The user connects to the network and starts his chores. Enter the launch of his new work in Google Docs project, editing the photos from his trip to New York in Picasa and upload a family video to YouTube. After listening to your favorite topics of Franz Ferdinand in Spotify and enjoy the new episodes of Gray’s Anatomy in Seriesyonkis.

The user connects to the network and starts his chores. Enter the launch of his new work in Google Docs project, editing the photos from his trip to New York in Picasa and upload a family video to YouTube. After listening to your favorite topics of Franz Ferdinand in Spotify and enjoy the new episodes of Gray’s Anatomy in Seriesyonkis. In addition, get his collection of film series and a virtual store as Rapidshare or Megaupload to lighten the hard drive and power sharing.

Everything he has done online, for free, without downloading anything on your terminal (Spotify only download the required browser). No matter where you are: at work, at home or in a hotel. You only need a connection: the web is running on the web and stays.

Perhaps unknowingly, the user is moving in the cloud (cloud in English), which is known as the virtual territory comprises all that software and applications that run outside the computer, whether fixed, portable or mobile phone . They are housed on servers located somewhere in undetermined but it is accessible from anywhere. The terminal then becomes a simple way to plug that cloud computing.

Thanks in part to the spread of higher bandwidth and better wireless connectivity (wifi), the cloud is the area in which the majority of everyday activities to a screen. In fact, 69% of Internet users have stored information on the Net or have used any software application online, according to a study of 2008 Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Some experts predict a future in which almost all our personal belongings (photographs, videos) and cultural (films, records …) will be in the cloud, ie a network of servers whose location aware. Thus, in theory, our digital belongings will be available at any time via any device with Web access to the counterparty, as warn others, is the unit of connectivity, the risk of losing privacy and mystery about how to modify cultural consumption.

The success of the cloud lies in the ease and convenience to manage their services. “The creators of online applications to compete for its fun and easy to use,” said the expert in information technologies Nicholas G. Carr, author of The Big Switch test, which predicts that the impact of the migration of technology to the cloud will be similar to the advent of electricity. “The traditional business applications, however, tend to be designed to deal effectively with a certain type of task, without considering the ease of use. It is also open on the Internet without the restrictions of the networks and systems companies.

Cloud computing (or cloud computing) is a term that originally referred only to how to coordinate multiple computers to improve the efficiency of their computing capacity, as he recalled David de Ugarte, an economist and cofounder of the new technologies consultant Society Electronic Indies. Now its meaning has expanded to also apply to managing digital information driven by users, a new environment has accentuated the changes to the digitization born. “The contents are no longer visible in a physical medium and consumed online,” said Fernando Garrido, a sociology of the Center for CyberSociety. “The new screens (mobile, portable …) opens a universe of time consumption. The change is radical.”

And it is changing the habits of viewing, listening and reading, warns Carr “The Network is designed to encourage the rapid consumption of small pieces of information, and we adapted our habits to the web. Books, CDs and videos are split into portions .

Some examples. Viewing of series and movies streaming (without having to download them to your hard drive) is increasing rapidly compared to discharges P2P (peer-to-peer). Almost half of Canadian Internet users, 47.8% used this formula (as in Seriesyonkis websites) for watching movies and series in the last year, ahead of 37.3% through the download file-sharing programs, according to the report eEspaña 2009, the Orange Foundation. In music, however, remain ahead of the discharge, 42%, compared to 38.5% who listen to music directly online.

Of the book is divided. Some are betting on the success of electronic broad-as-Carr and others for coexistence. “It takes us 500 years. On him we have built our society and our way of thinking,” says Garrido. “It’s hard to replace as an eBook, you can relocate.” And it is likely that each specializes: digital format for scholarly texts, documents, and the traditional, to literature and entertainment.

Emerges in a whole new kind of cultural consumption abundant, fragmented and, above all, immediately. Just a shortage and it breaks the link with the hardware. It is a paradigm shift: “The devices go from being a central element to be a means to access,” the psychologist Roberto Balaguer, specializing in the social impact of information technology. “They function as a continent to act as hooks in the cloud, where things happen and where young people live.”

A new environment for the head of software architecture for Microsoft, Ray Ozzie, has well defined in the Economist: [the cloud will be possible] “half in which all your devices together, managed through the web as a whole . In this direction is the new proposed Google for September: Google Wave, an ambitious service that will combine email, chat, wiki, word processing, maps, videos and photographs, as well as social network and will work together.

“The problem is that Google and Internet can become an alternative, and the user, almost an employee,” Ugarte alert, which considers the Wave as “the great trap mice of our privacy.”

That all personal information and creations (textual, photographic, etc.) are hosted in a virtual space outside the user control raises important questions, according to some experts. The first concern the connectivity (not used offline) and privacy. Unlike the material, the products identified in the cloud perfectly to your users, frequency of consultation, etc., “says José Antonio Millán, essayist and author of Manual of civility and good manners on the net. “These data, subject to privacy or changing cumbersome, can have an easy operation, at best, only advertising.”

A warning with which De Ugarte. “The point is to determine who has the sovereignty of the data. If you use the Google cloud, it also controls my data.” Thus, you can track all the user stored in its applications and cross it with his consultations and even your credit history. “It can be used, for example, to put ads in your Gmail account as your purchasing power.”

This is a vulnerability to which they are mainly vulnerable young people, the digital natives who have grown nearly wedged in the Net “Young people no longer connect to the Internet and no longer live as something alien or separate from the physical world” , says Garrido, the Center for CyberSociety. “They are on the internet in its cloud, permanently.” That is precisely why-read-their sense of privacy has changed dramatically. “It identifies the value of keeping certain information private.” In fact, over half of young people between 15 and 25 years have shared personal information with strangers through the Internet, according to a study by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

The other big question concerns the ownership of user’s creations, whether wikis, text in Google Docs, Picasa photos or videos recorded with mobile phones and uploaded to Qik. “You can be a good day with the fruit of his work has disappeared, or that appears under clauses reuse unacceptable,” warns Millán. “Projects whole teaching, research, etc., may be lost. There should be no acceptable system for the development of materials in the cloud that does not have at least the possibility of creating a backup on the computer.”

What seems to be no doubt of the business possibilities of the cloud. Google is the great champions of computing and online has been launched to conquer this environment. Its big bet is the OS Os Chrome, designed to work in the cloud. It is designed for netbooks (ultra), is based on open source and Linux for free download from the Web “We want it quick and light, it starts and you connect to the Internet in seconds. The interface is basically because the Most of the activity takes place on the web, “according to Google’s blog. Chrome OS will come in 2010.

Microsoft, the king of operating systems pre-installed in the terminal (something like the opposite of the cloud), has already responded. Since 2010 offering free online versions of Office for simple netbooks. Include word processing (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), presentations (PowerPoint) and recognition of text (OneNote). Will be financed by ads, as Google does.

The most likely scenario is that the cloud coexisting with copies of the material more sensitive to the hard disk, as Nicholas Carr notes: “I believe that store most of our cultural goods and information from remote data centers and managed by companies like Google, though likely to retain copies of some of them in our devices. ” Others believe that the effectiveness of programs for the fixed desktop is still unbeatable as Paul Boutin in Slate says. The good thing about them, he says, is that you can disconnect from the Internet and work quietly alone for a few hours.

The cloud also offers facilities management in data centers of enterprises. Google has the Google Apps services (including chat, email, word processor or web manager) is designed for work environments. “After success among users, the cloud will have more impact on business,” predicts Carlos Gracia Armendáriz, director of Google Enterprise for Spain and Portugal. The cloud, he adds, improves the efficiency of data management, such as spam filtering, for example.

Other companies, like Amazon, they sell part of its cloud (coordinated network of servers to work as a computer), which can be used as storage or computing capacity. “It’s a useful service for start-ups [new small businesses], it does not have to buy servers, hire only the computer,” explains Diego Mariño, Abiquo the company’s founder and promoter of free software to build clouds. The cloud, seen in its original sense, allowing “mix and the time and computing power of computers makes a commodity, such as cleaning or electricity, De Ugarte added.

And how to work together with the cloud creates opportunities for businesses, according to Carr “Collaboration is at the heart of the business, but is constrained by traditional applications of the companies, which tend to work isolated, restricted to one user or a company. ”

An example: “If you want to share a document in a word processor with Word, you have to attach the file to an email and send several people to edit and then handle each one,” he explains. “With an online word processor, such as Google Docs, anyone can work on the same document online. The great advantage of online applications for business, while reducing the costs of licensing and maintenance, is to make collaboration easier” .

In any case, the dematerialization of cultural and personal seems irreversible. “There will be cloud and local storage of digital assets”, provides Carr, “but I do not think it has much solid future.”

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