So Amazon draws first blood. Jeff Bezos has gone ahead and at the risk of infuriating the Music Goliaths who will be gunning for him, crying foul over the licensing issues, has launched the Cloud Drive with the Cloud Player. This indeed is really cool with 5 GB free space for everyone with an Amazon.com account and if you buy an album even worth 69 cents you will get a free 1 year upgrade to 20 GB. That indeed is cool. Speaking of which whaterver happened to Cuil, that which was supposed to give tough competition to Google.
Ok there are no parallels drawn here between Amazon and Apple but its nice to pitch giants against each other and see how it goes like India and Pakistan go head to head in semis tomorrow. But, I digress.
So, Apple have been since a really really long time pitching for cloud solution for Mobile Me users and an online streaming solution integrated into iTunes playing subscribers content. Steve Jobs with his persuasive power can indeed get the industries to change directions, in this case too maybe he will. But, with him gone on a leave looks like Apple has already lost that small edge they would have had in this scrimmage so to speak ;)
Comparing the Free options of cloud storages that we have today:
1. Windows Skydrive: It may not be that ubiquitous or feature packed but its got 25 GB, you just can't ignore such a huge number!
2. Google: Ofcourse, with its Gmail, picasa and Google docs offerings is a sizeable amount but its not at one place so you need to move from application to application which is again not that seamless
3. Amazon.com: Cloud Drive, offers 5 GB with a 69 cent upgrade to 20 GB for a year.
Just buy this after setting up your Cloud drive on Amazon for 20 GB upgrade til 2012 :)
69 cent Album to an easy upgrade :)
4. Apple: Hopefully Apple pitches in here or probably much above with more feature set with its North Carolina data center coming into action around fall this year...ofcourse, that's what the rumor is all about.
Just yesterday I was looking at this youtube video by Newegg where they reviewed the Seagate Go Flex drives with GoFlex Home and GoFlex TV options which pretty much uses your own drive hooked upto the net to be accessed on the cloud. So you are not paying anyone for space and its your own drive that is available on the net with security enable and you can pretty much not be restricted for space anymore.
Pretty cool! Huh?
Check out your options and upload away :)
