Anna Eskridge

Every day you probably run your hands across various different keyboards, touchpads, and plastic buttons. The hard part is getting the various products to talk to each other. But working with so many different devices poses some challenges.

You may store your business files on your work computer and your personal files on your home laptop. You'd like to watch movies on this system while you work, but they're stored on a Windows-based computer elsewhere in your apartment. Your cell phone may be the hub of your social life, but that means nothing when you surf the Web on a Mac. Sure, you can use removable media to transfer files, but the process is slow, you have to keep the media on hand in order to access files, and the cost of scratching a disc, losing a thumb drive, or dropping a portable hard drive is high. And of course you can't do anything by phone.

In the case of frequently updated files, you have to run back to your host system to copy new material. The solution to this problem of data creep is synchronization. The result is a smooth, seamless (and free) process for ensuring access to the latest versions of much-needed files. Lots of free applications and utilities can ease your multidevice lifestyle by keeping your critical files up-to-date and accessible to all of your deskbound or mobile systems. The underlying synchronization philosophy is the same, but different devices have different foibles that affect your ability to sync them easily. Sync PCs to PCs There are two primary ways to synchronize files across PCs, be they desktops, laptops, or a combination of the two: through direct, system-to-system synchronization, or by uploading files to and downloading them from a third-party cloud service.

With that in mind, we'll focus on three different types of synchronization: PC to PC, PC to Mac, and PC to mobile device. Direct synchronization benefits from faster transfer speeds and an unlimited capacity for changed data (because you perform the sync directly across two connected computers on your personal network). Its primary disadvantages is that you have to run both systems simultaneously to perform the synchronization, which eats up electricity and limits your ability to sync files when you're on the go. Anything you upload will exist in its own protected space on the Internet, accessible from any device that you allow into your cloud network. Cloud-based synchronization services act as a third-party host for your files. Computers will sync with your virtual storage space whenever they come online, eliminating the need to keep two or more systems running in order to keep files matched between the two. No service provider gives you access to more than a few gigabytes of free storage space for your files.

The major downside of the cloud is limited capacity. And since the available bandwidth between you and your ISP effectively caps your synchronization speed, relying on the cloud may not be a good idea for heavy file transfers. This beta tool for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 systems combines Microsoft's Windows Live Sync utility-a free, direct-synchronization tool-and 5GB of space in a Microsoft-hosted cloud. Windows Live Mesh offers the best of both worlds. Soon it will support Macs and phones, though these services have not yet been enabled.

To get started with Live Mesh, head over to Mesh.com and click the Sign In link. At this writing, the service is entirely free for download and use. To use Live Mesh, you must have a Windows Live ID; if you don't have one, create it now. Click the I Agree button to transfer to the main Live Mesh screen. After logging in via new accounts or by typing your log-in name and password, you'll jump to the 'Review and accept agreements' page for Live Mesh.

The Live Desktop screen is where you'll manage the connections between your PCs and your Microsoft cloud. Click the large Add device button, and download the accompanying Live Mesh software for your system. But before you can look at what's in your cloud-based storage, you'll want to add a system or two to synchronize. Run the installation routine, which adds a small Live Mesh icon to the lower-right portion of your taskbar. With that, you've completed your basic Live Mesh configuration. Sign into Live Mesh with your Windows Live ID, assign your current system a name, and click the Add Device button.

Repeat the preceding series of steps for each additional system you want to add to your synchronization network. Select a folder (excluding Windows system folders, hidden folders, your desktop directory, and folders on removable media or mapped network drives) on one of your systems, right-click the folder, and left-click the Add Folder to Live Mesh option that appears in the context menu. Once you're done, you can start adding files and folders to sync. Give the folder a name, and click OK. Live Mesh Cloud: click for full-size imageA shortcut to the folder will appear on the desktop of every other computer that runs Live Mesh. Use the screen that appears to assign the selected folder to a new location on your PC, if you wish.

Go to one of these systems and double-click the new desktop shortcut. Once you make the change, Live Mesh will sync the folder on this computer with the one on your original computer. If you want to perform synchronizations exclusively as peer-to-peer transfers (thus bypassing the 5GB limit of the Live Mesh cloud), click Show synchronization options after double-clicking the desktop Live Mesh folder shortcut. Repeat this process for all of the connected systems in your Live Mesh. From there, select the Never for this device option for the 'Live Desktop' device. Sync PCs to Macs Windows Live Mesh and its direct-synchronization-only variant, Windows Live Sync, aren't fleshed out for the Mac platform yet, and successive upgrades to OSX have broken the syncing capabilities of both Microsoft tools.

Otherwise, anything you add to the folders will transfer to the cloud as well-which you can view by signing into Mesh.com and double-clicking on your Live Desktop. To sync directly between a Windows PC and a Mac, you must first confirm that full network sharing is in effect between the two platforms. Once you can see shared folders on your Windows machine, and your Windows machine can see shared folders on your Apple machine, you're ready to start synchronizing. Setting this up can involve a complicated series of steps on the OS X side of things, so be sure to read Apple's handy walkthrough for the process. Syncback: click for full-size imageHead online to the 2BrightSparks Website, and grab the Syncback Freeware program.

Right-click the folder, map it as a network drive, and assign it a unique driver letter for your Windows PC. Once the Syncback installation is complete, launch the executable file and create a profile, which represents a single link between a folder on your Windows machine and a folder on your Apple machine. While the app installs itself on your Windows machine, use Windows Explorer to surf to a shared network folder on your Apple system. After you give this link a name, a screen containing a multitude of options appears before you. We're interested in synchronization, however, to insure that the mapped network drive and an individual Windows-based folder will always contain the same items on both systems. If you want to run a one-way backup between the mapped network folder (a folder on your Apple system) and a Windows-based folder-or vice versa-the first three backup options are for you. Select any folder on your Windows system to serve as one of these portals, and then select the mapped network drive you created earlier as the destination folder.

Select options in the Filter tab to include or exclude to a greater specificity-useful if you want to limit syncing to, say, all of your music files in your Windows downloads folder. Highlight the syncing option that best applies to your folder structure and click OK. A description of your synchronization setup will appear below the listed options; to tweak the description, click the program's Advanced tab. Finally, click the OK button to set up your profile. You can manually run these whenever you like it through the SyncBack program itself, or you can instruct Windows to run synchronizations at fixed time intervals. You can create multiple profiles for additional syncing tasks as you see fit. To do this, right-click a profile you just made and select Schedule.

From there, click the Settings tab and set the syncing frequency. Click the set password button and enter in the password associated with your Windows User Account. Remember, this procedure won't work unless your Apple system is running; similarly, your Windows system must be set to log automatically into your mapped network drives at boot-up. Dropbox iPhone: click for full-size imageIf you're hefting Apple's iPhone, you'll find that the synchronization options built into Apple's iTunes software are more than adequate to sync your device with Windows Mail, Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Safari, as well as with your photo, video, and music folders. Sync PCs to Phones and Mobile Devices The way to synchronize contacts, mail, calendars, and files from your PC to your mobile device depends on the particular phone you have. All of these options congregate under the Info tab when you click on your iPhone device in iTunes.

To handle that operation, you'll need a program called Dropbox. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn't come with built-in support for file and folder syncing between your PC and your iPhone's hard drive. When you install the application, you'll receive 2GB of free, cloud-based storage, represented by a new Dropbox folder in your My Documents folder. Install the free Dropbox app on your iPhone, and you'll be able to access (and download for offline viewing) any iPhone-readable file while you're on the go. Any file that you assign to this folder will sync up to your Dropbox storage. If you use a BlackBerry, Android phone, or Windows Mobile device, the appropriate application to use is called SugarSync.

Depending on your phone's functionality, you may even be able to edit files, in addition to viewing, sharing, and sending them remotely. Functionally it's similar to Dropbox: You move the files that you want to sync into your 2GB of free cloud space by assigning them to a single shared folder. Consult the SugarSync Website for customized instructions and applications for your specific phone model. Legacy systems running Windows XP can use a program called ActiveSync to accomplish the same task. For phones that run some variant of the Windows Mobile operating system, Windows Mobile Device Center is the ticket for synchronizing e-mail, contacts, calendars, and media files between a Vista or Windows 7 PC and your mobile device over a USB connection. If you have access to a Microsoft Exchange Server, you can use either application to synchronize your data wirelessly.

Google's easy-to-use walkthroughs will hold your hand as you take your first steps into synchronization land. If you don't mind using Google's array of services-including Contacts, Gmail, and Calendar-you can sync your data wirelessly by installing one of the company's Google Sync apps for BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile phones (among others). In this case, Google provides the Exchange Server, ensuring that your data will stay up-to-date without requiring a physical connection to a PC. Instructions for using the service vary by device.

Los Angeles City Council approved a US$7.25 million five-year deal Tuesday in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. According to Los Angeles City Council minutes, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft. Google is touting the deal as a major endorsement of its cloud-based approach to computing, but it turns out that some of the funding is indirectly coming from an unlikely source: Microsoft.

Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit, brought on behalf of six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software. Los Angeles City Council approved the deal unanimously on Tuesday, according to Google Spokesman Andrew Kovacs. Microsoft has paid out more than $1 billion in other class-action settlements based on similar claims. The migration from the city's Novell GroupWise e-mail servers will be handled by contractor Computer Sciences Corp. The five-year contract will cost Los Angeles about $1.5 million more than simply sticking with Novell.

Other applications such as calendaring, document sharing and chat will be handled by Google Apps too. But because the city will get extra storage capacity from Google, while at the same time being able to run other software on the Novell servers, it's worth the cost, according to an Oct. 7 city finance committee memo written by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana. The Los Angeles deal may hint at how this product will work. Google has pushed Google Apps as an option for government agencies, promising to ship a product called Government Cloud, which will be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), sometime next year. According to a Sept. 15 memo from the Los Angeles Information Technology Agency, Google will "provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud.' The GovCloud will store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies." This GovCloud would be encrypted and "physically and logically segregated" from Google's standard applications.

Because data would be encrypted and then stored on many different servers, Google's administrators wouldn't typically be able to access the information, although there would be so-called "Super Administrators" who would be able to recompile the data and read it. The data would be stored only in the U.S. and only accessible to U.S citizens who have undergone security clearance. The city would own the data and would be notified of "any request of data or security breach," the memo states. They convinced Los Angeles council members to tack on a "liquidated damages" clause to the contract that would award the city a payout in the event of a data breach. Critics are still worried about security and privacy, though. Kovacs of Google downplayed privacy and security concerns over the project. "One thing that was very clear in council today," he said. "They believe that Google Apps will make the city more secure than their current solution."

In a bid to appease publishers, Google has updated its search programs, allowing publishers who charge for their content to limit users to only five free page views per day. If you browse the WSJ site directly, for example, you could browse a certain number of articles for free, but once you reach the set limit, you would be prompted to register or subscribe to the site. Many publishers impose this type of limits on free page views for Web surfers who visit their sites directly.

But, in the past, Google refused to implement these limits on its search results and articles in its Google News service. Because of this stance, Google has drawn the ire of some news publishers. If you only clicked through WSJ articles using Google News, for example, your entries weren't counted toward the site's limit. Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has called Google many names and has threatened to remove its news assets (like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) from Google search. Google has stood firm and refused to pay news publishers for indexing their content. There were even discussions of Murdoch partnering with Microsoft, which would pay to exclusively index the content.

But the search giant now seems to have acknowledged the turmoil the newspaper industry is going through and is now making changes to accommodate the much disputed pay walls on certain Web sites. So if one user clicks on more than five articles in a day, he/she will be automatically routed to subscription purchase pages. The changes to Google's First Click Free program let publishers prevent unrestricted access to subscription Web sites. Google's John Mueller explains in a blog post that the company hopes "this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!" On Tuesday, the same day that Google announced the changes, Rupert Murdoch spoke at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the Internet age. He did not mention name of sites, but this has been seen as a direct attack at Google and its News service.

Murdoch explained that good journalism is an expensive commodity and criticised sites that profit from reusing news articles by others without paying. Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post also spoke at the workshop on Tuesday, and accused Murdoch of confusing aggregation of news with misappropriation. Rupert Murdoch is expected to erect more pay walls for it news properties in the coming months. Huffington said she strongly believes in aggregation next to original content, noting that some of Murdoch's own sites aggregate eternal content as well.

The CodePlex Foundation, an organization funded and created by Microsoft, Wednesday named its first executive director, but still has not begun to form its permanent board as promised. Hunter has held leadership roles at open source organizations such as Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and United Linux. Industry veteran Paula Hunter will assume the role of executive director, the Foundation said.

Podcast with Sam Ramji, CodePlex Foundation Hunter represents the first full-time staff member to join the CodePlex Foundation. The CodePlex Foundation, launched last September, is aimed at bringing open-source and proprietary software companies together to participate side-by-side in open-source projects. She is responsible for operations, including personnel, budgets and programs, with primary responsibility for sponsor development; evangelism for the Foundation and its mission; and outreach to key open source organizations including other foundations. "With her experience at the OSDL (now the Linux Foundation) and UnitedLinux, she has learned how to marry the needs of a major open source community with corporate contributors in a sustainable way," says Sam Ramji, interim president of the CodePlex Foundation's board of directors. In December, the Foundation said it was launching a search to fill both the role Hunter accepted and the role of technical director. The Foundation was funded with $1 million from Microsoft and includes four Microsoft employees among the six-person Board of Directors and another six employees on the 12-person Board of Advisers.

Ramji says Hunter would choose the technical director and interviews are ongoing. The structure of the organization drew the ire of critics almost immediately for the Microsoft-heavy board. The idea was the boards were just a placeholder until permanent members could be added, but permanent board members have been announced. At the time, Andy Updegrove, a lawyer and founder of ConsortiumInfo.org, called CodePlex a rigid foundation that has almost no wiggle room and a poorly crafted governance structure that concentrates authority at the top and leaves little power to others that might join the foundation. On Jan. 5, Ramji, interim president of the board of directors, said in a press release, "Expect to see the full permanent board - with significant changes to participants - announced in mid-January." He said three of the five board members were already in place, but no names were announced. "We're working through some excellent candidates as well as defining our policy on sponsorships, which has slowed down our process," he said. Follow John on Twitter: twitter.com/johnfontana This story, "Microsoft-funded CodePlex Foundation gets first exec," was originally published at NetworkWorld.com.

The CodePlex Foundation also listed its accomplishments during the first 100 days of its operation, including a project acceptance process, software code contribution agreement, new open source licensing models, and donated projects. Follow the latest developments in software at Network World.

Sony expects that 3D televisions will make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of all sets it sells in the financial year that begins in April 2012, a senior executive said late last week. Sony first announced its 3D ambitions in early September when President and CEO Howard Stringer said the company planned to launch 3D-capable Bravia TV sets and Blu-ray Disc players as well as adding 3D to the PlayStation 3. Sony's plans for the latter two products are already becoming clear: the Blu-ray Disc Association is working on a 3D disc standard while Sony plans to add 3D to all models of the PlayStation 3 via a firmware update. The goal further indicates Sony's confidence in 3D entertainment ahead of a roll-out of the technology next year. On the TV side, perhaps the largest and most important part of the picture, Sony hadn't disclosed many details but now that picture is starting to come into focus.

Yoshioka didn't elaborate on the additional hardware but said it would only add a little to the production cost of the TV set. The 3D-compatible sets will include a small piece of additional hardware that enables them to show 3D content but they'll also work as conventional television sets, said Hiroshi Yoshioka, executive deputy president of Sony and head of the unit that includes its TV business, in an interview. By far the biggest expense for 3D viewing will be the glasses that are required to produce the illusion of a three-dimensional image. By selling the glasses separately Sony will be able to keep its 3D-compatible sets competitive with other sets while only requiring a higher outlay from customers who want to experience 3D content. Those could cost up to around US$200 and won't necessarily be bundled with a television.

Yoshioka stressed that Sony has yet to determine the premium for 3D-compatible sets and whether it will bundle the glasses or sell them separately. Sony's TV business has been losing money for six years but Stringer committed this month to turning a profit on televisions in the next financial year, which runs from April 2010 to March 2011. Success with 3D will be vital if Sony is to accomplish its goal of grabbing a 20 percent share of the LCD TV market within the next three years. "It's all up to the contents," said Yoshioka. But the TV business is perhaps the most price-sensitive of all of Sony's product areas, particularly in the U.S. market, so the company will likely want to keep additional costs down. Sony's 3D plans revolve around gaming, movies and sports. If history is any indicator, sports is an additional area where users are willing to pay a little more money for a better experience.

Sony is already working on gaming with the PlayStation 3 upgrade plans and its movies division, Sony Pictures, is already producing 3D movies. The company's existing relationship with broadcasters through its movie division and TV production house could serve well in promoting 3D but even if it doesn't there will be a secondary route to 3D-capable sets. Smaller-scale experiments have already taken place in the U.S., where Sony recently offered its "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" movie to Internet-linked Bravia TVs ahead of the DVD release. "So far there is a good response," said Yoshioka of the trial. Sony is expanding its PlayStation Network service to cover its televisions and will launch a new content delivery service next year that will pump movies, TV shows and other video content directly into Bravia TVs and Blu-ray Disc players from its own servers. Late last year "Hancock," another Sony movie, was offered via the same route.

A data center start-up is exiting stealth mode with technology that reduces power and cooling costs by analyzing the energy consumption of IT equipment and applications. Officials at Viridity Software - the name means "greenness" - argue that today's power monitoring products focus only on the physical infrastructure, giving insight into how power is delivered to the data center but not insight into why it is being consumed. What does a real green data center look like?

Viridity's software maps the connections between applications and specific IT equipment, while also analyzing the relative importance to the business of each application. Viridity was founded in 2007 and has financing of more than $7 million from Battery Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. Then it provides step-by-step recommendations to eliminate power and cooling inefficiencies, simulates the potential impact of new technology deployments and enables chargeback. "They take an application-based view," says David Hill, an analyst with the Mesabi Group. "It's much more sophisticated and much more elegant [than current power monitoring products]. It's the way it should be done." Analysis tools that look solely at the power usage of servers and other infrastructure aren't necessarily helpful in controlling energy use, because they don't analyze the amount of power the business needs to operate effectively, Hill says. "If you just look at infrastructure you can't always understand what's happening, and know what energy each application is using," he says. The company was founded by CTO Michael Rowan, who founded continuous data protection vendor Revivio, which was acquired by Symantec three years ago; and vice president of engineering Chris Rocca, also a veteran of Revivio. The product is a software download combined with a hosted database, and prices can run anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands, depending on the size of deployment.

Viridity is still searching for a CEO. For now, board chairman Dave Lemont is serving as interim CEO. Viridity has eight customers so far and will make its software generally available at the end of March. Before founding Viridity, Rowan says he was consulting for large companies struggling to provide power to IT equipment. Viridity's software will prevent such mishaps, the company believes."Viridity will provide customers with the ability to model power consumption through the IT layer, by tying applications to the specific IT equipment that supports them," a company press release states. "Not only will the connections be mapped, but the relative business criticality of each application will be analyzed as well. One company bought millions of dollars worth of disk drives and attempted to install them when "someone said 'you can't plug them in because there's not enough power.'" That made Rowan realize how little information companies have about how power use relates to business processes. "The first thing that was striking was all that equipment was bought, paid for, shipped and installed before someone said there was no power," he says. The breadth and depth of this correlation is critical, as this is where virtually all of the data center's power demand is derived from."Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin

The iPhone 3GS allows users to record, trim and share video. Wouldn't it be great if it could do so much more? It's a capable camera, but the iPhone software's video features don't quite pack enough punch to completely cut iMovie or Windows Movie Maker out of your workflow.

ReelDirector is an iPhone app by Nexvio that allows for more sophisticated video-editing right on the phone. However, as an iMovie alternative for the road, it's more than capable of doing simple edits to make your clips look better than the average YouTube video. Much like the plethora of photo-editing and painting apps already available for the iPhone aren't Photoshop replacements, it's not about to render Final Cut Pro useless. With ReelDirector, you can arrange and stitch recorded video clips on a scrollable timeline made to look like a filmstrip. It's perfect to help explain to your family that, no, that's not a bear cub or Cousin Itt-it's your son, and he needs a haircut desperately.

There are four different styles of text overlays you can choose from to tell viewers what exactly they're looking at. To help your video blend together smoothly, you can choose between ten different kinds of transitions and several variations thereof for a total of 27 transitions, all chosen through a picker interface with live previews. When you've finished your minor masterpiece, ReelDirector allows you to share video via e-mail or save your project as a video in the Camera Roll for syncing. Each transition can be added or changed non-destructively, so if you've added a few too many of those really cool cross-dissolves to your video and it's giving your viewers a headache, you can simply go back to that project and export again as necessary. Easy! It's also made a tutorial video to demonstrate how to use ReelDirector but, despite appearances, the app isn't yet capable of mixing music together with video.

Nexvio plans to add voiceover support in future releases, and it's eager to hear your feedback for feature requests. For now, you can use the e-mail feature to ask your friend to spend a few minutes in iMovie or Windows Movie Maker adding music and kicking your movie up a notch. It's compatible only with the iPhone 3GS and requires iPhone OS 3.0 at a bare minimum; you'll need iPhone OS 3.1 to export projects to the Camera Roll as videos or e-mail them to friends. [via Cult of Mac ReelDirector costs $8 and is in the App Store now.