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Bitcasa moves your hard drive to the cloud

One of the most technically audacious companies I've seen announced itself at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference yesterday: Bitcasa.

Technically, it's a virtualized primary storage company. With this product, your main storage is actually in the "cloud," and because of that, it's pretty much unlimited. Your local hard drive is used--heavily--for the cache. If the technology works, this architecture should give you storage that's just as fast as a local-only hard drive, but with more capacity and reliability. Bitcasa will cost $10 a month with no storage cap for users. (A free version will be &… Read more

Gartner: 'Hype Cycle' peaks for iPad, 3D displays

A release from marketing researcher Gartner this week shows the "Hype Cycle" peaking for media tablets like Apple's iPad, along with other technologies that are currently riveting consumers' attention, such as 3D displays.

What exactly is the Hype Cycle? Jackie Fenn, a Gartner research vice president, describes it as follows: "What happens is that people get very excited and have very high expectations for a technology. And we get what we characterize as the peak of inflated expectations, where everyone feels they have to be involved or they're going to be left out."

Fenn continues: "In fact, the technology is often immature at that point, so a lot of people who try it don't get the value that they thought they were going to get. You get a trough of disillusionment, where you get a backlash against the technology, probably going too far the other way before you settle down and people start to understand how you do use the technology."

The October 9 Gartner release highlights "high-impact technologies," such as the iPad and other media tablets, wireless power, 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and private cloud computing. 4G mobile broadband is also shown as peaking.

Because Gartner generally describes these technologies as immature and not fully understood by consumers (nor suppliers), it is interesting to speculate about how the iPad,… Read more

Solve Safari 5.0.1 page load woes with DNS settings

This is a simple troubleshooting tip to help resolve occasionally slow or partial page loads, or when a Web page cannot be found.… Read more

Keep your coupons close

If you're not the type of person not to say 'no' to discounts, then Cellfire's mobile coupons application could potentially preserve your savings. The deals include local restaurants and retail services in the U.S., as well as national chains. Users can also save coupons for later use and participate in Cellfire's new program for cornering additional coupons by texting a keyword to 22888, Cellfire's short code. Unfortunately, Cellfire isn't always useful if your shopping habits don't mirror the offerings. Yet it's a broad enough service for us to lament that it hasn'… Read more