CourseSmart and eTextbooks

The one option that weighs heavily on every college student's mind is the purchasing of textbooks. Well as freedom to information increases and new innovations are made students are giving more options than the standard on campus, off campus bookstores and websites such as Amazon that charge exorbitant prices for books that can be returned at the end of the semester for a fraction of what you paid. The solution to this can be seen in the concept of CourseSmart, which offers its users books for a severe discount. Though users do not receive physical textbooks, they are able to access the book and all of it's contents for a period of about 6 months. One example that I was able to witness was a textbook of mine that was about $76 on Amazon brand new versus $39 on CourseSmart. The draw back to this site can be seen in the infancy of its creation. The website is a mere two and a half years old and only has collections from about fourteen publishers. Though this is a slight disadvantage, I do see this site becoming helpful in the classes that a user will not require the textbook after the class is over.

Gh.o.st Cloud Computing Software

Considering this is my first post I thought I would write about a product that I found to be extremely interesting and possibly useful. The concept of cloud computing is the concept that the internet (or the cloud) contains all of your information in one centralized source. G.ho.st provides a service that allows users to create a virtual computer or desktop within any internet browser. As a user, I am constantly on my desktop PC, Blackberry and Asus netbook. The use of these three products are used on a constant basis and are normally used for similar interests. The promising features of this website is the benefit of having 15gb of storage capacity for free that allows you to store any type of files that you wish along with the ability to attach several different widgets and addons. When I first created my account, I was able to set up my desktop on my PC with no problems. Other than a slow upload rate, it was everything that the website described it to be. The following day I tried the site on a shared PC on the UGA Campus and the desktop was the same as when I left it previously. I accessed the site from my phone on their mobile site, G.ho.st/m. The site was able to pull up all of my information with no problems and it worked extremely well. When I tried to access the site from my netbook the java applet that they have running for the virtual desktop to run was distorted and unable to be used or changed. This could be from the display requirements from the applet. Overall the operation and concept of the site are great ideas and very useful. Though the the site needs to work out a few bugs I feel that a free service that runs on service advertisement would be an excelent way to make college easier.