Matthew Puttnam is exactly the kind of guy one would expect to found a nanotechnology company. Read More
Monday, April 7, 2014
The Ultra-Dense Seagate Fast 4TB Portable Drive Is A Speedy Hunk Of Storage
With the rise of the cloud, external hard drives have nearly gone the way of the dodo. After all, who needs a fiddly, easily broken hard drive in an era of always on, high-speed Internet. But sometimes you want a super-dense, high-speed hard drive for backups and storage and the $299 Seagate Fast HDD USB 3.0 4TB fits the bill.
Reviewing a hard drive is actually quite tough. There are few out there of any note and, barring some unique hybrid models, there’s not much to say. This drive is particularly interesting because it is so , for lack of a better word, dense. Four terabytes is nothing to sneeze at, especially in a 4.6″ x 3.2″ x 0.88″ package that little bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Inside are two 5400 RPM 2TB drives working in RAID 0 configuration it it runs entirely on USB power. The drive includes a dual-headed USB 3.0 cable that is sufficient for most uses and, for lower-powered ports, includes a secondary USB jack to carry power to the drive. It also includes a standard, single-headed USB 3.0 cable.
The drive works perfectly out of the box and Seagate includes NTFS drivers for OS X users. You can also simply reformat the drive Mac OS Extended for Time Machine use.
What does the speed mean in real terms? Using Time Machine I was able to back up 188GB of data in about 50 minutes. It took about 5 seconds to move 800MB of data from an SSD to the Fast drive over USB 3.0. I also ran some basic benchmark tests using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.
Seagate Fast HDD USB 3.0 4TB
This is the benchmark for the drive in question. At 220MB/s on average, this didn’t look very speedy. However, after a bit of digging, I was able to find a previous generation Seagate drive to compare it to.
Seagate Backup Plus Portable (USB 3.0)
This drive, the SRD0SP0, is obviously like comparing apples to oranges. The drive maxed out at 100MB/s on USB 3.0, a noble effort, but definitely stymied by the RPMs of the included drive.
APPLE SSD SD0256F
Finally, as a benchmark, I tried the SSD inside a Macbook Pro 2013 edition. The Seagate drive – still spinning inside its little case – was half as fast as Apple’s latest and greatest.
The metal top and plastic casing look rugged enough but I wouldn’t recommend dragging this drive around on long trips. I suspect the two drives won’t enjoy much rough treatment although transport in a padded bag shouldn’t be a problem.
You’re not getting solid-state speeds by any measure with this drive but you are getting at least twice as fast as a previous-generation backup drive drive and, at $299 for 4TB, you’re paying less than $75 per terabyte. It is surprising to find so much storage in such a small package. Sadly, one wrong move could wipe out terabytes of data and because the drives are in RAID 0 configuration, those wrong moves could be truly disastrous as there is no on-board backup of your data. However, in terms of convenience, portability and speed, this little drive is quite compelling for folks looking for a small, portable backup solution.
Commenting Platform Disqus Introduces Sponsored Comments
Disqus, which says it powers the comment sections on almost 3 million websites, is announcing a new type of ad unit today — a Sponsored Comment.
Since Disqus already runs ads through its Promoted Discovery program, the idea of a Sponsored Comment seems like a pretty natural addition. However, in a company blog post, General Manager David Fleck said this actually stems from the launch of Featured Comments a month ago, with the Disqus team asking, “Can we use the concept of Featured Comments in order to make more money for publishers and allow brands to reach specific audiences?”
It sounds like a Sponsored Comment is basically a Featured Comment that advertisers pay for, occupying the same spot at the top of the thread. Not only should it bring in money for Disqus and the publisher, but Fleck suggested that it’s good for marketers, too, because it helps them advertise on “passion blogs around specific topics,” which might not be large enough own to employ their a sales team.
As for the reader, Fleck said Disqus will be upholding the quality of Sponsored Comments with a team of its own that reviews these comments and applies an “extremely highly threshold” before allowing them to be published. The publishers can set up their own filters too.
A spokesperson noted that even though Featured and Sponsored Comments occupy the same spot on the page,the sponsorships won’t necessarily erase the editorially-chosen comments. Which type of comment you see will rotate, so the spokesperson said, “Not all visitors will see Sponsored Comments, all of the time.”
In both the blog post and subsequent correspondence, Disqus emphasized that this feature is still in its early phases. The company said it’s still looking for user feedback, and it’s still figuring out the exact pricing of the ads.
Quote Roller Integrates With Salesforce To Make It Easy To Send And Process Sales Proposals
Despite being located across the pond, I’m claiming Quote Roller as a European startup. Founded in early 2011 out of Belarus in Eastern Europe, last year the company raised a $655k round led by French seed fund Kima Ventures and a host of other notable angel investors with the explicit aim to relocate to and conquer the United States. In typical European fashion, however, Quote Roller was already cash-flow positive by then, but, with an injection of capital, its founders now had the fuel needed to step on the gas, metaphorically and literally.
Today San Francisco-headquartered Quote Roller, which offers cloud-based software to easily create sales proposals, is announcing it’s reached a significant milestone on its product roadmap by integrating with Salesforce — something I understand has been in the works for quite sometime.
Designed to solve the “last mile” of CRM, the inspiration for Quote Roller came from the company’s two founders’ prior experience running a web development company. “We had to create dozens of sales proposals, the process was taking too much time, so Quote Roller was solving an internal problem,” co-founder Mikita Mikado tells TechCrunch. The solution is an app that lets sales people create, send and process sales proposals in “half the time” it normally takes when using Word and/or sending PDFs.
As well as being designed for ease-of-use, the software tracks when proposals are opened and how much time clients spend on each section of a proposal. Better still, proposals created by Quote Roller can be accepted and signed online, which is evidently where things are sped up. “We significantly improve the quoting process helping sales people to focus on selling, not quoting,” says Mikado.
To that end, Quote Roller already integrates with a plethora of other cloud applications including Xero, NimbleCRM, Freshbooks, GoogleApps, Box, and others. And now, of course, Salesforce. The latter, once installed via Salesforce AppExchange, sees the uber-CRM get an embedded “Create a quote” button within the opportunity details tab. Quote Roller then guides users through four simple steps to create a proposal. In addition, proposals can be finalised within Salesforce, including using Quote Roller’s analytics and digital signature features, without leaving the app.
Always. Be. Closing.
Twitter Acquires Android Lockscreen App Cover, Moves Deeper Into Mobile Services
A very interesting acquisition announcement from Twitter today: it’s buying Cover, an Android lockscreen app that lets you customise what apps you see and when. For now, Cover will remain live in the Play store.
“If that changes down the road, we’ll provide another update here,” the founders Todd Jackson, Gordon Luk and Edward Ho note in a blog post announcing the deal.
You can read Josh’s review of how Cover works here.
Cover is being somewhat cryptic in discussing what it will be working on at Twitter. “Twitter, like Cover, believes in the incredible potential of Android,” they write. “They share our vision that smartphones can be a lot smarter — more useful and more contextual — and together we’re going to make that happen. We’ll be building upon a lot of what makes Cover great, and we’re thrilled to create something even better at Twitter.”
At the same time, when you consider the work that Facebook has done in developing its Home service around the Android lockscreen, it’s clear that on some level, if an app is not owning the SIM that controls the entire phone, or the operating system, this is one very obvious way to remain front of mind for a user and incorporate a series of services that become front and center features for a user.
Apps are an overcrowded game. So owning the lockscreen gives you, effectively, a place to be first in the queue. It also gives Twitter some interesting potential routes for how it might longer term try to deliver its stream of followers’ new and messages outside of its own app. Widgets featuring Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other streams are already quite common, Cover could work on ways to formalise and improve that experience.
One question that lingers for me is how, when, and if companies like Twitter (and Facebook) will ever be able to think about these problems in the same way on iOS.
More generally, mobile has become huge business for Twitter. Apart from the fact that Twitter was created as a mobile-first service, Twitter generates more in advertising from mobile than it does from desktop. Cover meanwhile says it has picked up “hundreds of thousands” of users since launching in October 2013.
To date, Cover had raised $1.7 million in funding, a seed round from First Round Capital, Harrison Metal, Max Levchin, Scott Banister, Charlie Cheever, Keith Rabois, Dave Girouard and Alex Franz.
More to come.
WunWun And Gettaxi Partner To Offer On-Demand Product Delivery During Your Ride
Have you ever booked an Uber and wished that Uber came with a pint of ice cream, or a pizza, or a razor so you can shave your legs before your date? WunWun, the on-demand delivery service for anything, is now ready to make your dreams come true.
The company has partnered with Gettaxi to allow Gett users and WunWun users to get a special delivery alongside their car ride.
All you have to do is include the words “WunWun” in your Gettaxi request and explain what you’d like delivered, either at the point of pickup or somewhere along the course of your ride in the car. The cost of that product will then simply be added to the cost of your ride.
The service is only available to users who both have WunWun and Gett accounts, and deliveries are limited to Williamsburg, Dumbo, and Manhattan. WunWun is also charging an extra $10 to those who use the WunWun/Gett service.
Carrot.mx Raises $2M To Be The Zipcar Of Mexico
Carrot -- the 'Zipcar' of Mexico -- has raised a ~$2 million series B round led by Venture Partners. Read More
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