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With AOL-owned Xdrive on the auction block, competing cloud storage providers are scrapping together all sorts of plans to woo these potential paying customers to their services. Two in particular, Drop.io and Box.net, have set up simple escape hatches wherein Xdrive users can simply plug in their account credentials and have their data piped over.

There’s a catch, though: both services have free storage caps well beneath Xdrive’s generous 5GB. In the case of Drop.io, that cap is 100MB. To supplement this, the service is offering Xdrive users a special premium drop, which bumps up the cap to 1GB. Normally these premium chunks of storage cost $10 a pop, and only keep for a year’s time (read: subscription service).

Likewise, Box.net’s free cutoff cap is 1GB. If a user wants more space than that they’ll need to upgrade to a higher plan, which starts at $7.95 per month to get that same 5GB users had back on Xdrive.

So to summarize, if you’re an Xdrive user looking to jettison your data to someplace besides a hard drive, either of these services is really great, but they’ll cost you. The 5GB equivalent will be $40 in Drop.io (for your first year, then $50 after that), and $95.40 for a year in Box.net. If you’re willing to stick to 1GB, Box.net is the better deal, since you won’t have to pay $10 when free premium credit from Drop.io expires. You could also just throw caution to the wind, and go all-out with 50GB of ad-supported online storage from Adrive.

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Cloud storage providers bail out Xdrive users

Telephony service JaJah has launched two completely different voice tools that are both useful in their own right. The first is a new “concierge” service that lets you call any of your contacts with voice dialing using a special local access number. It works even if your handset does not support voice dialing, and will connect you to that person as long as you’ve synced up your address book with JaJah’s.

The other service, called Babel, is more useful for people visiting Beijing as part of this summer’s Olympics. By calling a special phone number you can leave a voice message that will be translated to Mandarin in just a few seconds. It’s meant to be used as an on-the-go tool for English speakers who are over there to watch the games and who might run into translation issues while getting around.

Unfortunately, Babel requires calling a local U.S., U.K., or Australia local access number to access it, as there’s not currently one for China. The good news is that if you’re in the depths of a local Chinatown in one of these supported countries, you’ll be able to ask for directions or order a dish off a restaurant menu using your phone instead of having to point to it on a menu.

I gave Babel a spin earlier this morning and had mixed results. You might as well give up for things like URLs or long words. Even when I spokes as slowly and as clearly as possible, it managed to flub up more than half of the words in some cases including classics like turning “point” into “porno” and “get” into “Georgia.” Regardless, its speed is truly impressive as it spits back results in just a few seconds. You can view my trials with it in the video below, or give it a spin yourself at 1-718-513-2969. You can also find the other local access numbers for the U.K. and Australia here.

If you’re a native Mandarin speaker, I’d love to hear how this does with English translations. Let me know in the comments.

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JaJah launches free translation and voice dialing services

Online jobs marketplace Elance is getting a big update next week, designed to bring more small businesspeople into the world of hiring workers they don’t know and will never meet.

The service will layer in a workflow that should make the whole Elance process easier for newbies. There’s a new time-tracker widget for contractors that automatically feeds data into the project page and the invoicing system. (It can be configured per job, if the contract is for piecework instead of time-based.) Elance, by the way, does not support keyboard logging or periodic screen capture of a worker’s PC, as ODesk does.

Time served.

Also new: free voice and chat communication support for hiring managers and contractors. People will be able to place anonymous calls even to contractors they haven’t yet hired, if they want to talk with them first. (The service will call both parties and connect them, protecting the caller from revealing his or her caller ID.)

Elance is also launching a skills testing program, much like ODesk’s, that allows contractors to get certified for particular types of work.

As before, hiring managers must place some of the funds for a job into escrow accounts, from which Elance will pay contractors when work is delivered or time milestones are met.

All the tasks that are under way get their own status page where customer and provider can communicate on their project. The system enforces the creation of status reports and requires each page be flagged with either an “on schedule” or “problem” tag. The goal is to keep communication open and keep projects moving.

All these additions to the Elance product set are designed to make users more comfortable with the evolving service economy, although as CEO Fabio Rosati says, the train has already left the station: there’s a “huge exodus of work that used to be done in offices and face-to-face, and it is starting to move online.”

Rosati’s goal is to make Elance into an “online workplace.” By providing matchmaking tools, workflow helpers, and communications services he wants to make the site, essentially, into a virtual office building–not just the bulletin board Elance was before.

The business is certainly sound, and the timing is right for this push. Elance takes a cut of all contractor payouts (4 percent to 6 percent depending on the volume of business the hiring party is doing on the site). That’s a small overhead to pay given the reticence businesses have now to hire new staff. Elance is about more than just that, of course, but in this economy, that’s probably enough to get the attention of a whole new troupe of users.

You can check out any time you like.

See also: Crowdspring, Taskmarket, RentACoder.

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Elance updates tools for hiring, managing contract labor

Web based RSS feed aggregator Spreed is casual reading’s worst enemy. A speed reader extraordinaire like Robert Scoble might enjoy it as a way to dig through even more stories a day, but at its heart it’s kind of like visiting an aquarium with one of those moving sidewalks; you’re still seeing what you came there to see–you just don’t have the luxury of taking your time.

Time is actually the key focus of Spreed. It centers around a speed reading player that will only show you three or four words of a story at a time, and in rapid succession. As your reading skills improve you can ramp up the amount of words per minute it shows you, letting you speed read any story at whatever level you’re capable of. Sure you could do this on your own, but Spreed forces you to look at nothing else but the words, making reading a distraction-free, yet slightly anxiety-inducing experience.

Like Netvibes, My Yahoo and others, Spreed has a built-in directory of RSS feeds you can subscribe to. What makes it neat is that it gives you a estimation of how long it will take to go through a story based on its length and your current WPM setting. It also shows you the time it thinks it would take you to read the story in non-speed read mode, along with a link in between the two to jump to the site itself. You can even plug in Microsoft Word documents, effectively making it a free speed reading training tool.

In addition to the desktop flavor Spreed has an iPhone variation that will let you access your bookmarked feeds and read them using the same speed viewer. It too has a quick WPM selector in case you want to dial it up a notch.

Ideally in the future Spreed could come out with a browser plug-in or bookmarklet that will take any story or RSS entry and run it through its player, letting you use a more capable RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines to add in some of the features it’s missing like link sharing, folders, and favoriting.

[via SimpleSpark]

Spreed takes full RSS feeds and makes them easy to parse with a speed reading player. You can tweak how many words per minute you want to read at and it will adjust accordingly. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Spreed makes reading RSS feeds faster, stressful

PALO ALTO, Calif.–There are nearly 30 start-ups promoting their wares today as part of AlwaysOn’s Stanford Summit–and that’s just before lunch. Many have been profiled by Webware in the past, but I wanted to take some time to dig into two of my personal favorites from this morning’s CEO presentations.

MyTrybe. This is a behind-the-scenes service for site owners who want to add recommendation features to their content. It uses a sliding scale happy face that you can drag on tagged pieces of content like stories, videos, and pictures to establish a ranking. MyTrybe will take that information and give you recommendations for other content you’d like, along with friend suggestions for others who liked similar things.

The service is about to launch a location-based service that will recommend things for you to do in a city (be it your home or while you’re out traveling) based on previous preferences and tastes. This information can be compiled into one central location, and viewed by anyone who has used a MyTrybe-integrated site.

MyTrybe keeps track of user ratings from various integrated sites and displays the information on a Google Map.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

Seen above is an example of this in action for finding art gallery recommendations. Unlike Yelp, MyTrybe’s rating and recommendation system can be used to filter in what you might like based on previous ratings and the ratings from your friends.

Funny or Die is one of the few video content providers that’s got both a plan for comedians to make money from content they create, along with some really amazingly well-done videos done by mainstream actors.

Much of the site’s professionally-produced content has been wildly popular when it hits social news and bookmarking sites. In fact, 140 of their videos have gotten on the front page of Digg since launching in April of last year.

What’s smart is that the same model that works for comics on Funny or Die can be scaled to other genres like snowboarding (ShredOrDie), Food (EatDrinkOrDie), and gaming (PwnOrDie). CEO Dick Glover told the audience here that they’ve gotten celebrities to do all their videos for free simply for the sake of getting their names out there. Celebrity videos are separated from the other content, but don’t make up for the mass of traffic and page views which come from user-submitted content.

ZipClip is a very simple service that relies on a browser plug-in to port content from your Web browser to your phone. Once installed you can send things over by highlighting them and using your right click. I remember Mozilla was on to something similar with project Joey, and it’s pretty cool if you want to save some time sending things like addresses, pictures, or articles to a mobile device without going through e-mail.

ZipClip’s “Ace” (it says that on his business card) Jeff Rails walked me through a demo of using the tool, which will run on most mainstream phones short of Apple’s iPhone or Windows Mobile smart phones (although Rails says a native iPhone application is on the way). One of it’s cool capabilities is that any video you select will be converted and optimized to stream on your device, just in case the original site was not compatible. You can also search and sort through all of your archived content right on your phone.

Stay tuned for more coverage. Some of the companies coming up deal in mobile broadcasting, so we’ll see what they’ve got up their sleeves.

Credit:
Early standouts from AlwaysOn Stanford