We now have diverse options suiting the different market segments – Zukmo for Consumers and SyncBlaze for MSPs/VARs and we are in the process of bundling the SyncBlaze service as an on premise edition for channel partners interested in hosting the services within the bounds of their infrastructure and storage domains.

FREE TRIAL 

We have introduced a free trial period of 30 days for our service providers which enables them to go for a test drive and get a hands-on feel of this service. For trying out our service, MSPs just need to fill up the minimal information requested in the SyncBlaze channel Signup page. The SyncBlaze support team will then connect with the respective Resellers and guide them in registering their accounts. Our company home page will also be redesigned in the near future to reference all our cloud solution offerings and it will provide for a way to redirect interested parties to the registration page.

We will soon be sharing the details on Pricing in our website.

KEY FEATURES

A number of core features in Sync Blaze are based on the functional adoption of its predecessor and popular customer oriented offering, Zukmo, which has been packaged and branded for business suitability.

The main features for the business edition are as follows:

• Enables your customers to securely store all types of business content with version control.
• Facilitates simplified file sharing with employees/clients etc. without the need for Emails/FTP/ Shared File servers to exchange business critical documents.
• Provides Universal Access from any Workstation, iPhone, Android, iPad etc. through the mobile web platform, desktop utilities and browser extensions.
• User friendly Collaboration for multidisciplinary teams to view/edit files instantly
• Offers a centralized searchable repository for all end user content – Files, Web content, Notes, Google Apps Docs, Emails & Social media
• Collect and Organize tagged Google Apps Docs, Emails, Notes, RSS feeds, Bookmarks, Social & Embedded media
• Reseller and Customer Administration module for control and configuration
• Powered by Amazon AWS – HIPAA, SOX & PCI Compliant infrastructure.

For starters, we have a Features page with a snapshot of the capabilities and also a more detailed Learn More section that covers each of the features in greater depth. We will also be featuring a series of blog posts covering the important functionalities in more depth with relevant information, illustrations and videos in some cases. Also, watch our blog space for more product updates.

During the past couple of months, we have been connecting and conversing with some of the partners who had expressed interest in providing SyncBlaze as a value added service to their customers. We hope to be aggressively marketing and communicating with many more partners & resellers to increase the brand awareness and also to strongly leverage their suggestions, requests and feedback to further refine our product development roadmap.

Get it now

Get Zukmo 1.0 now from the Android Market. If you are viewing this page from an Android device, click here to view and install Zukmo Android App from Android Market.

Sign in

Browse or Search your content

Zukmo for Android comes bundled with a crisp content browsing view, which means that you can easily browse or search through all of your content items such as saved Bookmarks, Tweets, RSS feeds, Notes, Google docs, Desktop Documents etc.

Due to built-in synchronization feature, all the content items that you can view in your personal digital library in the cloud are now instantly accessible from your Android phone. Currently, we list all your content items in chronological fashion by default and provide for a way to list the favorites from the clickable icon on top.

What’s on the Menu?

Offline Reading

More to come

This is simply the beginning with respect to our exciting venture in the mobile marketplace and we are laying out a broad plan for unveiling a mobile optimized web site of Zukmo so that our smart phone users can benefit immensely by directly browsing to Zukmo through their preferred mobile browser. In addition, we will also plan on releasing similar feature rich mobile apps for other popular devices such as iPhone/iPad in the near future.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start your free Zukmo account today!

Notes and Web Clippings:

Until today’s release users needed to import whole content sources to their libraries, even if only a small portion of it was of interest to them. We recognized the need for something more adaptable and that’s why we’re pleased to announce one of our most exciting new features: notes and web clippings. Users browsing through web content who are interested in only select portions can now simply highlight the desired content and use the right-click menu to import it to Zukmo as a note. Notes can also be made from directly within a user’s Zukmo library. Play with it. Learn to love it! These tools aim to make your library more useful, and your life a lot easier.

RSS and Atom Feed Handling:

Speaking of easier, how about those RSS feeds? They do the job of aggregating content on the stuff that’s interesting to us, but what if we follow more than one? For that, we’re pleased to introduce our new RSS feed handler. Think of it as your RSS feed for your RSS feeds. It’s a brain-full, but that’s what we’re here to help alleviate! Users can now subscribe to up to 10 of their favorite RSS feeds directly from Zukmo. This can be done by either by right-clicking the RSS feed button and selecting “Add this link to Zukmo”, or by inputting the feed’s link into the Zukmo library’s bookmark tool.

RSS feed content (title and description) is stored to the RSS section of the library. The option to go a level deeper and store an entire article is also available by simply bookmarking the article itself once it is opened. This permanently saves the article as a separate bookmarked item.

Twitter Changes:

With the way we handle RSS feeds, we’ve chosen to make a few changes to what users can do with their Twitter accounts. On the Twitter website you might find yourself overwhelmed looking for old tweets, but count on avoiding that with us! The latest 1000 of a user’s tweets, and 1500 of a user’s following tweets are now saved to the user’s library, and are indexed for searching. We decided to take it a step further and created an option to add any tweet URLs displayed in a tweet, as an indexed bookmark if desired.

Enhanced Account Management:

In an effort to provide you with better control over your account, we have integrated new areas for users to enable/disable/re-activate their linked accounts. By clicking on an activated service in the upper portion of the screen, a pop-up window will provide the option to disable the service and to additionally retain or delete indexed content associated with the account.

In addition, we have implemented an account usage stats area in the “My Account” profile page.  This will display various data regarding a user’s account and the composition their stored data

Changes to Delicious Integration:

With the acquisition of Delicious by the founders of YouTube, there have been several changes to the way Delicious feeds their data to us. Rest assured that we’ve worked to make this transition period as seamless as possible. As it stands, users can continue to import Delicious bookmarks to Zukmo with a linked Delicious account, as they are slated to disable servicing of Yahoo! accounts soon.

Miscellaneous:

Always last, but rarely least, we’ve also done some housecleaning to improve the way Zukmo looks and feels. In our official releases, you can always look below to see a list of the things we’ve changed if you’re interested. Of course, as we always like to remind our users, we rely on your help to improve Zukmo.  If you have any feedback, comments, or questions, feel free to contact us at feedback@zukmo.com. We look forward to hearing from you. Happy Zukmoing!

-The Zukmo Team

Kieran Kay is a Marketing and Business Development Associate for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start a free Zukmo account today!

Though we could write paragraph after paragraph about why Zukmo and Readitlater aren’t exactly in the same market space (Readitlater focuses on one-time reads, Zukmo focuses on longer-term information management solutions, Readitlater stores content offline while Zukmo indexes it in the cloud for easy management, etc.), a chart always seems to do the trick a little bit better:

*Information obtained through staff research and is not independently verified

As it’s easy to see, Zukmo and Readitlater actually differ quite significantly, and Zukmo continues to grow in terms of integration and functionality, weekly. We aren’t aiming for anything less than the best information management tool around. In order to actually shape Zukmo into the best, though, we need your help! Please send us any feedback or suggestions you might to feedback@zukmo.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

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.

We intend to make Zukmo the go-to-destination of all the important content that you discover anywhere. Initially, we got started by enabling our users to bookmark any web content of interest to them and then be able to search for the same at leisure within their own Zukmo space. However, bookmarking marks only the begininng of our endeavours and we are intensly planning to cut across a broad swathe of the digital content spectrum that users are likely to keep in their crosshairs.

Soon, you would be able to save, search and share all kinds of information from many desired sources of content. This would include a broad array such as Facebook & Twitter Streams, Desktop Documents, Google Apps, Emails, Video/Audio streams, RSS feeds, Web Clippings, Notes and much more. Further, we will be also adding support for such premier smart device platforms such as Android, iPhone and iPad etc. by building user friendly search and retieve apps that can be dowloaded into the respective mobile devices.

Given the direction we are going, we want to clarify that we are neither competing purely in the space of social bookmarking nor do we wish to add redundancy to existing cloud storage services. Our service will clearly be distinguished to aid as a personal digital memory for our time conscious and information flooded users who wish to quickly capture their online and desktop experiences for later consumption. Also, we will execute in a manner where content remains in sole possesion unless explicity shared by the user and we prefer not to compromise on the model of privacy being dictated by the user. We will however plan on providing a more comprehensive platform that will enable sharing and colloboration on documents within a group created and designated by the user.

Zukmo is meant to serve as a simple and supportive extension to the users for both capturing the designated information in a variety of contexts and hosting that selected crux of their online experience in the cloud. We envision a future where our users could dig out any content of importance to them from anywhere (i.e through browser or desktop or mobile devices) and continually add it to their personal library in the cloud. Then they could simply tune into their personal Zukmo space or “My Zukmo’ once again from anywhere to find all the relevant content that they have gathered diligently by leveraging its rich full-text and attribute based search capabilities. The core features of Zukmo are thus meant to enhance the productivity of the users, assist in the readability of content, promote the interactive sharing of content between private groups and provide for a secure cloud based content vault.

We have our work clearly cut out for us in terms of vastly expanding the scope of support in Zukmo and all future changes to our product and updates will be henceforth reflective of the core vision shared in this post. Currently, a major release has been slated during this week loaded with new features and we urge you to stay tuned to us on the exciting developments.

Where is the Software Plus Services play here? Not yet. But this is the beginning of the move towards Google adopting a ‘software plus services’ strategy. Google will soon realize there are some large solution providers out there who would like to customize and host their Google Apps themselves and offer it to their customers. Additionally, there will also be large mid-market and enterprise customers (which is where most of the IT money is spent) who would like to customize their apps, integrate them with their business processes, and even host Google Apps internally and manage it themselves.  Microsoft offers on-premise, channel hosted, and Microsoft hosted solutions for their applications; Google will follow suit soon – the only thing is that Google comes into the ring from the opposite side  (of Microsoft) . In summary, no IT vendor however big, can afford to ignore a segment of the market because of some religious opposition to a business model. As Microsoft and Google start pushing their software plus services strategy, smaller vendors will follow suit.

My recent comments on an MSPMentor post: “Will Managed Service Providers Back Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online” -are quite relevant in the context of this subject…

“I think it is inevitable that Microsoft takes this hybrid approach with the SaaS model. But the market is so big there is always room for VARs and MSPs to add    value and win customers. In our experience in the SMB market segment we have dealt with two types of SMBs, the one who has internal IT and the one who     outsources it to a local VAR or an MSP. The latter segment is where VARs and MSPs have to cater to by building relationships with customers and also by becoming a trusted advisor/CIO of these small businesses.

Finally, there is no point fighting the tide. Microsoft cannot afford to cede a market segment to a salesforce.com or Google etc. So they need to do something to capture the market segment which is directly consuming applications from the SaaS vendor. That does not mean there is no value VARs/MSPs can add. I strongly believe there is probably 50% of the SMB market segment who are not comfortable with consuming business applications directly from the SaaS vendor. They would go to their local MSP/VAR who would bring in additional value so that these SMBs can focus on their core business.”

I think the complexity of IT is such that it is impossible for a large vendor to cater to all types of businesses. There is a big segment of the market that does not want to figure things out on their own and rather focus on their core business. They would rather outsource it to a trusted MSP/VAR to figure everything out and deliver a solution they could use.

In my opinion, Google is coming around to the same conclusion. Watch this space!

The above post was written by Sekar Vembu 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.