Cloud Smart Meter Puts Amazon Web Services Analytics on Your iPad

 IT managers looking to keep a close eye on their businesses' AWS and S3 usage can now monitor the situation from the comfort of their executive iPad. 

The Cloud in Your Hands

With increased reliance on inexpensive cloud services, it can be easy to forget those cents mounting up, until you get the regular service bill. Newvem offers an iOS-based monitoring solution for those who want to watch the pennies.

Running on iPad or iPhone, the free, lightweight app can track your EC2, elastic storage and network costs, comparing them to previous periods and show graphical highlights and risks to your budget. With the ability to drill down into service costs or AWS instances, you can get an overview of pretty much everything that is going on with your enterprise account. 

As increasing numbers of managers and executives turn to the iPad as a super-dashboard, apps like Newvem's are useful in managing the raft of services that modern enterprises use. Newvem's main task is to help save users money on their cloud services usage, and this app could help provide scrutiny on IT's runaway use of cloud services. 

With all sorts of cloud-based services for Amazon popping up from third parties like Attunity's Cloud Service and RightScale, the wild west take-up of Amazon's services by trigger happy IT types might soon be a thing of the past. Perhaps these apps might also warn you when Amazon's AWS service suffers an outage too. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Mozilla Firefox Aurora Marketplace Opens For Android Users, Time to Get Testing

As apps become a commonplace with both an increased interest in web apps and smartphone usage, there are more and more options for where users can get them. Mozilla Firefox has joined other companies, like Google, and developed its own web and mobile app marketplace.

Mozilla Lab’s Engineer Manager, Bill Walker, made the announcement in a blog post yesterday. In his statement, Walker said that this pre-beta version of Mozilla's Aurora Marketplace was released as a way for the company to get proper feedback from users before releasing the beta and full versions.

Our goal is to collect as much real-life feedback as possible about the Marketplace’s design, usability, performance, reliability, and content,” he says. “Feedback from early adopters helps us enhance the quality of the Marketplace before it is released to larger audiences.”

With their marketplace, Mozilla aims to bring together not only those who use apps for business and recreational purposes, but aims to give users the opportunity to be a bigger part of the Marketplace and Mozilla community. In his post, Walker mentions that Mozilla is always looking for ways to engage with their users, as they can both browse current apps and submit and develop their own ideas for apps.

Firefox Marketplace also offers APIs for app submission, payments, and app discovery,” he says. “Like everything Mozilla does, this ecosystem is always open — users have choices and developers have control over their content, functionality and distribution.

The site also offers potential developers tutorials, FAQ’s and other material to help with the creation and development processes

What’s Available?

As the marketplace is in development, there are a limited amount of apps available. Even though the choice is limited, all of the apps on the site are available for free. Users can either search an app, or browse categories that range from Games and Lifestyle to Education and Business and News. Some of the current Apps include, The Boston Globe, Twitter, MixCloud and WordWars.

Where to Get it

If this marketplace venture proves to be successful, once it’s finishing beta testing it will become part of the Firefox OS that Mozilla has set up for mobile users.

Mozilla Firefox Aurora is available for download through Mozilla’s website to mobile users who have Android phones (version 2.2 and higher). Users can also choose to scan the QR code on the download page instead of downloading the program. In order to use the apps, users must configure their mobile device to accept non-market apps.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com