Ubuntu One

Surely there should be a better way to sync. That’s been a problem since sync technology started. Hence its a small market. Same with backup. But with cloud storage use growing, Canonical will need to do something more unique for Ubuntu One to stand out (of course they will in due time).

Honestly, the beta is a sleeper. I could not even move assets from one folder to another in the web interface. If its possible, then there is a big UI fail happening. But then, what’s the percentage of people using the web interface compared to the client? Dropbox is pretty much the king of the hill in this arena.

MobileMe almost nailed it, but is disastrously unstable (but they’ve been improving lately). The only reason why people stick to it is because of sync and the other services are just dogs not to mention overpriced. But hey, its Apple.

In the future releases of Ubuntu, expect a notification alert on the first login to sign up to the service (30 day trial for premium service, stuff like that). That’s the only way to have more subscribers outside the usual PR to come out.

What Jerome has been up to lately…

I know I haven’t been good at updating blogs ever since I got myself into something really serious called a “career.” But then, I wasn’t really out of circulation, its just that I didn’t get enough time or any brain matter left to be able to write an intelligent blog post (since when anyway?).

But then, I have good reasons for it. And I’m pretty proud to voice out what I have been up to and share some knowledge in the process.

Some of you may know that I am currently involved with a company called Morph Labs, a startup under the G2VC banner. Morph has been in operation for 3 years but it was only last year when we started doing some serious work on what we want to achieve, that is to become the catalyst of Software as a Service (SaaS). Ok that sounded a bit too cheesy so I’ll just elaborate with what we do.

We built the Morph eXchange, which is the central location of business with Morph. In it, we’ve written some cool apps like HelpMe and some Single Sign-On mechanism and we have more neat apps in the coming months. Central to Morph eXchange is the Morph Application Platform (MAP) which is currently on closed beta.

If you’re a Rails developer, or someone starting up with Rails but do not have the necessary infrastructure to run your app in the big league, then MAP can be beneficial to you. First, we manage the whole back end system so you can focus on your app development. It runs on Linux, has Ruby 1.8.6, supports Rails 2.x and 1.2.x, and uses PostgreSQL (sorry MySQL folks, maybe next time). Backup is done regularly so you are assured of your data. To make sure its possible for you to increase your capacity when you get a load or bandwidth spike, we utilize Amazon Web Services’ EC2 for elastic computing, and S3 for almost unlimited storage. Now you may ask if we were affected by the recent S3 outage – yes we were, but fixed it quickly when we figured out that it was Amazon at fault and not our system, but everything is back to normal again.

So again how does this work? From the Morph eXchange, you create what we call an Appspace. From this, you can create your Rails app and you can deploy it via a Ruby script that we provide to you when you open up an appspace. From the appspace, you have the benefit of revision control so you can revert back to past versions of your app just in case it fails.

Now if everything what I just wrote above didn’t make sense at all, maybe this video will explain it better: