CoTweet, a start-up that helps businesses manage their Twitter accounts, is rolling out its first fee-based services, with McDonald’s (MCD), Ford (F) and SunTrust (STI) among its paying customers.

The San Francisco company said over the summer, when it announced $1.1 million in funding, that it would eventually charge for some offerings. Its new enterprise program starts at $1,500 a month, said Jesse Engle, CoTweet’s chief executive.

In exchange, customers get the ability to store data about their interactions with other Twitter users, including tweets, retweets, replies and direct messages, for as long as they’re an active client. The free version of CoTweet, in contrast, stores conversational data for 14 days, he said.

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Until three weeks ago, few people outside corporate data centers knew much about deduplication technology, which makes data storage more efficient by culling repetitive documents. That changed when data storage companies NetApp (NTAP) and EMC (EMC) got into a bidding war last month for a leading provider of the heretofore obscure software.

Their target is Data Domain (DDUP), for which EMC is offering $30 a share and NetApp $25 a share. While the clash surprised people who don’t know about the technology, it was no shock for Darren Thomas, who heads Dell’s (DELL) data storage division. “We always knew” that deduplication was hot, he says.

This week, Dell jumped into the fray when it announced a new deduplication box that combines technology from software maker CommVault (CVLT) with Dell hardware. The new product – along with new deduplication services that Dell is offering – may give a hint into the company’s M&A strategy, which has been taking shape in recent months.

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Shares of both Seagate (STX) and Western Digital (WDC) are getting battered on fears that the hard-drive sector could once again soon find itself with a glut of supply.

At least in part, the Street is reacting to this morning’s downgrade of Marvell (MRVL) by Barclays Capital, which–as I noted earlier–was in response to indications from Taiwanese component makers of a slowdown PC demand. Barclays chip analyst Romit Shah wrote that “every company that we met with [in Taiwan] indicated that PC order rates are slowing into the back-to-school season.”

Meanwhile, Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar today notes new data on drive production that he thinks raises ominous clouds for Seagate in particular. Kumar says data from Techno Systems Research, a Japan-based market research firm, find that hard-drive unit production was down 18 percent sequentially in the March quarter, comparable to a 15 percent decline in PC shipments.

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Amazon (AMZN) has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution. Only it doesn’t rely on improved network infrastructure–instead, it relies on the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

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“Like the physical universe, the digital universe is expanding. In fact, exploding,” says John Gantz, a researcher for IDC.

For the last three years, Mr. Gantz has been commissioned by storage provider EMC (EMC) to count the number of bits created each year. And each year he reports that IDC previously underestimated the explosion of information.

This is good for EMC, but it’s probably not so good for the CIOs of the world. They’re the ones who have to find room in their shrunken budgets to buy the disk arrays to store all this stuff that’s being created by employees, customers and their devices. IDC says budgets for servers and storage are shrinking by 6 percent this year.

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Qwest (Q) plans to announce a new wireless Internet offering that lets broadband customers access AT&T (T) hotspots around the country.

The deal, whose terms are undisclosed, gives Qwest customers free use of some 17,000 wireless areas on AT&T’s network, including locations at Starbucks (SBUX) and McDonald’s (MCD).

The Denver company will promote the new service as part of its advertising campaign, which broke late last month and is focused on its Internet-related offerings such as Personal Digital Vault, its online storage service.

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Business at Sun Microsystems (JAVA) continues to, well, stink.

For the fiscal third quarter ended March 29, the server, storage and software company posted revenue of $2.614 billion, down 20 percent from a year ago, off 18.8 percent sequentially, and well short of the Street consensus of $2.86 billion. On the other hand, on a non-GAAP basis, the company lost 7 cents a share, which was not as bad as the 19 cent loss the Street had been expecting. On a GAAP basis, the company lost $201 million, or 27 cents a share.

Gross margin was 42.7 percent, down 2.2 points from a year ago, but up 0.8 points from the fiscal second quarter.

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“The cloud” has come to represent the bright future of computing, a world where processing and storage become as ubiquitous, cheap and accessible as electricity. But for big business, one researcher argues that “cloud” metaphor may be economically apt: The closer you look at the much-hyped technology’s price advantages, the fuzzier they seem.

At a conference organized by the Uptime Institute, a consulting firm focused on data center technologies, McKinsey & Co. analyst William Forrest on Wednesday plans to present a report aimed at debunking cloud computing’s appeal for large businesses.

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Everything is lost… unless you buy a Seagate hard drive. Picture a young mother fretting over losing photos of her adorable brood, or a 30-something man afraid he might lose the countless hours of music he’s stored on his PC. These images will hit the airwaves in December courtesy of Seagate, the disk drive maker. They are part of the company’s first television campaign aimed at consumers.

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There’s a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data. Here’s a bunch of observations; what theory explains the data sufficiently so that we can predict the next observation?

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The other day I was sitting in the bank watching a clerk copy information off a paper bank transfer to initiate a new wire transfer. Being a busy person I hate inefficiencies, and this was just plain bad. When I asked why the bank didn’t use an electronic copy to speed up the process, the clerk replied that using an electronic copy can create mistakes and cause liability for the bank. In the same way that people are mistrustful of electronic elections, they believe that a human being copying from a piece of paper is less prone to make mistakes than doing the same thing electronically. I smiled when I heard that, because I know it isn’t going to last.

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A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free-versus-pay online are ending. In 2007 the New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. … The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

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Companies used to give away pens, squishy balls and coffee cups to worm their ways into the hearts of customers. Now, they pass out database software. That is, in a sense, Sun Microsystems’ strategy with its $1 billion purchase of MySQL, said Sun CFO Mike Lehman at Sun’s Global Media Summit here today. Very few customers have or will pay for MySQL, he admitted. However, they are installing it in large and growing numbers, and that gives Sun an opportunity to visit them and try to sell them servers and storage systems.

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