New SkyDrive Plan Gives You 200 GB Of Space For $100 A Year

There’s lots of space in the cloud but it comes at a price. Microsoft SkyDrive says you can have 200 GB of space under a new plan that will cost you $100 a year. The plan is attractive for Windows 8.1 and Microsoft Surface 2 tablet users. SkyDrive comes integrated into Windows 8.1 and you can also use it as the default location to save your files from the desktop. Purchase a new Surface 2 or Surface 2 Pro and it comes bundled with 200GB of SkyDrive storage for free for two years.
Functionally, using SkyDrive could give a few benefits for space watchers and mobile users. The desktop has placeholders on the local file system for your files in the cloud. You can move, copy, and rename these local copies, but they will only be downloaded when you want to open them. This allows you to access all your files from the cloud without having to store anything locally. Microsoft calls them “smart files”.

Compared to the competition the purchase plan for the additional 200 GB of storage looks like a win. Dropbox charges $99/year for the 100GB Pro plan. Google Drive will bill you $9.99 per month for 200GB of space (approximately $120 per year). SkyDrive puts the additional space in perspective when it says that 200 GB is enough space to take a photo, every hour, from the moment someone is born, to the day they graduate from college.
But one can be sure, that extra space will be put to a lot of other uses apart from storing photos and videos. Have you maxed out the free 7GB limit on SkyDrive? How does the “bargain” sound to you? Or would you rather go for options available on Dropbox and Google Drive?

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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