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China's Tencent will offer 10TB of free cloud storage to attract US users
Getting wind that users of Tencent's Chinese-language cloud service have 10TB of free storage made many drool, but soon there'll be no need for envy. Peter Zheng, one of the company's vice presidents, announced last weekend that the complimentary storage setup is bound for the US and will likely be available in early 2014, PandoDaily reports. If you're not familiar with the offer, folks who sign up for one of the firm's QQ accounts and download its mobile cloud app score 1TB of gratis space, which will balloon closer to 10TB as needed. Sure, the idea of handing terabytes of your data to a foreign firm in an era of privacy concerns doesn't inspire confidence, but the outfit has plans to earn your trust: Zheng says your bits will likely be stored in servers outside of China. Can't wait for the freebie to make its way stateside? Tencent hopes to keep you distracted with the US launch of its Instagram-like image app, Story Camera, within two to three weeks.
Box announces 10GB of free storage and $5 starter plan
Almost everything is getting more expensive it seems, with one glorious exception; online storage. In the digital storage arms race, consumers are the winners thanks to a host of generous gigs of free storage offered by companies who want you to use their service. The latest move in the (online) storage wars comes from Box, who have launched a new, free personal storage and starter storage plan for budget-minded users. Box's free personal storage accounts have been upgraded from 5 GB of free storage to 10 GB. These plans only allow for one user, but a free extra 5 GB is a free extra 5 GB. The company has also introduced a brand-new Starter plan for small businesses looking to enter cloud storage. The plan offers 100 GB of storage and up to 10 different user accounts. Box's Aaron Levie has published an interesting post about their new and upgraded storage options which featured one particularly interesting tidbit of information about how much digital data usage is growing. For reference, Box started in 2005. Individuals are now accessing, editing, sharing, presenting and manipulating more data than ever before, across more devices than anyone could have ever predicted. It's estimated that there will be nearly 40,000 exabytes of digital data created by 2020 (enough data to fill up 671,088,640,000 64GB gold iPhones). For perspective, the year we started Box, there were only 130 exabytes of data in existence. If software is eating the world, then information is eating the enterprise, and we want Box to be the simple and obvious choice for sharing and accessing that information securely. Box has an iOS app that allows users to share files with coworkers, view presentations, comment on documents and instantly view updates to spreadsheets. You can download it from the App Store here, and if you were already an existing Box "personal user" enjoy that extra 5 GB of storage space.
Yahoo raises the stakes for free Flickr storage: 1 terabyte
It's official: Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer has gone completely bonkers, as the Yahoo-owned Flickr has just announced that all users now have a free terabyte of storage. That's a thousand gigabytes, folks. For free. As the Flickr website touts, one terabyte will hold 537,731 photos at an average size of 6.5 megapixels each. No more are you going to need to scale down the size of your images to fit 'em on Flickr -- just upload them at their native resolution. It's worth remembering that Flickr has a free iPhone app available to facilitate uploading, viewing and sharing your images.
Mobile Miscellany: week of October 24, 2011
This week was packed with news on the mobile front, so it was easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here's some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of October 24, 2011: Fan of white phones? Here ya go: the BlackBerry Bold 9900, Curve 9360 and Torch 9810 can be pre-ordered on Phones4U. If white doesn't do it for you, the Curve 9300 will be available in pink. [Stuff] HTC has announced its partnership with Dropbox, which means you can get 5GB of available storage on any of the company's Android devices. [Twitter] A few customers on Verizon's family plans have noticed a peculiar addition to the company's #DATA service; when the text showing the data usage arrives, it now mentions "shared," which may be an indication that Big Red's on its way to offering shared data plans in the near future. [Droid-Life] Rumors have flown for some time about LG's attempt at reviving the Prada series by introducing the K2 (aka the P940), and now we're finally starting to see images of the Android device leak out. Apparently, it'll be less than 9mm thin, offer an 8MP camera, 1.3MP front-facing cam, 21Mbps HSPA+ and have a 4.3-inch display with 1,000 nits of brightness. [PhoneArena via UnwiredView] Research in Motion announced BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, which extends Microsoft Exchange Online to the BlackBerry lineup. It's geared toward midsized businesses and enterprises. Head to the source for the details. [Microsoft-News]
