What is Bitcasa?
Bitcasa is a start-up begun by former execs at Mastercard, VeriSign and Mozy and is the latest entrant to the cloud storage market.
What makes Bitcasa different is that the service offers you truly infinite storage, all for just $10 per month. In fact, when you add your first folder, you are told that you have over 500TB of remaining free space, and the start-up says that number is only there because Windows and Mac machines cannot display higher numbers.
How does Bitcasa offer unlimited storage?
The company’s CEO says it can offer unlimited storage, “because 60 percent of their data is identical.” Simply, when you “cloudify” a music track or movie, the chances are someone else has the same exact track or movie on their computer.
Bitcasa uses “patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques, and encryption” to identify duplicate files and therefore the company only keeps a couple, (or even one) of of the files in its servers. By doing so, the company can keep its costs significantly down and offer infinite storage to its users.
Is it safe?
Now that you understand how it works, the biggest question is whether the data is safe, and who (if anyone) can access it. Bitcasa says every upload is encrypted and protected on the server side, meaning no one but you can ever access it, including employees of the company or “snooping” media companies.
This is great for users who may be scared that anyone can search their personal files. Services like DropBox have admitted that employees are prohibited from accessing files, but are not blocked in any way. They may lose their jobs, but they could do so after they have taken all your pictures, for example.
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Today at CES, Asus has unveiled their next iteration of the Transformer Prime line of tablets, one that has a 1920×1200 resolution display.
The new Transformer Prime (model TF700) will have the same sized screen as its recently released brother, but with a high-density display that should “make the individual pixels difficult to see even with the screen inches from one’s face.”
Other than the resolution, the only other update to the consumer hardware is a 2MP front-side camera which will enable 1080p video chats. The current model has a 1.2MP camera.
Additionally, Asus has changed the chassis, “taking the spin out of the aluminum back panel and inserting a plastic strip that’s supposed to improve Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS reception.” The Prime, at least in review units, was panned for poor Wi-Fi reception. Asus was even forced to remove GPS from the Prime’s spec sheet since it worked so poorly.
The updated tablet is coming in May with a $100 premium to current models, meaning $600 for 32GB and $700 for 64GB.
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Verizon has announced this week that it will be adding a new, speedier tier to its FiOS fiber broadband offering, offering as high as 150Mbit/sec downstream and 34Mbit upstream.
The service will cost users $195 per month.
So far, Verizon is rolling out the service to 12 U.S. states, and D.C., with small businesses and residential consumers expected to be able to use it fully by the end of the year.
Verizon currently offers a 50/20Mbit plan for $140 per month, their fastest offering.
New customers or upgrading customers must sign up for a one-year agreement to get the $195 price for the new incredibly fast option.
FiOS is currently available to 12.5 million households in the U.S. with Verizon expecting to expand reach to 18 million.
With a 150Mbit connection, users can download full two-hour 1080p HD movies in under 4 minutes and average music tracks in 300 milliseconds.
