You may know Dropbox . It’s the wildly popular file storage and syncing service that is driving the geek set gaga. You may also know Box.net. It’s the Web-based file storage and collaboration service. Now meet Oxygen Cloud . We’re not talking about a cloud for that cable network with a distinct feminine edge. Still, the logo is a cute pink. At least one fellow blogger at Enterprise 2.0 asked me if they were selling Oprah….in the cloud. He was serious. Sponsor Instead, Oxygen Cloud is a desktop file sharing service that combines storage and collaboration features in a cloud-based environment. It may sound odd to think of Oxygen as a cloud-based service on your desktop. But you can pretty much mix anything with the cloud these days. The desktop fits in a cloud environment as a symbol for the relationship between the Web and traditional work environments. Open the icon on your desktop or on any device and the cloud is right there. Dropbox has the feature. It’s a Nomadesk feature, too. Nomadesk considers itself to have a collaborative component so the combination Oxygen Cloud provides is not unprecedented. But there is a gap in the market. Data storage and collaboration are not often viewed n the same context. But they are forces that can be networked together by using the desktop as an abstraction to the concept of the cloud. Collaboration is still the hot topic. Any number of companies are working on developing services that provide sharing, co-editing, activity streams and associated features. Several popped up at Enterprise 2.0 On the contrary, we did not hear much discussion at Enterprise 2.0 about data storage and the amount of structured and unstructered data that is being produced. Oxygen believes it can solve both issues by bringing these forces together. The service won’t be available until later this summer so we will have to wait for it to go live before testing it out. But we did get the chance to sit down with Founder and CEO Peter Chang at Enterprise 2.0 last week. Chang says the Web is not really a place where the enterprise does its work. We’d care to differ a bit on that premise but we can agree that the ability to divest the Web storage from collaboration makes some sense. It may also have some value to serve as a way to mend the relationship between data storage and sharing. The Oxygen Cloud desktop environment permits people to share files in an end-to-end secure network. Files can be shared in a virtual environment that is connected to a public cloud. In that way, Oxygen Cloud acts as a super broker for Amazon or other cloud services. The data is securely stored. But the people can see the content in the same place. It’s a method of packaging that can solve a few problems. It helps mitigate the data storage question. And people can share document in what Oxygen maintains is a secure environment. Oxygen will also provide a do-it-yourself private cloud through a partnership with Data Robotics. Bandwidth is one of the issues with a service like Oxygen. It says a private cloud environment may resolve issues with Internet latency. Oxyen Cloud is subsidiary of LeapFILe , which provides secure file transfer services to the Fortune 500. It’s this pedigree that gives the service some additional strength. They are in a position to bridge that file storage experience. Oxgen Cloud combines collaboration so it is not a pure file storage service. In that respect it is a bit of a departure for LeapFile. We’ll see how things look once the beta goes live. Discuss

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Location-based service Gowalla announced this week that it has struck up a partnership with national newspaper USA TODAY to offer special content for the summer travel season. According to Gowalla community manager Jonathon Carroll’s blog post on the partnership, the deal will offer Gowalla users select content when they check in to more than 40 of the busiest airports in the country. Sponsor What happens is this – when you check in at one of these airports, the app will ask if you want to follow USA TODAY on Gowalla. If you do, you’ll get a “Jet Setter” pin for your Gowalla passport and access to airline and air travel news, trips (which consist of a number of recommended check-in locations to visit in the city you’re checked in to), and airport guides, which “let travelers know the cheapest place to park, the quickest way to get through security, the best options for dining and shopping, real-time flight information and more.” Once you’ve followed the USA TODAY account on Gowalla, any subsequent check-in at a selected airport will allow you to access this content. The partnership does something we don’t think we’ve seen much of before in the LBS sphere – it offers content that directly relates to the activity and reason for checking in to the location you’re checking in to. You’re at an airport, so you must be traveling and you obviously would be interested in information such as flight times or a guide for the airport you’re at. It’s precisely the type of catering of information that Robert Scoble argued for when he discussed the failures of LBS apps like Gowalla, Foursquare and others. Rather than simply offering users restaurant reviews from a local paper every time they check in somewhere, this new deal takes into account where the user is checking in and offers content based on that. While it is currently limited to a select number of airports across the country, we think it is an important step in the right direction. As Scoble argued, though, the real next step is for applications like Gowalla to recognize that when you check in to a car wash, the coffee shop two blocks away and the nearest public bathrooms should be suggested, not the lamp store across the street. Discuss

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Twitter ’s URL shortening service, t.co , is being advertised as a way to avoid stumbling into phishing scam. Shorteners make it easier to microblog, but they also make it easier for grifters to blind their online marks. “A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there’s a match, users can be warned before they continue.” Sponsor T.co, according to Twitter , will also enable metrics, to determine how many times a given link was clicked. “Eventually, this information will become an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm–the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting.” Users are free to continue to use their shortening services of choice but all links within Twitter will be wrapped in the t.co holster . Out of the box, the service will available to developers. This summer the company plans to roll it out service-wide. Given that all links in Twitter will be auto-shortened, it could have a tangible effect on start-ups that provide this service. Discuss

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Finland is quite a paradox. One would not think that a country with only 5 million people, plunged into darkness for a greater part of the year, would be the inventor of Linux, SSH, IRC, Nokia, F-Secure and MySQL. While the country is known for its technical feats, heavy metal bands, saunas, and educational system, it’s less known for its startups. Success stories include Sulake , owner of Habbo Hotel (one of the largest virtual worlds, with tens of millions of users, and pioneers of micro-transactions several years before Farmville) and Irc-Galleria , which is the largest social network for Finns. Sponsor Guest author Ramine Darabiha is an entrepreneur and occasional blogger at Nerdstalker and his own blog . Disclaimer: He is the CEO of MySites , which also partners with Xihalife, Dazzboard, Wreckamovie and Breezetags. He will also be a mentor at Summer of Startups. There was the $1 billion exit of MySQL to Sun, as well as Dopplr and Jaiku (the Finnish Twitter that was bought by Google and used as a basis for Google Buzz). Star Wreck was started by a group of friends from Tampere, and ended up having thousands of contributors and 8 million viewers, making it the most successful Finnish movie ever and the first major crowdsourced movie production. The Finnish ecosystem is facing many of the same challenges as other small European countries (I’ve made a list of the 10 major ones here ). There is a lack of entrepreneurs. Only 3% of the population wants to become entrepreneurs, and only a fraction of them want to create startups. Joining or starting a new venture is seen as a very risky thing, and there is still a strong stigma that people who are self-employed probably couldn’t find a “real” job in the first place. RWW’s Never Mind the Valley series: As is often the case in Europe, failure is perceived as extremely negative, rather than a learning opportunity. There is also a lack of visibility for Finnish startups. The local press and TV mostly ignore them, and blog coverage mainly comes from

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Yammer introduced today its Microsoft Sharepoint Web Part, which integrates Yammer with Sharepoint. Using the Web Part, available for Windows SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), Yammer users will now be able to put a Yammer feed on “virtually any SharePoint page” and post to Yammer from different areas within Sharepoint. MOSS users will be able to view Yammer messages alongside Sharepoint search results. Sponsor Yammer, to our surprise , has gained traction in the enterprise. In November it announced that it had 50,000 networks up and running (but how many of those are paid account we don’t know). Yammer released a Microsoft Outlook plugin and a Windows Mobile app in September. Having brought its service into the dominant enterprise e-mail application, Sharepoint integration was a logical next move. Yammer says Sharepoint 2010 integration is in development and will be available this summer. Socialcast , Socialtext Signals , Obayoo and status.net compete with Yammer in the enterprise microblogging market. Discuss

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