You almost can't be a major technology company these days without having a cloud service. Now, new reports indicate that Samsung is getting ready to take that plunge.

According to the South Korea-based Maeil Business publication, Samsung will launch its S-Cloud service on May 3 at a London press event. That date has already been scheduled by the company for press to "come and meet the next Galaxy" smartphone, according to the invitation.

Five Gigabytes?

The event, called Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012, is expected to feature the launch of the Galaxy S III smartphone, and now it appears that the new device will be accompanied by a cloud service. Maeil Business bases its report on a purportedly leaked plan from the company.

The report on Maeil Business indicates that five gigabytes might be offered as an initial free offering, which would match the free storage amount that is expected to be available in the coming Google Drive cloud service. Some observers are suggesting that Samsung might allow unlimited storage for content purchased through its cloud, thus echoing Amazon and Apple in providing storage for media purchased through its channels.

Maeil said that S-Cloud will be available to a wide range of Samsung devices, and will offer access to TV shows, movies, and music on both a paid and a free basis. Samsung is said to have partnered with Microsoft in order to have the infrastructure for offering this service globally.

The report about Samsung's new service comes a few days after reports that Google will launch an online storage platform and service next week, called Google Drive or GDrive.

Other Cloud Services

Those reports were based on allegedly leaked documents, including a screenshot from Lucidchart, a maker of online diagramming tools that is expected to be one of many Google partners in the effort. Other screen shots appear...

In Instagram's early days, in offices in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, basking in the blue glow of half a dozen computer screens, sat an old Polaroid camera. It was a Rainbow SX-70 OneStep Land Camera.

Most of Instagram's 30 million users would not recognize the instant film camera -- even though Edwin Land's creation was once a big deal, featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1972 -- but they would recognize the echoes of the camera's design in Instagram's logo.

In fact, Instagram's personality and style were inspired in some way from old film camera companies. The application's filters, which convert pictures to look like snapshots from yesteryear, were inspired by classic Brownie cameras, Instamatics and disposable point-and-shoots.

So why was a small start-up with only 13 employees able to build up Instagram, while a company like Eastman Kodak, which recently filed for bankruptcy protection, was not? It is easy to imagine how things would be different at Kodak had it dreamed up the idea. Canon, Leica, Nikon, Olympus and Pentax -- all of which are still in business, though for how long is yet to be determined -- did not build Instagram, either. (Polaroid disappeared long ago, though its brand name persists in different forms.)

Michael Hawley, who is on the board of Kodak, said the explanation could be summed up in one word: culture.

"It's a little like asking why Hasbro didn't do Farmville, or why McDonald's didn't start Whole Foods," said Mr. Hawley, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. "Cultural patterns are pretty hard to escape once you get sucked into them. For instance, Apple and Google are diametrical opposites in so many ways, have all the skills, but neither of them did Instagram, either."

Facebook could not build it, either. If it could, it...

With strong sales in its wireless and FiOS business, Verizon Communications on Thursday boasted a 15.7 percent growth in earnings per share for the first quarter, with a $922 million increase in cash flow from the same quarter of 2011.

Revenue from Verizon Wireless, which the company owns jointly with Vodafone Group Plc of the United Kingdom, rose 7.7 percent, with income from data plans up 21.1 percent and 734,000 retail net customer additions, including 501,000 postpaid billing customers. The carrier now has 93 million retail customers, maintaining its dominance of the U.S. market.

Landlines Dropping Fast

Subscriptions to FiOS fiber optic services grew by 193,000 Internet customers and 180,000 TV customers, while 104,000 more customers signed up for non-FiOS broadband connections. More than 5 million people now access the Internet via FiOS, the company said. Voice connections for homes and business, however, fell 6.9 percent year over year and 20.1 percent quarter-to-quarter as more people give up their landlines for mobile phones.

"We built momentum coming out of 2011, and our results show that we continue to execute in the key growth areas of our business," said Lowell McAdam, Verizon Communications' chairman and CEO. "Verizon Wireless produced both great growth and great margins, and we produced another strong quarter of FiOS growth. We are confident we will improve Wireline margins for the full year."

Verizon Wireless is investing substantially in its high-speed, long-term evolution data network, which as of today is available in 230 markets across the country, and it has benefited from its wide range of phones powered by Google's Android, the leading operating system in the market, as well as Apple's iPhone.

In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo said that more than half of the 6.2 million smartphones sold by Verizon Wireless in the first...

If you're drowning in e-mails on Gmail, Google has a new tool that could help you swim through them faster. On Thursday, the software giant announced the availability of a new Gmail Meter that provides visual and numerical analytics about your e-mails.

The meter is powered by an Apps Script that runs on the first day of each month. The results, an e-mail with various statistics analyzing your e-mails, is then sent to your Inbox. The stats include Volume Statistics, Daily Traffic, Traffic Patterns, E-Mail Categories, and other metrics. The app was created by a Google Apps Script Top Contributor, Romain Vialard.

Word Count, Thread Lengths

Volume Statistics itemizes how many e-mails were important and starred, the number of different people who sent the e-mails, how many were sent directly to you, and how many replies or original e-mails were sent. Google said that data and other in the Gmail Meter can be useful in making choices in Priority Inbox, which offers automatic sorting, categorizing into sections, and predictive analytics.

Peaks in traffic flow are presented as a time-based graph, allowing users to see when they are most e-mail-productive, and other graphs show the volume of received and sent e-mails over the past week. A pie chart shows the percentage of categorized e-mails, and Time Before First Response indicates how long you take to answer -- and for others to answer you.

If you wonder whether your average e-mail response is too verbose, Word Count presents the data in a bar chart. Other metrics include Thread Lengths, which helps users understand if they're participating in long threads of e-mails, and Top Senders and Top Recipients, which show your most frequent e-mail correspondents.

Gmail Outage

Gmail Meter can be set up from Google Docs, by opening a Spreadsheet, installing the meter from Script Gallery in Tools, and generating...