Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they've always conformed to the understanding of "The Cloud" that has prevailed at the time. If it's not like Apple's iCloud, which is integrated into Apple's devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don't. There's room for a third, stand-out option here.

Google already has a browser-based file system, Google Docs. It originated as a sort of word processor in the cloud, but it can actually handle and store many kinds of files, such as PDFs, JPEG images, MPEG audio and video, and it'll handle pretty much anything containing text. That does make it a pretty compelling stand-in for Dropbox when it comes to simply storing files.

It even has a nice disk drive icon now, after last year's Google makeovers. Google Drive, indeed:

Are people already using Google Docs as a cloud drive? Spanning, a company that provides backup for Google apps users (not just Google Apps users; free customers, too), took a look into how thousands of people are using it, and it studied their use to better optimize its services. Consequently, it has some insights into Google apps users to share.

Spanning has found that over half of the files in their customers' Docs accounts were not Google Apps-created. They were PDFs, audio, video, photos and Microsoft Office files. By file size, non-Google files comprised over 85% of the stuff people stored in their Docs accounts.

So, at least for the use case of storing files, lots of people are already using Google Docs instead of Dropbox. What Docs does that Dropbox doesn't is allow users to create and edit certain kinds of files. If you use Google Docs as your cloud document service, you're probably using it to make and work on documents, too. That's more than Dropbox can offer, standing on its own. (We'll get to apps built on top of Dropbox in a minute.)

Search, plus Your World

There's a new Google product that didn't exist last time the Google Drive rumors surfaced. It's Google. Or rather, it's Google+. On January 10, Google revealed Search, plus Your World, which threw everybody for a loop. If you don't understand that Google+ is the user-centric backbone of Google itself now, it doesn't make sense that this one side of Google search has stuff from this weird social network in it.

While this early stage of Search+ is definitely about putting Google+ in users' faces, that's not what the message is. "Your World" does not consist solely of YouTube videos shared on social networks. Google's personalized search also tries to figure out what a search means to you, so it can return something more meaningful. It's two modes of search: Global mode searches the indexed Web, and personal mode tailors it to you.

How much more useful would this be if Google's personalized search had your files in it? If your Google Drive contained your documents and music and other local files, they could show up in your personalized search results. If you couldn't remember whether you read something online or in a document you downloaded, Search+ could find both. Now we're giving meaning to the "Your World" part.

Dropbox has search, but it only contains part of what you're looking for when you search "your world." It's more useful as one of many services in a third-party cloud search app like Greplin, which also logs into Google apps and searches across. Google's new social signals run through all its services now, so if it's in your Google cloud, Google search will find it, period.

Dropbox Is A Platform. It'll Be Fine.

Between Docs and Search+, whatever Drive Google eventually ships (whether it's in a few weeks or another X years) will have lots of unique capabilities that make it a different beast from Dropbox.

That's exactly the way Dropbox wants it.

Dropbox turned down insane amounts of money from Apple, because it didn't want to get rolled in as a feature of one integrated system. That's why iCloud doesn't work like Dropbox. Apple wanted cloud syncing that was just there, so users don't have to know where their files are. Developers in the Apple ecosystem can just hook into iCloud. Their applications become Apple-specific. In exchange, they get free marketing in the App Store, and if Apple is feeling generous it features their apps as the App Of The Week or something.

Dropbox said "no" to all that. It wants to be the next Apple or Google, and its valuation seems optimistic about that possibility. Apple's cloud is totally integrated with its devices, using hardware as the platform. Google's cloud is integrated with its services, using the Web as a platform. Dropbox is a platform.

Dropbox lets different clients on different systems read and write to it. Dropbox doesn't have a Google Docs because anyone can build a word processor on top of it. We can build a thousand word processors on top of it, and if they can all read the same file format, they can all work together. Dropbox's platform ubiquity is what it's all about, and that's why Google (and Apple) can't copy it.

Lead photo: AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.com

Kundra's lasting legacy for federal IT is his "25-point plan." His goal was to cut back on U.S. IT spending by making the process more efficient and implementing new technologies, such as cloud computing. Kundra oversaw a budget of nearly $80 billion while the U.S. CIO.

Before moving up to the White House, Kundra was the CIO of the District of Columbia under Mayor Adrian Fenty and previous to that the secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Kundra will be a good fit for Salesforce. As the EVP for emerging markets, there are few people more qualified to spread the word of cloud computing and its cost benefits than Kundra. He was, in concert with former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, one of the biggest drivers of NASA's Nebula cloud computing system that became the foundation for OpenStack.

Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce in a press release. "His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise."

It's also a content shifting tool. Clicking the Evernote elephant icon in the sidebar saves the cleaned up version to your Evernote account so it can be read on all devices. The article viewer also comes with three themes, and beyond that, all the fonts, colors and alignments can be customized.

Clearly brings Evernote into an increasingly crowded market dominated by dedicated read-later services like Instapaper and Read It Later. Like Clearly, Read It Later turns all articles into single-page views, but Instapaper intentionally doesn't, in order to respect the revenue decisions of publishers.

Evernote Clearly could gain significant traction if users find they enjoy having all their cloud-synced stuff in one place, instead of having a separate app for reading. Content shifting is a new trend, and Evernote, whose basic service is free, is well positioned to introduce the behavior to new users.

Chrome and Firefox are the next biggest browsers after Internet Explorer, so Evernote Clearly is now available to a sizable chunk of the market. Chrome actually surpassed Firefox for the first time this month, only three years after launching, but Firefox renewed its search deal with Google yesterday, giving it a new lease on life.

You can install Clearly for Chrome or Firefox.

Do you use a clean-reading service? Which one do you use?

iPhone owners not satisfied with the available options now have a new one in Microsoft's SkyDrive, which launched its first iOS app today. The four-year-old service has been available to Windows users on the desktop and Windows Phone platform for some time. Today, it starts to branch out onto other platforms.

Lots of Windows users are carrying around iPhones, so it only makes sense for Microsoft to let them access their cloud-stored files from the device. Otherwise, most people will instinctively go for a solution like Dropbox. With its 25 GB of free space, SkyDrive is an attractive alternative to Dropbox, who only offers only two. Box's free account comes with five gigabytes of free storage.

This is just the latest iOS app from Microsoft, who released an application for Bing as well OneNote, which may foreshadow the eventual launch of Microsoft Office for iOS.

There are three main new features included in the Box update:

• Video and photo uploads: Box has added the ability to create new folders and upload photos and video to your account straight from your iOS device. This is a smart offering as it expands Box's capabilities for file sharing on the go but also because photos and videos are much larger data hogs than simple files. More data consumed means more users will end up paying for storage through Box.

• Full-text search: This is not something that was available before and should help Box users locate files within accounts that have a lot of documents. Cannot find that memo from the meeting three weeks ago? The added full-text search should be able to help you locate and share it with your co-workers on the fly.

Favorites for offline: We noted that offline storage was one of the biggest trends in mobile apps in 2011 and Box has gotten on that train with the ability to take a select few articles that you know you are going to want to read on the road. It will also help users surface important documents they know they come back to often.

This is a significant upgrade to the Box app for iOS. Yet, as our John Paul Titlow noted in October when Box announced its 50 GB offer, neither the company nor the other prominent personal cloud app Dropbox, have the ability to provide "seamless, cross-device syncing of things like contacts, calendars, reminders and Web bookmarks." It also appears that the ability to remotely back up you device is not included in this update. These are capabilities that Apple's iCloud features prominently and some of the best reasons to set up your iCloud account in iOS 5.

Does Box's update make you more likely to use the app? Or are you an existing Box user and are now excited with these new capabilities? Let us know in the comments.

You can geo-tag your food events, describe the scenario, take pictures, add caloric information with the food tracker and share through Facebook and Twitter. Basically, if you like to scrapbook your life and especially your adventures through the culinary world, that is what Evernote Food is designed for.

Evernote Hello is a way to remember people's names. It is a lot like an app that came out last month called Namerick, so similar to the point where we wonder if Evernote borrowed the idea or just hired the developer. Hello bases remembering people's names on three key principles: faces, time and context. So, what the person looks like, where and when you met them and what you were doing at the time.

When you meet someone new, you have have them using the forward-facing camera on the iPhone to take a picture of themselves (or take it yourself). The app will take four photos for a mosaic of that persons face. It will then create an "encounter" which contains the person's face and where you met them and any other notes you add at the time.

There are other services available that have the functionality of both Food and Hello. Facebook, especially with the the Timeline rollout set to come, is probably the first to pop to mind. Like Evernote, Facebook wants to be the place where you record your life and share it with your friends. Evernote's two new apps are perfect for people that like to document to their personal cloud through Evernote and do not like the idea of being attached to Facebook's social graph. If you are a heavy Evernote user, you will probably end up using Hello and Food. If not, there is probably no reason to do so.

Are you going to use Evernote Food and Hello? Do you like the idea of digitally scrap booking your life? Let us know in the comments.

The honeymoon has not been sweet.

Publishers did not have the tools to create fully functional magazines from the very start. Sure, they were nice looking, but that was about it. Over the last two years, though, publishers and developers have created dynamic tools that allow the news media to create apps that do not just meet user expectations, but go beyond them.

What can these services offer now that was more difficult to do when publishers initially came around to the idea of tablet magazines and newspapers? Quite a bit, actually. Let's look at what Urban Airship can do for publishers looking to put magazine apps in Apple's iOS Newsstand.

• Newsstand library support: configures newsstand apps for auto-renewable subscriptions and single issue purchases through Apple's in-app purchasing toolset.
• Content delivery: Hosts and delivers content available to users on any iOS device.
• Push notifications: This is a big one and perhaps one of the main items missing from original tablet apps. The ability to create easy push notifications enables publishers to put news right under the noses of users, increasing engagement and page views and alerting readers of new issues. The evolution of push notifications for mobile and tablet apps will be a critical piece in how publishers utilize the devices.
• Audience segmentation: Who is reading what? Where do you want to send certain readers? Urban Airship has "tags and aliases" features to associate mobile users with publishers CRM and personalize the experience.
• Free seed content: Users hate to download a news app and then automatically be forced to subscribe before getting content. Publishers need to sweeten the deal a little bit and give users free content, such as back issues, listed next to subscription services.
• Reports: How are users interacting with the news app? Analytics is the heart of understanding mobile users and there are a variety of companies out there, from Urban Airship, Localytics, Flurry, Apsalar and others that can help administrators reach the core goals of engagement and behavioral analysis.

What it comes down to is that publishers need to start looking at tablet apps like a developer would look at any other app, like a game or a utility. The goal is to gain reach, engage users, analyze behavior and monetize it. The Guardian and Future Publishing use Urban Airship and large publishers employ Flurry, Apsalar and Localytics for engagement and advertising insights.

There are also design tools that publishers can turn to for creating news apps that have evolved in the last year or so. Mag+ recently announced a new suite of publishing tools and pricing tiers for the smallest publisher to the largest magazine. Designed by editors and designers for editors and designers, it provides three tiers of publishing tools. There are also solutions from companies like Daylife, which launched real-time media management in June.

Apps are a data driven ecosystem, tied to the cloud, in the pockets of users on the go. News publishers need to understand the tools that can help them make the jump for the decaying old media standard to flexible and responsive new media technology companies.

Google Ventures thought it was a good idea. Along with Atlas Ventures, Objective Logistics raised a $1.5 million seed round this morning to further expand its reach and capabilities. The use-case scenarios are endless.

Have you ever been to a restaurant and noticed the tap screens that your server is inputting orders with? Those are called point-of-sale terminals and they are expensive investments for restaurants. There are dozens of POS makers but the primary ones are Aloha, Micros and POSitouch. Inside these POS terminals there are a variety of data points that can be triggered, from average revenue per guest, to tip size, to breakdowns of every item sold in the restaurant. Over the years the POS terminals have grown more sophisticated and require significant manager training to, from the service industry on outknow everything that the system can do.

Objective Logistics has built software, called MUSE, that uses algorithms to analyze all of the product sold and employee performance.

Objective Logistics goes into the POS terminals and gathers the data points and then feed them to the cloud for performance breakdown analysis per server. Is Tommy selling the steak? Is your bartender pushing the high-end liquor? Those who perform the best are then rewarded with the ultimate incentive in the restaurant industry - the ability to pick what shift you want. Friday night is certainly better than Monday morning when you are trying to pay rent off tips.

Essentially, Objective Logistics is creating an external data analysis tool to weed out the lazy or ineffective employees. It then adds game mechanics to incentivize them. Employees have leader boards, rankings and mini-contests. A lot of this happens in restaurants anyway, but Objective Logistics codifies it in a simple but meaningful way. Beauregard mentioned that the rewards initially come from the restaurant owners but there is significant potential with brand partnerships. Sell the most Budweiser for the year, win a trip to St. Louis or something of that ilk.

"Waiters and waitresses are the largest hourly sales force in the world," Beauregard said. "The idea is to self-motivate (sic) them to perform better ... we have created the Rosetta Stone of POS translators."

Objective Logistics, like most POS systems, is built on Microsoft's .NET structure, tying into Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Beauregard has the perfect background for developing MUSE for the restaurant industry. He started in restaurants as a dishwasher at 14 years old and stayed in the industry through college, finishing as a manager. He got a Bachelor of Science at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and studied microeconomics and behavioral science, among other things. After a couple of stops with investment banks, the idea for Objective Logistics fell into his lap, with the help of CTO Matthew Grace.

Any service industry that has a data input method like a POS terminal can benefit from a system like Objective Logistics.

Some may say we are using data to a fault, over-analyzing every aspect of life and work. To a certain extent this is true. The eye test will still tell suffice most of the time and a chef usually knows who his top servers are without a computer. But companies looking to exploit market inefficiencies can use data to get a step up on the competition. Even if it is just a server slinging soda and hamburgers.

If this seems objectionable from the standpoint of U.S. citizens, imagine how it looks to outsiders who are storing their data there. Some European companies who do business with U.S. technology companies are concerned enough to start looking elsewhere for infrastructure.

The new service allows companies to easily deploy and manage database instances in the cloud while still delivering products to consumers in such a way that complies with EU data protection laws.

A recent survey indicated that 70% of Europeans have concerns about their online data and how well companies secure it. A statement issued by two European politicians said that companies wishing to do business with consumers in Europe should abide by local data privacy laws, including social networks.

Cloudnines and City Network are pushing the privacy angle when marketing their services, as well as the notion that hosting data nearby (as opposed to across the pond) will improve latency and performance.

Considering growing concern over U.S. privacy developments, some of which are quite reasonable, we can realistically expect to see other firms in Europe and elsewhere follow suite with this type of branding effort.

When it was launched back in August 2007, SkyDrive was described as "a personal 'harddrive' on the internet". It's now a major player in the consumer cloud market, competing with other big guns like Apple's iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive. Also SkyDrive competes with innovative startups like Dropbox and SugarSync. The Microsoft blog post presents some statistics about the consumer cloud market, along with big claims for its future.

1. File clouds; using the traditional file and folder structure. Examples: SkyDrive, Dropbox
2. Device clouds; "A device-centric view of cloud storage "hides" the folders from you." Example: iCloud
3. App clouds; "they fully embrace the cloud [and] can enable new ways to collaborate, organize, and share." Examples: Google Docs, Evernote

That's a good way to break down the market, although you could argue that the first two categories will eventually converge.

According to Microsoft, mainstream users are "just starting" to use personal cloud products. Its own study, based on "an anonymous panel of MS customers," has 22% of people storing their photos online and 1% storing documents online. One suspects the figures would have been significantly higher if the panel had been comprised of Google Docs users. Microsoft customers are more likely than most to be still reliant on desktop software. Even so, I'm rather surprised at how low the online document storage figure is.

Microsoft also polled three groups of what it calls power users: college students, gadget fans, and photo enthusiasts. One statistic mentioned in the blog post is that "over 70% of Dropbox users also use Google Docs." Microsoft claims that "using these different tools can lead to formatting loss, extra steps and versions, or just confusion, since each tool has its own limitations." Which apparently is where Microsoft's SkyDrive comes in: presto, it solves all of that confusion. Google would argue that users should just use Google Docs for all of their documentation needs, which would also solve the confusion.

Frankly none of the above study results are very convincing, given that Microsoft was polling Microsoft users. The statistics that I was impressed by were SkyDrive's own usage numbers:

1. How many people are storing content on SkyDrive every month - 17M (October 2011)
2. How much content are they uploading and sharing every month - 360M files (October 2011)
3. How many devices connect to SkyDrive every month - 5M devices (October 2011)

How Does SkyDrive Compare to Other Offerings?

SkyDrive offers 25GB of free personal storage, with a limit of 100MB per individual file. That's a lot more storage than iCloud, which only offers 5GB of free storage. However the iCloud free storage limit doesn't include your photos or purchased music, apps, books, and TV shows.

So a big benefit of SkyDrive is the generous amount of free storage. However, as with many Microsoft online products, it's not a complete consumer cloud solution. There is also something called Windows Live Mesh, which syncs files between devices. The two products, SkyDrive and Windows Live Mesh, exist side by side. That's confusing for the consumer.

The bottom line though is that if you use mostly Windows devices (e.g. PC, tablet, smartphone), then SkyDrive is probably going to be a great solution for you. It's already being integrated into Windows Phone. If you use mostly Apple products, then iCloud is probably your best bet.

Or you can use an OS-independent service like Amazon Cloud Drive or Dropbox, products which often offer more functionality. As RWW Channels Editor David Strom wrote in a product comparison mid-year, neither iCloud or SkyDrive "is anywhere near what a cloud storage provider such as Box.net or Dropbox.com can provide in terms of features."

It's unclear what impact Windows 8 will end up having on the evolution of SkyDrive, but it's significant that Microsoft is so bullish on the consumer cloud. After all, Windows is the epitome of the desktop computing paradigm. If you've used SkyDrive, let us know your thoughts in the comments.

One of the leading Internet companies of this era is essentially a hard drive in the cloud. Dropbox, by some measures the world's 5th most valuable startup, makes it easy for you to sync files across devices. There are other, similar services too. Or you can go completely virtual by using an online office suite like Google Docs. In this article we outline some of the ways that you too can use the cloud to store your files.

I polled my Google+, Twitter and Facebook followers about which cloud services they use for file storage. Many of them mentioned Dropbox. Here's how I myself use Dropbox, probably a fairly typical use case:

I have a group of mainly business-focused folders on the hard drive of my desktop computer. Prior to Dropbox I would either send them to my laptop computer via FireWire (a high speed cord that connects one Mac computer to another) or by emailing important documents. This was both inefficient from a time perspective and also meant that my two computers quickly got out of sync.

Now, I simply connect those key folders on my desktop hard drive to Dropbox. This does two things: 1) it essentially backs up all of those files in Dropbox's cloud; 2) it enables my laptop to download all of those files from my desktop, using Dropbox as the middleman. I can also choose to download the files onto my iPhone and iPad, although because of limited storage I simply download individual files from Dropbox as I need to.

The beauty of Dropbox is that you're using the cloud as both a backup for your files and a conduit to sync files across devices. You don't have to rely on the cloud though, for example when you're offline. That's because the files are optionally downloaded onto the local machine, which I do on both my desktop and laptop (but not for my phone or iPad).

You get 2GB of storage for free on Dropbox, then premium plans start at $10 per month for 50GB.

Google Docs

I use a mix of desktop and online office software, although still with a bias towards desktop software for the heavy stuff (such as monthly statistics in an Excel spreadsheet for ReadWriteWeb). But it's possible these days to go completely Web-only for all office software. Google Docs is the most popular online office suite.

John Pozadzides, the CEO of web analytics software Woopra, told me on Google+ that "ALL new documents I create are done in Google Docs unless there is a specific requirement otherwise." He cited the collaboration features of Google Docs, noting that more than 80% of his documents are shared with others. But the key benefit to Google Docs is that John can access his documents "from anywhere there is a Web browser."

So while Dropbox is the best of breed among file sync and storage services, if you want to take it one step further you can attempt to cut out the middleman completely and create and consume files within Google Docs (or other online office solutions like Zoho and ThinkFree). It's not yet possible to completely eliminate local files. Colin Lovett told me on Google+ that he uses Google Docs and Photos "for everything except my raw audio and video files," for which he uses Dropbox to store.

Other Options

It's worth mentioning Evernote in this discussion, although it doesn't specifically market itself as a storage and sync service. It started out as an online notes tool, but now allows you to upload many different file types - images, audio, documents and more. I'm a daily Evernote user myself (I pay for the premium service), but so far I use it mostly as an online notes and planning tool.

Other options include SkyDrive (Microsoft's solution), CloudApp (a trendy Mac app favored by RWW hacker Tyler Gillies), Bitcasa (which is getting a lot of Valley hype for its "infinite storage"), SpiderOak, Box, Wuala and SugarSync.

If you're a developer or more technical than the average bear, check out our recent ReadWriteCloud post: From DevOps to NoOps: 10 Cloud Services You Should Be Using. Or you can build your own Cloud Drive!

Which Cloud Service(s) For Files Do You Use?

Whichever solution you go with, cloud storage of files is increasingly becoming a necessity for consumers. Even if you only have one personal computer, chances are you use other computing devices - at work, school or maybe even the good old Internet Cafe.

If you're new to this, I'd advise to give Dropbox a whirl. 2GB of storage is plenty to get started on. If you're an old hand already, let us know in the comments which tools and systems you use.

One of the applications for which the Consumer Cloud is particularly relevant is the calendar. Unless you still carry around a paper diary, you likely use a digital calendar service such as Google Calendar, Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook. You probably want to access your calendar while you're out and about, for example on your smartphone or tablet. While there are many ways to sync your calendar to your various devices, they're typically fairly technical or fiddly to set up. In this post we'll explore how calendar sync has evolved... or has it?

If you use Apple's new iCloud, you have an option to turn on calendar sync. But the user experience is less than ideal. In fact it's downright messy.

I use Google Calendar for my personal and work lives. The first problem I experienced with iCloud is that you have to choose between iCloud and Google Calendar sync. iCloud won't let you integrate the two. In other words, if you turn on iCloud to sync calendars - it will only sync iCal ones.

I was frankly confused by this at first, because when I had iCloud turned on to sync calendars I noticed a bunch of my old iCal calendars - that I'd long ago stopped using - show up on my iPhone and iPad (see screenshot to the right). What's more, they began to send me notifications on those devices! I eventually figured out that iCloud calendar sync was useless for me, as I was using Google Calendar and iCloud doesn't support it. So I turned off iCloud sync for calendars.

That meant I had to set up Google Calendar separately on each device that I own. I'd actually already done that a while ago. But the point is I thought iCloud would replace that process, so future devices would be easier to sync. It didn't.

I wasn't the only one to have problems with iCloud and calendars. Danny Sullivan blogged about his experiences trying to merge Outlook and Google Calendar with iCloud. Sullivan concluded that for calendaring, "iCloud isn't solving my cross-platform issue at all." Indeed, he felt it is "more invasive" than Google's calendar sync.

Other Solutions

There are other ways to sync calendars. For example ReadWriteWeb webmaster Jared Smith uses ActiveSync, a Microsoft technology, to sync iCal with Google calendar.

I asked my Google+ followers which calendar they use and if/how they sync it. Most people do sync across devices, but their methods vary.

Bob Adams commented that he uses Google for his personal calendar and Microsoft Exchange at work. He said that both are "merged on my Android calendar app."

Rob Michael's comment is more proof that Apple hasn't figured calendar sync out yet. "I started syncing calendars/contacts on my PalmPilot," said Michael, "then moved to Mac iCal/ AddressBk for syncing to iPhone. Now I've moved everything to Google Cal and access/ sync via Android/browser cloud. I love Google's offline functionality too. In some ways, the old Palm Pilot is my favorite for its ease of use and speed. My least favorite was the iPhone set-up."

Lest we forget, there are other calendars out there other than by Apple, Google and Microsoft. Hubert Wagner commented that he uses Lotus Notes calendar, which he said is "available on my laptop via Lotus Notes and browser [and] Notes Traveler and browser on Android."

Ahhh, if it were only this easy... Apple's marketing of iCloud for calendars.

Calendar Sync Still a Work In Progress

What all of these solutions - including iCloud - have in common is that they require a bit of technical set-up. None of these calendar sync solutions is the kind of simple, painless sync that Consumer Cloud services should be providing.

Google has the best solution so far, because it's all hosted in the cloud to begin with. Unlike Apple's iCal or Microsoft's Outlook. But other than on Android, which it has a large degree of control over, Google is reliant on device software from the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Apple does allow sync of Google Calendar onto its devices, but as mentioned above it's a fiddly process and needs to be set up separately on each device.

Perhaps one day iCloud and other consumer cloud services will make it a simple, one time only process to set up calendar sync across all devices. But that day is not here yet. Let us know your thoughts on calendar sync in the comments.

We have a special channel devoted to exploring the Cloud from a business point of view, called ReadWriteCloud. But over the past year it's become increasingly apparent that cloud services will soon rule the lives of consumers too. Which cloud service, or combination of cloud services, is right for you?

The Contenders

You're most likely going to end up with a mix and match of cloud services. The hardware you use will be one determining factor. For example I predominantly use Apple devices, so its new iCloud is going to become a key cloud service for me (more on Apple's increasing power in the cloud world below).

What applications you already use is also an important factor. For example, I'm a heavy user of Google services. Gmail has been my primary email application for years, I use Google Docs a lot and Google Calendar is where I organize my daily agenda. So while it's not a separately branded cloud service like iCloud, my Google Account is where I manage a lot of my key business data - and it's all hosted in the cloud. It's not necessary for me to host that much of my business content with Google, but it does help with sync and utilizing data across products.

So those are my two main cloud service providers: Apple and Google. Depending on your own hardware and software makeup, you might opt for other companies. Microsoft offers cloud services like SkyDrive and its Windows Live products (including Hotmail). Amazon is another strong contender. It cannily invested heavily in cloud infrastructure over the past 5 years. Amazon has also been releasing various cloud services, such as the March launch of a music storage locker called Amazon Cloud Drive.

There are a lot of specialist cloud services available, too. For example I use Evernote for online notes, Dropbox for files and Instapaper for cross-device news reading. Any one of these or other specialist services may yet emerge as a top dog in the consumer cloud space. My money would be on Dropbox, which has now become my central online repository of files.

Apple Could Show The Way Again, With iCloud

While it's a relatively new product, iCloud is going to be the one to watch in this market. It's certainly illustrative of how important the Consumer Cloud now is.

Steve Jobs positioned iCloud earlier this year as being the next big step in Apple's evolution. Apple started out as a computer company, then it morphed into a consumer electronics company (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.). Now Apple is offering an integrated cloud service to support all of those devices.

Steve Jobs announced iCloud at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference in June this year. It became available in early October, as part of the rollout of iOS5 - the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system.

In the Steve Jobs biography, there were a couple of key quotes that illustrate how key iCloud is to Apple's future. "We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud," Jobs is quoted as saying, "[that] streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data."

In 2010, before iCloud had been announced, Jobs told his biographer:

"We have a solution. It's our next big insight. We are going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device, and we are going to move the digital hub into the cloud."

Of course that insight wasn't new. Others, including all of the companies listed in this article, have been busy building online digital hubs. But nobody has really nailed it yet. Including iCloud at this point.

In upcoming posts, we'll delve into iCloud and other cloud offerings in more detail. As consumers, we just want to have our content available across all of our devices. That's currently easier said than done.

Let us know in the comments if you have any burning questions or issues about the world of the consumer cloud; we'll do our best to address them in future posts.

That is the expectation of about 39% of financial services CIOs worldwide, according to the survey. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 44% of CIOs for banking firms expect that more than half of their institutions' transactions will take place via infrastructure that lives in the cloud, and 33% expect most of them will be processed using some type of SaaS application.

Let the Machines Do What They Do Best, So People Can Focus Elsewhere

"As banks progressively replace people in the value chain with algorithmic operations (AOs) to run processes and make decisions, their intellectual property increasingly resides in these algorithms," reads a post on Gartner's blog. "The value of people is not in running operations but in improving the AOs."

It's this type of efficiency and operational enhancement that can drive what Gartner calls "creative destruction" within the banking industry.

As Gartner Managing Vice President Peter Redshaw summed it up, "Successful new cloud services can displace the existing and dominant process for design, distribution or transacting in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them."

When we wrote about Alien Dalvik 2.0 last week we promised to track them down and get a hands on video this week at CTIA Enterprise and Apps in San Diego. We are a couple days behind, but finally got a presentation of Android running on an iPad. Check it out below.

Otherwise, it is an interesting demo. Oliver Bartholot, VP of business development at Myriad took us through the paces. He mentioned that, yes, Myriad had met with Research In Motion to run Android apps on the BlackBerry QNX platform but that RIM went in house with their Android solutions.

Bartholot said that Myriad is following up on its promise from Mobile World Congress in February to run Dalvik everywhere. The next step, as you can see in the presentation below is to go "big." That means the connected home market, such as televisions. Expect announcements from Myriad coming around the time of CES 2012 in January.

Because Dalvik 2.0 is virtualization running through the cloud, it is perfect for the connected home market. Virtualization requires horsepower in the ways of CPU and GPU support, which TVs do not have. So, the heavy lifting is done in the cloud.

Myriad did not work with Apple in any way, shape or form on Alien Dalvik 2.0. Hence, it is not optimized to anything on the iPad. It runs a little slow (partly because of the network at the San Diego Convention Center) but it is definitely more than just a proof of concept at this point.

Check out the video and let us know your reactions in the comments.