Cloud Storage, OneNote, and More for Weddings
Companies like MiMedia and Microsoft are catering their apps and tools to fit your big day.
Posted by: Heather Fink on Aug 17, 2011 at 07:00AM
3 Comments
Not to spoil the romantic mood, but let’s be honest: There are lots of people who’d like to make some money off of your wedding day.
To wit: Tech companies catering their products to the engaged crowd. We’re calling the trend based on a stack of press releases in our Inbox, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that two new wedding-related riffs on existing techie tools won’t make your pre-and-post wedding life a little easier.
First, consider a wedding planner template from Microsoft OneNote 2010. If you haven’t used OneNote, think of it as a digitized spiral notebook; you can type anywhere, draw shapes and diagrams (seating charts, anyone?), make tables and checklists (his and her to-do’s?), and a lot of other stuff we haven’t tried yet. Notes are easily organized, and the search tool is definitely decent.
OneNote’s wedding template works by importing prearranged tabs, lists and tables into the application, allowing you to easily keep track of venues, vendors, prices, menus, and just about anything else you can think of. Best of all, the template is a free add-on. If you don’t have OneNote (every version of Office 2010 includes it), you can try it free for 60 days.
Think you can squeeze your planning into a two-month period? Sure gives you motivation to try, huh?
Of course, there are many couples for whom an actual real-life wedding planner is a must. Actual humans being so much more responsive, communicative, and, well, capable of making phone calls and meeting you at appointments and offering opinions and so forth.
But there’s no human-replacing when it comes to this next example: cloud storage. You’ve heard the term. It’s like using everyday storage units you’d rent from Seattle Public Storage, only it’s for your digital life. Folks use cloud storage when they run out of space on their own hardware, or if they want to keep something safe from household disasters or computer crashes. Files are copied and whisked away via an outside provider with a broadband internet connection; images, MP3s, documents, whatever are stored on high-security computer servers that are…well, it doesn’t really matter where they are because they’re not on your kitchen table.
Back to your wedding. Most couples would like to keep their wedding photos for as long as they live and then some, and with cloud storage, your wedding media is stored on different servers in different locations simultaneously in case anything at all goes wrong with one of them. Snazzy.
MiMedia.com, a cloud provider, offers seven gigabytes of storage for free, forever. What exactly does that get you? Seven gigs equal less than two hours of HD video, which is nowhere near enough to cover the extent of the reception’s open-bar debauchery. You may need an upgrade sooner than you think, so don’t get too lured in by the “f” word (free, c’mon).
And then there’s the issue of privacy.
A casual search of “privacy” on MiMedia.com yields no results, but the license agreement states in no uncertain terms that as long as you have your files on their servers, they can access and do just about whatever they want to with them. Amazon has a similar clause for their cloud storage solution. Yikes.
For most people and their wedding memories, this would seem to me to be a non-issue. But for sensitive information, artists who rely on copyright for income, and FBI, CIA, and government executives, a real storage unit might be in order. And a padlock.
P.S. – Sorry, Mac users; MiMedia is Windows-only for the time being, but Apple’s iCloud (more music-based, but boasting five gigabytes of free storage) is coming in the fall.
Tags: Seattle Wedding Details, Seattle Wedding Photography, Seattle Wedding Planning, Internet
Thank you for mentioning MiMedia as a source for online media storage. I wanted to note that MiMedia’s 7GB of free storage is among the most space offered by any cloud backup company. In fact, 7GB of space is enough to store over 1,000 songs, 1,400 photos, 140 videos, and 7,000 documents. This is ample free space to store an entire album of wedding photos, and then some. MiMedia’s paid storage plans are also competitively priced and offer enormous amounts of storage space for those who need more than 7GB.
Regarding privacy, MiMedia’s privacy policy is one of the most stringent in the field, and I can assure you that MiMedia does not access customer files. Because the data is stored on their servers, this disclaimer must be made, but MiMedia employees do not access user files. User privacy and data security are MiMedia’s top priorities
Hi MiMedia and thanks for commenting!
It is true that MiMedia’s 7GB of storage is a commendable amount for a free service. However, with regards to photo and video capacity, it’s a sliding scale. It all depends on just how good you want your media to look.
Quick examples. If I wanted to keep the absolute best-quality photos from my digital SLR, at about 10MB each, that’s only 700 or so photos. If I compress them to JPEG quality, I can fit about 1,600 (4.5MB each). And I have an older camera.
With video, it’s similar. Full HD video straight out of a Canon digital SLR (already compressed) weighs in at 4.8MB per second, or about 17GB per hour. You can compress it anywhere from there. A good visual is this chart from Kingston showing various capacities for their memory cards at different HD video rates: http://www.kingston.com/flash/sdhc.asp?id=5. Even at the lowest HD video rate they display, that’s 3 hours of video for 8GB, which, I should mention, could easily accommodate 140 videos, so long as they’re short (just under a minute and a half each).
Long story short, couples, or anyone, could fit tens of thousands of photographs or videos into 7GB, but they just won’t look very good (and the videos would have to be short). For people looking to store hours of high-quality video and photographs, well, those take up lots of space, and it seems totally fair that they would be asked to pay for some of it.
And thank you for addressing the privacy concerns; it certainly is an ongoing debate, and I would simply be remiss not to mention it.
Google has tons of free wedding planning tools that you can access in the cloud. Just go to www.google.com/weddings and you’ll find everything you need.
It’s what I’m using to plan my 2012 wedding right now and I love it. The free website builder is a big help because it integrates with maps and web photo albums and many useful tools.