Best & Free Cloud Computing Applications

The Cloud Computing buzz is growing every day with growing number of business & government establishments opting for the cloud computing based services. On 14 December 2009, the City of Los Angeles (United States) switched to cloud computing. It equips 34,000 city employees with Google Apps for eMail and collaboration in the cloud. The other cities already on Google Apps cloud are Washington D.C. and Orlando.

There’s no dearth of Cloud Computing based services if you are ready to pay. But we all love free stuff on the Internet. Even the best Internet innovation is absolutely free, yes, you guessed it right; Google search! I stumbled upon a few excellent free software & services, though you can always debate on how come they are cloud based. Cloud Computing is still fuzzy and everyone has her/his own definition.

The Best & Free Cloud Application to manage your money in the Cloud

Mint: A Cloud based personal finance tool, to manage your money. It was launched in September 2007. In just 2+ years of existence it has received 30+ prestigious web awards from the likes of CNN Money, Time, Business Week, PC Mag etc. Just create an account and access all your balances and transactions together on the web or on your iPhone. I think it’s a simple but innovative concept: All your money related accounts viz. Bank Accounts, Credit Card, Loan, Stock Brokerage & other Investment in one place.

I created an account but unfortunately non of my India based banks are supported by Mint. Interestingly the FAQ at Mint explicitly mentions that currently it supports only US-based financial institutions, I found State Bank Of India (Credit Card Account) supported at Mint (But I don’t have an account with State Bank of India). Barclays, ABN Amro and few Europe based banks are also supported but you must check it at Mint for details, cause I did find ABN Amro but couldn’t find my ABN Amro India Bank in their list.

If your Bank or Financial institution is not supported by Mint you can always raise a request to Add it.

Optional Info: Mint has following information to share about adding your bank: “Due to factors outside our control, including approval of the banks themselves, we cannot guarantee that your bank will be supported, but we will do our best. We add support for more banks and credit unions every week thanks to requests from customers like you”.

You may worry that you have to give Mint the login data for all your accounts. As per Mint:

“Mint provides bank–level data security and industry–leading identity protection. Its security and privacy have been validated by VeriSign and TRUSTe. We never know your identity. You register anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the log–in information for the online bank, credit union, credit card and investment accounts you want to consolidate in Mint.”

No wonder why over 1 million customers have put their faith in Mint.

Free *Cloud based Desktop

*Optional Info: Experts opinion differ as what explicitly is a Cloud Desktop / VirtualOS / WebTop / Remote Desktop / Online Desktop / WEB-OS / OOS (Online Operating System) / Virtual Desktop / DDE (Distributed Desktop Environment). I think for the sake of simplicity, all these jargons can be treated as representing almost the same thing, though with a subtle difference.

iCloud: I love this application for its slick design. It’s punch line: Your friends, files & digital life on any computer, truly represents what it does. Online storage, Photos, Music, Movies, Application development, Calendar, Mail, Media Player, Word Processors etc. It has both free & premium signup. It also offers a platform for web developers (Platform as a service, PaaS). Free account provides 3GB of iCloud Drive storage. Check the following screen shot, I created after Signing into my Free account. Here you can view the wallpaper, desktop icons, Programs (like All Programs of any Windows OS), the user name (& his photograph), Start Menu, Taskbar etc.

Cloudo: It’s a free computer that lives on the Internet, right in your web browser. This means that you can access your documents, photos, music, movies and all other files no matter where you are, from any computer or mobile phone. Cloudo is a hosted service, there is no hardware or software to setup and maintain, and the DDE is fully accessible from any internet connected device. Other advantages of utilizing hosted software include centralizing data backup, updates, and security at the data center as well as benefits of lower cost which can be associated with the administration of a single global instance of software versus many local instances.Here, I have created the following screen shot after opening Word program. You can also see the attractive media player(Right hand bottom), Desktop icons, wallpaper etc.

eyeOS: It describes itself as the Open Source Cloud’s Web Desktop. I found it is similar to the iCloud & Cloudo described above. It has a very attractive design. It’s just an introduction, So I am not providing any distinct comparison between these services. You can go & explore: Create an Account at eyeOS to get started with this free Cloud Desktop.

The Best Free Cloud based Antivirus

Panda Cloud Antivirus: The first free Antivirus from the cloud. It has received many decent reviews. PC Magazine stamped it’s renowned Editor’s Choice on Panda CloudAV for Best Free AV.

• No need to worry about regular updates.
• Occupies very little system resources.
• It uses collective intelligence servers for fast detection
• Simple interface. 

Also protects your PC while offline (not connected to internet) as it uses local cache of signatures from Collective Intelligence. But please note that the local cache doesn’t maintain a signature of virus/malware which it deem dead or not in circulation.

Best *Free Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Google App Engine: It was released (Beta) in April 2008. It’s a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. It virtualizes applications across multiple servers and data centers.Currently, the supported programming languages are Python and Java (and by extension, other JVM languages).

*Google App Engine is free up to a certain level of used resources. Fees are charged for additional storage, bandwidth, or CPU cycles required by the application. When I signed up in my free account, it’s showing I can build & deploy up to 10 applications. Not so sure about it as it says it’ll reset quotas every 24 hours, will share about it later.

Following is an excerpt from Google App Engine’s website:

• Google App Engine enables developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power our own applications
• No assembly required. Google App Engine exposes a fully-integrated development environment.
• It's easy to scale. Google App Engine makes it easy to design scalable applications that grow from one to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
• It's free to get started. Every Google App Engine application will have enough CPU, bandwidth, and storage to serve around 5 million monthly pageviews for free. You can purchase additional resources at competitive prices when you need them and you'll pay only for what you use.

To Sign up for Google App Engine:

• You can signup using your existing Gmail account.
• You must provide your mobile number as Google will Verify Your Account by SMS.
• You’ll be asked to enter the Google App Engine Code which you receive in your mobile. you’ll only need to verify your account once.
• After SMS verification you’ll enter Application Identifier and Application Title (Choose any relevant name)
• You can also sign in to Google App Engine with your Google Apps account, use the following URL:
  https://appengine.google.com/a/<YOURDOMAIN.COM>/

Force.com Free Edition: It’s a leading cloud platform (PaaS: Platform as a Service) for business applications & websites, an offering from the SaaS (Software as a Service) leader Salesforce.com. But you can build & run only your first application for free. Something is better than nothing. Just Sign up & explore.

Optional Info:  Leading paid cloud-based platforms (PaaS) are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure Services Platform.

Enjoy the freebies. Let me know if you know about other free cloud based applications.

Few other Cloud Computing Articles, you may find useful:

• Cloud Computing: A Basic Introduction – 1
• Cloud Computing: A Basic Introduction – 2
• Top 10 Cloud Computing Service Providers of 2009