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When It Wasn't Stuffing Cars, EMC Was Doing Real Business

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:56:45 +0000

When it wasn’t stuffing a Mini Cooper full of dancers storage concern EMC actually did launch a huge batch of new products yesterday.

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

With 500-Shareholder Concerns Gone, Will Facebook Make Big Acquisitions?

Liz Gannes — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 21:14:56 +0000

At the stroke of midnight this New Year’s Eve, Facebook’s financial gurus must have breathed a sigh of relief. It was a new fiscal year, 2011, which meant an end to the days of stressing about having 500 shareholders.

Staying at 499 shareholders or fewer is something Facebook has worried about since at least 2007, and sidestepped by creating a special kind of restricted stock unit for new employees and making small talent acquisitions that avoided, when possible, awarding start-ups and their investors with Facebook stock.

Now that that’s over, Facebook’s acquisitions team may get the go-ahead this year to pursue larger and more complicated deals.

As is now widely known, SEC rules mandate that a company with more than 500 shareholders at the end of a fiscal year must report financial information, something Facebook didn’t want to do as a private company. But if you read the fine print, as BoomTown’s Kara Swisher first reported, Facebook has 120 days to disclose from the end of the fiscal year in which it crosses 500 shareholders.

That means the end of April of 2012, by which point Facebook has said in paperwork for its Goldman Sachs funding deal it expects to file to go public.

Basically, Facebook has exorcised a curse hanging over its head by outlasting it. Like a nightclub bouncer, the company had been letting one shareholder out of the room before allowing another in. And now that’s over, as long as Facebook goes public next year.

(Though at this point, many of the company’s financial details are already leaking out as part of the troubling Goldman Sachs deal.)

For now, Facebook is still being cautious about adding shareholders; the Goldman deal (which we’ve heard still hasn’t closed) was structured to combine Goldman’s wealthy clients into a single entity to avoid adding too many shareholders.

Facebook’s corporate development team has said publicly that part of why it likes doing “acqhire” deals of small, early-stage start-ups is because they are relatively uncomplicated, financially speaking. Wherever it can, Facebook tries to cash out an acquired start-up’s shareholders instead of giving them stock. In the past, if a start-up had too many shareholders, it might not have been an attractive acquisition candidate.

Facebook doesn’t always get its way on that preference; sometimes it pays in stock. For instance, Facebook bought two start-ups that had taken investments from RRE Ventures: Hot Potato (in August 2010) and Drop.io (in October). In the first case, Facebook paid RRE in cash, but the second time around, RRE was able to negotiate for stock.

But now that Facebook seems to basically be giving itself the go-ahead to surge past 500, who gets to be shareholder number 501 or even number 1,001? It’s possible they could be the employees and investors in larger, more complicated M&A deals. Facebook’s name has come up in acquisition discussions for companies like Twitter and Foursquare, but now it may actually start closing more of those deals.

To date, Facebook’s largest acquisition has been FriendFeed for $50 million in cash and stock in 2009. The first time many tech watchers heard of the 10 tiny start-ups Facebook acquired in 2010 was when the deals closed.

But now that big deals are on the table, the question is, who’s next?

Here’s Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” last night ranting about Facebook avoiding making financial disclosures:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

The Anti-Social Network

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Please see my own disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

For LinkedIn, First Comes IPO, Then Comes Marriage to Google?

Liz Gannes — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:57:08 +0000

It’s an open secret in Silicon Valley that LinkedIn, which is perpetually the topic of IPO speculation, is close to finally taking the public plunge.

Reuters reported this week that the company plans to go public in 2011. We’ve heard much the same and that the professional network will likely file papers within the next few months.

But, according to several sources, there are other interesting scenarios for LinkedIn in the coming year.

Top on the list is an acquisition, either right after a filing or even after a public offering.

The quick public-to-private transition is not unprecedented. And early in its history LinkedIn had been courted by bigger companies, including Dow Jones.

Of the potential acquirers these days, many point to Google as the most obvious suitor. (Microsoft would be another.)

Why would Google is interested in buying LinkedIn?

First, LinkedIn is a social service that’s clearly distinct from Facebook.

But would LinkedIn be the solution to Google’s existential questions about getting social?

That’s unclear, but the company does fit in on a thematic level with the search giant’s cloud-hosted enterprise product line. In addition, LinkedIn has created a central repository for corporate information and business people, which is already quite searchable but could be put to more uses.

How much is LinkedIn worth? Recent purchases of its stock have valued the company at more than $2 billion. Pushing the company toward the public markets would help set a price range up higher.

But things could get interesting very quickly if Google also managed to buy Twitter. Google has long eyed the real-time information network, which recently completed a big funding round that valued the company at $3.7 billion.

For under $10 billion then, Google could really shake things up in the social space.

Here’s LinkedIn’s standard comment on the IPO talk, which is no fun at all:

“We don’t comment on speculation. An IPO is one of many tactics that we could choose to pursue. We are focused on building our business and doing what is in the best long-term interest of LinkedIn members and shareholders.”

In 4G Race, Verizon Pulls Ahead With Pricey Speed

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 02:03:48 +0000

One of the biggest technology trends in 2011 will be the expansion of new, faster cellular networks called 4G, or fourth generation. These networks promise a big increase in speed and capacity to handle the surge in streaming video, audio and Web surfing from hot-selling devices like super-smart phones and tablets, as well as from laptops. But you’ll have to buy new phones, modems and other connected consumer devices to get the higher speed they offer.

[ See post to watch video ]

Wireless carriers and handset makers will be touting their 4G plans and compatible devices at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it will be a couple of years before 4G networks in the U.S. achieve the same coverage as the current standard, called 3G.

The move to 4G from 3G began last year, with Sprint leading the way and Verizon Wireless joining in the last few weeks of 2010 with a limited deployment. But 2011 will see the service spreading to more and more cities, and is also expected to see the entry of AT&T. T-Mobile hasn’t announced an actual 4G network rollout, but is instead relying on a souped-up version of 3G that it is marketing as 4G because it claims it can deliver similar data speeds with its approach.

I’ve been testing the 4G network of the latest entrant, Verizon, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., which is one of 38 metro areas (plus 60 airports) where the company turned on its 4G network in December. My verdict is that it’s wicked fast—the fastest 4G network I’ve tried—but also potentially costly. In my tests, with a laptop modem, it proved dramatically faster than Verizon’s 3G network, and recorded speeds on a par with some land-line Internet connections.

But 4G from Verizon won’t be cheap. For laptop modem users, at least, Verizon is charging $50 a month for up to 5 gigabytes of data use and $80 monthly for 10 gigabytes. If you run over, the company will bill you $10 for every extra gigabyte. Such data limits aren’t new, but, with 4G’s much higher speeds, users may find themselves sending and receiving more data more often, and thus breaching the limits more regularly. For instance, in my tests, I was easily able to download a nearly 600 megabyte TV show, something I wouldn’t even try with a 3G modem. That one download would have eaten up more than 10% of my monthly cap under the $50 plan.

Verizon’s first LTE laptop modem, the LG VL600, has a flip top that reveals the USB connector.

Verizon’s variant of 4G uses a different underlying technology than Sprint’s. It’s called LTE, for Long Term Evolution, and is also the 4G system being adopted by many other cellular operators around the world, including AT&T. (Technically, this first version of LTE isn’t considered true 4G by the engineering standards body that rules on such matters, but that makes little difference to consumers looking for faster connections.)

The company says it chose LTE because it is not only fast, but is less prone to interference, can provide better battery life, has less latency, or lag, and can better handle multiple users simultaneously. The LTE system doesn’t affect voice calls on Verizon’s network—it’s only for data, and operates in tandem with the current voice network.

Verizon claims its new network is up to 10 times faster than its 3G network and says consumers will see speeds of between 5 and 12 megabits per second for downloads and between 2 and 5 mbps for uploads, in “real-world, loaded network environments.”

As of this writing, Verizon doesn’t offer an actual LTE-capable smart phone, only LTE USB modems that plug into laptops. But the company is expected to offer a sneak peek at CES this week of several LTE phones that will roll out in the coming months, as well other planned LTE devices, from a variety of manufacturers. Again, I want to stress that your current Verizon phone or laptop modem can’t be upgraded to work with LTE. You’ll need a new one.

For my tests, I used Verizon’s first LTE laptop modem, the VL600 made by LG of Korea. It sells for $100 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a two-year service contract. This modem can handle data over slower 3G networks, if you happen to stray out of one of Verizon’s 4G service areas. For now, it works only on computers running Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. But the company says it should have Mac-compatible LTE modems in a month or so.

To use it, you have to first install, from an included CD, a new version of Verizon’s cellular modem software, VZAccess Manager. Older versions won’t work. My test machine was a Lenovo ThinkPad X301, which worked fine with a Verizon 3G modem. Installation was relatively quick and smooth, though I was immediately instructed to download an updated version of the software, so I had to go through it twice.

I disabled Wi-Fi on the ThinkPad, plugged in the LTE modem and ran 10 tests using the popular Speedtest.net website. The results were impressive. Verizon’s 4G network averaged just a shade under 16 megabits per second for downloads and 6.6 mbps for uploads. That was 15 times the download speed, and 13 times the upload speed, of a Verizon 3G modem I tested immediately afterward using the same method in the same location.

To relate these speeds to real-world scenarios, I downloaded from iTunes a standard-definition episode of the TV show “The Good Wife”—a 588 megabyte file—in just seven minutes, instead of the two hours or so iTunes predicted it would take when I was using the 3G modem. I streamed several long videos, including two in HD, from the Web, and they played smooth as silk.

But there are caveats. For one thing, hardly anyone is using this new Verizon network yet, and it’s likely to slow down as it gets crowded, especially with smart-phone users. Secondly, laptop cellular modems typically deliver faster speeds than phones, so my results don’t necessarily predict phone or tablet performance.

Also, speeds can vary by city and distance. My tests were mainly conducted against a server in my local D.C. area. But I also tried a few tests against a server in San Francisco and only got about 6 mbps download—within Verizon’s claims, but much slower.

Still, if you can afford it, and if it works well in phones and tablets, Verizon’s new LTE network could be a great boon to your digital lifestyle.

Find all Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, allthingsd.com.

Oracle to SAP: You Owe Us Another $212 Million

John Paczkowski — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 06:15:14 +0000

Oracle is putting the screws to SAP again.

In court papers filed Friday, the company demanded SAP pay it $212 million in interest on top of the $1.3 billion in damages it was awarded in the TomorrowNow lawsuit. Should Oracle’s demand be approved, SAP’s total penalties would rise to $1.63 billion.

SAP, which argued in court that it should be held liable for no more than $28 million, clearly has no plans to pay Oracle the interest to which it says it’s entitled.

Said an SAP spokesman, “We don’t believe that Oracle is entitled to any additional compensation beyond the final judgement in this case.”

Reached for comment, Oracle declined to give one.

PREVIOUSLY:

Oracle-SAP Verdict: SAP Owes Oracle $1.3 Billion

Oracle-SAP: Closing Statements Followed by Closing Insults

Oracle-SAP Case Closes With $1.67 Billion Difference of Opinion

LOLCatz: Safra on The Stand Again in Oracle-SAP Trial

Plattner and White No-Shows at Oracle-SAP Trial

Damages Expert to SAP: You Owe Me $14 Million and Oracle Four Times That

Oracle, SAP and the Apotheker Sideshow

Better Late: SAP Co-CEO Apologizes for Oracle IP Theft

SAP Co-CEO Expected to Testify in Oracle Trial Today

HP to Oracle: Leave Léo Alone

Oracle Still Hoping to Snag HP’s Apotheker for SAP Trial

HP CEO to Oracle: Here’s Looking at You, Kid–Suntory Time!

Ellison to Self: Damn, Damn. I Knew I Should Have Said $4.5 Billion

SAP Attorney: Board Knew TomorrowNow Was Infringing at Time of Acquisition

Oracle Co-President on SAP’s Damages Offer: “It’s Crazy”

Oracle Enlists Process Servers, Not PIs, to Find HP CEO

Oracle-SAP Trial: Ellison Swaps Katana for Poison Darts

Objection: Mr. Ellison Is Referring to the Defendant as “Choleric of Temper” Again

Oracle Lands Early Shots in SAP Trial

Your Honor, We Object to Mr. Ellison’s Repeated Use of the Term “Slimy Weasels”

Oracle to HP CEO: Chicken!

Oracle Vs. SAP: We Got a Right to Pick a Little Fight–Bonanza!

SAP’s Tab in Oracle Case: $120 Million and Counting

Gag Order Denied in Oracle, SAP Trial

Ellison Taunts HP CEO a Second Time

SAP to Ellison: Save the Drama for Your Mama

Ellison to HP CEO: “Warrior, Come Out to Plaaeeay!

SAP: Please Gag Oracle

HP Scandal Sucks in New York Times Columnist Over Conflict of Interest

Welch to HP Board: You Don’t Know Jack!

Insiders Criticize Ellison For HP CEO Slam

Was Apotheker HP’s First Choice of CEO?

HP Names Ex-SAP Chief Apotheker as CEO

Motorola Split Set for Jan. 4

Ina Fried — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:44:56 +0000

Breaking up is, well, a lot of paperwork.

Motorola filed the details Tuesday afternoon on its plan to split itself in two. The spinoff of the cellphone unit will take place Jan. 4, with holders getting one share of the mobile unit, known as Motorola Mobility, for every eight shares of Motorola they own. The remaining Motorola company will then have a one-for-seven reverse stock split, which would have the effect of boosting the per-share price (but not the inherent value) of the suddenly smaller company.

The split will be made before the market opens on Jan. 4 to shareholders of record as of Dec. 21.

“Today’s announcement marks another important milestone toward the upcoming separation that is expected to benefit Motorola, its stockholders, as well as each company’s respective customers and employees,” Motorola’s co-CEOs Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha said in a statement. “We look forward to taking advantage of the opportunities before us as we begin the new year as two independent, publicly traded companies.”

Motorola Mobility will trade under the ticker symbol MMI, while the remaining Motorola, known as Motorola Solutions, will use the ticker symbol MSI.

Whether all this splitting and name changing will boost the company’s value remains to be seen.

Chinese Video Site Youku Files for IPO in U.S.

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:29:04 +0000

Youku, China’s biggest online video-sharing site, has filed for an IPO in the U.S. in a bid to raise $150 million, which would go toward diversification of its revenue sources and sharpening its competitive edge in the Chinese video space. Not so coincidentally, Tudou, the site’s largest competitor in the Chinese market, filed for an IPO in the U.S. last week, and is seeking to raise $120 million.

LimeWire Gives Up the Ghost, Shuts Down P2P File-Sharing Client

Peter Kafka — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:57:57 +0000

Last spring, music file-sharing service LimeWire suffered a crushing blow in federal court. This is the net result: The company is shutting down its core software–though it insists it’s not doing that exactly. It’s the victory the big music labels have been seeking for some time.

The company says it will comply with a court injunction to turn off “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of its software, which remains one of the most popular methods of finding free–and illegal–music on the Web.

That means the company will stop offering downloads of its software, which you could still get on its site as of late Tuesday afternoon. And it also means that the company will disable the software that’s already been downloaded, according to people familiar with LimeWire’s plans.

I don’t know if LimeWire intends to cripple its client via a “kill switch” or some other method, but as of 20 minutes ago it hadn’t gone into effect–I was able to locate and download a version of the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” within a minute of booting up LimeWire’s software. (UPDATE for the technically minded, via a person familiar with the company’s plans: “They’ve taken down the relay severs on the Gnutella network which the Limewire client uses to figure out which other p2p clients have what info on them.” This should render existing clients effectively useless as anything other than a media player within the next nine hours, I’m told.)

LimeWire‘s client has been downloaded “hundreds of millions” of times, and is still responsible for the “vast majority” of usage on the Gnutella trading network, says Eric Garland, who runs the BigChampagne media tracking service. The company’s moves won’t affect other open source clients that run on the same Gnutella network, like FrostWire.

Meanwhile, LimeWire’s parent company, Lime Group, is prepping a new music service that it says will be legal, and should be due out in a month.

But the utility of that service depends on the participation of the big music labels, and at least for now the labels are still trying to extract a big piece of Lime Group’s hide. Court hearings in the damages phase of Lime Group’s hire are scheduled to resume in January. And this statement by industry trade group RIAA makes it clear that the labels aren’t feeling conciliatory:

“For the better part of the last decade, Limewire and Gorton have violated the law. The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that Limewire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely. In January, the court will conduct a trial to determine the appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the Limewire system.”

Today’s announcement comes after Lime and the labels spent weeks trying to negotiate an out-of-court settlement; Federal District Court judge Kimba Wood actually handed down the injunction in August.

Here’s LimeWire CEO George Searle’s description of events, via blog post:

As of today, we are required to stop distribution and support of LimeWire’s P2P file-sharing service as a result of a court-ordered injunction.

Naturally, we’re disappointed with this turn of events. We are extremely proud of our pioneering history and have, for years, worked hard to bridge the gap between technology and content rights holders. However, at this time, we have no option but to cease further distribution and support of our software.

It’s a sad occasion for our team, and for you–the hundreds of millions of people who have used LimeWire to discover new things.

While we have enabled open sharing and discovery for the past decade, LimeWire is mostly the product of the people who used it. You made LimeWire. Thank you for letting us being part of that. Your support and enthusiasm has fueled everything that we do.

During this challenging time, we are excited about the future. The injunction applies only to the LimeWire product. Our company remains open for business.

We remain deeply committed to working with the music industry and making the act of loving music more fulfilling for everyone – including artists, songwriters, publishers, labels, and of course music fans.Our team of technologists and music enthusiasts are creating a completely new music service that puts you back at the center of your digital music experience.

We’ll be sharing more details about our new service and look forward to bringing it to you in the future.

And here’s a LimeWire PR rep’s description of what’s going on:

As a result of a court ordered injunction, we are required to disable “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of LimeWire’s P2P file-sharing software.

Please note LimeWire’s official statement on this legal development is as follows:

“While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward. We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.” – LimeWire Spokesperson.

An important point of clarification, LimeWire is not “shutting down”, in specific regarding our software, we are compelled to use our best efforts cease support and distribution of the file-sharing software, along with increased filtering. And, that is what we are doing.

Get Your Storage Out of the Cloud

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:35:34 +0000

Ask anyone in the technology industry to talk about trends and “the cloud” is sure to come up in conversation. The cloud is a hip way of describing Web-accessible storage, and whether people know it or not, they’re using this more each day. Social networks save account information in the cloud. Photo-sharing sites store images in the cloud. Web-based email programs keep messages in the cloud. People also are starting to back up the contents of their computers to the cloud, which makes files accessible from almost anywhere using an Internet connection.

[ See post to watch video ]

Not everyone is gung-ho about storing personal data somewhere other than on their own PC. They might wonder who else can access the cloud’s contents and if the cloud is a truly reliable option for storage.

This week I tested Pogoplug (pogoplug.com), a $129 solution that lets people back up their digital files and access them via a Web browser, or mobile devices. It streams content through the cloud (Pogoplug servers), but never actually stores anything in the cloud. People keep their content on their own hard drive—the Pogoplug lets them access it elsewhere via the cloud.

For the most part, Pogoplug works like a charm. One downside is that files can be a bit slower to open from remote computers or mobile devices than on computers within the same network as the Pogoplug. But its single best attribute is its ability to do the job without trying to tell you every smart thing it’s doing in the background.

Unique Model

Pogoplug comes from San Francisco-based Cloud Engines Inc. and its business model is unlike other cloud-storage solutions. Pogoplug users pay upfront for the device and a hard drive of their choice, which is the storage device, and they never pay again. Other services store content in the cloud, making for faster remote access to files. But these services charge users monthly or annually for storage. ZumoDrive offers 2 gigabytes of storage free but charges annual fees ranging from $30 for 10 gigabytes to $800 for 500 gigabytes. SugarSync, a cloud-based synching program, also offers a free 2-gigabyte program, but charges from $50 to $250 a year for 30 to 250 gigabytes.

Pogoplug uses in-home storage with through-the-cloud access.

Cloud Engines sent me a hard drive for my testing: Seagate’s (STX) FreeAgent Go with 250 gigabytes of storage. This little rectangle costs $90 on Seagate.com or $69 on Amazon.com (AMZN), bringing my Pogoplug set-up total to $200. This is $180 less than just one year of ZumoDrive’s 200-gigabyte plan, or $50 less than SugarSync’s one-year, 250-gigabyte plan.

The Pogoplug is a white box with an electric pink strip running down one side and its underbelly. Three cables attach to it and run out to the wall socket, a router and whatever storage you choose (a hard drive or a small thumb drive). Each Pogoplug has four USB ports, allowing four hard drives or several USB hubs with additional USB ports to connect to the gadget at once.

A Mini Computer

The Pogoplug runs as a mini computer with its own processor that sends files out to the cloud for streaming whenever you want to see them. It creates thumbnails of photos and organizes media, making it easier to find on the my.pogoplug.com Web site. And Pogoplug also uses advanced networking to create a secure connection so people with firewalls and extra secure network settings can leave them just as they are.

Setting up Pogoplug is as simple as plugging in its three cords and pairing it with a computer. I shared with the Pogoplug at least 100 files from a Windows 7 PC and a MacBook Pro. I also set sharing to synchronize with Pogoplug whenever new files were added to designated files on my computers. All of this content was stored on the Seagate hard drive and neatly displayed on my.pogoplug.com.

Hunting for Files

This Web site looks sort of like a bare-bones version of iTunes. Three sections on the left—My Media; Show My Files (sorted into today, last week, last month, those I shared and those shared with me); and My Library—opened content in a large panel. Options at the bottom of the screen changed the way this content was displayed, and a search box enabled hunting through all types of files for specific words. I tried “snow” and found many results, thanks to photos taken of the recent storms in Washington, D.C.

Each file saved to Pogoplug is represented by a thumbnail image on the Web site and can be downloaded, shared or previewed by you or others with whom you share. Videos are, by default, shortened to 10-second previews, but an option in settings allows videos to always show in their full formats. An Upload button at the bottom lets people share content from whatever computer they are using to Pogoplug, and a Sharing button sends files to friends via email or social-networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Options let people set sharing so Pogoplug constantly updates friends whenever new data is added, like new photos added to an album.

Both Macs and PCs worked for me while I tested accessing Pogoplug on the three main browsers that run on both machines: Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s (GOOG) Chrome and Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Internet Explorer worked on Windows. I simply opened my.pogoplug.com, entered my username and password, and I could see all the files on the Seagate hard drive. A desktop app for the Mac or PC treats Pogoplug as a local drive, making it easy to drag and drop media to it.

Most common files types can be stored, accessed and shared through the Pogoplug. I tested sharing movies, music, photos, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs and others. These digital files can reside solely on the hard drives plugged into the Pogoplug. Computers in the same network opened files faster than computers or smart phones working in other places, but the wait wasn’t unbearable.

I also used a free Pogoplug app on the iPhone and Palm (PALM) Pre, and the interface was just as simple as the my.pogoplug.com site. A Pogoplug app also exists in the Android Market app store for Android phones, but the app for BlackBerry isn’t yet in RIM’s (RIMM) App Catalog and must be installed via the Desktop Manager. Even without an app, I used the iPhone browser to open shared files sent to me in emails, and had no trouble viewing images or listening to songs.

Pogoplug is a terrifically simple way to back up files and make them accessible from afar or on the go. Starting in March, Pogoplug will be capable of synchronizing and backing up content through the cloud service with other Pogoplugs located elsewhere. For instance, you can keep Pogoplug at home and one at the office and have a backup to your backup device.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

A Windows to Help You Forget

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:02:03 +0000

In just two weeks, on Oct. 22, Microsoft’s long operating-system nightmare will be over. The company will release Windows 7, a faster and much better operating system than the little-loved Windows Vista, which did a lot to harm both the company’s reputation, and the productivity and blood pressure of its users. PC makers will rush to flood physical and online stores with new computers pre-loaded with Windows 7, and to offer the software to Vista owners who wish to upgrade.

[ See post to watch video ]

With Windows 7, PC users will at last have a strong, modern successor to the sturdy and familiar, but aged, Windows XP, which is still the most popular version of Windows, despite having come out in 2001. In the high-tech world, an eight-year-old operating system is the equivalent of a 20-year-old car. While XP works well for many people, it is relatively weak in areas such as security, networking and other features more important today than when XP was designed around 1999.

After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft (MSFT) has produced. It’s a boost to productivity and a pleasure to use. Despite a few drawbacks, I can heartily recommend Windows 7 to mainstream consumers.

Like the new Snow Leopard operating system released in August by Microsoft’s archrival, Apple (AAPL), Windows 7 is much more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary product. Its main goal was to fix the flaws in Vista and to finally give Microsoft customers a reason to move up from XP. But Windows 7 is packed with features and tweaks that make using your computer an easier and more satisfying experience.

The new taskbar shows small previews of many windows and allows for larger previews.

Windows 7 introduces real advances in organizing your programs and files, arranging your taskbar and desktop, and quickly viewing and launching the page or document you want, when you want it. It also has cool built-in touch-screen features.

It removes a lot of clutter. And it mostly banishes Vista’s main flaws—sluggishness; incompatibility with third-party software and hardware; heavy hardware requirements; and constant, annoying security warnings.

I tested Windows 7 on 11 different computers, ranging from tiny netbooks to standard laptops to a couple of big desktops. These included machines from Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL), Acer, Asus, Toshiba and Sony (SNE). I even successfully ran it on an Apple Macintosh laptop. On some of these machines, Windows 7 was pre-loaded. On others, I had to upgrade from an earlier version of Windows.

In most cases, the installation took 45 minutes or less, and the new operating system worked snappily and well. But, I did encounter some drawbacks and problems. On a couple of these machines, glacial start-up and reboot times reminded me of Vista. And, on a couple of others, after upgrading, key features like the display or touchpad didn’t work properly. Also, Windows 7 still requires add-on security software that has to be frequently updated. It’s tedious and painful to upgrade an existing computer from XP to 7, and the variety of editions in which Windows 7 is offered is confusing.

Finally, Microsoft has stripped Windows 7 of familiar built-in applications, such as email, photo organizing, address book, calendar and video-editing programs. These can be downloaded free of charge, but they no longer come with the operating system, though some PC makers may choose to pre-load them.

In recent years, I, like many other reviewers, have argued that Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is much better than Windows. That’s no longer true. I still give the Mac OS a slight edge because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows.

Now, however, it’s much more of a toss-up between the two rivals. Windows 7 beats the Mac OS in some areas, such as better previews and navigation right from the taskbar, easier organization of open windows on the desktop and touch-screen capabilities. So Apple will have to scramble now that the gift of a flawed Vista has been replaced with a reliable, elegant version of Windows.

Here are some of the key features of Windows 7.

New Taskbar: In Windows 7, the familiar taskbar has been reinvented and made taller. Instead of mainly being a place where icons of open windows temporarily appear, it now is a place where you can permanently “pin” the icons of frequently used programs anywhere along its length, and in any arrangement you choose. This is a concept borrowed from Apple’s similar feature, the Dock. But Windows 7 takes the concept further.

For each running program, hovering over its taskbar icon pops up a small preview screen showing a mini-view of that program. This preview idea was in Vista. But, in Windows 7, it has been expanded in several ways. Now, every open window in that program is included separately in the preview. If you mouse over a window in the preview screen, it appears at full size on your desktop and all other windows on the desktop become transparent—part of a feature called Aero Peek. Click on the window and it comes up, ready for use. You can even close windows from these previews, or play media in them.

I found this feature more natural and versatile than a similar feature in Snow Leopard called Dock Expose.

You can also use Aero Peek at any time to see your empty desktop, with open windows reduced to virtual panes of glass. To do this, you just hover over a small rectangle at the right edge of the taskbar.

Taskbar icons also provide Jump Lists—pop-up menus listing frequent actions or recent files used.

Desktop organization: A feature called Snap allows you to expand windows to full-screen size by just dragging them to the top of the screen, or to half-screen size by dragging them to the left or right edges of the screen. Another called Shake allows you to make all other windows but the one you’re working on disappear by simply grabbing its title bar with the mouse and shaking it several times.

File organization: In Windows Explorer, the left-hand column now includes a feature called Libraries. Each library—Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos—consolidates all files of those types regardless of which folder, or even which hard disk, they live in.

Networking: Windows 7 still isn’t quite as natural at networking as I find the Mac to be, but it’s better than Vista. For instance, now you can see all available wireless networks by just clicking on an icon in the taskbar. A new feature called HomeGroups is supposed to let you share files more easily among Windows 7 PCs on your home network. In my tests, it worked, but not consistently, and it required typing in long, arcane passwords.

Touch: Some of the same kinds of multitouch gestures made popular on the iPhone are now built into Windows 7. But these features won’t likely become popular for a while because to get the most out of them, a computer needs a special type of touch screen that goes beyond most of the ones existing now. I tested this on one such laptop, a Lenovo, and was able to move windows around, to resize and flip through photos, and more.

Speed: In my tests, on every machine, Windows 7 ran swiftly and with far fewer of the delays typical in running Vista. All the laptops I tested resumed from sleep quickly and properly, unlike in Vista. Start-up and restart times were also improved. I chose six Windows 7 laptops from different makers to compare with a new MacBook Pro laptop. The Mac still started and restarted faster than most of the Windows 7 PCs. But the speed gap has narrowed considerably, and one of the Lenovos beat the Mac in restart time.

Nagging: In the name of security, Vista put up nagging warnings about a wide variety of tasks, driving people crazy. In Windows 7, you can now set this system so it nags you only when things are happening that you consider really worth the nag. Also, Microsoft has consolidated most of the alerts from the lower-right system tray into one icon, and they seemed less frequent.

Compatibility: I tried a wide variety of third-party software and all worked fine on every Windows 7 machine. These included Mozilla Firefox; Adobe (ADBE) Reader; Google’s (GOOG) Picasa and Chrome; and Apple’s iTunes and Safari.

I also tested several hardware devices, and, unlike Vista, Windows 7 handled all but one smoothly. These included a networked H-P printer, a Canon (CAJ) camera, an iPod nano, and at least five external flash drives and hard disks. The one failure was a Verizon (VZ) USB cellular modem. Microsoft says you don’t need external software to run these, but I found it was necessary, and even then had to use a trick I found on the Web to get it to work.

System Requirements: Nearly all Vista PCs, and newer or beefier XP machines, should be able to run Windows 7 fine. Even the netbooks I tested ran it speedily, especially with the Starter Edition, which lacks some of the powerful graphics effects in the operating system. (Other netbooks will be able to run other editions.)

If you have a standard PC, called a 32-bit PC, you’ll need at least one gigabyte of memory, 16 gigabytes of free hard-disk space and a graphics system that can support Microsoft technologies called “DirectX 9 with WDDM 1.0.” You’ll also need a processor with a speed of at least one gigahertz. If you have a newer-style 64-bit PC, which can use more memory, you’ll need at least two gigabytes of memory and 20 gigabytes of free hard disk space. In either case, you should double the minimum memory specification.

Aero Peek lets you see your desktop by making your windows transparent.

Installation, editions and price: There are four editions of Windows 7 of interest to consumers. One, a limited version called Starter, comes pre-loaded on netbooks. A second, called Professional, is mainly for people who need to tap remotely into company networks (check with your company to see if you need this). A third, called Ultimate, is mainly for techies who want every feature of all other editions. Most average consumers will want Home Premium, which costs $120 for upgrades.

The system for upgrading is complicated, but Vista owners can upgrade to the exactly comparable edition of Windows 7 while keeping all files, settings and programs in place.

Unfortunately, XP owners, the biggest body of Windows users, won’t be able to do that. They’ll have to wipe out their hard disks after backing up their files elsewhere, then install Windows 7, then restore their personal files, then re-install all their programs from the original CDs or downloaded installer files. Then, they have to install all the patches and upgrades to those programs from over the years.

Microsoft includes an Easy Transfer wizard to help with this, but it moves only personal files, not programs. This painful XP upgrade process is one of the worst things about Windows 7 and will likely drive many XP owners to either stick with what they’ve got or wait and buy a new one.

In my tests, both types of installations went OK, though the latter could take a long time.

Bottom line: Windows 7 is a very good, versatile operating system that should help Microsoft bury the memory of Vista and make PC users happy.

Correction: The edition of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system aimed at business users is called Windows 7 Professional. This week’s Personal Technology column erroneously stated it was named Business.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

Quickoffice Brings Editing to iPhones, But Put It on Hold

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:04:03 +0000

I am typing these words in a full-fledged word processor on an Apple iPhone. It’s a third-party app that allows you to edit, format or create Microsoft Word and Excel documents, and then send them back to a PC or Mac where they can be opened in Word or Excel. Oh, and it has cut, copy and paste in its word processor — a capability long missing from the iPhone that isn’t due from Apple (AAPL) itself until this summer.

[ See post to watch video ]

Devotees of older smart phones, tired of iPhone hype, will be quick to note this is no innovation. Devices like Windows Mobile phones, Palm (PALM) Treos and BlackBerrys have made these abilities available for years. But, for the 37 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners, it’s potentially a major step forward, closing a hole in a hand-held computing platform that is otherwise more elegant and versatile than any other.

This new app, called Quickoffice, has some nice features. Its cut, copy and paste function is very well designed. It can save files locally on the phone. It has a built-in email function for sending files to others, and it can upload or download files to and from a PC or Mac, or to and from online storage.

But there’s a catch. While Quickoffice, which is also available on other platforms, did work OK in my tests, it has some major drawbacks that keep me from recommending it right now. The product’s maker, Quickoffice Inc., acknowledges these and is working to fix them by summer. But, especially because Quickoffice costs $19.99, a Rolls-Royce price in the iPhone’s app store, you might want to hold off on buying it until the fixes are in place.

In particular, Quickoffice can’t simply load and edit any Word or Excel file you receive as an email attachment. The company claims this is a built-in iPhone limitation, but it’s still a big problem for users. Instead, to get files into Quickoffice for editing, you have to transfer them using a Wi-Fi network from your PC or Mac, or from the iDisk online storage feature of Apple’s MobileMe Web service, which costs $99 a year.

Also, amazingly, Quickoffice shipped without any automatic typo-correcting function or spell checker. For various technical reasons, it couldn’t even use the one built into the iPhone. So, you have to do a lot of correcting of typos once the file gets onto a computer. For instance, the first words of this column, as originally created in Quickoffice, read: “I am typing these words in a full-feledged word pricessor … ” I had to clean them up in Word on my laptop.

The Quickword app on iPhone

And, while you can view a text or spreadsheet file in landscape mode, you can do only limited editing of text documents in this mode, and no editing at all of spreadsheet documents viewed in landscape.

Quickoffice for the iPhone consists of three modules. One is Quickword, the word processor. The second is Quicksheet, the spreadsheet program. These two, also separately available from the app store at $12.99 each, can handle standard Microsoft (MSFT) .doc and . xls files, but not Microsoft’s newer .docx and .xlsx formats. The third module, called Quickoffice Files, merely transfers and displays files, but doesn’t allow editing or creating them. It handles a much wider variety of file types, and is sold separately for $1.99.

Cut, copy and paste is implemented nicely. You simply double-tap to select a word or triple-tap to select a paragraph. Small dots appear at either end of the selection, allowing you to expand or contract the selected section of text. Once your selection is done, you can then cut it or copy it, or change its formatting. To cut or copy your selection, you just choose cut or copy from a popup menu. To paste, you tap once elsewhere in the document, and then select Paste from a popup menu. You can paste text copied or cut from one Quickword document into another, but not into any other app on the iPhone. (Apple will add that ability this summer.)

Quickword is the better of the two main modules. It has an impressive suite of features, including the ability to bold or italicize characters, change fonts and colors, create bullet points, and undo or redo changes. All of this formatting was retained correctly when I transferred the files to a computer, and vice versa. Quickword doesn’t have every feature of Word on a computer, but its feature set is strong.

Quicksheet has 125 functions. It also does formatting of cells well, and has undo and redo. Again, it isn’t as powerful as Excel, but its capabilities are decent. Unfortunately, unlike in the word processor, I found some problems in Quicksheet. In one simple spreadsheet I imported, it failed to properly display text that stretched across multiple cells, and failed to do a simple recalculation that worked perfectly in Excel. Also, it lacks cut, copy and paste.

Getting documents into the app is a pain. Unless you have a MobileMe account, on either Windows or Mac, you have to type a geeky numerical address into a Web browser and then choose a file from your computer using the browser page that comes up.

Quickoffice is an OK start, but it needs a lot of work.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Dell Remote Access Keeps Your Files at Your Disposal

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:06:02 +0000

Say you’re on the road and you need to look at a file that’s on your main computer back at your office or house. Or say you’re using a device with limited storage, like a smart phone or one of the tiny new “netbook” portable PCs, and you want access to a file that isn’t on the device at hand.

You might be able to get at the desired file if you have previously uploaded it to an online storage or photo-sharing service, or emailed it to yourself. But, in many cases, you could be stuck.

[ See post to watch video ]

Now Dell (DELL), the big computer maker, is aiming to solve that problem with a new service called Dell Remote Access. Despite the name, the service can be installed on any brand of Windows PC running Windows XP or Windows Vista to make its files remotely accessible, as long as it has a broadband connection. You can transfer, or stream, or share these files with others. You can even remotely use the host computer’s Web camera.

And some of the service’s functions also work even if your remote device is one of Apple’s (AAPL) Macintosh computers or iPhones, or a computer powered by the Linux operating system, like Dell’s own Mini netbook.

For basic functionality — making the files on one Windows PC remotely accessible from other devices — Dell Remote Access is free. If you want to use its advanced functions, like the ability to remotely control the host PC or to access other devices on your home network, it costs $9.95 a month, or $99 a year. This paid version of the service also includes the ability to share with others access to files or to devices on your network, such as stand-alone Web cameras.

You only need to install special software on the host PC whose files are to be remotely accessed. For basic file access, the remote devices require just a Web browser and a password to tap into the host computer. You can download the software, and get started with the service, at dellremoteaccess.com.

I’ve been testing Dell Remote Access for a few days, at home and on the road, and found that it works well, despite a few glitches and limitations. It’s not revolutionary — many other services and software programs do part or all of what it does, with varying degrees of technical difficulty and at varying fees — but Dell Remote Access combines a wide variety of functions into a fairly simple package. It will be available as a preinstalled option on Dell’s PCs later this year.

Dell also is hoping it will give a boost to sales of its Mini line of very small machines with limited internal storage for files.

For my tests, I installed Dell Remote Access on my home Dell desktop, an XPS One model running Windows Vista. The installation was easy and quick, except for one oddity: To use the new service, you have to uninstall a network diagnostic utility Dell installs on its machines, called Dell Network Assistant. Since I had little or no use for the utility, this was no big loss, but if you rely on it, this conflict could pose a problem.

Next, I used the Remote Access software to select folders I wanted to make remotely accessible. By default, the program assumes you want to share your documents, music and pictures folders, but I added some others. The software tests your network connection to let you know how well it’s likely to work.

I used a variety of remote devices to access this home Dell. These included a Sony (SNE) Vaio laptop running Vista, a Mac laptop and an Apple iPhone. I even tried accessing the Dell machine from a virtual Windows XP installation running on the Mac.

Some of these tests were conducted from within my home network and others were conducted from across the country.

In general, the tests went well. With the Sony laptop, and within Windows XP running on the Mac, I was able to view photos and slide shows, and stream music and videos, from the Dell in all locations. I opened Microsoft Office (MSFT) files and PDF files remotely and transferred files to the remote machines. I was even able to remotely control the Dell at decent speeds and use the Dell’s built-in camera.

The only annoyance was that every time you want to remotely control the host machine, you must download and install a small utility. You also have to leave on your home computer.

Dell’s system provides more limited functionality if your remote machine is a Mac using Apple’s operating system, or a Linux machine or a mobile phone. With these setups, you can only view, stream or transfer files only from the main host computer. You can’t do remote control or view cameras.

But these limited functions did work pretty well on the Mac and the iPhone, although in some cases I had to first download a song to the Mac before it would play, rather than simply streaming it directly from the Dell.

But Microsoft Word documents stored on the Dell opened right up on the Mac. It was particularly impressive to be able to view a document or photo stored on the Dell from an iPhone thousands of miles away.

Dell Remote Access is a worthy service that’s worth a try.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Navigating Microsoft Office

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:45:04 +0000

Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

In the new version of Microsoft Office, I cannot find a “favorites” capability in the Open dialog box. In my older version, when I began to open a document, I had a box on the left called “Favorites” that I could invoke to find common file locations. Did they really kill this very useful feature?

No, but they changed the way you make it visible in Office 2007. You can get back your “Favorites” category by right-clicking the bar at the left-hand side of the Open dialog. From the menu that appears, click on “Add Favorites,” and your Favorites category should appear in the left-hand bar, and stay there.

If I have McAfee security software, do I need an antispyware program as well?

Everyone running a Windows computer, even a virtual Windows computer on a Mac, should have antispyware software. In some ways, spyware is a worse security problem than viruses, and can lead to identity theft.

McAfee has made many types and versions of security software over the years. Some, especially recent versions of the company’s comprehensive products, include antispyware protection. Check your version to make sure it includes this capability. If it doesn’t, you will either need to upgrade to a more comprehensive suite, or obtain a separate anti-spyware product.

When my friend put a Spike Jones CD of mine into his Mac to import it using iTunes, the CD was misidentified with an embarrassing title. What would cause such a thing to happen? Does iTunes go out to the Web looking for album names, instead of going by what’s on a disk?

Yes. Music programs like iTunes, and all its major competitors, can’t identify a disk directly. So they rely on online databases to identify CDs. Each CD contains a hidden code that the database providers quickly match up with their huge catalogs of CDs to provide the album title, artist, date, track list and other information. But, sometimes, especially when the CD is relatively obscure, the databases are wrong and yield erroneous information. When that happens, you have to type in the information by hand.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

With CrossLoop, Users Can Get Help From Techie Friend

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:34:03 +0000

Trying to help a less-knowledgeable friend or family member solve computer problems can be very frustrating — especially if you can’t sit with him or her in front of the PC. It can be slow and awkward merely explaining the steps you’d like the other person to perform to diagnose and solve the problem.

The best approach is to control the distant computer remotely — with the owner’s consent — during the problem-solving session. That way, you can directly manipulate the machine while explaining what you’re doing over the phone.

[ See post to watch video ]

There are a variety of services and software that allow such remote control. Tools for doing so are even preinstalled in obscure corners of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. But many are too complicated for average users — even those with enough knowledge to help solve common problems. Others cost money, or require you to establish an account with a service, or are aimed mainly at folks seeking unattended access to their own remote computers.

This week, I tested a remote-control product designed specifically for collaborative help sessions solicited by the person seeking help. It is free, simple and can be used without setting up an account. And it also has an added dimension: If you have a problem and lack a tech-savvy friend or relative who can help, the company that makes the software maintains a directory of thousands of geeks who can help you, usually for a fee.

The product is called CrossLoop and can be downloaded at crossloop.com. It currently works only with Windows computers, but the company plans to release a Macintosh version in a few months.

To use CrossLoop, both you and the person you are helping must download and install the free program, a quick and simple process. When you run the program, you are invited to create a free account, which allows you to track your sessions and rate people who help you. But there’s a clearly marked Skip button that permits you to use the program with all of its features even without an account.

The software has a very clear, simple interface. It consists of two large tabbed sections: a grey one labeled Share for the person whose machine is to be operated remotely, and a green one labeled Access for the remote operator, called the “helper” by the company.

For security reasons, CrossLoop doesn’t allow its users to gain control of unattended machines. The process must begin with a person at the remote machine clicking the Share tab. That click generates an access code that is different for each remote session. The person seeking help then gives that code, usually over the phone, to the helper. The helper then clicks on the Access tab on his or her PC, and types in the code. The person on the other end must confirm that he or she wants to go ahead. Only then is the connection opened.

Once this process is complete, the helper sees a large window replicating the desktop of the remotely controlled machine, and can control that PC using his or her own mouse and keyboard. The helper can even transfer files to the remote machine.

On the other end, the person being helped can be passive or can share control of the computer. At any time, the person being helped can disconnect the session or limit the helper to just viewing the screen rather than controlling it.

The company says that it keeps no record of any of the sessions and that its software encrypts all communication between the two computers involved.

I tested CrossLoop in two scenarios. In one, I used it to help my friend Alan configure his new copy of Microsoft Office to save files in the older Office formats. The remote-control session worked fine, although Alan’s Internet connection was so slow that there were long delays in seeing changes occur on his screen.

In the second scenario, I hired one of CrossLoop’s listed consultants for $25 to clean up a Sony laptop I own that was running sluggishly. He spent over an hour deleting needless programs and removing others that were unnecessarily set to launch automatically. He carefully consulted me by phone to make sure he wasn’t cutting anything I needed or wanted. Again, I considered the session a success.

The only problem I saw in my tests was that when helping someone with a Vista machine, you may have to temporarily disable a security-warning feature called User Account Control, which pops up frequently and cuts off the connection.

CrossLoop eventually hopes to make money by charging the paid consultants in its network a fee. But it doesn’t guarantee that they are effective or honest, and merely relies on the ratings of others who have used them. It is theoretically possible for such a person to steal your data or plant malware on your computer.

Still, if you are helping a friend or relative with a PC problem, or are willing to trust a well-rated stranger to give you help, CrossLoop is a simple, effective way to do the job.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Defragmenting a Hard Disk

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:46:01 +0000

Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

A friend of mine suggested that I “defragment” my computer every once in a while. He says it will boost performance, but he also said it will move my data around. I tend to be very organized as to where I put documents on my computer. Will defragmenting my computer jumble my files and put them into random places?

No. Defragmenting a hard disk doesn’t change or scramble the organization of files and folders that you have established. Your file organization should look just the same after defragmenting the disk. What defragmenting does is rearrange the location on the disk of the data segments that make up your files. In some cases, a single file like a word-processor document might actually be made up of multiple data segments, invisible to you, that are located in widely separated physical spots on the disk. Defragmenting tries to optimize the location of these segments so that the computer operates more efficiently.

I saw your review of Norton Internet Security 2009, and wonder what is the difference between this product and Norton 360?

Norton 360 has the same features as Norton Internet Security, but adds some additional ones, like online backup and PC “tune-up.” It also costs more. However, the current version of Norton 360 doesn’t include the improvements I wrote about in the NIS product that make it faster and less of a burden on your computer. Those are planned for a future version of Norton 360.

Can I use one of the new 3G iPhones as a wireless modem for my Apple laptop?

No. That function isn’t built into the iPhone and Apple yanked from distribution a third-party program that enabled using the phone as a modem. I suspect the reason is a business one, not a technical one. Cellphone carriers like AT&T typically take the position that connecting a laptop to their networks, whether via a data card or via a cellphone used as a modem, should command a higher monthly data charge than they typically levy for a cellphone alone.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns online free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Back From Whence Ye Came, YHOO!

John Paczkowski — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:00:45 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Adobe Makes Web's Flash Crawl

John Paczkowski — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:18:00 +0000

Flash content on the Web may be slow-loading and occasionally nonintuitive, but at least now it’s searchable.

Adobe (ADBE) has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention. It’s made content encoded in the Flash file format (SWF), which was previously undiscoverable to search engines, discoverable–and it’s given Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) the tools necessary to discover it.

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, explained: “We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Google will begin doing that today; Yahoo, whenever it manages. A big change for both companies, especially Google, which has long advised Webmasters concerned about their PageRank to use Flash sparingly. “In general, search engines are text based,” the company explains in its “Creating a Google-friendly site” FAQ. “This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.”

Today that changes. And now, developers can use Flash to their hearts’ content, without mucking about with workarounds to ensure the dynamic content it makes possible is properly indexed and ranked.

Adobe Makes Web's Flash Crawl

John Paczkowski — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:18:00 +0000

Flash content on the Web may be slow-loading and occasionally nonintuitive, but at least now it’s searchable.

Think of the Net as a Giant Mixed Tape and Price Accordingly

John Paczkowski — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:15:16 +0000

Of the 1,770 songs stored in the average MP3 player of the average 14- to 24-year-old, nearly half are pirated. This according to a new study by the University of Hertfordshire, which found nearly two-thirds of that demographic willing to admit it downloads music illegally. Commissioned by the recording industry group, British Music Rights, the study also found that 58% had copied music from friends’ hard drives and 42% had shared their music over a peer-to-peer network. A full 95% said they’d copied music in some way or another at one time or another.

And 80% would pay for a legal subscription-based music service that would allow them to discover, swap and recommend music.

Which, if true, illustrates the great disparity between the consumer and industry views of digital music. Because according to the Hertfordshire study, consumers–at least those in this particular age group–view digital music on the Internet as a sort of giant mixed tape to be explored and shared. They don’t have much of an emotional connection with it: “Respondents seem to attach a hierarchy of value to different formats of music, with streaming-on-demand the least valuable (though still valued); ownership of digital files somewhere in the middle; and ownership of the original physical CD the most valuable.”

The recording industry, of course, has failed to recognize that hierarchy. When, and if, it does, the study notes, it may finally succeed in monetizing that mixed-tape ethos that’s befuddled it for so long. “Survey responses suggest that respondents would continue to purchase CDs and go to gigs, even if they subscribed to a legitimate peer-to-peer file-sharing service,” the survey adds. “Fans want to support or pay tribute to their favorite artists and ownership of a digital music file does not necessarily do justice to their sense of devotion.”