And after spending an hour talking with Fred Studer, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Business Solutions Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg Thursday, we can say it's probably an unfair chuckle at both Microsoft and its customer base. "I bet they still use IE6," Alex Wilhelm writes in his post.

So tech journalists and Microsoft can make declarations about the cloud being great, the place only a fool would avoid, but it's up to tech journalists and the companies that make those cloud-enabled products to show them why they're losing time and productivity by doing things the way they have always done things. And remember, Microsoft made a lot of those on-premise technologies a lot of companies purchased a decade or more ago, so they have to be extra tactful in convincing companies about what can be a radical shft.

Breaking Down The Microsoft Dynamics Strategy

At the risk of oversimplifying, Studer and Ehrenberg are tasked with anticipating problems for a wide range of businesses, then figuring out which tools from Microsoft's ample shed they can apply to solving those problems. For example, they were the ones who leaked news to ReadWriteWeb that a workplace version of Kinect would be available next month.

The two are clearly focused on Cloud-based products that are more affordable and easier to implement, but that is not all the division is working on. But they also want to introduce those products to customers with on-premise products with gentle nudges as opposed to simply demanding that they change. The strategy, as outlined by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, includes moving all four of the Dynamics ERP products to the Azure, offering exclusive tie-ins to other products with the cloud versions of its ERP products and eventually releasing new products on the cloud before the on-premise versions are released.

"We think our history of building on-site solutions give us an advantage. The shift isn't going to be immediate," Studer said. "People are going to exist on-premise and on the cloud for a long time to come, and that is building into the things we do well."

Studer and Ehrenberg outlined some of the problems they are addressing, some of the possible solutions and gave a sneak peak of some of the topics they'll be discussing at next month's Convergence 2012 conference in Houston.

ERP Needs To Be Better At Predicting Business Trends

Ehrenberg said ERP has been good at analyzing past business trends, but it needs to get better at predicting what will happen tomorrow. We talked about restaurants and grocery stores that still may be using a spiral-bound notebook to record daily sales and weather figures on any given day to help them make food orders for the same day the following year.

One small chain of convenience stores Microsoft Dynamics has been working with had a women who was doing just that for about 20 stores in the chain and used about two dozen data points, ranging from weather forecasts to local sports team schedules.

Dynamics was able to build a machine-learning model of the women's system and analyze 200 days of historical data. The Microsoft model was better able to adapt, finding new information to pull into the model (like a sports team's schedule that was affecting sales but not being accounted for), while eliminating other data points that didn't matter.

Other models can be tailored for other businesses. Retailers rely on foot traffic, something that may be affected by city sidewalk construction projects. A convention schedule from the local Chamber of Commerce could also be rolled into the model.

"We've done the science," Ehrenberg said. "Now we're working on ways to turn it into a product."

Giving Little Guys A Fighting Chance Against Wal-Mart And Amazon

The cloud, Studer said, will let small retailers share inventory: with other small retailers.

There's a good chance you've done something like this in the past year. You've vowed to support small, local businesses. Maybe you're buying a newly-released book or an oil filter for your car, or a set of socket wrenches. You head to the local book shop, auto parts dealer or hardware store, only to find the item is out of stock. The shop owner can order it for you, but...

You soon find yourself walking across the parking lot of a big-box retail store, or you find yourself driving home to order the item online. Chances are it's cheaper than you would have paid at the smaller store, not to mention it's in stock, and that's enough to temper the guilt you're feeling about not buying local. And maybe the next time you need a similar product, you don't even bother with the well-intentioned trip to the small store first.

That's been the plight of small retailers for more than a decade: bigger stores have bigger inventories, and online stores have unlimited inventories. Price isn't even a factor if you don't have the product to sell, but Studer thinks the cloud may offer smaller stores a novel to at least compete with bigger rivals on inventory control.

"You come in looking for a certain auto part and, using the cloud, I can look it up and say that I don't have it, but the guy down the street has what you're looking for," Studer said. "Yes, I'm sending you down the street to a competitor, but at least I'm not putting you in the habit of going to Amazon or Wal-Mart first."

The point is translating the benefits of cloud-based, ERP products into something that is easy to understand, easy to use and easy to implement for businesses outside of the tech sector. Microsoft Dynamics believes that allowing companies to choose on-premise products, if that is what they are most comfortable with, and then transitioning them at their own pace is crucial.

"There's a value in having that choice," Studer said. "We really want to provide customers with a lot of flexibility."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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

We've got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. It's almost too much to keep straight. Fortunately, there are little helpers out there. I've found two I love, and I'll show you how to use them. One is free, the other is in closed beta, but there are invites below! If you've got other suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Greplin: For Finding Your Stuff

Greplin is the way I find that one online thing I'm looking for. It's a fast search engine that can index a whole bunch of common cloud services many of us use. Once it's done crawling for the first time, you don't have to wait for a second. You type in your search query, and Greplin brings back an organized list of everything in your cloud-life that matches.

It can search Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Contacts (as well as the professional Google Apps versions). It searches Dropbox, of course. It searches Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn. It's got Delicious and Pinboard. It has Yahoo Mail. It even searches Reddit. And these are all free. Premium users can search Evernote, Yammer, Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire. All of these services in one search.

Some of them you have to unlock by inviting friends. That's okay. Invite your friends. They'll thank you for it.

Here's Greplin in action:

Yes, you're reading that right. My Greplin has (at press time) 1,106,324 documents in it. Every search is instantaneous, though. I can filter the results by service (Twitter, Google Reader, whatever) as well as by type of content: events, files, links, messages, notes, people and streams. Clicking on each service on the left sidebar tells you its status and how many items are indexed.

Greplin's premium service is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. But basically every consumer service, and even the Google Apps service, is available for free. Evernote is in premium, and that's a very tempting hook for power users. But it's amazing what the free version of Greplin can do. In addition to the Web version (which works on mobile), there's a free iPhone app, and it's killer.

What About Sensitive Stuff Like Logins & Passwords?

User names, passwords, ID and credit card numbers are hard to remember, too, and we need to use them often online. But it's not a good idea to keep those in a cloud-hosted service like the ones Greplin searches. It's best to keep those in a secure service if you're going to store them on your computer at all.

Today I found out about Dashlane, which will do just that. It's a desktop application for Mac and Windows that will remember all your sensitive info so you don't have to. It's also just a convenience; it plugs into your browsers and lets you fill in Web forms with your saved information automatically. It's like 1Password, which is available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, but the features are a little simpler.

I've taken it for a spin. It's easy to set up, and it's very secure. It lets you store your contact info, various forms of ID, credit cards and Web accounts. It's also good for shopping online and lets you speed through the checkout process. When you're filling out a form on any Web page, boxes that Dashlane can fill in have a little gazelle (or whatever its mascot is) icon. You click it and drop the info in. No need to remember it or even type it out.

Dashlane is not quite open to the public, but here's a link for RWW fans to get it now! I've been using it all day, and it makes everything faster.

What other services do you use to keep yourself sane online? Share them in the comments.

The legacy IT model can no longer meet the requirements of today's agile development teams. Historically, the old IT model required at best two to four weeks to spec out a development and test environment, order the machines, network and storage gear, wait for delivery, rack it, and configure them. That procurement process is extremely time-consuming, inconvenient and costly. Today's development teams require a new approach to obtain much needed IT resources quickly for their development and test projects.

• Deliver a self-service solution portal. Developers can create, replicate, change or delete entire software dev/test stacks in seconds.
• Provide on-demand scalability and configurability. Developers can create new release stacks on-demand and in a consistent and dependable fashion as they go through release cycles.
• Provision multiple dev/test environments. Test engineers can run multiple copies of a release, build and test various OS/DB/Browser combinations and scale the environments up or down quickly, as needed.
• Enable constant time snapshots and rapid bug reproduction. Dev teams can recreate any complex bug scenarios (including production issues), rapidly snapshot those environments, make changes, run tests and compare the results to the original.
• Facilitate collaboration and parallel work streams. Engineers can collaborate and share access to those environments with other engineers and support professionals over the Web.

At the same time, IT professionals can get full visibility and control over cloud environments. In particular, they can:

• Set-up dev/test environment templates that are IT policy compliant.
• Create users, roles, access control lists and permissions.
• Establish hybrid cloud architecture to connect to in-house data centers.
• Assign group, project and individual level quota for machines, storage and networks.
• Track usage by month, by user, by project and implement charge backs if needed.
• Audit and ensure compliance policies are followed.

The result?

IT teams that adopt a cloud-enabled agile IT solution such as Skytap Cloud can expect to reduce their total cost of ownership by more than 70% while also reducing the release cycle time by more than 75% when compared to the legacy IT infrastructure. Agile IT empowers development teams to achieve the full potential of the agile model. In addition, IT will be able to retain full visibility and control over cloud environments and reduce operating costs.

Photo by OeilDeNuit

The app is a Q&A platform that helps users find health information written by local physicians. The company says it has 5,000 physicians signed up for "virtual practices."

The app has one interface for doctors and a separate interface for patients. Patients can ask questions for free, and answers are delivered pretty fast, as I found out.

Warning: privacy advocates beware -- this app requires personal identity information, like name, age and location at registration.The app also asks if you want to share with Facebook, and it gives you a choice. That was good. I said no.

The app lists "trending" questions.

The questions most similar to yours scroll automatically to the top as you type. Doctors endure much in order to help the sick. One of the easier questions to print: "Can my co-workers catch my eczema?"

Many questions ask for advice about general themes: like baby care, and what to do with a fever.

I asked a purposely vague question, completely made up: "I have a rash on my foot, what is it?" A doctor, who was apparently real, provided an answer in about a minute through a push notification that sent me to the answer page.

The answer? "See a doctor." Thank you, doctor.

I asked another more serious question: "How many times should I change the gauze on my burnt hand?" No doctor had answered that question at the time of posting.

What is really interesting about this is that the catalyst for the app is the same catalyst that launched the blended learning movement in education. In order to free up time in the day, some portion of the teaching hours is devoted to online learning. This app does the same thing. The app works totally free of advertising and sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies so as to maintain trust and the feeling of objectivity.

Screenshot comes from iPhone image capture

The Docs team pushed a change that was "designed to improve real time collaboration within the document list." That sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately, it revealed a big old memory management bug that they couldn't detect until it was exposed to the full force of Google Docs users. Basically, the machines that check for updates didn't clear their memory properly, so they filled up and crashed, shifting the load onto other machines, causing them to crash, and away we go. The team caught the problem within half an hour. It's worth reading the blog post to see exactly how.

Downtime is the bugaboo, the monster under our bed at the dawn of the cloud era. No service is 100% reliable, but cloud services are becoming more and more vital to keep our businesses running and our sites up. A cloud service provider's handling of an outage is absolutely crucial to keeping its customers happy and earning their forgiveness. But since outages usually require detailed technical explanations, they are often left to engineers whose tone might not be as gentle or apologetic as can be. When Amazon's EBS hosting services went down in April, bringing some of the Web's most important sites with them, the explanation was long-winded and dense, and the fallout was not handled well. Warren's post today couldn't be more different.

How have cloud outages affected you? Tell us your stories in the comments.

The new mobile-optimized layout is very similar to that of Dropbox's native apps for iOS and Android, except that it of course works across platforms, including Windows Phone 7, Android and iPhone. It displays nicely on the iPad as well, but doesn't quite compare to Dropbox's native iPad app, which is specifically optimized for the tablet.

The team plans on working in support for more devices, the ability to manage referrals and various enhancements to file sharing and management.

Dropbox is known to get the most out of their interns, who operate much like full-time team members and are allowed to work on any project they choose. This has recently included things like redesigning their Android app (coming soon), coding signficiant upgrades to the product's iOS apps and, in one case, creating a code obfuscator "to help make sure Dropbox's secret sauce stays secret."

You answered and we culled your responses on Facebook and Twitter and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

While this month's AWS outage wasn't nearly as long or severe as the one we saw in April, such disturbances are a potential cause for concern. If you think having Reddit or Tumblr go down for an hour can cause a panic, imagine having mission-critical systems at the Pentagon grind to a halt.

The biggest advantage cloud computing offers governments is the areas efficiency and affordability. In his 25-point proposal (PDF) to reform federal IT, outgoing U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra identified cost savings as one of the main justifications for adopting the "cloud first" approach to federal IT he advocates.

In the report, Kundra cites the 50% cost reduction seen over five years by the General Services Administration when they switched to Google Apps for email. That was a savings of about $15 million, which is just a fraction what would stand to be gained if other federal agencies followed Kundra's recommendation of migrating three "must move" services to the cloud. By migrating more data and services into the cloud, the U.S. government could stand to save as much as $3 billion.

In addition to financial savings, employing cloud-based IT solutions generally makes it easier and quicker to deploy solutions and scale in the face of rapid growth in demand on resources.

Downtime and Security Issues Cause Concern

While some government agencies have jumped on board with the cloud migration idea, some are more hesistant, a fact explored in a recent story in the New York Times.

According to the Times:

Surveys of chief information officers of federal agencies, conducted by various research companies, show an elevated degree of concern about security when asked about cloud computing. But the agencies must comply with Mr. Kundra's "Cloud First" policy, which encourages the use of cloud services for new projects and requires them to move at least three existing projects to the cloud by next summer.

Of course, solutions like AWS GovCloud are designed with the strict and specific security needs of government agencies in mind. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has outlined the federal government's standards when it comes to information security risk management, and those guidelines are met by GovCloud.

As far as concerns about downtime, government agencies would be well advised to borrow a page from Netflix's playbook. Even during the worst of this April's AWS outage, the movie streaming service stayed up and running, thanks to an approach to engineering that aims to avoid the side effects of exactly that type of outage.

The record companies claimed that services like these duplicate files in ways that violate copyrights, that they don't do enough to stop repeat infringers, and that playing back songs from a locker constitute a "public performance," which would require a license for the material. The judge rejected all these claims, finding that MP3tunes is protected as a service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The plaintiffs also argued that works recorded prior to 1972 were not protected by the DMCA, but the judge overturned this charge as well.

Overall, this is a resounding victory for cloud locker services and their users, though, as Robertson says, "it was not a complete victory[, and it was] not a final ruling," because some elements can still be appealed. EMI's case relied on several misconstructions of the nature of these services, and the judge turned those aside. EMI claimed that these cloud services host a "master copy" of a file within their service, so that users who upload the same song are just playing one digital copy hosted by the service. Playing that file would constitute a "public performance" that would require a license. But in reality, cloud locker services store individual copies of a user's own music, so they are merely service providers, and they can't be held accountable for copyright violations.

A victory for consumer choice

When it comes to Web-based music services, the alternative to cloud storage is a subscription-based streaming model, many of which have gained in popularity this year. These services are dependent on licenses for the material, though, so if they don't have the music a user is looking for, that user has to listen to it elsewhere. Alternatively, cloud lockers agnostically host whatever music a user wants to upload, and both Google and Amazon offer services like these, as does MP3tunes, the defendant in this case. Though record labels have accused these services of promoting piracy, today's ruling finds that they aren't responsible for the content uploaded by their users, and that's a victory for consumer choice.

Do you use Web-based music services?

Why Pogoplug?

There are no storage limits or long upload times, explains the company, differentiating its offering from similar cloud services, like Google Music or Amazon's Cloud Player. Both of those services require you to move your MP3s from your computer's drive to the companies' servers and they're only for music.

With Pogoplug, your computer is the server and more file types are supported.

Pogoplug Now Offering Freemium Software - And Free Invites for You!

There are two levels of service with the new software. For free, you can download the client and stream your media to any other device, including iOS devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch), on your same local network. To make your files available online, however, there's a $29 fee. This allows you to install the software on all your machines, too, which means you can make every single file you own available "in the cloud," whether they're stored on a Windows PC or on your Mac.

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The Web interface offers three new apps for accessing your files: an online jukebox for streaming music, a cinema app for videos or movies and a gallery app for viewing photos, already organized using their own metadata.

While the idea of "cloud drive" isn't all that unique, the company is offering a unique spin on the concept - a cloud drive you own and control, instead of one run by a major corporation like Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple.

Of course, another big company had the same idea not too long ago - Opera Software, makers of the Web browser of the same name. With Opera Unite, the organization proclaimed it would "reinvent the Web" by turning any computer into both a client and server. The concept itself, as a standalone entity, didn't take off with users, and the technology is now baked into the Web browser instead. Opera may have just been a bit ahead of the time with the cloud streaming concept, or it could be that people don't want the hassle of managing their own cloud. (Did I leave my computer on? Is my home Wi-Fi down?) Still, for only $29, users with larger collections of media might find the small hassle worth price, as it's far cheaper than using a third-party cloud storage service.

"The personal computing experience is a victim of its own success" research company Forrester says in a report outlining a strategy for consumers and corporations in approaching the "personal cloud." Forrester predicts that the personal cloud will be a $12 billion dollar market by 2016. What is the personal cloud going to look like and who are the leaders going to be?

Forrester says that by 2016, 196 million U.S. consumers will be using a personal cloud service ("P Cloud"), of which 97 million will pay for the service, either via subscription or one-time purchase. They will revolve around Microsoft, Google and Apple.

Where is Amazon?

In the cloud landscape of 2011, that might seem like a bit of a surprise. When it comes to cloud services, Amazon is one of the leaders in the industry. Yet, Forrester does not mention Amazon Web Services in the report. When you look at the vision of the personal cloud, the omission makes sense. The "P Cloud" will be built around existing communications structures on along major operating systems. Amazon does not have an operating system for PCs or mobile devices. It is rumored to be building devices on Android that will be released later this year, so in the Forrester formula, Amazon will be functioning within the Google vertical of the personal cloud (though, Amazon will probably continue to be a robust player in commercial cloud and Web services).

"P Cloud" As The Third Major Client Software

Forrester says that the cloud will be the third major client software battleground. The PC operating system was the first, won early by Microsoft with niches carved out for Apple and Linux. Mobile is the second and remains fluid and volatile with Google's Android leading in market share with Apple, Research in Motion and Microsoft figuring out how to gain ground. The personal cloud will be the third and will be built on top of the first two. Hence, the companies with strong infrastructure in operating systems and communications will be the leaders in the personal cloud as well.

Forrester sees the personal cloud as a disruptive force to the current online services market. It says to "prepare for major opportunity and turbulence selling to individuals." That means marketers should explore the personal cloud as a new channel to reach customers. IT managers should plan for personal cloud integration as consumers continue to want information stored in personal services at work and the major email providers should create a better experience to capture users from any email address in the company's personal cloud net.

We speculated at the end of April that iCloud was to be the name of Apple's cloud service after it bought the domain name from Swedish cloud service XCerion for $4.5 million, according to Om Malik. iCloud.com is still redirecting to CloudMe, what XCerion rebranded iCloud ahead of Apple's domain purchase. The question becomes now: what is this iCloud going to look like?

More Images from the North Carolina Apple Data Center - Mission "Not Impossible"

Apple Hiring a Team to Build "the Future of Cloud Services"

Cloud Round-up: Apple Hires Microsoft Data Center Guru, Private Clouds Discredited and More

Should You Move Your Files to Amazon's New Cloud Drive?

Many have speculated that iCloud will be a music streaming service or locker, like Amazon's Cloud Drive or Google Music Beta. Apple has a shiny, brand new $1 billion data center in North Carolina and an aging storage service in MobileMe that could use a revamp and rebrand.

Apple said iCloud, among other topics, would be discussed at the keynote on June 6: "Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple's advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple's upcoming cloud services offering."

The updates to Max OS X and iOS 5 do not come as surprises and are generally mainstays of WWDC keynotes. Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself will be delivering the keynote at Moscone West next Monday, according to Endadget.

To be fair, with the launch of the newly revamped application, mSpot is providing only three of the four service types mentioned above.  You can't play music on demand just yet.

But when asked if the company was considering such a move, mSpot's co-founder and CEO Daren Tsui said, "we're looking into that." He also mentioned that he has several ideas for additional paid-only features that mSpot will debut later this year - features which could entice its free users to move into the premium tiers, he said. Tsui wouldn't detail what these features are, however. But he did say that while the features themselves may not be novel, the way they're packaged into mSpot's hybrid system is.

And what could be better than music on demand, we ask? We expect that's one of the hooks that mSpot has in mind. If so, this mashup music service could be the one that finally sells streaming music naysayers on giving "the cloud" a shot. Whether you prefer to purchase your own tracks, serendipitously discover new music through radio plays or listen to curated streams, mSpot has it. And maybe one day, on-demand tunes too.

For now, the service is free, and you get 5 GB of storage free. For $3.99/month, you can have 40 GB instead. Other tiers will be introduced this year, with access to more features. The iOS version, as well as PC and Mac versions of this updated service will launch later this year, as well.

Mspot's Features

Mspot also offers a few bonuses that not all its competitors have: live lyrics that display while music plays, "cached mode" for offline access to tunes (even for entire playlists), automatic export of metadata, cover art and playlists from iTunes, automatic, wireless syncing from PC to cloud (i.e., when you add more music to your desktop music collection it immediately syncs to mSpot), and continuous playback of songs even in areas where cellular coverage is spotty.

In addition, with the newly updated mobile application (beta), you're given 5 GB of free online storage for storing the MP3's you own, access to hundreds of Internet radio stations, access to mSpot's own 80 to 85 programmed stations and a Pandora-like personal radio player that builds a station based on artists or genres you like.

And unlike Amazon's new Cloud Player app, when you stream your own music online via mSpot, it isn't just a means to an end - it also helps to serve up recommendations. As your listening preferences change, so do these recommendations.

Not bad for a free app.

For those unaware, mSpot is not a newcomer to mobile music, despite its low-profile name. The company has been building mobile apps for over 6 and a half years now, including the white label radio apps for AT&T, Sprint, U.S. Cellular and others. The company also has other entertainment-focused apps like mSpot Movies.

To learn more about the service or to try out mSpot for yourself, head to www.mspot.com.

While both Amazon and Google's offerings have the same basic concept behind their design, there are some notable differences between the two, as detailed below.

"Cloud Drive" is the brand name of Amazon's cloud-based streaming music service. Although the focus, at present, is on providing an online home to your MP3 collection, the service already supports other types of files, too, including documents, pictures and videos. In this way, it's more akin to Google's Docs service, because, as with Docs, you can upload almost any of the most commonly-used file types to Amazon's cloud.

The caveat with Amazon's service is the price. You get 5 GB of online storage for free, which equates to around 2,000 songs, assuming you are just using the service for music and nothing else. Anything more, and you have to pay. There are storage plans available with yearly fees attached. These include the following annual plans: 20 GB ($20), 50 GB ($50), 100 GB ($100), 200 GB ($200), 500 GB ($500) and 1,000 GB ($1,000).

However, not only do your Amazon.com MP3 purchases not count towards your storage total, the company is also running a special through the end of the year which allows you to upgrade to the 20 GB plan just for buying one album from Amazon. There's a caveat here as well, that "free" upgrade is only good for one year from the date of the purchase. Afterwards, if you don't sign up to pay for the $20/year 20 GB plan, you'll be automatically downgraded to the free 5 GB plan.

For playing music from your online storage, Amazon's Cloud Drive includes a music streaming service called Amazon Cloud Player. This online app provides basic music controls, playlist support and filters for sorting by Albums, Artists, Genres and Songs. It supports the playback of MP3 files, like those which Amazon itself sells, plus AAC files, like the non-DRM files sold on iTunes. It also supports playlist import from Windows Media Player and iTunes.

The player works on both the Mac and PC platforms, plus Android phones. A somewhat kludgy workaround is available now for iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), but it's not as polished as the native Android application. It's also not considered an "official" means of streaming your music by Amazon. The company clearly states on its website that "iPad and iPhone are not currently supported platforms for either the Amazon MP3 Store or Amazon Cloud Player." This is mentioned in a side note at the bottom of a chart featuring the Cloud Player's current status for the Web, Android, BlackBerry and Palm mobile operating systems. The fact that iOS didn't even make the chart further hints at Amazon's planned Android-based tablet, reportedly in the works now. By refusing to support iPhone and iPad, Amazon's tablet has a competitive advantage over Apple devices, and Amazon's MP3 store will have a similar advantage over iTunes. (Well, at least until Apple launches "cloud iTunes," that is).

Google Music: Storage for 20,000 Songs for Free, No Music Store

Like Amazon's Cloud Drive offering, Google's Music service is also being launched without the record labels' support. Google's failure to negotiate a proper deal with the labels led to the delay in the launch of Google Music, according to reports.  However, in Google's case, this is a far worse problem than for Amazon because at least Amazon already had a (legal and licensed) online MP3 store where it sells music. Google does not. For end users, that's certainly a shame, but for Google's own purposes, it may not matter as much. Unlike Amazon, Google's main goal isn't to sell more MP3's to end users, it wants to sell Android-based phones. More philosophically, and core to everything Google does, its goal is also to get more people online, using the Web and Google services, all so they can see and click on more ads.

To make up for its missing "store" component, Google is enticing users with features instead. The new service offers things like automatic playlist creation tools and, perhaps more importantly, more free storage. During its initial phase, Google offers beta customers the ability to store up to 20,000 songs for no charge. Google is measuring storage prices in "songs," not GB, for what it's worth. Regardless, Google is offering roughly 10 times the amount of storage as Amazon does, and for free. That's a compelling advantage, and one Google can easily afford. Unfortunately, this "free" option is only available "for a limited time," says Google.

Like Amazon's Cloud Drive, Google Music will involve a lengthy upload process where you use a downloadable client software application installed on your Mac or PC to copy songs from your computer to the cloud. Also like Amazon, a Flash-based Web player will allow you to play your music from your computer, including Google's own Chrome OS operating system. And finally, while Amazon offers a native Cloud Player app for Android, Google will instead update its own Music application for Android, a core app that ships on all Android phones, with support for Google Music. We had previously seen this application in the wild, thanks to users on a popular mobile forum site, XDA-Developers, who discovered a way to install the newer version of the Music app on their phones. They discovered songs could both be streamed and synced to Google's Cloud right from the mobile device itself. Amazon, however, only allows uploads (syncing) from a PC. But both Google and Amazon will support the ability to download songs to your mobile device for offline listening, it appears.

A notable difference between Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music is the scope of its offering. While Cloud Drive supports other file types beyond just songs, Google Music, as the name suggests, is for music only. For online storage of other files, Google offers Google Docs, also available as a native Android application.

For now, Google Music will be invite-only - Google I/O attendees will receive invites, as will users of Motorola's Xoom Android-based tablet computer on Verizon, according to TechCrunch.

Geographic Restrictions

Both Amazon's and Google's products are limited to select geographic regions, it should be noted. Currently, Amazon offers Cloud Drive to the U.S., plus Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

At launch, Google Music will be U.S.-only.

Note: This article will be updated after Google's official announcement today. Current sources are AllThingsD andTechCrunch, both of which confirmed these facts with Google.

Image credit: lead - LifeofAndroid; player screenshots, forum user RazorHail