Box.net Launches OpenBox Services

Box.net: "With the new OpenBox Services, you can bring the power of web applications directly into your existing Box account. Edit photos and images online with Picnik, work on your Word and Excel files using Zoho, publish documents for the whole world to see through Scribd, send your documents signed with EchoSign, and much more...

Already have an account? Log in and add services to your Box Upload files to one place for use anywhere Box users can now utilize third-party applications with their files stored online, which means you will only need to upload files to the web once. Upload an image to your Box account and be able to edit it online with Picnik, send it to a friend on Facebook, add a link to it on Twitter, and turn it into a custom t-shirt on Zazzle — all from a single file upload."

I'm a fan of box for online storage because of it's widgets, and overall UX. Their ongoing efforts to further tie-in box storage to other popular web services is a good thing.

Box.net Releases Microsoft & Adobe Plug-ins

mashable.com: "Box.net, the file-sharing application, has launched a few more plug-ins due to the success of its plug-in developed for Microsoft Office.

There are now box.net plug-ins available for Open Office, Photoshop, Acrobat and 3ds max. These plug-ins allow you to back up files and share directly from each application."

Box is doing a great job at extending their service beyond the website only model. The widget they offer is very useful, now tying specific apps directly to online storage will be super handy as well (although they appear to be Windows only). I'd love to see them create an S3 option for their service as well, where they become the interface between you and (ie cheap) S3 storage.

Bandwagon: Backup iTunes to S3 or FTP

Bandwagon FTP edition (beta) available: "Bandwagon is an app service that automatically and continuously backs up iTunes to your online storage. Furthermore, Bandwagon is event driven, not scheduled backup (i.e. when you add tracks, it will automatically back it up)."

They have two versions of the service: an Amazon S3 edition called Bandwagon DIY (which has been renamed to Bandwagon S3) which, of course, backs up to your S3 storage. Then Bandwagon FTP is geared towards users that have unused web hosting storage or have their own homegrown ftp server.

This is great to see another developer putting a task-based intelligent front end onto S3 / FTP. With the various options for online storage out there getting bigger and cheaper, these kinds of utilities will help to decentralize data storage and keep more people from suffering the horrors of complete data loss.



Please note, while I'm genuinely into the Bandwagon idea, I'm also posting this in the hopes of getting the discount on their service that they are currently offering to bloggers ;)

Interview With Jeff Bezos On Amazon Web Services

TalkCrunch: "Moments after Jeff Bezos left the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I was able to talk to him for a few minutes about Amazon’s web services ambitions. Jeff is emphasizing that new services like Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are going to be a key business line for them in the future, and they are planting the seeds now."

I'm really into the possibilities for S3. It's interesting to hear some info straight from Bezos.