how well it worked. BigQuery crunched the data ten times faster, showing how much faster data crunching can be when using Google’s monstrous computing power.

While in limited preview, BigQuery was free to try for 30 days, but now that the service is all the way live, companies will have to pony up. Thankfully, the prices appear fairly reasonable. Here’s the breakdown:

Let us know in the comments if your company might give BigQuery a shot for its big data needs or if you prefer Hadoop, Netezza, or Vertica.

Data image: Toria/Shutterstock

Downloading a PDF or Microsoft Office file from the web is easily one of the more antiquated practices still being used today. It’s also something cloud document startup Crocodoc wants to abolish with its new HTML5 document embedding service, which launches today.

If you’ve ever viewed a document in Dropbox, Yammer, or LinkedIn, then you’re using Crocodoc’s product. The startup’s service takes PDF and Microsoft office document files and replicates them online for wider consumption. While this functionality is also available in Google Docs, Crocodoc’s service preserves the document in a way that’s very similar to how it looks and functions within native desktop software. With Google, I can technically see the document, but often times a documents style, images, and other formatting is altered.

“You’re essentially getting something that’s on par with Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word, but within a web app, ” Crocodoc founder and CEO Ryan Damico told VentureBeat in an interview. “When you view a document in Google Docs, its much slower to load in the browser, everything is blurry when you try to zoom in, and there’s kind of faked text selection that doesn’t really look right.” He adds that while Google Docs is a consumer-focused product, its main focus isn’t in translating documents perfectly, which is necessary for many people.

Crocodoc’s new service can be embedded into a variety of third-party apps by using iFrame or JavaScript, and without the need for plugins or additional software. Customers can customize the doc experience to fit specific branding, and offer commenting and markup tools for collaboration with others.

The startup charges by the document, so its service will probably be most useful for businesses, or organizations that produce a heavy flow of documents that need to be shared among a large group. The startup’s first product, Crocodoc Personal, is targeted at consumers and still available. Its new product is already powering the document viewing experience within Yammer, SAP, LinkedIn, Edmodo, and Dropbox.

Founded in 2010, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised about $1 million to date. Its funding comes from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and top Silicon Valley investors including Dave McClure, Joshua Schachter, Paul Buchheit, and Steve Chen. Crocodoc has four employees, but has plans to double or triple its staff within a year, Damico said.

Photo of the Crocodoc team (above) and screenshots via Crocodoc

South Korean electronics giant LG has introduced LG Cloud, a service that lets users store and access content across Android phones, smart TVs, and PCs, the company announced today.

LG Cloud arrives in beta form on tomorrow. The company will try to differentiate its offering from just-launched Google Drive and services like Dropbox and SugarSync by placing its emphasis on storing and streaming media rather than every type of file.

With LG Cloud, you can access and stream video, music, and photo files on Android smartphones, smart TVs, and PCs. The Android app is the most interesting app here, and it will automatically sync the files on your phone with LG’s servers. The LG Cloud Android app will be available for download from Google Play or LG Smart World shortly.

“Most companies today only see the cloud as a storage device or in the case of YouTube or Flickr, only for one type of content,” said Havis Kwon, CEO of LG’s home entertainment division, in a statement. “LG makes the devices that millions of people watch content on so we can set a new yardstick for ease of use by setting up our own cloud service

People that own LG’s smartphones or smart TVs will get 50GB free for six months, while everyone else who signs up for the service will get 5GB free, which is the same space that Google Drive offers and more space than Dropbox’s free 2GB per user. Other paid options will be introduced when service launches out of beta.

LG Cloud photo: LG