Rosebuds

The Rose Hotel Blog

Cloud computing for travelers

Cloud computing is all the rage in conversations about wireless and online communication. This is not surprising when you consider that cloud computing has implications for all kinds of work and play – including business and recreational travel.

A good mantra might be, “While traveling use the cloud.”

Let’s start with a definition for the uninitiated. Cloud computing is simply internet-based computing that involves using the shared resources of the internet. Example: If you have a Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail account, you’re cloud computing. The resources exist on internet servers owned by companies like Microsoft and Google, rather than running on your computer’s hard drive and slowing its performance. If you have a Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account, you’re cloud computing.

But there’s much more to cloud computing than internet-based email browsers and social media sites. Powerful work gets done with cloud computing. To wit: If you’re in sales and use Salesforce.com to manage your clients and prospects, you’re cloud computing.

As Portfolio magazine recently wrote, “Many of us business travelers live our lives on the road, but a good number of us now work in the cloud. Rather than clog our laptop with expensive and resource-hogging software, we rely on tricks, techniques and devices that are freely available thanks to cloud computing.”
Joe Brancatelli, author of the Portfolio article, recommends that travelers tap into these cloud computing websites to assist in creating documents, translating foreign languages, or making playlists.

The office suites in the sky: Microsoft Office has never had more competition. Today you can find free or inexpensive internet-based office suites that replicate Microsoft’s ubiquitous Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook programs, without devouring space on your laptop’s hard drive. The emergence of cloud computing has forced Microsoft to create Office Live, an online version of its programs, which used to only be available on computer hard drives. But you have other options as well, such as Google Apps, Zoho, ThinkFree and Zimbra, among others. For a comparison of these options, click here.

Speak and be understood: With so much international travel and business being conducted, one never knows when language translation services will be needed on the fly. Enter the website Reverso. Portfolio calls it the most accurate online translation service for short bursts of text. It handles English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese and Hebrew.

The instant art director: Everyone with a mobile phone is a photographer. Add a picture-editing software package from websites like FotoFlexer and BeFunky and you become an art director. That’s an important economizer for small-business people working with small budgets. FotoFlexer offers tools to crop, resize, retouch and add effects to your images. BeFunky has more advanced tools, such as a drawing feature. It also allows you to recast your picture into a pointillist “masterpiece.”

YouTube, the site for sore ears: Yes, YouTube is a video site but it also contains music that’s not available for sale. Joe Brancatelli writes that two recent examples are David Allyn’s recording of Kern and Hammerstein’s 1937 classic, “The Folks That Live on the Hill,” and a live performance of Patti Smith singing “Because the Night” accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. “So I went to VidToMP3, which allows you to convert YouTube videos into MP3s for your music player,” Brancatelli writes. “All you do is enter the URL of the video and the site returns a downloadable audio track as an MP3. Ingenious — and the sound quality is quite acceptable.”

The cloud is raining music: Load your laptop’s hard drive with music files and its processing speed slows. Here’s an alternate idea. Internet-based radio stations and music services are legion and they stream every conceivable genre of music on demand. One good cloud site, according to Portfolio, is Sky.fm, which is equipped with more than three dozen streams. Genres range from various styles of jazz to global music options from reggae to J-pop (Japanese pop).

Hide in the cloud: Why? Brancatelli says, “There are times when it may be wise to hide your actual IP address and surf the web anonymously. There are dozens of downloadable programs that will do the job, of course. But they all seem to deposit icky bits of code on your laptop that slows down your web surfing even when you aren’t using the software.” Take the matter to the cloud, he recommends, at a site like Proxy.org. Enter the URL address you want to visit and then select a proxy from the list. Pretty simple.

PDFs in a non-Adobe Flash: PDF stands for Portable Document Format and is an open standard for exchanging documents electronically. The file format was created by Adobe Systems but can be expensive and unwieldy. CutePDF Writer is a tiny freeware download and isn’t any more difficult to use than hitting the “print” button. It saves the images and words you’ve assembled while keeping the format intact.

These examples are a tiny fraction of the virtually endless resources offered to travelers by cloud computing, but it’s a start. Enter the cloud and explore.

Leave A Comment: