I was somewhat surprised recently to read that Buford, Georgia (which despite our address is actually the closest city to our current office) was named by Fortune Magazine as the #3 best place in the country to start a business. Of course, that’s not really a surprise to me. When I moved to Georgia from California (where I had lived and worked for 10 years) to start Jungle Disk a year and a half ago, more than a few friends thought I was crazy. Why would anyone leave California to start a technology company? Although there were personal reasons as well, I saw a great opportunity to build a company in Georgia and Gwinnett County specifically. There are the factors that Fortune points out like cost of living and quality of life (yes, the people here are actually nice), but Atlanta also has a strong backbone for technology, with schools like Georgia Tech, Emory, and UGA close by. The venture capital opportunities, while the best in the southeast, still don’t come close to California, but the software business isn’t capital intensive and we’ve been extremely successful without outside funding to date. There is a small but growing community of technology startups here, and you can really feel things starting to happen.

Of course, I still had concerns about building a business here - would I be able to find the best people? Would they even want to work for an Internet startup in Atlanta? The answer so far has been yes - we’ve recently hired some great people and I’ll be introducing them shortly. We’re moving to new offices in nearby Suwanee soon, and Jungle Disk 2.0 coming up fast. Lots of excitement here to say the least. I’m looking forward to sharing more news about Jungle Disk 2.0, as well as a preview of some of the new features later this week. Stay tuned for more!

As we mentioned in the UI redesign blog post, the user interface for configuring automatic backups is getting a major overhaul in Jungle Disk 2.0.

One of the features in the new interface is a “quick picks” list of common folders that people might want to backup. You can still manually pick files and folders, but this list will help novice users who aren’t even sure what they should be backing up, and also help speed setup for experienced users as well. We’re in the process of compiling a list of these common folders on each platform. We’ve got the obvious ones (like My Documents on Windows), but we’d like to include as many application-specific folders as possible -things like your Firefox bookmarks or Quicken data files.

We’d like your help to fill out this list. Head over to this post in our feature requests forum, where we’ve posted the initial list of common folders. Is there anything you backup that isn’t on the list? If so, post a reply on that forum thread with the application and the location of the files. We’ll include the most popular ones in the final release.

Microsoft announced their first serious, developer-oriented cloud computing service yesterday, Microsoft SQL Data Services. This particular service doesn’t appear to compete directly with Amazon S3, but does appear very similar to another Amazon Web Service - Amazon SimpleDB.

There have been many rumors over the past few months about Microsoft making a serious push into cloud computing, an area which thus far has been pioneered (at least on a wide scale) by Amazon. It will be interesting to see where they go from here. Launching a bulk data hosting service or a virtual hosting service to compete with Amazon S3 and EC2 seems like a strong possibility. Beyond Microsoft, I think we’ll see other large companies get into this market including Google and Sun (which already has the Network.com computing service). All this competition can only be a good thing for cloud computing customers such as Jungle Disk and our users. Competition will drive down prices and start a functionality race as each service tries to attract developers.

It’s worth noting that although Jungle Disk only works with Amazon S3 today, we’ve designed the software to be flexible enough to allow us to add additional storage providers in the future if there is customer demand. Right now there really aren’t any viable competitors to Amazon S3, but it looks like that is going to change as the major Internet companies slowly transition from being simple web sites to Internet infrastructure utilities. While the media is focused on the “social” revolution changing the face of the web through sites like MySpace and Facebook, the real revolution is happening behind the scenes as the Internet changes from being a global communication platform to a global computing platform.