DEMO: Enroute wants to be Salesforce.com of postage

">Enroute Systems Corp. today launched a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that its CEO claims will save companies up to 30% off their shipping bills while getting their packages delivered just as fast. Enroute's product, ShipIt!, offers real-time pricing and delivery time information on half-a-dozen shipping vendors, from the big companies to unknown regional shippers that are often cheaper and faster, McCall said. In an attempt to reduce time and complexity, many companies ship packages using one or two favored vendors, such as the U.S. Postal Service, UPS or Federal Express, using next-day-air as a standard, said Enroute founder and CEO Keith McCall. Its dashboard can also let shippers broaden their options to, for example, ground shipping, which is just as fast and cheaper than next-day-air for destinations less than 200 miles away, McCall said.

ShipIt is targeted at U.S. companies that spend more than $100,000 a year on shipping. ShipIt also crunches and presents statistics to help users figure out if their shipping vendor is imposing undue delivery surcharges after the fact for things like overweight packages and incorrect addresses. "Surcharges can kill you," said McCall, who started Enroute last year after leaving his job as CTO of Exchange service provider Azaleos Corp., McCall's ambition is no less than to "become the Salesforce.com of the transportation management industry," he said. Those include Internet retailers and many law firms. Enroute, which is based in Bellevue, Wash., already claims a number of customers, including Seattle-area e-commerce retailers such as Cutter&Buck and Zumiez. But ShipIt can make sense for even eBay Power Sellers due to Enroute's friendly startup cost (It charges 10 cents to a dollar per package, and claims it can shave $1 to $3 off the average $12 per-parcel shipping fee). That, claimed McCall, is far cheaper than incumbent client apps offered by companies such as Kewill or Pitney Bowes. Enroute has received a total of $1.25 million in venture funding.

The software is hosted on Amazon.com's EC2, with a separate data center to provide redundancy.

From Sidekick to Gmail: A short history of cloud computing outages

This past week's Microsoft-T-Mobile-Sidekick data loss mess is the latest in a string of high profile cloud computing outages that have grabbed headlines over the past couple of years. Here's a short history of cloud computing SNAFUs: Microsoft Danger outage: Contacts, calendar entries, photographs and other personal information of T-Mobile Sidekick users looks to be lost for good following a service disruption at Sidekick provider Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary. Inevitably, the coverage of the initial outage (as well as cloud security breaches) is followed by explanations of why the outage happened (human error, network equipment, hackers, etc.) and analysis stories pointing out the pitfalls of putting your faith in the cloud.

The amount of data and number of users affected wasn't disclosed by Microsoft or T-Mobile, but Sidekick support forums were buzzing with pleas from users looking for tips on how to restore their devices or get their data back. Various explanations have been served up by the vendor, from routing errors to server maintenance issues. Google Gmail fails…again:  When Google's Gmail faltered on Sept. 24, it wasn't down for more than a couple of hours, but it was the second outage during the month and the latest in a disturbing string of outages for Google's cloud-based offerings, including Google search, Google News and Google Apps over the past 18 months. Some have come to Google's defense, saying that even though the company has had its share of outages, we are talking about mainly free services (you get what you pay for, in other words). Twitter goes down…and yes, that's news:  While Twitter had been keeping its Fail Whale in hiding more often than not, a big Twitter outage that lasted throughout the morning and into early afternoon in early August had social networking types fuming. eBay's PayPal crashes: The PayPal online payments system failed a couple of times in August, leaving millions of customers unable to complete transactions. A denial-of-service attack was blamed for the problem.

A network hardware issue was fingered as the culprit for the outage, which lasted for between 1 and 4.5 hours, depending on how you look at it. Rackspace pays up:  Rackspace was forced to pay out between $2.5 million and $3.5 million in service credits to customers in the wake of a power outage that hit its Dallas data center in late June. It cost PayPal millions of dollars in lost business; it's unclear how much it cost merchants. Rackspace, which offers a variety of hosting and cloud services for enterprise customers, suffered power generator failures on June 29 that caused customer servers to go down for part of the day. This was only a test release of Azure, so observers noted that this obviously wasn't as big a deal as a production service outage. More disruptions followed and Rackspace kept customers up to date via its blog.  Windows Azure test release goes down:  Early adopters of Microsoft's cloud-computing network Windows Azure suffered an overnight outage over a weekend in mid-March during which their applications being hosted on the network weren't available.

Separately, Microsoft also suffered a Hotmail messaging system outage in March.  Salesforce.com kicks off the Year of the Cloud Outage:  As CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum reported in January, Salesforce.com suffered a service disruption for about an hour on Jan. 6 due to a core network device failing because of memory allocation errors. IDG News Service contributed to this story. Amazon S3 storage service knocked out:  We actually have to go back to summer of 2008 to find coverage of the last major Amazon S3 cloud network outage, which lasted for 7 to 8 hours and followed another outage earlier last year caused by too many authentication requests.

iTunes gains Automatically Add to iTunes feature

One of the often requested features for iTunes has been the ability to set a folder for it to watch, automatically adding any items you drop in that folder to its library. In typical Apple fashion, it's not exactly what people were asking for, but Apple's interpretation of what they want. In iTunes 9, Apple has quietly added this feature, although I wouldn't blame you for not having noticed its existence. When you install iTunes 9, it automatically creates an Automatically Add to iTunes folder in your ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder (or under ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media if you created a new library after installing iTunes 9). When you put an iTunes-compatible media file in this folder, it will, as the name suggests, be added to iTunes automatically.

Whenever you drop any file into that folder, it's instantly added to iTunes if the application is running. In my limited testing, I've found that it pretty much works as advertised. If not, it gets added the next time iTunes is launched. And if you ever delete or rename the Automatically Add to iTunes folder, iTunes simply creates a new one for you the next time it is launched. It even looks for files in subfolders you create and adds them to the library as well.

However, it does have a lot of caveats. You can be pretty assured that if the video was downloaded from the Internet, it will not be supported by iTunes. For one thing, iTunes's list of supported formats, especially in the video department, is comically short. In such a case, iTunes will move it to a Not Added subfolder within the Automatically Add to iTunes folder. Still, there are other problems.

But that's to be expected because iTunes has never exactly supported a host of media formats. When users asked for an option to direct iTunes to a folder, they really wanted an option to direct iTunes to any folder. So if you have a huge collection of media in your Movies folder or on an external hard disk drive containing files that you'd like to automatically add to iTunes, you'll still have to move them to that particular folder. What Apple has done, on the other hand, is created a pre-designated folder for the task and not given an option to change it to any other location. What's the point, then?

Well, you say, we can just use the Automatically Add to iTunes folder as our primary movies folder, then-maybe even move it to a location of our choosing, and leave behind an alias to take its place. You can just drag and drop them onto the iTunes icon in the Dock and be done with it. Wouldn't that work? Not only does iTunes not accept anything added to that folder if you move it, but the presence of the alias prevents iTunes from creating a new version of the folder either. Not so much.

And when iTunes does add media files from the Automatically Add to iTunes folder, it moves them into its media folder and organizes them as it normally would, even if you have the option to do so disabled under iTunes's advanced preferences. The only possible use I can see if for you to set it as the default download location for media files you purchase/download off the Internet, so that they can automatically be added to iTunes without your having to do so (and even there, Apple has recommended you don't use it for incomplete files). I hope Apple rethinks this and gives users the freedom to use any folder they want and makes iTunes stop moving the media files around if the user doesn't want it to. It also deletes any subfolders you create within that folder (although that's a logical conclusion, given that they're useless if the media files you put in them never stay there). In short, I don't think the feature is very useful in the form Apple chose to implement it. It's still a (very small) step in the right direction though.

Amazon.com to pay $150,000 to settle suit challenging take-back of 1984

Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a federal lawsuit brought by a Michigan high school student and an California academic whose electronic copies of George Orwell's novel, 1984 were deleted from their Kindle devices in mid-July. On July 16, Amazon had removed the novels 1984 and Animal Farm from its Kindle e-book store, as well as from users' digital lockers and Kindle e-book readers after learning that they had been placed in the store by a third party that didn't have the rights to the books. Michael Aschenbrener, the attorney for student Justin Gawronski, 17, and Tony Bruguier, said the two men are donating the settlement monies to charity. "Neither will receive a flat cent," he said today in a telephone interview. The Amazon move ignited a firestorm of debate about customer rights with electronic books.

Aschenbrener, like others critical of Amazon's initial move, noted the irony of deleting "1984" from users' Kindles, since the novel depicts a totalitarian state loaded with civil rights repressions. Less than a week after removing the books from users' Kindle devices, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos issued a strong public apology, calling the company's handling of illegally sold copies of the e-books "stupid [and] thoughtless." Aschenbrener said he believes Amazon learned a valuable lesson in the case, one that he hopes other digital media companies take note of. "The lesson here is that media companies have to be careful about respecting users' rights," said the attorney Michael Aschenbrener of Kamber Edelson in Chicago. "Digital books are different than traditional books, but not that different." For example, an owner of a traditional book would never consent to the sudden arrival of a bookseller at his door demanding the return of a book, he said. "If anything, other companies are hopefully not interested in going through the PR nightmare that Amazon did," the attorney said. The vast majority of the $150,000 to be paid by Amazon.com will go to charities, as stipulated in the eight-page settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle on Sept. 25. The case was described on Friday as "closed" in the online court records system known as PACER. Gawronski, based in Michigan, could not be reached for comment, but had said before the settlement that he had taken notes along with "1984," but when the e-book was taken back by Amazon, the notes only pointed to locations where the text went missing, making the notes fairly useless. Aschenbrener said Bruguier, an academic based in California, has chosen not to comment on the case. Amazon had paid Gawronski $30 prior to the settlement as compensation for the loss of the book.

EMC executive takes over at storage vendor Xiotech

EMC executive Alan Atkinson is taking over as CEO of Xiotech, a storage company that just secured $10 million in new financing. Glassmeyer is also general partner of Oak Investment Partners, which owns a majority stake in Xiotech. Nine data storage companies to watch Atkinson was co-founder and CEO of WysDM, a data protection vendor sold to EMC in April 2008. Atkinson remained at EMC as vice president of the company's Storage Software Group, but on Thursday was announced as Xiotech's new CEO. Xiotech said its previous CEO, Casey Powell, will remain on the board of directors and will be a "strategic advisor to Atkinson." "With his extensive knowledge of and experience with data storage, Alan Atkinson is the right leader to take Xiotech to the next level," Ed Glassmeyer of Xiotech's board of directors said in an announcement.

Atkinson's 21-year career includes positions at StorageNetworks, Goldman Sachs and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Xiotech, based in Eden Prairie, Minn., plans to use the cash to expand its Intelligent Storage Element technology with new products to be released early next year. He takes over at Xiotech just after the company announced a $10 million funding round from private investors. Xiotech says its ISE architecture is designed to provide 100% usable storage capacity, to improve efficiency but without a performance hit. Atkinson marked his first day on the job at Xiotech with a blog post. "I can honestly say, after 20+ years in the storage industry (I'm really not THAT old), I've never seen a company this size with so many talented storage folks," he wrote. "We have more patents than most companies five times our size." Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter