The Cloud

2011 is the year of the cloud.

What is the cloud?  Basically its a term describing the notion that all of your digital stuff is no longer stored on a local device like your computer.  Instead it is stored on the internet, in the "cloud", able to be streamed to any one of your devices, like your iphone or ipad.  The advantage of this is that there is no longer the need to synch or transfer any files, once they are uploaded once, you are done.

A lot of us are already using cloud services, like google docs, dropbox,  i disk from mobile me and others.  But these are mostly for documents, and not optimized for music and video streaming.

Amazon got to the market first with what they are branding their "cloud drive" and today they went right at Apples throat in undercutting them significantly by pricing the new Lady GAGA album for 99 Cents.  As you can see in the graphic they are giving a free upgrade of 20 GB (enough for many peoples entire music library) to anyone who buys the album.  Why are they doing this?  Well because Apple is rumored to come out with their own cloud service in the coming 60 days or so.  Amazon is thinking that they can get a good headstart and pull enough people away from Apple by getting them used to their service and making it worthwhile to pretty much give away the hottest album in the last year and a half.  Amazons regular music "mp3 store" is also being priced about 2 dollars cheaper per album then the equivalent on Itunes.  And once you buy from them, it is backed up forever in their "cloud drive" I am buying all my music now through Amazon until Apple meets their price.

Apple and Amazon are two amazing companies both run by genius visionaries (Jobs and Bezos)  and I love both of them, use both of them all the time and I love the competition!!

May the best Cloud win!!