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Yesterday we looked at the three leading "cloud locker" services for music: iTunes Match, Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Music. As a preface to that post, I mentioned that there are two main battles going on in the online music market. One is between the three cloud lockers, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is between music streaming services like Spotify, Rdio and MOG.

But while we currently think of cloud lockers as being different from streaming services, the two types will merge over time. This has begun to happen already.

Continuing our series about the Consumer Cloud, today we compare the three leading music cloud services: Apple's iTunes Match (just launched today), Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music. With these three highly competitive services, online music fans have never had it so good.

There are two main battles going on in the online music market, each of which is benefiting consumers greatly. One is between the three so-called cloud lockers mentioned above, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is about whether you even need an online archive at all.

Yesterday we started a new series about the Consumer Cloud, defined as an online repository for your content and applications. These services, such as Apple's new iCloud and Amazon's Cloud Drive, are becoming increasingly important in the multi-device world we live in.

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?

Charlotte-based CLT Blog connected the dots and found that Amazon has purchased a speech recognition startup called Yap, according to an SEC filing. While neither company has made a formal announcement - and the filing doesn't even mention Amazon by name - it says that Yap merged with a company called "Dion Acquisition Sub," which has the same address as an Amazon building.

With the Kindle Fire about to hit stores, it's tempting to compare this acquisition to Apple's purchase of Siri. But is that a fair comparison? Yap transcribed voicemail. Siri was based on a DARPA-funded military artificial intelligence project. With some consumers hesitating between the iPad and the Kindle Fire, there's bound to be a feature race. But speech-to-text input is one thing. The AI-powered future of search is another.

For those of us who have grown accustomed to purchasing things from our laptops, tablets and smartphones, the experience of walking into a physical store and standing in line can get tiresome. It's hard to top the immediacy and convenience of online and mobile shopping. Yet, there are still plenty of items that are best purchased in person.

Apple hopes to bridge the gap between these digital and physical worlds. The company just released an update to its Apple Store app for iOS. Using the application, customers can not only purchase Apple products like they can on the Apple website, but they can now opt to pick them up in person at one of the company's many retail locations.

Over the weekend I finished reading the authorized biography of Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. It's a hefty 650 pages and spans the entire life and career of Steve Jobs, the iconic Apple co-founder who sadly passed away a month ago. The biography is well worth reading, I gave the book 5/5 stars. I'll even say that it should be required reading for technology entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to be a leader in our industry. The biography is a sympathetic one, so don't expect to read a great deal of criticism about Steve Jobs. Despite that, it's a well-rounded portrayal of a man destined to be remembered as one of the great product visionaries of our time.

There's plenty to learn from the biography. Here are three of the main lessons that I took from the book. Each comes from an aspect of Steve Jobs' own personality, which he managed to instill into his company Apple. (Note: don't worry, there aren't any spoilers in this post!)

Despite a number of cogent arguments against it, Apple is going through with the requirement for apps in the Mac App Store to be sandboxed. A number of Mac developers have already spoken up about the policy, but Apple's going through with it anyway. Initially set to go into effect this month, Apple has moved the deadline to March 1, 2012. Does Apple really know better than independent developers here, or is it just being a bully in its own sandbox?

"I finally cracked it," Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson just months before his death. He was referring to the design and functionality of television, something Jobs had long wanted his company to reimagine.

In the official biography of the late Apple founder that came out today, one of the last topics discussed before Isaacson touches on Jobs' summer 2011 resignation is how he had hoped to revolutionize the television set.

Hulu Plus, the paid subscription offering from the premium video streaming site Hulu, will be available on the Nintendo Wii console and 3DS handheld system by the end of the year, the company announced. Hulu Plus joins Netflix as the second video streaming service available on Nintendo gaming consoles. Both are already available on competing gaming systems like Microsoft's XBox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3.

But the real threat, as Nintendo of America's own president has admitted, is not the traditional gaming console manufacturers. It's Apple.

It was an interesting quarter for Google. The search giant moved into uncharted territory with the launch of Google Plus, bringing its data-driven business squarely into the social realm. The branding of "Google+" is hard to ignore; how do you read that? It's "Google," but it's more. But to make the social network a + instead of a -, Google has to tie it into its core business - advertising targeted to searches - and use the social data to improve it.

Google can't do that without its mobile vehicle, Android, the most popular smartphone OS in the world. Mobile computing is becoming the most important kind. Its use surpassed desktop computing this year, and mobile ad revenue is exploding. Location-powered search is the key to the business, and Apple - Google's mobile competitor - is revving its engines in that space. Google Plus, the big Q3 experiment, is tailor-made for Android use. So where is Google's mobile vision in its Q3 earnings results announced yesterday? Good question. It isn't there.