Part of living in the information age is our need to filter through mountains of the stuff every day. Among the vast amounts of Web pages, documents and media that we go through, we occasionally encounter a gem that’s worth saving or sharing. Before Zukmo, bookmarks, cluttered desktops, and emails were bulky stand-alone solutions and made the process of retrieving the content later a painstaking task. Zukmo solves this problem with a suite of integrated tools, bringing us one step closer to making the stuff that piques our interest more accessible and a lot more useful.

Call it your second brain, if you will. With a single click, Zukmo’s integrated browser button imports a complete copy of any website (minus the unimportant bits, like ads) to your personalized Zukmo library. It can also keep track of your important desktop documents, Google documents, Twitter and RSS feeds, YouTube videos and so much more!

Arguably Zukmo’s most powerful feature is its ability to index the entire contents of the things you choose to store in your Zukmo library (think of it like the index at the back of a book). This makes searching through your vast and growing amounts of stored information, a breeze.

Zukmo is also a cross platform application. This means that you can store, search, share, and view all of your content (which is stored in the cloud, so it doesn’t take up precious disk space!) whether you’re on your iPhone, Android, or your computer!

Feel like sharing? Zukmo easily exports any desired content to your email, Facebook, or Twitter feeds. With Zukmo you needn’t worry about security, either. Not only do we promise to respect the privacy of your account and its contents, but Zukmo recently received Softpedia’s 100% Clean Award certifying that it’s free of spyware, adware, and viruses!

So what are you waiting for? Take a step toward increasing the accessibility and usefulness of your stored information and give Zukmo a shot. Start a free account with us today!

Just follow the steps below for this one-time setup to add a “Send to Zukmo” button in Google Reader. This button will facilitate you to save content with a single click and help you to keep track of interesting stuff on the web.

1. Login to Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader
2. Once you logged into Google Reader, go to Settings -> Reader Settings.
3. To add a “Send to Zukmo” button in Google RSS Reader, click “Send To” link/ tab.
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click “Create a custom link” link.
5. EnterName as Zukmo

   URL as https://www.zukmo.com/loadLinksToZukmo?url=${url}&title=${title}

   Icon URL as https://www.zukmo.com/images/zukmo.png

   

6. Click “Save” button to save the changes and get back to Google Reader Subscriptions. You will have an additional button “Send to Zukmo” on every RSS Reader entry as shown in the screenshot below. If you come across any interesting content, add it to Zukmo by using the “Send to Zukmo” button. All the content that you push to Zukmo is automatically indexed, categorized and made searchable.

The following are some of the choicest improvements and changes implemented in this release.

Multimedia Inclusion

We have added popular video sharing site Vimeo.com to the list of supported sites from which we can agglomerate embedded videos/presentations in addition to currently supported YouTube.com and Slideshare.Net. We hope to extend the number of supported sites based on the popularity of the sites, volume of videos/presentations available and and specific user feedback requesting for inclusion. Work has ensued for adding Scribd and a few other popular video sharing sites into the mix. We will also venture into adding popular audio sharing sites and warmly welcome suggestions from our users of their favorite multimedia sites.

File Size limit

We have an upload file size limit for a single piece of content that is being added to Zukmo and this limit differs depending on the type of content. The limit is of 10MB for desktop documents, 10MB for all Google document types except spreadsheets (which is 20MB) and 10MB for web content. There is currently no limit for tweets.

Icons for content sources

Representative icons for each of the content sources have been included as identifiers and symbolic pointers to the listing of entities for each of the services. In addition, these icons are featured among the mix in the search results to visually distinguish between the service categories

Retain Search Keyword

Search convenience has been improved by ensuring that whatever the user types in as a keyword for conducting a search in any of the listed services will be retained in place even if the user browses other service categories. In this case, the related matching results for those corresponding categories will be displayed as the user moves from one service category to another in the left panel on the landing page.

Other Tidbits

In order to make a provision to contextually fetch on demand for users availing Google docs and Google Apps Docs services, there is a Fetch now link provided in the landing page below the search bar to fetch on demand streams of content from these sources. This provision has already been made for twitter streams.

Quality Assurance

We also indulged partly in grunt work in squashing some non-critical bugs in order to ensure continued consistency and reliability of our services. In this, we would also like to seek the active participation of all our users to inform and interact with us on incorrect or inconsistent behavior as and when it is discovered from them. Such a feedback will be quite valuable from our perspective of being able to deliver a high caliber product that not only suits the need but the expectations of our quality conscious customers.

With our development strategy shifting gears towards an agile methodology, our users can anticipate, on an intermittent scale, a slew of amendments entailing efficient packaging and swift roll out of much desired features and new services. We eagerly want to hear from all our users on both the current enhancements as well as preexisting features and avidly encourage them to participate in our forum for any discussions or respond to blog posts or simply just drop an e-mail to us.

This would certainly rank as the most comprehensive upgrade ever since the launch of Zukmo and we had worked diligently to both vastly broaden the horizons of our services with exciting new offerings as well as incorporate significant improvements in terms of  depth of functionalities, effectiveness of user experience and range of flexibility afforded to our users.

Given below are the highlights of what is contained in the release.

New Services Wizard

Given the breadth of services that have been commissioned, we have introduced a new Services Wizard that presents a list of services that the user can sign up. Please note that all of them are free services and we encourage the users to utilize as much as possible to their liking and suitability. Among the services mentioned, Bookmarks and Desktop Documents are available right out of the box and listed under “My Services” in the wizard but for the others the users would need to enable formal authentication as required by the service provider and hence they are listed under “Add Services”. The user upon clicking the service icon will then be redirected to the chosen service providers for an one time authentication process which will authorize Zukmo to access the specific service belonging to the particular user’s account. Post authentication, the user will be returned back to the wizard to enable their choice of other services in a similar manner. The set of chosen services will figure under “My Services” and this wizard can subsequently be accessed from the landing page from a link in the header as well as by clicking the setting icon in “My Services” category in the left panel.

The most notable inclusion in this release is that new content sources like Desktop Documents, Google Docs, Google Apps Docs, Twitter have been inducted into the expanding span of Zukmo services in addition to the existing bookmarking services. Further,content of multimedia specific websites like Youtube and Slideshare have been processed and categorized in a unique and intuitive manner.

New Content Sources

1. Desktop Documents and Windows Utility

   Zukmo users can now easily add specific documents from their desktop environments to in two ways. One is to navigate to the browser file upload page which can be accessed by the link “Upload Documents” on top of the left panel in the landing page.Please note that there is a restriction of 10MB for each file being uploaded.

   

   Another way available for Microsoft Windows Users is to download and install the Zukmo Desktop Utility that will enable them to easily add a file to zukmo by simply right-clicking on the specific document and using the pop up menu item “Add to Zukmo”. The Utility is available by navigating to “My Account” in the menu accompanying the login name on top of the landing page. Under “My Account”, navigate to “Desktop Docs” page using the corresponding listing in the Left panel.

   Note to new users

   The installation of the utility will require one time authentication using the Zukmo ID and Zukmo specific password which would have been provided through email to all new users upon registration.

   Note to Existing users

   The installation of the utility will notify them to setup their Zukmo specific password and then redirect them to the password setup screen to complete the same.

2. Google Apps Documents & Google Documents

   Google docs is Google’s web based collaborative application (eg. accessed through Documents link in Gmail Header) while Google Apps is a customized service for enterprises which bundles multiple apps including Google Docs and is provided with a specific domain name. Zukmo users can now easily add Google Docs and Google Apps Docs of different types such as Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings and PDF files by enabling the specific Google Docs or Google Apps Docs account using the “My services” wizard.By default when the service is initialized by the user, all documents within their google docs or google apps account will be fetched. The user can go to “My Account” page and set a customized configuration in the Google docs page and the Google Apps Doc page which will help specify whether to fetch a subset of documents by collection name or by document type and in addition enable or disable scheduled fetching. On demand fetching of documents can be triggered by clicking on the “Fetch Now” button in those pages.

3. Twitter Stream

   Zukmo users can easily add twitter streams from their respective user accounts by enabling the specific twitter account using the “My services” wizard. By default, this would enable Zukmo to fetch the user’s tweets, the tweets of everyone they are following and all the Retweets. In conjuction, the UI also has been designed to list all the tweets and classify the tweets of their following, favorite tweets and retweets. Further, the names of the user’s following along with the number of tweets are displayed as tags under “Following”. Additionally, the user can even post a tweet from within Zukmo.

   Specifically those tweets containing URLs are processed additionally in a unique way and referenced under Tweeted links by listing the actual URLS titles.There is a “Fetch Now” link next to the Tweets breadcrumb to provide for on demand fetching of tweets. The Twitter configuration section in the “My Accounts” page allows for disabling the fetching of tweets.

4. Multimedia (YouTube.com & Slideshare.net)

   Zukmo users will be able to add bookmarks with multimedia content in a more contextual manner. Specifically, You Tube videos and Slideshare presentations when added to zukmo will result in the respective embedded videos and presentations to be included in the listing under “Multimedia” Services. Typically, the webpages with Youtube videos and Slideshare presentations have accompanying title, description and tags in addition to many miscellaneous information like comments and other items. Each listing in Zukmo will carry the complete title, a portion of description and an icon of the presentation which when clicked will play the related presentation in nominal size. In addition, each listing carries a reader icon which will open a stripped version of the original page that will contain only the title, actual presentation and the entire description and will be devoid of any other distracting items or elements found in the original page.

   

   Additionally, tags found in the Youtube and Slideshare pages will be recommended when the “Add to Zukmo and Share” option is used from the Zukmo browser button. When users add a specific page to Zukmo in Youtube or Slideshare, only the main video or presentation content displayed in the page is added to Zukmo. Any other video or presentation links are discarded. However, users will be able to right-click on a specific link in Youtube and Slideshare and add it to Zukmo which will in turn add the accompanying video or presentation resource referenced by the link.

New and Improved User Interface

We had overhauled our general approach towards the overall theme and structure of the presentation layer and resolved to gravitate towards building a simplified, visually pleasing and uncluttered user interface with lighter colored skins and appealing fonts. Preliminarily, this has resulted in our efforts to streamline the landing page where we switched from the horizontal tabbed interface to the panel based structured listing of our categorized entities like the services, tags, friends etc. Pagination also has been discarded in favor of revealing results on demand in the same page.

We are consistently gathering feedback from our valued users and beta testers and this would enable us to tweak the UI to accommodate for an engaging user experience without sacrificing simplicity and ease of use.

Also worth noting…

1. Recently, Zukmo Addon for Safari was made available in the Apple Safari extension gallery and the Zukmo Add on for Internet Explorer 9 was made available in the IE addon gallery. You can find the Safari addon here and the IE addon here.
2. Integrated Search across all content sources has been enabled and can be performed by picking “Everything” under “My Services” panel in the landing page and conducting a keyword based search.
3. Ability to rename and delete tags universally has been added and is available by clicking on the respective icons next to the “Tags” heading in the panel.
4. Marked improvement in search performance due to a range of optimizations conducted beneath the hood.
5. “Reset” link next to Search button to assist the user to default back to listing of all entries once a specific search is conducted.

As detailed earlier in the prior post on the road ahead, our development team will continue to strive in implementing our road-map and focus on packaging many more features as well as content sources of interest and importance to our users. We plan to line it all up in piecemeal fashion with a steady stream of resourceful updates in compressed time frames and will keep you informed at every stage of all developments to follow this release.

We enthusiastically embrace and value all your feedback, critique and suggestions and sincerely consider it as a key factor for improving our services. Please do chime in with your views on the user forum or through email or in response to blog posts.

With Vembu Home Synchronization feature, you can seamlessly work on a document from your office PC or your home PC without having to copy files back and forth. Once you add a document to be synchronized with Vembu Home, the document will be automatically synchronized to any number of devices you want the document to be available.

Configuring Vembu Home to sync your data

After installing Vembu Home in your computer, register for free Vembu Home account by accessing Vembu Home Agent console,

Once you complete with the registration process, login to Vembu Home Agent Console.

Once logged in, you don’t have to use the Vembu Home Agent Console to synchronize your files. You can simply sync your data right from your Windows explorer as you browse files.

Right-click on a file or folder from your Windows Explorer, select Sync with Vembu Home and then choose either one of the following option to synchronize your data across multiple devices.

Copy to sync folder – Choosing this option will copy the selected file or folder for synchronization to the Vembu Sync folder. You need to manually do this every time you change the file in the original location so that the changes would be synchronized to the Vembu Home Cloud and subsequently to other devices you have configured.

Sync from current location – Choosing this option will include the selected file or folder for Synchronization from its current location – without copying to the Vembu Sync folder. If you modify the file, the synchronization process will be automatically synchronize the modified content to the Vembu Home Cloud and subsequently to other devices you have configured.

Sharing files Online through Vembu Home

If you need to share some of your files with your friends or colleagues online, Vembu Home is a simple and secure tool to achieve this. You can upload and share files online from your desktop with a single click.

Right-click a file or folder in Windows Explorer, select “Sync with Vembu Home” and then choose “Upload and Share” option to share files online.

Upload and share – Choosing this option will upload the selected file to Vembu Home Cloud and provide you with a link you could share with others.

For more details on Vembu Home’s File Synchronization & File Sharing features, please refer this document http://home.vembu.com/features.php

If you haven’t installed the Vembu Home yet, now is the time to do it. We will be adding more and more exciting features in the near future. If you are an existing user, please find the instructions to upgrade to the latest version of Vembu Home from here.

The above post was written by Arul Prabhu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

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Why did we launch only 10 GB storage plan?

With this initial production launch, we want to get to know more about Vembu Home user’s adoption for cloud storage. Based on the results and user feedback we are planning to provide premium storage options in  the coming months.

What shall you do if you need more storage immediately in the cloud?

Please e-mail Vembu Home support at help@vembu.com with your requirements. We will try hard to incorporate your suggestion as we do more updates to Vembu Home.

Besides payment plan and making Vembu Home production ready, lots of exciting stuff has happened with this update. While most of the changes are back-end performance stuff, there has been a prolific effort in fixing bugs and making Vembu Home easy to use. Surely, this update belongs to the Vembu Home Server cluster, which has sort of come of age to provide a smooth and uninterrupted service for our users. Watch out for lots more cool stuff coming your way in our coming updates.

The above post was written by Jay of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

[Updated @ 09:30 AM PDT] Maintenance operation is still going on, we will update you once the service is up and running.

[Update @ 10:30 AM PDT] Maintenance in our Amazon infrastructure has been completed. Vembu Home service is now available. More details on the maintenance update once our initial stability tests are complete.

Fast forward to 2010 – The Thomas Jefferson University Hospital is on Facebook connecting to its users.  The doctor my friend knew would be overjoyed to hear this.  The Facebook page has invites to screening events, announcements for speeches and lots more information*.   And with Facebook expected to close in on 500 million users next month, there is no doubt that cloud based social networking solutions (Facebook, Twitter etc.) are heaven-sent for consumer organizations who want to redefine their interaction with users (and successfully beat the competition in the process too).

CRN mentioned this recently as a successful example of ‘Consumerizing’ the Cloud – while also mentioning other medical players like Kaiser Permanente which lets patients to select and swap doctors while rating them as a user community.

The dizzying growth of social networking sites has been questioned quite a lot in the past.  Umair Haque asks,

“If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust?”

Most of the social networking solutions using the Cloud (e.g. tons of Facebook apps now run on the Amazon Cloud) are rarely about ‘trust, connection and community’ and are more about attention grabs and clicks. This recent development by Thomas Jefferson University is like a whiff of fresh air in the hodgepodge that is ‘social networking’ these days.

What does this mean for other organizations which think they are missing the bus by not being on ‘social media’? – I believe that organizations that take Cloud based social networking solutions seriously and redefine their model of reaching out and offering services to customers will be leaders in their field while their counterparts who simply choose to fiddle with social-media ‘presence’ instead will be left behind.

* – I admit Facebook is not a prime example for illustrating this point; what with Facebook’s shooting itself in the foot with privacy settings and the recent flak that it has received. Needless to say, any implementation of ‘consumerizing’ the Cloud should ensure that no user medical information is ever entrusted to Mr. Zuckerberg or to a Facebook app!

The above post was written by Gokul Sriram of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

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Here are the highlights of the new features which are available with the latest update.

I. Network Mapped Drives support:

One of the most requested features since our initial release was the support for mapped drives. With this feature, the users will be able to

1. Backup from a network mapped drive to the Local HDDs or the Cloud Server
2. Store local backups to a network mapped drive

This feature is ideally used by users who have multiple computers/devices with critical data to backup but which have an operating system not yet supported by Vembu Home. Using a simple network mapping to the share or drive of the other systems, users will be able to backup those computers. The users can also backup to and from your Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.

II. Global Configuration of backup encryption password & CPU Usage:

In our initial release, users had to configure encryption password and CPU usage for each backup set. We have now moved the password and CPU usage configurations under the options tab along with Backup Window configuration. Users will now be able to store a common global encryption password for all their backups. The users can also change the CPU usage dynamically for all the backups at one place.

III. ‘Do not Backup’ Window Settings configured by default:

Now, ‘Do not backup’ window settings are configured by default between 8 AM to 6 PM. Users don’t have to now worry about backups hogging the system resources during those hours. Backups will automatically stop during the ‘Do not backup’ window hours, and will resume after the window. This default configuration has been done only on fresh Vembu Home installations. For the existing installations, you can go to the Options Tab and manually configure them.

IV. Test Connectivity with the Amazon Cloud Server:

With this feature you can check the connectivity with the Amazon Cloud Server.

V. Advanced Graphical Backup Report added:

We have added a more intuitive backup report for

1. Files configured for backup, protected files & skipped files
2. Storage quota in Amazon Cloud, storage used by backup & storage used by the client.

VI. One-Click Configuration of Pre-Configured Backups:

A more intuitive representation for the pre-configured backups available with Vembu Home Console is now provided. This provides one-click configuration of your favorite backups such as My Documents, Outlook, Registry & System State, Browser Settings etc.

VII. Support for Automatic Software Updates:

Now, any future software updates will be automatically downloaded and installed without any manual efforts from the user.

One of the major under-the-hood features included in this update is the addition of an embedded local web service to the Vembu Home Agent instead of the more bulky Apache-PHP Web Service, making the client much more light weight.

The update also includes several other under-the-hood enhancements which improve the overall performance of the Vembu Home Agent.

The above post was written by Jay of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Why many SMBs are reluctant to Cloud?

“Cloud Computing” – a buzz word that’s on the peak of Hype Cycle for quite some time now is still a ‘jargon’ to many SMBs and Mid Market Companies. It was interesting to see the results of the ‘cloud hosting awareness survey’ conducted by RackSpace that more than two thirds of the SMBs in US are not familiar with the term “Cloud Hosting” – Wow!

Now, two questions immediately arise in our mind. Is that the Small Businesses failed to grasp the cloud computing technology or the Cloud hosting providers done a horrendous job in marketing to that segment? I can understand why cloud hosting providers are more catered towards the ‘enterprise segment’ expecting some big deals ($$$) instead of focusing on mom and pop services which are typical of SMBs.

Now that even if the cloud hosting providers turned their flash light on SMBs and started to focus on this segment, they are faced with two big questions (barriers) that needs a fix.

1) Security and privacy concerns
2) Benefit over existing hosting service

A recent Forrester survey reveals that 51% of SMB survey respondents cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not adopting cloud computing yet. Small Businesses need a TRUE value proposition on why they need to move their data out of their premises and the real business value they derive out of it. These are some prime reasons on why many SMBs are still reluctant to cloud.

Why SMBs need the cloud?

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Time frame) is one(four) good reason on why Small Businesses need the cloud – Sounds like a typical sales pitch?

Budget – The cost of running and managing an in-house data center is increasing exponentially year by year and more than the hardware cost, it’s the support & management cost and business app cost etc… that are the real pain points. On top of it, increasing cost for the maintenance required for the datacenter, electrical power supplies, cooling, bandwidth etc… are some prime factors on why SMBs need the cloud.

Authority – When small businesses require a business app, it has to go through lots of stages especially when maintained in-house. Right from staging, development, testing, production and fail over environment, the in-house IT department will be working on lots of other items as well in order to bring up the business app. Now if there should be a technical problem with the storage devices or servers, SMBs typically don’t have the situation under control and have to rely on the hardware vendor’s technical support.

Need – SMBs usually do not have remote data centers for managing their offsite data backup requirements. Data Backup is more than a need – a mandate for running successful businesses. Businesses without proactive backup and recovery policies are likely to be OUT OF BUSINESS within 2 years of a major disaster. Replication to a cloud platform is an effective data backup and recovery strategy and helps Small Businesses to withstand a data disaster.

Timeframe – Small businesses don’t have to go through a typical two week purchase order process and additional two weeks of configuration, staging, testing etc… in order for a Business Application to be available for production use. With Cloud Computing, they can get up and running in few days and this quick process will have a profitable impact on the business.


Small Businesses have always more reasons to shift their data out of their premises and move it to the cloud. But they are reluctant and held up and what they need is the right message that “Your Data is Safe and Your Business is Protected” to get them up and running on the cloud.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.