Posts tagged STORE
Dropbox To Business: Never Mind The Breaches, Come Store Your Stuff With Us!
Apr 10th
Dropbox is making a new push to win over business customers to its cloud-storage business. But its checkered history of security breaches may make it a tough sell in the enterprise.
Dropbox said Wednesday that it has added single sign-on (SSO) capabilities to its storage service, matching a capability that its chief rival, Box.net, has offered for some time. Dropbox also decided to rename its “Dropbox for Teams” business service “Dropbox for Business.” The added feature and a name change may not seem like much to hang the new marketing push on, but Dropbox claims it has high hopes.
Beginning next month, Dropbox users will be able to sign on to their corporate account using Active Directory, which, behind the scenes, will also log them into Dropbox. The company said it’s partnering with Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified; Ping Identity and Okta also provide SSO solutions to Box, which signed up with Ping Identity in 2011 to provide SSO capabilities via its PingFederate technology.
Dropbox doesn’t just compete with Box.net, but SugarSync, Google Drive, Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and a host of smaller services. But it was Dropbox that Box CEO Aaron Levie skewered with an April Fool’s Day prank. Why? Because Levie can see Dropbox in the rear-view mirror.
Dropbox’s vast scale — it boasts 100 million users, with 600 million “work files” stored every work week, according to a spokeswoman — represents a threat. Dropbox counts users in 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies, according to Kevin Egan, the vice president of sales that Dropbox hired away from Salesforce.
Someone’s Gotta Pay For All This
It’s not clear how many of those people actually use Dropbox for business purposes — though it might not matter. Egan said that Dropbox’s legacy in the consumer space — it has signed partnership agreements with both HTC and Samsung for free storage when customers buy the Samsung Galaxy S3 or HTC One, plus deals with Yahoo Mail and its purchase of Mailbox — means that consumers turn into evangelists when they enter the workplace.
“Millions of people have signed up using their work email address at Fortune 500 companies,” Egan said. “And I think what we want to do is allow them to maintain the level of enthusiasm that they have, but embrace IT more, so they have 100 percent confidence that they have control and visibility.”
The opportunity, of course, is that consumers are hooked on free; businesses aren’t. Dropbox users can get up to 2 GB of storage for free, with up to 18 GB after various referrals and promotions. For Dropbox for Business/Teams, the price remains $125 per user, per year.
In 2012, however, co-founder Arash Ferdowsi told The Economist that only 4 percent of its users base were paying customers. That makes Dropbox look like the “we’ll make it up on volume” strategy writ large — eventually someone’s gotta pay, right? Attracting corporate customers helps make up for that.
Right now, Dropbox is asking what those corporate customers want. Tido Carriero, the lead engineer at Dropbox for Business, said future improvements could include things like making the Dropbox interface easier to use for large teams. “But for now, SSO is what they’re shouting in our ear,” he said.
Security Breaches Still Hurt
Unfortunately, what may be lurking in the back of some minds may be a pair of security lapses. In 2011, Dropbox accidentally pushed a code update that introduced a bug into the company’s authentication mechanism, allowing third parties to log into user accounts and access files. Last year, hacks at other Web sites allowed attackers to penetrate accounts used by Dropbox employees, including a document from which they may have been able to harvest email addresses. In August, those email addresses were apparently used to send Dropbox users spam.
Since then, Dropbox has added two-factor authentication, as well as a recent administration console that can require two-factor authentication and monitor employee use, including restricting shared folders and links within the company. But Dropbox has been hurt by the lingering effects on its reputation.
“We haven’t won deals — there have been deals that we have not won because of it,” Egan said. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing — explaining our security protocols better, sometimes it’s a question of comfort with the business, and sometimes they’re a couple of years away from embracing us. It’s certainly hard to know what happened, but it’s certainly top of mind for a lot of IT admins.”
If Dropbox’s strategy works, then its next target is government. Carriero said that the company is not FIPS certified, and it’s probably unlikely that the Pentagon would agree to use a cloud storage solution like Dropbox. A smaller county or town might end up using the service, though.
Storage has become a commodity. Box.net is attempting, through partnerships, to allow as many companies as possible to do stuff with that data. That adds value. Dropbox’s purchase of Mailbox is headed in the right direction, but it still appears to be chasing Box, at least in the business space.
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Google pulls game from Play Store for SEO joke – Tech2
Apr 10th
 Tech2 |
Google pulls game from Play Store for SEO joke
Tech2 Google has been working overtime to boot out apps that are malicious or of low quality from its Play Store, but it seems the company is also cracking down on apps that load up their descriptions with SEO-friendly terms. The search giant recently kicked … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Boots New Game Hazard Rush From Play Store For SEO Joke, Reminds … – Android Police
Apr 9th
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Google Boots New Game Hazard Rush From Play Store For SEO Joke, Reminds …
Android Police Well, the community was into Hazard Rush, which (according to the app description) is a little like Snake and Geometry Wars. It's the next part of the description that got Hazard Rush banned from Google Play. The developer made a cheeky SEO joke, and … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
App Store Optimization (ASO): Is It Really the New SEO? – Search Engine Journal
Apr 2nd
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App Store Optimization (ASO): Is It Really the New SEO?
Search Engine Journal Although apps were once seen as a way to play games or check emails, there now seems to be an app for everything (and every business). A few weeks ago the popular Techcrunch wrote an article claiming that ASO (App Store Optimization) is the new SEO, … |
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App Store Optimization (ASO): Is It Really the New SEO?
Apr 2nd
It’s no secret that mobile optimization is becoming incredibly important for companies looking to expand their reach, but what many companies are beginning to realize is that it’s not out of the question to create an app. Although apps were once seen as a way to play games or check emails, there now seems to [...]
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Apple Yanks ‘Sweatshop’ Game From The App Store. Oh, The Irony
Mar 22nd
Apple has yanked the controversial game Sweatshop HD from its App Store — a move rife with irony given Apple’s own long association with questionable labor practices in China.
Apple actually pulled Sweatshop last month, although the news just broke Thursday on the game site Polygon. The game put players in a managerial position at an expanding offshore clothing factory. Among other things, it offers the option to employ cheap child labor as everything from fires, longer work hours, and mutilating injuries force players to make increasingly dark decisions to meet the bottom line.
Simon Parkin, head of the game’s studio Littleloud, told Polygon the title was pulled because Apple was “uncomfortable selling a game based around the theme of running a sweatshop.” The game was originally released for browsers in 2011 and saw an iOS release last year.
This Is Not The Exploitation You Think It Is
But Sweatshop wasn’t designed to make a quick buck off a cartoony rendition of offshore manufacturing and child exploitation. Littleloud said it got fact-checking input from Labour Behind The Label, a UK-based charity that raises awareness about who manufacturers many Western branded products and where.
Sweatshop was also featured by Games For Change, a New York-based nonprofit that aims “to leverage entertainment and engagement for social good.” On its Web site, Littleloud says it set out to make a game that “challenged young people to think about the origin of the clothes we buy.” Its tag line for the game: “Explore the high cost of cheap fashion.”
Despite all that, Apple chickened out. It’s a telling move, mainly because Apple has long been fighting allegations of sitting idly by while its many Chinese manufactures employ a swath of unfair labor practices to meet the world’s demand for iPhones and iPads. Principally among that group is Foxconn, who just last fall admitted to using child labor with workers as young as 14, and has been routinely plagued by its high suicide rate and massive riots due to the company’s long work hours and robotic lifestyle regiment it imposes on its workers.
Playing Sweatshop: A Lesson In Cruelty
As I fired up the in-browser version of the game for the first time, I was met with a lengthy and darkly comic introduction that takes you from a store selling a Nike-esque shoe in high demand across the loading docks, delivery trucks, and ocean-crossing steam liners that move it from the sweatshop it was produced in. This is all to the soundtrack of unbelievably catchy arcade techno music that starkly contrasts with what you’re seeing on screen.
The game starts small, putting you in charge of one child laborer and $100 to hire more workers. Sweatshop is an optimization strategy game, meaning you’re given a top-down view of the factory and must accomplish a task as fast as possible, and with as few errors as you can manage, through furious mouse clicks and intense monitoring of the game’s multiple working parts, which in this game happen to be fearful children and exhausted adults.
The children are scared mostly because of the cruel and heartless head manager, a stocky, mustached man in a shirt and tie that continuously calls his workers “lazybones” and complains about having to provide them with water. As the conveyor belt pulls in material to make things like hats and shirts, you have to make sure each item is completed before it gets to the end of the belt or it counts as a failed item. If you rack up a certain number of failed items – like I did numerous times while trying to keep my workers hydrated and simultaneously maximizing my speed – you lose the contract and have to restart the level.
Sweatshop holds nothing back when it comes to making you reflect on your decisions, and ultimately begin to marginalize every worker until you begin to think of them as just another cog in the big manufacturing machine. The end of each level gives you a stat rundown, boosting your overall score for the level with bonuses for quality, time and the amount of cash used (which you can try to control by firing workers as they become less useful or by hiring more children). You’re also given a button at the bottom to check your CV, which displays the trophies you’ve earned for completing certain in-game milestones like refreshing your first tired worker.
While it haphazardly treats themes of child labor and deplorable working conditions in a satirically upbeat manner, Sweatshop also spends a good chunk of time addressing the player directly in a serious manner. At the end of each level, the game’s representative child laborer character offers a real sweatshop fact.
That same character engages in one-on-one conversation with you at the beginning of each level to let you know what makes for more manageable conditions, like paying for more water and keeping the conveyer on slow. The child even offers his personal story — for instance, how he wishes he could attend school but instead must work to support his family.
Why Apple Should Allow Socially Conscious Games
Many may note the irony at play in Apple banning a game over its controversial, child-labor-related content following Foxconn’s breaking of labor laws last year. Apple deserves some credit it acknowledging the problems of outsourced manufacturing; it launched an investigation last year into Foxconn’s labor practices (though only after the New York Times published some damning investigative reports).
But by banning Sweatshop — a game that, while unorthodox in its message delivery, does actively try to make smartphone users think about the welfare of the workers behind the things they wear and the devices they use — Apple has again retreated from the debate. Not exactly what you’d normally expect from a company that once exhorted people to “think different.”
Approving and promoting a game like Sweatshop might seem risky from a traditional PR perspective, but it would highlight Apple’s willingness to allow others transparent discussion of labor conditions on its platform. It would open up debate, and might even win the company some kudos among critics who have blasted Apple for its lackluster response and feeble efforts to improve working conditions at its overseas contractors.
At the moment, though, it seems Apple’s App Store nannies are too “uncomfortable” to take that chance.
How Alterna-Apple Could Redress The Problem
Imagine for a moment we lived in an alternative universe, one in which Apple executives really wanted to improve working conditions in iProduct factories. That’s exactly the world conjured up in a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-liberalish think tank, which argues that Apple could, and should, deploy its enormous cash reserves to pay higher wages to the Chinese workers who assemble its iPhones and iPads. (And, for good measure, to its Apple Store retail workers as well.)
“Almost entirely absent from the discussion has been whether those reserves should also be used to provide fairer compensation to the workers making its products abroad or selling its products here,” writes report author Isaac Shapiro.
Shapiro argues that Apple could take several simple steps to improve thousands of lives — for instance, by switching to a livable wage standard, providing retroactive compensation to workers for past labor rights violations, and to keep working to lower the 60 hour work weeks at many of its contractor factories.
Similarly, the EPI report calls for Apple to fulfill its March 2012 promise to compensate workers for all of their past unpaid hours. ”Apple has since gone silent on this promise, and may be walking away from it, even though the promise is a response to illegal and unjust work practices, and could be fulfilled using just a tiny fraction of Apple’s massive reserve,” Shapiro writes.
These are, generally speaking, terrific suggestions for Apple. But if the iPhone maker doesn’t even have the cojones to allow a social advocacy game on its App Store, I sure wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it to put some muscle behind the real-world issues that game addresses in virtual form.
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Google Kicks Ad Blocking Android App Out of Google Play Store
Mar 14th
Google pulled ad blocking app AdBlock Plus. Google says it “interferes with or accesses another service or product in an unauthorized manner”, which Google said is a violation of section 4.4 of its Developer Distribution Agreement.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Android’s Google Play Store Turns 1
Mar 6th
Google Play is celebrating its first birthday today by giving away free and cheap Android applications. Well, it’s not really Google Play’s first birthday, but it is exactly a year since Google rebranded its Android applications store.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Web Servers In A Can: Now In Stock At Mac App Store
Feb 8th
Web developers using OS X, take note: If you want to create a fully contained server stack in which to build and test your latest ideas on Joomla, Drupal or WordPress, you’re just one click away from creating such an environment.
Four Different Choices
Within the App Store for OS X can now be found four such stacks, courtesy of BitRock’s Bitnami, a free software service that enables you to install various software stacks either natively on Windows, OS X or Linux; as a virtual machine in VMware or as an Amazon Cloud instance.
Full disclosure: I’ve been a Bitnami fan for a long time. The stacks it offers, which include Alfresco, ownCloud and SugarCRM, are very easy to install and are perfect for fast setup when I want to review software or slap a together a website.
The stacks offered in the App Store include Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and a generic MAMP stack (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) – all popular website platforms that are installed natively on your Mac machine.
Bitnami stacks installed natively are not installed as they would be if you built the software in the stacks by scratch. Instead of code getting installed all over the place, the binaries for the stack are all placed inside one directory, completely self-contained.
A Different Kind Of Walled Garden
The Bitnami stack from the App Store, it seems, are walled off even more, according to reports from users. The App Store’s sandboxing apparently makes configuring the software a little harder than it normally would be, so if you’re going to do extensive development with these stacks, users are recommending you visit Bitnami and get the native installation packages from the company directly.
This is not to decry the App Store’s Bitnami stacks. I pulled down the Joomla stack, installed and configured it, and was ready to work with it in minutes. I can play around with themes and extensions in Joomla to my heart’s content. Best of all, there was little to no resource dragging on my system, which I sometimes experience when I run one of these stacks as a virtual machine in VMware or Parallels.
Serious developers may indeed want to pull down the images straight from Bitnami, or better yet, install one of these stacks as a full-on Amazon Machine Instance on the EC2 platform and create an eventual production version of the stack you’re creating.
It’s too easy not to.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Video: SEO Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Store – The Online Seller
Feb 5th
 The Online Seller |
Video: SEO Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Store
The Online Seller Learn how to drive traffic to your listings and online store by finding the right keywords and weaving them into your listings' content. We explain what tool you should use for your research and where to place those all-important keywords. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
